CHAPTER SECOND

THE FREIGHT OF THE MAYFLOWER


The motive force which drove the English Separatists and Puritans to a
voluntary exile in New England in 1620 and later, had its origin in the
brain of the son of a Saxon slate cutter just a century before. Martin
Luther first gave utterance to a mental protest which had long been on the
tongue's tip of many thoughtful and conscientious persons in Europe, but
which, till then, no one had found the courage, or the energy, or the
conviction, or the clear-headedness (as the case might be) to formulate
and announce. Once having reached its focus, however, and attained its
expression, it spread like a flame in dry stubble, and produced results in
men and nations rarely precedented in the history of the world, whose
vibrations have not yet died away.

Henry VIII. of England was born and died a Catholic; though of religion
of any kind he never betrayed an inkling. His Act of Supremacy, in 1534,
which set his will above that of the Pope of Rome, had no religious
bearing, but merely indicated that he wanted to divorce one woman in order
to marry another. Nevertheless it made it incumbent upon the Pope to
excommunicate him, and thus placed him, and England as represented by him,
in a quasi-dissenting attitude toward the orthodox faith. And coming as it
did so soon after Luther's outbreak, it may have encouraged Englishmen to
think on lines of liberal belief.