ACTS BIBLE
The ones who left
The Puritans wanted the Church of England purified. The Separatists judged that it could not be, gathered churches by covenant outside it, and were hanged for it. One of those congregations sailed in 1620 and its governor wrote the book.
The documents behind this page: Browne's 1582 treatise by its title, the Act of 35 Elizabeth I, the executions of 1593, Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation from the manuscript, the Mayflower Compact, and Winslow's letter of 1621.
That Puritan and Separatist name the same people.
The categories really do blur. In its widest sense the word Puritan covers both parties, they held the same Calvinist doctrine, and the sources call the Separatists separating Puritans as often as anything else. Robert Browne, whose treatise gave the movement its nickname, was an active Separatist for six years and then conformed and went back to the Church of England for the rest of his life. On the Mayflower the church members were a minority of the passengers.
The line between them is not doctrine, it is the church question, and it is sharp. The non-separating Puritan judged the Church of England a true church needing reform and stayed in it to push. The Separatist judged that a parish drawn by a bishop is not a church at all, and that a church is a company of believers who join themselves by covenant, so he left and gathered one. Bradford's own sentence names both halves: they shook off the yoke and joined themselves by a covenant of the Lord into a church estate.
That separating was a matter of preference, not of danger.
The crown did not say it was punishing faith. Barrow and Greenwood were convicted of devising and circulating seditious books, and the state held that a subject who denies the sovereign's authority in religion is a political danger in a century of assassination plots and armadas. Read the indictments alone and this looks like a government defending itself rather than a church persecuting Christians.
Then read what the law actually reached. The Act of 35 Elizabeth I jailed anyone over sixteen for staying away from church or attending a meeting the state had not licensed, and exiled those who would not conform in three months. Two men were hanged at Bury St Edmunds for handing round a book. Penry went to the gallows on the strength of a draft petition found in his private papers that had never been presented or published. A state that hangs a man for what he wrote and did not send is punishing conscience, whatever the charge sheet says.
That the Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic to find freedom of religion.
They already had it. Holland let them worship as they chose for eleven or twelve years, and they left anyway. Bradford's own list of reasons puts hard labour first, then men worn out before their time, then their children being drawn away by the licentiousness of the country and by the work that broke them. Those are economic and parental reasons, and a lesson that hides them to keep the story noble is hiding Bradford's own page.
Bradford gives four reasons and the fourth is in his own hand: a great hope and inward zeal of laying some good foundation for the propagating and advancing of the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world, though they should be but stepping-stones for others. Mission is stated, in writing, by the man who was there, and it sits alongside the wages and the children rather than instead of them.
That the Compact founded a Christian nation on Christian principles.
Bradford says plainly what occasioned it, and it is not a sermon. Some of the passengers who were not of the church had said that once ashore they would use their own liberty, because the patent was for Virginia and they had landed outside it. The Compact was drafted to hold a shipload of strangers together under a government that no charter covered, and it binds them to civil laws for the general good, not to a confession of faith.
What matters is the form they reached for under pressure. These were people whose church existed because they had covenanted themselves into it, and facing a civil emergency they wrote another covenant: in the presence of God and one another, combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, and frame just and equal laws to which we promise all due submission. Government by the consent of the governed, in writing, in 1620, because that was the only shape of common life they knew.
That the Pilgrims held the first Thanksgiving in 1621.
Almost every detail of the popular version fails. One eyewitness account of the 1621 gathering survives, a letter of Edward Winslow's, and it never uses the word thanksgiving; the colonists themselves called that a different thing, a day of prayer, and Plymouth's first was in 1623. Nobody called 1621 the first Thanksgiving until an editor's footnote in 1841. The national holiday dates from 1863.
The record we do have is better than the pageant. Winslow writes that the governor sent four men fowling, that ninety Wampanoag men came with Massasoit, that they stayed three days and went out and killed five deer and brought them in. That is a harvest, an alliance one year old, and two peoples eating what the other brought. It needs no improvement, and improving it is what has made it easy to dismiss.
That Plymouth and its Native neighbours were a story of friendship.
It ended in blood, and our side wrote it down. In 1637 an alliance that included Plymouth burned the Pequot fort at Mystic with its people inside, and Bradford describes the burning, the smell of it, and calls the victory a sweet sacrifice for which they gave praise to God. In 1675 the alliance broke. Massasoit's son Metacom was killed, his head was set on a pike at the entrance to Plymouth where it stood for more than twenty years, and his wife and nine-year-old son were captured and sold as slaves in Bermuda.
Both halves are in the same book and both belong in the same lesson. The treaty of six articles held for more than fifty years, longer than most treaties anywhere, and Tisquantum kept that colony alive through a year it had no right to survive. And the colony that made that treaty broke it, and the men who confessed that God made every man in His image wrote a page praising a fire that killed four hundred. Scripture judges the Pilgrims too, and they said so themselves.
That Baptist churches in America descend from Plymouth.
The resemblance is close enough to fool anyone. Plymouth gathered a church by covenant, governed it without bishops, and held that the state has no authority to compose a congregation. Read a Baptist church covenant beside Bradford's first chapter and they look like parent and child, and plenty of pulpits have said exactly that in November.
The principle is shared and the line is not. The Particular Baptists who wrote the 1689 Confession came out of a Separatist congregation in London between 1638 and 1641, from English Puritanism rather than from Plymouth or from the continent. What Plymouth did pass on is visible elsewhere: when the non-separating Puritans of Massachusetts Bay gathered their first church at Salem in 1629 they did it by covenant, with Plymouth's deacon there to advise and Bradford making the trip to give them the right hand of fellowship.
So many therfore of these proffessors as saw y^e evill of these things, in thes parts, and whose harts y^e Lord had touched w^th heavenly zeale for his trueth, they shooke of this yoake of antichristian bondage, and as y^e Lords free people, joyned them selves (by a covenant of the Lord) into a church estate, in y^e felowship of y^e gospell, to walke in all his wayes, made known, or to be made known unto them, according to their best endeavours, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them. And that it cost them something this ensewing historie will declare.
Of Plymouth Plantation, Book I, chapter 1
This is the Separatist position in one sentence, and the last line is the whole book's warning label. A covenant, entered freely, to walk in everything God has shown them and everything He has not shown them yet, whatever it costs.
Lastly, (and which was not least,) a great hope & inward zeall they had of laying some good foundation, or at least to make some way therunto, for y^e propagating & advancing y^e gospell of y^e kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of y^e world; yea, though they should be but even as stepping-stones unto others for y^e performing of so great a work.
Of Plymouth Plantation, Book I, chapter 4, the last of four reasons
Bradford lists four reasons for leaving Leiden and this is the fourth. The first three are the hardness of the place, the wearing out of grown men before their time, and what the city was doing to their children. A class that quotes only this one has made them nobler than Bradford did.
It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearfull sight to see them thus frying, in ye fyer, and ye streams of blood quenching ye same, and horrible was ye stinck & sente ther of; but ye victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prays therof to God, who had wrought so wonderfuly for them.
Of Plymouth Plantation, Book II, anno 1637
The hardest page in the book, and it is in the same hand as the covenant sentence. A teacher who quotes Bradford on the church and not on Mystic is choosing which of his pages the class is allowed to weigh.