AGAINST CONFORMITY, OR ON BEING WILLING TO LIVE WITH INSECURITY AND ERROR

John M. Barry, Roger Williams and The Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (New York: Viking, 2012) ("William also saw conformity in a different way than did Winthrop and Cotton, or for that matter than did any of the members of the Westminster Assembly or of Parliament. Conformity is a function of the desire for certainty; the greater or lesser that desire, the greater or lesser the demand for conformity. This was the age both believing in and seeking certainty, certainty of everything from the infallibility of Scripture to one's place in God's plan. The very sense of society as a body, with each person in a fixed and place and performing a fixed task, reflected that view, and that view was not limited to Puritans. . . . " "Roger Williams had never conformed--not even as a child, for even his father had persecuted him for his beliefs as a young boy. Yet for all his conviction, for all his commitment to his own way, it was not certainty he had clung to much of his life. Quite the contrary, he had remarkable willingness to live with doubt and uncertainty. As he had told Winthrop so many years before, I desire not to sleep in securitie and dreame of a Nest wch no hand can reach." "His ability to live without security matched his willingness to live with error--including the possibility of his own error. He lived in a way that was the antithesis of Cotton's monstrous partiality, a partiality to one's own views that appalled him, that he found repulsive. By contrast, he urged the asking of questions and argued that without doing so a society could not advance. He warned that if 'it shall be a crime, humbly and peaceably to question . . . what ever is publickly taught and delivered, you will most certainly find your selves . . . enslav'd and captivated in the Chains of those Popish Darknesses, (to wit Ignorance, is the mother of Devotion, and we must believe as the church believes, &c.).' " Id. at 344-345.).