A pilgrim people

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 791.

RELIGION

"They knew they were pilgrims," wrote William Bradford, one of their first governors, of the little group of English men and women who set sail from the city of Leyden, Holland, in 1620. Though the people of Holland had welcomed them, the little group of English Protestants had never felt really at home there. Now they were sailing for England on the first step of their journey to the New World.

The Pilgrims left behind them a continent torn by religious quarrels. For over a thousand years, Roman Catholic Christianity had been the religion of most of Europe. But by the 16th century, many people had grown to resent the richly decorated churches and ornate ceremonies of the Catholic Church. They resented the power of the Pope, the head of the Catholic Church, as well as the bishops, many of whom lived as magnificently as civil rulers.

Early in the 16th century, Martin Luther, a German monk, broke with the Catholic Church. Luther's teaching emphasized direct personal responsibility to God, challenging the role of the Church as an intermediary. A few years later, John Calvin, a French lawyer, also left the Catholic Church. One of his basic concepts was the idea of God as absolute sovereign, another challenge to the Church's authority.

As a result of their protesting of widely accepted teachings, Luther, Calvin and other religious reformers soon became known as Protestants. Their ideas spread rapidly through northern Europe. Soon established Protestant Churches had arisen in several European lands.

The modern concept of religious tolerance was not widespread. People were expected to follow the religion of their king. Catholics and Protestants fought each other and many religious people on both sides died for their beliefs

In England, King Henry VIII (1491-1547) formed a national Church with himself as its leader. But many English people considered the Church of England too much like the Catholic Church. They became known as Puritans, because they wanted a "pure" and simple Church. The ideas of John Calvin particularly appealed to these Puritans.

When James I became King of England in 1603, he began to persecute the Puritans. Many went to prison or left the country. The Puritans could not always agree among themselves either. Many small Puritan groups formed in England. The Pilgrims who went to the New World belonged to one of them.

The Pilgrims left England with a patent, or permission to settle land, from the Virginia Company, a private company which already owned another colony at Jamestown, Virginia. The Pilgrims landed at Cape Cod, a sandy hook of land in what is now the state of Massachusetts. Their patent gave them no authority to settle there—they were too far north. The Pilgrims turned south, but they ran into waves and storms. So they turned north again and anchored in the cape harbor.

Some of the people who had joined the Pilgrims in London began to complain. They said the Pilgrim leaders had no right to govern land not controlled by the Virginia Company. The Pilgrim leaders were faced with a governmental crisis. How could they unite their people to face the dangers of the wilderness?

As religious believers, the Pilgrims had formed a congregation, or small group of church members, by joining themselves together and choosing a minister. They did this through a contract, and they considered such congregations the basic unit of the Church.

When the Pilgrims assembled on their ship, the Mayflower, they formed a government in the same way they had formed their congregation. They made a contract, which became known as the "Mayflower Compact."

With this contract, they agreed to form a "civil body politic" which could make "just and equal laws" for the colony. Most of the grown men of the group signed the compact. Then they began the search for a place to build their homes.

Other Puritans soon followed the Pilgrims to Massachusetts and established towns there. Like other Protestants, they read the Bible often and claimed the right to interpret or explain the meaning of the Holy Book for themselves. The Puritans were particularly interested in the Old Testament.

The Old Testament describes the history of the Jewish people as a contract between God and Israel. God's contract with the Jewish people was the model for the covenants by which the Puritans formed their congregations. The Puritans thought of themselves as a special people. "We shall be as a city upon a hill," wrote John Winthrop, (1588-1649) another Puritan leader. "The eyes of all people are upon us."

Like other followers of Calvin, the Puritans considered worldly success a sign of being saved. They considered their increasing prosperity a sign that God was pleased with them. They generally assumed that those who disagreed with their religious ideas were not saved and therefore should not be tolerated.

In 1636, Roger Williams (1603-1683) was forced out of Massachusetts for disagreeing with the ministers there. He founded a colony in what later became the state of Rhode Island. Rhode Island allowed religious freedom to everyone, and it became a refuge for people persecuted for their religion.

Two other American states began as heavens of religious freedom. Maryland was founded as a refuge for Catholics. And Pennsylvania was founded as a refuge for Quakers, a religious group which adopted a very plain way of life and refused to participate in war or to take oaths.