care for our own comfort and that
of others, are all well, but truth, honor, reverence, and fidelity to
duty are indispensable.

The Pilgrims were right in affirming the paramount authority of the law
of God. If they erred in seeking that authoritative law, and passed over
the Sermon on the Mount for the stern Hebraisms of Moses; if they
hesitated in view of the largeness of Christian liberty; if they seemed
unwilling to accept the sweetness and light of the good tidings, let us
not forget that it was the mistake of men who feared more than they dared
to hope, whose estimate of the exceeding awfulness of sin caused them to
dwell upon God's vengeance rather than his compassion; and whose dread of
evil was so great that, in shutting their hearts against it, they
sometimes shut out the good. It is well for us if we have learned to
listen to the sweet persuasion of the Beatitudes; but there are crises in
all lives which require also the emphatic "Thou shalt not" or the
Decalogue which the founders wrote on the gate-posts of their
commonwealth.

Let us then be thankful for the assurances which the last few years have
afforded us that:

"The Pilgrim spirit is not dead,
But walks in noon's broad light."

We have seen it in the faith and trust which no circumstances could
shake, in heroic self-sacrifice, in entire consecration to duty. The
fathers have lived in their sons. Have we not all known the Winthrops
and Brewsters, the Saltonstalls and Sewalls, of old times, in
gubernatorial chairs, in legislative halls, around winter camp-fires, in
the slow martyrdoms of prison and hospital? The great struggle through
which we have passed has taught us how much we owe to the men and women
of the Plymouth Colony,--the noblest ancestry that ever a people looked
back to with love and reverence. Honor, then, to the Pilgrims! Let their
memory be green forever!

GOVERNOR ENDICOTT.

I am sorry that I cannot respond in person to the invitation of the Essex
Institute to its commemorative festival on the 18th. I especially regret
it, because, though a member of the Society of Friends, and, as such,
regarding with abhorrence the severe persecution of the sect under the
administration of Governor Endicott, I am not unmindful of the otherwise
noble qualities and worthy record of the great Puritan, whose misfortune
it was to live in an age which regarded religious toleration as a crime.
He was the vi