Who was the first person to mention the "wall of seperation"

[McD]

I have known it to be Jefferson ever since I have been aware of the phrase. I read his letter to the Danbury Baptists and other writings from him on the issue. Now I got some gonad telling me that the man to first make mention of "The Wall" was Roger Williams, one of the Danbury Baptists. This same gonad is telling me that Williams conceived of the notion of the wall and that Williams intended it to be "one way" :rolleyes:

Have I been wrong all these years? Did I just presume that Jefferson came up with it originally because it was in his writings that I first encountered it? Did Jefferson take someone else's metaphor and change it to suit his absolute seperationist position?

[enemigo]

I have known it to be Jefferson ever since I have been aware of the phrase. I read his letter to the Danbury Baptists and other writings from him on the issue. Now I got some gonad telling me that the man to first make mention of "The Wall" was Roger Williams, one of the Danbury Baptists. This same gonad is telling me that Williams conceived of the notion of the wall and that Williams intended it to be "one way" :rolleyes:

Have I been wrong all these years? Did I just presume that Jefferson came up with it originally because it was in his writings that I first encountered it? Did Jefferson take someone else's metaphor and change it to suit his absolute seperationist position?
Williams wasn't a "Danbury" Baptist. He lived between 1604-1683, founded Rhode Island, and apparently he also founded the first Baptist Church on this continent in 1639.

The Williams quote in question appears to be the following, though it doesn't specifically say, "separation of church and state" :
When they [the Church] have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the Candlestick, etc., and made His Garden a wilderness as it is this day. And that therefore if He will ever please to restore His garden and Paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world, and all that be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the World. (The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, Volume 1, page 108 (1644))
I suspect that your "gonad" friend is referencing some Barton misinformation from here (http://www.noapathy.org/tracts/mythofseparation.html), which includes the quote above, right after saying, "He [Jefferson] was establishing common ground with the Baptists by borrowing the words of Roger Williams, one of the Baptist's own prominent preachers." (emphasis mine)

I suspect that said "gonad" took that to mean that Williams was a Danbury, instead of simply a Baptist from over a century earlier. From what I can gather from a variety of sources, while Williams founded the first Baptist church in America, he only remained a Baptist for several months, and then broke with them. He referred to himself as a "seeker," essentially a non-denominational Christian in search of the True Church.

[gravitybow]

Two paragraphs from The Godless Constitution (1996), by Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore:

...It is difficult today to understand how influential [Scottish minister James] Burgh's books were for Americans in the age of the Revolution, but in 1790 when Jefferson advised a friend on the best writers or books on politics he listed Adam Smith, Montesquieu, "Locke's little book on government," the Federalist, and Burgh's Political Disquisitions. John Adams set himself to make Burgh's writings "more known and attended to the several parts of America" since they were "held in high estimation by all." For the modern Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn, Burgh's Political Disquisitions was the "key book of this [revolutionary] generation."
pg. 82

Burgh played an important role in shaping American attitudes to the state and the place of religion in public life. He is, in fact, the original source of the metaphor, which Jefferson would use, that captures in a phrase this entire liberal secular view of the relationship between politics and religion - the wall of separation. In his book Crito, published in London in 1767 and widely read in America, Burgh suggested that it was essential to "build an impenetrable wall of separation between things sacred and civil." Decades before Jefferson, Burgh had offered the metaphoric alternative to the Christian commonwealth.
pg. 83

[Toto]

Godless Constitution (http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=157)

Political Disquisitions appears to be online here (http://www.constitution.org/cmt/burgh/burgh.htm) and at other places.

Excerpts from Burgh (http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch2s6.html) 1774

All lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people. Power in the people is like light in the sun, native, original, inherent and unlimited by any thing human. In governors, it may be compared to the reflected light of the moon; for it is only borrowed, delegated, and limited by the intention of the people, whose it is, and to whom governors are to consider themselves as responsible, while the people are answerable only to God, themselves being the losers, if they pursue a false scheme of politics. Of which more hereafter.

Excerpt from Crito and other documents here (http://www.auok.org/early_advocates_3.htm) “Build an impenetrable wall of separation between things sacred and civil. Do not send a graceless (military) officer, reeking from the arms of his trull, to the performance of a holy rite of religion, as a test for his holding the command of a regiment. To profane, in such a manner, a religion, which you pretend to reverence; is an impiety sufficient to bring down upon your heads, the roof of the sacred building you thus defile.�

James Burgh, Crito Vol. 2, 1767.

“The Church . . . is espoused as a chaste virgin unto Christ. He is her husband; and she is the bride, the lamb’s wife. And if so, was she to be joined to the State, it would be committing spiritual adultery, the most detestable of all enormities! . . . This union we know, has often been productive of the most pernicious consequences. They have always corrupted, and often ruined one another; as wine and water mingled, turns to vinegar. The State, I say, has always corrupted the Church. . . . The very establishment corrupts the Church. And such a Church will consequently corrupt the State.�

“Freeman of Virginia,� Freeman’s Remonstrance against an Ecclesiastical Establishment, 1777.

[fromtheright]

I agree that Jefferson was far more likely to borrow the term from Burgh than from Williams but I disagree with many, believing that Williams wall was in fact one directional. Williams was very much a separatist and he wished to protect the "Garden" of the Church from the secular wilderness. There may be something to the common ground idea, though, in referencing a term from both Williams and Burgh, with which the Baptists were familiar, and from which overlap we continue to debate its meaning I guess.