At length by one means or another the members of this battered little community got away and met together in Amsterdam. To plain north country folk this was indeed a strange land, and one can see in the vivid and eloquent language of Bradford of Austerfield, who was a young man when he crossed the German Ocean, the memory of the impressions which these cities of the Low Countries made on their rustic minds. But "it was not longe before they saw the grimme and grisly face of povertie coming upon them like an armed man, with whom they must bukle and incounter." III. [Sidenote: Removal to Leyden.] [Sidenote: Bradford's Plimouth Plantation.] [Sidenote: Winslow's Relations.] Robinson discovered that he was not of a piece with those Separatists who had preceded him to Amsterdam. In one division of these, questions of whalebone in bodices, of high-heeled shoes and women's hats, distracted scrupulous minds. In the other, which came from the same part of England as Robinson's church, the agitations were of a theological nature. Questions about the baptism of infants and the inherent righteousness of man and the portion of his nature that Christ derived from his mother, with discussions of the right of a man to be a magistrate and a church member at the same time, were seething in the heated brain of the scrupulous but saintly pastor. Robinson saw that these controversies would involve the Scrooby church if it remained in Amsterdam. In Robinson the centrifugal force of Separatism had already spent itself, and his practical wisdom had set bounds to the course of his logic. To leave the Dutch metropolis for a smaller place was to reduce the Scrooby exiles to still deeper poverty, but nevertheless the Pilgrims fled from discord as they had fled from persecution, and removed to the university city of Leyden, called by its admirers "the Athens of the Occident." After their departure English Separatism in Amsterdam went on tearing itself to pieces in a sincere endeavor to find ultimate theological truth, but Robinson's people in spite of their poverty were united, and were honored by those among whom they sojourned. Others, hearing of their good report, came to them from England, and the exiled church of Leyden was fairly prosperous. IV. [Sidenote: Danger of extinction.]