Pilgrim Fathers
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To secure the object which they sought, “they were content to earn
a bare subsistence by a life of frugality and toil. They asked nothing
from the soil but the reasonable returns of their own labor. No golden
vision threw a deceitful halo around their path.... They were content
with the slow but steady progress of their social polity. They patiently
endured the privations of the wilderness, watering the tree of liberty
with their tears, and with the sweat of their brow, till it took deep root
in the land.”
The Bible was held as the foundation of faith, the source of wisdom,
and the charter of liberty. Its principles were diligently taught in the
home, in the school, and in the church, and its fruits were manifest
in thrift, intelligence, purity, and temperance. One might be for years
a dweller in the Puritan settlement, “and not see a drunkard, or hear
an oath, or meet a beggar.”—Bancroft, pt. 1, ch. 19, par. 25. It was
demonstrated that the principles of the Bible are the surest safeguards
of national greatness. The feeble and isolated colonies grew to a
confederation of powerful states, and the world marked with wonder
the peace and prosperity of “a church without a pope, and a state
without a king.”
But continually increasing numbers were attracted to the shores of
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America, actuated by motives widely different from those of the first
Pilgrims. Though the primitive faith and purity exerted a widespread
and molding power, yet its influence became less and less as the
numbers increased of those who sought only worldly advantage.
The regulation adopted by the early colonists, of permitting only
members of the church to vote or to hold office in the civil government,
led to most pernicious results. This measure had been accepted as
a means of preserving the purity of the state, but it resulted in the
corruption of the church. A profession of religion being the condition
of suffrage and officeholding, many, actuated solely by motives of
worldly policy, united with the church without a change of heart. Thus
the churches came to consist, to a considerable extent, of unconverted
persons; and even in the ministry were those who not only held errors
of doctrine, but who were ignorant of the renewing power of the
Holy Spirit. Thus again was demonstrated the evil results, so often
witnessed in the history of the church from the days of Constantine to
the present, of attempting to build up the church by the aid of the state,
of appealing to the secular power in support of the gospel of Him who