The Congregationalists

fellowship with its neighbors. On the contrary, the Pilgrim settlement had, from its beginning, been the object of distinctly unfriendly feeling and deed on the part of the religious party that was dominant in the company. Some of the sorest of the troubles that beset that forlorn hope of a colony in their preparations for the voyage, and pursued them into their refuge in the wilderness, proceeded from that Puritan party to which they were bound by identity of religious opinion and by feelings of reverence towards its great preachers and theologians. The Puritans abhorred the schism by which the Separatists had torn themselves loose from the general fellowship of English Christians, and had been shocked at the acrimonious denunciations flung back upon the National Church by some who had left it. The record of the seceders had not been altogether such as to command respect. Among them had been martyrs and confessors of whom the world was not worthy. But their earliest leader, Robert Browne, a man of prophetic mind, in whose writings are enunciated those principles of polity both in church and state which after three centuries have come to general acceptance in America, had not in him the stuff for a martyr, and after a stormy day his sun set under a cloud. Of the churches of The Separation, existing in exile under the protection of the Dutch Republic, some had brought scandal on their cause, by meddlesome attempts at discipline, by disputes over questions which to...