But not such were the company of true worshipers who, at peril of liberty and life, were wont to assemble each Lord's day in a room of the old manor-house of Scrooby, of which William Brewster was lessee, for Christian fellowship and worship, and for instruction in Christian truth and duty from the saintly lips of John Robinson.

The extreme radicals of their day, they seem to have been divinely preserved from the besetting sins of radicalism--its narrowness, its self-righteousness, its censoriousness and intolerance.
Those who read the copious records of the early New England colonization are again and again surprised at finding that the impoverished little company of Separatists at Leyden and Plymouth, who were so sharply reprobated by their Puritan brethren of the Church of England for their schismatic attitude, their over-righteousness and exclusiveness, do really excel, in liberality and patient tolerance and catholic and comprehensive love toward all good men, those who sat in judgment on them.

Something of this is due to the native nobleness of the men themselves, of whom the world was not worthy; something of it to their long discipline in the passive virtues under bitter persecution in their native land and in exile in Holland and in the wilderness; much of it certainly to the incomparably wise and Christ-like teaching of Robinson both at Scrooby and at Leyden, and afterward through the tender and faithful epistles with which he followed them across the sea; and all of it to the grace of God working in their hearts and glorified in their living and their dying.
It would be incompatible with the limits of this volume to recite in detail the story of the Pilgrims; it has been told more amply and with fuller repetition than almost any other chapter of human history, and is never to be told or heard without awakening that thrill with which the heartstrings respond to the sufferings and triumphs of Christ's blessed martyrs and confessors.

But, more dispassionately studied with reference to its position and relations in ecclesiastical history, it cannot be understood unless the sharp and sometimes exasperated antagonism is kept in view that existed between the inconsiderable faction, as it was esteemed, of the Separatists, and the great and growing Puritan party at that time in disfavor with king and court and hierarchy, but soon to become the dominant party not only in the Church of England, but in the nation.

It is not strange that the antagonism between the two parties should be lost sight of.