The greatest story in the world, period 3 (of 3)

by Horace G. Hutchinson

The predominance of Portugal in the East had been finally broken. French, Dutch, and English all had sailed round the Cape and formed settlements in India and the Malay Archipelago, disputing with Spain and Portugal the trade of the East. In the West, in the New World, Spain for the most part was content to develop, in such peace as the English seamen would grant her, her empire in Mexico and South America. The occupation of Bermuda and of Barbadoes by the English was accomplished without as much opposition from Spain as we should expect to find, and Sir Walter Raleigh's settlement of Virginia, named after the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, was achieved without fighting except against the native Red Indians, was from this expedition that Sir Walter has the credit of introducing into England potatoes and tobacco.

Even before the beginning of the century we have seen the settlement of England's first Colony, Newfoundland, and it was in the first years of the seventeenth century that a trading port was established on the St. Lawrence river, soon to grow into the city of Quebec.

Spaniards had settled along the coast of what now is Florida, England had planted the colony which commemorates the Virgin Queen; and southward of Virginia lies a state still named after Louis, King of France—Louisiana. At that time it formed but a small part of a far larger territory so-called and claimed as a French possession. England and France, however, did not come to blows in this part of the newly found great continent, but they did fall to fighting over their settlements on the shore of the St. Lawrence. In the meantime settlers from England had formed a colony in what was called New England, between the St. Lawrence in the north and Virginia southward. Among these were the colonists who received the name of the Pilgrim Fathers—pilgrims flying from England for their religion's sake, to become the fathers of an important part of the great American nation.

Religious differences

We may pay a little further attention now to the reasons that induced them to go this pilgrimage. Their principal motive was to escape persecution on account of their religion. That desire led to several pilgrimages and movements of people of the same kind in course of the story. It was a similar motive, for instance, which made many of the Huguenots come to England and other foreign lands. Some went to Canada, where they encountered, as we have said, the English on the St. Lawrence. To understand the violent intolerance of any differences of religious belief and practice which produced these movements, we have to understand the way in which the men of that date viewed those differences.

In the first place, looking at it from the Protestant side, the Protestants felt very bitterly the evil conduct which they saw in the establishments of the Church. They protested against these evils, and also against the authority claimed by the Pope. The Puritans in England, for nearly the same reasons, were in protest against what we may call the High Church Protestants and against the authority claimed by the Crown as head of that Church.

On the Catholic side, the Pope and all the authorities were naturally incensed against any who protested against his authority, because it was essentially part of his claim, as Pope, that he was infallible, that he could do no wrong, and that therefore it was a sin to protest against anything he might choose to do or affirm. And inevitably, since he was spiritual ruler of the Catholic kings, he used his immense influence to induce them to put down this defiance of his authority by their subjects.

Then that spirit of inquiry and of protest, which was directed first against the Pope and his commands, very easily led men into criticism of the authority of the kings themselves and into protest against their actions: and this was a kind of protest which was not at all agreeable to the despotic kings of that day.

Finally, we should note this point most particularly—that men had lately begun to read for themselves, for the first time, the Bible, and that in the Old Testament they found that the Lord punished Israel and Judah—whole nations at a time—because certain sections of those nations deviated from His true service. Thence they derived the conviction that if any section of a modern nation deviated and went astray from the practice of the true religion, that nation as a whole was liable to divine punishment. We must get that conviction of theirs into our minds, and see all that is implied by it, if we would understand how it was that they were so fiercely intolerant of these religious differences. It explains a great deal of what is otherwise obscure and difficult about persecution done in the name of religion. It explains why the nations were so ready to send out of their midst any section that so differed from the majority in their religious beliefs: and it explains also why these sections were so very willing to go. The English Puritans who went to America, both at the time of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620, and again later, must have felt that they were getting away from the society of wicked men in whose punishment they might expect to be included; and similarly the rest of the nation would be only too pleased to see them go—for the same reason, that the majority feared lest the wrath of Heaven should fall upon the whole mass of the people, because of the wickedness (that is to say, of the difference of religious belief and practice which they looked upon as wickedness) of this small section.

Cavaliers and Puritans