صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

lift the race to a higher plane, mistaken as were the methods so often employed. But the men who fought for what they believed to be right were men who were not afraid to shed their blood in defense of the right. They fought because the path to the ideal had to be hewed out with the sword, and in its making many men must be overcome by the heat and burden of the fray. They did not run away.

-

66

The Puritans were men with ideals and aspirations. Their ideal was a state in which the word of God was the law of man, a practical world based on Belief in God," Carlyle says. Their aspiration was to found a state with the Bible as their constitution.

CHAPTER VIII

PURITANISM GIVES BIRTH TO DEMOCRACY

Ar the time when the great Puritan migration took place from England to Massachusetts, between the years 1620 and 1630, England was at heart Puritan and the Puritans were in the majority. Puritanism had its adherents and supporters in all ranks of life. Great nobles, leading members of the House of Commons, city merchants who with splendid audacity were financing ventures and expeditions to all parts of the world and laying the foundation for England's incomparable commerce; landed squires, the men who have always been the backbone of English solidity and conservatism; country preachers, the common people, the dwellers in villages as well as those in London and the other large cities, were in favor of the reformation of the Church and a wider political liberty.

It is important that the position and strength of the Puritan party in England should be clearly understood; but it is perhaps even more important to dwell with emphasis upon the truth that the Puritan movement, born in the throes of religious conviction, matured into a political party. It was a protest against the existing order.

The pictures and stories of the Pilgrims setting sail in their frail bark, their landing amidst surroundings so strange and forbidding, their trials and sufferings, their scanty supplies, convey to the modern mind that the Puritans — and this confusion of idea between the Pilgrim and the Puritan seems almost impossible of rectification

[ocr errors]

were the prototypes of that stream of emigration that for three quarters of a century has flowed through the gates of America in ever-increasing volume, and that, like the modern emigrant, the Puritan came to his new home with a pack on his back, unkempt, friendless, and poor. These hardy pioneers — Pilgrims as well as Puritans had to bear the brunt of discomfort as the vanguard of every army of civilization always must; but it was not an army of tatterdemalions without stores or provisions. The Puritans were much better provided than the Pilgrims, but even they had some things that make for comfort rather than solely for necessity. Mourt in his Relation tells of "a green rug and three or four cushions" that were used by the Pilgrims in the ceremonies attending the state reception given to Massasoit, which "were, of course, necessarily brought in the May-Flower," Ames says.1 In case the reader may have overlooked it, I call his attention to the fact that the rug was green, which is evidence that the mythical belief in the Pilgrim and the Puritan hatred of bright colors has no existence.

1 Ames: The May-Flower and her Log, p. 221.

From the beginning the Puritans were well provided. They were backed by strong interests in England, who had the money to charter ships and furnish them with all that was needed to support a colony until it could stand alone. In the twelve years of Archbishop Laud's administration, Neal tells us, about four thousand planters left England, "who laid the foundation of several little towns and villages up and down the country, carrying over with them in materials, money and cattle, etc., not less than to the value of one hundred and ninety thousand pounds, besides the merchandise intended for traffick with the Indians. Upon the whole, it has been computed, that the four settlements of New England, viz. Plimouth, the Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut and Newhaven, all of which were accomplished before the beginning of the civil wars, drained England of four or five hundred thousand pounds, (a very great sum in those days) and if the persecution of the Puritans had continued twelve years longer, it is thought that a fourth part of the riches of the kingdom would have passed out of it through this channel.” 1

Not only were they well provided with the things necessary to set a young colony on the road to material success, but they were captained by men of strength and ability and standing. They were not men to whom life had been a failure and who, having nothing to lose, could afford to risk much for 1 Neal: History of the Puritan, vol. i, p. 546.

great gain. In 1630, only ten years after the little company of the Mayflower had for the first time laid eyes on their new home, John Winthrop and seven hundred companions set sail in eleven ships. "It was more than a colony, it was the migration of a people." The managers of the expedition were Winthrop, a lawyer in the prime of life, of good family and comfortable estate, and worthy; John Humphrey and Isaac Johnson, sons-in-law of the Earl of Lincoln; Thomas Dudley, manager of the Earl's estates; Theophilus Eaton, a London merchant who had served the king as minister to Denmark; William Vassall, an opulent West India proprietor. "The principal planters of Massachusetts," Chalmers says, "were English country gentlemen of no inconsiderable fortunes; of enlarged understandings improved by liberal education; of extensive ambition concealed under the appearance of religious humility." Their concealed ambition was to lay the foundations of "a renovated England, secure in freedom and pure in religion." Before sailing, Winthrop issued an address "to the rest of their Brethren, in and of the Church of England." It gave assurance that we desire you would be pleased to take notice that the principals and body of our company esteem it our honor to call the Church of England from whence wee rise, our deare mother, and cannot part from our native countrie, where she specially resideth, without much sadness of heart and many tears in our eyes,

66

« السابقةمتابعة »