The Compact sprang into being by no magic of inspiration: it was the fruit of minds that had fostered the intention to be free through years of just living, and the winning simplicity of the Pilgrims’ several declarations of faith was the natural outcome of the spirit that framed them. For eighteen years or more their leaders had believed and practised the precepts of John Robinson whom they had chosen as pastor of their little congregation at Scrooby; and Robinson charged them, according to Edward Winslow, to keep an open mind: “for he was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of His holy word. He took occasion, also, miserably to bewail the state of the Reformed Churches” who stuck where Luther and Calvin had left them. “Yet God had not revealed His whole will to them.... It is not possible ... that full perfection of knowledge should break forth at once.” Men who held that concept of life—the progressive revelation of truth—were as little likely to cramp the just liberties of other men as they were to submit themselves to the unjust imposition of law. And when England persecuted them, it was fitting that they should flee to Holland, the country of William the Silent, who had declared: “You have no right to trouble yourself with any man’s conscience, so long as nothing is done to cause private harm or public scandal.” That might have been the motto of their new government. It has been truly said that the Plymouth Church was “free of blood.” They never hanged a Quaker or burned a witch, and refugees from the Massachusetts Bay Colony constantly found asylum with them. It must be remembered that they were so-called “Separatists,” the Independents, men who set religion above any church, a very different folk from those uncompromising protestants of the Church of England, the Puritans. Yet, wisely, John Robinson had counselled them to be “ready to close with the godly party of the Kingdom of England and rather to study union than disunion” with their neighbors in the New World. That “union” was meant to include no abandonment of principle, and when unwillingly enough they were forced to merge with the richer colony of Massachusetts Bay, they were sufficiently powerful to expand somewhat its rigid theocracy; though the Puritan influence, in turn, did much to curdle the early tolerance of the Pilgrims.