The strong grasp of the intellectual and practical side of his and the other Pilgrims’ ideals of religious liberty,—for which, no doubt, they owed a deep debt to that splendid apostolic figure, their old pastor at Leyden, John Robinson,—is evidenced by the clear exposition of their claims, in the answer they gave to charges against them of dissembling in their declaration of conformity to the practices of the French Reformed Churches, and of undue license in differing from those professed forms of worship: “In attempting to tie us to the French practices in every detail, you derogate from the liberty we have in Christ Jesus. The Apostle Paul would have none follow him but wherein he followed Christ; much less ought any Christian or Church in the world do so. The French may err, we may err, and other Churches may err, and doubtless do in many circumstances. That honour of infallibility belongs, therefore, only to the word of God and pure testament of Christ, to be followed as the only rule and pattern for direction by all Churches and Christians. It is great arrogance for any man or Church to think that he or they have so sounded the word of God to the bottom as to be able to set down precisely a Church’s practices without error in substance or circumstance, and in such a way that no one thereafter may digress or differ from them with impunity.” On the other hand, it is interesting to mark Bradford’s disparagement of Utopian schemes of communal, or socialistic, forms of government. Here is his conservative argument, based on the experience of the first few years of their colonization: “The failure of this experiment of communal service, which was tried for several years, and by good and honest men, proves the emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times,—that the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community by a commonwealth, would make a state happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For in this instance, community of property (so far as it went) was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit and comfort.... If (it was thought) all were to share alike, and all were to do alike, then all were on an equality throughout, and one was as good as another; and so, if it did not actually abolish those very relations which God himself has set among men, it did at least greatly diminish the mutual respect that is so important should be preserved amongst them. Let none argue that this is due to human failing rather than to this communistic plan of life in itself. I answer, seeing that all men have this failing in them, that God in His wisdom saw that another plan of life was fitter for them.”