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30 The National Music of America.
Gradually both sects, in America, approached each other and were finally merged as Con-gregationalists.
Who, then, were the Pilgrims ? All those members of the Separatist Church at Ley-den, who voted for the migration to America, whether they were actually able to go there or not, together with such other members as afterward joined their church from England.1 The Puritans were reformers who claimed to be within the ranks of the Church of England, a free, non-conformist, and greatly dissatisfied kind of Episcopalians; the Separatists, who subsequently became Pilgrims to America, renounced the above church and formed a community by themselves. They were fearfully persecuted, even, at times, by the Puritans. They were sometimes contemptuously called "Brownites" or "Brownists," after Robert Brown, who in 1580 warmly espoused their cause, afterward deserted it,
1 Arber, p. 355. |
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