earthly pilgrimage, but active and cheerful; "a good man and full of the Holy Ghost, and much people were added to the Lord." Yea, he is the Barnabas of this little church and colony.

So the congregation gather into this log-fort, and begin to praise God. They are but a very little handful, enough for a social prayer meeting; and some have to remain in the dwellings, to tend the sick, and watch against surprisal from the Indians; others are on guard also at the Fort with muskets, watching as sentinels, while all watch and pray. If the naked children of the forest are watching also, with bow and arrow, they hear sweet and solemn music this morning, and it is one of God's means to keep them in awe, and defend his people from them. The whole congregation sing, and the hymn rises as from one heart, with the sweetness of the unison of all voices. Our Pilgrim Fathers were good singers. We have the testimony of Mr. Winslow to this point. When they were embarking from Leyden he says, "We refreshed ourselves with singing of psalms, making joyful melody in our hearts as well as with the voice, there being many of our congregation very expert in music; and indeed it was the sweetest music that mine ears ever heard." It was congregational singing, and so was it at each Sabbath's worship in this timber-fort in the wilderness. It were well if our congregations in modern time would follow this delightful pilgrim and scriptural habit of expertness in music.

The song ended, they unite in prayer. Mr. Brewster was a gifted man in this sacred exercise, especially in the humble confession of sin, and pleading for pardon. He was not long in prayer, but frequent; and he set the heart and conscience at work, as in Paul's expression, laboring earnestly in prayer. He prayed fervently, with and for the people, and they with and for him. They came to God in great want, and prayed for great blessings.

And then with equal power and beauty, under the guid

ing of the Saviour, he opened unto them the Scriptures, and applied both the law and the promises, being plain and distinct, as well as affectionately stirring and moving in his teachings. Powerfully and profitably he taught, twice every Sabbath, to the great contentment of the hearers, and to their comfortable edification. This he continued to do, till the Church had another minister, and many were brought to God by his ministry. "Yea, he did more in their behalf in a year, than many that have their hundreds a year do in all their lives." He was a man that had done and suffered much for the Lord Jesus and the Gospel's sake, and so doing and suffering, God upheld him to a great age, and kept him actively useful to the last.

From the enjoyment of his ministrations, and of God's Spirit in them, they would go down to their dwellings with renewed hope and faith and courage to bear the exceeding trials of the week. Though their outward man was weak and wasting, yet the inward was renewed day by day, and perhaps the darker and gloomier it grew externally, the brighter was all within. Mr. Brewster loved to dwell upon God's promises, and to show his faithfulness and loving kindness in all the severe discipline they were passing through. He preached that winter in the midst of sickness, fears, and deaths, and the next in the midst of a wasting famine. And his own confidence in God, and his cheerful endurance of personal suffering, did much to keep the spirits of his fainting flock. He would address them almost in the words of Baxter :

up

Why art thou, fainting soul, cast down?

And thus disquieted with fears?

Art thou not passing to thy crown,

Through storms of pain and floods of tears?

Fear not, O thou of little faith!

Art thou not in thy Saviour's hand?
Remember what his promise saith,
For life and death are his command.

To Him thou did'st thyself intrust,

When first thou did'st for Heaven embark,
And He hath proved both kind and just;
Still thou art with Him in his ark.
Could'st thou expect to see no seas?
Nor feel no tossing wind or wave?
It is enough that from all these
Thy faithful pilot thee will save.

Thy Lord hath taught thee how to want
A place wherein to put thy head;
While He is thine, be thou content
To beg or lack thy daily bread.

Heaven is thy roof, earth is thy floor;
His love can keep thee dry and warm;
Christ and His bounty are thy store;

His angels guard thee from all harm.

These simple lines, the language of Baxter's heart and experience, must have been the tenor of many a sermon, many a consoling exhortation from the beloved and venerated Elder of the Pilgrims.

It is one thing to express the thoughts and aspirations of Christian faith, hope, and love in poetry, and a very different thing to possess and act them out amidst the pressure of severe suffering. The Pilgrims exercised with marvellous cheerfulness the Christian graces of patience, perseverance, and unshaken trust in God, amidst circumstances that had nothing of the romantic, nothing of the imaginative in them; nothing to give a fictitious power of interest to the work in which they were engaged. To our minds at this day, every circumstance is full of interest; there is no want of the romantic, the imaginative, even in external things; and in the moral, the spiritual, how transcendently sublime and beautiful! But they themselves were alone, forlorn, the outcasts of the world, counted in high places as the offscouring of all things, and in the place of their own high duty, pressed down, for months together, into a daily drudgery of toil for the support of this mortal life, wasting,

dying. Put the glory where it belongs; it was a remarkable scene of the grace of God; they endured, as seeing Him who is invisible.

From their Mount of God's sanctuary, their Timber-Fort of Sabbath prayer and praise, where they dwelt upon the promises, and held communion with the world unseen and eternal, they went down, thoughtful, sad, yet comforted, resigned, and trustful, to their rude and insufficient dwellings, to the labors of the week, to the tending of the sick, to the burial of the dead, and the toils of the living; always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in their mortal body. Yea, they could have said, speaking to future generations, We which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, and death worketh us, that life may work in you.

CHAPTER XV.

THE FIRST DEATHS AND BURIALS.

THE first winter with the Pilgrim colony was a period of fatigue, anxiety, sickness, sadness, and death. There is but little notice of these distresses in the earliest Journal of the Pilgrims, and it is somewhat singular that the deaths of that winter among their small number are not named. The omission must have been for some particular reason. Perhaps, as they were to send this Journal for publication in England, and the first impressions in regard to the colony would be made upon many minds by its perusal, they dared not let the pressure of calamity and the ravages of disease be seen too clearly. They did not repine at God's discipline for themselves; they trusted in God, although he should slay them; their submissive, cheerful faith was undiminished by their trials; but they could not in the same way trust in man, and they had reason to be afraid of the gloomy interpretation of God's providences by those who knew not the secret of the Lord, nor the glory and faithfulness of his covenant. Yet could they see and feel, in the assurance of God's presence,

"It is no death when souls depart,

If thou depart not from the soul."