Williams stuffed The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience full of any materials he found relevant to his cause. It opens with three prefaces and three chapters from a 1620 work purportedly from a former inmate of Newgate prison pleading against persecution for cause of conscience. A broad response from John Cotton follows, and the bulk of the first part of this book of about 265 pages comes in “A Reply to the Aforesaid Answer of Mr. Cotton,” a reply couched in the form of a dialogue between Truth and Peace.

In various formulations, accompanied by references to the Scriptures and to church fathers such as Tertullian, Cotton had pounded away at one theme: that a man may be granted liberty of conscience if he fears God because it is certain that he will repent of his errors once he learns the truth, but there remains the question of should a “heretic, after once or twice admonition . . . be tolerated . . . without such punishment as may preserve others from dangerous and damnable infection.” Cotton’s answer, of course, is no. Against Cotton’s talk of punishment, Williams pleads for toleration, citing “the cry of the whole earth, made drunk with the blood of its inhabitants, slaughtering each other in their blinded zeal for conscience, for religion, against the Catholics, against the Lutherans, etc.” As for Cotton’s “admonitions,” Williams replies that “the worship which a state professes may be contradicted and preached against, and yet no breach of civil peace.”

Williams had referred to Matthew 13:30, 38, in which Christ had commanded that the tares be allowed to grow together with the wheat. To this, Cotton had responded that the tares were “partly hypocrites, like unto the godly, but indeed carnal,” and that the good and the bad are so intertwined that the persons in whom the tares grow “cannot be rooted out but good wheat will be rooted out with them.” However, Williams disagrees, saying that no evidence suggests that tares represent persons. This exchange of exegeses of the wheat and the tares—and of other scriptural passages—continued repetitiously in The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy.

A Calvinist himself, Williams slyly turned Cotton’s own Calvinist tenets against him. Because one never knows whom God has chosen for his elect, one cannot be sure that a persecuted sinner does not enjoy God’s grace. Furthermore, the doctrine of predestination disproves the logic of forcing sinners to convert when they have no free will to exercise on their spiritual fate. Williams asked what the point was anyway, as after all, “The souls of all men are either naturally dead in sin or live in Christ.” Indifference to these points of theology incurs a “three-fold guilt” on the part of those civil authorities who meddle forcefully with an individual’s faith, Williams says.

The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience is a long, repetitious work, organized according to a private vision inscrutable to most readers, replete with biblical references, and exhausting to read. Its greatness lies not only in its arguments but also in the fervor of its composition by a man whose courage was exemplary. Polishook concludes that Williams’s ideas today “appear unmistakably fitting and correct, because the accumulation of years has made them familiar and acceptable,” whereas “Cotton’s monument was the untold influence of his thought on the New England way of life.”