The stern, uncompromising attitude of these people in whom there was no quibbling with right or wrong as they perceived it, which gave them the physical courage to endure persecution, mutilation, and even death, was the result of the religious agitations which began in England with Wycliffe and were directed against the oppressions and corruptions which flourished within the Church’s powerful organization. Though suppressed, the leaven had sifted down to the people who, stultified by centuries of grossest superstition, had silently and patiently borne the yoke. In the stirrings of this religious Renaissance the book that reached them was Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible; this gave to them the Semitic conception of God--the one God--which the voices of those “primitive Puritans the Prophets” had saved from the obliterating dangers of idolatry and superstition. The stolid somberness of the Northern races responded to the majestic swing of this wonderful collection of Hebrew documents which traced a people’s struggles and thought development. Some of its characters as Huxley says of “Jepthah, Gideon, and Sampson are men of the old heroic stamp, who would look as much in place in a Norse Saga as where they are.” Stray chapters sometimes came into the possession of some yeoman who was fortunate enough to read; in silence and secrecy, when the day’s work was done, there would gather round him eager listeners. To know what this book’s message meant to them, one needs but read their subsequent history. To hear it, possess it, and believe it, they suffered the diabolical tortures and fiendish perpetrations which at once made martyrs and tyrants of men, and which laid in England the foundation of what Ranke calls the “heroic age of Protestantism in Western Europe.” Of this breed were the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock. Their inherent independence had been fostered by a long exile in Leyden; there the old Teutonic spirit of freedom had survived, and had given her men that sublime courage and determination, when besieged by the Duke of Alva and starving, “that rather than yield they would devour their left arms to enable them to continue the defense with their right.”[5] Leyden afterwards became a haven for those of other countries who, breaking from prescribed thought, dared to act accordingly. It was also a university center; political and religious tenets were subjects of common debate. Robinson who became one of the Pilgrim fathers took an active part in these discussions.