by later comers who had never mastered the truth for which they testified, the principles for which they suffered attained the most conspicuous triumph of modern times. The United States of America is their creation. They fashioned the mould in which the greatest of the Republics has been cast. They mastered its destinies. They imprinted their character on state after state. In all that vast congeries of commonwealths there is not one which does not bear in every branch of its administration the patent mark of the men of the Mayflower. They and their descendants have been the soul of the nation. They presided over its birth, they guided its youth, they saved it from disruption and from slavery, and they and the men whom they have inspired are still the hope of its future. Power has gravitated from the Eastern states to the West, as in England the centre of the progressive movement is no longer in the Eastern but in the Northern Counties. But the West is the sturdier manchild of the East, the lusty progeny of the men of iron mould who, with Bible and broadsword, founded the New England beyond the sea.

of

The establishment of modern democracy, the establishment of religious liberty, and the establishment of the American Republic- these are the most considerable achievements of our race in the last hundred years, and in all three the Independents played the leading part. The French Revolution was a mere French echo of the proclamation of principles realised in action by every Independent conventicle two hundred years before, and by the Independents laid down as the foundation of the great Republic, of which that France to day is but a second-hand imitation. Hence it is that Mr. Carlyle rightly declares that, compared with the Mayflower, which carried the life-spark of Transatlantic Anglo-Saxondom, the Argo was but a foolish bumbarge. The American Continent became a vast sounding-board whereby Independent principles. were echoed back to the Continent of Europe. Through the Mayflower the English Independents created a new world in America, through America they recreated Europe.

There is no need here to tell again the oft-told story of the Mayflower. The Independent Congregation, driven out of the Eastern Counties by the persecution of the Anglican authorities, settled in Leyden, and here they prospered in peace for twelve years. But they began to see that this precious seed of a Christian democracy stood in imminent danger of being wasted in Holland. They could not hope to form a permanent and a growing English colony in the Low Countries. Their children might become Dutch, as the Huguenot refugees became English. They dimly felt that they carried with them in their small ark the hope of the future. So they began considering where they could go to found a community which would have liberty to worship and space in which to grow. After much dubitation, some of them wished to go to Guiana! They decided upon settling in North America. They got permission to settle in some part of Virginia, but they could not get a promise from the King of freedom of worship. All that he would promise was, that he would consent to let them go unnoticed. In order to obtain capital for the settlement, they had to practically sell themselves into servitude for seven years to some London financiers.

Their reasons for believing they would succeed where so many had failed are set forth in a document which is well worth quoting. They said :—

We are well weaned from the delicate milk of our mother country and inured to the difficulties of a strange and hard land, which yet, in a great part, we have by patience over

come.

The people are, for the body of them, industrious and frugal as any company of people in the world.

We are knit together in a most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord, of the violation of which we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof we hold ourselves straitly tied to all care of each other's good, and of the whole by every one, and so mutually.

Lastly, it is not with us as with other men, to whom small things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again.

Armed with this faith in God and in themselves, they bought a 40-ton boat, the Speedwell, and hired the Mayflower, of 180 tons. The Speedwell brought the pilgrims from Delft to Southampton, where she joined the Mayflower. They sailed August 5, 1620, but soon after the Speedwell sprung a leak and had to return to Plymouth. The Mayflower, with 182 passengers, sailed alone, September 6th, and after two months stormy tossing on the Atlantic reached the other side on the 9th November.

Of their subsequent fortunes there is no need here to tell. But I may quote from an admirable article by Edwin D. Mead, on the "Message of Puritanism for this Time," in the current number of the New England Magazine. Speaking of the men of the Mayflower," Mr. Mead says:

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These most practical and hard-handed and hard-headed of men were the greatest idealists in history, the most imperious and thorough in subordinating every interest of life to the power of their great faith and vision. Lowell pronounces them "the most perfect incarnation of an idea which the world has ever seen." How important the idea which they bore seemed to him he declared when he said: Next to the fugitives whom Moses led out of Egypt, the little shipload of outcasts who landed at Plymouth two centuries and a half ago are destined to influence the future of the world." I think, too, that from the time of Moses.on there had never been any enterprise so full of the spirit of Moses as this. There are whole chapters of Deuteronomy which might well enough be chapters of Bradford's Journal. Some poor, weak creatures, who had been over and spent a few months with the Plymouth colony in 1623, had gone back to London and discouraged others from coming by stories of all sorts of hardships at Plymouth. There was lack of the sacraments, the children were not properly catechised, the water wasn't good, the fish wouldn't take salt to keep sweet, there were foxes and wolves, and so ona dozen objections in all, the last being that the people were "much annoyed with muskeetoes." They are too delicate and unfit to begin new plantations and colonies," wrote Bradford, answering every objection in detail, "that cannot endure, the biting of a muskeeto; we would wish such to keep at home till at least they be muskeeto proof." The men who planted New England were "muskeeto proof." And so have the men always been who have pushed ahead the New England idea. So were the men who have gone out of New England to carry New England all over the Great West. The men who followed Gen. Rufus Putnam from Massachusetts to Marietta were "muskeeto procf." The men who followed Moses Cleveland from Connecticut to the Western Reserve were "muskeeto proof" The Pilgrim Fathers of Illinois and Michigan and Wisconsin and Minnesota and Kansas and Colorado were "muskeeto proof." They had all learned that great lesson of not being greatly vexed by life's little vexations, which are what bring so many good men to nothing.

The Pilgrim Fathers were "muskeeto proof." None of them sulked over sore fingers, or bothered Bradford over their feet. They got no miraculous manna or quail, they were reduced to the three grains of corn; but still no complaint, no hankering after things left behind. And when the Mayflower went back, after the first winter of death, while half their number lay in the graves in the wheatfield, not one went back, no, "not one looked back who had set his hand to this ploughing."

These are men worth celebrating, these most practical, most religious men, these men who put their highest idea most absolutely into life. This is the thing to be said about Puritanism altogether, that it was idealism with hands, a faith that made faithful, religion wholly in earnest.

After them came other emigrants who were not of their mould, and whose inability to grasp their great principle caused much trouble in the infant Commonwealth. Yet not even the thought of the bitter persecution which these new comers brought over to America can prevent our feeling sympathy with their parting words when they left their native land :

We will not say, as the Separatists were wont to say at their leaving of England, "Farewell, Babylon! Farewell, Rome!" But we will say, "Farewell, dear England! Farewell, the Church of God in England, and all the Christian friends there!" We do not go to New England as Separatists from the Church of England, though we cannot but separate from the corruptions in it. But we go to practise the positive part of Church reformation, and propagate the gospel in America.

The effective mass of English-born Independency lay wholly without the bounds of England, partly in little companies of Separatists and semi-Separatists among the English exiles in the towns of Holland, but chietly and in most assured completeness both in bulk and in detail in the incipient Transatlantic Commonwealth of New England. One thing, however, was certain all the while. These two effective aggregations of English-born Independency beyond the bounds of England-the small Dutch scattering and the massive American extension-were not disassociated from England, and had not learned to be foreign to her, but were in constant correspondence with her, in constant survey of her concerns, and attached to her by such homeward yearnings that, on the least opportunity, the least signal given, they would leap back upon her shores.

To leap back upon our shores is impossible now, but they may attain the same end in more practical fashion by working for the reunion of the English-speaking nations. Of our colonies and offshoots it may be said, as was said two hundred years ago by the Independents of their churches :

From the first, every, or at least the generality of our churches, have been in a manner like so many ships (though holding forth the same great colours) launched singly, and sailing apart and alone in the vast ocean of these tumultuous times, and they, exposed to every wind of doctrine, under no other conduct than the Word of the Spirit, and their particular elders and principal brethren, without associations among ourselves, or so much as holding out common lights to others, whereby to know where we were.

But as good John Wise said in New England to these disunited, unassociated churches, we may say to the various English-speaking commonwealths which encircle the world:

Hold your hold, brethren! Pull up well upon your own oars, you have a rich cargo, and I hope you will escape shipwreck; for according to the latest observations, if we are not within sight, yet we are not far from harbour; and though

Cromwell has ever been the patron saint of the Independents. Hallam, on the authority of Crabbe, tells a touching story of the reverence, almost approaching to worship, paid by some Independents of his acquaintance to a portrait of the Lord Protector, which they treated with the same respect that the Russian peasant pays to the icon of our Lord, or Mary the Mother. Of all men of women born, no man has ever appeared to me so altogether worthy of the love, the devotion, and the passionate admiration of English-speaking men as Oliver Cromwell.

Milton did not speak unadvisedly when he sang "Cromwell, our chief of men." Cromwell is our chief of men. Beside him there is none other. He is the incarnate genius of the English race at its best. What Shakespeare is in literature, Cromwell was in practical affairs, alike in tented field, in the senate, and in the administration of the affairs of the Empire. It is the glory of the Independents that they have never wavered in their allegiance to their chief. Not when his bones were buried at Tyburn and his skull was grinning on the point of a pike above the Hall of Westminster, did any of his own people hesitate for a moment in the homage which they paid their man of men. One must love the highest when we see it; and the Independents, having seen Cromwell at close quarters all his life, mourned him as the hero-saint of Christian democracy. Carlyle, fifty years ago, unveiled to the literary and general public the features of the Lord Protector which had long been a familiar object of admiring homage to the Independents. Nor was it only by the Independents that his name and fame have been cherished. Deep in the heart of the common people the memory of Cromwell survives to this day as that of the hero-deliverer of the nation, the heaven-sent scourge of the oppressor. In seasons of prosperity and of peace his name is seldom heard. But let misfortune and war overtake us, and as the stars appear in the darkened sky, the name of Cromwell rises instinctively to the lips of our common people. In times of domestic trouble and foreign peril the yearning of the English-speaking man never varies. "Oh for another Cromwell!" is the more or less articulate aspiration of his heart. Cromwell is to all of us, even to those who are descendants of the Cavaliers, the supreme embodiment of heroic valour. Victory ever sat upon his helm, and before the resistless might of his sword all enemies were scattered "as a little dust." It is very touching and memorable this devotion of the dumb heart of England to Cromwell. Our village folk, they say, know no history. That is true, and yet it is false. Their history is summed up in one word, and that word Cromwell. Nothing to them are the stories of Plantagenet and Tudor. The Wars of the Roses have become as the battles of Kites and Crows that preceded the Roman Conquest; but they all know of Cromwell. He is the day-star of modern democracy, the incarnation of the religious revolt against tyranny, in whose single person are summed up all the glories and all the triumphs of the revolution which emancipated mankind from the superstition of kingship. As the German in dire stress sighs for the return of Frederick Barbarossa from his enchanted cave, as the ancient Roman prayed for the appearance of the great Twin Brethren in crises of the

fight, so do our people's thoughts go back in hours of darkness and danger to him who, "guided by faith and matchless fortitude," hewed down the embattled hosts of the tyrant, and made England for the first time mistress of the world that was to be, sovereign of the seas, and nursing mother of the free and nascent commonwealths in whose hands lie the sceptre of our planet.

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Alfred, Cromwell, Nelson, are three of the greatest names in English history. Of the three, Cromwell is far the most real. His is a name earth wears for ever next her heart." Nelson, first of sea-kings, who died with the watchword of duty on his lips, will ever be an inspiration to those who follow after. But Nelson, although supreme in his own department, never touched the inmost heart of English life. He was a sentinel on her watery frontier. King Alfred has become almost as shadowy as King Arthur. But Oliver Cromwell touched the national life at every point, and his personality was never more vividly realised than it is to-day. His exploits are still the theme of popular legend, his career a stimulus to the schoolboy's ambition, his renown the cherished heritage of all English-speaking men. To-day we are but beginning to bring our governing classes up to the line of his imperial march. As Cardinal Manning said long ago, Cromwell, more than any English sovereign or statesman, realised the imperial grandeur of his country and at the same time cared with passionate earnestness for the welfare of the common people. We are entering into his labours, and shall count ourselves happy if, in the course of the next few generations, we can but fill in the majestic outlines of the Cromwellian policy.

But

The very thoroughness of his victories has rendered their importance almost inconceivable to us. The truths for which martyrs have cheerfully rendered up their lives in the arena and at the stake become so universally recognised by the next generation that we marvel at the need of the sacrifice. It seems to us now, no doubt, almost as absurd to question the doctrine of religious liberty as it is to cavil at the multiplication table. two hundred years ago through what bloody sweat and bitter tears our fathers had to pass before they could get even a conception of the sublime truth into the dull heads of their intolerant contemporaries! The paradox of yesterday is the truism of to-day, and the immortal principles for which our forefathers were proud to die have become the commonplaces of the man in the street. It is almost impossible for us to conceive how much obloquy the Independents suffered because of their advocacy of religious liberty. It is curious to read the invectives of the seventeenth century, and to see that the head and front of their offending was their refusal to accept a toleration for themselves without at the same time securing liberty for others. Baillie, the Presbyterian chronicler of the proceedings of the Westminster Assembly, was particularly indignant at this shameless consistency. He writes::

Many of them preach, and some print, a libertie of conscience, at least the great equitie of a tolleration for all religions; that every man should be permitted without feare so much as of discountenance from the magistrate, to professe publicklie his conscience, were he never so erroneous, and also live according thereunto, if he trouble not the publick peace by any sedition or wicked practise.

He (John Goodwin) is a bitter enemy of Presbyterie, and

is openly for a full libertie of conscience to all sects, even Turks, Jews, Papists, etc.; a new faction to procure libertie for sects.

The Independents in our last meeting of our grand committee of accomodation have expressed their desyres for tolleration, not only for themselves but to other sects.

The cantankerous Thomas Edwards, author of "Gangræna," expressed himself with even greater vehemence. He writes:

A Toleration is the grand design of the Devil; his masterpiece and chief engine he works by, at this time, to uphold his tottering kingdom. It is the most compendious, ready, sure way to destroy all religion, lay all waste, and bring in all evil; it is a most transcendent catholic and fundamental evil for this kingdom of any that can be imagined. An original sin is the most fundamental sin, having the seed and spawn of all in it; so a Toleration hath all errors in it and all evils. . . . Independency in England is the mother, nurse and patroness of all other errors. . . . Let us, therefore, fill all presses, cause all pulpits to ring, and so possess Parliament, City and whole kingdom against the sects, and of the evil of schism and a toleration, that we may no more hear of a Toleration, nor of separated churches, being hateful names in the Church of God.

Facing all this, the Independents, under Cromwell, fought and conquered. It was a work to which they were naturally called. Hallam remarks that

it is certain that the Congregational scheme leads to toleration, as the National Church scheme is averse to it, for manifold reasons.

It is true that the toleration which they claimed was not extended to Roman Catholics, although Hallam admits that never since the Reformation had they enjoyed so much liberty as in the Commonwealth; but in those days a Papist was almost ipso facto a rebel, and the Papist priest was the emissary of a power which was plotting day and night to unite all the Popish interests in all the Christian world against England. If the Papists would have left off attempting to destroy England, Englishmen would have desisted from attempting to destroy Papists Religious toleration was, however, but one of the achievements of the Independents. They live in history as the men who smote down the Stuarts, hewed off the head of the first Charles, and founded the Commonwealth, thereby establishing for the first time that principle of the government of the people by the people and for the people which is the fundamental doctrine of modern democracy. Lord Brougham's eulogy of the Independents may be quoted here as a proof that I am not exaggerating the part played by them in that great crisis of our race :—

The Independents are a body much to be respected indeed for their numbers, but far more to be held in lasting veneration for the unshaken fortitude with which in all times they have maintained their attachment to civil and religious liberty, and holding fast by their own principles have carried to the uttermost pitch the great doctrine of absolute toleration-men to whose ancestors this country will ever acknowledge a boundless debt of gratitude as long as freedom is prized amongst us, for they-I fearlessly proclaim it-they, with whatever ridicule some visit their excesses, or with whatever blame others, they, with the zeal of martyrs, the purity of the early Christians, the skill and courage of the most renowned warriors, gloriously suffered and fought and conquered for England the free constitution which she now enjoys.