Compare And Contrast Puritans And Pilgrims

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The topic I've chosen to compare and contrast for my paper is the pilgrims and the puritans. The pilgrims were a group of settlers who journeyed Holland aboard the Mayflower. They landed in Plymouth in 1620. The Puritans were a group of settlers who arrived almost a decade later in Massachusetts Bay. They came in many ships and outnumbered the pilgrims.
The Pilgrims and Puritans are extremely similar in most of their practices and beliefs. They both came to America looking for religious freedom. Both Pilgrims and Puritans strongly opposed the Catholic church. They both believed that The Anglican Church, the Church of England should ultimately make more reforms and get rid of any and all traces of the Roman Catholic Church. Pilgrims and …show more content…

For instance the Pilgrims were separatists and the Puritans were non-separatists. The Pilgrim separatists wanted to end all ties with the established Anglican Church. Whereas the Puritan non- separatists sought to reform the Anglican church from within.The Puritans wanted the church to become pure by getting rid of all the catholic influences and rituals. They wanted the church to go back to the old faith of the new testaments. The Puritans didn't want to separate from the church. They only wanted to make reforms or changes within the church. The Pilgrims however believed the church was to corrupt to purify from the inside and that the Puritans should separate from the church. These people were called separatists. The separatists decided to leave their country and their church behind them and move to the Netherlands to avoid religious persecution. While there their leader Williams Brewster published several religious pamphlets that directly criticized King James I of England and opposed the main principals of the Church of England. Authorities were then sent into the Netherlands to arrest him but he escapes. The rest of the groups end up reading a book by John Smith and it basically was a description of New England. This book inspired the separatists to journey to the new world and set up their own colony. They arrived in North America in 1620. They named their new town Plymouth.

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