Chapter 16 - The Pilgrim Fathers

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 [290]
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.
241
242 The Great Controversy
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
[291] 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
Pilgrim Fathers 243
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 [292]
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 5:70.
“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 1:269.
“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
244 The Great Controversy
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
[293] 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. 5:297. 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
[294] 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
Pilgrim Fathers 245
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 magistrate
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 [295]
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
246 The Great Controversy
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 or 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
[296] 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.
Pilgrim Fathers 247
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 [297]
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
248 The Great Controversy
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 [298] 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
Pilgrim Fathers 249
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.