It is a world privilege that in December, in this year of grace 1920, we are celebrating the Tercentenary of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers on the shores of New England. The study of history in the past has been too much from a material standpoint. Surely the time is swiftly coming when history will be seen to be the development of the spiritual idea of Truth in the minds of men, and the struggle of this idea for articulation, growth, and final supremacy. The promise in the sixth chapter of Genesis is, "My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh;" that is, the time is coming when Spirit will be proved All-in-all, and matter or the flesh to be nothingness, an image only of the carnal or mortal mind. The present opportunity now given in current literature both sides of the Atlantic, of reviving our knowledge and study of the events of that stirring period of pilgrimage is truly invaluable, for with a just understanding of what the Pilgrims stood for and accomplished, it is somewhat easier to understand the exact position which Christian Science holds in the world to-day. It is the reasonable, the blessed outcome of the faith and freedom which they won for posterity, three hundred years ago!
There is no more dramatic, no more romantic page in all the annals of civilization than that depicting the sailing of the little Mayflower from Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620. That brave company of one hundred and two people was seeking the promised land of Spirit, and ready to yield their material all in its achievement. They were the outcome of the great religious revival of their age, the climax of nearly a century of earnest thinking that had intervened since the defeat of the Spanish Armada. They belonged to the ever growing body of Christians all over Europe who believed that the Reformation had only gone halfway; that the open study of the Bible had but just begun, and should be free to all.
Strange that the very man, James I, under whose protection and supervision the great authorized version of the Bible in the English tongue was being prepared, should have been at the same time the channel for blocking the independent reading of that same Bible and the spread of the gospel to the other side of the world. Many fell away under the weight of the ecclesiastical machinery he set up throughout the realm. There was the case of Gervaise Neville, for instance, who once had the daring to characterize the Episcopal order of the church as an "antichristian hierarchic," but in after years it was alas, written of him that "now he be further run backward than ever he was forward!" There were others, however, who remained firm in the battle for freedom of conscience.
