Hence they were called Separatists or Brownists, from the name of their founder, Robert Browne, a man of gentle birth, a Cambridge graduate, and a relative of Lord Burleigh, one of Queen Elizabeth's great ministers of state. This is so well known that it seems almost unnecessary again to restate it; but so many persons have such vague ideas about the origin of the Pilgrim movement that the salient facts must be emphasized for the better understanding of subsequent events.

The history of the Church, of all churches, until humanity and religion became one (and they were far apart in the early days of religion), has always been the fierce persecution of those who questioned its authority or would attempt to make its practices more nearly conform to its spiritual teachings. Itinerant preachers in the Church of England who urged upon the simple country folk to live better and purer lives fell under the persecution of the Established Church, and to escape their enemies fled to Holland, where men might without interference worship their God in their own way. Those who remained suffered for the sake of conscience. "For some were taken and clapt up in prison, others had their houses besett and watcht night and day, and hardly escaped their hands; and yet most were faine to flie and leave their houses and habitations, and the means of their livelihood. Yet these and many other sharper things which afterward befell them, were no other than they

looked for, and therefore were ye better prepared to bear them by ye assistance of God's grace and spirit." 1

Nothing more concisely typifies the character of the Pilgrim, his whole conception of life, his softness, his almost passionate prayer to be let alone, than his circumlocutory flight to America; and nothing more vividly contrasts the character of the Pilgrim and the Puritan than the reasons which made the latter leave the land of his birth.

When the Pilgrim found that he was an object of persecution because his worship of God was not that of the great majority of the nation, he went to Holland — and this is to be noted - not as a rebel against his sovereign or to be a thorn in the side of the kingdom that had thrust him out; he went not to found a new state or to lead in a reformation. Peace and quietness he craved, and he believed he would find them among those tolerant Dutch folk to whom sects and formularies meant less than they did to any other people of Europe at that time. He prayed and he worked, for he was always industrious and work seemed the natural condition of man, but he was a stranger apart from the people among whom he tarried. And it was this feeling of isolation and of being a stranger in a strange land that led to the greater flight.

That insularity of the English that has made the race what it is was in the blood of the Pilgrims.

1 Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, p. 14.

The little children they had brought with them were growing up and other children were born unto them, and they wanted these children to be English-speaking and English-thinking and not half-English and half-Dutch. The motives that inspired their flight, as one of their historians tells us, were that they might enjoy liberty of conscience, and keep their own language and the name of Englishmen, and train their children as they were trained, and enlarge the Church of Christ. Beyond the seas was a country in which Englishmen were settling, a country that promised rich rewards to the industrious and God-fearing, in which God might be worshiped without the fear of persecution of king or clergy. There was to be found that freedom and liberty, that perfect right to live according to the dictates of their conscience, that was denied them in the Old World. And they went.

Now see how differently the Puritan faced the problem that so vexed the soul of the gentler Pilgrim. The Puritan was no separatist. He was a Church of England man, but he was at one with the Pilgrim in demanding reformation. Christ's vicar on earth was no longer Christlike. The Church was rotten with corruption; its ministers, instead of setting the example of holy living and holy dying, were a stench in the nostrils of men who lived decently and died in the profound consolation of a just but merciful Creator; the ceremonies of the Church, the 1 Young's Chronicles, p. 381.

vestments of its priests, its prayers and forms, savored of the mockery of Rome and were abhorrent to men who had drawn a new inspiration from the stern morality of Calvin. "Some men of the greatest parts and most extensive knowledge that the nation at this time produced, could not enjoy any peace of mind, because obliged to hear prayers offered up to the Divinity by a priest covered with a white linen vestment." Yet the Church was their Church, not to be destroyed but to be brought back to its old ways, to be reformed, but to be reformed from within and not from without. The Puritans in England stood up manfully to the fray. They had no thought of going to Holland or elsewhere to establish a Church more in consonance with their idea. The Church they had to reform was in England, and it was there the battle was to be fought. And fight they did with all the zeal and courageous determination that men display only when they are fighting for a principle; how well they fought is told in the story of Cromwell and his psalm-singing Ironsides at Marston Moor and Naseby; and their vengeance went unsatisfied until the king they fought laid his head on the block and the great principle of free speech and a free parliament was forever established. These were the men who went forth to found the Massachusetts colony. They brought their religion with them, they brought the same spirit of resistance to the evil practices that

1 Hume: History of England, p. 526.

the Church sanctioned, and the same determination to purify the Church. The Church was still to them their spiritual mother whose blessing they invoked. "We separate not from the Church of England, but from its corruptions," they said.

A nation to endure must be animated by higher and nobler reasons for its existence than the mere material desires that have led to the propagation of the animal species. Ease, mere wealth, the support of life under the most favorable conditions are all insufficient, and in the end they destroy. A race to live, a nation to grow and become truly great, must have implanted in its breast aspirations and ideals; it is of no consequence what form those aspirations and ideals take, but they must be a beacon light toward which the eyes of men forever turn. One reason why savage races have become extinct is that they were content with their material surroundings and were not quickened by the prompting of the higher things. They were deaf to the spiritual voice. The great nations who have moulded civilization have felt the ennobling influence of the infinite mystery; they have yearned for that something that would lift them above their sordid surroundings. It is immaterial whether the ideal for which they strove was personal liberty or liberty of conscience; religion, which often assumed a form material rather than ideal; the betterment of mankind. Whatever form it assumed, it was for the moment an idealistic conception, an effort to