The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 297

no authority over their consciences. It is an inborn principle which
nothing can eradicate.”—Congressional documents (U.S.A.), serial No.
200, document No. 271.
As the tidings spread through the countries of Europe, of a land
where every man might enjoy the fruit of his own labor and obey the
convictions of his own conscience, thousands flocked to the 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.”—Martyn, vol. 5, p. 417. 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 settlement, “and not see a drunkard, or hear an
oath, or meet a beggar.”—Bancroft, pt. 1, ch. 19, par. 25. 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

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