06 The Founders of Freedom: John Robinson and the Pilgrim Fathers

LECTURE VI THE FOUNDERS OF FREEDOM: JOHN ROBINSON AND THE PILGRIM FATHERS THE Gospel is more than a great faith; it is a great adventure. Its news is so good that it must be carried everywhere at all hazards. The most thrilling pages in Christian history describe the enterprise of the Evangel. When a leading English Review, that has a reputation for cynicism, some time ago described the missionary movement, its cynicism gave way to genuine enthusiasm. "They have kept alive at the heart of a selfish and materialized culture," it declared of our missionaries, "a genuine heroic tradition"; and went on to say that there were few families of note in England that had not made some contribution to the army of missionary martyrs, and that "all the ends of the earth are hallowed by their graves." No man can read such records without emotion and pride. There is no history to compare with it, nor ever can be. It is something to realize in these days that unselfishness can devise and achieve greater things than selfishness ever can. We all know that science and commerce have inspired expeditions which have filled the world with admiration; but the simple truth is, that the adventures inspired by the disinterestedness of Christian evangelists, have thrown all other enterprises into the shade.

There have been many types of missionary preachers and missionary adventures. Much that is best in America today, derives from a pilgrim race. In the words of Mr. Lowell, they crossed the Atlantic "to plant their idea in virgin soil." They may not have looked romantic. Shovel hats and long black cloaks do not compare in picturesqueness with the embroidered raiment of the cavalier heroes of Vandyck. Yet these men and women, so prim and demure of outward aspect, set forth on the most astonishing of adventures, reading their destiny westward in the heaven of their ideals, and by the good hand of God prospering them, sowing the world with free commonwealths. A clever modern novelist has invented for us the title, "The Beloved Vagabond." It might have stood for a description of the Mayflower. You may read on a tomb in that spellbound burial-place at Plymouth, part of an address delivered by a preacher whose body rests beneath. He describes his associates as "my beloved adventurers." That great writer, Professor Seeley, says, "Religion alone can turn emigration into exodus." Who shall define or describe the mystic determining impulse that drove the Pilgrims into the wild, to make a home for faith and freedom? Had they any prescience of the greatness of the goal? Did they, too, see an Abrahamic vision of a seed as the stars innumerable, for those who would go forth not knowing whither, but content to follow the gleam? Did they say, when the winds of heaven filled their sails and bare them far from friends and fatherland, "the spirit driveth us into the wilderness"? Were they all equally clear that the Will of God was with them, and that in the Book of Destiny their names were written as the humble pioneers of a new world and a new order? Were all hearts westward and forward, and all minds constant in their resolve? Did none nourish a treacherous appetite for the flesh-pots of Europe, murmur at the discouragements of the journey, "Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?"

How gladly would we know more than we do, or ever can, of the details of that golden romance, which surely, outside the pages of the New Testament, is the greatest story in the world!

Savonarola ruled Florence, Calvin ruled Geneva, John Knox ruled the realm of Scotland. Each in measure asserted the authority of Christ over a turbulent and sometimes rebellious population. Their difficulty was that they were compelled to put new wine into old bottles, until new bottles could be wrought and shaped for the new wines The Pilgrim Fathers would have a new bottle for their new wine. They demanded a free commonwealth suited to their free ideals of worship, and of citizenship. They could not be content to graft their new branch on the old decayed stock, where it must be overshadowed by all the other branches that bare fruit of so doubtful a flavor. For the most part they were business people who found Leyden a tolerable town to thrive in. But their religion made them restless. The Promised Land was in their hearts. The more John Robinson preached to them of the primitive church, and the destiny of the kingdom, the less they were satisfied with the compromise society which alone was possible to them where they were. We may perhaps be thankful that the result of faithful and real preaching is not always, as in the case of John Robinson, that the congregation arise and flee. But I confess I always suspect my own preaching of weakness if it does not make many young people uncomfortable, and compel them to become missionaries of the ideal, even at some considerable sacrifice. "Will you be content," argued John Robinson in effect, "to go down to your graves with your witness undelivered, and your bravest hopes unattempted? Or will you risk something, nay everything, to translate your theories of Christian freedom into a veritable free society?" The problem of Savonarola, Calvin, Knox, was whether the preached word was powerful enough to transform and convert an old order. The problem of John Robinson and the Pilgrims, was whether the preached word was powerful enough to create and establish a new one.

Before I come to a somewhat closer study of the man and his ideals who inspired one of the world’s most momentous enterprises by his preaching, I shall ask you to spare a thought for that revival of preaching which marked the heroic age, in which the mind of England was turned permanently Protestant. I say the mind of England, for no serious student believes that we were made Protestant by the domestic vagaries of Henry VIII. We were made Protestant by an open Bible, and its prophets. One lesson had been taught by the ballads of Chaucer, and the visions of Piers Plowman, and was reinforced afterwards by the tracts of Martin Marprelate, that to win the ear of the people you must talk their language. To popularize the Reformation and its new religious ideals, it was necessary that preachers should arise who thought in the vernacular, and who seasoned their speech with the salt of such homely words and phrases, as made Tyndale’s Bible understand not only by the college-bred, but by the smith at the anvil, and the laborer behind the plough. When Hugh Latimer began to teach the new doctrine from St. Paul’s Cross, every London apprentice knew and relished his message. After all, is not this one of the signs of a new Pentecost, "We did hear tell in our own tongue the wonderful works of God"? There is a saying of Jesus that we shall all do well to lay to heart: "What I tell you in secret, that publish ye on the housetop." Christianity is every man’s religion; and therefore can be translated without loss into the language of the street. It is a religion for the open air. It is a religion that does not suffer by being brought home to the conscience and reason of simple folk. It is susceptible of learned philosophical statement, I doubt not, satisfying to the greatest and profoundest thinkers, but John Ruskin once said, with the touch of exaggeration characteristic of him, "What a little child cannot understand of Christianity, nobody else need try to." The essential Protestant faith captured the ear and the heart of sixteenth-century London, through the pithy pregnant Saxon speech of Latimer, with his command of laughter and tears.

He presented the citizen in the street with a plain man’s religion. He spoke it as simply, I say it with reverence, as the Savior spoke to the peasants in the fields of Judea, or the fishermen by the Galilean lakes. He did not so much appeal to the theologically-trained mind; and he certainly did not appeal to any sense of ecclesiastical authority. He appealed to common sense; he appealed to the instincts of the multitude. He appealed to their love of justice and of humanity. There never was a more human being than Hugh Latimer. The people well know the men who love them, believe in them, and understand them. The sheep hear the voice of the true shepherd. London has always been a city with much that is artificial and materialistic in its complicated cosmopolitan life; and no one ever held the key of its affections who was not a true man. Latimer’s preaching is oratory stripped of all that is meretricious, and oratory that is not sterilized by conventionality. No timid, stilted pulpiteer, who has never learned that grace is more than grammar, and that to win your hearers, you may break every pulpit convention that was ever designed by a sleek respectability to keep our volcanic Gospel within the bonds of decency and order, will ever capture the soul of a great city, or speak with a voice that will ring in the hearts of a free people. And if Latimer knew the secret, another knew it who is worthy to be named with him--that passionate pilgrim of the Puritanism which was only Latimer’s Protestantism become logical and thorough--I mean John Penry. They burned Latimer at Oxford, and hanged Penry on a gibbet in the Old Kent Road; but not till these men and others like-minded had set England on fire. For one thing, they had shed their blood for freedom of thought and freedom of speech, and no martyr has ever died for those sacred principles in vain. The preacher’s very existence was at stake in the controversy, whether religion was to consist of prayers and offices rendered in a foreign tongue, or the truths which free men were to think and speak in their own free speech. In the former system the prophet has no place; in the latter system he is the most precious possession of his age.

I hope I shall not weary you by insistence on this point; but the tendency of theology to become an esoteric philosophy, full of technical terms understand only by the experts, has the inevitable effect that its professors and teachers lose touch with life. Always the preacher must be a man of his time. His business is to restate the eternal message of salvation in the terms of today. Chaste and cultured archaisms are pleasant to the palate of the scholar; but the Gospel is for the people, and we need more than anything else, men of the people who know their needs and their thoughts, and can make the Evangel, what it eternally is, the property and heritage of the simple and the poor. Some of you will recall, by way of illustration, the scathing satires of Erasmus on the scholastic theologians and preachers who, in his time, made it their business to cultivate a reputation for erudition and profundity, by talking in words that the vulgar could not understand. This is a specimen which Erasmus gives of the teaching of these inflated doctrinaires. "They say that ’ person ’ does not signify relation of origin, but duplex negation of communicability in genera, that is, it connotes something positive, and is a noun of the first instance, not the second. They say the persons of the Divine Nature exist reciprocally by circumcision, and circumcision is when a thing subsists really in something else which is really distinct, by the mutual assistance of presentiality in the same essence." After reading two or three lines of that kind of thing, you feel as if you were in a lunatic asylum. Do you wonder that men and women sickened and wearied of it? And do you wonder that the Reformation preachers brought a veritable new revelation to the world when they read out to the common people such great simple words as these, "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father but by Me"? If Tyndale had done nothing else by his translation of the Bible he had taught us for all time that there is no more dignified and majestic diction than the simple speech of the common people.

I cannot explain to you just why it is, that the true prophet is always a master of simple speech, but it is certain that no man can speak home to the hearts of his fellow-men without it. Inasmuch as the Reformation was a return to the natural and to the human from the artificial and the scholastic, it did more than change the world’s history, it revived the order of prophets, and it created a literature. From Hugh Latimer and John Penry, to Daniel Defoe and John Bunyan, you can read the influence of the Reformation in bringing religion back to life, and making it the inspiration of the common people.

After all, it was but natural that the Puritan preacher with his love of reality, should be impatient of the mere tricks and artifices borrowed from the demagogue. The Richard Bernard who was only "almost persuaded" to become a pilgrim, and just missed immortality thereby, dealt out wholesome warnings to young preachers in his book entitled "The Faithful Shepherd." How he satirizes those brethren who, as Mr. Spurgeon used to say, "mistake perspiration for inspiration," and try to produce an impression by violence which could not be produced by the weight of their argument! Some forward ones, he declares, are "moved to violent motions as casting abroad of their arms, smiting on the pulpit, lifting themselves up, and again suddenly stamping down." Others "through too great fear and bashfulness which causeth hemmings, spittings, rubbing the brows, lifting up of the shoulders, nodding of the head,taking often hold of the cloak or gown, fiddling with the fingers upon the breast buttons, stroking of the beard and such-like toies." There is sound sense as well as humor, in this attempt to put us on our guard against ridiculous and meaningless nervous gestures which distract and annoy the most indulgent of our hearers, and add nothing to our power. It is always easier in this matter to enforce the truth by precept than by practice; but nothing is more certain than that the man who has learned early the right modulation of the voice, and to be content with those simple gestures which are natural and dignified, has mastered what is fundamental to the art of pulpit oratory. That this was no chance judgment of some isolated Puritan divine, but one common to all in that generation, may be further gathered from an excellent passage in one of John Robinson’s forceful writings. "As a woman, over-curiously trimmed, is to be suspected, so is a speech. And indeed he that goes about by eloquence, without firm ground of reason to persuade, goes about to deceive. As some are large in speech out of abundance of matter and upon due consideration, so the most multiply words either from weakness or vanity. Some excuse their tediousness, saying that they cannot speak shorter, which is all one as if they said that they have unbridled tongues and inordinate passions setting them a-work. I have been many times drawn so dry, that I could not well speak any longer for want of matter; but I could ever speak as short as I would." I ask you, could the thing be better put? Could there be a better comparison than this of a highly rhetorical speech or sermon to "a woman, over-curiously trimmed"? Have we not had to listen to many discourses where you could not see the dress for the trimmings? It may be impossible to lay down any canons of good taste in this matter, but I shall venture to submit to you, that the Puritan frugality of illustration and adornment, is far more effective than the prodigality and even profligacy of quotation and ornament which is sometimes popular among us today, and which may dazzle, but does not really subdue and persuade an audience.

Nevertheless, you are not to suppose that John Robinson could not estimate the worth and value of apposite and pointed illustration. Dr. John Brown has borne testimony to the wealth of his reading, the catholicity of his range of knowledge. He has discovered quotations from Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thales, Cicero, Terence, Pliny, Plutarch, Seneca, Epictetus and Suetonius among the classics; among the Fathers, from Ignatius, Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory Nazienzen, Lactantius, Jerome, Basil and Eusebius; among later writers, from Bernard, Anselm, Scaliger, Beza, Erasmus and Melancthon, as well as his own contemporaries. This renowned preacher and scholar, who was to inspire men and women to attempt and achieve one of the most heroic tasks in history, was a man steeped in literature, who had wrestled in his study with great themes, who had sat at the feet of men of mind of all schools and generations, whose culture was as catholic as his sympathies were wide, and who yet, as Tennyson says, "wore his weight of learning lightly as a flower," and never lost touch with his fellows, or gave up to academic ambition what was meant for mankind. Had it been otherwise, he might have become a walking encyclopedia, but never the mainspring of that gallant adventure which planted a free church on a free soil. The more I study the personality and the preaching of John Robinson, the less I wonder at the spirit and exploits of the community whose members owed everything to his inspiration. Under the strongest temptations to intolerance, he maintained a generous temper and a broad Christian outlook. He was immovably firm in the maintenance of principles, but even his controversial utterances are distinguished by a large charity that lifts him above his time. And I cannot be wrong in arguing, that his ministry bears the marks upon it of the influence of his church, which was almost alone among the separatist communities of the time in its freedom from unworthy partisanship, and the frictions and bickering which are the fruits of jealousy and pedantry. I imagine John Robinson would have found it difficult to decide whether his people owed most to his preaching, or his preaching owed most to his people. One has the feeling that such a church would have made almost any preacher eloquent; yet again, one is driven to conclude that such a preacher would have created a true church out of almost any material. The fact of the matter is, of course, that the atmosphere of faith and prayer does make good preaching inevitable, whereas the attitude of suspicion and criticism will "freeze the genial current of the soul," and give to any earnest and spiritual minister a sense of laboring at the oar to no purpose.

It is not possible to leave out of account that many preachers are called to preach to the worldly, the unbelieving, the indifferent and the hostile; and we should be contradicting some of the most glorious facts in Christian history, if we did not recognize that God does not leave His witnesses alone when they go forth on His errands, no matter how difficult the journey. But it is almost impossible to separate John Robinson from the church he loved so deeply, and which loved him with equal intensity and constancy. He was just one of the members of the body, deriving health and power from his vital relation to all the rest, and communicating his own life and strength to them. When he spoke to this outside world, when he put pen to paper, when he became a champion in controversy, and a defender of his faith and people, it was not he alone who spoke. The whole church seemed to become eloquent in and through him. Equally impressive is it, that the church members to whom he gave his blessing, and a double portion of his spirit, seemed to reproduce his faith, courage and charity when far from his presence.

Leagues of tempestuous Atlantic waters never separated people and pastor in ideal or in fellowship. Still the mystic spiritual tie held. Still they thought together, and prayed together, and aspired together, and wrought together. It was as if he, their pastor, were present at every council meeting, was a guest in every cabin, prayed at the bedside of the dying, joined the hands of the newly-wed, and committed those who died in Christ to their last resting place in the forest. Of all the blows that fell one by one upon that struggling Pilgrim community in the bitter heroic days, when death and famine seemed their most familiar acquaintances, the most crushing and heart-breaking was the news of the death of their beloved pastor; and every soul in Plymouth colony felt as if his father had fallen, and sorrowed most of all, that they should see his face no more.

We have got to believe more than we do, in this sacred cooperation of preacher and people. We shall have no ideal preachers in the pulpit, unless and until we have ideal hearers in the pew. For conquests that will startle and awaken the world, the need will always be for prophet spirits who are sustained and illuminated by their contact with a society of consecrated souls. It is all very well to lecture students for the ministry on the vocation and equipment of the preacher, or on the ideal of his calling, but in sober truth, such lectures ought from time to time to be delivered to the officers and members of churches and congregations. They make or mar the ministry. They encourage or discourage the preacher. They make it possible for him to be at his best, and impossible for his arrows to miss the mark. They create the atmosphere in which faith can live, and doubt cannot. They arm him for unseen conflicts, and protect him by their prayers from insidious attacks on his moral integrity. Moreover, it is they who multiply his message, translate it into living fact and deed, and so give power and effect to his ministry. Let it never be forgotten that modern America sprang out of the ideal relation between a pastor and a church; a man of God and a people of God.

Let it never be forgotten that the problem was thought out in church meeting, and the enterprise planned and adopted within the atmosphere of a Christian assembly. It was there, while men and women pleaded for light, and for faith to walk in it, that the spirit of illumination was vouchsafed, under whose gracious guidance the yoke became easy and the burden light. Together, while the prophet-leader saw his vision, and the people kindled to it, they became equal to the sacrifice, and confident of the Will and the Way. I cannot analyze how much of those faithful discourses that will stir men’s souls to the end of time, was due to the rapt and resolute faces of simple heroes and heroines that were upturned to meet his gaze, and how much of their exaltation and enthusiasm was due to their contact with a soul in which indubitably dwelt Divine insight and fire; I only know that their sublime cooperation made the westward track of the Mayflower plain, and wrote the new Book of Genesis in the Bible of human destiny.

Forgive me if I linger lovingly on these familiar scenes, so big with fate, and so weighty with instruction. The preacher who has not pondered over these origins of New England’s history, must blame himself if he has missed much inspiration for his own work. The part played by Moses in the days of the Jewish exodus towards the Land of Promise is not one wit more notable or significant than the part played by Johnson in the exodus that ended in this land of promise. I might spare a moment or two for examples of his genius in the employment of rare and suggestive texts of Scripture, and his skill in turning out-of-the-way incidents in Bible narratives to profitable account. There are many seemingly desert places in Scripture, that a preacher who knows his Bible, can make to blossom like the rose. Not that there was any strained ingenuity about John Robinson’s way with texts. But who would forget that text out of the Book of Samuel from which he preached on the special day set apart for inquiring the mind of the spirit as to this enterprise, "And David’s men said unto him, Behold we be afraid here in Judah; how much more then if we come to Keilah against the armies of the Philistines? Then David inquired of the Lord yet again. And the Lord answered him and said, Arise, go down to Keilah; for I will deliver the Philistines into thine hand." Among all your New England towns today, I wonder if there is one named Keilah; and if not, whether it is too late to supply the omission? Unless all reports lie, there are still enough Philistines left to justify the experiment.

Then on the ever-memorable day when he preached to the Pilgrims for the last time, the sermon that has become an imperishable legacy for all forward souls, he found his text in the Book of Ezra, "I proclaimed a fast there at the river Ahava that we might afflict ourselves before our God, to seek of Him a right way for us, and for our little ones, and for all our substance." Think how these felicitous words must have accomplished their purpose, which was to provoke to new fervor of prayer and faith those who at the crisis of their fate still needed to be assured that theirs was a God-prompted and God-guided enterprise. Often, when I study the preaching of our fathers, I am impressed by the fact that they knew their Bibles better than we do. They had less of the light of criticism, but they had, I think, notwithstanding, a more exact knowledge of Holy Writ. Today this great territory of Scripture is like a modern continent; extreme and unhealthy congestion at certain well-known centers, and vast tracts of country uncultivated and unknown. How many of those listening to me have been led against the "Philistines at Keilah," or have heard "a fast proclaimed at the river Ahava"?

Perhaps we flatter ourselves that if we had part and lot in so wonderful a movement we, too, should be moved to search the Scriptures, and to uncover some of their hidden gems of price. But that is to harbor an undeveloped imagination. Every hour of assembly is a time big with destiny. Every Sunday men and women go forth from the tryst with God to face measureless possibilities. Suppose that you and I, who have the unspeakable privilege of interpreting the book of life, realized that the men and women we are addressing are as capable of disinterested sacrifices and noble exploits as their progenitors at Leyden; and that before a week is out some of them may have launched their Mayflower, and embraced a God-given adventure, with what emotion would our speech to them be charged? If we fail, it is because we do not see the possibilities latent in what we call an "ordinary congregation." No assembling of ourselves together to meet with Christ can ever be "ordinary." That is only a fashion of speech. We say sometimes, "It was just an/ordinary service." If we have ceased to expect extraordinary manifestations of God’s power, and revelations of His will—that our young men should see visions and our old men dream dreams—why is it? It was just as possible that your fathers at Leyden should say "Yes" or" No" to the beckoning hand of their divine destiny, as that we should accept or reject the higher Will for our own. There was no single element present at their fateful assembly in their Leyden meeting house, that may not be present at any hour of worship in these days, and in the land of their adoption. All that is necessary for us to repeat their enterprises and achievements, is soul enough to believe in God’s will and to surrender to His leadership.

I am impressed by the fact, that the last picture of their beloved minister which the Pilgrims carried with them to their promised land, was the one so simply and vividly described by the historian of their enterprise. "The tide—which stays for no man—calling them away, that were thus loth to depart, their Reverend Pastor, falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks, commended them with most fervent prayers unto the Lord and His blessing." I suspect that we have all at times felt what we call the burden of extempore prayer. But I am certain that the soul of the prophet is most surely and powerfully revealed in his prayers. To speak to men of God is a high privilege. There is perhaps one higher: it is to speak to God for men. I do not doubt that many a great saying of John Robinson lingered in the memories of his pilgrim flock, and was recalled under the pine-trees and behind the stockades in their new settlement. But assuredly the most sacred recollection of all, was of his tender and loving intercessions on their behalf; and they came to feel that the greatest moments in their lives, were those ever-memorable ones when that prophet-spirit talked with God, and they saw heaven open, and heard things scarce lawful for man to hear. God forgive us that our pulpit prayers tend to become so formal, and even unreal l For this is the sublimest office the minister of the Kingdom is called to fulfill. It is out of such spirit of communion and sacred intercourse with Deity that the pilgrim ambition is born, and the pilgrim vow sealed and ratified. Nay, I go further. It is in our prayers that our real ideals and hopes for our people are revealed. If we have great aspirations for them; if in our personal desire we destine them to sacrificial service; if we so love them as to cherish for them the glory and honor of the God-dedicated and forward-moving life, they will make the discovery in our prayers. For it is in our prayers that the deeps of the soul are uncovered, and the passionate yearnings of the true minister for his people make themselves known. That is a great adjective which Scripture applies to the fervent prayers of a good man. They are "energizing." They charge receptive souls with new and sublime forces. They reestablish broken or imperfect connections with the source of Divine power. They baptize the waiting, willing, listening heart with new vitality. They "energize "--dare I say" electrify"?—the mind. Who can doubt that those who knelt around their spiritual father at Delft-haven, with the rickety ship Speedwell lying near as if to remind them of the perils and discomforts of their adventure, were braced and strengthened and "energized" for their deathless task by the fervent applications of that man of God? Let no preacher among us fail to realize the power of inspiration that may communicate itself through his sermons to his congregation; but least of all let him forget that the final stimulus to deeds of faith and devotion will be felt and known by his people in the supreme hour of fervent and energizing prayer.

I must ask you to spare one thought for a feature of the famous expedition on which perhaps we do not often dwell. No minister went with them; that is, no ordained preacher and pastor. Apart from the fragrant memory of their former leader’s ministry, they were dependent on what we sometimes speak of as a "layman’s" service. I would like to press Elder Brewster’s example upon you, as another and unanswerable argument why we should not deprive ourselves, as we do, of the spiritual wealth of men and women in our churches who have not devoted themselves to the formal ministry, but whose thought and experience would enrich our corporate life. Would to God that all the Lord’s servants were prophets! When shall we get away from the paralyzing misconception that a man of affairs is thereby incapacitated from being a spiritual leader? I make no doubt that the meditations of Elder Brewster were all the wiser and nobler that he had many public anxieties to bear, and responsibilities to carry. It ought to be forever symbolical of New England, that the religious spirit was united to the spirit of practical citizenship in him who, unordained of man, assumed spiritual leadership within the pilgrim theocracy. So the preaching of the Word, and the higher Idealism, resulted in the founding of a new world "dedicated to the proposition," as Lincoln would say, that Christ’s will is the only worthy and wholesome law for a state. To recover that ideal we need a new race of prophets--seers of inspired vision like John Robinson, statesmen of spiritual experience and moral stature like Brewster. How the Pilgrim church created the Pilgrim state; how it drew up as Mr. Bancroft says, "the first instrument conferring equal civil and religious rights on every member of the commonwealth"; how it sought to do the will of God on earth is matter of history. Imperishable as that history is, it is of little worth for the world of to-morrow in comparison with the necessity that her new preachers and spiritual leaders should "highly resolve," that they will bring to the stupendous task of creating yet another "new world" a double portion of the spirit of their sires--the same faith, fortitude and sacred adventure, a like endurance in the teeth of danger, suffering and death, and "an equal temper of heroic hearts."