With this unchecked expansion of his soul, young William's intellect was also awakened. Though at first forbidden advanced schooling, he became a self-taught man, a thoughtful student of history, philosophy and theology, proficient also in linguistics, as the classic Latin and Greek, and late in life, the original Hebrew of the Old Testament.
His joining with the Separatists from the Established State Church of England was an act which offended his relatives and early acquaintances, who tried in vain to make him abandon his stand; for he could not, consistently with his convictions, comply with their desires. It was observed that "neither could the wrath of his uncles, nor the scoff of his neighbors, now turned upon him as one of the Puritans, divert him from his pious inclinations". Thus he answered them, "To keep a good conscience and walk in such a way as God has prescribed in his word is a thing which I shall prefer above you all, and above life itself."
Government officers soon discovered this company of Dissenters, stopped their meetings, and proceeded to make arrests. In the autumn of 1607 when seventeen years of age, Bradford and his associates endeavored to go over to Holland, where religious liberty was allowed. He was one of the chief advocates of this measure. But the ship master that was to take them betrayed their plan to the authorities, who sent the Puritans into prison at Boston in Lincolnshire. Next spring the same attempt was made, unsuccessfully again; for their rulers neither granted them freedom at home nor emigration abroad. But before that year of 1608 passed, the victims of persecution escaped one after another, by various means, across the water to Amsterdam. Bradford's ship encountered a seven days' storm and was driven out of its course hundreds of miles, close to Norway, even the mariners giving up in despair. The Pilgrims remained calm, though unused to the sea; and our hero was heard to repeat in prayer, with his companions, "Yet, Lord, thou canst save."
On reaching Holland, an envious passenger accused him as having fled from England as a culprit, and he was taken before the magistrates, who, however, willingly released him when the truth was known.
Leyden was the Pilgrims' rendezvous. The place was congenial to the ardent spirit of this youth, and he became a student at the University there. He must have heard in England as a boy, how the martyr John Bradford, chaplain to Edward VI and one of the most acceptable preachers in the realm, because of his religious principles had been burned to death, in the reign of Bloody Mary. And the people of Leyden could recite for sympathetic ears, the tales of heroic and successful resistance against King Philip of Spain only thirty years before these Puritan refugees from intolerance arrived.
William now went about to earn a living. As an apprentice to a French Protestant, he learned the trade of dying silk, and doubtless, beside his Dutch, acquired here his thorough familiarity with the French language so widely used even in those days.
II
THE PILGRIM
The best inheritance they have left us is the New England conscience. The Puritan's habit of self-examination and prayer has left its impress on the habit of thought of the great nation that has risen where he showed the way.
Governor Guild of Massachusetts, at the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Calvin, in Geneva, Switzerland, July 9, 1909.