The story of the voyage of the Mayflower in 1620 and of the Pilgrim settlement at Plymouth has been told again and again, and in this year of the tercentenary celebration will be repeated in still further varying forms; but we are certain that it will never be more graphically narrated than by the Pilgrims themselves and their friends during the twenties, thirties, and forties of the seventeenth century.

In this paper I do not intend to venture to give any new version of that narrative. It is my purpose rather to recall certain phases of the story as they appear in the vigorous and terse English of the earliest accounts, and to note especially also the interesting archæological information concerning the Indians of New England which they furnish.

In considering the relations of the early settlers of Massachusetts and the Indians it is greatly to be regretted that the Red Men possessed no civilized method by which they could leave a record of their own ideas, their own thoughts, and their own reasons for their actions, and that consequently nothing has survived except through tradition or through the medium of records compiled and written by the invaders of their country. All that we really know is the White Man's version; he has always been the judge, the jury, and the advocate for the plaintiff, all in one. The defense has had no means of being heard except through the plaintiff's lawyers, whose knowledge, even of the Indian language, was very slight. Certainly a unique trial. When we stop for a few minutes in our present energetic, busy, hurrying everyday life, and consider the luxury in which we now live, our comfortable homes, our variety of food, our steam cars, our motor cars, our telegraph and telephone, all of which we now demand as necessities and as our lawful rights, it is almost impossible to realize that three hundred years ago in this same land, in our own Massachusetts, for one winter and more or less for two years, our ancestors were absolutely dependent on the Indians for food sufficient to sustain life.

The widespread reaction towards the Church of Rome by which the first half of the last century was marked, has been subjected to a multitude of more or less intelligent explanations. It was to be expected from poor human nature that each critic should explain in accordance with that law of human development which he had himself embraced, and in illustration of that moral which he deemed it most salutary to draw. In this field the disciple of Bossuet will be forever at issue with the disciple of Comte. From the one we hear how the eyes of Europe had been providentially opened by long years of anarchy and bloodshed, how the spirit of schism had been at length unmasked, how the exhausted nations were taught once more to value a unified spiritual control, and how amid the wreck of thrones and the desolation of kingdoms the very dullest of mankind must have been awed by the spectacle of the Chair of Peter standing fast, an authentic token of the Mighty Hand and the Outstretched Arm. From the other side we listen to the cold comment that world disasters are apt to drive back the less robust sort of mind to the solace of old superstition, that mental progress like all things human has its ebb and flow, and that we need not be surprised if a season of shivering credulity alternates with a season of fearless rationalism. The philosophic historian may well be left to wear himself out in this profitless debate with the brethren of his own craft. Non nostri est tantas componere lites.

The Second Report of the Joint Commission on the Book of Common Prayer is an interesting document, not only for the history of liturgy in the American Church but also in showing, perhaps more by implication than by direct statement, the lines along which thought in the Episcopal Church is at present moving.