049. THE PILGRIMS WERE SEPARATISTS

THE PILGRIMS WERE SEPARATISTS The Pilgrims at Plymouth, on the other hand, were Separatists. They had given up the hope of reform within the Church of England, and they had begun a reform and had set up a church for themselves, "without tarrying for any." They were not Presbyterians, but Independents. They abjured altogether the theory of a national church. They had their rise in the east of England, and for this reason, after leaving Scrooby, where their first church was formed, and Leyden, the Dutch town of their temporary sojourn, they spread abroad from Plymouth, and named the counties and towns of eastern Massachusetts from the towns and counties of eastern England, their early home. A spirit of greater charity prevailed among them than manifested itself among the Puritans,—their exile in Holland, and the sorrows that followed it, had softened them, somewhat as the Puritans were softened afterward. While the Puritans admitted to full church privileges all who had been baptized in infancy, the Pilgrims limited the number of communicants in the church to those who were thought to be regenerate. While the Puritan wanted right government, the Pilgrim wished to add to this a certain measure of individual liberty. The Puritan desired not only to walk in the right way himself, but to compel other men to walk in it also; the Pilgrim held in theory, and for a time at least, that religion was a voluntary matter, and that the State must do nothing but protect the Church against violence. And so, through the early years at Plymouth, Miles Standish was captain of the military forces of the Old Colony, although he was not a member of the church; while the General Court of Massachusetts Bay decided, in 1631, that all State officials must be churchmembers, and that no one should be entitled to vote for these State officials unless he too was a member of some orthodox church.

It might also seem that Plymouth Colony was a home of religious liberty. But this was only because the Pilgrims were a homogeneous body, and no occasion for testing their liberality had yet arisen. Miles Standish was a whole-souled man; he loved the Pilgrims, if he did not love their faith; he had at any rate no heterodox or disturbing doctrines to propound. Until 1656 there was no express religious qualification for office. But two years later, as Mr. Winsor tell us,’ "When the colony was overrun with Quaker propagandists, persons of that faith, as well as all others who similarly opposed the laws and the established worship, were distinctly excluded from the privileges of freemen, and, in the new revision of the laws in 1671, freemen were obliged to be at least twenty-one years of age, ’of sober and peaceable conversation, orthodox in the fundamentals of religion,’ and possessed of at least twenty pounds’ worth of rateable estate in the colony." It is true that this religious exclusiveness did not find formal expression in legislation until half a century after the colony was founded, and we must grant that the people of Plymouth were somewhat more liberal than those of Massachusetts