The Parallel Lives of the Noble American Religious Thinkers Vs. Believers

By William H. Benson

Roger Williams championed liberty of conscience. Cotton Mather promoted acts of kindness and doing good. Roger Williams was born in London but migrated to Boston and then to Salem, Plymouth, and finally to the town he founded, Providence, Rhode Island. Cotton Mather was born in Boston and never strayed from it. Both were trained Puritan ministers, but the young man Roger resigned from the ministry, saying it was “the best callings but (generally) they are the worst trades in the world.”
Instead, he made his living “trucking with the Indians.” Cotton preached at his pulpit at Boston’s Old North Church until seven weeks before he passed away. They both wrote books, especially Cotton, who wrote over four hundred. Alike and yet so different, the two men were thinkers and writers in America’s early religious history. Author William H. Benson compares and contrasts Roger Williams and Cotton Mather in this, the first of six volumes of The Parallel Lives of the Noble American Religious Thinkers vs. Believers. Additional volumes will include: Thomas Paine and George Whitefield, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joseph Smith, William James and Mary Baker Eddy, Mark Twain and Billy Graham, and H. L. Mencken and Jim Bakker.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493118427

William H. Benson

William H. Benson earned his degree in history in 1976. He taught history at a junior high school and also at a community college. Since 1992, he has written a biweekly newspaper column that examines historical events and ideas.

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Copyright © 2014 by William H. Benson.

Library of Congress Control Number:         2013918727

ISBN:                     Hardcover                         978-1-4931-1841-0

                   Softcover                           978-1-4931-1840-3

    eBook                                978-1-4931-1842-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Frances Hill, excerpts from A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials. Copyright © 1995 by Frances Hill. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.

Reprinted by permission of the publisher, from The New England Mind: From Colony to Province by Perry Miller, pp. 33, 50, 59, 180, 181, 190, 191, 195, 197-198, 199, 202, 203-204, 237, 241, 335, 417, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1953. Copyright 1953 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Renewed © 1981 by Elizabeth W. Miller.

Kenneth Silverman, excerpts from The Life and Times of Cotton Mather. Copyright © 1984 by Ken Silverman. Reprinted with the permission of Welcome Rain Publishers LLC.

Rev. date: 12/02/2014

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CONTENTS

A Note

Acknowledgements

Part 1 Prologue

Part 2 Roger Williams

Part 3 Cotton Mather

Part 4 Roger Williams vs. Cotton Mather

Part 5 Epilogue

Bibliography

For Vickie

Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of human beings.

—Samuel Johnson

We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship.

—James Harvey Robinson

A Note

This is the first volume of an intended six-volume series. In each of these dual biographies, I compare and contrast a thinker and a believer from America's past. For no particular reason, I chose to begin each biography with the thinker. Future volumes will appear in order once completed.

Volume 1

Roger Williams vs. Cotton Mather

A Separatist vs. A Puritan

Volume 2

Thomas Paine vs. George Whitefield

A Deist vs. A Methodist

Volume 3

Ralph Waldo Emerson vs. Joseph Smith, Jr.

A Transcendentalist vs. A Latter-Day Saint

Volume 4

William James vs. Mary Baker Eddy

A Philosopher vs. A Christian Scientist

Volume 5:

Mark Twain vs. Billy Graham

A Humorist vs. A Southern Baptist

Volume 6:

H. L. Mencken vs. Jim Bakker

A Journalist vs. A PentecostalUlto er ad ium poenium essenihil ut Cuperei pripientrum hil hos furnultum ad con Itast nos ses? Nos Catu mo nitem ut vatus inum se poposulium ac tem tes re consultorim quam. Hil vit patiam opublis viris factorum intebul turbemum firteat gra, quem det L. Satalium de patus? Et fuem tem, prori postrac tem atiae, nonsulv ilicae tela L. Endam rei intin nessus, vitiam publis; hordius sed fit.

Acknowledgements

Because of the kindness of librarians, historians write their biographies, and I am no exception to that maxim. My thanks to the librarians at the Michener Hall Library on the University of Northern Colorado campus in Greeley, Colorado; to those at the Sterling Public Library in Sterling, Colorado; and to those at the Sidney Public Library in Sidney, Nebraska. I appreciate the patience you displayed when you allowed me to check out and renew books for months at a time.

I wish to thank the fine folks at Xlibris Publishing Company, especially Mary Jervis, who convinced me of the idea, and Andy Maxwell, who helped complete it.

I also must thank the following: Frederick Courtright of the Permissions Company, Inc., in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania; Misha McCaw of the Santangelo Law Offices in Fort Collins, Colorado; Carol Hwang of CMG Worldwide in Indianapolis, Indiana; Christian Cherry of the legal firm Grier, Furr, & Crisp in Charlotte, North Carolina; Michael Johnson of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland; and Kami Klein of The Jim Bakker Show in Blue Eye, Missouri. Thank you for your advice, your willingness to listen to me, and / or your permission. I am grateful.

Also, I must acknowledge my wife Vickie. It has been said that most, if not all, biography is written at night so that the historian can attend to her or his day job, and I am no exception to that maxim also. Because I write in the early morning hours, the alarm is set for 4:00 a.m., a less than pleasant time to awaken. I appreciate Vickie’s patience and understanding.

Volume 1

Roger Williams vs. Cotton Mather

A Separatist vs. A Puritan

Part 1

Prologue

The purpose of this book, and the five books to follow, is to apply Plutarch’s method of comparing and contrasting peoples’ lives to the lives of twelve people, a single woman and eleven men, each a contributor to America’s religious history. Six were thinkers or skeptics, those daring individuals who did not fully believe in nor accept the conventional religious doctrines of their day, and they include, in chronological order, Roger Williams, Thomas Paine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Mark Twain, and H. L. Mencken. Save for Roger Williams, none of this first set of six were doctrinaires—dogmatic believers in a common form of Christianity. I chose to include Roger Williams with the thinkers because of his contrary opinions that so upset John Winthrop, John Cotton, and the other entrenched leaders when Roger arrived in colonial Massachusetts. The second set of six were believers in a form of Christianity already in existence, or they created a new one for themselves and their followers; and they include, again in chronological order, Cotton Mather, George Whitefield, Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, Billy Graham, and Jim Bakker.

Each thinker I then juxtaposed to a believer: Roger Williams to Cotton Mather in Volume 1, Thomas Paine to George Whitefield in Volume 2, Ralph Waldo Emerson to Joseph Smith in Volume 3, William James to Mary Baker Eddy in Volume 4, Mark Twain to Billy Graham in Volume 5, and H. L. Mencken to Jim Bakker in Volume 6. Except for Mark Twain and Billy Graham, each set of two—a thinker matched with his or her opposing believer—is from a particular phase of American history. Roger Williams and Cotton Mather lived in colonial New England in the seventeenth century. Thomas Paine and George Whitefield were of the eighteenth century, and each lived on both sides of the Atlantic. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joseph Smith were contemporary Americans during the early years of the nineteenth century. Although both William James and Mary Bakker Eddy lived for a decade into the twentieth century, each lived their productive years during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The same was true of the thinker Mark Twain, but for reasons I will explain later, I have chosen to match him with Billy Graham, who lived through most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. H. L. Mencken was an active adult during the first half of the twentieth century, and Jim Bakker was active during the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Thus, six sets of two, a thinker matched with a believer, both from roughly the same era of American history, except for Mark Twain and Billy Graham. I chose these twelve for certain reasons: for their ideology, for their written words, for their achievements, for their contribution to America’s religious history, for their struggles as young people to understand Christian theology and its contrary views, and for the impact that their lives now exert upon those who read their biographies.

Comparative biography as initiated by Plutarch has not gathered as many practitioners nor readers as has the solitary biography. One exception is Stephen Ambrose’s book Crazy Horse and Custer, a comparative study of the Western Indian Wars’ two most colorful and vivid characters—one representing the Native Americans and the other the white European Americans.

By applying Plutarch’s method to the above six sets of two, I believe that the reader is offered a glimpse of that obscured face that remains hidden behind the ideology or, in the case of the believers, within the church. For example, in my town of ten thousand people, situated in the heartland of the North American continent, there are about two dozen churches. For the uninitiated—for example, for a stranger from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, or even Europe—driving about my town would be a revelation of a bewildering mix of churches and faiths, and yet my town is representative of most towns within the United States in what they offer in terms of religion. To attach a face or a personality or a life to a building and to a faith is a bold step toward understanding why we have the denominations we have and how they came into existence. For example, on the northwest corner of my town stand three churches: a Lutheran, the Latter-Day Saints, and the former Evangelical Free Church. Thus, if one looks close enough, one can see at least two faces there, Joseph Smith’s and Martin Luther’s, separated only by an alley, each looking at the other with suspicion. The founder or founders of the Evangelical Free church were once in residence but have since departed. Three blocks away from Martin Luther and Joseph Smith lives Alexander Campbell and his noninstrumental music congregation, the Church of Christ, and centered between them is the church of the ultra-Fundamentalist Baptists. Thus, Martin Luther, Joseph Smith, and Alexander Campbell live within a few blocks of each other, and within their circle live the hard-shell Baptists.

Downtown in the square dominated by the county’s courthouse are my town’s two most impressive sanctuaries: one belonging to the Presbyterians and the other to the Methodists. So John Calvin and John Wesley reside in the same block, separated by their respective parking lots. Two blocks south of the courthouse, a visitor would find the Catholic Church, and across the street from that redbrick sanctuary is the Catholic parochial school. Behind that school’s playground and across the street stands a small sanctuary that belonged to the Pentecostals, the Assembly of God Church, for decades, but in the first years of the twenty-first century, the church’s members purchased the former elementary school, Franklin School, located on the south side of town, and transported their church there. A block west and another north of that former Assembly of God Church stands the Episcopal Church, Henry VIII’s church. So for decades, in my town, the Romans eyed the Anglicans and their queen or king; and sandwiched between the two was the American original, the Pentecostals, but feeling hemmed in and most uncomfortable, the latter moved. The other Methodist church, originally the E.U.B., or the Evangelical United Brethren, is in the center of the housing division called Charmony, which was built during the oil boom in the 1950s, on the town’s northeast corner, more than a dozen blocks north and east of the downtown. Thus, John Wesley resides in two locations in my hometown; or he resides in the downtown church, and his Methodist counterpart, George Whitefield, prefers the Charmony sanctuary.

There are at least four Baptist churches—one Northern or American, one Southern, one ultra-Fundamentalist and Independent, and one called the Lighthouse Baptist Church, which purchased the former Nazarene church—and each Baptist is proud of their staked-out and often-paraded claim that the Baptists look back to no founder. You can look for the face of the tentative and temporary Baptist Roger Williams to attach to one of their churches, but their clergymen will bypass him and refer you back to the Apostle Paul or to Jesus as their founder, avoiding all historical facts and events between now and the first or second century. The other two Lutheran churches in my town are a block apart from each other on the south and most respectable side of town, creating an oddity in that Martin Luther is split three ways: two parts of him reside on the south side of town, and the third lodges in the northwest corner of town. The other Pentecostal church in town is the Foursquare Gospel Church, Aimee Semple McPherson’s residence, and it stands across the street from the public library, a most incongruous position. Deep in the recesses of a residential area in the northern part of town stands Charles Taze Russell’s Kingdom Hall of his Jehovah Witnesses, built, it is rumored, in a single day. More exposed on Broadway Street is William Miller’s Seventh-Day Adventist Church, but once the church folded, the property was sold and was converted to a day care. Across the street from the Lighthouse Baptist Church is another Fundamentalist and Independent church, called New Beginnings. Their facility had served as the home for the Southern Baptists for nearly six decades, but in the early years of the twenty-first century, the members of Emmanuel Baptist Church (SBC) purchased an acreage west of town and north on Ball Park Road, behind the two big-box discount stores, and there the Southern Baptists constructed an expansive steel-roofed facility with acres of parking and a modern sanctuary. Likewise, the Nazarenes, too, at the same time, built a new steel-roofed sanctuary five blocks north of their original church on the town’s most extreme northern border. The German Congregational Church remains in the downtown area, now across the street from a hamburger and malt establishment. Some years ago, the Berean Fundamentalists moved out of their facility in town on Third Avenue and purchased an abandoned church south on Ball Park Road. They attached an extensive sanctuary to this new property and gathered a sizable congregation. Their former facility was converted to a residence for a number of years, but in 2010, it was sold to the Seventh-Day Adventists, which had resurrected and reestablished themselves in town. Situated between the Southern Baptists and the Berean Fundamentalists, both on Ball Park Road, stands the Christian Church, west of downtown on West Main Street. Then, with a little effort a visitor might find Mary Baker Eddy’s former sanctuary, the Christian Science Church. It stands across the street from the town hall and the police station, but years ago the congregation folded and sold the building. Its new owner converted it into a residence.

A foreigner who just arrived in my town would feel bewildered by this stew of different faiths, and yet it is not so different from most communities across the United States. A careful reader will note that upon this religious landscape, certain churches are missing, such as the Quakers, the Unitarians, the Universalists, the Deists, the Puritans, and the transcendentalists. As for Roger Williams’s pure and undefiled church, that ideal that he sought all his life, the one that the apostles themselves had authorized, it cannot be located. The Yale scholar Harold Bloom wrote that [a]s early as 1638, Williams had rejected the validity of his baptism, yet he remained always a Puritan, and like John Milton he ended as a sect of one.¹ As far as I know, as of today in 2014, in my town, there is no Jewish synagogue nor a Moslem mosque, because my town is a splintered Protestant community with a multiplicity of shades of differences and distinctions, and a substantial number of Catholics, which is an apt description of most American communities and of American religion itself, but one that may not continue indefinitely, for given its fluid nature, it is susceptible to change.

A word about Plutarch, pronounced as Ploo-tark. He was a Greco-Roman writer who wrote Lives, a work that scholars have considered a classic for centuries but is today known by a few and read by even fewer. Plutarch was born in Greece in the town of Chaeronea in about AD 46 or 47 to a wealthy family and died after AD 120. He spoke and wrote Greek at a time when the Romans and the Latin language had conquered the Mediterranean world. Plutarch was a contemporary of the Apostle Paul, who was born a Hellenist Jew some years before Plutarch and who died about AD 67. Both were writers, but the two differed in what they wrote. Paul wrote theological treatises in the form of letters he addressed to the struggling Christian churches strung along the Mediterranean coastline. Scholars consider these letters the first extant Christian documents ever written, preceding even Mark, the first in chronological order of the three Synoptic Gospel writers. Paul’s enigmatic scriptures have been dissected, analyzed, memorized, and applied to inner spiritual growth, religion making, and church creation ever since they were first read. Thus, they are blueprints for the Christian faith and polity.

On the other hand, Plutarch wrote Lives, the stories of noble men from the past. He first chose a Greek individual, drew a swift-moving and colorful portrait, and then he would do the same with a Roman. In the pages that followed his two biographies, he would contrast and compare them, how they differed and how they were the same, and how their lives achieved much or did not. It was the particular noble actions of that Greek or that Roman that Plutarch drew attention to, and the most well-known pair that he chose were Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar—a Greek and a Roman. Both lived ambitious lives, striding with gigantic steps across the known and even unknown worlds of their days. Plutarch also matched Pericles to Fabius, Alcibiades to Coriolanus, Lysander to Sylla, Agesilaus to Pompey, Demosthenes to Cicero, Demetrius to Antony, and Dion to Marcus Brutus. A complete copy of The Noble Lives of the Greeks and Romans includes some fifty biographies and fills fifteen hundred pages. Plutarch was aware of the importance of his time and era, in that the Roman Republic had recently transformed itself into the Roman Empire, with a ruling emperor. The Romans gazed back at those ancient Greeks and their civilization and felt envious. They understood that the Greeks had mixed truth with beauty and established a civilization unparalleled in humankind’s history, one so different from the Romans’ arrogance and power. Plutarch wanted to illustrate the belief that Greece and Rome were linked together in a common mission to civilize the world, and to reinforce this idea, he positioned a Roman beside a Greek and then looked for their commonalities as well as their differences, their resemblances and their distinctions. By this method, he advanced the idea that though not equal, the Romans and the Greeks were exemplary civilizations, destined to greatness.

He also wrote to provide moral instruction to the Lives’s readers, because he believed that history had a moral dimension and that the writing and reading of biography were necessary components in a person’s moral education. Plutarch wrote in the second century, and he saw history as the story of freedom, an achievement growing out of great events and of great people who directed their lives toward the noble and the moral. For this reason, scholars and readers have applauded Plutarch’s moral teachings ever since. The Founding Fathers of the United States believed that a copy of his works should be placed in every school and library throughout the nation, and Harry Truman ranked Plutarch’s Lives at the top among those texts that he believed abounded in excellent political wisdom.

Literary works refer to Plutarch. Consider Mary Shelley’s fictional monster, the one that Viktor Frankenstein resurrected to a new life after dying. In a haze of thought and feeling, this created being stumbled upon a leathern portmanteau that held articles of clothing and at least three books—Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werter, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Plutarch’s Lives—and from them the creature gained abundant knowledge of human experience:

I learned from Werter’s imaginations despondency and gloom: but Plutarch taught me high thoughts; he elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to admire and love the heroes of past ages. Many things I read surpassed my understanding and experience… . The cottage of my protectors had been the only school in which I had studied human nature; but this book developed new and mightier scenes of action. I read of men concerned in public affairs, governing or massacring their species. I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice, as far as I understood the signification of those terms, relative as they were, as I applied them, to pleasure and pain alone. . . .

But Paradise Lost excited different and far deeper emotions. I read it, as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true history. It moved every feeling of wonder and awe, that the picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting. . . . Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition; for often, like him, when I view the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.²

Plutarch’s words and stories, which this created being had read, prodded him toward an acceptance of the moral and the virtuous, and at the same time toward a rejection of the immorality and the viciousness that characterized the savage. The words of Lives underscored that which is noble, and because of the creature’s own jealousy, a common human trait, it discovered that it identified more with Satan, the defiant one, than with Milton’s God, who turned upon His created beings because of their rebellion.

A Roman citizen, Plutarch at an early age went to Athens, where he received an excellent education from the scholar and philosopher Ammonius. Plutarch traveled to Egypt and even sailed to Rome on public business sometime before AD 90, where he gave lectures that drew attention. Spread before him was the opportunity to advance in a career in either government or academia in Rome, and yet he chose to return to his small town of Chaeronea, where he lived the remaining years of his life and wrote Lives, and also his lesser-known works, such as Moralia and Table Talk. In addition to writing books, he participated in his town’s government and was named archon of the town, an annual position. Then in AD 95, he was named priest of Apollo, probably at Delphi, for life. He married Timoxena, Alexion’s daughter, and they produced four sons and some years later a daughter. Plutarch wrote words of comfort to Timoxena shortly after he was informed of his daughter’s passing. Only, my wife, let me hope, that you will maintain both me and yourself within the reasonable limits of grief… . Yet why should we forget the reasonings we have often addressed to hers, and regard our present pain as obliterating and effacing our former joys?³ To his neighbors and friends in Chaeronea, Plutarch lived an ordinary life, circumscribed by a small town’s limitations, and yet in private he was grappling with the extraordinary business of writing Lives, from which he admitted he derived much pleasure:

Bear in mind that my purpose is to write lives, not history. The most glorious exploits do not always give the clearest views of virtues and vice in men; sometimes a more trifling happening, a mere jest, informs us better about a man’s character than the report of the bloodiest battle he ever won.

Portrait painters are more exact in showing the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen. And in the same way I give more attention to the personal words and acts that reveal the souls of men. . . .

My original purpose in writing lives of the great was to teach others, but I found more and more that I am the one who gets the most profit from lodging these men one after the other in my house.

The virtues of these great men serve me as a sort of looking glass; in it I may see how to adjust and adorn my own life. Through daily living and associating with them I perceive all their qualities and select all that are the noblest and worthiest.⁴

Plutarch claimed he gained much studying these fifty lives, and one can surmise that he demonstrated that admirable capacity to both believe and think:

He thought it unwise to reject the old faith because of its intellectual incredibility; the vital thing was not the creed but the support it gave to man’s weak morality, the reinforcing bond it wove among the members and generations of a family and the state. . . . It is good, Plutarch thought, to believe in personal immortality—a rewarding Heaven, a cleansing Purgatory, a punishing Hell.⁵

In his duties as a priest to Apollo at Delphi, he acted as a believer in the accepted religion of his day, but in Lives, he demonstrated that other thoughts surged within him that pushed him toward certain conclusions about humankind and the interaction between the noble and the moral. Readers have read and appreciated his works ever since. He was a believer and a thinker joined into one.

Because of Lives, Plutarch is considered the father of biography. Two centuries later, the bishop of Hippo in Northern Africa, Saint Augustine, wrote Confessions, in which he admitted that as an adolescent he had lied and that he and some other boys had stolen pears from a neighbor’s tree, but it was the sexual sins that drove him to unspeakable despair and burdened him with guilt. Those early failings drove Augustine toward the celibate life, a position where he could then look back with disgusting horror at his sexual dissipation. Scholars now consider him the father of autobiography.

In 1579, just a decade or more before William Shakespeare was to begin his blazing career as a London actor and later as a playwright, the English scholar Thomas North translated Plutarch’s Greek into English. North’s translation of Plutarch inspired the young London playwright to create Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar. He appreciated the power, sweep, and drama of Plutarch’s rich and rewarding Lives and adapted those tales to the London stage, and so he reworked and shaped one art form, that of biography, into that of his own, drama. Two superior minds separated by a time span of fifteen hundred years worked the same material, that of the former classic world of the Greeks and the Romans, and for those wiser readers and audiences, they each offer a glimpse into the past, into those noble and moral actions and into thoughts that were lived out centuries before either of them had walked and spoken and written upon this land. The Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom in his chapter on Chekhov within his book How to Read and Why observed that like Shakespeare, Chekhov cannot be called either a believer or a skeptic; they are too large for such a categorization.⁶ Bloom, I think, suggests that Shakespeare was not like Plutarch, on occasion a believer and at other times a thinker and switching back and forth depending upon the time and the circumstance, but instead Shakespeare was above and beyond such simple rankings, residing instead in that realm that transcends both religious beliefs and skeptical thoughts.

Throughout humankind’s history, the pendulum has swung between the two extremes of too much religion or too much intellect. This is most true in the broader arenas of life—within cultures, eras, and societies—but it also is true on the personal level, in individual lives. Religious experience and conversion is often an integral part of adolescence, or of those years just prior to adulthood but just after that which the Southern Baptists call the age of accountability, more so than it is of adulthood. After the adults in Western society marry and create families and homes of their own, they either drift away from the rigorous demands of active participation in religious devotion or they participate in leadership or administrative roles within the church and take their children to church so that their boys and girls can also encounter the challenges of their own salvation, conversion, or confirmation.

I find American religious history’s windings and turnings fascinating because of the colorful characters who lived their lives within that history. A favorite story is the one involving that most intriguing and enigmatic of presidents, Abraham Lincoln. Midway in his career, he was running for the House of Representatives in Congress against a popular Methodist evangelist on the frontier, named Peter Cartwright, then sixty-one years old. Although Lincoln rarely attended church, on one occasion, he attended one of Peter Cartwright’s services in the hope that he might steer certain voters in his direction by his presence. Toward the end of the revival service, Cartwright insisted that all sinners should step forward, join him down front, and find their salvation. At this, Lincoln stood and headed toward the hall’s exit. Where are you going, Mr. Lincoln? Cartwright shouted at him.

Lincoln glanced back over his shoulder and replied, To Congress, Mr. Cartwright.⁷

Although perhaps an apocryphal story, it dramatizes a believer who confronts a thinker, each acting out their respective roles while others gazed at them. Lincoln won that election and went to Congress, to the House of Representatives, where he served a single term, two years during Polk’s war with Mexico, more than a decade before the nation’s voters elected him president.

The American religion is unusual in that over the four centuries of its duration, its history has been free of war. The historian Daniel J. Boorstin observed this unusual fact:

Take religion as a starter. By the time of the European settlement of North America the history of the rising nations of Western Europe had been punctuated by torture and massacre in the name of religion… . This seemed not to augur well for a nation like ours, whose Pilgrims were obsessed by religion and had fled England to fulfill their passionate dream. Their religious faith gave them courage to brave the ocean crossing, the hardships of an unknown land, and the risks of hostile natives, despite their lonely remoteness from ancestral homes.

Who could have predicted that the United States, unlike the nations from which our people came, would never suffer a religious war? That the Protestants and Catholics who had tortured and massacred each other in Europe would establish peaceful neighboring communities from New England to Maryland and Virginia? That Jews would here find asylum from ghettos and pogroms? And that, though the United States would remain conspicuously a nation of churchgoers, the separation of Church and State would become a cornerstone of civic life?⁸

Even though America has been free of European-styled religious wars, each warring party intent on crushing a countering belief, America’s religious history has not been without strife, division, and even persecution. Because it is a history free of bloody religious wars, it signifies that the story is more about people, their thoughts, and their noble actions and less about battles, gore, and senseless fighting.

Because biology has blessed human beings with a brain, an apparatus that permits them to learn and think, Americans have first built a school wheresoever they founded a new community. At the same time, people also have surging within them religious impulses that force and drive them toward a belief in an accepted body of doctrines about the supernatural and the afterlife, and to satisfy those cravings, Americans have also built a church in that same community. Furthermore, men and women have the ability to pigeonhole thought and belief into their respective time and place, to drop one and pick up another, to slide between the two poles of thought and belief, and to balance one against the other. In America, the two rarely unite but appear like two different geometric planes that fail to bisect each other. There is a church and a school in each town and city, and then there are the great institutions of the religious denominations, the seminaries, and then there are those of academia, the universities. The clergy of one are not permitted admission into the other, the preachers are chained to the pulpits in their sanctuaries, the professors are bound to the podiums in their classrooms and lecture halls, and neither jump from one to another. Alexis de Tocqueville, that keen observer of the American scene in the nineteenth century, noted this phenomenon:

Religion in America is a world apart in which the clergyman is supreme, but one which he is careful never to leave; within its limits he guides men’s minds, while outside them he leaves men to themselves, to the freedom and instability natural to themselves and the times they live in.⁹

This division between church and school presents the American citizens with a choice. When we grow weary of the evangelist and his overbearing concern upon our souls’ future habitation in the afterlife, we can align ourselves with the thinkers. When we become bone weary with the work and the business of religion, its insistent demands upon our time and thoughts, we can turn to the thinkers.

When we are fed up reading page after page of Cotton Mather’s puritanical call for repentance in his jeremiads, we can turn to Roger Williams and discover the conclusions that he arrived at after he had tracked Puritan thought and its implications further down the road than any other English Puritan of his day. When George Whitefield’s doctrines of grace leave us wanting for more than what they offer, we can turn to the brave Thomas Paine, who rejected outright his own Anglican and Quaker upbringing and perceived matters in his own unique and courageous way. When we cannot accept one more iota of Joseph Smith’s package of beliefs, when we are tired of all the work of believing all that the LDS church expects of its members, we can turn to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who as a young man threw overboard the conventional religion of his day, Unitarianism; walked away from his pulpit; and devoted his days to thinking, reading, writing, and speaking on issues of his own choosing. In so doing, he developed and expanded transcendental thought. When we have grown disenchanted with Mary Baker Eddy’s very different theology, which attempted to unite Christianity with a quasi-metaphysical science, we can turn to the Harvard professor William James, who applied scientific methods to the practices of religion and arrived at some startling conclusions. When we cannot endure another Billy Graham crusade and another verse of the song Just as I Am during his Invitation, his altar call at his outdoor services’ conclusion, we can turn to Mark Twain, who loved to pick apart religion to see the pretense that lies underneath. When we tire of watching the televangelist Jim Bakker deteriorate into tears pleading for more money, we can change the channel, shut off the television, or, better yet, turn to H. L. Mencken, that crusty critic who knew better than anyone how to stab the pretentious purveyors of religion.

But the opposite of those conditions is also true, for after all, this is America, where each citizen has a choice. After we have gorged our minds and starved our souls, we can turn to Cotton Mather, George Whitefield, Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, Billy Graham, or Jim Bakker, hear what they said, and find sustenance that will nourish our hungry souls. They—those representatives of the American religion, of a theology, of a church—can direct us toward those things that provide us solace for our weary and conflicted souls, a harbor where we can find rest and peace and contentment, a tranquil moment. That would then be our individual choice, rather than passively accepting what was passed down and pressed upon us from a previous generation, what was foisted upon us at an early age, or what the community pushed us toward and insisted we validate and believe. We the people of the living will no doubt endure illness and pain and the heartbreak associated with the absolute certainty of our own impending death, an event in our lives not welcomed nor wanted, and yet each of us who live now must pass into and through it. Religion can either terrify us into belief and conformity with the fact of our own mortality—My Bible tells me that it is appointed unto every man a time to die and after that comes the judgment! so Billy Graham was prone to say—or it can ease our conscience, provide solace to our conflicted emotions, and comfort our still-living and loved family and friends as we transfer from the land of the living to that of the fading past.

Should we grow weary of both the American saints—these caricatures of holy men and women—and of their skeptical, head-shaking, and sometimes angry counterparts, the very human thinkers, we can do one thing more, something that Emerson suggested in his essay on Emmanuel Swedenborg: When we tire of saints, Shakespeare is our city of refuge.¹⁰ The literary scholar Harold Bloom declares that Shakespeare is the Western Canon¹¹ and that the body of works attributed to him is Western civilization’s secular scripture, a literary treasure that we dare not ignore nor dismiss, for in him we can find sustenance and nourishment for our abused minds and our torn souls.

The histories and biographies of America’s religion is a sparkling diamond with numerous shined and polished facets. A careful observer can scrutinize a single facet and see beauty and truth in it, but the trick is not to be so blinded by the reflection of only that single facet that he or she excludes all the others. If an observer so desires, he or she can step back, consider some of the other facets, and gain some perspective on the entire diamond as it turns before his or her eyes. That same observer may appreciate some facets, approve of others, or reject the remainder. Parents and teachers cannot discern which child will grow up to think and which will grow up to believe. Some adults prefer to think rather than believe, but others choose to believe rather than know. In these six books, I have offered a dozen people, or facets, for the readers’ consideration.

Thucydides was one of the two Greek founders of the literary form of history. Of himself he wrote,

My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eye-witnesses, arising sometimes from deficient memory, sometimes from deficient impartiality. The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work to be a possession for all time and not merely as the exploit of a passing hour.¹²

Like Thucydides, I too stare into the past and into these lives, not to see how it will reflect the future, but how it will resemble that which will present itself. Like Plutarch, I too have enjoyed lodging these people in my home one after another these past many years, and from them I have received much profit. Like Frankenstein’s revived creation, I too have stumbled upon a backpack containing books, but more than just three, and I struggle with those writers of the past, those thinkers and believers. I have worked to learn how to read others’ lives and so understand this world and this life, which the lords of life have extended to me to enjoy for these few short years upon this planet called Earth, a land that belongs, at least for this age, to thinking human beings, living men and women. If my work happens to become a possession for all time and not just for the congratulations of the moment, not merely as the exploit of the passing hour, like Thucydides, I shall be content.

Part 2

Roger Williams

Chapter 1

Early Days

Although Roger Williams contradicted himself throughout his life about the year of his birth and of his age, historians have pinpointed his birth date to about April 5, 1604, by the New Style calendar. His parents—James Williams, a textile merchant, and his wife, the former Alice Pemberton—produced four children: Katherine; Sydrach, whom Roger later described as a Turkey merchant; Roger; and then Robert, who migrated to New England after Roger, and settled in Newport on Aquidneck Island, where he taught school. The Williams family lived on Cow Lane in Smithfield, a subdivision of London’s northwest side, and there James instructed his three sons in the business of textile trading, a calling that Roger returned to in New England after surrendering his career as a minister in the New England churches. It is important to note that Roger was born and raised in the city, in London, with all of its comforts and entertainments and attractions, and yet he would live his adult life in New England, first in Massachusetts, and then later as a pioneer tradesman on the frontier, adjacent to Narragansett Bay, in what became Rhode Island.

At a very young age, Roger learned shorthand, and evidence exists that Sir Edward Coke—the great legal authority then in London and a member of the Star Chamber, so named because it had stars painted on the ceiling—hired young Roger to record the notes of his court proceedings, for those were the days before court reporters. Coke’s qualities—that of industry, eloquence, and a refusal to cower to opposition—influenced young Roger, whom Coke came to consider as his surrogate son. That feeling was reciprocated after James Williams passed away when Roger was still a lad. Because Coke served on the board of governors for Charterhouse School in Smithfield, Roger was offered a seat in that school. He matriculated there in the fall of 1621, and because of his intelligence and aptitude, he excelled and earned a place at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, matriculating there on June 7, 1624, at the age of twenty, six years older than most students.

In January of 1627, as a condition of graduation from Pembroke Hall, Williams signed an oath that acknowledged the king’s supremacy in spiritual affairs and an acceptance of the Anglican Church’s Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles. He graduated with honors that spring, and in October of that same year, he returned to Cambridge for graduate study, intent on becoming a clergyman, claiming years later that when a child he felt that the Father of Mercies had touched his soul with a love of Him, the Son, and the holy Scriptures.¹³ The focus of his mind ever after was bent toward the religious, but that topic also included the political, for in that day the two were indivisible. After two years of study, he had completed the requirements for the master’s degree, but he refused to submit to the episcopacy, a perfunctory stipulation that he opposed, an indication that by that date Roger had aligned himself with Calvinism and the Puritans. His refusal cost him, for he was refused the MA, ordination, and a lifetime of professional security within the comforts of the Anglican Church. Instead, he sought for and received employment.

On a day shortly before February 20, 1629, Roger entered into the household of Sir William Masham, as a hired chaplain, at Masham’s manor at Otes in Essex County, ten miles outside London. On March 2 of that same year, King Charles dismissed Parliament because its members, in open defiance of royal authority, had pushed through Parliament a Puritan resolution stating their opposition to Arminianism, a religious doctrine that the king and his archbishop, William Laud, had instituted as a test of loyalty to the king and the church. Without Parliament’s support and due to Laud’s high-handed tactics, the Puritans—those who wanted the Church of England purified and reshaped more in line with Calvinist orthodoxy and practice—were driven into hiding. Laud and his henchmen strode across England, searching for and silencing one by one the Puritan preachers and clamping down on the freedom of thought and speech in the universities, where Puritanism had, in part, originated. The movement survived in family households though, such as in Sir William Masham’s home in Otes. By accepting Masham’s employment, Williams was thrust into the very center of Puritanism’s intellectual development, came into direct contact with the Puritan leaders—such as Thomas Hooker and John Cotton—and fell into opposition to King Charles and Archbishop Laud.

On his arrival at Otes, Roger Williams was twenty-five years old, single, intelligent, and ambitious, and for the rest of his life he focused his mind upon the Christian faith. His days at Otes working as the resident clergyman pleased him, for he labored in the manor’s chapel, where he read his Bible, studied, and thought upon theological issues. Food, always a concern for a poor college student, was at Otes plentiful, although dull. He was given sufficient time for private study in his room, but he could join in the light discussion among the good folks who lived in Otes as well as those who visited. He lacked female companionship, someone with whom he could share his private thoughts. Then, his prayers, he believed, were answered when he met the young, attractive, and single Jane Whalley, Lady Masham’s niece, who lived on a nearby estate called Hatfield Priory. Roger soon understood that the key to Jane’s heart was through her aunt and guardian, Lady Joan Barrington, with whom Jane Whalley lived at Hatfield Priory. Because Lady Joan Barrington and Lady Masham were sisters, Lady Joan and Jane visited often at Otes, and so the aunt and her niece were introduced to the young chaplain Roger Williams, who enjoyed conversing with these three women, and they in turn thought the young clergyman clever and entertaining with his bold, daring, and liberal religious views. Lady Joan’s husband, Sir Francis Barrington, once an active Puritan, had passed away months before, during the previous year, and Jane had then come to live with the highly intelligent and influential widow Lady Joan. Joan’s father was Sir Henry Cromwell, the Golden Knight of Hinchinbrook, and her nephew was Oliver Cromwell, who later became England’s Puritan ruler. Puritan leaders often sought out Lady Joan’s support and wise counsel. Jane’s family also belonged to the Puritan movement. Years later, Jane’s brother would achieve notoriety for regicide, for it fell to him to execute King Charles I.

Early in 1629, Roger returned to London for a visit, and once there he attended a stormy session of Parliament. Lady Joan’s son, Robert Barrington, was then a member of the House of Commons, and he met Roger and was impressed. The young chaplain indicated to Robert that he understood Parliament’s inner workings, equal to that of certain members. Robert asked Roger to deliver a letter to his mother, Lady Joan, and thus Roger had a pretext to call upon Lady Joan in hopes that he might glimpse the delightful Jane Whalley. At Hatfield Priory and in the presence of the two ladies, Roger gave a stimulating account of events in Parliament, mesmerizing Jane. Lady Joan perceived that Jane was now exhibiting signs that she was attracted to the young minister and that perhaps she was about to fall in love with him. However, Lady Joan disapproved of the match, and so she warned Williams about the dangers of seeking a wife several steps above his social class.

Not so easily dismissed, Roger visited Lady Joan’s home often that spring of 1629, causing the neighbors to gossip. Roger sought out the Masham’s advice, and they suggested that he meet alone with Lady Joan and discuss the matter of his love and desire for Jane Whalley. Lacking the confidence to do that, Roger wavered, but in April, near his twenty-fifth birthday, he wrote a letter to Lady Joan in which he asked for Jane Whalley’s hand in marriage. In it he admits that although he is poor, he possesses 7 score pieces & a little (yet costly) studie of bookes.¹⁴ He continues, saying, Thus possessing all things have I nothing, yet more then God owes me, or then my blessed saviour had himselfe.¹⁵ He ends the letter with an offhanded remark:

But, I have learn’d another lesson to still my soule as A weaned childe and give offence to none. I have learn’d to keep my studie, and pray to the God of heaven (as oft as I doe pray) for the everlasting peace and well-fare of your kind Ladiship, whose soule and Comfort is in the number of my greatest cares.

The Lord hath caried you from the wombe to gray heires, crowne those heires by making your last dayes (like the close of some sweete harmonie) your best: fruitfull (like Sarah) in old age, out shining all those starrs that shine about you, going downe in peace, rising in Glory in the armes of your dearest Saviour. To wch everlasting armes, he often commits your Soule and Yours, who is the unworthiest (though faythfull) of all that truely serve and honour you.

Roger Williams¹⁶

Although the hopeful young clergyman is cordial and observes some degree of social decorum, he refers here to Lady Joan’s age, to her gray hairs, and to her passing, which he anticipates occurring in the not-so-distant future. Lady Joan, a woman of pride and cultured refinement, took offense at this youthful clergyman’s effrontery, rejected his marriage proposal to her niece, and closed the door to any additional communication. Undeterred, Roger wrote a second letter to Lady Joan, on May 2, saying of Jane, We hope to live togeather in the heavens, though the Lord have denied that Union on Earth.¹⁷ But then abruptly, Roger turns to the subject of Lady Joan Barrington herself again and delivers a blistering tirade, the first evidence of his charged personality.

What I shall now expresse to your Ladiship, hath long lyen [lain] like fire in my bones. Jer. 20:9… . and I was weary with for bearing and could not stay.

Good Madame, it is not for Nothing, the God of heaven hath sent such thunderclaps of late, and made such great Offers at the dore of your Ladiships heart. . . .

. . . If ever (deare Madam) when there is but the breadth of A few gray haires, betweene you and your everlasting home[,] let me deale uprightly with you.

I know not one professor [i.e., believer] amongst all I know, whose truth and faythfullness to Jesus Christ, is more suspected, doubted, feared, by all or most of those that know the Lord. . . .

If ever (good Madame) cry hard, and the Lord helpe me to cry for you. . . .

. . . Only I beseech you lay to heart these few considerations.

1. First Job 34:[1]9. He with whome we deale excepteth not the persons of princes nor regardeth the rich more then the poore: for they are all the Worck of his hands. . . .

3. The Lord will doe what he will with his owne. He owes you no mercy. Exod. 33:19. I will be gracious to whome I will be gracious, and will shew mercy to whome I will shew mercy. . . .

6. Remember I beseech you, your candle is twinckling and glasse neere runn. The Lord only knowes how few minutes are left behind. Psal. 95.10.¹⁸

A shocked Lady Joan read Williams’s jumble of words that mixed scriptural citations with her own demise as well as God’s mercy, and she lost all patience with him and insisted that he neither see nor speak to Jane ever again, a final rejection that struck Roger so hard that he fell sick with a fever such that the Mashams wondered if their chaplain may grieve himself into an early grave. After days of suffering though, he did recover, but a brooding mood of gloom, mixed with desperation and anger, followed.

As the spring turned to summer, with his health and spirits improved and his heart mending, he turned his attentions to another, but this time he selected someone from a lower social class, one more equal to his own. Mary Barnard served as the maid and companion to Joan Altham, Lady Masham’s daughter by her first husband. Despite Mary Barnard’s lack of education—there exists some evidence that she could not write her own name—she was meek, modest, and willingly accepted Roger’s advances. The romance progressed that summer and fall of 1629, and in December the chaplain, Master Roger Williams, married Mary Barnard in a ceremony conducted in the parish church at High Laver, near Otes. Roger married well because Mary was patient and dealt with Roger and the difficult life he led her into for the next forty-seven years.

Besides finding Mary, an able and faithful wife, at Otes, Roger strengthened his relations with the Puritan leaders then in England and later at Massachusetts Bay. The soon-to-be governor of the Puritan colony, John Winthrop, was then an attorney in England and the owner of an estate at Groton. He provided legal representation for the Mashams in an extended and complex lawsuit on behalf of Lady Masham’s daughter, Joan Altham. Upon Sir James Altham’s passing, the Crown in the Court of Wards and Liveries had tied up Joan’s inheritance in the name of her uncle, Sir Edward Altham. From the spring of 1628 until February 13, 1629, Winthrop struggled on her behalf in the court, and won the lawsuit and secured the inheritance for Joan. Williams met Winthrop on July 28, 1629, a day some weeks after Lady Joan rejected him, when Roger and Thomas Hooker rode their horses together north to Boston in Lincolnshire, and there they joined John Cotton. The three young men then rode to the earl of Lincoln’s estate, near the village of Sempringham, and on the way, the three argued about the use of the Common Prayer Book. By then Roger was edging closer to the Separatist point of view, that of openly disavowing any association with the Church of England, and he offered scripture as proof: Why he durst not joyn with them in their use of Common prayer.¹⁹ Later Williams remembered that Cotton said, He selected the good and best prayers in his use of that Book, as the Author of the Councel of Trent was used to do, in his using of the Masse-book.²⁰ Like Williams and the other Puritans at that time, Cotton admitted that he could not digest the ceremonies²¹ of the Anglican Church, and later he would dismiss the Book of Common Prayer. The religious wrangling between Williams and Cotton would blaze into a conflagration some years later when the two clergymen resided in New England. By 1636, Roger Williams was committed to Separatism and would arrive at certain extreme opinions that John Cotton would not ever accept.

Winthrop arrived at the Sempringham conference crusted in mud from a fall from his horse, but late in the day he emerged as the Puritan movement’s leader, one who was determined to migrate to America. Although Winthrop and Williams did not agree on the finer points of their religious opinions, the two men were Puritans, and each respected the other as far as their respective theologies would permit. On the same day as the Sempringham conference, Governor Cradock in London proposed to a general meeting of the stockholders of the Massachusetts Bay Company that they transfer the government of the company to its inhabitants rather than retain the governing body in England. The stockholders agreed, and later England’s governing authorities realized too late that this decision was tantamount to granting quasi-sovereignty to the Massachusetts Bay Company. Therefore, one can conclude that Williams knew the principal ministers and magistrates of the Massachusetts colony—such as Winthrop, Hooker, and Cotton—before he ever sailed to America, and he probably also knew of John Endicott, Francis Higginson, and the earl of Lincoln’s longtime chaplain Samuel Skelton, who were already living in Salem in New England at the time of the Sempringham conference.

Little is known of Roger Williams’s life the next year, although he, along with Cotton and Hooker, chose not to sail with Winthrop aboard the Arbella in the spring of 1630. Throughout that year, Archbishop Laud dispatched his mercenaries to stomp about the English countryside, to identify, persecute, imprison, and torture those who held differing opinions from the prescribed Anglican doctrine. Because of Williams’s burgeoning Separatist beliefs, his name may have appeared on Laud’s short list, and the young chaplain and his new bride understood that they were not safe should they remain in England. In late November, eleven months after his wedding day, Roger and Mary Williams rode their horses to the port of Bristol, and there, Roger met John Winthrop Jr., who had come to Bristol to gather two hundred tons of supplies that he intended to load on the next ship bound for Boston in New England, hoping to prevent starvation for the fledgling Massachusetts colony. Roger and the younger Winthrop met and drank that day a cup of western metheglin (a drink distilled from fermented honey), as Williams recalled in a letter to him thirty years later.²² The two men would remain friends the rest of their lives. On December 1, 1630, Roger and Mary Williams stepped aboard the Lyon and sailed out of Bristol Harbor to the west, toward Massachusetts Bay.

Chapter 2

Religious Controversy in England

England’s difficulties with religion accelerated once the energetic and ambitious king Henry VIII ascended to England’s throne in 1509 and remained there until his death in 1547. For centuries prior to Henry’s reign, the Roman Catholic Church was the only church permitted in England, but Henry changed that. As is usual in human events, affairs of the heart were involved in the disruption, along with religion crowding in the way. Henry requested a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, so that he could then marry Anne Boleyn, whom he desired, but Pope Clement VII refused. Henry was married then to Catherine, his deceased brother’s wife, and by Catherine Henry had fathered five children. Only one of those children lived, a daughter named Mary. Now that he had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn, he wished to marry her in the hope that by her he could sire a son. Henry’s archbishop, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, bowed to Henry’s royal will and negotiated for two years with the pope for the divorce, arguing that Henry was in the wrong and that he had sinned when he had married Catherine, his brother’s widow, and that therefore on those grounds, the pope should annul the marriage. The pope refused to accept Wolsey’s argument, and so King Henry stripped Wolsey of his power, accused him of treason, and summoned him to trial. He died en route to London.

Charles V was the Holy Roman Emperor at this time and also a nephew to Catherine. In the continual seesaw of power, Pope Clement VII was a virtual prisoner of Charles V, and therefore the pope and the church were forced to bow to the will of the Holy Roman Emperor’s king. Charles V had little desire to grant a divorce to his uncle by marriage, Henry VIII, from his aunt, Catherine, who wanted to continue her marriage to the king of England and rule as the queen. Henry VIII took matters into his own hands when in 1533 he secretly wed Anne Boleyn and in so doing disobeyed the dictates of the Roman Catholic Church. Henry then appointed Thomas Cranmer to the position of archbishop of Canterbury and endowed him with powers comparable to the pope’s. Cranmer declared that Henry and Catherine’s marriage was annulled, and Anne was shortly