The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 295

the law.”—Bancroft, pt. 1, ch. 15, par. 16. He declared it to be the duty
of the magistrate to restrain crime, but never to control the conscience.
“The public or the magistrates may decide,” he said, “what is due from
man to man; but when they attempt to prescribe a man’s duties to God,
they are out of place, and there can be no safety; for it is clear that if the
magistrates has the power, he may decree one set of opinions or beliefs
today and another tomorrow; as has been done in England by different
kings and queens, and by different popes and councils in the Roman
Church; so that belief would become a heap of confusion.”—Martyn,
vol. 5, p. 340.
Attendance at the services of the established church was required
under a penalty of fine or imprisonment. “Williams reprobated the law;
the worst statute in the English code was that which did but enforce
attendance upon the parish church. To compel men to unite with those
of a different creed, he regarded as an open violation of their natural
rights; to drag to public worship the irreligious and the unwilling,
seemed only like requiring hypocrisy.... ‘No one should be bound to
worship, or,’ he added, ‘to maintain a worship, against his own consent.’
‘What!’ exclaimed his antagonists, amazed at his tenets, ‘is not the
laborer worthy of his hire?’ ‘Yes,’ replied he, ‘from them that hire
him.”’—Bancroft, pt. 1, ch. 15, par. 2.
Roger Williams was respected and beloved as a faithful minister,
a man of rare gifts, of unbending integrity and true benevolence; yet
his steadfast denial of the right of civil magistrates to authority over
the church, and his demand for religious liberty, could not be tolerated.
The application of this new doctrine, it was urged, would “subvert the
fundamental state and government of the country.”—Ibid., pt. 1, ch. 15,
par. 10. He was sentenced to banishment from the colonies, and, finally,
to avoid arrest, he was forced to flee, amid the cold and storms of winter,
into the unbroken forest.
“For fourteen weeks,” he says, “I was sorely tossed in a bitter season,
not knowing what bread or bed did mean.”

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