Encouragement for Mary

Every schoolboy can place Roger Williams in worldly history as the founder of Rhode Island. He was also a most otherworldly American. In 1652, he published a little book entitled Experiments of Spiritual Life and Health, which contains some of the most beautiful devotional passages ever written by an American. Long forgotten, the book has now been reprinted with an essay by Baptist Historian Winthrop S. Hudson (Westminster; $2).

Roger Williams wrote this little book as a letter of encouragement to his wife Mary. She had been sick during Williams' long absences (living "in the thickest of the naked Indians of America, in their very wild houses and by their barbarous fires") and on recovering, she was greatly worried about her spiritual state.

Hypocrites Cry & Howl. To help her, Williams composed and sent her "a handful of flowers" plucked from the garden of Scripture and made into "a little posy fit and easy for thy meditation and refreshing."

God's children, his book admonished, must "use this world and all the comforts of it with a weaned eye and minds, as if we used it not ... as English travelers that lodge in an Indian house use all the wild Indian's comforts with a strange affection, willing and ready to be gone . . ."

And God's children "find a kind of holy pleasure and delight in prayer, whatever be the event or issue . . . Hypocrites in their prayers . . . cry and howl upon their beds for corn and wine . . . but the prayers of God's children chiefly eye heavenly things . . . They also wait for His holy pleasure and leisure . . . confessing themselves beggars at God's door and dogs under His table."

Persecutors Pass Away. Hatred of sin in itself, said Williams, is one of the true marks of a true Christian. The worldly and unregenerate "can only hate the damages and disgrace and discredit of it; and so may a whore hate whoredom. 'Tis only the property of God's children and the newborn to hate sin as sin, with the sinful appearance of it, as opposite to their new and heavenly nature in Jesus Christ."

Unlike most of his Puritan contemporaries, Williams was tolerant of those who did not believe as he did.* His Christian always turned the other cheek: "How quietly, without the swellings of revenge and wrath, should we bear the daily injuries, reproaches, persecutings, etc., from the hands of men who pass away and wither (it may be before night) like grass, or as the smoke on the chimney's top ..."

Roger Williams thought that too many of his countrymen had come to New England "with too much weak desire of peace and liberty."

The true way to spiritual health was unselfishly and unceasingly "to make it a work and business in all these earthy things" to glorify God. "This is our seedtime," wrote Roger Williams, "of which every minute is precious."

*The tolerance was not mutual. In 1636, in midwinter, he fled Salem under sentence of banishment by the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

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