As this ssue goes to press, the landing of Mayflower II is history. More than 150,000 tourists as well as the whole town turned out to participate in the welcoming ceremonies. Among the numbers sang by the massed choirs was the grand old hymn, "O God, our help in ages past" Indians representing the Cherokee and Chickasaw tribes were flown in by plane from Oklahoma.
This unique service has not only reenacted history; it has also made history. Capt. Alan Villiers, wearing colonial garb signed the compact, just as he brought the ship to harbor. While sixty miles out in the Atlantic he radioed this message:
We are greatly honored and delighted to be here off the American shores with this lovely ship which we're bringing for the American people. We look forward tremendously to coming in. Everything worked well. It's about 300 years since anybody tried out this type of ship. So we have to learn a hit.
There is no need to emphasize that the original Mayflower had no radio. How far the world has traveled in recent decades!
Many in this great country as well as in Europe will view this event as a piece of interesting sentimentality. But as heralds of God's last message to the world we must permit its deep significance to impress us. When a kindly Providence opened the way for the Pilgrims to leave their homelands to sail the wide seas and to lay the foundations of a new nation, it was that this new world might become the cradle not only of "liberty and justice for all" but that in later years it might become the home base of a great, extensive work that would carry the everlasting gospel in God's judgment-hour setting with its final gospel entreaty to "every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people" in preparation for the coming of our Lord.
The tree of liberty, so long struggling for existence under impossible conditions at times, needed a fertile soil in which to grow and develop. And this continent provided a land untrampled by age-old intolerance and unhampered by state religions. These early settlers sought a new way of life and that way of life has become in the last century and a half the coveted pattern of living in nearly all countries of the world.
The picture story of this link with the past is sent to our workers around the world in the hope that we may all sense the high responsibility that is ours in carrying the welcome news of liberty to our friends and neighbors everywhere. Whatever America has been able to contribute to our generation, it is because men three hundred years ago laid a firm foundation.
Two centuries after the landing of the first Pilgrims, Samuel Smith, in his poem, "My Country, 'Tis of Thee- expressed thoughts which we could wish might be truly expressed by God's people everywhere in every land and in every clime.
