On the eve of departure a solemn fast was held. “Let us seek of God,” said these disciples so shortly to be severed by the sullen sea, “a right way for us and for our little ones and for all our substance.” Is it strange that New England is moral and well-ordered and devout, when it was begotten of a fast and a prayer?
Robinson gave the departing members of his exiled flock “a farewell, breathing a freedom of opinion and an independence of authority such as then was hardly known in the world;”[110] and this he intermixed with practical directions for the future guidance of the Pilgrim voyagers. He chose that beautiful text in Ezra, “And there, at the river by Ahava, I proclaimed a fast, that we might humble ourselves before God, and seek of him a right way for us, and for our children, and for all our substance.”[111]
Unhappily, “but a brief outline of that remarkable sermon has been preserved. We would gladly give whole shoals of printed discourses in exchange for that one homily. While, however, the larger part is lost in the long silence of the past, the fragments of this great man’s farewell utterances are gathered up and preserved among our richest relics.”[112]
Never was there a more affecting occasion. A Christian congregation, welded together alike by a common faith and a common misfortune, was about to be rent asunder. Some of their number, thrice exiled, were soon to essay the settlement of an unknown and legendary wilderness. These dear wanderers they might never see again with their mortal eyes; and even should they meet them once more on the shores of time, years must intervene before the greeting. Strange thoughts and anxious chased each other across the troubled mirror of each countenance. All eyes were dim with tears; all hands were clasped; the pastor’s heart was full. Amidst the painful silence, broken by a frequent sob, the low, sweet voice of Robinson was heard quivering upon the sympathetic air: “Brethren, we are now ere long to part asunder, and the Lord knoweth whether I shall live ever to see your faces more. But whether the Lord hath appointed it or not, I charge you before God and his blessed angels to follow me no farther than I have followed Christ. If God should reveal any thing to you by any other instrument of his, be as ready to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth of my ministry, for I am very confident the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy word. Miserably do I bewail the state and condition of the reformed churches, who are come to a period in religion, and will go no farther than the instruments of their reformation.
“Remember your church covenant, in which you have agreed to walk in all the ways of the Lord, made or to be made known unto you. Remember your promise and covenant with God and with one another to receive whatever light and truth shall be made known to you from his written word; but withal, take heed, I beseech you, what you receive for truth, and compare it and weigh it with other scriptures of truth before you accept it; for it is not possible the Christian world should come so lately out of such thick antichristian darkness, and that full perfection of knowledge should break forth at once.”[113]
Much is said now-a-days about the development of Christianity. The clatter of pseudo-philosophers is deafening. We have the German rationalistic school; the worshippers in the “broad church” of the humanitarians; the idolaters of a mystic pantheism; the devotees of the Socinian tenets; the bold blasphemers who reject all faith, and form a creed in epigrammatic sneers; and the apostles of two churches, one of which believes that God is too good to damn men, while the other holds that man is too good to be damned. All this divinity is quite adrift; it floats rudderless, and rejects the anchorage of God’s word. Robinson was wiser. He was no friend of stagnant Christianity; but in all his voyaging after truth he clung to his Bible anchorage. Inside of that he saw ample room for the completest development. “The Bible, not the fathers, formed his text-book; he discerned there the depths of truth and glory, into which he was persuaded that thoughtful minds might plunge farther and farther as time rolled on. The Bible was to him like the universe, a system unchangeable in its great facts and fundamental principles, but ever opening wider and wider upon devout and studious intellects. He knew there would be no change in God’s word, no addition to or subtraction from its contents; but he looked for beautiful and improving changes in men’s views—for broader, clearer, and grander conceptions of God’s truth.”[114] This was Robinson’s idea of “the development of Christianity,” and it was surcharged with profound philosophy as well as with sound practical direction and Christian pathos. The great Puritan teacher was neither a Socinian, a Pantheist, a Rationalist, nor a Mystic; he claimed no kinship with the money-changers who scourge Christ out of the temple of his divinity; least of all did he sympathize with those who reject the sufficiency of the Scripture text, and found their schemes of progress upon material bases. No; Robinson favored the most radical Christian progress, but he based his idea upon the Bible, and knew how to guard his notion of development from misconception and abuse. The evangelical believers of our day owe the famous Leyden exile a lasting debt of gratitude for the clear distinction which he has drawn between the progressive “liberty of the sons of God,” and the earth-born whims which materialism baptizes with the name of “progress.”
In this same sermon Robinson pressed one other thing, exhibiting, in a bigoted and narrow age, rare catholicity of spirit. “Another thing I commend to you,” he said; “by all means shake off the name of Brownist.[115] ’Tis a mere nickname, a brand to make religion odious, and the professors of it, to the Christian world. To that end I should be glad if some godly minister would go over with you before my coming; for there will be no appreciable difference between the Puritans who have not renounced the church of England and you, when you come to the practice of the ordinances out of the British kingdom. By all means close with the godly party of England, and rather study union than division; in how nearly we may possibly, without sin, close with them, than in the least measure to affect division or separation from them. Nor be ye loath to take another pastor or teacher; for that flock which hath two shepherds is not endangered, but secured thereby.”[116]
Thus abruptly ends this precious fragment; and it may justly be esteemed one of the rarest verbal gems in the trophied casket of our Saxon tongue.