Mr. Robinson was a remarkable man, placed in circumstances very like those of the original founders of Christianity, and with a simplicity, honesty, and freedom of spirit, singularly similar to theirs. As Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, he was called by some the author of Independency; but Mr. Cotton of New England afterwards wisely replied, that "the New Testament was the author of it, and that it was received in the times of purest primitive antiquity, many hundred years before Mr. Robinson was born." Besides this, the Church, and not the pastor, were appointed to plant it, and under God did plant it, in New England. Unto principalities and powers in heavenly places, as well as to the gazing monarchies on earth, and angry counsellings together of kings and rulers, has been made known by the Church, as of old, the manifold wisdom of God.

There was at this time a degree of religious liberty in Holland, such as was not to be found anywhere else in the world. It was brought about by the fierceness of the persecutions of Philip the Second, through the exercise of God's great prerogative of bringing good out of evil, and causing the wrath of man to praise him. The Romish Church, in the persons of Philip and the Duke of Alva, put up a gallows in the Netherlands to hang the Reformation, but hung their own cause upon it. To this place of liberty Robinson and the Pilgrims with much difficulty escaped in 1607. It was a night of many nights in one, when they made their Exodus out of Egypt. Not in one body, but separately, individually, and with many tears, harassments, and persecutions, did they effect their escape. And when this was accomplished, they dwelt many years as strangers on the Egyptian side of the Red Sea, before they crossed the ocean to come to that Canaan, which God had chosen and prepared for them.

They

They removed from Rameses and pitched in Succoth; and they departed from Succoth and pitched in Etham. seemed all the while to hear as of old the voice of Jehovah, “I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God: and ye shall know that I am the Lord your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. And I will bring you in unto the land, concerning the which I did swear to give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob: and I will give it to you for an heritage." God, who was with them, made them feel that it was not for a lasting encampment in Amsterdam or Leyden that he had brought them out, nor for themselves alone, nor for their own enjoyment, that he was leading them. God awoke within them the great purpose of crossing the ocean, and incited them to it by many inducements, providences, and trials, inward and external. Above all, God caused to grow up in their hearts, in the language of Gov. Bradford, "a great hope and inward zeal of laying some good foundation, or at least to make some way

thereunto, for the propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in these remote parts of the world; yea, though they should be as stepping stones unto others for performing of so great a work." Their first motive in getting out of Egypt had been, as it were, simply a three days' journey into the wilderness to sacrifice freely unto their God. They do not seem to have dreamed, while in England, of the great conception of founding a colony of God in the New World. But this was what God had for them to do, and in due time he told them of it, made them sensible of their mission, woke up in their hearts a desire for it, broke up their encampment in Etham, and caused them to enter the sea.

The day before their embarkation in 1620, their beloved and venerated pastor preached from the text in Ezra 8: 28, "And there at the river Ahava I proclaimed a fast, that we might humble ourselves before our God, and seek of him a right way for us, and for our children, and for all our substance." "So," says the Pilgrim Bradford, "they left that goodly and pleasant city, which had been their resting-place near twelve years. But they knew that they were PILGRIMS, and looked not so much on those things, but lifted up their eyes to heaven, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits." It was a great day in the history of the world, this fast day by the sea. It was a remarkable discourse in which the Pastor poured into the minds of these framers of a new world in Christ the last instructions he was ever to give to his flock this side the grave. What would we not give for the whole of what he uttered that day! Mr. Winslow, who was present, has reported part of it, a prophetic part, of almost inspired wisdom. "I charge you," said he, "before God and his blessed angels, to follow me no further than I follow Christ; and if God should reveal anything to you by any other instrument of his, be as ready to receive it, as you ever were to receive any truth by my ministry; for I am very confident the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word."

This address of Robinson to the Pilgrims was something entirely out of the ordinary course of human affairs. It was like a message from some old prophet of God. It has the character of something supernatural, as if the speaker were rapt into a vision of the future, and were under an impulse, not of his own spirit, but carried, as it were, in an inspiration out of himself. You seem to see a prophet, a lawgiver, lifted as on a mount of vision, from which he bends forward, addressing, across the ocean, the future millions of the Western world.

The next day, the Pilgrims proceeded down to the port at Delft Haven, a few miles from Leyden, and the wind being fair, went at once on board ship. On the deck of the vessel, Robin son kneeled down in the midst of them, and in the presence of

many spectators on the quay, commended them and their enterprise to God. How sacred and solemn was that hour of supplication! In all history there is no finer subject for a great painter, than the moment of this parting prayer of Robinson's on the ship's deck.

No eye but God's followed the Pilgrims across the wintry ocean. Little have they said of their sufferings in that long and dangerous passage, but have spoken of God's providence and mercy. With a simplicity, that in itself is sublime, they narrate the perils of their landing, and first surveys, on an icebound, untried coast, in freezing weather, which was death's icy arrow to many a precious frame. They tell of God's good providence in the discovery of hidden corn, beneath ground so covered with snow and so hard frozen, that we were fain, say they, with our curtleaxes and short swords, to hew and cut the ground a foot deep, and then wrest it up with levers. They tell of the delight with which they found fresh springs, and sat down and drank their first New England water-emblem of that sacred stream God was opening, through them, for future generations, to supply the city of our God. They tell of their first perilous encounter with the Indians, whom it pleased God to vanquish; and how, after giving God thanks for this deliverance, they went on, amidst snow and rain and bad weather, and imminent danger of shipwreck to their little shallop. The labor of their discovery and landing at Plymouth was amidst watchings all night in the rain; the wind northwest and freezing hard, with great difficulty to kindle a fire for the wet, cold, and feeble. The pleasure of the Divine Providence is hailed by them. "But it was very cold," say they," for the water froze on our clothes, and made them many times like coats of iron." They recount their first Sabbath of rest at Plymouth; but what a rest! amidst hunger and peril, houseless, in the open bitter elements! And meantime God was preparing severer trials than any of these; for when the little worn and wearied party returned to the ship to comfort the hearts of their brethren with news of their discovery and landing, they. had to learn that the dear wife of William Bradford had fallen from the ship and was drowned. By what a baptism of hardships and suffering did it please God that our Pilgrim fathers should lay the foundations of his Church in our beloved country! yet with what patience, what calm simplicity of resolution and trust in God, what undying hope, and unrepining endurance! Indeed, they died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and Pilgrims on the earth.

And these were the men by whom God was opening and demonstrating to the world the discoveries of truth essential to the

world's peace, on which only the world's welfare could rest, by the working of which alone individual kingdoms could be conducted to the enjoyment of an indestructible liberty, and all the world's empires could be bound in mutual harmony and love. The opening of these discoveries was to be from point to point, not all at once, as a flood of supernatural light, but disciplinary, providential, by more truth and light breaking forth out of God's word, as Mr. Robinson prophesied, as they were able to bear it; truth and light received by those whom God had placed in such circumstances as made thea willing to receive it, those from whom he had, even by inimical and violent hands, removed the films of prejudice, those from before whose minds he had broken down the darkening piles of State despotism at the door of the Church, and whom he had removed, by themselves, into the wilderness, in order to let the light of the Scriptures shine. And the demonstration of these discoveries was to be as gradual as the growth of a vigorous, free, Christian State, in perfect religious liberty, beneath their light and influence. As a child passes from discipline to discipline, from school to school, from lower to higher masters, so from step to step God led our Fathers, so naturally, that at the time they could no more see the great end to which he was bringing them, or the intended and expected consummation of light, than a being ignorant of the material processes of our world, who should be placed for the first time where he could watch the dawning of the day, could measure the stealthy imperceptible steps of the morning, or predict the glorious appearance of the sun. Indeed, at the time, they were often so overwhelmed with difficulties, and absorbed in the questions of this day's and the morrow's preservation, that as to God's providence and intentions, or their own discoveries of his future will, they were like men lost in catacombs, and feeling their way in almost total darkness.

And yet they were coming to discoveries, which were to renew the face of the earth; they were working out problems by the .solution of which the world was to be brought from its abode. with the dead into the light of the living. They were discoveries grander than that of a new world, and to be gained through infinitely greater toil than that of Columbus. They were problems, indeed, upon the solution of which they could merely enter, merely take the first steps, while other generations would be requisite to complete them; but the right entrance was essential, and had not the first setps been steps in God, the after progress would have been from intricacy to intricacy, instead of opening into perfect day. The corn of wheat mist fall into the ground and die, or it would have remained alone, and nothing would have grown from it. There must of necessit be this death to self, and then the seed was to ripen into a glorious harvest.

They offered themselves as this self-denying, yet ever-living corn; God selected, God prepared them, and by his providence and grace induced and perfected the self-offering. They were that corn that fell into the ground and died forgotten, uncared for, unpraised, cast out and derided, of the whole world. They were that corn, that handful of corn, as on the tops of the mountains, and from it sprang the fruit, shaking like Lebanon, that now fills this country, and is fast filling the world.

But these discoveries all lay involved in the knowledge and development of the true idea of the Church. That was to be disentangled from the lies of the god of this world, from the despotism and mistakes of men; it was to be disinterred from the mighty fabric of wood, hay, and stubble, in worldly ceremonies and hierarchies, under which it had been buried for centuries. The Church, rightly conceived, contains the destinies. of the world wrapped up in it; the Church is the germ of the world's true life, and only as that germ grows, the world's true life grows. The Church, or rather, the Spirit through the Church, is to govern the world's form, will conquer it, will control it, will shape it for God. When the world's form is such as springs from the development of life in the Church, or grows by an indissoluble connexion with it, then, it is true, it is indestructible, it is imperishable. The Church is the soul of the world, containing the law of the world's permanent happiness, from which the world's forms are to be organized and developed, just as the germ of a seed in the earth contains folded up within it the law and form of the future plant in its perfection. If the world's forms grow awry, despotic, infernal, by and for themselves, they are mere excrescences, and will have to be changed or cut away. Everything shall grow from and for the immortal germ, the Life of Christ, hidden in the Church, to expand and subdue the world to itself. The conquest is to be perfected, and in it the glory of the Lord is to be revealed, and all flesh is to see it together.

The kingdom of God is as leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. The world is as raw and unprepared for God's glory, until the Life of Christ in the Church interpenetrates and governs it, as a measure of meal unleavened, unformed, uncooked, unfit for nourishment, without bond or principle of unity or continuity, ready to be blown away by the wind, ready to scatter like dust. Until the true principles, the indestructible, eternal principles, on which God would raise his Church, were discovered, nothing of permanence was discovered, nothing of lasting interest, nothing of importance, nothing that could give peace. The world rocked to and fro, like a ship in a storm, without helm, without anchor