“Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong;—
Nay, but she aimed not at glory, no lover of glory she;
Give her the glory of going on, and still to be.”
Tennyson’s Wages.
TO the stout-hearted Pilgrims who landed here in 1620 this “glory of going on, and still to be” has been meted in lavish measure. For nearly three hundred years the fire first kindled in far-away Scrooby in the hearts of John Robinson, Elder Brewster, Richard Clyfton, the youthful William Bradford and their devoted followers has burned with a clear flame; the torch of truth there lit by them has been handed on from generation to generation.
For the many latter-day pilgrims who visit the shrines of New England, the gray boulder on Clarke’s Island where the weary voyagers rested after their stormy cruise in the shallop; the humble rock on our shore where they at length found shelter; our noble statue of “clear-eyed Faith” and the not far distant monument on Bunker Hill, will ever bear like testimony to the courage of that little band of independent thinkers. Meeting in secret in the Manor-House of Scrooby, these far-sighted heroes, when they “shooke of the yoake of antichristian bondage” of the Church of England, made possible for their descendants a later Declaration of Independence!
And every year, with the new knowledge it brings, adds to the pathos of that early endeavor after religious and civil liberty. Many English scholars, generously overlooking the Separation of 1776, have traced on the mother soil of Old England the very beginnings of the Separatist movement, and thanks to their careful study of musty records and yellow parchments we now have a satisfactory, though still incomplete, record of those few eventful lives to which we proudly owe our present freedom.
One enthusiast even finds the earliest evidences of this movement in the concerted action of certain rebellious weavers of the twelfth
century—thirty weavers of the diocese of Worcester—who were summoned before the Council of Oxford to answer a charge of making light of the sacraments and of priestly power. Though they answered that they were Christians and reverenced the teachings of the apostles, they were driven from the country as heretics, to perish of cold. This “pious firmness” on the part of the council, writes the short-sighted chronicler, not only cleansed the realm of England from the pestilence which had crept in, but also prevented it from creeping in again. But the pestilence did creep in again and again and the weeds grew apace, for which thanks are chiefly due to John Wyclif and his followers.
Even before the Reformation Foxe tells of “secret multitudes who tasted and followed the sweetness of God’s Holy Word, and whose fervent zeal may appear by their sitting up all night in reading and hearing.” But we must be content to trace our ancestry and our love of liberty to the early years of the seventeenth century, at which time, as we may now all read in the clear lettering of Bradford’s own pen,