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In order to appreciate the political greatness and the moral grandeur of the work of the Pilgrims, we should recall that, when the Mayflower Compact was framed, in no part of the world did there exist a government of just and equal laws, and that in no country was there real religious liberty or the complete separation of Church and State.

In fact, the great and now fundamental principle of the separation of Church and State was first made a living reality by the Pilgrims, although, in theory at least, it antedated the voyage of the Mayflower. It was the essence of their holy covenant of congregation entered into years before. And to the Pilgrims chiefly are due the credit and honor of incorporating this principle into Anglo-American polity. A wide gulf separated the Pilgrims from the Puritans in this respect. The Pilgrims, first known in England as the Separatists and Brownists—hated alike by Puritan and Cavalier—advocated religious liberty and the complete separation of Church and State. The Puritans, however, when they secured power in England and later in New England, were intolerant in religion and opposed both to religious liberty and to the separation of Church and State. They were determined that the state should dominate in religious as well as in civil affairs and that it should regulate the religion of all; in truth, they sought to impose a dominant theocracy as completely as Henry VIII. and Elizabeth were determined to have a state church under their own spiritual supremacy and to abolish all "diversity of opinions," if necessary by rack, fire and the scaffold. The Pilgrim, personifying him as you love to in the lofty and generous spirit of Robinson at Leyden, believed in religious freedom, or, as it is differently phrased, in liberty of conscience; the Puritan was determined that all should be coerced by legislation and the sword to conform to his religious views as the only true faith. Although the Puritan theocracy found its most complete development and tyranny in Massachusetts, the colony of Plymouth remained liberal and tolerant. Notwithstanding the terrible record of sanguinary persecutions among other religious denominations of that age, no instance is recorded of religious persecution by the Pilgrims or in the Plymouth colony.ssss1 You will recall that the famous Pilgrim captain, Myles Standish, never joined the Plymouth church, that no witches were ever burned in Plymouth, and that when a malicious woman accused a neighbor of witchcraft, she was promptly convicted of slander and thereupon fined and publicly whipped. The excesses and fury of religious persecution by Protestants and Catholics alike were the products of the fierce, intolerant and blind spirit of that age. We should judge them not by the standards of the twentieth century, but by those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and must not overlook the fact that in many cases these persecutions were as much political as they were religious.