ROGER WILLIAMS
PROPHET AND PIONEER OF SOUL-LIBERTY

“Even the absence of a definite experiment must not deter him. Hewould create a society where the principles would be put to the test.He would fashion a State where the Church and the crown would bemutually helpful though independent. He would create a condition ofhumanity where the sovereignty of the soul before God would be respected,and where every man, believer or disbeliever, Gentile, Jew, orTurk, would have untrammeled opportunity for the display and exerciseof the faith within him. Here lies the core of his heroism!”

“This one monument speaks the gratitude of one State. But the wholecountry has an eloquent voice of appreciation. Even as the tombstone ofSir Christopher Wren, the builder of St. Paul’s Cathedral, intones thelarger praise when it says, ‘If you would see his monument, look aroundyou,’ so would we point to the great principles of equal and religiousfreedom, written into the Constitution of forty-eight States, and engravenon the minds of ninety millions of people in our country and making theirmoral and civic influence felt all over the civilized globe, as worthytributes to the genius of Roger Williams.”

—Extracts from Thanksgiving Address on “Roger Williams,” deliveredby Rabbi Abram Simon, Ph. D., to Reformed Congregation KenesethIsrael, Philadelphia, November 24, 1912.