art.

Noble words, worthy to have been inscribed over the altar of the first
church to be erected by the departing brethren, words to bear fruit after
centuries should go by. Had not the deeply injured and misunderstood
Grotius already said, "If the trees we plant do not shade us, they will
yet serve for our descendants?"

Yet it is passing strange that the preacher of that sermon should be the
recent champion of the Contra-Remonstrants in the great controversy; the
man who had made himself so terrible to the pupils of the gentle and
tolerant Arminius.

And thus half of that English congregation went down to Delftshaven,
attended by the other half who were to follow at a later period with
their beloved pastor. There was a pathetic leave-taking. Even many of the
Hollanders, mere casual spectators, were in tears.

Robinson, kneeling on the deck of the little vessel, offered a prayer and
a farewell. Who could dream that this departure of an almost nameless
band of emigrants to the wilderness was an epoch in the world's history?
Yet these were the Pilgrim Fathers of New England, the founders of what
was to be the mightiest republic of modern history, mighty and stable
because it had been founded upon an idea.

They were not in search of material comfort and the chances of elevating
their condition, by removing from an overpeopled country to an organized
Commonwealth, offering a wide field for pauper labourers. Some of them
were of good social rank and highest education, most of them in decent
circumstances, none of them in absolute poverty. And a few years later
they were to be joined by a far larger company with leaders and many
brethren of ancient birth and landed possessions, men of "education,
figure; and estate," all ready to convert property into cash and to place
it in joint-stock, not as the basis of promising speculation, but as the
foundation of a church.

It signifies not how much or how little one may sympathize with their
dogma or their discipline now. To the fact that the early settlement of
that wilderness was by self-sacrificing men of earnestness and faith, who
were bent on "advancing the Gospel of Christ in remote parts of the
world," in the midst of savage beasts, more savage men, and unimaginable
difficulties and dangers, there can be little doubt that the highest
forms of Western civilization are due. Through their provisional
theocracy, the result of the independent church system was to establish