The Mayflower set sail September 16, 1620

American Minute with Bill Federer

SEPTEMBER 16, 1620, according to the Gregorian Calendar, 102 passengers set sail on the Pilgrims’ ship, Mayflower.

Their 66-day journey of 2,750 miles encountered storms so rough the beam supporting the main mast cracked and was propped back in place with “a great iron screw.”

One youth, John Howland, was swept overboard by a freezing wave and rescued. His descendants include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Humphrey Bogart, Franklin D. Roosevelt and George W. Bush.

During the Pilgrims’ voyage, a man died and a mother gave birth.

Intending to land in Virginia, they were blown off-course.

Of their landing in Massachusetts, Governor William Bradford wrote:

“Being thus arrived in a good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.”

Though half died that first bitter winter, Governor William Bradford wrote:

“Last and not least, they cherished a great hope and inward zeal of laying good foundations…for the propagation and advance of the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in the remote parts of the world.”

At the Bicentennial Celebration of the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, Secretary of State Daniel Webster stated December 22, 1820:

“There is a…sort of genius of the place, which…awes us. We feel that we are on the spot where the first scene of our history was laid; where the hearths and altars of New England were first placed; where Christianity, and civilization…made their first lodgement, in a vast extent of country…

‘If God prosper us,’ might have been the… language of our fathers, when they landed upon this Rock, ‘…we shall here begin a work which shall last for ages… We shall fill this region of the great continent…with civilization and Christianity…”

Daniel Webster continued:

“The morning that beamed…saw the Pilgrims already at home…a government and a country were to commence, with the very first foundations laid under the divine light of the Christian religion…

Our ancestors established their system of government on morality and religious sentiment…Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.

Our fathers came here to enjoy their religion free and unmolested; and, at the end of two centuries, there is nothing upon which we can pronounce more confidently…than of the inestimable importance of that religion to man…”

Daniel Webster warned:

“We are bound…to convince the world that order and law, religion and morality, the rights of conscience, the rights of persons, and the rights of property, may all be preserved and secured, in the most perfect manner, by a government entirely and purely elective.

If we fail in this, our disaster will be signal, and will furnish an argument…in support of those opinions which maintain that government can rest safely on nothing but power and coercion…”

Continuing his 1820 speech, Daniel Webster added a rebuke:

“The African slave-trader is a pirate and a felon; and in the sight of Heaven, an offender far beyond the ordinary depth of human guilt…

If there be…any participation in this traffic, let us pledge ourselves here, upon the rock of Plymouth, to extirpate and destroy it…

I invoke the ministers of our religion, that they proclaim its denunciation of these crimes, and add its solemn sanctions to the authority of human laws.

If the pulpit be silent whenever or wherever there may be a sinner bloody with this guilt within the hearing of its voice, the pulpit is false to its trust…”

Daniel Webster reflected further:

“Whoever shall hereafter write this part of our history…will be able to record no…lawless and despotic acts, or any successful usurpation.

His page will contain no exhibition of…civil authority habitually trampled down by military power, or of a community crushed by the burden of taxation…

He will speak…of that happy condition, in which the restraint and coercion of government are almost invisible and imperceptible…”

Daniel Webster stated further:

“Finally, let us not forget the religious character of our origin.

Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion.

They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope.

They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary.

Let us cherish these sentiments, and extend this influence still more widely; in the full conviction, that that is the happiest society which partakes in the highest degree of the mild and peaceful spirit of Christianity…”

Daniel Webster concluded:

“Advance, then, ye future generations!

We would hail you, as you rise in your long succession, to fill the places which we now fill…

We welcome you to the blessings of good government and religious
liberty…

We welcome you to…the happiness of kindred, and parents, and children.

We welcome you to the immeasurable blessings of rational existence, the immortal hope of Christianity, and the light of everlasting truth!”

---

The Moral Liberal contributing editor, William J. Federer, is the bestselling author of “Backfired: A Nation Born for Religious Tolerance no Longer Tolerates Religion,” and numerous other books. A frequent radio and television guest, his daily American Minute is broadcast nationally via radio, television, and Internet. Check out all of Bill’s books here.

Robert Boyle born January 25, 1627

American Minute with Bill Federer

The “Father of Chemistry” wanted to evangelize America?… and warned of the end?

Robert Boyle was born JANUARY 25, 1627.

He studied Bacon, Descartes, and other of his contemporaries, including scientists Isaac Newton and Galileo, philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, and poet John Milton.

Robert Boyle made contributions in physics and chemistry, especially with his pneumatic experiments using the vacuum pump, putting forward the idea that gases were made of tiny particles.

He discovered the basic law of gas dynamics, known as “Boyle’s Law,” that if the volume of a gas is decreased, the pressure increases proportionally.

Boyle defined the modern idea of an ‘element,’ introduced the litmus test to distinguish acids from bases, and was the first to use the term “chemical analysis.”

In 1660, Boyle and eleven others formed the Royal Society in London to advance scientific experiments.

While in Geneva, during a frightening thunderstorm, Boyle had a deepening conversion experience.

Boyle devoted much effort to defending and propagating the Christian religion, writing the ‘Boyle Lectures’ and numerous books, including:

Of the high Veneration Man’s Intellect owes to God (1684);

Discourse Of Things Above Reason (1681);

Some Considerations touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures (1661); and

The Christian Virtuoso (1690), which John Locke reviewed in 1681, and which was a basis for Cotton Mather’s work, The Christian Philosopher, 1721.

Robert Boyle provided in his Last Will and Testament, dated July 28, 1691:

“Fifty pounds…for an annual salary so some learned Divine or Preaching Minister…to preach eight sermons in the year, for proving the Christian Religion against notorious Infidels, viz., Atheists, Theists, Pagans, Jews, and Mahometans, not descending lower to any controversies that are among Christians themselves…

and encouraging…any undertaking for Propagating the Christian Religion in foreign parts.”

Robert Boyle was a director of the East India Company, and spent large sums supporting missionary societies in the spread of Christianity in Asia.

Boyle believed all races, no matter how diverse, came from Adam and Eve.

He funded translations of the Bible to make it available in people’s vernacular language, in contrast to the prevailing Latin-only policy, most notably an Irish edition (1680-1685), which was thought ill of by English upper class.

In a letter to a Mr. Clodius, Boyle was concerned about propagating the Gospel to natives in New England and the rest of America, and how to translate and print the Bible in American Indian languages.

Robert Boyle wrote:

“Our Saviour would love at no less rate than death; and from the super-eminent height of glory, stooped and debased Himself to the sufferance of the extremest of indignities, and sunk himself to the bottom of abjectness, to exalt our condition to the contrary extreme.”

Boyle wrote in Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures (1661):

“The Books of Scripture…expound each other; as in the mariner’s compass, the needle’s extremity, though it seems to point purposely to the north, doth yet at the same time discover both east and west, as distant as they are from it and each other, so do some texts of Scripture guide us to the intelligence of others.”

Boyle wrote:

“There are divers truths in the Christian religion, that reason left to itself would never have been able to find out…

Such as…free will…that the world was made in six days, that Christ should be born of a virgin, and that in his person there should be united two such infinitely distant natures as the divine and human;

and that the bodies of good men shall be raised from death and so advantageously changed, that the glorified persons shall be like or equal to, the angels.”

Boyle wrote of the last days and the “sinful world’s ruin”:

“In Noah’s time a deluge of impiety called for a deluge of waters…and so when (in the last days) the earth shall be replenished with those scoffers mentioned by St Peter, who will walk after their own lusts, and deride the expectation of God’s foretold coming to judge and punish the ungodly,

their impiety shall be as well punished as silenced by the unexpected flames…that shall either destroy or transfigure the world.

For as by the law of Moses the leperous garment which would not be recovered by being washed in water, was to be burnt in the fire, so the world, which the Deluge could not cleanse, a general conflagration must destroy.”

Boyle wrote of the destruction of the world by fire at the end of this age:

“The present course of nature shall not last always, but that one day this world…shall either be abolished by annihilation, or which seems far more probable, be innovated, and as it were transfigured, and that, by the intervention of that fire, which shall dissolve and destroy the present frame of nature:

so that either way, the present state of things, (as well natural as political) shall have an end.”

---

The Moral Liberal contributing editor, William J. Federer, is the bestselling author of “Backfired: A Nation Born for Religious Tolerance no Longer Tolerates Religion,” and numerous other books. A frequent radio and television guest, his daily American Minute is broadcast nationally via radio, television, and Internet. Check out all of Bill’s books here.