Beyond their dark age led the van of thought.
Well, reasoned Mr. Bayard, on such a scene and such an occasion as this, might the words of Whittier be repeated—
Our hearts grow cold,
We lightly hold
A right which brave men died to gain;
The stake, the cord,
The axe, the sword,
Grim nurses at its birth of pain.
It was the momentous issues raised by the invasion of liberty of conscience that drove John Robinson and his associates forth. As William Bradford has recorded, "Being thus molested and with no hope of their continuance there, by a joynte consent they resolved to go into ye low countries, where they heard was freedom of religion for all men." Then it was that they made the attempted passage from Boston to The Netherlands.
| Tablet in Vestibule of Robinson Memorial Church, Gainsborough | Memorial Tablet on St. Peter's Church, Leyden |
Glancing at the history of the arbitrary and cruel measures taken to prevent the departure of the congregation, which finally, in broken detachments, distressed, despoiled, imperilled by land and sea, assembled at Amsterdam, moving thence to Leyden, Mr. Bayard paid grateful recognition to the country which, in their hour of sore need, extended to exiles welcome protection and generous toleration in an age of intolerance, and recited the familiar incidents connected with their sailing for America. "It is clear and plain to us now that the departure from England of this small body of humble men was a great step in the march of Christian civilisation. It contained the seed of Christian liberty, freedom of enquiry, freedom of man's conscience." As for John Robinson, between whose grave and the colony he was the means of planting, washes the wide ocean he never crossed. His memory is a tie of kindred—a recognition of the common trust committed to both nations to sustain the principles of civil and religious liberty of which he was a fearless champion, and under which he has so marvellously fulfilled the prophesy "A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a great nation." And the seed of Christian liberty, sown in adversity but on good soil, has become a wide-spreading tree in whose sheltering branches all who will may lodge.
Six years after this stone-laying, in June, 1902, the tercentenary of the founding of the Gainsborough church, a tablet was unveiled in the vestibule of the new building to commemorate the world-wide co-operation in honouring one "the thought of whom stirs equal reverence in English and American hearts."
What the American Ambassador so well said at Gainsborough was a fitting prelude to the excursion which his countrymen, continuing their itinerary, made to the Pilgrim scenes in Holland where, in 1891, the English Plymouth memorial year, they had erected on St. Peter's Cathedral at Leyden, under which lie his bones, a tablet to John Robinson, pastor of the English church worshipping "over against this spot," whence at his prompting went forth the Pilgrim Fathers to settle New England.