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The Landing of the Pilgrims by Henry A. Bacon
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The Spanish, Portuguese, and French all believed it was their God-ordained responsibility to evangelize the native people in the New World, and had sent missionaries for a hundred years before the English. England was the last of the four colonial ventures into the New World and the first significant Protestant mission.
Protestants were late in accepting the mandate to “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to all creation.” Their excuses were the command was only mandatory for the first apostles, the end of the world was at hand and there was no time, and (among the hard-line Calvinists) predestination would take care of everything. (John McManners, The Oxford History of Christianity, p. 337)
The first English settlers in New England were Separatists. They believed the Church of England was doomed and irrecoverably corrupt, and they wanted to escape from it. (Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, p. 33)
In 1606, William Brewster led a group of Separatists to the Netherlands. After ten years, alarmed by the negative influences surrounding their children, the Separatists decided to immigrate to America. A group of London investors financed the voyage in exchange for the majority proceeds of the first six years.
On December 21, 1620, a small band of these Separatists aboard the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. They came to the New World with the express purpose of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth.
“Thus, out of small beginnings, as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled has shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation, let the glorious name of God have all the praise.” (William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, p. 236. Bradford was the governor of the Plymouth Colony from 1621-1656.)
Bradford, in his history Of Plymouth Plantation, first referred to them as Pilgrims. But they were not ordinary pilgrims, traveling to a sacred shrine, and then returning home. There were, rather, perpetual pilgrims, setting up a new sanctified country – a City on a Hill. (Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, p. 30)
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