The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 294

as they were, the Pilgrims did not yet comprehend the great principle of
religious liberty. The freedom which they sacrificed so much to secure
for themselves, they were not equally ready to grant to others. “Very few,
even of the foremost thinkers and moralists of the seventeenth century,
had any just conception of that grand principle, the outgrowth of the
New Testament, which acknowledges God as the sole judge of human
faith.”—Ibid., vol. 5, p. 297. The doctrine that God has committed
to the church the right to control the conscience, and to define and
punish heresy, is one of the most deeply rooted of papal errors. While
the Reformers rejected the creed of Rome, they were not entirely free
from her spirit of intolerance. The dense darkness in which, through
the long ages of her rule, popery had enveloped all Christendom, had
not even yet been wholly dissipated. Said one of the leading ministers
in the colony of Massachusetts Bay: “It was toleration that made the
world antichristian; and the church never took harm by the punishment
of heretics.”—Ibid., vol. 5, p. 335. The regulation was adopted by
the colonists that only church members should have a voice in the civil
government. A kind of state church was formed, all the people being
required to contribute to the support of the clergy, and the magistrates
being authorized to suppress heresy. Thus the secular power was in the
hands of the church. It was not long before these measures led to the
inevitable result—persecution.
Eleven years after the planting of the first colony, Roger Williams
came to the New World. Like the early Pilgrims he came to enjoy
religious freedom; but, unlike them, he saw—what so few in his time
had yet seen—that this freedom was the inalienable right of all, whatever
might be their creed. He was an earnest seeker for truth, with Robinson
holding it impossible that all the light from God’s word had yet been
received. Williams “was the first person in modern Christendom to
establish civil government on the doctrine of the liberty of conscience,
the equality of opinions before

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