Pilgrim Fathers

“ Are we to praise and never be weary of praising the Pilgrim Fathers for abandoning their country, their homes, their friends, and their relations to come to the wilds of inhospitable New England, in order that they might worship God according to the dictates of their consciences, and must we condemn the first pioneers in the wilderness who plunged into the solitudes of Egypt for precisely the same reason, in order to fulfil the great aspiration of their souls to God—the pilgrim saints of the desert? ”

“ It seems to me that our Pilgrim Fathers made a mistake when they expected all mankind to think with them, and another mistake when they put aside the holiest and most solemnly beautiful days of all the year—those upon which our blessed Lord was born, suffered, and ascended into heaven. ”

“ We have before us the inspiring, the ennobling example of the Pilgrim Fathers, who, denied the right to worship God after their own manner in their home across the seas, made the perilous journey to the new world to establish here the beginning of a mighty church and a mighty pattern for all who were to come after them. ”

“ Because if you look back into the lives of the Pilgrim Fathers, let us say, or into those of the great soldiers and statesmen of Cromwellian England, you will find that these men had a sense of personal significance, a sense of destiny, such as no one in politics or literature seems to possess to-day. They were still in touch with the old Bible. To-day if life seems adventurous and fragmentary and generally aimless it is largely because of this one thing. We have lost touch with history. We have ceased to see human affairs as one great epic unfolding. ”

“ The American masses even to this day venerate the Pilgrim Fathers, and no amount of historical evidence will shake their veneration for those fierce and ignorant fanatics, whose memory should long ago have been buried in charitable oblivion. It is only the Catholic historian and philosopher that can to-day respect the inkling of truth which they held, and which St. Augustine says is to be found in every heresy and doctrinal vagary. ”

“ For such an inconsequential whim as that men should be free to pray in any way they choose, the Pilgrim Fathers betook themselves to a wilderness peopled with savages, preferring to die by the tomahawk rather than submit to clerical authority. ”

“ Pilgrim Fathers expatriated themselves, crossed the Atlantic,—then a greater enterprise than now to circumnavigate the globe,—and braved a savage foe, that they might worship God unmolested,—while many of us throw our votes in wantonness, or for a bribe, or to gratify revenge. ”

“ In reviewing his life we are carried back to that eventful era when the pilgrim fathers held their lives by a slender tenure amidst the red men of the wilderness that they might enjoy that liberty of conscience which is the inalienable gift of God. ”

“ Had the Pilgrim Fathers been met on Plymouth Rock by immigration officials; had their children been placed immediately in good free schools, and given the care of doctors, dentists, and nurses; had they found themselves in infinitely better circumstances than they had ever enjoyed in England, indulging in undreamed-of luxuries, and taught by kind-hearted philanthropists,—what pioneer virtues would they have developed, what sons would they have bred, what honours [Pg 220] would history have accorded them? ”

“ Finding themselves no better off in the republic, which had emancipated itself, simultaneously, from Spain and Rome, the Pilgrim Fathers shook the dust of the old world from their feet and sought a new hemisphere. Surely in the primeval forests men might hope to interpret Scripture and serve God each according to his own lights. ”

“ Those peculiar outward emblems, which were its badges at first, were of transient duration; like the clay and ligaments with which the graft is held in its place, made to be brushed away as soon as the scion is firmly united. The spirit of the Pilgrims was a life-giving spirit; activity, thrift, intelligence, liberty, followed in its train; and as for courage, a coward and a Puritan never went together. ”

“ In our praise of the Pilgrim Fathers, we often forget, I think, that there were other Pilgrims besides those at Plymouth Rock—other wanderers, who, perhaps, did not seek freedom to worship God, but who did seek better homes for their children, and who tried by their discoveries to show that we had a bigger, richer country than we knew about. ”

“ Even the brute creation was not forgotten; and cruelty to animals was a civil offence. The sympathies of the colonists were wide; a regard for Protestant Germany was as old as emigration; and during the Thirty Years’ war, the Pilgrims held fasts and offered prayers for the success of the Saxon cause”—crowned with the gospel.
But the glory of the Pilgrim Fathers was their faith. They trusted God, and acted. The secret of their strength and success was the open Bible and the family altar. They were men, and therefore not infallible. They sometimes erred grievously, and walked limping and awry ”

“ Every such difference ought to give way, and, in general, does give way, in the presence of the healing spirit that comes to us from the remembrance of those old heroic times. The right thinking Episcopalian not only acquiesces, but rejoices cordially in the praises of the Pilgrim Fathers. He can glory even in their stern puritanism, without losing a particle of reverence or respect for his own cherished views. ”

“ Some facts about these specimen citizens are worthy of attention. More than one-half of them were born and received their early training in New England, and full one-third are direct lineal descendants of the Pilgrim fathers. All, so far as we know, are undoubted believers in the Christian religion—the greater proportion of them are men of peculiarly and strongly religious natures, who have been active and efficient in every peculiarly religious work. ”

“ But our great need now is more religion in every-day life.
Still, take it all in all, I think the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers are as good as their ancestors, and in many ways better. Children are apt to be an echo of their ancestors. We are apt to put a halo around the Forefathers, but I suspect that at our age they were very much like ourselves. People are not wise when they long for the good old days.
But though your Forefathers may not have been much, if any, better than yourselves, let us extol them for the fact that they started this country in the right direction. ”

“ The credit for the first permanent settlement in the chilly regions of the Charles River usually goes to a small group of people who are referred to as the Pilgrim Fathers. A Pilgrim, in the usual sense of the word, is one who “journeys to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion.” ”

“ To much that the Pilgrim conscientiously believed, and with his whole heart accepted, the present age has grown careless; we are lukewarm or indifferent upon some points which he esteemed vital; but it is small credit to us, if we are tolerant of error simply because we care little for truth. ”

“ The Pilgrims “grew in knowledge and gifts and other graces of the Spirit of God, and lived together in peace and love and holiness; and as many came unto them from divers parts of England, they grew to be a great congregation. If at any time differences arose or offences broke out—as it cannot be but sometimes there will, even among the best of men—they were ever so met with and nipped in the bud betimes, or otherwise so well compassed, as still love, peace, and communion, were preserved ”

“ The peculiar situation of the Pilgrims tended to increase that rugged individuality, that self-confident earnestness, that somewhat dogmatic vigor, which already characterized them, and which is still a salient trait of their descendants. ”

“ JANE GOODWIN AUSTIN. THE STORY-TELLER OF THE PILGRIMS.
HIS famous daughter of the Pilgrims has become a specialist in their behalf, and has pledged her remaining years to develop their story. Every summer she visits Plymouth, where she constantly studies not only the written records of the Pilgrim Fathers, but the crumbling gravestones and the oral traditions which have come down among their descendants. ”

“ The Pilgrims were fretted by the unsatisfactory and clogging conditions of their compact with the London partners. Their prosperity was perpetually menaced by the factions and the chicanery of a herd of merchants whose only god was mammon, and who cared nothing for justice and sober living and their plighted word, if only they might make their heaps high and massy. ”

“ So, after they had continued together about a year, and kept their meetings every sabbath in one place and another, exercising the worship of God despite the diligence and malice of their adversaries, seeing that they could no longer continue in that condition, they prepared to pass over into Holland as they could.” [27]
The Pilgrims were preëminently men of action. They were not dreamy speculators; they were not dilettanti idealists. They never let “I dare not” wait upon “I would.” ”

“ The sprouting corn began to wither in the blade. Famine seemed inevitable. In this emergency, the devout Pilgrims resorted to the “mercy-seat,” and besought Him who had so often appeared to succor them to aid them now. A special day of fasting and prayer was appointed; and we may still
“hear the Pilgrims’ peaceful prayer
Swelling along the silent air,
Amid the forest wild.”
It has been well said, that answers to prayer do not generally come with observation. They are often sent in a way which is hid from most persons, and frequently even from those who receive them. ”

“ But notwithstanding the fact that the Pilgrims erected a theocracy, and by conferring upon the civil arm jurisdiction in religion, opened the way to unjust persecution, it is also true that they “builded better than they knew;” for the principles they professed eventually forced their children to a broader platform. They secured the future. They were the acorn; let the nineteenth century be the oak.
“For we doubt not, through the ages
One increasing purpose runs ”

“ What was a Pilgrim? (A pilgrim is a wanderer. We think first of the Puritan fathers when we speak of Pilgrims, but the Pilgrim who appeared to Lord Douglas was a palmer who showed by his garb and his olive branch that he had been to the Holy Land.) See picture, page 319. ”

“ Do you understand why? Because the noble Pilgrims had great love for God. They lived a life of loyal trust in him. Not only on Sundays, but every day they loved to read the Bible and pray. And so that they might pray to God and serve him as they wished they gave up kind friends and comfortable [24] homes and risked their very lives. We should not think a picture of our Pilgrim forefathers good unless it made us think as soon as we saw it of this part of their lives.
One hundred and two Pilgrims had come to America on the Mayflower. ”

“ Standing thus among the graves of the pioneer dead and putting all modern life behind him, one’s thoughts go back across the centuries and grasp, with a new sense of reality, the facts of Pilgrim history. The Forefathers, who did brave deeds and suffered much, and planted in the wilderness the seeds of a free [Pg 49] nation, stand forth not as shadowy historical figures, but as living men. ”

“ Yet, in differentiating between Pilgrim and Puritan and in recalling the facts as to the origin of religious freedom and the separation of Church and State, the greatest of all the blessings we now enjoy—in giving most of the glory to the Pilgrims, notwithstanding the claims of Catholic Maryland—I am not at all unmindful that in religion and in politics the Pilgrim and the Puritan had many views in common, that our debt to both is quite inseparable, and that our gratitude to them should be eternal. ”

“ Poor pilgrims here may eat and sleep, Whilst them in safety their good Lord will keep. Fall to, fall to, poor man, and take thy fill, In nature’s plasure there can be no ill. In vain our king’s indulgent hand supplies What peevish man his longing soul denies.
This was enough to have stagger’d a stouter man than Tender-conscience, and he himself could not have resisted so powerful a temptation, had it not been for the remembrance of the thunder and the voice: Also he called to mind that saying of the holy Jesus, To do the will of my heavenly father, is both my meat and my drink. ”

“ Lonely pilgrim, that same Jesus
Will return to earth again!
See the first faint beams of morning
Chasing night and clouds away,
All the glorious sky adorning;
Pilgrim, it is break of day!
Rouse thee, pilgrim, weep no longer;
Let thy glad Hosanna ring!
Jesus comes in power and glory;
Hail thy Saviour and thy King!
ELIJAH. He calmly stands on the mountain's brow.
God shield thee, thou lonely prophet, now!
For thy friends are few, and thy foes are strong,
And each heart beats high in that mocking throng;
And every eye is fixed upon thee,
As thou standest alone in thy majesty. ”

“ The little Marian learned; And a thoughtful and a happier child
She to her home returned.
Years rolled away, the scene has changed,
A wife and mother now, Marian has found the Wicket Gate,
She and her children too. And oh! how sweet it is to see
This littel Pilgrim band, As on towards their heavenly home,
They travel hand in hand. When cloudy days fall to their lot,
They see a light afar, The light that shone on Bethlehem's plain,
The Pilgrim's guiding star. ”

“ Udal ap Rhys repeats it in his Tour through Spain and Portugal, 35-8. It is inserted in the Acta Sanctorum, vi. 45. Pope Calixtus II. mentions it among the miracles of Santiago.
Pilgrim (A Passionate) , American who visits England, as one seeks the home he has loved throughout a tedious exile. It is like the return of a weary child to his mother’s arms, as night comes on. He lingers upon each feature of the landscape as upon the face of his beloved, and counts the rest of the world but “a garish” place.—Henry James, Jr., A Passionate Pilgrim.
Pilgrim’s Progress (The) , by John Bunyan. ”