"The individual conscience is more and more reinforced by a social conscience that finds its expression in law. Our philosophers have been telling us that religion is loyalty to a beloved community. All this does not indicate a return to the Puritanism of the seventeenth century, but it makes seventeenth-century Puritanism more intelligible to us."

T

HE Church of the Latter Day Saints has an interesting ceremonial called "baptizing for the dead." The living saint is able to make his faith retroactive, and effective for the spiritual benefit of persons who were unfortunate enough to live before they had an opportunity to know what it was. He stands as it were godfather to his ancestors. He vouches for them as members of the true church. This gives the church an antiquity which it would not otherwise have had.

Latter-day patriots are not behind Latter-Day Saints in their tendency to impute their own ideals to generations that have passed away. They magnify the virtues of their forefathers, but they take for granted that they were the same virtues that are now admired. Those who assert that the former days were better than these are not willing to admit that they may have been essentially different from these.

Just now when we are celebrating the tercentenary of the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, one may be allowed to make a modest plea for the individuality of these worthies. Their essential ideals and purposes are in danger of being obscured by the mists of ancestor worship.

We are in the midst of an earnest effort to Americanize the aliens who dwell among us. It is a laudable endeavor, though it is sometimes under

Copyright, 1920, by THE CENTURY Co. All rights reserved.

1

Leaving England

taken with a suddenness which alarms the innocent foreigner, who does not know why we are taking such an interest in his behalf. It is difficult for him to understand that he must be regenerated before he takes out his naturalization papers.

What more natural than that we Americanize the men of the Mayflower who came to these shores in the year 1620? Have we not for a long time adopted them as in a peculiar manner our forefathers, and have we not a right to attribute to them our political views? If they are not illustrative of what the great republic has become, they have been receiving praise under false pretenses.

Our American faith was formulated in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution of the United States. If we wish to define it further we point proudly to Washington's Farewell Address and the Monroe Doctrine. He that doth not believe these things, let him be anathema. The true American is ready to maintain these principles against the alien world.

That all men have certain inalienable rights, that there should be a complete separation between the functions of the church and state, that there should be no taxation without representation, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed-these are the principles of 1776. That which gives the fighting edge to these principles is the stubborn determination that the American continent should be free from the control of European monarchs.

By antedating the Declaration by a hundred and fifty years we double the period to which we point with pride. There is a chronological expansion which is very gratifying. By one swoop we take into our national fold several generations of respectable people whose characters do us honor. They doubtless felt as we do, or would have done so if they had had the opportunity. They were the makers of America; that goes without question. Why, then, should we not attribute to them American principles as we understand them?

This attempt to Americanize several generations of colonial Englishmen has led to two results. One is to minimize the significance of the American Revolution, and the other is to devitalize the history of the period which preceded it.

The American War of Independence is treated as merely the throwing off of the yoke that had long been irksome. The forefathers came to these shores to escape the tyranny of James I. They set up independent governments as far as they were able. At last their descendants completed their task and drove out the minions of George III.

This simplifies history, but it ignores the fact that a great revolution took place in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In this revolution

Fift 11-028-66 As did Capy

The Mayflower in mid-ocean

something more was involved than independence from the mother country. Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were not simply taking up the unfinished business of the forefathers; they were announcing new ideas that produced a violent explosion in America and afterward in France. It is to be noted that Washington always spoke of the Revolution, and it was a real one.

The effect of the effort to read into the history of the colonial period the spirit of 1776 is to produce a curious sense of unreality. We are reminded of the stage directions of an old miracle play where Adam crosses the stage "on the way to be created."

The prerevolutionary Americans do not seem like real persons with definite purposes of their own. They are shadowy types of what their descendants are subsequently to become. The historian is careful to point out every act that has a symbolic suggestion of something that afterward came to pass, just as the commentator on the Old Testament has his eye on the New. The phrase continually comes to mind, "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet." The patriotism of the sons is imputed to the fathers, who come trailing clouds of genealogical glory which obscure their own proper features.

The Covenant of the Mayflower is treated as if it were the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, the New England town meeting becomes a prophecy of the Continental Congress, and we are told that a controversy over a stray pig led to the discovery of great principles which were afterward embodied in the Constitution of the United States. As to the Monroe Doctrine, that was indigenous to Rhode Island.

Our romancers have done their part in making the early NewEnglanders appear to be peculiar people cut off from all contacts with their contemporaries. There is a sense not only of geographical remoteness, but of spiritual aloofness. The Salem of Hawthorne might be on another planet from London or Bristol. We do not think of the grave citizens as having gossipy letters from cousins and aunts on the other side of the sea.

It would be a fitting celebration of the tercentenary to restore the Pilgrims of the Mayflower to their proper place in history. They and the Puritans who quickly followed them had a very vivid life of their own. They had opinions which they held with great tenacity and had purposes which gave unity to their lives. They were good haters, and they hated some things which we tolerate. They had their limitations and, like all earnest people, they prized them highly. They were men of their own time and were interested in what were then living issues. In order to get a realistic view of them we must think of them as belonging to the history of England in one of the most stirring periods, and not merely to the prenatal history of the United States. They were seventeenth-century Eng

Landing. Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts

lishmen and not faint foreshadowings of eighteenth-century Americans. Still less did their enthusiasms correspond with those of the great cosmopolitan America of our own day. Perhaps there is no element that could less easily fuse in our melting-pot.

They were a part of a movement which was just as distinct as that of modern Zionism. To be a Zionist, one must be first of all a Jew. In going to Palestine the Jew of Warsaw does not cut himself off from his own people. Their prayers follow him, and they are eager to hear of his success. He is where their hearts are. So the early New-Englander was first of all an Englishman. He had come to the New World impelled by ideas which he held in common with thousands of his countrymen. He was enthusiastically devoted to a great revolutionary cause which, beginning with a few obscure people, gathered strength until at last it swept away the long-established order. In the early part of the struggle New England was on the fighting-line.

It was the Puritan revolution which culminated in the establishment of the English Commonwealth with which these men were related. Here they found the realization of their ideals. They were stirred by its passions and they rejoiced in its success. It is worth our while to note the difference between the seventeenth-century revolution and that of the eighteenth century.

To understand the Puritan of the seventeenth century, we must remember that though he was a very independent person, his fundamental interest was not in the individual man, but in a new social order. He did not make our distinction between church and state. Religion was to him a public matter.

That every state should have a religion was something on which all parties in that day were agreed. But the Puritan contention was that the religion of the state should not be formal, but real. The nation should be held to the same strict rules of conscience which bound the private man. There was no excuse for public unrighteousness. Milton was setting forth a political creed when he wrote, "A Commonwealth ought to be a huge Christian personage, one mighty growth and stature of an honest man, as compact of virtue as of body."

When the passengers of the Mayflower formed themselves into a body politic "for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian religion," they were clearly expressing their purpose. Civil government was not an end in itself; it was a means for advancing true religion.

An early New England minister asks the question, "What is our errand in the wilderness?" His answer is that it is not religion as a private interest. Personal religion could be practised anywhere.