Nothing is
more inevitable than our reaching back to the beginning of the
seventeenth century and endeavoring to select, among the
thousands of Englishmen who emigrated or even thought of
emigrating to this country, those who possessed the genuine heart
and sinew of the permanent settler.
Oliver Cromwell, for instance, is said to have thought of
emigrating hither in 1637. If he had joined his friends John
Cotton and Roger Williams in New England, who can doubt that the
personal characteristics of "my brave Oliver" would today be
identified with the "American" qualities which we discover in
1637 on the shores of Massachusetts Bay? And what an American
settler Cromwell would have made!
If we turn from physical and moral daring to the field of
theological and political speculation, it is easy today to
select, among the writings of the earliest colonists, certain
radical utterances which seem to presage the very temper of the
late eighteenth century. Pastor John Robinson's farewell address
to the Pilgrims at Leyden in 1620 contained the famous words:
"The Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy Word.
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