(1603–1683), was a British-born clergyman who founded the Providence Plantation in Rhode Island.229 A graduate from Pembroke, 1624, he was ordained in the Church of England, 1628. An enthusiastic Puritan minister, his sermons in favor of religious liberty caused him to be persecuted. In 1630, he fled to the Massachusetts Bay Colony where he pastored in Plymouth, 1632–33, and in Salem, 1634. There his criticism of the state church led to a sentenced of being sent back to England, 1635. He escaped and lived among the Indians, befriending them and learning their language.
In 1636, he founded the town of Providence on the land which the Narragansett Indians gave him. This was the first place ever where the freedom to worship God was separated from the control of the state. In 1639, he organized the first Baptist Church in the new world, with one of the principal foundations being that the state could not interfere with or restrict the free and open worship of God according to the Bible. He sailed to England to obtain a patent for Rhode Island, 1643, and served as the colony’s first President, 1654–57.
In one of his messages, Roger Williams wrote:230
When they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broken down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, and made His garden a wilderness, as at this day. And that therefore if He will eer please to restore His garden and paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world.231
On January 9, 1872, Senator Henry Bowen Anthony delivered a Eulogy of Roger Williams in Congress:
He knew, for God, whose prophet he was, revealed it to him, that the great principles for which he contended, and for which he suffered, founded in the eternal fitness of things, would endure forever.
He did not inquire if his name would survive a generation. In his vision of the future he saw mankind emancipated from … the blindness of bigotry, from the cruelties of intolerance. He saw the nations walking forth into the liberty wherewith Christ had made them free.232