thereunto, for the propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in these remote parts of the world; yea, though they should be as stepping stones unto others for performing of so great a work." Their first motive in getting out of Egypt had been, as it were, simply a three days' journey into the wilderness to sacrifice freely unto their God. They do not seem to have dreamed, while in England, of the great conception of founding a colony of God in the New World. But this was what God had for them to do, and in due time he told them of it, made them sensible of their mission, woke up in their hearts a desire for it, broke up their encampment in Etham, and caused them to enter the sea.

The day before their embarkation in 1620, their beloved and venerated pastor preached from the text in Ezra 8:28, “And there at the river Ahava I proclaimed a fast, that we might humble ourselves before our God, and seek of him a right way for us, and for our children, and for all our substance." "So," says the Pilgrim Bradford, "they left that goodly and pleasant city, which had been their resting-place near twelve years. But they knew that they were PILGRIMS, and looked not so much on those things, but lifted up their eyes to heaven, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits." It was a great day in the history of the world, this fast day by the sea. It was a remarkable discourse in which the Pastor poured into the minds of these framers of a new world in Christ the last instructions he was ever to give to his flock this side the grave. What would we not give for the whole of what he uttered that day! Mr. Winslow, who was present, has reported part of it, a prophetic part, of almost inspired wisdom. "I charge you," said he, "before God and his blessed angels, to follow me no further than I follow Christ; and if God should reveal anything to you by any other instrument of his, be as ready to receive it, as you ever were to receive any truth by my ministry; for I am very confident the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word."

This address of Robinson to the Pilgrims was something entirely out of the ordinary course of human affairs. It was like a message from some old prophet of God. It has the character of something supernatural, as if the speaker were rapt into a vision of the future, and were under an impulse, not of his own spirit, but carried, as it were, in an inspiration out of himself. seem to see a prophet, a lawgiver, lifted as on a mount of vision, from which he bends forward, addressing, across the ocean, the future millions of the Western world.

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The next day, the Pilgrims proceeded down to the port at Delft Haven, a few miles from Leyden, and the wind being fair, went at once on board ship. On the deck of the vessel, Robin son kneeled down in the midst of them, and in the presence of

many spectators on the quay, commended them and their enterprise to God. How sacred and solemn was that hour of supplication! In all history there is no finer subject for a great painter, than the moment of this parting prayer of Robinson's on the ship's deck.

No eye but God's followed the Pilgrims across the wintry ocean. Little have they said of their sufferings in that long and dangerous passage, but have spoken of God's providence and mercy. With a simplicity, that in itself is sublime, they narrate the perils of their landing, and first surveys, on an icebound, untried coast, in freezing weather, which was death's icy arrow to many a precious frame. They tell of God's good providence in the discovery of hidden corn, beneath ground so covered with snow and so hard frozen, that we were fain, say they, with our curtleaxes and short swords, to hew and cut the ground a foot deep, and then wrest it up with levers. They tell of the delight with which they found fresh springs, and sat down and drank their first New England water-emblem of that sacred stream God was opening, through them, for future generations, to supply the city of our God. They tell of their first perilous encounter with the Indians, whom it pleased God to vanquish; and how, after giving God thanks for this deliverance, they went on, amidst snow and rain and bad weather, and imminent danger of shipwreck to their little shallop. The labor of their discovery and landing at Plymouth was amidst watchings all night in the rain; the wind northwest and freezing hard, with great difficulty to kindle a fire for the wet, cold, and feeble. The pleasure of the Divine Providence is hailed by them. "But it was very cold," say they, "for the water froze on our clothes, and made them many times like coats of iron." They recount their first Sabbath of rest at Plymouth; but what a rest! amidst hunger and peril, houseless, in the open bitter elements! And meantime God was preparing severer trials than any of these; for when the little. worn and wearied party returned to the ship to comfort the hearts of their brethren with news of their discovery and landing, they had to learn that the dear wife of William Bradford had fallen from the ship and was drowned. By what a baptism of hardships and suffering did it please God that our Pilgrim fathers should lay the foundations of his Church in our beloved country! yet with what patience, what calm simplicity of resolution and trust in God, what undying hope, and unrepining endurance! Indeed, they died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and Pilgrims on the earth.

And these were the men by whom God was opening and demonstrating to the world the discoveries of truth essential to the

world's peace, on which only the world's welfare could rest, by the working of which alone individual kingdoms could be conducted to the enjoyment of an indestructible liberty, and all the world's empires could be bound in mutual harmony and love. The opening of these discoveries was to be from point to point, not all at once, as a flood of supernatural light, but disciplinary, providential, by more truth and light breaking forth out of God's word, as Mr. Robinson prophesied, as they were able to bear it; truth and light received by those whom God had placed in such circumstances as made thema willing to receive it, those from whom he had, even by inimical and violent hands, removed the films of prejudice, those from before whose minds he had broken down the darkening piles of State despotism at the door of the Church, and whom he had removed, by themselves, into the wilderness, in order to let the light of the Scriptures shine. And the demonstration of these discoveries was to be as gradual as the growth of a vigorous, free, Christian State, in perfect religious liberty, beneath their light and influence. As a child passes from discipline to discipline, from school to school, from lower to higher masters, so from step to step God led our Fathers, so naturally, that at the time they could no more see the great end to which he was bringing them, or the intended and expected consummation of light, than a being ignorant of the material processes of our world, who should be placed for the first time where he could watch the dawning of the day, could measure the stealthy imperceptible steps of the morning, or predict the glorious appearance of the sun. Indeed, at the time, they were often so overwhelmed with difficulties, and absorbed in the questions of this day's and the morrow's preservation, that as to God's providence and intentions, or their own discoveries of his future will, they were like men lost in catacombs, and feeling their way in almost total darkness.

And yet they were coming to discoveries, which were to renew the face of the earth; they were working out problems by the solution of which the world was to be brought from its abode with the dead into the light of the living. They were discoveries grander than that of a new world, and to be gained through infinitely greater toil than that of Columbus. They were problems, indeed, upon the solution of which they could merely enter, merely take the first steps, while other generations would be requisite to complete them; but the right entrance was essential, and had not the first setps been steps in God, the after progress would have been from intricacy to intricacy, instead of opening into perfect day. The corn of wheat mist fall into the ground and die, or it would have remained alone, and nothing would have grown from it. There must of necessity be this death to self, and then the seed was to ripen into a glorious harvest.

They offered themselves as this self-denying, yet ever-living corn; God selected, God prepared them, and by his providence and grace induced and perfected the self-offering. They were that corn that fell into the ground and died forgotten, uncared for, unpraised, cast out and derided, of the whole world. They were that corn, that handful of corn, as on the tops of the mountains, and from it sprang the fruit, shaking like Lebanon, that now fills this country, and is fast filling the world.

But these discoveries all lay involved in the knowledge and development of the true idea of the Church. That was to be disentangled from the lies of the god of this world, from the despotism and mistakes of men; it was to be disinterred from the mighty fabric of wood, hay, and stubble, in worldly ceremonies and hierarchies, under which it had been buried for centuries. The Church, rightly conceived, contains the destinies of the world wrapped up in it; the Church is the germ of the world's true life, and only as that germ grows, the world's true life grows. The Church, or rather, the Spirit through the Church, is to govern the world's form, will conquer it, will control it, will shape it for God. When the world's form is such as springs from the development of life in the Church, or grows by an indissoluble connexion with it, then, it is true, it is indestructible, it is imperishable. The Church is the soul of the world, containing the law of the world's permanent happiness, from which the world's forms are to be organized and developed, just as the germ of a seed in the earth contains folded up within it the law and form of the future plant in its perfection. If the world's forms grow awry, despotic, infernal, by and for themselves, they are mere excrescences, and will have to be changed or cut away. Everything shall grow from and for the immortal germ, the Life of Christ, hidden in the Church, to expand and subdue the world to itself. The conquest is to be perfected, and in it the glory of the Lord is to be revealed, and all flesh is to see it together.

The kingdom of God is as leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. The world is as raw and unprepared for God's glory, until the Life of Christ in the Church interpenetrates and governs it, as a measure of meal unleavened, unformed, uncooked, unfit for nourishment, without bond or principle of unity or continuity, ready to be blown away by the wind, ready to scatter like dust. Until the true principles, the indestructible, eternal principles, on which God would raise his Church, were discovered, nothing of permanence was discovered, nothing of lasting interest, nothing of importance, nothing that could give peace. The world rocked to and fro, like a ship in a storm, without helm, without anchor

age, and so, till Christ rules, it must continue to rock, beneath God's great announcement, I will overturn, overturn, overturn.

The ecclesiastical discoveries of the Puritans were discoveries at the centre, discoveries of the way in which God works, not man. They were discoveries of divine law. They were not speculations like an Ecclesiastical Polity of Hooker, theorizings of ingenious sophistry in support of power, grand scaffoldings to build a system that was to be thrown down. They were neither the inflations nor the sweepings of the house of philosophy. They were not forms of external law and organization presupposed, or copied from the man of sin and son of perdition, and impressed upon the world to make everything bend to them, beneath the power of a machinery of despotism, brought to bear upon crude, ignorant, barbarous, unprepared material. They were discoveries of the principles of Christian liberty and law, working from within, not from without; not things that could be laid down and demonstrated in eight books, but things which God only could demonstrate, by showing them in actual life, free life, spontaneous life, life from inward principle, not from law laid down, and organization prescribed in a human directory. They were discoveries of the leaven of bread, and not of a machinery, or the laws of a machinery, by which bread could be made without leaven. They were discoveries in regard to the principle of gravitation in the spiritual universe, and not speculations in regard to the crust of our globe, or conclusions of despotism from the vestiges of creation, how to make, develope, and govern a globe like ours.

Some of these discoveries were things that almost seem to us at the present time to be truisms, we have seen them so long, we have lived by them, we are so accustomed to them from our infancy. But Hooker well said, that many talk of the truth, who know not the depth from whence it springeth; and eminently true is this of the principles of simple liberty, which, at such incalculable cost, by such intense discipline of suffering, the Puritans were made God's instruments in working out. They were then unknown to the whole world. They were principles hated of the world, and guards were set over them, and proclamations issued against them as the world's enemies, and rewards offered for their extermination. They were regarded as monstrosities, as forms of evil and malignity, worse than ever issued from the fabled caves of demons sealed up by Solomon. And they are still so regarded by a large part of the world, the blindness having been removed only from a few kingdoms, and only in part from them.

The spiritual discoveries so precious and familiar to us, are almost as strange and monstrous to multitudes, as the brute gods of old Egypt seem now to a Christian mind, as the true system of