II. “It held that every man has the right of private judgment, of testing his belief by the sacred writ, and of worshipping God in his own way as that text directed.”[520]
On this doctrine the Pilgrims thrived. “Brown bread and the gospel is good fare,” they said to one another.[521] Indeed it was; and there on the desolate coast, where wheat froze and the bitter winter congealed six months of the twelve, men grew. “At last,” says Elliott, “in the beginning of the seventeenth century, we see a church with no priest, with no hierarchy, with no forms; none like it since that at Corinth; none so entirely free to work out its ideas into life and action. It was a religious democracy. Its doctrines and practices were the outcome of the time, and were decided on by the votes of the members as men. In theory, the majority ruled in the Plymouth church. ’Tis a noticeable thing in human history, and it has had its influence in both church and state. The day had come when a few brave men could take this step in advance towards freedom, and not be swallowed up and lost. The day had come when democracy was possible in the church, foretelling its speedy coming in the state.”[522]
CHAPTER XVIII.
SAD NEWS FROM ENGLAND.
“Thou know’st ’tis common; all that live must die.
Passing through nature to eternity.”
Shakspeare’s Hamlet.
The Pilgrims were fretted by the unsatisfactory and clogging conditions of their compact with the London partners. Their prosperity was perpetually menaced by the factions and the chicanery of a herd of merchants whose only god was mammon, and who cared nothing for justice and sober living and their plighted word, if only they might make their heaps high and massy.
Early in 1625, the colonists determined to initiate measures which should look to their disenthralment, and whose result should be to give them in fee simple those lands which their patient skill had wrung from the sturdy hand of unwilling and churlish nature. Standish was commissioned to go to England, and open negotiations with the Merchant-adventurers.[523]
Two ships, which had come out on a trading voyage, were now about to sail for home. In the larger of these the redoubtable captain embarked. “Being both well laden, they went joyfully home together, the greater towing the lesser at her stern all the way over. And they had such fair weather, that they never once cast off till both were shot deep into the English channel. Yet there the little vessel was unhappily seized by a Turkish rover, and carried into Sallee, where master and crew were made slaves; and her cargo of beaver-skins was sold at sixpence a piece. Thus were their hopes dashed, and the joyful news they meant to carry home was turned to heavy tidings.”[524]