Our Pilgrim Forefathers:

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Our Pilgrim Forefathers: From England to New England

If we would understand the history of our family, we must learn what manner of men and women were those forefathers and foremothers of ours who left home and friends to meet the terrible hardships and dangers which they knew were awaiting them in a new and almost unknown world, what were the impelling motives and the high visions that sustained and urged them on to their part in the building of the nation.

In an age when ignorance and illiteracy were the common condition of the majority, they were moist of them educated men and as far as we can trace their history in England, they were owners of property and in comfortable circumstances.

Fiske says of the early settlers of New England:

"As regards their social derivation, the settlers were homogenous in character to a remarkable degree, and they were drawn form the sturdiest part of the English stock. In all history there has been no instance of colonization so exclusively effected by picked and chosen men. The colonists knew that and were proud of it. William Stoughton in his election sermon in 1688 says: 'God sifted the whole nation that he might send choice grain into the wilderness' " [Fiske's "Beginnings of New England"]

It was a hard cruel age in which they lived. Arber says of it:

"There is not one of us but lives under conditions in which Law is always, and under all circumstances, the supreme authority. We can hardly realize a condition of society in which Law itself was struggling for existence; in which everybody and everything was governed by the King's will and was subordinate and contributory to the royal satisfaction." [Arber's "Story of the Pilgrims," p. 12]

But it was an age quickened into new life by the revival of learning, by the invention of the printing press, by the discovery of the new world and of new paths of commerce.

In the 13th century, the Barons of England had forces form King John, the Magna Charta, their ideal of civil liberty which although often trampled on was never thereafter wholly lost sight of.

In the 14th century, John Wycliff had a vision of religious freedom and had translated the Bible into the language of the people, and his followers, the despised Lollards, or "mumblers, clad in long robes of coarse red wool, barefoot and with pilgrim's staff in hand" had travelled up and down the land distributing hand-copied passages from his tracts and from the Bible among the people. So deep an impression had been made that Richard II angrily exclaimed that "every third man in the kingdom was a Lollard."

Wycliff assesrted the entire sufficiency of the Bible as the rule of faith. He denied [to be continued. . . .]