Voyage of the Pilgrim Fathers

The Founding of the Modern American Nation

The willingness of men to accept suffering in every degree and even the pain of death to establish their right to worship as they please, has been a phenomenon at all periods in history wherever a monotheistic religion has been adopted as a national religion. The religions which were based on the recognition of many gods were always much more tolerant of anyone who found himself out of step with their teachings and observances, and only when such heretics threatened to endanger the State, as in the case of the Roman persecution of the early Christians, did the State take much interest in them.

Of all the monotheistic religions, the one basing its teaching on the love and understanding of the Deity has been the most zealous in bringing its benefits to men and so eager and insistent upon forcing the soul’s salvation upon reluctant or dissenting adherents that it has the highest record for intolerance of all the religions. This intolerance has, at various times since the death of Christ, the founder of the religion, produced some of the most iniquitous crimes against man.

It represents probably the greatest paradox that history can pro­vide, for based on the love of God for mankind and teaching the essential necessity for man to love his fellow-men, even his enemies, imprisonment, tortures and death have been inflicted not only on those who refused to accept it, but especially on those who having accepted it in principle have yet been unable to accept in some cases the dogmas, in others, mere forms of worship. That is to say, it has proved most harsh to those within its fold rather than to those who have, in its view, foolishly rejected it altogether.

This, of course, has not been the fault of the religion, but the fault of organizations devised by men to make its teachings available. A religion which can be so wide in the application of its principles as to support various forms of teaching and worship within one branch of it, for example, English Protestantism as represented by the Church of England shelters Low Churchmen and Anglo-Catholics, Evangelicals and Modernists, by the extraneous power which its presentation and administration bestowed on the teachers and administrators found that this power became more important than the salvation of men through belief in a basic faith, though it was in the name of saving souls that it sought to maintain its power.

Neither of the two main branches of Christianity, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, at all events in Europe, can claim immunity from the charge of having committed crimes against humanity in the name of the Deity; neither can claim with justification that it was man’s eternal salvation alone which motivated them; both must admit that their main concern was the acquisition and retention of temporal power. It was the pursuit of this power that began it all.

For the first fifteen hundred years after the death of Christ there was in Europe only one Christian Church, teaching only one version of the Christian religion. Its headquarters were in Rome, and its head was called the Pope.

The early Roman Church had carried out the injunction of the founder of its religion, “Go ye out into all the world and preach my Gospel,” and by a series of missionary enterprises had brought Christianity to the peoples of western Europe, among whom it had set up branches of its own organization. These branches were limbs of the main body of the Church in Rome. Its local governors, the archbishops and bishops, its abbots and its priors, were chosen and appointed by the Pope, and they were under obligation to him to sec that every decree that issued from him was faithfully carried out.

Over the centuries, the temporal rulers, both emperors and kings, princes and dukes, in order to secure the paramount benefit which the Christian religion had to offer, a blissful existence in an eternal hereafter, had been prepared in all matters pertaining to religion within their realms to submit to the Pope’s authority, and from quite early on they had treated the leaders of the Church on the same level as their own great temporal lieutenants, and had made them grants of land and permitted them to raise revenues for the financing of their work.

So wealthy did the Church become that very soon its influence was extended to the temporal sphere, and though by the end of the first millennium a number of the temporal rulers were beginning to resent this influence to the point of resistance, the Pope and his great lieutenants were able to subdue all opposition.

It has long since become a cliche that power corrupts, but it was certainly true of the Roman Catholic Church. By the Middle Ages greed for power and wealth and the satisfaction of this greed had led to a degeneration in the general moral behaviour of the officials of the Church, and rapidly became so embracing that among people who were naturally profligate, the sexual morality of Pope and cardinals, archbishops and bishops, abbots and priests, monks and nuns set them apart as profligates without equal.

From time to time the rumblings of a shocked and disillusioned laity protesting against the general laxness of the Church, from Rome to the Orkneys, was heard; but the power wielded by the Church was such and the inherent simplicity of even the most highly educated laymen such that no protest was ever pushed to effective action.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, however, a new protest began to be heard. It emanated from a simple German monk who, greatly daring, criticized the Pope himself and all the Pope’s great lieutenants, and with such effect that his protests could not be ignored. Once papal notice had been taken of him, nothing could be done but to refute his accusations successfully and immunize the Church from the danger he represented either by putting him away where he could be cut off from contact with the world, or even by death as a heretic.

Martin Luther

To its surprise and consternation, however, the Church found that Friar Martin Luther had, in his protests, put into words for the first time in a form which many could understand the thoughts and feelings of a vast number of men, among whom were powerful temporal rulers. To the Church’s even greater consternation it found that these temporal rulers, sure of the support of their subjects, were prepared to give their powerful protection to Luther.

Nevertheless, Pope and the Holy Synod could not afford to retract, and though Luther could not be removed from the scene, every attempt had to be made to prove his accusations unfounded and to convince the people by argument of the Church’s rightness in all matters.

The struggle between Luther and his supporters and the Pope and his lieutenants went on for many years, and just as it was beginning to come to one of its several climaxes in 1529 something happened absolutely unconnected with the protest of the German monk, but which, nevertheless, produced the first fracture in the universal authority of the Roman Church.

Henry VIII

Henry VIII of England had been married to his wife Catherine for twenty years and she had produced him no heir. Concerned, by the need to establish a strong succession, he contended, though in fact he had fallen in love with a voluptuous gentlewoman to the point of obsession, Henry decided that he must divorce his wife in order to marry Anne Boleyn.

The only person who could make that possible was the Pope, who alone had authority to annul marriages. But now the temporal power which the papacy wielded was to prove, by involving the Pope in temporal politics, an instrument in its own undoing.

A nephew of Queen Catherine was Charles, who besides being hereditary king of Spain had also been elected Holy Roman Emperor. At the beginning of his reign as Emperor he had fallen into a dispute with France over the possession of territories in Italy, had declared war on Francis I of France and had defeated him.

The power that Charles now exercised over large parts of Italy threatened the temporal power of the Pope, and a quarrel had broken out between the two men, with the result that Charles had attacked and sacked Rome and made the Pope his prisoner.

And Clement VII was still his prisoner when Henry VIII asked the Pope to annul his marriage with his captor’s aunt. The Pope was therefore in no position to grant Henry’s request.

But Henry was also a powerful monarch, and not wishing to alienate him by an outright refusal, the Pope stalled. For several years argument and counter-arguments passed between London and Rome, until at last, Henry, unable to accept any further delay with patience, declared that the Pope no longer had any authority over the Church in England, appointed himself the Head of that Church and directed the compliant Archbishop of Canterbury to grant him the divorce the Pope had refused.

Happily, Henry was a very different character from that other English king who had once been excommunicated by the Pope. By this time the great barons of England had ceased to be so warlike as John’s great barons had been, the powers of the Crown, with the passage of years, had become more subject to the authority of Parliament and Henry had neither the rapacity of John nor his need for money. Besides, the educated classes of England were now more sophisticated than the gentry of thirteenth-century England had been.

Not only that, the reputation of the Church in England was as bad as that anywhere; there had already been several attempts to protest; and the reluctance of the people to pay Peter’s Pence, a tax imposed by Rome and paid to Rome, was bound to make any slackening of the Pope’s influence popular.

When Henry cut the Church in England off from Rome, almost immediately he set about purging it of its worst features, by subjecting the hierarchy to his own discipline and closing down the hotbeds of vice which the monasteries had become. Nevertheless, it was not his intention to interfere with the religious rituals nor with the dogmas which the Roman Church had developed.

Edward VI

It was only towards the end of his reign, when the Reformation had become established on the Continent and he was being regarded as one of the great Protestant leaders, that he began to plan reforms in ritual and religious teaching. But it was not until the reign of his successor, Edward VI, that these reforms began to be really effective, when the English translation of the Bible was ordered to be kept in the churches and the first Prayer Book in English by law made the only form of worship in the English churches a ritual shorn of all its popish character.

But once a physical break with Rome was made in this way, there came into existence a desire on the part of some for absolute free expression in matters of religion. It was not enough for them that the hated shackles of Rome had been cast off, nor that the former ties with the Roman teachings and Roman ritualistic practices had been abandoned; they began to conceive their own ideas of God and religion and to demand the right to translate those ideas into a form of worship which was not prescribed for them by the State.

On the other hand, there were those who regretted the break with Rome, and wished to continue at least to worship in the old Roman forms.

Against both, the Protestants and the old Catholics, the State reacted firmly. The Forms as laid down in the English Prayer Book were to be the only permissible forms of worship; and the new dogmas as expounded by the English ecclesiastical authorities were to be the only beliefs acceptable. In effect, the people of England found that they had exchanged one religious tyranny for another, for laws were introduced making any deviation a punishable offence.

The return to Catholicism in Mary’s reign increased the revulsion to Rome, and Elizabeth I with popular approval extended her father’s and her brother’s reforms. In the matter of enforcement she found that she had to go further than her predecessors, and require her subjects to worship by law. An Act of Parliament was introduced making attendance at church at least once on a Sunday obligatory under pain of a fine of one shilling, equivalent in our day to fifty shillings.

The ecclesiastical authorities had not learned the lessons of the Christian martyrs. They did not seem to appreciate that nothing so stimulates revolts of conscience in religious matters as persecution. The fact that they were to be dragooned into conformity in religion strengthened the resolve of the more extreme Protestants to kick against the pricks of the established Church.

Deriving its spiritual principles from the Reformation, a separatist movement sprang up in protest against the Elizabethan church settlement and the royal supremacy in church affairs. The leader of these early Independents, as they called themselves, was one Robert Browne. He declared the principle of the lordship of Christ over His Church as against the royal supremacy, and the principle that the Church consisted only of Christian believers and that such believers, gathered together into local churches, had the direct responsibility under the guidance of Christ for the government of the churches. The Independents, later to be called the Congrega-tionalists, therefore stood for the voluntary principle as against every form of absolutism.

This was more than Elizabeth could support, and the Independents came under the most rigorous persecution, and some of their leaders, notably Barrow, Greenwood and Penry, were put to death. The persecution continued under the Stuarts, and in 1608 the then leader, John Robinson, to escape further persecution, crossed with some of his followers to Amsterdam.

The Low Countries, which had suffered much from the Catholics during the invasion of their country by Philip of Spain, had embraced the Reformation more ardently and totally than any other European country, and was looked upon as a refuge of all persecuted Protestants. In 1609, Robinson was appointed pastor of a church in Leyden and there he conceived the idea of a Puritan colony in America.

A century had elapsed between the discovery of the New World by Columbus and the beginning of any systematic colonization. It is true that the Spaniards had started a settlement in Florida in 1565, but it was not until 1606 that the English began to consider that it might have possibilities of a commercial kind. In the following year, James I granted a charter for the planting of colonies in Virginia, so named after his illustrious predecessor, the Virgin Queen.

Though Robinson and the Independents were well treated in the Low Countries, they wished to retain their native language and customs, and this was very difficult to do, living as they did surrounded by a people speaking a foreign tongue and used to doing things differently. It took Robinson some years to formulate his scheme so that it could become a practical undertaking.

However, he received the sympathetic support of the Virginia Company, who made him and his followers a grant of land. Other powerful supporters of the Puritan party also obtained for the would-be colonists a promise from James that in their new home they should be free to worship as they pleased and would not be interfered with.

By 1620 all preparations for the venture were complete. Those from Robinson’s congregation who had elected to go, Robinson was to have followed later, but was prevented by his work from doing so, and he died in Leyden in 1625, crossed to England, and there joined with others from the Independents who had remained in England.

On 6 September, 1620, a party of seventy-eight men and twenty-four women set sail from Plymouth, in Devon, in a square-rigged brigantine, double-decked, broad in the beam, with upper works rising high in the stern, called the Mayflower, commanded by her part-owner, Captain Christopher Jones.

The Mayflower ran into bad weather on the crossing, and on 21 December the party were forced to land on the coast of Massa­chusetts, far south of the territory granted to them. Here they founded Plymouth Colony.

The colony prospered, and though the hardships experienced were tremendous, the freedom in religion more than compensated for them, and the example of the Pilgrim Fathers, as these first colonists were called, was followed by others as the religious troubles at home increased under the intolerance of the Stuarts.

In 1629, other Puritans crossed the Atlantic and established a colony in Massachusetts Bay. They were followed at frequent intervals by others, who founded colonies in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. In 1664, under external pressures, these colonies united in a confederacy called the United Colonies of New England.

A map of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Source

These with the later-founded colonies of Pennsylvania, North and South Carolina and Georgia rebelled against the Westminster Government in 1776 and declared their independence, and the United States of America came into being.

No other great nation in the history of the world has had its foundations laid in this way. Probably no other event in history shows so clearly the relation of cause and effect.