MR. BAYARD AND THE PILGRIM FATHERS.
[To THZ EDITOR 01 THE " SPECTATOZ.".1 SIR,—In your article in the Spectator of last week, the words occur : "They [Dissenters] may not, it is tree, recognise this description of their position." You are undoubtedly correct in this surmise. But the exception I venture to take is not to your opinion on the education controversy, but to your reading of history. Your description of the Pilgrim Fathers recalls a saying of Napoleon I., that "history is a fable which has been agreed upon." You say :—" Freedom of conscience is made up of two elements,—determination to conquer it for ourselves, and readiness to concede it to others. The Pilgrim Fathers possessed the former element in an heroic measure.
But in the latter element they were altogether wanting What they claimed for themselves they did not so much as dream of granting to their neighbours."
Now, I respectfully challenge the writer to produce a single shred of evidence in support of this latter statement. Authentic history disproves the truth of it, and shows that the Pilgrim Fathers, or founders of New Plymouth, were singularly free from the stain of persecution and spirit of intolerance. Why, even Miles Standish, the stout-hearted soldier and leader of the colony, is said to have been a Roman Catholic, and this was a century before toleration of Catholics was dreamt of in England. It was in New Plymouth that a movement was set on foot "for a fall and free tolerance of religion to all men, without exception against Turk, Jew, Papist, Arian, Socinian, Familist, or any other." Winslow, Governor of the colony, writing to Governor Winthrop, says : —" You would have admired to have seen how sweet the carrion relished to the palate of most of them." This does not bear out your statement that they did not so much as dream of granting freedom of conscience to others. In what you say about the Puritans you seem to fall into the error, only too current, of forgetting that there were Puritans and Puritans, that the name stands for almost as manifold diversity of faith and character as the name Protestant. It may be quite true that one class of Puritans was "the proto- type of the old-fashioned Establishment men,—the men who defended the Test Acts, &c." It is not the less true, however, that Puritans of another class—those represented by the Pilgrim Fathers and the founders of New England—were "the spiritual ancestors of the modern Nonconformists.—/
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