This was the period of Robinson's activity as author.

In erudite studies, in grave debate with gainsayers at home and with fellow-exiles in Holland, he was maturing in his own mind, and in the minds of the church, those large and liberal yet definite views of church organization and duty which were destined for coming ages so profoundly to influence the American church in all its orders and divisions.

"He became a reformer of the Separation."[87:1] We pass by the heroic and pathetic story of the consultations and correspondences, the negotiations and disappointments, the embarkation and voyage, and come to that memorable date, November 11 (= 21), 1620, when, arrived off the shore of Cape Cod, the little company, without charter or warrant of any kind from any government on earth, about to land on a savage continent in quest of a home, gathered in the cabin of the "Mayflower," and after a method quite in analogy with that in which, sixteen years before, they had constituted the church at Scrooby, entered into formal and solemn compact "in the presence of God and one of another, covenanting and combining themselves together into a civil body politic." It is difficult, in reading the instrument then subscribed, to avoid the conviction that the theory of the origin of the powers of civil government in a social compact, which had long floated in literature before it came to be distinctly articulated in the "Contrat Social" of Jean Jacques Rousseau, was familiar to the minds of those by whom the paper was drawn.

Thoughtful men at the present day universally recognize the fallacy of this plausible hypothesis, which once had such wide currency and so serious an influence on the course of political history in America.

But whether or not they were affected by the theory, the practical good sense of the men and their deference to the teachings of the Bible secured them from the vicious and absurd consequences deducible from it.