William Bradford :: essays research papers

"If a tree falls but no one is there to see it, does it really fall?" This quote explains the very logic of history. Throughout the course of history, many significant occurrences have shaped our society to what it is today: free. William Bradford not only lived through a symbolic historical cornerstone of America, but wrote about it too. William Bradford, the second governor of Plymouth colony elected, was accountable for the young colony’s success through great hardships. The Pilgrims were signified as complete abdicates from the Church of England. The success of the Plymouth was based on covenantalism - the belief that men could form compacts or covenants in the sight of God as a basis for government without the consent of a higher authority. According to Bradford’s exposé, the Pilgrims: shook off this yoke of antichristian bondage, and as the Lord's free people joined themselves (by a covenant of the Lord) into a church estate, in the fellowship of the gospel, to walk in all His ways made known, or to be made known unto them, according to their best endeavors, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them. And that it cost them something this ensuing history will declare. But after these things they could not long continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted and persecuted on every side, so as their former afflictions were but as flea-bitings in comparison of these, which now came upon them. For some were taken and clapped up in prison, others had their houses beset and watched night and day, and hardly escaped their hands; and the most were fain to flee and leave their houses and habitations, and the means of their livelihood. Yet these and many other sharper things which afterward befell them, were no other than they looked for, and therefore were the better prepared to bear them by the assistance of God's grace and Spirit. Yet seeing themselves thus molested, and that there was no hope of their continuance there, by a joint consent they resolved to go into the Low Countries, where they heard was freedom of religion for all men; they resolved to get over into Holland as they could. (W. Brad Home Page). Once in Holland, the Pilgrims discovered that religious persecution was being diffused. They picked up once again on another brave journey in search for a land that was seemingly impossible to find: a land of religious freedom.