Looking through history's pages, one finds much for which to thank previous generations. Any freedom the world enjoys today is perhaps not unconnected with the Pilgrim Fathers' journey to a new world where they could worship God according to their highest ideals. Mary Baker Eddy says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 176), "The Pilgrims came to establish a nation in true freedom, in the rights of conscience." Several times in her writings our Leader stresses the rights of conscience which the Pilgrims demanded to exercise when they withdrew to the almost unknown shores of a strange continent.
One's conscience is his intuitive faculty of deciding what is right and just. And a matter of conscience is one in which the individual is bound to act in accord with his inward conviction of right. The Pilgrims acted in this way, and their experience gives an encouraging illustration of God's protection of those who are conscientious in obeying their divinely derived intuitions. The protection given the Israelites when they left Egypt has been recalled and celebrated ever since the days of their journey. God has been praised for His goodness toward those who had the courage to break away from tyranny in order to worship the invisible God according to the rights of conscience. But little is said, or even widely known, of the protection the Pilgrims were accorded by the same sheltering Deity.
For instance, a friendly Indian, Samoset, appeared shortly after the Pilgrims had chosen Plymouth as the right place for their settlement. Samoset welcomed them in English, and he explained that the Pilgrims had selected the only area in that section of the coast which was not occupied by Indian tribes—the only area where they would not have been challenged. The tribe which had owned this land had been wiped out four years previously by an epidemic, and for this reason the place was deserted. The ground, also, was adequately cleared for raising much-needed crops, and this was of particular benefit.
