Part number five of our Why We Are Baptists. And tonight, we're gonna be focusing our attention upon Baptists in America. Last week, we looked at a lot of the history of the Baptists. We looked at the First Baptist Church over in Amsterdam, the First Baptist Churches in England. We talked about some of these men like John Smith. We talked about Thomas Elwes. But tonight, I wanna look at how Baptists began over here in the United States of America. a lot different than it happened over there. And we'll be really focusing upon two different men tonight, Roger Williams and John Clark. These are some of the, we call them our Baptist forefathers, but I wanna talk to you about them tonight. But before we do, I wanna look at our scripture tonight. We're gonna look at Romans chapter 14, verses one through nine. Romans 14, one through nine. Our focus will be upon verse five. Romans chapter 14, the Bible says, him that is weak in the faith receive you, but not to doubtful disputations. For one believeth that he may eat all things, another who is weak eateth herbs. Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not, and let him Let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth, for God hath received him. Who art thou that judges another man's servant? To his own master he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up, for God is able to make him stand. One man esteemeth one day above another, another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord. He that regardeth not the day to the Lord, he doth not regard it. He that eateth, eateth to the Lord, for he giveth God thanks, and he that eateth not to the Lord, he eateth not and giveth God thanks. For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. For wherever we live, we live unto the Lord, and whether we die, we die unto the Lord. Whether we live therefore or die, we are the Lord's. For to this end, Christ both died and rose and revived, that he might be Lord both of the dead and living. Heavenly Father, God, we thank you so much, Lord, for the reading of your word tonight. I'm praying now that you help us as we continue through this study, Lord, that everything that takes place here, everything we say, Lord, will just be pleasing to you. In Jesus' precious name we pray, amen. Well, that verse five there, We see this is the Apostle Paul, he's teaching the Christians there in Rome about Christianity. And he's talking, if you didn't recognize it, I told you our focus would be on verse five. He's talking about your individual soul liberty. We talked about that a couple of weeks ago, about that being the I in the Baptist. We use that as that acrostic, the I, as individual soul liberty. And what that simply means is that we believe that every man ought to be able to worship with however his conscience allows him to worship. If that's what you want to do, if that's the way you want to worship, we believe that you have the right to do that. And that nobody else has the right to tell you how to worship. And you know, I'll go as far as to say, if you want to be an atheist and not believe in God, that is your right to do that. I highly and strongly advise against it. But if you want to be an atheist and deny God, you will go to hell. And it is your right to do that, if that's what you want to do. But we also believe that everybody ought to trust the Lord Jesus. Everybody ought to receive Him as Savior and be saved, repent of their sins, repent and turn to God to save them through Jesus Christ. But we do believe in individual soul liberty. That's why Paul said, let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. Listen, if somebody has to tell you how to worship, you're not really worshiping according to your own conscience. or your own heart, your own soul, your own mind. We're to love the Lord Jesus with all of our heart, mind, and soul. And if you can't do that, if somebody tells you that you have to do that, then that's not really the real thing. And so we believe in individual soul liberty. And that's really the subject of the message throughout all of tonight as we look at these two men, Roger Williams and John Clark. These men, especially Roger Williams, is referred to as the apostle of soul liberty. That was his main focus in his life once he got over here to the New World. Now I'm not going to reteach you elementary history tonight, but I do want to just quickly refresh your memories on it. It may be a while since you all have heard anything in the classroom about the beginning of America and the colonies and all that. I quizzed my family at the table last night and I was shocked that they didn't have any more information than they did. But of course we all know the little saying, what happened in 1492? Columbus sailed the ocean blue, right? He came over to the New World and landed somewhere down around, I believe, Puerto Rico. And we always say that he discovered America. Well, he didn't really discover America. He came over here, he was exploring, and he landed upon a place. He didn't know what it was, but it was new to him. But we accredit him as being the discoverer of the New World, of Americas. And we even celebrate Columbus Day, which I believe is coming up here real soon. I believe maybe in a week or so. But after that, not a lot happened until 1513, Ponce de Leon discovered Florida. Well, there was already people in Florida. He didn't really discover it, but it was new to him. But he landed there in Florida, and we give him credit for being the discoverer of that land. And in 1539, Hernando de Soto, he brought nine ships and 620 men over and landed in the Tampa Bay. And this is where we start seeing trade happen, and people now are are staying in the new land and different companies are coming and getting goods from this land and taking them back to England and Spain and they're selling these things. And then in 1607, a man named John Smith, we all heard of him, we know about the story of Pocahontas and don't believe everything that you hear on Walt Disney, but John Smith founded the Jamestown colony in Virginia. And we know that to be the first colonies up through there. And he did it on behalf of England, therefore declaring that land New England. And so that whole section up through there they referred to as New England. It was ruled by England. The king of England was the ruler over it. He was the one that had a say in it. And so John Smith founded that colony. And then just a little bit later, in 1620, as the colonies started growing and more people came over, buying and selling and trading and all these, it started growing. And so people found out that they could go to the New World where they were free to practice religion however they felt that they wanted to. But their soul conscience, their soul liberty. And so, if you remember last week, we talked about the Brownists, which is the Puritan separatists, which we refer to now as Pilgrims, the Pilgrims. In 1620, the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, and a hundred Brownists that came over here, they're Puritan separatists, they fled England because of persecution, and we talked about that. King James declared that he would harry anybody out of that country that did not conform to the Church of England. And that's exactly what happened. And so they, of course, first fled over into Amsterdam. We talked about that. Well, what happened when they got to Amsterdam, and they'd been there a while, and they started losing their Englishness. And so they didn't want to lose their language, didn't want to lose all their English things, their heritage. And so they said, you know what, because they were conforming to the Dutch now. and that we're being more like the Dutch. And so they wanted to remain as English, but they couldn't go back to England. And so they said, well, let's go to the New World and we'll start a new England. And there we can practice our religion and not be persecuted. And so that's what they did. They came over here. They believe there was 102 on the Mayflower. Out of that 102, 40 of them survived the first winter. And so here we have what we refer to as you've got Puritans and you've got Puritan separatists. You can refer to them just as separatists if you'd like but they're still Puritans. Now just as that name implies Puritan we think of the word purify. That was what they wanted to do. They were out of the Church of England. Remember the king was over that. At this point King James is the ruler there in England. And he is over the Church of England. And so they wanted to purify the Church of England of a lot of the things that the Catholics, that they picked up from the Roman Catholics, because that's what they first were. And so they were referred to as Puritans. And by the way, that was another name that somebody else gave them. They didn't say, we want to purify the church, therefore we are going to be called Puritans. No, it was somebody saying, those Puritans, they think they can purify the church. So it was a bad name. But they took it. And then you had another group in that same church of Puritans, but they couldn't stay in the church. They wanted out of it. See, the mainline Puritans wanted to stay in it and purify it and change it. But these other Puritans, they said, there's no way we can stay here. We've got to get out of this mess. Start our own group. And so they were called separatists because they separated from the Church of England. And so there you have the two groups of Puritans. Well, both these two groups were on that Mayflower. It wasn't just the regular Puritans, but it was a Puritan separatist. And then you had other people. You had Anabaptists, you had Baptists, and a lot of these people were coming over to this new world. Well, the Puritans, they maintain a very strict adherence to the scripture. They wanted to do away with a lot of the things of the Roman influence, the Catholic influence, but they still clung to some of them. And they still had a mentality that everybody else had to worship the same way that they did. And so they brought all that, and they were more than just a religious group, they were a political group as well, probably as much as a political group as they were religious. And so politics and government was all in these Puritans. Well, in 1630, 10 years after the Pilgrims got here, another man named Roger Williams, not the piano player Roger Williams, this is Roger Williams, a historic figure from England. He also was in the Church of England, and he tried to remain there, but he found that he had to separate from them. He could no longer tolerate that religion that they were in. And so he was considered also a Puritan separatist. He separated from the Church of England, tried to remain in England, but was not able to because King James was running them off. One quote from King James during that time, he said, I will make them conform or harry them out of this land. And so he said about getting rid of everybody that defied the Church of England. I mean, they ruled everything. They were the church and the state. They were the government. Whatever they said, that's what you had to do. And so if you didn't agree with them, you're out of there. And so Roger Williams, he comes over to this land. We talked about last week John Smith beginning that first Baptist church there in Amsterdam. You remember John Smith, instead of coming to the New World, he went to, first he went to Amsterdam. And of course we know that he passed away before all this. But John Smith, he fled over the English Channel into Amsterdam to flee from persecution from the Church of England. Well, all of those that were there in Holland, they were dissatisfied with everything and that's why they came over to the Americas. Now, when Roger Williams came over here, he landed here in Boston Harbor, February 5th, 1631. Now that was about 10 years since the Pilgrims had come over, the Puritans, the first ones come over. And at that time, there were two major colonies that he could have joined. There was, and this was in New England, he could join either the Plymouth colony, which was made up of people like him who were separatist, Or he could have joined the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was made up of the mainline Puritans. For some reason, only known to Roger Williams, he decided to join up with the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And they had a different mindset about them than he did. He was always pushing for soul liberty and worshiping the way that you want to and not how somebody else tells you you have to worship. But for some reason he joined the Massachusetts Bay Colony with those Puritans instead of the separatists. And at first it was working out. They loved him. They called him the godly minister. And so they wanted him to preach and pastor and everything else. And things were fine for just a little while until he started teaching and preaching about being separate, about the differences that he had in their beliefs and how he believed in individual soul liberty. Well, this riled them up greatly, and they banished him from that colony and said that he could never, ever return. And I find it ironic that these Puritans that came over here because of religious persecution were now the ones persecuting other people because they weren't worshiping the way they thought they ought to. And that just goes to show you the awful cycle when church and state get married together, when there's not a separation of church and state, this is what happens. When the church rules your life, when the government is the church and the church is the government, this is the things that happen. You have to do what they say or otherwise you lose your citizenship. If you did not worship the way these Puritans did in that Massachusetts Bay colony, they turned you out and you had to live with the Indians. You didn't have anywhere else to go unless they would take you at the other colony. And so pretty much people were having to leave and live on their own and most of them died that went out there into the wilderness. I mean, it was not built up like it is now. I mean, it was still wilderness. And these people were just common people. They wasn't Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett. You know, they didn't know how to clear the land and all this stuff, and so they died. And so they were getting persecuted because of their own religious conscience. Well, Roger Williams, he's known for a lot of things, but religious soul liberty is the number one thing that we can remember about Roger Williams. He was determined to push the idea of separation of church and state everywhere that he went. He knew that that was the reason for all the problems that they'd had in England. If it had not been for the church and state being one, then they could have practiced their religion. But because it wasn't, the church and the state was telling him how he must worship. And if he didn't like it, He could be persecuted, he could be killed, he could be banished. And so he said, we're going to make a change. And so that was his idea of coming to America to have this change. In the spring of 1631, the Puritans in Boston, they passed a law that said only church members had the rights to citizenship over here in the Americas now. And so if you didn't belong to these Puritans' church, you were not a citizen. You couldn't be a citizen. And so that was a law that was passed. Well, of course, Roger Williams publicly spoke out about it, which greatly angered the Puritans. And so after this he had to move to another place and he went to Salem. Y'all remember the Salem witch trials? It's the same place, only the Salem witch trials happened much later than all this. But he preached a few months in Salem and then he was labeled as a troublemaker and they ran him off from there. So he moved to the Plymouth colony, the one where the separatist was. And things worked out pretty well for him there. And he stayed there about two years preaching, pastoring a church. Everything was going good until he had that same desire within him to push the separation of the church and state. and his ideas. And there was other things that he also believed that these Puritans did not believe in. One of them was taking oaths. They declared that you must take an oath to the church, and even if you didn't believe in what you were signing, if you didn't do that, then you couldn't be part of the church. And he, of course, outright refused to do that. He didn't believe in that. He thought that was sinful, which it is, to force somebody to sign something they do not believe in according to religion. That's sinful. And so he didn't last there either. And so after two years, he got banished from there. And so he went wandering off on his own, trying to find a place where he could worship and get along. It came to find out that Roger Williams had a deep interest in the Native American Indians. And so he started going over to them and talking with them. He learned their language. He got among them and was trying to help them actually. He had a heart for them. He tried to help them and he learned their language and become friends with them. And he served as an interpreter for all the colonies for a long time. It is said that Roger Williams prevented more bloodshed between the colonies and the Indians than any other man. And so he learned how to speak with the Indians, learned their language and everything. And he eventually moved back to Salem after this and began preaching again. And he pastored a church there, but it didn't take him long, he got into more trouble. He wrote a pamphlet concerning his concerns about the settlers not paying the Indians for their land. And he thought that was wrong. And so he was trying to stand up for the Indians, and the church declared that he was going against the king because King James had gave them the rights to this land. And because he's saying this, he's talking out against the kings. They called it treasonous. So once again, he's in trouble. He can't stay there. And so he gets banished again. And he's only been in America now for five years. All this has happened within five years. So he lost everything. And by the way, his church would not back him up. They wouldn't stand up for him because the government put sanctions on him. They weren't allowed to do certain things. And so his church turned their back on him, and he lost his church, he lost everything, lost his citizenship. And so after all this, he once again went out on his own. He got out on foot to escape. They had summonsed him to come to court in Boston, and somebody told him that their plan was to put him on a ship and deport him back to England. And so he escaped and run off, left his family, left his home, left everything, and went out on his own. And for the next several months, which they say was the harshest part of winter, for about four months, he, Roger Williams, went through the Just the native lands, trying to live off the land. He met up with some Indians and stayed with them some. Nearly froze to death. He was sick a lot. But he finally, he got in a canoe. and crossed across the river to an island where he was warmly greeted by the American Indians. Word had gotten out about him. And the place that he landed, he declared to be called Providence. He said it was God's providence that we come here because look at how we're being treated. We got treated warmly. First time since he's been here he's been treated good. And so he came to live with the American Indians there where now he's called Providence. We call it today Providence, Rhode Island. And so his intention was just to live there and settle among them and help them and just live happily there among the natives. But what happened, other people started getting persecuted by the Puritans. And they were getting banished and they didn't have nowhere to go and so they heard about Providence. And they said, well, Roger Williams in Providence. We heard that he's getting treated good. And he wasn't planning on this, but he established his own English colony there in Providence, Rhode Island. It wasn't called Rhode Island at the time. But eventually he purchased the land from the Indians. The saying is that they gave it to him, but he did pay for it. But the Indians had a strange thing of not believing in that the land could be sold, but they would trade things. And so there was a lot of trade going on, and they traded. Anyway, he ends up with the title of the land there for Providence. And so the government that he established there allowed people to practice their religion without persecution. They could practice their own soul's conscience, their religious liberties. And so people began coming and it started growing. The problem was, though, that it was not sanctioned by England. And because they were not sanctioned, they could not get aid like the rest of the colonies. And so if a ship came in to New England and it had food and things on it, well, Rhode Island or Providence got left out because they weren't sanctioned. And they started starving. People were living in caves. They couldn't build homes. They didn't have food. I mean, they were bad off. And so they knew that they had to get sanctioned by the government because Massachusetts was trying to take them over. They had already took over some of their land and claimed it, and claimed it was part of their claim of the colony. And so they knew that they had to do something about it. Well, about that time, in 1637, another man came along named John Clark. I told you I was going to talk about two people. One was Roger Williams and the next was John Clark. John Clark was from London. He was a physician and he was also a Baptist preacher. And so he left England and came to the New World and attempted to settle there in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Well, about the time he arrived, they passed a new law that nobody knew could join the colony. If that was their intentions, they were to be run off. So there he was. He had no place to go. And not only that, there was another uprising that happened there that was about religious persecution. There was a lot of Anabaptists and Baptists trying to live among them, and there was a lot of trouble over that. And so he, along with a lot of other people, got banished from the colony, and so naturally they gravitated toward Providence. And so now you've got Roger Williams in Providence with his colony, and now you've got John Clark that's come, and other people that's come, trying to escape this persecution, trying to find a place they could practice their religion, and so they all end up in Providence. Now, when he got there, of course, he meets up with Roger Williams, they become friends, and the two of them co-found the state of Rhode Island. They're considered the co-founders of Rhode Island. Now, many of the people that migrated to Providence were Anabaptists, or just Baptists, plain Baptists, including John Clark. John Clark was a Baptist, and their views were different than the Puritans' views. They believed only in believers' baptism. They did not believe in baptizing infants. The Puritans still was doing that. And so they did not believe in that, and they didn't, of course, they believed in individual soul liberty, didn't believe in any kind of church and state being together. And so Roger Williams began getting interested in these Baptist beliefs, these faiths. And so Roger Williams asked a man named Ezekiel Holliman to baptize him into the Baptist faith. Now there's a lot of different stories around that and it's hard to pin down because it happened so long ago. But for some reason he did not ask John Clark to do it, John Clark being a Baptist minister, but he asked this other man. And when this man baptized him, Roger Williams turned around and baptized that man and then about 12 to 15 other people that were there that Roger Williams was giving sermons to and they were following him. And so this is when most History books will tell you that the first Baptist church began in the United States. That's what most of them will tell you. Most of the history books that you read are made by those of the Protestant faith. And we're talking about religious history books, not your school history books. Your school history books is not going to give you all this information that we're giving you tonight. Roger Williams, he becomes a Baptist, if you want to call him that. And they say that the first church in America was started in 1639. Well, there's a problem with that. If Roger Williams truly founded the first Baptist church in America, then that breaks the chain of succession going back to Jesus and his disciples. Because Roger Williams was not an Anabaptist. He was a Puritan. He was a Protestant. And so if he is the one that started, then our chain gets broken. And so I, along with a lot of other people, Dr. Carroll and his Trail of Blood book, he claims that that was not the First Baptist Church, that actually John Clark started the First Baptist Church. If you read Dr. Carroll's book on page 49, He talks about that. And let me tell you what he says. He says that the first Baptist church was started by John Clark in 1638 in Newport, Rhode Island. This is what he said. He said, in this colony, two Baptist churches were organized even prior to the legal establishment of the colony. As to the exact date of the organization of at least one of these two churches, even the Baptists, according to history, are in a disagreement. All seems to be agreed as to the date of the organization of the one at Providence by Roger Williams in 1639. As to the date of the one organized at Newport by John Clark, all the later testimony seems to give the date at 1638. All the earlier seems to give it a later some years later. The one organized by Roger Williams at Providence seems to have lived but a few months. The other by John Clark at Newport is still living. My own opinion as to the date of the organization of the Newport Church, based on all available data, is that 1638 is the correct date. Personally, I am sure this date is correct. Now listen, I have read dozens upon dozens of Baptist history books, both by Protestants and mainline Baptists, and I personally agree with Dr. Carroll. I find more evidence of John Clark starting the first Baptist church in America than Roger Williams. Now like I said, history books, they're not going to say that. They won't declare that. But one thing you've got to remember, when you're doing historical research on church and Baptists and the history of the beginning of America, you've got two different mindsets that write these books. One is a mindset like the Puritans. You've got the Protestant mindset. And everything they want to point back to Protestantism. and the Reformation and all that, and that's where the church comes from. And then you have the other mindset, which are mainline Baptists, Anabaptists, people that's been Baptists ever since Jesus and his disciples, that unbroken chain of succession of Baptists. And so when you read both of them, you have to try to filter out what's right and what's wrong. And so I lean with the mainline Baptist on this, not the Protestants. And so you can get two books written at the same time period about the same subject. One book will say, oh yeah, Roger Williams began the first church in America, Baptist Church. And the other ones will say, no, it was John Clark. And so you have to be very careful when you're studying this. Also, when you think about these Puritans, and you think about them being pure because that's what they want to do, and everybody thinks, oh, they were such godly people. Oh, they were, you know, we think about those pilgrims, and they're wearing their little things, their little hats, and they're so prim and proper and all that. Don't be fooled by all that. The Puritans were some of the most bloodthirsty, mean-spirited, vindictive, abusive people that you've ever seen in your life. Now, we get the story he gave to us in the second, third grade at school about these sweet pilgrims that offer the Indians up with this meal because they taught them how to plant corn and all this. And, oh, they all got along and it was so great. You know, Miles Standish, he got up and cut the turkey and everything else. Listen, don't fall for all that. They're not going to tell you the truth in your public schools. They're going to tell you what they want your kids to know. They're not going to tell you the truth in history. I was fortunate I had a dad that was a history teacher that told me the truth about history. He told me the truth about the Civil War, that it wasn't started because of slavery, even though that's what my school tried to tell me. But I'm not going to digress here, but we think of these godly Puritan pilgrims stepping off the Mayflower, surviving the harsh window, and offering up all this food to the Indians. Listen, I'm not going to go into a lot of details, but like I said, of the 102 that came over on the Mayflower, 40 survived the first winter. None of them knew how to do anything hardly. They didn't know how to grow crops. They didn't have any food. They starved to death. They froze to death. Didn't have anywhere to stay. Didn't know how to build a house. And so if it had not been for one person, one Indian, and we've all heard the name Squanto, Squanto was kidnapped back by one of John Smith's friends, was taken over to England, sold into slavery. He escaped from there, but while he was in England, he learned English. And he came back to America, and when he got here, he discovered that all of his tribe had been slaughtered. And so he had nowhere to go. He lived there amongst those Indians that were with the Pilgrims, that lived there where the Pilgrims are in Plymouth. And he became their interpreter. And so he started being this go-between between the Pilgrims and the Indians, and they taught him how to grow corn. They taught him how to do things. And so, thankfully, they had him. But this first Thanksgiving that we get pushed so much that was so wonderful and lovely and all this stuff, listen, it wasn't as great as you think it was, Charlie Brown. I'll tell you that right now. When they had that meal, 90 Indians showed up with weapons compared to their 40 everyday common people that came to the table, and they thought they were all going to get slaughtered. They thought this was going to be a massacre. But they survived through that. And after that Thanksgiving, there were numerous wars between the Pilgrims and the Indians. They slaughtered many of them. As more people came over to the Americas, the American Indians got slaughtered. And so it was terrible. It was bloodshed all the time. They would come and attack the colonies and slaughter them and steal the women and children. So there were not only hostilities between the Puritans and the Indians, but between the Puritans and the Baptists, the Anabaptists. Anybody that believed differently than the Puritans, there was problems. They killed many of them. They tortured Baptists, just like the Catholics did. And so before we go start singing the praises of the Puritans, and I've got a lot of Puritan books and literature, and I read them, and they had a lot of good writing, a lot of good ideas and thoughts. They're not the greatest people. They're just like the Catholic Church. They persecuted people like us. And so that's why we got to be very careful as we're studying history that we have the right account. One book that I found, if you want to write this down, that goes into a lot of great details and depth. It's easy to read, but it gives you a lot of accurate information as far as I can tell. It's a book called Baptist Succession, A Handbook of Baptist History. It was published back in 1870 by a man named D.B. Ray, David Bertram Ray. He was a Baptist pastor and the editor of the Baptist Sentinel back in the 1880s. In his book, oh by the way you can go to Google and just type in the word Baptist Succession and the first thing that will pop up will be his book. You can go to archive.org. And the whole book's there. You can download it. It's rather long, but it's in a PDF form. But it's got a lot in there. And in that book, his claim is that Roger Williams actually left the church four months after he had established it, or after he got baptized, that he regretted his baptism, that he actually left the baptism and was not a Baptist. And so he says this in his book. He said, it is both offensive and invidious for those who ought to know better to persist in the circulation of the false representation that Roger Williams was the founder of the American Baptist. Those who make this charge are wholly inexcusable, for they are ignorant of Baptist history. They should not affirm concerning that about which they are not informed. But if they know the facts in the case and still persist in the charge, they are evidently dishonest and unworthy of respect." He says this too, he says, about John Clark. John Clark received his baptism in Elder Stilwell's church in London, and that church received hers from the Dutch Baptist of Holland, sending over a minister to be baptized by them. These Baptists descended from the Waldenses, whose historical line reaches far back, connects with the Donatist, and theirs to the Apostolical churches. And so he gives the chain of succession through John Clark back to London, back to Holland, back to the Walden's, back to the Donatus, back to the Apostolics, back to the Apostles. And so there's your chain of succession. And based off all my research, and I've done this for hours, more than I even want to tell you about, I'm going to stick with the founder of the Baptist Church in America being John Clark. John Clark, the true Baptist preacher, he did not come out of the Catholic Church, did not come out of the Church of England, was not a Protestant, but was a pure and pure Baptist. Now, one of the issues, and I'll hurry along, one of the issues of the citizens of Providence faced, like I said, was the fact that they were not recognized as a charter. And so the only way you could be a charter is if you appealed to the king and in England, and he gave you a charter, and then you're okay. So the people of Providence, they sent John Clark and Roger Williams back to England to apply for this charter and to try to get it. Well, when they got there, they discovered England was a lot different than it was back when they were there ten years ago. They were in a state of civil war. The king was, they were trying to overthrow the king. A lot of things were happening in the government. And so it was in turmoil. And so it took 12 years, but in 1663, they were finally able to obtain the charter. John Clark actually stayed in England, lived off, he didn't have any income, but just lived off what he could to stay there and petition for this charter for the people in Providence. And finally, in 1663, King Charles II signed off on the charter for Rhode Island and Providence plantations, and it become a legitimate New England colony. Now, for time's sake, we won't go into it tonight, but there was an incident that took place that you need to be aware of, involving John Clark, and you may have heard of this, John Clark along with John Crandall and Obadiah Holmes. Does anybody recognize the name Obadiah Holmes? Ever heard the lashings or the beatings of Obadiah Holmes? This is your Baptist history. Dr. Carroll gives an account of it in your book, page 49, down at the bottom it starts, but you can read it there for yourself. But in a nutshell, these three men from the church there in Newport, Rhode Island, where John Clark was the pastor, he along with these other two men, John Crandell and Obadiah Holmes, was requested by one of their church members to come across the river over into the land there where they were not supposed to be, into the Boston territory. Because he was so sick, this church member was sick, and he wanted him to come. And so they crossed over there into the Boston territory, went into his home, and was having a service. They were preaching. everything like this and somebody Informed the government they came in grabbed all three of these men took them and arrested them took them to the Congregationalist Church during a service and made them go in the service and they were all wearing hats and they refused to remove their hats because they were in a Congregationalist Church and they didn't believe in it and for that reason they arrested these men put them in prison and And for two weeks they stayed in prison until they finally had a sentence laid upon them. And the sentence was because they had not removed their hats when they went in this church. So they could either pay a big fine or receive severe beatings, lashings. Well, the church raised enough money that was an anonymous donation gave to get them out. And John Clark and John Crandall were released. They agreed to be released. But Obadiah Holmes says, I'm not going anywhere. Nobody's paying my fine. I didn't do anything wrong. And therefore, I'm not going to go. And he took the 30 lashes with what they called a three-corded whip. It says in history that they beat him so bad, the blood run down his back so much that it went down his legs and filled his shoes full of blood and that he could not lay down for two weeks. He had to lay on his hands and on his elbows and was unable to lay down flat for two weeks after he got beat. So the beating there, the lashing of Obadiah Holmes is something that is very important. That is persecution of religion here in America. It was going on in America. And so if you think it can happen here, it can happen here if you've got the wrong people in charge. Now these nuts right now that's trying to take over our government, I'm not talking the ones that's running it right now, I'm talking the ones that wants to run it, the same thing can happen here in the United States. You let the wrong people in that don't believe the way that we believe, and they think they can run everything, that Baptist preacher down there, he can't be preaching those things about sodomy and sin and telling people that they're bad and all this. That's hate speech. You let the wrong people in the government, that's what's going to happen. They'll start persecuting religion, just like they did in those days. We'll either be in prison, fine, or maybe we'll be taking lashes like Obadiah Holmes. And so the beliefs of soul liberty and separation of church and state would actually become the foundation of our Constitution of the United States of America. Now, the liberal school books will not tell your children about all this history. The Baptists were fundamental at the beginning of this great nation. If it had not been for the Baptists, men like Roger Williams and John Clark standing up for religious soul liberty, separation of church and state, we wouldn't have the country that we had. These men, and listen, we owe them a great debt. These faithful men and women in history stood up for our religious freedoms and our right to worship according to our own soul liberty. Imagine if we were still under the rule of England and that we had to do whatever they said we had to do. That's why in our Baptist acrostic we state the I in the Baptist stands for individual soul liberty. So I'm thankful for men that had what it took Amen. Now, I know I threw a lot of history at you, and you may think, well, I don't know why in the world we come to church and have to suffer through history lessons. Listen, this is our Baptist history. We go back to this. If it had not been for all these things, we would not have the right to stand here tonight and worship and worship freely, come in and sing our songs and pray our prayers and preach our sermons and teach our classes. It's because of our history that we're able to do this. we'll be proud of.