em to be its minister. But he preached complete separation of
Church and State, and demanded absolute religious liberty, not only for
all Christians but also for Jews, Turks, and heathen. They should have
in the state equal civil and political rights with believers. A man's
conscience belongs exclusively to him, and not to the state.[76] Exiled
and in danger, Williams forsook Salem and with a faithful few founded,
1636, the city of Providence in the country of the Narragansett Indians,
where all who were persecuted on account of their religion should find a
refuge. In the original compact the seceders promised obedience to laws
determined by a majority of themselves, but "only in civil
things"--religion was to be in no way a subject of legislation.[77] Here
for the first time was recognized the most unrestricted liberty of
religious conviction, and that by a man who was himself glowing with
religious feeling.

Nineteen settlers from Providence in 1638 founded Aquedneck, the second
colony in the present state of Rhode Island, after having concluded a
most remarkable compact: "We whose names are underwritten do here
solemnly, in the presence of Jehovah, incorporate ourselves into a Bodie
Politik, and as he shall help, will submit our persons, lives and
estates unto our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords,
and to all those perfect and absolute laws of his given us in his holy
word of truth, to be guided and judged hereby.--Exod. xxiv, 3, 4; 2
Chron. xi, 3; 2 Kings xi, 17."[78]

But such as did not go so far as Roger Williams in the recognition of
liberty of conscience were yet dominated by the idea of the necessity of
a social compact in founding a new colony. In the Fundamental Orders of
Connecticut, a colony founded by Puritans who also had emigrated from
Massachusetts, the settlers in 1638 declared that they united themselves
in a body politic in pursuance of the word of God in order to guard the
liberty of the Gospel and the church discipline to which they were
accustomed, and in order also in civil affairs to be ruled according to
the laws.[79] In the opposition in which they stood to the religious
conditions in England, the Puritans, although themselves little inclined
to toleration, proceeded invariably upon the idea that their state had
first of all to realize religious liberty, which was for them the free
exercise of their own religious convictions.

The idea that state and government rested u