It would be incompatible with the limits of this volume to recite in detail the story of the Pilgrims; it has been told more amply and with fuller repetition than almost any other chapter of human history, and is never to be told or heard without awakening that thrill with which the heartstrings respond to the sufferings and triumphs of Christ's blessed martyrs and confessors. But, more dispassionately studied with reference to its position and relations in ecclesiastical history, it cannot be understood unless the sharp and sometimes exasperated antagonism is kept in view that existed between the inconsiderable faction, as it was esteemed, of the Separatists, and the great and growing Puritan party at that time in disfavor with king and court and hierarchy, but soon to become the dominant party not only in the Church of England, but in the nation. It is not strange that the antagonism between the two parties should be lost sight of. The two are identified in their theological convictions, in their spiritual sympathies, and, for the most part, in their judgment on questions concerning the externals of the church; and presently their respective colonies, planted side by side, not without mutual doubts and suspicions, are to grow together, leaving no visible seam of juncture, Like kindred drops commingling into one.[84:1] To the Puritan reformer within the Church of England, the act of the Pilgrims at Scrooby in separating themselves from the general mass of English Christians, mingled though that mass might be with a multitude of unworthy was nothing less than the sin of schism. One effect of the act was to reflect odium upon the whole party of Puritans, and involve them in the suspicion of that sedition which was so unjustly, but with such fatal success, imputed to the Separatists. It was a hard and doubtful warfare that the Puritans were waging against spiritual wickedness in high places; the defection of the Separatists doubly weakened them in the conflict. It is not strange, however it may seem so, that the animosity of Puritan toward Separatist was sometimes acrimonious, nor that the public reproaches hurled at the unpopular little party should have provoked recriminations upon the assailants as being involved in the defilements and the plagues of Babylon, and should have driven the Separatists into a narrower exclusiveness of separation, cutting themselves off not only from communion with abuses and corruptions in the Church of England, but even from fellowship with good and holy men in the national church who did not find it a duty to secede.