Introduction: A New Encounter with Early Modern Britain

Summary

Roger Williams, the founder of Providence, penned The Hirelings Ministry None of Christs in 1652. He wrote at the close of the religious wars that had pitted the peoples and churches of Britain and Ireland against one another since 1637. Williams denounced the incomplete conversion of souls to the Gospel of Christ with racial imagery: ‘although the holy Spirit of God, in every Nation where the Word comes, washeth white some Blackamores, and changeth some Leopards spots, yet the bodies and bulks of nations, cannot by all the Acts and Statutes under heaven, cut off the Blackamores skin’. We might think Williams bemoaned the state of grace in the American colonies, but he had in mind the complacent reformers who trumpeted the ‘great and mighty conuersions of whole Nations, England, Scotland, French, Dutch, &c. from Popery to be good Protestants’. As a promoter of Independency, the freedom to seek God outside a ‘state’ church, Williams drew a direct contrast between the established churches of the Old World and the spirituality of the New: ‘This mine eyes have often seen among the thousands of wild, yet wise Americans … utterly uncapable of Formes and Ministers (or Officers) of Christian Worship, while yet in their naturally and worldly capacities … made spirituall and heavenly, by the holy Spirit of God.’

The Protestant churches in Britain and Ireland compiled a dismal missionary record in the Isles. According to Williams, ‘as an eminent Person lately spake (upon occasion of a Debate touching the Conversion of Indians) we have Indians at home, Indians in Cornwall, Indians in Wales, Indians in Ireland’. They desperately needed the true Gospel to stop them being ‘turned forward and backward as the Weather-cock’ by this or that established church. Williams contended that ‘it is not the will of the Father of Spirits that … any Towne or Parish (so called) in England, Scotland, or Ireland, be disturbed in their worship (what worship soever it be) by the ciuill sword’ acting for a state church. The answer for the peoples of the Isles, ‘Indian’ or otherwise, lay with the Gospel fervour and Holy Spirit that fed those wild, yet wise Americans, openly professed in free assemblies by women and men who sought the Son of God.