306 The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan
[ 297 ] shores of the New World. Colonies rapidly multiplied.“ Massachusetts, by special law, offered free welcome and aid, at the public cost, to Christians of any nationality who might fly beyond the Atlantic‘ to escape from wars or famine, or the oppression of their persecutors.’ Thus the fugitive and the downtrodden were, by statute, made the guests of the commonwealth.” 447 In twenty years from the first landing at Plymouth, as many thousand Pilgrims were settled in New England.
To secure the object which they sought,“ they were content to earn a bare subsistence by a life of frugality and toil. They asked nothing from the soil but the reasonable returns of their own labor. No golden vision threw a deceitful halo around their path.... They were content with the slow but steady progress of their social polity. They patiently endured the privations of the wilderness, watering the tree of liberty with their tears, and with the sweat of their brow, till it took deep root in the land.”
The Bible was held as the foundation of faith, the source of wisdom, and the charter of liberty. Its principles were diligently taught in the home, in the school, and in the church, and its fruits were manifest in thrift, intelligence, purity, and temperance. One might be for years a dweller in the Puritan settlements,“ and not see a drunkard, or hear an oath, or meet a beggar.” 448 It was demonstrated that the principles of the Bible are the surest safeguards of national greatness. The feeble and isolated colonies grew to a confederation of powerful States, and the world marked with wonder the peace and prosperity of“ a church without a pope, and a state without a king.”
But continually increasing numbers were attracted to the shores of America, actuated by motives widely different from those of the first Pilgrims. Though the primitive faith and purity exerted a wide-spread and moulding power, yet its influence
447 Martyn, Vol. V, p. 417. 448 Bancroft, Part I, ch. 19, par. 25.