The Strengthening Agreement

November 20, 1960
Akron

This sermon celebrates our American Thanksgiving by reviewing some of the principles and deeds of the Pilgrim Fathers, tendering particular notice and honor toward that document which was their strengthening agreement – The Mayflower Compact.

Adjoining historic Burial Hill, at the head of Town Square in Plymouth, Massachusetts is an Italian Renaissance style church which houses the oldest, continuous church congregation in America. Since the Pilgrims landed from the Mayflower, there has been an unbroken record of parish affairs and a continuous ministry. The church building itself is the fourth in the series of buildings that have been constructed by this continuing congregation.

When you enter the church, you will observe three famous stained glass windows in the channel. The left window portrays a soldier, seated; by his left hand his sword rests in its sheath; his right hand likes on an open book on his knee.

This is the window if civil liberty. The soldier prefers democratic procedures, symbolized by his seated posture, the sheathed sword and the open book. Discussion and intelligence should be the mainstays of the social process. One has the right to speak, to gather peaceably, to have trial by jury, to elect by secret ballot, to gather in political convention without fear, to write an editorial conveying one’s convictions, even though that expression might be unpopular or radical. All these principles which have been grown under both support and struggle in America are symbolized by that soldier whose strength is ready to be used.

The right window depicts a minister holding a scroll of the law, with his arm on the scriptures, indicating our religious heritage. When the Pilgrims held that first American Thanksgiving feast, the autumn after that first dreadful year, they were not originating a holiday. The Indians who gathered with them also had a long history of celebrating harvest home. The Pilgrims found scriptural authority for harvest festival in the ancient Hebrew book of Leviticus (23 33/38). All peoples everywhere have been deeply moved always by the mystery of the harvest and the wonder of growing things which nourish the life of man. The ingathering festival, when thanks are offered to the creator for harvest abundance, is among the universal ceremonies and feelings of the human family.

In the center of this triumvirate of stained glass masterpieces is the Window of the Compact. The figure of civil liberty and the figure of religious celebration flank the central window which shows the Pilgrims gathering in the cabin of the Mayflower to sign the document known as the Mayflower Compact.

Because we live in an age of advertising superlatives when the “colossal” is merely mediocre and the average is described as super-colossal on a wide screen, yet, the language of the Compact may seem somewhat restrained and antiquarian, but like many old treasures, its quality endures. More important, the Compact is the original instrument of democratic government on this continent and from its key sentence one can traces the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights:

“We solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time as shall be thought most meete and convenient for the general good of the colony.”

Those who signed were not identical in their ideas – John Alden was a tradesman, Miles Standish a soldier and the people were of various backgrounds and classes. As George Williston pointed out in his provocative account of the Pilgrims, SAINTS AND STRANGERS, there were not only the Pilgrims from Holland, but also some of the passengers and crew were undesirables -- “strangers” -- recruited from the London streets by the company which financed the Pilgrim enterprise. But “Saints” and “Strangers” alike found in that Compact a strengthening agreement, which not only continued in strength and dignity as it fortified those principles which later received constitutional form, but also foreshadowed a strong strain of liberal thinking in the centuries to come. Let us consider again from whence the Pilgrims came and the course they took.

When Henry VIII too the Church of England out of the Roman Catholic Church, free religion and the rights of church members to govern their affairs was by no means an automatic by-product of that separation. Even the Cromwellian revolution maintained a church hierarchy in the form of the presbytery. In the sixteenth century, Robert Browne revolted against the idea of religion being enforced by civil law. Secretly he taught what today we refer to as the congregational form of church government. Believing that a church should be separate from the State, he insisted that the magistrate should have no coercive power over it. Each local church should be complete and bound only by voluntary allegiance to larger church bodies. Because of the implications in the Reformation doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” -- that all persons were equal before God – it followed that all members were equal in the church, with the same voting rights and the same privilege of holding office. Furthermore, Browne insisted that the whole purport of the New Testament vindicated this view of Church and State and represented gospel sanction for the equality of members.

One of the consequences of Browne’s efforts and thought was that the movement which is sometimes called the “Scrooby, Leyden, Plymouth” group. Vital to it was John Robinson, who never set foot on the shores of the new world, but without him the voyage could not have been organized, or the spirit maintained that carried the group through disastrous trials to their goal of permanent settlement.

About the year 1600, scattered persons from Scrooby and nearby towns on the East Coast of England gathered in a church organization with this covenant, “We, the Lord’s free people, join ourselves, by a covenant of the Lord, into a church-estate in the fellowship of the gospel, to walk in all his ways, made known or to be made known unto us, according to our best endeavors.” (Can you not see how one statement in the recent statement of principles of the Universalist Church could grow from this covenant, “we believe the authority of truth, known or to be known?”)

William Brewster, well-born and educated, was one of the dynamic spirits and ruling elder. Alert for heresy, the civil and religious authorities soon came after the small, reforming religious group and Brewster was jailed. The Pilgrims determined to escape to Holland but were betrayed by a sea captain in their first attempt. They eventually got away to Holland in 1608 after much suffering and persecution. Holland was not an entirely strange land for the group, as already two Separatists movements from England had established themselves in Amsterdam. But as these groups were characterized by internal dissension, the Scrooby group decided to go elsewhere. So they went to Leyden, textile center and home of a famous university. Soon John Robinson was elected pastor and the group grew in numbers. The Pilgrims were a welcome addition to the Leyden community and the Dutch magistrates remarked [on] their high qualities of conduct and character.

But some of the Scrooby Pilgrims were uneasy in Leyden. They still longed for the sovereignty of the English flag, even though they had been persecuted by English authorities; they missed the mother tongue and the opportunity to rear their children in English schools. Even more as William Bradford commented, “They were inspired with a great hope and inward zeal for the propagation of the gospel in the remote parts of the world, a mighty work in which they might be the stepping-stones for those who might follow in the paths where they had led.”

Permission to settle in the new world was not easy to obtain. Finally, a company of London merchants, known as the Adventurers secured the patent for the land and supplied capital.

John Robinson decided to stay in Leyden, but his contribution was creative and enduring. He came to believe strongly in the separation of Church and State. When the group was preparing to leave for the New World, he composed a letter of farewell and instruction and included his counsel that they should become a “body politick, using amongst yourselves civil governments,” and this became a part of the Mayflower Compact. He fortified their determination when he urged, “it is the first duty of man to inform his conscience aright; and then to follow the direction it gives.”

You know how the Pilgrims sailed August 1, but when the Speedwell proved to be unseaworthy, a second start, Sept. 2, was necessary with all the passengers aboard the Mayflower. Two and one-half months later, they reached Cape Cod bay after an arduous voyage. On November 11, 1620, they gathered in the cabin, signed the Compact and thus created the constitutional instrument which was their rule of government in the new world.

The Pilgrims represented a liberal element that softened the harsh and intolerant Puritanism which was to settle other parts of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. During the long ministry of Francis Kendall in the early nineteenth century, the Church became Unitarian. And for the last generation, The First Universalist Society has combined with First Parish Church.

The Compact was the first organized instrument of democracy produced in the colonies. From its recognition of the equality of persons has grown principles embodied in the town meeting form of civil government, the separation of church and state, toleration of heretical views and recognition of conscience as the final arbiter of man’s decisions.

There is a further consequence: The conjunction of the Thanksgiving festival with the celebration of the Mayflower Compact suggests a revealing insight into human growth in wisdom, courage and religious maturity.

The feast of harvest home is as old as the ages far removed from the earliest histories, when primitive man expressed the great surge of emotions he felt when the mystery of the fertile soil, the growing season and the time of harvest provided him with the roots and fruits which fed the family. With no laboratory knowledge of the germination, root, bud, blossom and fruition, early man felt abounding gratitude for the mysterious providence which enabled him to survive and eventually to plan, plant, and cultivate. In all places and times it has been good to sing praises for the beauty and fruitfulness of the earth.

But the agreement of the Compact, together with the ancient feeling of thankfulness for harvest home, proclaims something else about man. Man cannot be fully satisfied with a full belly only. In order to survive, food is the most primary substance to secure and sunsure [sic?]. The history of man clearly indicates that where food is unobtainable, high ideas of morality or spirituality are submerged in a flood of hunger pains. This is a fact of human existence, call it materialism or what you will, but people have to have something to live on before they reflect and act on ideas worth living for.

But as man in the more fortunate areas has been able to provide at least a minimum, subsistence level of necessities, he has been turned to other things. The Pilgrims in the cabin of the Mayflower agreed to a way of government which provided that laws were to be established by the body politic – that is, by the people themselves. They had committed themselves to self-government, asserting that man must be equal before the law and free before his God.

The human pilgrimage of man provides no unqualified assurance of man’s ability to grow in wisdom and stature. History has dark corners of evil when inhumanity, intolerance, unspeakable cruelty have provided considerable testimony to the weakness and moral inadequacy of the human being. But there has been a gradual refinement of ideas; certain values of freedom and human dignity have been emerging; and the religious festivals of mankind increasingly emphasize the better moralities that are beginning to be prized in the human venture. Thanksgiving is not only gratitude for the abundance of nature, but re-assertion and re-statement of the inalienable rights to worship according to conscience and to be equal before civil government. Christmas is not alone a theological proposition that sinful humanity could only be redeemed by God taking form and paying the sin-sacrifice for all men. Christmas has become more profound and poignant in its emerging theme that all human life is valuable. All babies whether born in the lacquered cradles of the wealthy or the poor straw of a stable, are of supreme worth.

Most ceremonies are ancient, but always there is needed the growth of principle, the re-evaluation of what is, in the light of what should be, a continuing recognition of advancing truth to refine and protect the best of the human venture. John Robinson in his farewell address to the Pilgrims at Leyden, said it best in his famous prophecy of a religion dedicated to advancing truth, “The Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth from his holy word.”