as by the most strong cords of heaven, drawn effectually and with all the heart, to love God again who hath loved him first, and so becomes one with him, and rests upon him, for all good."

"Love is the loadstone of love; and the most ready and compendious way to be beloved of others is to love them first. They, taking knowledge thereof, will be effectually drawn to answerable good-will, if they be not harder than iron, and such as have cast off the chains and bonds of common humanity; for even 'publicans and sinners love those that love them.' Yea, admit thy love of them never come to their knowledge, yet will God, by the invisible hand of his providence, bend their hearts by mutual affection unto thee, at least so far as is good for thee. . . . We must not be like the Pharisees who, instead of enlarging their own affections, straightened [narrowed] the law of loving their neighbors unto such as loved them or dwelt within a certain compass of them; but we must account all our neighbors that need pity or help from us; and our Christian neighbors and brethren also, if the Lord have received them, though they be neither minded in all things as we are, nor minded towards us as we are towards them.' 991

The Separatists were charged sometimes with heresy, always with schism. On the topic of "heresy and schism," the pastor of the Pilgrims might hold forth light in words like these:

"Men are often accounted heretics with greater sin through want of charity in the judges than in the judged through defect of faith. Of old, some have been branded heretics for holding antipodes; others for holding the original of the soul by traduction; others for thinking that Mary the mother of Christ had other children by her husband Joseph-the first being a certain truth; and the second a philosophical doubt; and the third, though an error, yet neither against

1 Works, i., 64-66.

foundation nor post of the Scripture's building. As there are certain elements and foundations of the oracles of God and of Christian faith, which must first be laid, and upon which other truths are to be built, so must not the foundation be confounded with the walls or roof; nor [must] errors lightly be made fundamental or unavoidably damnable. Yea, who can say with how little and imperfect faith in Christ, both for degree and parts, God both can and doth save the sincere in heart, whose salvation depends not upon the perfection of the instrument, faith, but of the object, Christ? On the contrary, there are some vulgar and common errors, though less severely censured, which are apparently damnable-as, by name, for a man to believe and expect mercy from God and salvation by Christ, though going on in affected ignorance of, or profane disobedience to God's commandments."

"If only an uncharitable heart make an uncharitable person before God, and a proud heart a proud person, then he who, upon due examination and certain knowledge of his heart, finds and feels the same truly disposed to union with all Christians so far as possibly he can see it lawful-though through error or frailty he may step aside into some by-path—yet hath that person a supersedeas from the Lord in his bosom, securing him from being attached as a schismatical person, and so found in the court of heaven what blame soever he may bear from men upon earth, or correction from God, for his failing, upon infirmity, therein.

"No man can endure to be withdrawn from, nor easily dissented from by another, in his way of religion; in which, above all other things, he makes account that he himself draws nearest to God. Therefore to do this causelessly (for not the separation but the cause makes the schismatic), though out of error or scrupulosity, is evil; more, to do it out of wantonness of mind, or lust to contend, or affectation

of singularity; most of all, to do it out of proud contempt or cruel revenge against others.” 1

The last essay is "Of Death." To most of those who had loved and honored the writer as their pastor, the first reading of it must have been when they were "sorrowing most of all that they should see his face no more." Surely they must have seemed to hear some of his tones and cadences, as if

"From the sky, serene and far,

A voice fell like a falling star,"

while they read, through their tears, these latest words of teaching and of comfort from him who had so bravely borne with them the heat and burden of their day :

"Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints,' when they die for, or in, faith and a good conscience; as the gold, melting and dissolving in the furnace, is as much esteemed by the goldsmith as any in his shop or purse. Precious also it is while they live, and that which God will not lightly suffer to befall them. And if he put their tears in his bottle, he will not neglect their blood, nor easily suffer it to be shed; neither doth death, when it comes, part him and them, though it part man and man, yea man and wife, yea man in himself, soul and body. Friends show themselves faithful in sticking to their friends in sickness and all other afflictions; but they, how affectionate soever, must leave them in death, and are glad to remove them, and have ‘their dead buried out of their sight.' But the fruit of God's love reacheth unto death itself-in which he doth his beloved ones the greatest good, when friends can do no more for them.

"He that said, 'Before death and the funeral no man is happy,' spake the truth, as he meant, of the happiness which can be found in worldly things. But both he, and they who have so admired his saying, should have considered that he

1 Works, i., 70, 72.
R

who is not happy before death in worldly things, can not be happy in them by it which deprives him of them all, and of life itself, which is better than they, and for which they are. But miserable, indeed, is the happiness whereof a man hath neither beginning nor certainty but by ceasing to be a man. The godly are truly happy both in life and death, the wicked in neither.

"We are not to mourn for the death of our Christian friends, as they which are without hope, either in regard of them or of ourselves;-not of them, because such as are asleep with Jesus, God will bring with him to a more glorious life, in which we (in our time and theirs) shall ever remain with the Lord and them;-not of ourselves, as if, because they had left us, God had left us also. But we should take occasion by their deaths to love this world the less, out of which they are taken, and heaven the more, whither they are gone before us, and where we shall ever enjoy them. Amen.”

CHAPTER XIII.

STRUGGLES AND SACRIFICES IN A GREAT ATTEMPT.

So long as the Pilgrims remained in Holland, they never ceased to feel that they were simply exiles from their country-strangers in a strange land. They were ever waiting, with hope deferred, for some such change in the policy of the English government as would permit them to go home. None of them could forget that the change of policy which took place when Mary was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth brought back hundreds of English fugitives from all parts of Europe. Who could tell how soon the providence of God, in whose hand is "the king's heart as the rivers of water, and he turneth it whithersoever he will," might open the way for their return? In that hope, they labored and struggled; they ate contentedly the bread of carefulness; they bore each other's burdens, fulfilling the law of Christ; they married and were given in marriage; they greeted the birth of children in their households, and gave them to God in baptism; they buried, in hope of "a better country, even a heavenly," many an associate in testimony and in suffering, whose eyes had failed with longing for the sight of dear old England. In that hope, the church for which they had suffered, and which encircled them with the bond of its covenant, grew dearer to them year by year; the simplicity and purity of its worship, the fidelity and efficacy of its discipline, and the constant wealth of "teaching" from its honored pastor, were more and more valued by them, as showing what might be in England if liberty were there. But gradually that hope was receding. While some had found their graves in that foreign soil, others were growing old. What was to become of their children? What would become of