The Heritage of our Fore Fathers

Guest Blogger: Katie Dillard

The Pilgrim fathers set foot on Plymouth not as abandoned rebels who fled tyrants and persecutors. But they were an educated people who inhabited reformed hearts and self-governed lives. Their purpose and intent in coming to this forsaken land, full of savages, and wild forests, and untamed animals, was to put into action their self-governed endeavors.

Daniel Webster explains it this way: “The morning that beamed on the first night of their repose saw the Pilgrims already at home in their country. There were political institutions, and civil liberty, and religious worship. Poetry was fancied nothing in the wanderings of heroes, so distinct and characteristic. Here was man, indeed, unprotected, and un-provided for, on the shore of a rude and fearful wilderness; but it was politic, intelligent, and educated man. Everything was civilized but the physical world. Institutions, containing in substance all that ages had done for human government, were organized in a forest.”

The Pilgrims were Separatists. They had been practicing self-government and individual liberty in their homes, and in their hearts for decades before they landed on Plymouth. The institutions that Webster is referring to are that of family, church and government. They had already been cultivating, individually, their minds and their nature to live in liberty in the light of the gospel.

Going to New England, for the Pilgrims, was an act of OBEDIENCE. They believed that “out of the heart are the issues of life,” and that “where the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty.” They wanted to “walk in the liberty wherewith Christ had made them free.” This was the intent of the Pilgrim fathers. It wasn’t just a physical separation from King and government, but an adherence to the laws of nature and nature’s God.

The distinction between the Separatist Pilgrims and the Puritans was significant.

The Separatists could not compromise their internal liberty for external government. They wanted to worship God in spirit and truth. The Puritans wanted to “purify” the government, and the church, by compromises and legislation. This was the major difference while both were still in England.

When the Pilgrims had been in New England a few years, the Puritans decided to follow suit. But they continued to use the prayer book, and act under the government of the mother land, while Plymouth was acting under the auspices of its own government, and legislation. The Pilgrims received little persecution from the “Massachusetts Bay Colony,” but they reciprocated only in constructive admonishments.

What is the heritage? Plymouth Plantation was a civil and religious politick which enumerated the internal convictions of the heart. The Pilgrim fathers were obedient so that these same liberties that they experienced in their lives could be experienced in the lives of their posterity. How else could they justify those years of suffering and hardship? It was obviously not for their personal enjoyment and happiness, but for their children’s enjoyment of civil and ecclesiastical liberty. Webster ponders the point: “We are in the line of conveyance, through which whatever had been obtained by the spirit and efforts of our ancestors is to be communicated to our children.”

So then, it is now our duty to continue the good work begun in our fathers, and teach these precepts to our children. Like the Pilgrims, we should look at the family as the primary institution, which is the external effort of internal convictions.

“For out of the heart, the mouth speaks.”

Katie works at The Alamo as a Living Historian and is a tour guide in downtown San Antonio. In her spare time she collects books, finds time to work on her master’s degree in School Administration, and participates in the living history programs at the Nimitz Museum of the Pacific War. She enjoys any and every opportunity to educate people on their American Christian heritage.