THE HOMILETIC REVIEW Published Monthly by Funk & Wagnalls Company, 354-360 Fourth Avenue, New York. (Adam W. Wagnalls, Pres.; Wilfred J. Funk, Vice-Pres.; Robert J. Cuddihy, Treas.; William Neisel, Sec.) VOL. LXXX NOVEMBER, 1920 No. 5 THE MEANING AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE It is well that the entire Christian world pause in this critical year in human history to consider the significance of that event occurring three centuries ago which has affected the form and character of religious thought and national consitutions throughout the world. We study the Pilgrims, not that we may passively admire their courage and devotion to exalted ideals, but that we may, from them and their acts, be better qualified to serve our own generation. We are at once confronted with the dynamic of a worthy ideal. The Pilgrims in England and in Holland were weak in numbers, and without wealth and influential backing. They had no ability to appeal to popular imagination or to curry favor with the powers that bè, but quite the contrary. Their capital was a lofty ideal which dominated their entire being and became their guiding principle. This ideal produced under its benign sway what we call the Pilgrim spirit that led in turn to action, and under this spirit, through action, was formed that which has commanded and still commands the admiration of the world, namely, the Pilgrim character. This was their capital, their stock in trade, their only resource for conquering a new world and securing intellectual and religious liberty for the human race. Their overmastering ideal was "liberty under law," and the law to which they appealed was the law of God. This is made clear by the Mayflower Compact. The Compact itself was the constitution of the new colony for the creation of a body politic. It is a significant fact that in the 158 words employed in the covenant, omitting the formal witnessing and signatures, 27 words or one-sixth of the body of the document, are devoted to the recognition of God and the supremacy of his reign. Here we have a masterly example of the recognition of the necessity of law and the supremacy of the divine Ruler in matters of State. We find in this document no place for priestly intervention or the exercise of the divine right of kings. The Pilgrims covenanted for the daily practise in both Church and State of the sovereignty and immanence of Almighty God. We are here inquiring into the meaning and significance of these events of three centuries ago as applicable to this twentieth century. If this tercentenary has no significance for us, it were best that we waste little time in rehearsing what the pilgrims were and what they did; it is but an interesting piece of history written in a book that is sealed and for an age that has passed away. We can not, however, accept this conclusion. The end and purpose of this tercentenary commemoration should be to awaken in the minds and consciences of the people of this country and the world a new appreciation of the Pilgrims' contribution to government and liberty under law and secure their devoted cooperation in a more effective and practical application of their principles to the problems of this generation. If this generation fails to catch the spirit of the Pilgrims, the streams of Pilgrim influence will cease to flow through us to the centuries yet to come. What then is the significance and meaning to us of this historic fact?. We can not escape from the conclusion that the Pilgrim ideal, spirit, and character had their source in a God of law and order. This fact is of outstanding prominence in their conception of Church and State. We can not imagine the Pilgrim Fathers achieving success in anything or as passing on to us aught that could command our gratitude or even our consideration apart from this undergirding assumption. We too are dealing with questions as significant and as imperative as confronted them. Our national life has become complex and with a tendency quite the opposite of simplification. A thousand complications have entered, tending to divert attention from fundamental principles. Party supremacy, social inequalities, racial differences, commercial complications, religious controversies, and a hundred distracting elements besides have entered into our body politic and even into the Church, until we seem to be drifting away from the ideals of the Pilgrims, the exercise of their spirit, and the practise and demonstration of their character. We content ourselves with attempting to treat the surface symptom while the disease unchecked gnaws at the vitals of Church and State. We as descendants of the Pilgrims must reincarnate God in the State and recognize his supremacy in our halls of legislation, as well as in all matter of society and State. We must read in the story of the Pilgrims that eternal truth upon which they relied, that the nations which forget God will per ish; that there is no profit to a nation in winning the wealth of the world and losing its own national soul; that the Lord knows the ways of the righteous nation, but that the way of the wicked nation shall perish. We children of the Pilgrims, heirs to their ideals and to their reliance upon divine law, need to pause and review our own ideals and utterances to ascertain whether we have been true to our heritage in the message we have delivered to our own generation. We have gloriously proclaimed a divine. law for man and for society and have failed to thunder the gospel of righteousness for the nation. The Pilgrims demanded freedom of conscience under law. They denied the right of priest or sovereign to dictate what they should believe and how they should worship. They claimed the right to interpret the word of God in accordance with the ripest scholarship of their age and to order the expression of that interpretation in such a manner as would most satisfactorily express their religious emotions. It is true that they did not always concede to others the liberty demanded for themselves, and it was through this breach of obedience to their own principles of liberty that they revealed most clearly the surpassing worth of the liberty they became voluntary exiles to experience and enjoy. It is vastly easier to demand liberty for oneself than it is to concede the same privilege to others. In the theological garden intolerance flourishes, choking out that liberty with which Christ has made his followers free. The Church of Christ has not yet fully learned the meaning of liberty of conscience under the law of the spirit of God. Intolerance, theolog ical egotism, and boasted spiritual supremacy are still regnant in the Church, altho in not so violent a form as at some periods in the past. But to-day they are suficiently prevalent and active to perpetuate enervating divisions and produce criminal waste in the resources of the Church. The Mayflower Compact enthroned God and created a constitution, but it avoided a catalog of specifications that inevitably would have forced that little party into groups and sects even before they stept upon Plymouth Rock. The task remains for our generation to reincarnate that liberty which Jesus Christ brought to earth and which the Pilgrims proclaimed. The Pilgrims, while differing in many things, believed in the necessity of united action. Society first, and later the State, were to be one, altho comprising many divergent elements. Adverse opinions could be exprest, but only in an orderly way, and conclusions reached by the majority became the law of all. While they revolted from the doctrine that kings ruled by divine right, they no less strenuously guarded themselves and their colony against the rule of the mob without law. Human law to them was not far removed from divine law, since they persistently adhered to the belief of divine direction in the affairs of the State exercised through the majority of its citizens who recognized him as the God of nations as he was the ruler of men. Zeal for uniformity in nonconformity led to acts of intolerance no less condemnatory than the acts of their own persecutors on the other side of the sea. They were too close to the questions to understand their selfcondemnatory character. The principle, however, was correct, namely cooperation in the interest of the common good and under the guiding hand of God and in accordance with law. Their purpose was to unite and solidify, but in their zeal they created divisions. There was lacking a spirit of tolerance, without which no true and permanent unity can be maintained. One of the results has been the existence of a large number of religious sects, orders, or communions, all within the nonconformist fold, each one drawing courage and inspiration from the Pilgrims, believing itself to be the best interpretation of the Pilgrim ideal and spirit and therefore their true and legitimate successor. To us at this tercentenary, in the light of the centuries, there comes a clear message calling for reincarnating the spirit of toleration. It is a time to proclaim the message, not of compromise, but of Christian toleration and of recognition of the right of every child of God to practise his own interpretation of the demands upon him of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Pilgrims were not thinking so much about laying the foundations of a new State based upon the principles. of democracy as they were of organizing their own little society in the new world upon a safe working basis with guaranteed personal liberty. The most prophetic soul among them did not catch even a glimpse of a great republic stretching from sea to sea; much less did the dream of those same principles becoming gradually regnant in other nations, at that time unborn, and even permeating the intolerance of their chief persecutor with the leaven of their own overmastering faith. In a word, the principles for which they were ready to suffer the loss of all things in order to see them applied to the society of which they were a part have proved themselves equally capable of application to republics and great powers of masterful strength and proportions. We as their successors see vast possibilities in these principles of which they were largely, if not wholly, unaware. In fact, we are only slightly interested in the details of the organization and conduct of Plymouth Col ony, while we are all absorbingly interested in the application of those principles to our own national government and also to the governments of other countries. There is, however, a still wider application of these same principles to which we have as yet given scant thought, which is now thrusting itself to the front with imperative urgency. I refer to the application of the principles of the Pilgrims to international relations. Shall nations recognize God in the conduct of their own home affairs and deny him in their relations to sister nations? Shall a nation seek to establish government by law for its own citizens and eschew law in its international dealings? Shall a nation demand liberty of judgment and liberty of action under law for itself and deny the same to others? In a word, shall a nation interpret the Pilgrims' ideals and principles as applicable only to its own life and acts and not see that they are equally applicable to all international relations? This leads us to our fifth and final point, which is that the message and significance of this Pilgrim Tercentenary to us is the League of Nations in the interest of the government of the world by law and on the basis of the divine right of the individual nation set in a community of Godruled nations. Freed from the fog and confusion that conceal the fundamental aim and purpose of the League, we find it but an enlarged conception of the Compact entered into in the cabin of the Mayflower. The first Compact was for the orderly government of a colony of pilgrims; the second for the perpetuation of orderly government for the world. The first was for the mutual protection of a handful of men and women exiled from their homes, about to take up their abode upon strange and threatening shores; the latter is for the mutual protection of the nations of the world, shaken from their traditional moorings by a war of unprecedented destruction and facing conditions pregnant with peril and threatening disaster. The Covenant in the Mayflower by repeated statements recognized allegiance to Almighty God; the League makes no mention of God, but embodies in its structure the loftiest ideals of 'brotherly helpfulness and disinterested service. The league consummated in the cabin of the Mayflower was but a forerunner and shadow of the League formulated in Paris. The one became the effective foundation for the government of the colonies; the other may become the guiding instrument for the peaceable organization of the world. The fact that over thirty nations, including all of the great powers and most of the smaller ones, have ratified the League, constitutes at least a presumption that it may be able to achieve that for which it was conceived and promulgated. America alone of all the great nations, outside the central powers, hesitates to sign the compact. Is it possible that we, occupying the land of the Pilgrims, boasting our ancestry through the Pilgrim line and lauding their courage, daring, and foresight, are to fail in the perpetuation of their spirit in the interest of the government of the world by law and the maintenance of permanent peace by compact? Who would to-day have been lauding the Pilgrims and the service they rendered to the world had they been too zealous for personal ease and comfort and too timid to make the sacrifice necessary for facing the hardships and perils of the sea and the less known dangers upon a barren and unknown shore? Who to-day would recount their deeds, had they shrunk from undertaking what no one had before under taken, had they listened to the voices of those who predicted crass failure as the inevitable outcome of the State without a king. The Pilgrim name would never have been perpetuated had they not trusted to the spirit of justice in the common heart of man and upon that trust dared to erect a State. Democracy would never have been transported across the Atlantic and planted in the Plymouth Colony had not that body of men and women stood ready to pay the cost even to the last supreme sacrifice. They had some conceptions of the penalty of liberty in Church and State; but even they did not realize the final cost of it all. We thank God they did not, for now we see that, had the sacrifice demanded been ten times what it was, the worth to the world was even a thousandfold greater. Has the mantle of the Pilgrim fallen upon us? Does their blood throb in our veins and their spirit dominate our generation? "Is true freedom but to break Fetters for our own dear sake; It is only in the spirit breathed by Lowell that we can perpetuate the Pilgrim spirit and transmit its blessing to the world. THE PILGRIMS' CONTRIBUTION TO LITERATURE CHARLES A. DINSMORE, D.D., Yale University, New Haven, Conn. THAT the Pilgrims have added rich treasure to the traditions, the ideals, and the well-being of humanity will hardly be questioned; what is the value of their contribution to the world's literature? It would not have been at all surprizing if an imperishable book or a group of illustrious writers had issued from that unique movement, for many of the conditions. for the production of an altogether memorable literature were present. The stars were propitious. In the first place, the men of the Pilgrim and Puritan migrations were born and nurtured, all of them, in the most brilliant literary epoch that has burst on the world since the days of Pericles. It was the age of Shakespeare and Milton, of Francis Bacon and the King James Bible. The genius of the English people was at flood tide. The national mind was virile, spontaneous, intensely alive on many sides. Passions were elemental, language was racy, men were in love with life. Without embarrassment England can compare her famous men of the days of Good Queen Bess with the immortals, either of Florence or Athens, in any epoch. Prof. Barrett Wendell has shown that while English letters rapidly passed through the changing eras indicated by the names of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden-from spontaneity to deliberation-the men of the Puritan migration were and continued to be Elizabethan men in spontaneity, enthu siasm and versatility. Nor was culture lacking. The leaders were university men; in those early days there was a Cambridge University graduate to every 250 inhabitants, a proportion of cultivated talent hardly to be matched anywhere in history. early days there was The civilization these men planted was founded on a book. Learning was held in the highest reverence. Probably no other community of equal size ever existed where the concerns of the mind and the spirit were so completely in the |