The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, Volume 1

"Roger Williams was one of those rare individuals who took the accepted ideas of his time and followed them to conclusions that challenged his contemporaries and still challenge us. To have his complete writings once again available is a great service to all who would understand American religion and political institutions at the deepest level."



Edmund S. Morgan

Sterling Professor of History Emeritus

Yale University



"It has been America's great good fortune that Roger Williams's career stood at the beginning of its history. Just as some experience in the youth of a person is ever afterward a determinant of his personality, so the American character has inevitably been molded by the fact that in the first years of colonization there arose this prophet of religious liberty. Later generations could not forget him or deny him. The image of him in conflict with the founders of New England could not be obliterated; all later righteous men would be tormented by it until they learned to accept his basic thesis, that freedom is a condition of the spirit."



Perry Miller (1963)