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Chapter Sixteen
The Pilgrim Fathers
The English Reformers, while renouncing the doctrines
of Romanism, had retained many of its forms. Thus
though the authority and the creed of Rome were rejected,
not a few of her customs and ceremonies were incorporated
into the worship of the Church of England. It was claimed
that these things were not matters of conscience; that though
they were not commanded in Scripture, and hence were
nonessential, yet not being forbidden, they were not intrinsically
evil. Their observance tended to narrow the gulf which
separated the reformed churches from Rome, and it was
urged that they would promote the acceptance of the
Protestant faith by Romanists.
To the conservative and compromising, these arguments
seemed conclusive. But there was another class that did not
so judge. The fact that these customs “tended to bridge over
the chasm between Rome and the Reformation” (Martyn,
volume 5, page 22), was in their view a conclusive argument
against retaining them. They looked upon them as badges of
the slavery from which they had been delivered and to which
they had no disposition to return. They reasoned that God
has in His word established the regulations governing His
worship, and that men are not at liberty to add to these or
to detract from them. The very beginning of the great
apostasy was in seeking to supplement the authority of God by
that of the church. Rome began by enjoining what God
had not forbidden, and she ended by forbidding what He
had explicitly enjoined.
Many earnestly desired to return to the purity and
simplicity which characterized the primitive church. They
regarded many of the established customs of the English
Church as monuments of idolatry, and they could not in
conscience unite in her worship. But the church, being
supported by the civil authority, would permit no dissent from
her forms. Attendance upon her service was required by law,
and unauthorized assemblies for religious worship were
prohibited, under penalty of imprisonment, exile, and death.
At the opening of the seventeenth century the monarch
who had just ascended the throne of England declared his
determination to make the Puritans “conform, or . . . harry
them out of the land, or else worse.” —George Bancroft, History
of the United States of America, pt. 1, ch. 12, par. 6.
Hunted, persecuted, and imprisoned, they could discern in
the future no promise of better days, and many yielded to the
conviction that for such as would serve God according to
the dictates of their conscience, “England was ceasing forever
to be a habitable place.” —J. G. Palfrey, History of New
England, ch. 3, par. 43. Some at last determined to seek
refuge in Holland. Difficulties, losses, and imprisonment
were encountered. Their purposes were thwarted, and they
were betrayed into the hands of their enemies. But steadfast
perseverance finally conquered, and they found shelter on
the friendly shores of the Dutch Republic.
In their flight they had left their houses, their goods, and
their means of livelihood. They were strangers in a strange
land, among a people of different language and customs.
They were forced to resort to new and untried occupations
to earn their bread. Middle-aged men, who had spent their
lives in tilling the soil, had now to learn mechanical trades.
But they cheerfully accepted the situation and lost no time in
idleness or repining. Though often pinched with poverty,
they thanked God for the blessings which were still granted
them and found their joy in unmolested spiritual
communion. “They knew they were pilgrims, and looked not
much on those things, but lifted up their eyes to heaven,
their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.” —Bancroft,
pt. 1, ch. 12, par. 15.
In the midst of exile and hardship their love and faith
waxed strong. They trusted the Lord’s promises, and He did
not fail them in time of need. His angels were by their side,
to encourage and support them. And when God’s hand
seemed pointing them across the sea, to a land where they
might found for themselves a state, and leave to their
children the precious heritage of religious liberty, they went
forward, without shrinking, in the path of providence.
God had permitted trials to come upon His people to
prepare them for the accomplishment of His gracious
purpose toward them. The church had been brought low, that
she might be exalted. God was about to display His power in
her behalf, to give to the world another evidence that He will
not forsake those who trust in Him. He had overruled events
to cause the wrath of Satan and the plots of evil men to
advance His glory and to bring His people to a place of security.
Persecution and exile were opening the way to freedom.
When first constrained to separate from the English
Church, the Puritans had joined themselves together by a
solemn covenant, as the Lord’s free people, “to walk together
in all His ways made known or to be made known to them.”
—J. Brown, The Pilgrim Fathers, page 74. Here was the
true spirit of reform, the vital principle of Protestantism. It
was with this purpose that the Pilgrims departed from Holland
to find a home in the New World. John Robinson, their
pastor, who was providentially prevented from accompanying
them, in his farewell address to the exiles said:
“Brethren, we are now erelong to part asunder, and the
Lord knoweth whether I shall live ever to see your faces
more. But whether the Lord hath appointed it or not, I
charge you before God and His blessed angels to follow me
no farther than I have followed Christ. If God should reveal
anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready
to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth of my
ministry; for I am very confident the Lord hath more truth
and light yet to break forth out of His holy word.” —Martyn,
vol. 5, p. 70.
“For my part, I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of
the reformed churches, who are come to a period in religion,
and will go at present no farther than the instruments of
their reformation. The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go
beyond what Luther saw; . . . and the Calvinists, you see,
stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who
yet saw not all things. This is a misery much to be lamented;
for though they were burning and shining lights in their
time, yet they penetrated not into the whole counsel of God,
but were they now living, would be as willing to embrace
further light as that which they first received.” —D. Neal,
History of the Puritans, vol. 1, p. 269.
“Remember your church covenant, in which you have
agreed to walk in all the ways of the Lord, made or to be
made known unto you. Remember your promise and covenant
with God and with one another, to receive whatever
light and truth shall be made known to you from His written
word; but withal, take heed, I beseech you, what you
receive for truth, and compare it and weigh it with other
scriptures of truth before you accept it; for it is not possible
the Christian world should come so lately out of such thick
antichristian darkness, and that full perfection of knowledge
should break forth at once.” —Martyn, vol. 5, pp. 70, 71.
It was the desire for liberty of conscience that inspired the
Pilgrims to brave the perils of the long journey across the sea,
to endure the hardships and dangers of the wilderness, and
with God’s blessing to lay, on the shores of America, the
foundation of a mighty nation. Yet honest and God-fearing
as they were, the Pilgrims did not yet comprehend the great
principle of religious liberty. The freedom which they sacrificed
so much to secure for themselves, they were not equally
ready to grant to others. “Very few, even of the foremost
thinkers and moralists of the seventeenth century, had any
just conception of that grand principle, the outgrowth of the
New Testament, which acknowledges God as the sole judge
of human faith.” —Ibid., vol. 5, p. 297. The doctrine
that God has committed to the church the right to control the
conscience, and to define and punish heresy, is one of the most
deeply rooted of papal errors. While the Reformers rejected
the creed of Rome, they were not entirely free from her spirit
of intolerance. The dense darkness in which, through the
long ages of her rule, popery had enveloped all Christendom,
had not even yet been wholly dissipated. Said one of the
leading ministers in the colony of Massachusetts Bay: “It was
toleration that made the world antichristian; and the church
never took harm by the punishment of heretics.” —Ibid., vol.
5, p. 335. The regulation was adopted by the colonists that
only church members should have a voice in the civil government.
A kind of state church was formed, all the people being
required to contribute to the support of the clergy, and
the magistrates being authorized to suppress heresy. Thus
the secular power was in the hands of the church. It was
not long before these measures led to the inevitable result
—persecution.
Eleven years after the planting of the first colony, Roger
Williams came to the New World. Like the early Pilgrims
he came to enjoy religious freedom; but, unlike them, he saw
—what so few in his time had yet seen—that this freedom
was the inalienable right of all, whatever might be their
creed. He was an earnest seeker for truth, with Robinson
holding it impossible that all the light from God’s word had
yet been received. Williams “was the first person in modern
Christendom to establish civil government on the doctrine
of the liberty of conscience, the equality of opinions before
the law.” —Bancroft, pt. 1, ch. 15, par. 16. He declared it to
be the duty of the magistrate to restrain crime, but never to
control the conscience. “The public or the magistrates may
decide,” he said, “what is due from man to man; but when
they attempt to prescribe a man’s duties to God, they are out
of place, and there can be no safety; for it is clear that if the
magistrates has the power, he may decree one set of opinions
or beliefs today and another tomorrow; as has been done in
England by different kings and queens, and by different
popes and councils in the Roman Church; so that belief
would become a heap of confusion.” —Martyn, vol. 5, p. 340.
Attendance at the services of the established church was
required under a penalty of fine or imprisonment. “Williams
reprobated the law; the worst statute in the English code
was that which did but enforce attendance upon the parish
church. To compel men to unite with those of a different
creed, he regarded as an open violation of their natural
rights; to drag to public worship the irreligious and the
unwilling, seemed only like requiring hypocrisy. . . . ‘No one
should be bound to worship, or,’ he added, ‘to maintain a
worship, against his own consent.’ ‘What!’ exclaimed his
antagonists, amazed at his tenets, ‘is not the laborer worthy
of his hire?’ ‘Yes,’ replied he, ‘from them that hire him.’” —
Bancroft, pt. 1, ch. 15, par. 2.
Roger Williams was respected and beloved as a faithful
minister, a man of rare gifts, of unbending integrity and true
benevolence; yet his steadfast denial of the right of civil
magistrates to authority over the church, and his demand for
religious liberty, could not be tolerated. The application of
this new doctrine, it was urged, would “subvert the fundamental
state and government of the country.” —Ibid., pt. 1,
ch. 15, par. 10. He was sentenced to banishment from the
colonies, and, finally, to avoid arrest, he was forced to flee,
amid the cold and storms of winter, into the unbroken forest.
“For fourteen weeks,” he says, “I was sorely tossed in a
bitter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean.”
But “the ravens fed me in the wilderness,” and a hollow tree
often served him for a shelter. —Martyn, vol. 5, pp. 349, 350.
Thus he continued his painful flight through the snow and
the trackless forest, until he found refuge with an Indian
tribe whose confidence and affection he had won while
endeavoring to teach them the truths of the gospel.
Making his way at last, after months of change and
wandering, to the shores of Narragansett Bay, he there laid
the foundation of the first state of modern times that in the
fullest sense recognized the right of religious freedom. The
fundamental principle of Roger Williams’s colony was “that
every man should have liberty to worship God according to
the light of his own conscience.” —Ibid., vol. 5,
p. 354. His little state, Rhode Island, became the asylum of the
oppressed, and it increased and prospered until its foundation
principles—civil and religious liberty—became the cornerstones
of the American Republic.
In that grand old document which our forefathers set forth
as their bill of rights—the Declaration of Independence—they
declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal; that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And the Constitution
guarantees, in the most explicit terms, the inviolability
of conscience: “No religious test shall ever be required as a
qualification to any office of public trust under the United
States.” “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
“The framers of the Constitution recognized the eternal
principle that man’s relation with his God is above human
legislation, and his rights of conscience inalienable. Reasoning
was not necessary to establish this truth; we are conscious
of it in our own bosoms. It is this consciousness which, in
defiance of human laws, has sustained so many martyrs in
tortures and flames. They felt that their duty to God was
superior to human enactments, and that man could exercise
no authority over their consciences. It is an inborn principle
which nothing can eradicate.” —Congressional documents
(U.S.A.), serial No. 200, document No. 271.
As the tidings spread through the countries of Europe, of
a land where every man might enjoy the fruit of his own
labor and obey the convictions of his own conscience,
thousands flocked to the shores of the New World. Colonies
rapidly multiplied. “Massachusetts, by special law, offered
free welcome and aid, at the public cost, to Christians of any
nationality who might fly beyond the Atlantic ‘to escape from
wars or famine, or the oppression of their persecutors.’ Thus
the fugitive and the downtrodden were, by statute, made the
guests of the commonwealth.” —Martyn, vol. 5, p. 417. In
twenty years from the first landing at Plymouth, as many
thousand Pilgrims were settled in New England.
To secure the object which they sought, “they were content
to earn a bare subsistence by a life of frugality and toil.
They asked nothing from the soil but the reasonable returns
of their own labor. No golden vision threw a deceitful halo
around their path. . . . They were content with the slow
but steady progress of their social polity. They patiently
endured the privations of the wilderness, watering the tree
of liberty with their tears, and with the sweat of their brow,
till it took deep root in the land.”
The Bible was held as the foundation of faith, the source
of wisdom, and the charter of liberty. Its principles were
diligently taught in the home, in the school, and in the
church, and its fruits were manifest in thrift, intelligence,
purity, and temperance. One might be for years a dweller in
the Puritan settlement, “and not see a drunkard, or hear an
oath, or meet a beggar.” —Bancroft, pt. 1, ch. 19, par. 25. It
was demonstrated that the principles of the Bible are the
surest safeguards of national greatness. The feeble and isolated
colonies grew to a confederation of powerful states, and
the world marked with wonder the peace and prosperity of
“a church without a pope, and a state without a king.”
But continually increasing numbers were attracted to the
shores of America, actuated by motives widely different from
those of the first Pilgrims. Though the primitive faith and
purity exerted a widespread and molding power, yet its
influence became less and less as the numbers increased
of those who sought only worldly advantage.
The regulation adopted by the early colonists, of permitting
only members of the church to vote or to hold office in
the civil government, led to most pernicious results. This
measure had been accepted as a means of preserving the
purity of the state, but it resulted in the corruption of the
church. A profession of religion being the condition of
suffrage and officeholding, many, actuated solely by motives
of worldly policy, united with the church without a change
of heart. Thus the churches came to consist, to a considerable
extent, of unconverted persons; and even in the ministry
were those who not only held errors of doctrine, but who
were ignorant of the renewing power of the Holy Spirit.
Thus again was demonstrated the evil results, so often witnessed
in the history of the church from the days of Constantine
to the present, of attempting to build up the church by
the aid of the state, of appealing to the secular power in
support of the gospel of Him who declared: “My kingdom
is not of this world.”
John 18:36. The union of the church
with the state, be the degree never so slight, while it may
appear to bring the world nearer to the church, does in reality
but bring the church nearer to the world.
The great principle so nobly advocated by Robinson and
Roger Williams, that truth is progressive, that Christians
should stand ready to accept all the light which may shine
from God’s holy word, was lost sight of by their descendants.
The Protestant churches of America, —and those of Europe
as well, —so highly favored in receiving the blessings of the
Reformation, failed to press forward in the path of reform.
Though a few faithful men arose, from time to time, to
proclaim new truth and expose long-cherished error, the
majority, like the Jews in Christ’s day or the papists in the
time of Luther, were content to believe as their fathers had
believed and to live as they had lived. Therefore religion
again degenerated into formalism; and errors and superstitions
which would have been cast aside had the church continued
to walk in the light of God’s word, were retained and
cherished. Thus the spirit inspired by the Reformation gradually
died out, until there was almost as great need of reform
in the Protestant churches as in the Roman Church in the
time of Luther. There was the same worldliness and spiritual
stupor, a similar reverence for the opinions of men, and
substitution of human theories for the teachings of God’s word.
The wide circulation of the Bible in the early part of the
nineteenth century, and the great light thus shed upon the
world, was not followed by a corresponding advance in
knowledge of revealed truth, or in experimental religion.
Satan could not, as in former ages, keep God’s word from
the people; it had been placed within the reach of all; but
in order still to accomplish his object, he led many to value it
but lightly. Men neglected to search the Scriptures, and thus
they continued to accept false interpretations, and to cherish
doctrines which had no foundation in the Bible.
Seeing the failure of his efforts to crush out the truth by
persecution, Satan had again resorted to the plan of compromise
which led to the great apostasy and the formation of the
Church of Rome. He had induced Christians to ally themselves,
not now with pagans, but with those who, by their
devotion to the things of this world, had proved themselves
to be as truly idolaters as were the worshipers of graven
images. And the results of this union were no less pernicious
now than in former ages; pride and extravagance were fostered
under the guise of religion, and the churches became
corrupted. Satan continued to pervert the doctrines of the
Bible, and traditions that were to ruin millions were taking
deep root. The church was upholding and defending these
traditions, instead of contending for “the faith which was
once delivered unto the saints.” Thus were degraded the
principles for which the Reformers had done and suffered
so much.
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