Before they left Leyden, their pastor preached to them a farewell sermon, which for loftiness of spirit and breadth of vision has hardly a parallel in that age of intolerance.  He laid down the principle that criticism of the Scriptures had not been exhausted merely because it had been begun; that the human conscience was of too subtle a nature to be imprisoned for ever in formulas however ingeniously devised; that the religious reformation begun a century ago was not completed; and that the Creator had not necessarily concluded all His revelations to mankind.

The words have long been familiar to students of history, but they can hardly be too often laid to heart.

Noble words, worthy to have been inscribed over the altar of the first church to be erected by the departing brethren, words to bear fruit after centuries should go by.  Had not the deeply injured and misunderstood Grotius already said, “If the trees we plant do not shade us, they will yet serve for our descendants?”

Yet it is passing strange that the preacher of that sermon should be the recent champion of the Contra-Remonstrants in the great controversy; the man who had made himself so terrible to the pupils of the gentle and tolerant Arminius.

And thus half of that English congregation went down to Delftshaven, attended by the other half who were to follow at a later period with their beloved pastor.  There was a pathetic leave-taking.  Even many of the Hollanders, mere casual spectators, were in tears.

Robinson, kneeling on the deck of the little vessel, offered a prayer and a farewell.  Who could dream that this departure of an almost nameless band of emigrants to the wilderness was an epoch in the world’s history?  Yet these were the Pilgrim Fathers of New England, the founders of what was to be the mightiest republic of modern history, mighty and stable because it had been founded upon an idea.

They were not in search of material comfort and the chances of elevating their condition, by removing from an overpeopled country to an organized Commonwealth, offering a wide field for pauper labourers.  Some of them were of good social rank and highest education, most of them in decent circumstances, none of them in absolute poverty.  And a few years later they were to be joined by a far larger company with leaders and many brethren of ancient birth and landed possessions, men of “education, figure; and estate,” all ready to convert property into cash and to place it in joint-stock, not as the basis of promising speculation, but as the foundation of a church.

It signifies not how much or how little one may sympathize with their dogma or their discipline now.  To the fact that the early settlement of that wilderness was by self-sacrificing men of earnestness and faith, who were bent on “advancing the Gospel of Christ in remote parts of the world,” in the midst of savage beasts, more savage men, and unimaginable difficulties and dangers, there can be little doubt that the highest forms of Western civilization are due.  Through their provisional theocracy, the result of the independent church system was to establish the true purport of the Reformation, absolute religious equality.  Civil and political equality followed as a matter of course.