Williams' life and major works - the 1643 bestseller A Key Into the Language of America and the 1644 treatise The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution - inspire nothing less than awe. Williams showed up in Massachusetts in 1631 and immediately mixed it up with the theocrats there, staking controversial positions on hotly debated questions such as the presence of a disturbingly papal cross on the flag of England. Two of his arguments would earn him exile: He insisted that the colonists had robbed the local Indians of their property (he called it 'an unjust usurpation upon others' possessions') and, even worse, that civil magistrates had no business enforcing religious laws (lest 'the wilderness of the world' engulf 'the garden of the church').
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