The year 1920 witnesses the commemoration of the tercentenary of the Pilgrim Fathers' departure from the Old World for the shores of the New. In the summer of 1620 a little band of men and women after much careful thought and prayer left their homes and country for a new place where, as pioneers of a freer and less material thought, they could worship God according to the demands which enlightenment made upon him.
Had they been concerned with themselves alone they might have enjoyed tolerance and a degree of material comfort as guests and ultimately as citizens of Holland. For twelve years after they had fled from the persecution in England they had lived in Amsterdam and then at Leyden. But this experience forced upon them the conclusion that if they were safely to keep the particular heritage of spiritual knowledge of which they felt themselves the God-appointed guardians, they would need effectively to protect their little community from being submerged in the active life and thought of the Holland of the seventeenth century. Settlement either in busy Amsterdam or in the more secluded and scholarly Leyden involved, therefore, a very serious consideration to the English exiles.
Prolonged residence in any country is followed by the adoption of its language, and these English people cared as much for their language as for their nationality and they resolved to lose neither. It was therefore decided that, putting aside all considerations of material comfort and the dread of the unknown, the Pilgrims should once more go forward to preserve that which in heaven-born clear-sightedness they felt was indeed worth a supreme adventure.
