"THE PILGRIMS AND THEIR HISTORY." (To rim Emma or rue
" SpEcrava."]
Sm,—The writer of your article on Mr. Roland Debar's volume has accepted without criticism or reference to authorities Mr. Usher's interpretations of history. Mr. Usher is known as a pleasant writer with an imaginative gift which enables him to fills in gaps where evidence is not at hand. He is also fond of challenging accepted judgments of history. Both of these tendencies appear in his anxiety to show " that the popular conception of the Pilgrims as exiles for conscience' oaks is misleading," and hie denial of J. R. Green's statement that the meeting. of the Pilgrims at Sormoby "draw down the heavy hand of the law." The records of the Eeclesiaetioal Court at York are conclusive me the action of the Church authorities. The records contain the following entries (— "December. 1607. Office against Richard Jackson of Someday, for his disobedience in matters of religion. A process was served upon him by the pursuivant, and he gives his word to appear, and is fined 220 and a warrant sent out for his apprehension.
December, 1807. William Brewster of Serooby, gentleman. information is given that he is a Brownist and disobedient in matters of religion."
In the following spring a return was made to the Exchequer of the Archbishop of York:— "Richard Jackson, William Brewster, and Robert Rochester of Scrooby in the County of Nottingham, Browniete or Separatists, for a fine or amereement of £20 a piece set and imposed upon every one of them by Robert Abbot and Robert Snowdon. Doctors of Divinity, and Mathew Dedworth, Bachelor of Law, &c."
In the autumn of the same year (quoted Brown, Pilgrim Fathers, p. 98), when Brewster and Bradford tried to cram Holland they were betrayed and "first by the catchpole officer. rifled and stripped of their money, books, and much other goods, they were presented to the magistrates, and messages were sent to inform the Lords of the Council of them; and on they were committed to ward." If J. It. Green was wrong in calling this "the heavy hand of the law," what would Mr. Roland Usher call it?
It he a misuses of language In say that the Pilgrims were driven to Holland "not by the intolerance of the Church but by their own intolerance." The principles of the Pilgrim Church were constructive. They gathered from their reading of the New Testament that the Christian life involved a spiritual fellowship. When they tried to realize a spiritual fellowship in England they were treated ea turbulent parishioners, fined, and imprisoned. They went first to Holland, and then to Plymouth, Massachusetts, because conscience urged them at all meta to oarry out an ideal which seamed to them inseparable from a conscientious profession of Christianity. If this is not "becoming an exile for conscience' sake," the words have no meaning. The point is wall worth insisting on because there la a tendency abroad—illustrated by Mr. Roland Usher—to exaggerate the negative, dissenting side of the verdicts of conscience. It is assumed that conscience GUM only make "conscientious objectors." It ie worth remembering that a band of exiles, for conscience' sake gave to the modern world its greatest constructive ideal—the Ideal of democracy conditioned, inspired, and restrained by religion, and that in the moment when European civilization wen in peril it was the reimpact of that Ideal on European affairs which saved the situation.
Mr. Roland Usher will not really help either England or America by becoming an apologist for the Jacobean English Church. The action of the Church was overruled in the provi- dence of God for the good of the world, but the help it gave to the greatest movement of the time was by antithesis. The Bishops impressed on the new world once for ever that autocracy in the Church was the handmaid of autocracy in the State, and that if there was to be a new world at all there must he no State Church and no autocratio Bishops—I am, Writer of the article on Pilgrim Father* in the Encyclopedia of Religion sad Ethics.
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