BOOK I. Lord's day is not what the laws of the land affirm it to be; or that church government by presbytery is antichristian or unlawful,' shall recant his errors, and find bail for his future conduct, or suffer indefinite imprisonment.* It will be seen that this act supposes the existence, and open avowal, of Atheism and Deism, of Unitarianism and Arminianism, and couples the licence of the Antinomian with the mysticism of the Quakers. In 1648, the great remedy of the parliament, it seems, against these errors of the times, consisted in the staff of the constable, the miseries of a prison cell, and the use of the hangman. It is manifest that the Long Parliament is not improving in wisdom or temper, and its days are not likely to be many. The desperate junto who passed this act hoped by this means to scare and crush the Independents in the army, and the sects who were in a measure sheltered by them. But there were Presbyterians who did not concur in this policy, and the Independents were little moved by it.

The Presbyterian clergy never ceased to be diligent students, zealous preachers and pastors, and they succeeded through many years in giving-to use their own language-a face of godliness to the parishes of England. Too much praise can hardly be given them on this ground. But the time came in which both the divines and the statesmen of this party were to show themselves unequal to the great political crisis which they had done so much to evoke. In the meanwhile, another party, not less old in our history, but of slower growth, was making its existence felt both in England and America, and was about to come in as a more advanced wave in the history of English thought, and of English action. *Scobel's Acts, 149, 150.

The rise of Independency, and of the larger and freer CHAP.IV. thinking to which Independency gave comparative protection and encouragement, constitutes the second, and the more developed phase of the great revolution which dates from the meeting of the Long Parliament.

of English

to Holland.

Towards the close of the reign of Elizabeth, and in Migration the time of her successor, Nonconformists who had Separatists separated from the established church began their migration to Holland. Humble men and women, in London, in Gainsborough, and in a village named Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire, had heard that the Dutch were a sober and industrious nation, and granted liberty of worship to strangers who chose to settle among them. So precious to the heart of those people was the thought of such liberty, that to gain it, families who had never seen the sea, and many who had never travelled far beyond their own homestead, covenanted together to go to that land, and to cast themselves on Providence in that strange and far-off country." * The Rev. Richard

One of the sufferers thus writes of the lot which had befallen them at home : 'Some were taken and clapped up in prison; others had 'their houses beset and watched night and day, and hardly escaped 'their hands; and the most were fain to fly and leave their habitations, ' and the means of their livelihood.' What they felt in prospect of seeking a new home is thus indicated: To go into a country they 'knew not but by hearsay, where they must learn a new language, and 'get their livings they knew not how, it being a dear place, and sub'ject to the miseries of war, it was by many thought an adventure 'almost desperate, a case intolerable, and a misery worse than death; especially seeing they were not acquainted with trades nor traffic, (by 'which the country doth subsist,) but had only been used to a plain 'country life, and the innocent trade of husbandry. But these things 'did not dismay them, (although they did sometimes trouble them,) for 'their desires were set on the ways of God, and to enjoy his ordinances. They rested on his providence, and knew in whom they had believed.'

rous.

BOOK 1. Clifton, formerly rector of Babworth, near Scrooby, accompanied the people who were the fruit of his spiritual labour in their exile. The church under his oversight at Amsterdam is said to have numbered three hundred members. The church of the same character, under the Rev. John Robinson, at Leyden, was hardly less numeMuch had those people endured in their attempts to escape from the country which had given them birth, but which would not give them a religious home; and much were they to endure from the want of suitable employment among a people of foreign ways and foreign speech. But after a while, their industry and moral worth procured them friends, and they found a fair supply of their simple wants.

Migration to America.

The reader will remember that from the church at Leyden went those memorable adventurers who were the founders of New Plymouth, known in history as the Pilgrim Fathers. Other voluntary exiles followed in the wake of the pilgrims. So constant, indeed, and so widening was the stream which flowed in that direction. from this country, that when the Long Parliament assembled, New Plymouth and Boston had become mother settlements to a fair progeny. Not less than fifty thousand persons, it was supposed, had left our shores in search of a freedom in New England which they had despaired of realizing in the old. Of so much importance had those colonies become, that when the assembly of divines was about to meet at Westminster, the churches of New England were invited to send some of their learned men to assist in its delibera

Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, 10, 11. Hunter's Collections concerning the Church and Congregation of Protestant Separatists formed at Scrooby.

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Character of

the colonists

in America.

tions. In fact, during the oppressions of the last ten CHAP. IV. years, many of the bravest and wisest gentlemen in England, persons of large wealth, and even peers of the realm, were prompted to look towards that western world as a promised land to all men capable of feeling that to cease to live would be a less evil than to cease to be religiously free.* Nor were all the early settlers in those regions persons from humble life. Without a considerable admixture of the kind of thoughtfulness which comes from religion aided by education, the history of those colonies would not have become such as we find it. Among the men of some mark and position who sailed in the Mayflower, were Bradford, and Brewster, and Winslow, and Standish-men who left an impress on the settlement at New Plymouth which was not to be effaced. It was so in the colony of Massachusetts. The colonists were mostly persons to be influenced by intelligence, and there were intelligent men to influence them. Winthrop, more than once governor of Massachusetts, was a man to lead men; and for a while, Harry Vane, afterwards so prominent in our English history, filled that office.

Colonists have generally become such from purely

In 1641 Milton thus wrote: 'What numbers of faithful and freeborn Englishmen and good Christians have been constrained to 'forsake their dearest home, their friends and kindred, whom nothing but the wide ocean and the savage deserts of America could hide and shelter from the fury of the bishops. Let the astrologer be dismayed. ' at the portentous blaze of comets, and impressions in the air, as fore'telling troubles and changes to states; I shall believe there cannot be a more ill-boding sign to a nation-God turn the omen from usthan when the inhabitants, to avoid insufferable grievances at home, are enforced by heaps to forsake their native country.' Reformation in England, Book ii.

tive with

can settlers.

BOOK I. Commercial or secular considerations. Our special Grand mo- interest in the early American colonies arises from the the Ameri- fact that their object was not so much secular as religious. They consisted of persons who believed themselves to be possessed with the idea of Christianity which is set forth in its own records, in distinction from the conventional and corrupt forms of it everywhere about them. They feared, and not without reason, that it might be their lot to see their views of the Christian religion die out in Holland from the fewness of their numbers; and to see them crushed out in England by the hostility of the government. Believing, as they did, that their creed, their polity, and their worship were the same which had been so precious among the people who first bore the Christian name, it was natural they should wish to give place and establishment to principles so regarded, in some region where they might take root, grow, and expand. In their great enterprise their spiritual liberty was their first object, and in relation to that they aimed to provide, not simply for themselves, nor for their children, but for the unborn and remote generations of men.

Their ideal state.

In the Christendom familiar to this new race of colonists, the state was everywhere more or less hostile to the spiritual freedom of the church. To their imagination an order of things was present, in which the magistrate and the minister, the state and the church, should be at one, and at one in their endeavour to realize this scriptural idea of the Christian life. They coveted a settled home of that character for themselves, for their children, and for all who shared in their faith and feeling. In this New England way,' as it was afterwards called, we see a sequence from the circum