Abstract

Roger Williams Again

The article discusses the book "Roger Williams, Prophet and Pioneer," by Emily Easton. The book is a biography of the author Roger Williams. Easton devotes herself pretty strictly to telling the story of Williams's life. She passes lightly over Williams's controversies and wastes no space in discussing the patent of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in Mississippi, from the standpoint of political science or the development of American ideas of government. The book brings out little of importance that is new. Bereft of the halo of greatness which time has bestowed upon him, which no one in his day seems to have perceived, Williams stands out as an extreme individualist whose collisions with authority in church and state were inevitable and whose conception of social organization was hardly susceptible of realization either then or later.