THE PILGRIM FATHERS.

I.

PRECURSORS OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS.

THE sailing of the Mayflower from Plymouth to New England, in 1620, was one of those epoch-making events in history which are at once the fruit of the past and the seed of the future. The hundred exiles who in simple heroic fashion crossed the Atlantic in their little barque of a hundred and eighty tons, while merely aiming at freedom of worship for themselves and their children, were really bringing to new and pregnant issue the long and resolute struggle of centuries. We can see now that they were almost unconsciously pointing the way to a broader, freer life for the English-speaking people on both sides of the sea. For the time in which they lived was, in a special sense, a time of transition. In the Tudor days, only recently ended, England had been under the personal government of monarchs who, though not uninfluenced by the opinion of their people, were yet practically absolute and irresponsible. Other forces, however, were now coming into play, and the nation was to make its way to a fuller life as a community of free selfgoverning men. This transition from mediæval to modern life was brought about by the combined action of religious enthusiasm with the spirit of personal independence.

of the renegades who had been excommunicated at Oxford, it is not so clear that the realm was cleansed from this so-called pestilence. And as at the same time he also caused an oath to be taken of all sheriffs that they would see to the execution of these commands, and that 'all his officers, dapifers and barons, together with all knights and freeholders, should be sworn to the same effect,'1 it would appear that the opinions of these people were not confined to the diocese of Worcester, but were widely sympathised with elsewhere through the kingdom. These outcasts who declared themselves to be believers in the Holy Trinity, in the canonical Scriptures, and also ‘in the one true Church,' but who repudiated the catholic doctrine of sacraments and rejected the ecclesiastical ceremonies, seem to have been the first to greet the morn,

Or rather, rose the day to antedate,

By striking out a solitary spark,

When all the land with midnight gloom was dark.'

How the seed grew secretly and the leaven worked silently during the next century and a half it may not be easy to show. But such secret, silent working there must have been. Our countryman, William of Occam, born about 1270, was excommunicated by the Pope in the early part of the fourteenth century, for asserting in dialogues and tractates the freedom of the law of Christ against the plenitude of papal power. He maintained the authority of Scripture as the supreme arbiter of all things in the Church, and sought after that which was eternal as opposed to that which is merely of human ordinance. In that same century, also, we have in the Vision of Piers Plowman, a prophet who, though no Lollard, made nought of pilgrimages, penances, and oblations, in comparison with holiness and charity, appealed to the plainest Scriptural 1 Camden Society, Assize of Clarendon. a Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets, xiv.

truths, and installed reason and conscience as the guides of the self-directed soul. Even Chaucer's voice was a voice of freedom, and of more or less covert hostility to the priestly system of the Church.

But if to any one man more than another we may trace the origin of the Free Church influences most potent in our modern life, that one man was John Wickliff of Lutterworth. He not only gave to Hus his ruling ideas, and sowed the seeds of Reformation in Germany, but in his own land also did much to change the emphasis in religion from the ceremonial to the ethical and spiritual. He carried the appeal from the organised authority of the priesthood to the authority of the Church's Invisible Head. As a Reformer his inspiration came from returning to the primitive faith. For religious thought must ever return to the essential ideas which Jesus created, and every such return is the beginning of new life, and so the Founder of Christianity remains the most recreative force in the religion He founded.

While John Wickliff and his followers may not have been the first to assail priestly pretensions, they appear to have been the first to carry out a definitely-organised movement in the way of ecclesiastical reform. Wickliff contended that the official clergy alone are not the Church, for, said he, 'the temple of God is the congregation, living religiously, of just men for whom Jesus shed His blood.' He held to the free and immediate access of believers to the grace of God in Christ; in other words, to the general priesthood of believers. In accordance with these principles, secret assemblies were gathered of those who were of like mind in the faith of Christ; and preachers were sent forth, as in 1382 Archbishop Courtenay complained in the House of Lords, going through the realm from county to county, and from town to town, preaching from day to day, not only in churches and churchyards, but also