For love and labor on our ship of state.
By faith the Pilgrims left old England, and sojourned in Holland as in a strange country. By faith they trusted their all to God and the Mayflower. By faith they endured the hardships of that first winter and founded their colony in which they sought to honor God according to the truth as they saw it. All honor to the faith of our Pilgrim Fathers.
In hope the Puritans left their native land, seeking not a separation from the mother Church but rather purification of the Established Order. In hope they founded Salem and Boston and other towns about the Massachusetts Bay. In hope they laid strong the foundations which afterward led to the victories of Lexington and Bunker Hill. All honor to the Puritan builders of a great commonwealth, the New America.
Through charity Roger Williams fled into the depths of snowy forests and crossed frozen streams, to form among savage tribes a new colony where no man would be denied political privileges because of religious belief. Through charity he forgave those who exiled him and at the risk of his own life saved Puritan and Pilgrim from an impending Indian massacre. Through charity he shared his purchased possessions gratuitously with others. Through charity he formed the immortal compact binding men together “only in civil things.” Through charity he sacrificed his humble patrimony, his home at Salem, and the earnings of his lifetime to safeguard and protect the colony he had founded for the joys of others. Through charity he extended for the first time in our national history a loving welcome to men of all beliefs into the new fraternity of human hearts founded for human helpfulness.
Roger Williams possessed the faith of the Pilgrim and the hope of the Puritan. Faith and hope getteth, but charity giveth. Roger Williams possessed the charity of Christ. He followed in the footsteps of his Master along a pathway of pain. Like the Man of Galilee, in the olive orchard and vine-clad garden, and on the bleak skull-shaped hill without the walls of Jerusalem, his humble servant, the man of Providence, had his Gethsemane and Golgotha in the frozen forests and on the snow-clad hills under the wintry skies of New England.
Aye, call it holy ground,
The soil where first they trod,
They left unstained what there they found,
Freedom to worship God.
And now in these United States of America, there abideth the faith of the Pilgrim, the hope of the Puritan, and the charity of Roger Williams; but the greatest of these is charity.