And it was nearly ten years later still, when John Milton, in
his treatise " Of Reformation in England," exclaimed, " What
numbers of faithful and free-born Englishmen, and good Chris
tians, have been constrained to forsake their dearest home, their
friends and kindred, whom nothing but the wide ocean, and the
savage deserts of America, could hide and shelter from the fury
of the bishops ! Oh, sir, if we could but see the shape of our
dear mother England, as poets are wont to give a personal form
to what they please, how would she appear, think ye, but in
a mourning weed, with ashes upon her head, and tears abun
dantly flowing from her eyes, to behold so many of her children
exposed at once, and thrust from things of dearest necessity,
because their conscience could not assent to things which the
bishops thought indifferent ! "

But the time was to come when England was to make signal
recognition of this memorable Exodus. Little did they imagine,
those pious, humble, simple-hearted men and women, as they
stood on the deck of their little bark of only one hundred and
eighty tons burthen, and looked wistfully upon their native
shores receding from their moistened eyes, little did they im
agine that the scene of that embarkation, before two centuries
and a half had passed away, should not only be among the most
cherished ornaments of the Rotundo of the American Capitol,
but should be found, as it is found this day, among the most
conspicuous frescoes in the corridors of the Parliament Houses
of Old England. Still less could the haughty Monarch and the

1 Bacon s Essays, No. LV.



100 TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY

bigoted Prelates, who had reluctantly been induced " to connive
and wink at their departure," have dreamed, that such a picture
should ever be warranted and welcomed by their successors, as
one of the appropriate scenes for inspiring and for warning
them, as they should sweep along, through the grand galleries
of State, to their places on the throne or the Episcopal bench,
in that gorgeous Chamber of the temporal and spiritual Lords
of Great Britain.

But this would not be the only souvenir of the Pilgrim
Fathers which might suffuse the cheeks of a Bancroft, a Wren,
or a Laud, could they be permitted to revisit the scenes of their
old prelatical intolerance and arrogance.

The suburban residence of the Bishop of London at Fulham
has many charms. Its velvet lawn, its walks upon the Thames,
its grand old oaks and cedars of Lebanon, its fine historical
portraits, its rare library, its beautiful modern chapel, and,
above all, its antique hall, recently restored, in which the
cruel Bonner and the noble Ridley may have successively held
their councils during the struggles of the Reformation, and
where Bancroft and Laud may have concerted their schemes of
bigotry and persecution, 1 render it altogether one of the most
interesting places near London, and hardly less attractive than
Lambeth itself. I have been privileged to visit it on more than
one of those delicious afternoons of an English June, when the
apartments and the grounds were thronged by all that was most
distinguished in the society of the Metropolis, assembled to pay
their respects to one whose exalted character, and earnest piety,
and liberal churchmanship, and unsparing devotion to the hum
blest as well as the highest duties of his station, have won for
him universal esteem, respect, and affection, and who has re
cently been called by the Queen to the Primacy of all England. 2
But I need hardly say, that to an American, or certainly to a
New England eye, there was nothing in all the treasures of art,
or of antiquity, or of literature, which that palace contained,
nothing in all the loveliness of its natural scenery and surround-

1 See Note at the end of this Oration, p. 133.

2 Archibald Campbell Tait, late Bishop of London, now Archbishop of Canter
bury.



OF THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS. 101

ings, nothing jn all the historical associations of the spot, noth
ing in all the beauty and accomplishments and titled or untitled
celebrity of the company gathered beneath the roof or scattered
upon the lawn, which could compare for a moment with the
interest of an old manuscript volume, which strangely enough
had found its way there, of all places in the world, and which
had rested for three quarters of a century almost unidentified
and unrecognized on its library-shelves. You will all have an
ticipated me when I say that it is the long-lost manuscript
volume, of which but a small portion had ever been printed or
copied, written by the hand of William Bradford himself, and
giving the detailed story of the Pilgrim Fathers from their first
gathering at Scrooby down to the year 1647.

My valued friend, Mr. Charles Deane, to whom, above almost
all others, we are indebted for throwing light upon the early
history of New England, in the edition of this volume which
he so admirably prepared and annotated for the Collections of
the Massachusetts Historical Society, has sufficiently described
the circumstances of its discovery. When the glad tidings first
reached us, I did not fail to sympathize with those who felt that
a more rightful as well as more congenial and appropriate place
for such a manuscript might be found on this side of the Atlan
tic. But after a little more reflection, and after we had secured
an exact and complete transcript of it for publication, I could
not help feeling that there was something of special fitness and
felicity in its being left precisely where it is. There let it rest,
as a remembrancer to all who shall succeed, generation after
generation, to that famous See and its charming palace, of the
simple faith, the devoted piety, the brave obedience to the
dictates of conscience, of those who led the way in the
colonization of New England, and who endured so heroi
cally the persecutions and perils which that great enterprise
involved !

How it would have gratified the honest heart of Bradford
himself, could he have known where his precious volume should
at length be found, and in what estimation it should be held
after it was found ! How it would have delighted him to know
that instead of being set down in some " Index Expurgatorius,"



102 TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY

or burned at St. Paul s Cross, as compounded of heresy and
blasphemy, as it would have been by those who dwelt or
congregated at Fulham at the time it was written, it should
be sacredly guarded among the heirlooms of the palace and its
successive occupants ! How much more it would have delighted
him to know that so much of the simplicity and liberality of
form and faith which it portrayed and inculcated, would be
cherished and exemplified by more than one of those under
whose official custody it was in these latter days to fall !

Few persons, I presume, will doubt that had the Church of
England, between 1608 and 1620, been what it is to-day, and
its Bishops and Archbishops such in life and in spirit as those
who have recently presided at London and Canterbury, Brews-
ter and Bradford would hardly have left Scrooby, and the May
flower might long have been employed in less interesting ways
than in bringing Separatists to Plymouth Rock. As that church
and its prelates then were, let us thank God that such Separa
tists were found ! An Episcopalian myself, by election as well
as by education, and warmly attached to the forms and the
faith in which I was brought up ; believing that the Church of
England has rendered inestimable service to the cause of religion
in furnishing a safe and sure anchorage in so many stormy times,
when the minds of men were " tossed to and fro, and carried
about with every wind of doctrine ; " and prizing that very
prayer-book, which was disowned and discarded by Bradford
and Brewster, and by Winthrop, too, as second only to the
Bible in the richness of its treasures of prayer and praise ; I yet
rejoice, as heartily as any Congregationalist who listens to me,
that our Pilgrim Fathers were Separatists.

I rejoice, too, that the Puritan Fathers of Massachusetts, who
followed them to these shores ten years afterwards, though,
to the last, they " esteemed it their honor to call the Church of
England their dear mother, and could not part from their native
country, where she specially resideth, without much sadness of
heart and many tears," were, if not technically and professedly,
yet to all intents and purposes, Separatists, also ; Semi-Sepa
ratists at least, as Robinson himself was called when he wrote
and published that book which so offended the Brownists. I



OF THE LANDING OP THE PILGRIMS. 103

rejoice that the prelatical assumptions and tyrannies of that day
were resisted. The Church of England would never have been
the noble church it has since become, had there been no season
able protest against its corruptions, its extravagant formalism,
and its overbearing intolerance. The earliest Separatists were
those who separated from Rome ; and when something more
than a disposition was manifested to return towards Rome, in
almost every thing except the acknowledgment of its temporal
supremacy, another separation could not have been, ought not
to have been, avoided. A serious renewal of such manifesta
tions at this day, I need not say, would rend the Anglican
Church asunder ; and its American daughter would, under
similar circumstances, deservedly share its fate. Pretensions
of human infallibility need not be proclaimed by an Ecumenical
Council in order to be offensive and abhorrent. It does not
require a conclave of Cardinals to render assumptions and pro
scriptions and excommunications odious. Convocations and
Conventions, and even Synods and Councils and Conferences,
will answer just as well. When so much of the discipline of
the English Church was devoted to matters of form and cere
mony ; when spiritualism was in danger of forgetting its first
syllable, and of degenerating into an empty ritualism ; when
godly ministers were silenced for " scrupling the vestments," or
for preaching an evening lecture, and men and women and chil
dren were punished for not bowing in the Creed, or kneeling
at the altar, or for having family prayers under their own roof,
separation call it Schism, if you will was the true resort
arid the only remedy. For the sake of the church itself, but a
thousand-fold more for the sake of Christianity, which is above
all churches, it was needful that a great example of such a sep
aration should be exhibited at all hazards and at any sacrifice.
The glorious Luther, to whose memory that majestic monument
has so recently been erected at Worms, had furnished such an
example in his own day and land, and with relation to the
church of which he had once been a devoted disciple. No
name may be compared with his name in the grand calendar of
Separatists. But our Pilgrim Fathers were humble followers
in the same path of Protestantism, and thanks be to God that



104 TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY

their hearts were inspired and emboldened to imitate his heroic
course.

I would not seem too harsh towards those old prelates of the
English Church, by whom Pilgrims or Puritans were persecuted.
Sir James Mackintosh, I think, has somewhere said, that if the
United Netherlands had erected a statue to the real author of
all their liberties, it would have been to the Duke of Alva,
whose abominable tyranny goaded the Dutch to desperation,
and drove them into rebellion. I am not sure that, on this
principle, New England might not well include Bancroft and
Laud in her gallery of eminent benefactors. We must never
forget, however, that almost all great movements are but the
resultants of opposing forces ; and that, in impressing upon
them their final shape and direction, those who resist are hardly
less effective than those who support and urge. Nor can it be
forgotten that, in the turn of the wheel of England s fortunes,
poor Laud was himself destined to persecution and martyrdom.
It must have been a grim joke, when Hugh Peters and others
proposed to send him over to New England for punishment, as
his Breviate tells us they did ; and it might be a matter for
curious conjecture what would have happened to him, had he
come here then. But the meekness and bravery and Christian
heroism with which he bore his fate, when so wantonly and
barbarously brought to the block, after four years of imprison
ment in the Tower, are almost enough to make us forget that
he was ever so haughty and insolent and cruel, and quite enough
to extinguish all resentment of his wrongs.

But let me not longer delay to acknowledge, on this occasion,
the deep debt which New England and our whole country owes
to the Congregationalism which the Pilgrims established on our
soil, and of which the very first church in America was planted
by them here at Plymouth. My whole heart is in sympathy
with the celebration of this Jubilee to be held in my native
city, this evening, by the Congregationalists of our land. They
would wrong themselves, indeed, as well as all who are not of
their own communion, were they to celebrate it in an} narrow,
controversial spirit, and to turn a national into a merely denomi
national anniversary. But it would be doing them deep injus-



OF THE LANDING OP THE PILGRIMS. 105

tice to suggest or imagine such a thing. They have a right to
celebrate it, and they will celebrate it, as a day whose associa
tions and influences have far outreached every thing sectarian
and every thing sectional, and which are as comprehensive as
the land they live in, and as all-embracing as the Christianity
they profess and cherish.

Few persons, if any, can hesitate to agree with them, that no
other system of church government than Congregationalism
could have been successful in New England at that day. No
other system could have done so much for religion ; no other
system could have done so much for liberty, religious or civil.
" The meeting-house, the school-house, and the training-field,"
said old John Adams, " are the scenes where New England men
were formed." He did not intend to omit the town-house, for
no one was more sensible than himself how much of New Eng
land education and character was owing to our little municipal
organizations, and to the free consultations and discussions of
our little town meetings. But he was right in naming " the
meeting-house " first. Certainly, for the cause of religious free
dom, no other security could have compared with the inde
pendent system of church government. Independent churches
prepared the way for Independent States and an Independent
Nation ; and formed the earliest and most enduring barriers and
bulwarks at once against hierarchies and monarchies.

That work fully and finally accomplished, and civil arid relig
ious freedom securely established, we may all be more than con
tent, we all ought to rejoice, as we witness the association and
the prosperous advancement, under whatever name or form they
may choose to enroll themselves, of " all who profess and call
themselves Christians," studying ever, as Edward Winslow
tells us the sainted Robinson studied, towards his latter end,
"peace and union as far as might agree with faith and a good
conscience." Let those who will, indulge in the dream, or
cherish the waking vision, of a single universal Church on
earth, recognized and accepted of men, whose authority is bind
ing on every conscience, and decisive of every point of faith or
form. To the eye of God, indeed, such a Church may be visi
ble even now, in " the blessed company of all faithful people,"



106 TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY

in whatever region they may dwell, with whatever organization
they may be connected, with Him as their head, " of whom the
whole family in earth and heaven is named." And as, in some
grand orchestra, hundreds of performers, each with his own in
strument and his own separate score, strike widely variant notes,
and produce sounds, sometimes in close succession and some
times at lengthened intervals, which heard alone would seem to
be wanting in every thing like method or melody, but which
heard together are found delighting the ear, and ravishing the
soul, with a flood of magnificent harmony, as they give concerted
expression to the glowing conceptions of some mighty master,
like him, the centennial anniversary of whose birthday has just
been commemorated, 1 even so, even so, it maybe, from
the differing, broken, and often seemingly discordant strains of
sincere seekers after God, the Divine ear, upon which no lisp of
the voice or breathing of the heart is ever lost, catches only a
combined and glorious anthem of prayer and praise !

But to human ears such harmonies are not vouchsafed. The
Church, in all its majestic unity, shall be revealed hereafter.
The " Jerusalem, which is the mother of us all, is above ; " and
we can only humbly hope that, in the providence of God, its
gates shall be wider, and its courts fuller, and its members
quickened and multiplied, by the very differences of form and
of doctrine which have divided Christians from each other on
earth, and which have created something of competition and
rivalry, and even of contention, in their efforts to advance the
ends of their respective denominations. Absolute religious uni
formity, as poor human nature is now constituted, would but
too certainly be the cause, if it were not itself the consequence,
of absolute religious indifference and stagnation.

Pardon me, fellow-citizens and friends, for a digression, if
it be one, in which I may almost seem to have forgotten that
I have been privileged to occupy this pulpit only for a tempo
rary and secular purpose, and to have encroached on the pre
rogative of its stated incumbent ; but coming here, at your
flattering call, to unite in the commemoration of those whose

1 Beethoven, born Dec. 17, 1770.



OF THE LANDING OP THE PILGRIMS. 107

special distinction it was to have separated from the communion
to which I rejoice to belong, I could not resist the impulse to
give utterance to thoughts which are always uppermost in my
mind, when I reflect on this period of New England history.
I hasten now to resume and to finish the thread of that
Pilgrim narrative which is the legitimate theme of my dis
course.

I must not detain you for a moment by the details of that
perilous voyage across the Atlantic, with its " many fierce
storms, with which the ship was badly shaken and her upper
works made very leaky ; and one of the mainbeams in the mid
ships bowed and cracked." I must not detain you by dwelling
on that " serious consultation " in mid-ocean about putting
back, when u the great iron screw which the passengers brought
out of Holland " was so providentially found " for the buckling
of the mainbeam," and " raising it into his place." All this is
described in the journal of Bradford with a pathos and a power
which could riot be surpassed.

I must not detain you either by attempting to portray, in any
words of my own, their arrival, on the 21st of November,
within the sheltering arm of yonder noble Cape, " the coast
fringed with ice dreary forests, interspersed with sandy tracts,
filling the background ; " " no friendly light-houses, as yet,
hanging out their cressets on your headlands ; no brave pilot
boat hovering like a sea-bird on the tops of the waves, to guide
the shattered bark to its harbor ; no charts and soundings mak
ing the secret pathways of the deep plain as a gravelled road
through a lawn." All this was depicted, at the great second-
centennial celebration of the settlement of Barnstable, by my
lamented friend Edward Everett, with a grandeur of diction
and imagery which no living orator can approach. They seem
still ringing in my ear from his own lips, for I was by his side
on that occasion, and no one who heard him on that day can
ever forget his tones or his words, as, " with a spirit raised
above mere natural agencies," he exclaimed, "I see the
mountains of New England rising from their rocky thrones.
They rush forward into the ocean, settling down as they ad
vance, and there they range themselves, a mighty bulwark



108 T\VO HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY

around the heaven-directed vessel. Yes, the everlasting God
himself stretches out the arm of his mercy and his power in
substantial manifestation, and gathers the meek company of his
worshippers as in the hollow of his hand I "

Nor will I detain you for a moment on the simple but solemn
covenant which the Pilgrim Fathers formed and signed in the
cabin of the Mayflower on that same 21st of November, the
earliest " original compact" of self-government of which we
have any authentic record in the annals of our race. That has
had ample illustration on many other occasions, and has just
been the subject of special commemoration by the New England
Historic-Genealogical Society in Boston.

I turn at once to what concerns this day and this hour. I
turn at once to that third exploring party which left the May
flower not quite blown up by the rashness of a mischievous
boy, and still riding at anchor in Cape Cod harbor on the
16th of December ; and for whose wanderings in search of a
final place of settlement our friend Dr. Dexter has supplied so
precise a chronological table. I turn to those " ten of our men,"
with " two of our seamen," and with six of the ship s company,
eighteen in all, in an open shallop, who, after spending a
large part of two days " in getting clear of a sandy point, which
lay within less than a furlong of the ship," " the weather
being very cold and hard," two of their number " very sick "
and one of them almost "swooning with the cold," and the
gunner for a day and a night seemingly " sick unto death,"
found " smoother water and better sailing " on the 17th, but
" so cold that the water froze on their clothes and made them
many times like coats of iron ; " who were startled at midnight
by " a great and hideous cry," and after a fearful but triumph
ant " first encounter," early the next morning, with a band of
Indians, who assailed them with savage yells and showers of
arrows, and after a hardly less fearful encounter with a furious
storm, which " split their mast in three pieces," and swept them
so far upon the breakers that the cry was suddenly heard from
the helmsman, " About with her, or else we are all cast away,"
found themselves at last, when the darkness of midnight had
almost overtaken them, " under the lee of a small island, and



OF THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS. 109

remained all that night in safety," " keeping their watch in the
rain."

There they passed the 19th, exploring the island, and perhaps
repairing their shattered mast. The record is brief but sugges
tive : " Here we made our rendezvous all that day, being Satur
day." But briefer still, and how much more suggestive and
significant, is the entry of the following day !

" 10. (20) of December, on the Sabboth day wee rested."

I pause, I pause for a moment, at that most impressive
record. Among all the marvellous concisenesses and terse
nesses of a Thucydides or a Tacitus, condensing a whole
chapter of philosophy, or the whole character of an individual
or a people, into the compass of a motto, I know of nothing
terser or more condensed than this ; nor any thing which devel
ops and expands, as we ponder it, into a fuller or finer or more
characteristic picture of those whom it describes. " On the
Sabboth day wee rested." It was no mere secular or physical
rest. The day before had sufficed for that. But alone, upon a
desert island, in the depths of a stormy winter ; wellnigh without
food, wholly without shelter ; after a week of such experiences,
such exposure and hardship and suffering, that the bare recital at
this hour almost freezes our blood ; without an idea that the mor
row should be other or better than the day before ; with every
conceivable motive, on their own account, and on account of those
whom they had left in the ship, to lose not an instant of time,
but to hasten and hurry forward to the completion of the work
of exploration which they had undertaken, they still " remem
bered the Sabbath day to keep it holy." " On the Sabboth day
wee rested."

It does not require one to sympathize with the extreme Sab
batarian strictness of Pilgrim or Puritan, in order to be touched
by the beauty of such a record and of such an example. I know
of no monument on the face of the earth, ancient or modern,
which would appeal more forcibly to the hearts of all who rev
erence an implicit and heroic obedience to the commandments