The party opposed, increased in numbers, and in the boldness of its attacks upon the church, and the church with the queen in the severity of their penal inflictions. As the result of the whole, she bequeathed to her successor, a powerful and organized party, embittered by persecution, and prepared to contend with power arrayed against them. At first it was a religious party; afterwards, through necessity, it appeared and made itself felt in the Parliament, as a political body.* To accomplish her will, in the matters of the church, the queen ventured upon violent extensions of royal authority, and high assumptions of arbitrary power. For this end, she trampled on the privileges of parliament and the rights of Englishmen. Doing this, she aroused against herself, the old and stubborn spirit of English liberty, and enlisted many on the side of the Puritans, who cared little for their non-conforming scruples.

Thus it was that the question of English liberty, was connected with the question of religious usages and discipline; thus did it happen that her successor found to his astonishment, that "there was such a thing as a Parliament." The outset of his administration, was signalized by the hope, on the part of the Non-conformists, that he would favor their views. On his way from Scotland to the throne, he was presented with a petition for the removal of the abuses, signed by nearly one thousand ministers. His disposition soon became manifest. At the close of the conference at Hampton court, a conference, the record of which is a decisive testimony to the brutality of the king, he uttered the remarkable words, "If this is all your party hath to say, I will make them conform themselves, or else I will harrie them out of the land." He was as good as his word. Notwithstanding the advice of Lord Bacon, presented a second time to the throne, advice left still on

* Note A.

record, he persisted in his most offensive and insolent oppression, till toward the end of his reign, the emigration to New England first began.

Thus far I have traced the history of parties in England, that a just idea may be formed of the character of the men who planted this land.

They were of a great and growing party, embracing men of all classes, and of various religious and political principles, the soul of which was grave and earnest piety toward God, a hearty reverence for his word, and a determined purpose to hold high the sacred convictions of reason and conscience-never to dishonor them by cowardly or courtly compliances to dead power; though it filled a throne, or spoke terror in the Star chamber.

It was the party of the middling class throughout the kingdom; of the men of intelligence, of worth, of substantial though not of princely wealth, including not the nobles truly, but many of the gentry in the agricultural districts. It was the party also of the manufacturers and the merchants, the men who have given England its princely wealth, and London its splendid magnificence. In the civil wars, the city of London was ever with the Parliament against the king, and by its present aid and its abundant resources, the Parliament and the people triumphed. It embraced many hundreds of ministers, confessed by all to have been learned, godly and eloquent men, whose influence over their flocks, through the pre-eminence of their qualifications for their work, made the contest ever so unequal and laborious to the king, the court and the hierarchy.

When from this party, thousands emigrated to this soil, and planted their feet upon these shores, there was stricken off from the English nation, an integral portion of its worthiest population, representing its substantial interests and the several constituents of its real strength and glory.. They did not come, a band of needy adventurers, driven

out by the necessity of a superabundant population, and the scarcity of food and employment; whose first care, is for the necessities of nature, whose next anxiety is for wealth, and who leave society, government, literature and religion to grow up as they can, the last want of a generation grown squalid by the neglect of culture, and barbarous in the midst of material wealth. They came from no such necessity as this, but for the sake of institutions did they come,-institutions enshrined in their best affections, made sacred by conscientious reverence, and doubly dear by suffering and trial. These it was their object to enjoy and make sure; and to transport them to a secure refuge, they were willing to go to regions most distant, if thus they could remove them beyond the reach of their foes,—to shores that were cold and inhospitable, if their ruggedness might repel the visitations of these unwelcome guests.

Never had the world seen a sight like this before; learning, piety, culture, rank and wealth, going out from the abodes of civilized life, to lay the foundations of a colony; a colony ever proverbial before, as being the last resort of the needy, or the tempting prize of the adventurous,- -a colony planted not by the poor or the rapacious, but by fit representatives from every class of society in the finest nation upon earth, except indeed the idlers who sparkled on its surface, and the ignorant and vicious, who crawled in the slime of its dregs.

Faith in God was the law of their characters, and the soul of their enterprises. This faith was not a general and distant recognition of his perfections, but it was a familiar though reverent acquaintance with his glory; not a cold assent to his agency in all things, but a heartfelt conviction that his finger moves every event, and orders the result of every undertaking. The piety of the Puritans however, though a distinguishing was not the one distinctive feature which made them what they were. Piety as stedfast and

martyr-like, had dwelt among the secluded Waldenses, and sustained them by simple trust in God, in the dark hour of their threatened extinction. Piety of as seraphic fervor, had fired the ardent Huguenot in his unequal contest. The piety of the Puritans, while it was affectionate and believing, was intellectual, philosophic, standing upon truth and principle, as upon a rock. It was piety animating the English mind, with its peculiarly reflective character, and its stubborn adhesion to its convictions, against power and place, when this mind awoke as by an electric impulse, to a knowledge of its dignity, and the high purpose which God had commissioned it to accomplish. It was piety exacting the conscientious fulfillment of individual and daily duties, and not content with these, but daring to test by the word of God "the tenure of kings and magistrates," the foundations of church and state, and to demand in the name of God, that these should be ordered by the principles of his word, and should act in harmony with that sublime government, which included them all. Most of all, the church engaged their most earnest solicitude and tasked their severest inquiries. The state they left as they found it. They prescribed no form of civil government as divine. They entered the lists of civil strife and acted as politicians, not to overthrow the monarchy of England, but to make her king the head of a purer church; not to strip him of his hereditary rights, but to secure to his subjects, their hereditary privileges. They honored the state, as the auxiliary and patron of the church, having its own sphere, and its own duties, but these coincident with the object of the church.

Besides the discipline of law, the discipline of the family, and the discipline of the school, were esteemed of essential importance. A child uncontrolled at home, and untrained at school, was in their view a burden on the earth, a curse

to the commonwealth, and a hopeless subject for the church; a heathen in a Christian land.

The church of God, with its Sabbaths of consecrated rest, its teaching and pastoral Ministry, its active Brotherhood, its Schoolmaster in every hamlet, its domestic Priest in every household, its Magistracy "just men ruling in the fear of God," all in harmony with the principles of the divine government; this was the soul, the animating principle of all their movements, the bright result of every enterprise. It was not agriculture, with its plenteous harvests, not commerce with its golden prizes, not adventure with its romantic incidents and its barbaric spoils, not civil independence with its ambitious designs, not these first, and the church and its adjuncts second, not these second and incidental to the church, but the Church all in all.

We need not contend, that their views of the church were scriptural and true, to give to men bound across the Atlantic on an errand and for an aim like this, the heartiest homage of our fervent admiration; nor need we pronounce them faultless men, to set them apart for our honor, as men whom the earth can match with none like them, in the justness of their views of man's truest interests, and their self-denying wisdom to advance them.

Behold the passengers of the Mayflower, not daring to land upon the shores of Cape Cod in a dreary winter's day, till they had institutions to land upon the shores before them, under the shade of which they might sit down and dwell. Where are the men but they, who shivering at unaccustomed cold, disappointed of their expected harbor, defrauded by treachery, and vexed by delay, would crowd into a narrow cabin, to form themselves into a state, and would refuse to disembark till they could land in the dignity of an organized commonwealth? Behold the newly planted colonists of Massachusetts and New Haven, with