WILLIAMS, ROGER. - Protestant polemicist and English colonizer, founder of the State of Rhode Island, b. in London in 1603, d. in Providence in 1683. He studied law at Cambridge and took orders in the Anglican Church in 1629.
Having moved to Massachusetts, he became minister of the Church at Salem, advocating principles even more democratic than those of the levellers, the most radical among the dissenters. He was in fact banished thence and, after a long and most arduous journey, moved to Providence (1636) among the Indians, whose language he learned, compiling a grammar of it entitled A key into the language of America (1643). He subsequently became a Baptist and a seeker, that is, opposed to every established creed, while maintaining the foundation of Christian ethics, thus in some way anticipating Emerson’s transcendentalism and Channing’s Unitarianism. He favored the separation of State from Church, for
