his holy, prayerful, watchful, and fruitful walk with God. His death was just such, in heavenly joy and triumph, as his life of grace, hid with Christ in God, had predicted. He had been declining through the winter of 1657, yet not in what he counted sickness, until just three days before God took him to his everlasting rest. The first of those days the Angel of the Covenant seemed to give him warning that his hour was near; and that night, "the God of Heaven so filled his mind with ineffable consolations, that he seemed little short of Paul, wrapt up into the unutterable entertainments of Paradise." His joy must have been great, yea, ravishing, for he said to his dear friends in the morning, that the good Spirit of the Lord had given him a pledge of his happiness in another world, and the first fruits of his eternal glory. That night's blissful experience alone was to him worth all the years of toil and pain he had endured in the great work his Lord had permitted him to accomplish. For, what were all the days and nights, the weeks and months of cold and hunger, of peril, anxiety, pain, and famine, passed through in the early years of that great service, compared with the celestial revelations and assurances of that one night! He died, May 9, 1657, in the 69th year of his age. CHAPTER XIII. THE FIRST NEW ENGLAND SABBATH. FROM the highest point amidst the scenery that overlooks the Rock of our Forefathers' first permanent landing, and includes so many points now of the deepest interest, we have looked abroad over the Harbor, the Islands, and the Sea. By the providence of God these Pilgrims stopped at Plymouth. This rock, then washed by the flowing tide, and surmounted above by the primitive forest, was their first landing place. Their first landing place, indeed, for the purpose of a habitation and a grave, upon this rockbound coast, but not the first spot hallowed by the freedom and the sacredness of their religious worship. No! There is a spot here, within the sweep of your eye in this beautiful scene, more sacred than this. As you follow the horizon, you see there, towards the north-east, where the land breaks the sea view, and where the central peninsula in the harbor almost seems to join the main land on the other side, a green and partly wooded island. It seems to you, perhaps, to be the continent, but it is an island. It is the spot of all places in North or South America to my mind the most hallowed. It is the island where the fatigued, desolate, almost perishing Pilgrims spent their first Sabbath. Yes! there they stopped and rested the seventh day, and hallowed it, because they would not desecrate it, even in seeking rest. O noble commencement of the foundations of an enterprise, like which the world never saw, nor probably will again see, ever! Within half an hour's sail of the coast, nay, within ten minutes' sail, if the wind and tide favored, of the place where they were to abide all the rest of their pilgrimage, they moored at the island, and would not again set a sail that day, or take an oar in hand, or do aught of worldly work, because it was the Lord's Day. And there, upon that desolate island, frost-bound, habitationless, beneath a snowy sky, or, what was worse, a freezing sleet, they dedicated the hours of the Sabbath to the worship of God! There is no spot in all this scene, on which the vision rests with so solemn and thrilling an interest as that. And what a remarkable manifestation of character it was, what a proof of supreme regard to God, and belief in his word, and obedience to it! Might they not have reasoned that the work of seeking shelter, in which they were then engaged, was a work of necessity and mercy, that the season of winter was already far advancing, that every day was precious, and that one day's delay might be productive of great evil? Might they not have argued that here, where none but God beheld them, God who knew their hearts, and knew that they were laboring for him, and who had said that the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath, they might relax for once their strictness, and continue their course, more especially as there were none to be affected by their example? How many a descendant of the Pilgrims, under the pressure of a much less necessity, has put the claims of conscience beneath those of expediency, and made the demands of God's institution to wait upon man's convenience! None to be affected by their example? And what one movement or act of those Pilgrims, or sentiment, or opinion, or coloring of life, that will not exert an influence to the latest generation? It might be said that the guardian genius of the after age was watching them; and in acting conscientiously and faithfully towards God, they acted safely, wisely, righteously towards man. They so acted in this matter of keeping the Sabbath, that a world might imitate them. That day, kept for Godon that island, has sent down a blessing for all the posterity of the Pilgrims-those costly prayers and praises-a preserving, sustaining influence throughout New England, to make the descendants of the Pilgrims a Sabbath-keeping people; and none but a Sabbath-keeping people can be truly free. There was a time when these men on that desolate island, had they stayed in Europe, and attempted to keep such a Sabbath in the country of their birth, would perhaps have been thrown into prison for not observing the rubrics of the Book of Sports, for not giving to the service of Satan the time which God claimed for his service. This Sabbath was the beginning of their perfect freedom from bondage. How beautiful the island looks this day, in this warm light, beneath an atmosphere of such enchanting clearness, rising so green in the mantle of August from the sea! different sight and a different abode to them, in the month of December, wet, cold, icy, and shelterless. Yet there they stood; there they praised God; there arose to heaven from New England's soil the first Sabbath hymn of praise and the first united prayer of faith, from child-like, patient, submissive hearts, from men in resolution and endurance, children in faith and obedience. Amidst the storm they sang, And the stars heard, and the sea! And the sounding aisles of the dim woods rang It was a This beautiful painting is not that of mere imagination. The place of that first religious meeting on New England soil looks now entirely destitute of trees, but the Pilgrims' Journal tells us that then this Island was thickly covered with woods, as indeed the whole shores of Plymouth harbor seem to have been wooded, down to the brink of the sea, save where the Indians had made clearings for cornfields. There then, the dim and icicled woods did indeed ring to the anthems of the free; for they surely had a heart to sing as well as pray; and God had brought them, in the past day's course, through a great discipline, not only of peril and prayers, but of deliverance and thanksgiving. Yet they rejoiced with trembling. That Island is a very sacred spot. We would put a monument there, sooner than on Bunker Hill; a monument to God, to the Sabbath, to the faith of the Pilgrims, to the hidden life of social, civil, and religious freedom, of which the Sabbath is the safeguard. A monument there, where spiritually the first battle was fought, and the first victory was gained, on this North Western Continent, against the powers of darkness, against spiritual wickedness, in the high places of earth and of the soul. Verily, if we may suppose the Enemy of God and man looking on and watching that movement, that Sabbath's work, that Sabbath's reverent and submissive stillness, and prayer, and praise (and why may we not? for not alone in civilized Europe was the god of this world supreme and busy, but here, from one end of the continent to the other, in savage rites he had his worship); if we may suppose the Enemy of mankind gazing when that island was first trodden by the Pilgrim feet, awe-stricken would he and his hosts have beheld the solemn employments of that day! It was a most wonderful' consecration of all New England to God, this religious keeping of the first Sabbath day spent upon its shores, amidst such storm, such fear, such heart-chilling cold, and frightful desolation. We should like to see a granite monument on that island, and the words inscribed on it, The First Sabbath of the Pilgrims. We say again, a greater battle was fought and gained there than that on Bunker Hill, and a foundation of |