ROGER WILLIAMS. - Protestant polemicist and English colonizer, founder of the State of Rhode Island, b. in London in 1603, d. at Providence in 1683. He studied law at Cambridge and was ordained in the Church of England in 1629.
After moving to Massachusetts, he served as minister of the church at Salem, advocating principles even more democratic than those of the Levellers, the most radical among the dissenters. He was accordingly banished from there and, after a long and arduous journey, settled at Providence (1636) among the Indians, whose language he learned and for which he compiled a grammar entitled A Key into the Language of America (1643). He subsequently became a Baptist and a Seeker, i.e., opposed to every established creed, while still maintaining the foundation of Christian ethics, thus in some way anticipating the transcendentalism of Emerson and the Unitarianism of Channing. He advocated the separation of State from Church, for