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Seeking Freedom in a New World
169
The tidings spread through Europe of a land where every man
might enjoy the fruit of his own labor and obey his conscience.
Thousands flocked to the shores of the New World. In twenty years
from the first landing at Plymouth (1620), as many thousand Pilgrims
were settled in New England.
“They asked nothing from the soil but the reasonable returns
of their own labor. ... 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.”
Surest Safeguard of National Greatness
Bible principles were taught in the home, school, and church; its
fruits were manifest in thrift, intelligence, purity, and temperance.
One might for years “not see a drunkard, or hear an oath, or meet
a beggar.
Bible principles are the surest safeguards of national
greatness. The feeble colonies grew into powerful states, and the
world marked the prosperity of “a church without a pope, and a state
without a king.”
But increasing numbers were attracted to America by motives
different from those of the Pilgrims. The numbers increased of those
who sought only worldly advantage.
The early colonists permitted only members of the church to vote
or to hold office in the government. This measure had been accepted
to preserve the purity of the state; it resulted in the corruption of
the church. Many united with the church without a change of heart.
Even in the ministry were those who were ignorant of the renewing
power of the Holy Spirit. From the days of Constantine to the
present, attempting to build up the church by the aid of the state,
while it may appear to bring the world nearer to the church, in reality
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brings the church nearer to the world.
The Protestant churches of America, and those in Europe as well,
failed to press forward in the path of reform. The majority, like the
Jews in Christ’s day or the papists in the time of Luther, were content
to believe as their fathers had believed. Errors and superstitions were
retained. The Reformation gradually died out, until there was almost
as great need of reform in the Protestant churches as in the Roman
11
Bancroft, pt. 1, ch. 19, par. 25.