Picture to yourself a group of citizens and their families, of good standing and of average education. In defiance of established law and order, and of the accepted, orthodox view of it, this little body of people pursues an ideal, vital to the peace of their souls, with a tenacity which implies certain loss of personal freedom and confiscation of property, with risk of death. Rather than be compelled to abandon the pursuit of their ideal, these people voluntarily exile themselves from England, thereby depriving themselves of loved homes and dear friends and worldly possessions. After a few years of severe hardships in Holland, their newly adopted country, the seed they are nurturing is threatened once again. It must be preserved at all costs. They gather it up and bear it across the seas—fearful seas—and plant it once more, forming a little settlement in the savage, distant land of North America. For years they defend their treasure there against every conceivable attack by Nature and by man, encouraged solely by the consciousness that the plant they are tending is God’s Truth—Freedom for each man to honour and worship God as he sees Him. First picture this to yourself as if it were an incident of modern occurrence, and try to realize what would be its significance. Then turn your eyes upon our Pilgrims, and watch them through their persecution in mediæval England; their flight to Holland; their hard sojourn there; their voyage across the wide seas of those days, and their settlement at New Plymouth—“in a country devoid of all civilized inhabitants, given over only to savage and brutish men, who range up and down, little differing from the wild beasts themselves.... What, then, could now sustain them but the spirit of God, and His grace? Ought not the children of their fathers rightly to say: Our fathers were Englishmen who came over the great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice, and looked on their adversity.... Let them therefore praise the Lord, because He is good, and His mercies endure forever. Yea, let them that have been redeemed of the Lord, show how He hath delivered them from the hand of the oppressor. When they wandered forth into the desert-wilderness, out of the way, and found no city to dwell in, both hungry and thirsty, their soul was overwhelmed in them. Let them confess before the Lord His loving kindness, and His wonderful works before the sons of men.” As we read this pæan of praise, penned by Bradford some ten or twelve years after their arrival, the reality of a sublime human sacrifice begins to shape itself in the mind, and our wonder rests upon the spiritual grandeur of the offering, rather than upon its world-wide consequences—of which the tale is not yet told.