John Cotton’s Answer to Roger Williams and Queries of Highest Consideration
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Overview
Examine the final installment in the epistolary debate between John Cotton and Roger Williams. This letter from John Cotton closes the discussion he began with his first letter to Williams about 10 years earlier. In it, as editor J. Lewis Diman notes, Cotton seeks to “convince Williams of the insufficiency of those grounds which had led him to reject the fellowship of the Massachusetts churches.” The letter provides insight into the dispute between the nonconformist and separatist positions, as well as offering, incidentally, discussion that provides the most complete account of the proceedings against Williams.
This volume also contains Queries of Highest Consideration, published while Williams was in England to obtain a charter for Providence. In this brief treatise—an open letter to the Westminster Assembly and the “dissenting brethren”: Jeremiah Burroughs, Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, and William Bridge—Williams discusses the distinct provinces of civil and ecclesiastical authority.