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The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience Discussed and Mr. Cotton's Letter Examined and Answered cover

The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience Discussed and Mr. Cotton's Letter Examined and Answered

Chapter 63: CHAP. LV.
By Roger Williams
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History - Early Modern (c. 1450-1750)Philosophy & EthicsReligion/Spirituality

About This Book

The work mounts a sustained argument against using civil power to enforce religious conformity, grounding its case in scriptural interpretation and practical reasoning. It critiques claims that magistrates should punish religious dissent, examines and replies to a contemporary minister's published letter, and offers addresses aimed at lawmakers and general readers. Interleaving theological exegesis, legal and moral reasoning, and polemical rejoinders, the text advocates freedom of conscience and the separation of church authority from state coercion, while outlining a defense of toleration as consistent with Christian principles.

CHAP. LV.

Usury in a commonweal, or civil state, lawfully permitted.

Truth. I proceed. Hence it is that some generals of armies, and governors of cities, towns, &c., do, and, as those former instances prove, lawfully permit some evil persons and practices. As for instance, in the civil state, usury: for the preventing of a greater evil in the civil body, as stealing, robbing, murdering, perishing of the poor, and the hindrance, or stop, of commerce and dealing in the commonwealth. Just like physicians, wisely permitting noisome humours, and sometimes diseases, when the cure or purging would prove more dangerous to the destruction of the whole, a weak or crazy body, and specially at such a time.

Thus, in many other instances, it pleased the Father of lights, the God of Israel, to permit that people, especially in the matter of their demand of a king, wherein he pleaded that himself as well as Samuel was rejected.

Permission of the tares in the field of the world for a twofold good. 1. Of the good wheat. 2. Of the whole world, the field itself.

This ground, to wit, for a common good of the whole, is the same with that of the Lord Jesus commanding the tares to be permitted in the world; because, otherwise, the good wheat should be endangered to be rooted up out of the field or world also, as well as the tares. And therefore, for the good sake, the tares, which are indeed evil, were to be permitted: yea, and for the general good of the whole world, the field itself, which, for want of this obedience to that command of Christ, hath been and is laid waste and desolate with the fury and rage of civil war, professedly raised and maintained, as all states profess, for the maintenance of one true religion—after the pattern of that typical land of Canaan—and to suppress and pluck up these tares of false prophets and false professors, anti-christians, heretics, &c., out of the world.

Hence illæ lachrymæ: hence Germany’s, Ireland’s, and now England’s, tears and dreadful desolations, which ought to have been, and may be for the future,—by obedience to the command of the Lord Jesus, concerning the permission of tares to live in the world, though not in the church—I say, ought to have been, and may be mercifully prevented.