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Almost three hundred years have passed into history since
the Pilgrim ship bearing its precious freight of human souls dropped
anchor in Cape Cod Bay, and its occupants sent out their shallop in search of a suitable place for landing.
English ships had visited the New England coast many times between the
date of the discovery of the New World by Columbus and that day; but they
had brought only explorers, adventurers, traders and fishermen. Unlike the
long line of its
predecessors, the Mayflower came laden with men, women and children,
bringing with them all their earthly possessions; and, what was
immeasurably more important, the Anglo-Saxon love of liberty, which,
developed under the new conditions they found here, has given us the boon
of perfect liberty and equality under the law, but not in contravention of
law.
They had come to stay. Denied the right to worship God
in such form and manner as they saw fit, persecuted for their
non-conformity to the established faith, they had fled from England to
Holland, and from the latter country to the wilderness peopled only by
natives who knew nothing of European civilization, European customs or
European religion, beyond what little they had learned from traders; and
that was not favorable to the Europeans.
The century preceding their coming had witnessed the
most remarkable upheavals in the religious world of which history
furnishes any record, except the advent of men who have promulgated an
entirely new religion with such vigor that they have succeeded in
impressing their teachings upon a considerable portion of the people of
the world.
In 1517 Tetzel, a Dominican Friar, and the guardian of
the Franciscan Friars had been appointed by the Cardinal Archbishop of
Mainz, joint commissaries for Saxony and North Germany, to preach an
indulgence to all who would contribute to the rebuilding of St. Peter's
Church at Rome; and while Tetzel was preaching in the Schlosskirche at
Juterbogk, Luther had nailed to the door of the kirche his ninety-five
theses, in which he challenged Tetzel to a defense of his position, and
took an attitude contrary to the established order, from which he ever
after refused to recant.
A little later, Henry VIII of England, in consequence
of a quarrel with the Pope and Cardinals concerning the dissolution of his
marriage to Catherine of Aragon, had established the Church of England as
an independent ecclesiastical body; and still later John Calvin, a
Frenchman, born in the rear that Henry ascended the throne of England,
promulgated the Geneva Creed.
All these things had set the leaven of religious
liberty into a ferment which nearly blew the lid off the mixing pan; and
creeds without number sprang up, especially among people who had chafed
under the restrictions which held them to forms of worship and to beliefs
established by others, whom they thought no more capable of expounding the
teachings of the founders of the religion they professed than were they.
If Luther the priest could dissent from the teachings that had been
inculcated into his mind through a long course of training for his
profession; if the King of England, who had been a firm adherent of the
established order of things, and had so ably defended the prerogatives of
the church of Rome that he had been recognized by it as "Defender of the
Faith," could set up an independent church, what limit was to be placed
upon revolts against theological dogmas? What was to prevent the men who
followed Luther, the English dissenters and Calvin in doing their own
thinking, from doing a little independent thinking on their own account?
At any rate, this is just what happened, with the
result that the dissenters from the dogma of the first dissenters found
themselves in just as uncomfortable a position as that in which those
first protestants against the established religion were placed by their
protestations; for it is a peculiar characteristic of the human mind,
that, having discovered what it considers error in the tenets of any
faith, and set up its own standard, it at once becomes intolerant of
any one who suggests or even thinks that he has the same right to dissent
from the latest standard established. So we find the Church of England
refusing to the followers of Calvin the same religious liberty they had
claimed in their defiance of the Church of Rome.
It was this which drove the Pilgrims across the
Atlantic in search of a home in the wilderness where they might be free
from all restrictions upon their religious liberty; and by the irony of
fate, it was this same working of the human mind, this same characteristic
of which I have just spoken, that led them to acts of intolerance and
oppression against men of other religious beliefs and the heterodox
members of their own congregations, men whose consciences would not allow
them to subscribe to all the tenets of the creed set up for them. It was
this that drove Roger Williams from Salem to seek refuge first with
Massasoit at Sowams, and later with the Narragansetts at the place which
he devoutly named Providence; that sent Gorton from Plymouth to the same
Narragansett country; and John Easton and a multitude of other Quakers
from the Massachusetts Bay colony to Rhode Island and other places.
The Pilgrims and the Puritans came here in search of a
home where they might be free, but closed their doors to others impelled
by the same love of freedom to flee their native land, thus following the
example of those whose persecutions they themselves had fled. In this they
were bait following the inscrutable workings of the human mind, and
indirectly and unintentionally laying the foundations of a broader liberty
than they ever beheld in their wildest flights of fancy; for the very
intolerance which they displayed but sharpened the spirit of resistance,
and led to a more thorough understanding of true liberty, the liberty to
pursue one's own inclinations until the pursuit reaches the bounds of
positive evil, or trespasses upon the like liberties of another.
These reflections are peculiarly applicable to the
settlers of Southern New England, because they were the first to attempt
to establish upon these shores the principle of religious liberty for
themselves, though denied to others. The Roman Catholics in Maryland and
the Quakers in Pennsylvania but followed the trail they blazed; and it is
in consequence of these facts that we of New England claim for our barren
soil the title of Birthplace of the American Ideal, which if carefully
conserved and safeguarded, will become the ideal of the world. Our New
England soil may not be as productive as that of the plains of our middle
west or of our sunny south; but the atmosphere of New England civil and
religious liberty that has surrounded us has been highly productive of men
and women who have left the impress of their character upon the life of
the country. In fact, I question whether any one will attempt at this late
day to gainsay the claim so often made that December 21, 1620, was the
natal day of the American system of government. Somewhat crude at its
birth was the idea out of which that system has grown; but the
intolerance of restraint in matters of thought was there, and it is this
spirit of resistance to attempts to limit the freedom of thought and
action, running through all our colonial history, that finally developed
into that immortal document, the Declaration of Independence, written, it
is true, by a lover of humanity from fair Virginia, but breathing in its
every line the traditions of New England, which had ere that time become
the traditions of an incipient nation.
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Massasoit of the Wampanoags
Massasoit of the Wampanoags
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