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Significant Distinction of the Pilgrim Colony
"This colony is honourably distinguished from all others in ancient or modern times. It was planted under the influence of Christian principles, and was designed to be a refuge whither the persecuted in England might repair with safety. The parties who originated it were men of exalted piety; and the motives which swayed their conduct were of the highest and purest order of which human nature admits. Other colonies had been founded at the impulse of national glory, or of commercial enterprise; but this sprang from a sacred regard to the interests of religion, whose healthful tone and vigorous nature it proclaimed to the communities of Europe. The character of the colonists gave a religious complexion to their affairs, while their fortitude and piety revived the hopes of their brethren at home, and gave promise of a better state of things than had yet been realized. The world which the enterprising genius of Columbus had revealed to the European nations was a theatre on which new maxims of government and new forms of religion were to be subjected to the test of experiment. Many of the settlements effected on its shores were conducted by men of piety, who were more solicitous for the preservation of Christian truth than for the accumulation of worldly gain. The experiment was therefore made under the happiest auspices, and the rising communities of the New World were speedily in a condition to speak the language of freedom to the enfeebled and decrepit forms of despotism in Europe. Their early history was distinguished by some inconsistencies flowing from the errors they had imbibed in infancy. The peculiarity of their situation, and the perplexing and hazardous nature of the circumstances amid which they were required to act, unhappily led them to forget on some occasions the tolerant and generous principles which the noble Robinson had inculcated. But his spirit revived among them, and ultimately effected the extinction of those laws and usages which were alike inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity and the professions of their fathers."—DANIEL NEAL, M.A., History of the Puritans, vol. 1, p. 270 n.
The Verdict of History
Of movements significant and prophetic there have been many. The whole course of the Protestant reformation, from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth, is coincident with the transfer of the world's political centre of gravity from the Tiber and the Rhine to the Thames and the Mississippi. The whole career of the men who speak English has within this period been the most potent agency in this transfer. In these gigantic processes of evolution we cannot mark beginnings or endings by years, hardly even by centuries. But among the significant events which prophesied the final triumph of the English over the Roman idea, perhaps the most significant—the one which marks most incisively the dawning of a new era—was the migration of English Puritans across the Atlantic Ocean, to repeat in a new environment and on a far grander scale the work which their forefathers had wrought in Britain. The voyage of the Mayflower was not in itself the greatest event in this migration; but it serves to mark the era, and it is only when we study it in the mood awakened by the general considerations here set forth that we can properly estimate the historic importance of the great Puritan Exodus."--JORN FISKE, The Beginnings of New England (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston, 1889), p. 49.
Answering Destiny's Call
"Conscious of ability to act a higher part in the great drama of humanity, they, (the Pilgrims) ... were moved by 'a hope and inward zeal of advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in the remote parts of the New World; yea, though they should be but as stepping-stones unto others for performing so great a work.' "—GEORGE BAN-CROFT, History of the United States of America (p. 201).
