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Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty QUOTES

Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty QUOTES

1 " It was a skill useful to lawyers, and no man in all English history was more the lawyer than Coke. He personified a profession considered both so influential and so dubious that in 1372 the House of Commons had tried to bar lawyers from Parliament; little had changed when, in Coke’s lifetime, Shakespeare wrote, “First, kill all the lawyers. "

― John M. Barry , Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty

2 " Meanwhile, Quakers used outrageous behavior to draw more attention to their beliefs and provoke a response. A Quaker man walked into a Boston church holding a bottle in each hand, then smashed them to the floor; he shouted, “Thus will the Lord break all to pieces!” A Quaker woman stripped herself naked and paraded through the Newbury church during worship. Another Quaker woman paraded nude through the streets of Boston. "

― John M. Barry , Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty

3 " Williams created the first government in the world which broke church and state apart. Because those who had linked the two believed that political authority came from God, this led to a fission whose fallout included the new and equally explosive concept that the state derives its authority from and remains subject to its citizens. "

― John M. Barry , Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty

4 " Coke’s influence was direct, Bacon’s more subtle, but Williams built upon the grounding both provided him, adding his own insights and his own conclusions, leaving a legacy of his own. It would be he, not Thomas Jefferson, who first called for a “wall of separation” to describe the relationship of church and state which both he and Jefferson demanded. It would be he who created the first government in the world that built such a wall. And it would be he who first defined the word “liberty” in modern terms, and saw the relationship between a free individual and the state in a modern way. "

― John M. Barry , Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty

5 " He was saying that mixing church and state corrupted the church. He was saying that when one mixes religion and politics one gets politics. "

― John M. Barry , Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty

6 " More than that, many Puritans believed that if the battle with the Antichrist was commencing, they had to convert the Indians. "

― John M. Barry , Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty