Roger Williams and the 2nd Stone (Cut Out of the Mountains)

Roger Williams looked for the restoration of apostles and prophets and the true church during the time of stone rolling forth. Roger Williams’ view of the Stone Kingdom was remarkably accurate. He understood from reading church history that Christianity could not be the Stone kingdom of Daniel 2 because it had fallen away long ago. In his Bloudy Tenent, he wrote, “Christianity fell asleep in the bosom of Constantine, and the laps and bosoms of those Emperors who professed the name of Christ.” Continuing on in the same passage Roger Williams describes the effect that pagan and Christian rulers had upon the Church. The unknowing zeal of Constantine and other Emperors... maintaining their religion by the material sword, I say by this means Christianity was eclipsed, and the professors of it fell asleep. Babel or confusion was ushered in, and by degrees the Gardens of the Churches of the Saints were turned into the Wilderness of whole nations, until the whole world became Christian or Christendom, Revelations 12 and 13.4 Roger Williams saw that Christ would commission new apostolic messengers to proclaim the gospel with power and to gather churches according to the original pattern of the early church. One of the most profound things Roger Williams saw was that the newly-formed colonies needed a form of government that would secure and protect the rights of this pure church (or Stone Kingdom) whenever it might be raised up, so it would be able to exist and grow and mature, completely free from the civil government's control and free from the imposition of any denomination as a state church. He alone in his day understood that God's holy people would be raised up in another generation and that their future security needed to be ensured. Taken from "Roger Williams Waiting for the Restoration of the True Church" (http://1drv.ms/1EoN6RC)