The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience Discussed and Mr. Cotton's Letter Examined and Answered, by Roger Williams TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE BOTH HOUSES OF THE HIGH COURT OF PARLIAMENT. Right honourable and renowned Patriots, Next to the saving of your own souls in the lamentable shipwreck of mankind, your task as Christians is to save the souls, but as magistrates the bodies and goods, of others. Many excellent discourses have been presented to your fathers’ hands and yours, in former and present parliaments. I shall be humbly bold to say, that, in what concerns your duties as magistrates towards others, a more necessary and seasonable debate was never yet presented. Two things your honours here may please to view, in this controversy of persecution for cause of conscience, beyond what is extant. First. The whole body of this controversy formed and pitched in true battalia. Secondly. Although in respect of myself it be impar congressus, yet, in the power of that God who is Maximus in Minimis, your Honours shall see the controversy is discussed with men as able as most, eminent for ability and piety—Mr. Cotton, and the New English ministers. When the prophets in scripture have given their coats of arms and escutcheons to great men, your Honours know the Babylonian monarch hath the lion, the Persian the bear, the Grecian the leopard, the Roman a compound of the former three, most strange and dreadful, Dan. vii. Their oppressing, plundering, ravishing, murdering, not only the bodies, but the souls of men, are large explaining commentaries of such similitudes. Your Honours have been famous to the end of the world for your unparalleled wisdom, courage, justice, mercy, in the vindicating your civil laws, liberties, &c. Yet let it not be grievous to your Honours’ thoughts to ponder a little, why all the prayers, and tears, and fastings, in this nation, have not pierced the heavens, and quenched these flames; which yet who knows how far they will spread, and when they will out! Your Honours have broke the jaws of the oppressor, and taken the prey out of his teeth, Job xxix. 17. For which act, I believe, it hath pleased the Most High God to set a guard, not only of trained men, but of mighty angels, to secure your sitting, and the city. I fear we are not pardoned, though reprieved. Oh! that there may be a lengthening of London’s tranquillity, of the parliament’s safety, by [shewing] mercy to the poor! Dan. iv. [27.] Right Honourable, soul yoke, soul oppressions, plunderings, ravishings, &c., are of a crimson and deepest dye, and I believe the chief of England’s sins—unstopping the vials of England’s present sorrows. This glass presents your Honours with arguments from religion, reason, experience: all proving that the greatest yokes yet lying upon English necks, the people’s and your own, are of a spiritual and foul nature. All former parliaments have changed these yokes according to their consciences, popish or protestant. It is now your Honour’s turn at helm, and as [is] your task so I hope [is] your resolution—not to change: for that is but to turn the wheel, which another parliament, and the very next, may turn again; but to ease the subjects and yourselves from a yoke (as was once spoke in a case not unlike, Acts xv. [10]) which neither you nor your fathers were ever able to bear. Most noble senators; your fathers, whose seats you fill, are mouldered, and mouldering their brains, their tongues, &c., to ashes in the pit of rottenness: they and you must shortly, together with two worlds of men, appear at the great bar. It shall then be no grief of heart that you have now attended to the cries of souls, thousands oppressed, millions ravished, by the acts and statutes concerning souls not yet repealed—of bodies impoverished, imprisoned, &c., for their souls’ belief: yea, slaughtered on heaps for religious controversies, in the wars of present and former ages. The famous saying of a late king of Bohemia. “Notwithstanding the success of later times, wherein sundry opinions have been hatched about the subject of religion, a man may clearly discern with his eye, and as it were touch with his finger, that according to the verity of holy scripture, &c., men’s consciences ought in no sort to be violated, urged, or constrained. And whensoever men have attempted any thing by this violent course, whether openly or by secret means, the issue hath been pernicious, and the cause of great and wonderful innovations in the principallest and mightiest kingdoms and countries,” &c.[83] It cannot be denied to be a pious and prudential act for your Honours, according to your conscience, to call for the advice of faithful counsellors in the high debates concerning your own, and the souls of others. Yet, let it not be imputed as a crime for any suppliant to the God of heaven for you, if, the humble sense of what their souls believe, they pour forth, amongst others, these three requests at the throne of grace: First. That neither your Honours, nor those excellent and worthy persons whose advice you seek, limit the Holy One of Israel to their apprehensions, debates, conclusions, rejecting or neglecting the humble and faithful suggestions of any, though as base as spittle and clay, with which sometimes Christ Jesus opens the eyes of them that are born blind. Secondly. That the present and future generations of the sons of men may never have cause to say that such a parliament, as England never enjoyed the like, should model the worship of the living, eternal, and invisible God, after the bias of any earthly interest, though of the highest concernment under the sun. And yet saith the learned Sir Francis Bacon[84] (however otherwise persuaded, yet thus he confesseth), “Such as hold pressure of conscience, are guided therein by some private interests of their own.” Thirdly. [That] whatever way of worshipping God your own consciences are persuaded to walk in, yet, from any bloody act of violence to the consciences of others, it may never be told at Rome nor Oxford, that the parliament of England hath committed a greater rape than if they had forced or ravished the bodies of all the women in the world. And that England’s parliament, so famous throughout all Europe and the world, should at last turn papists, prelatists, Presbyterians, Independents, Socinians, Familists, Antinomians, &c., by confirming all these sorts of consciences by civil force and violence to their consciences.[85]