the famous motto of Chillingworth had a real meaning and application: THE BIBLE IS THE RELIGION OF PROTESTANTS.

Second. The religion of the founders of New England was friendly to the diffusion of knowledge, and set a high value on learning. Many of their pastors, especially, were men of great attainments. Not a few of them had been educated at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in England, and some had brought with them a European reputation. John Cotton, John Wilson, Thomas Hooker, Dunster, and Chauncey, of whom the last two became Presidents of the University at Cambridge; Thomas Thatcher, Samuel Whiting, John Sherman, John Eliot, and several more of the early ministers, were men of great learning. All were well instructed in theology, and thoroughly versed in Hebrew, as well as in Greek and Latin. Some, too, such as Sherman and Watertown, were fine mathematical scholars. They were the friends and correspondents of Baxter, and Howe, and Selden, and Milton, and other luminaries among the Puritans of England. Their regard for useful learning they amply proved, by the establishment of schools and. academies for all the youth of the colonies, as well as for their own children. Only eight years after thefirst settlement of Massachusetts colony, they founded, at a great expense for men in their circumstances, the University of Harvard, at Cambridge, near Boston, an institution at which, for a period of more than sixty years, the most distinguished men of New England received their academical education.

Third. Their religion was eminently fitted to enlarge men's views of the duty of living for God and promoting His kingdom in the world. They felt that Christianity was the greatest boon that mankind can possess; a blessing which they were bound to do their utmost to secure to their posterity. In going to a new continent, they were influenced by a double hope, the enlargement of Christ's kingdom by the conversion of heathen tribes, and the founding of an empire for their own children, in which His religion should gloriously prevail. Their eyes seemed to catch some glimpses of the Messiah's universal reign, when "all nations shall be blessed in Him, and call Him blessed."

Fourth. Their religion prompted to great examples of self-denial. Filled with the idea of an empire in which true religion might live and flourish, and satisfied from what they had seen of the Old World that the Truth was in bondage there, they sighed for a land in which they might serve God according to His blessed Word. To secure such a privilege to themselves and their children, they were willing to go into a wilderness, and to toil and die. This was something worth making sacrifices for, and much did they sacrifice to obtain it.

Though poor in comparison with many others, still they belonged to good families, and might have lived very comfortably in England; but they preferred exile and hardship, in the hope of securing spiritual advantages to themselves and their posterity.

Fifth. There was a noble patriotism in their religion. Some of them had long been exiled from England; others had found their mother country a very unkindly home, and yet England was still dear to them. With them it was not "Farewell, Babylon! farewell, Rome!" but, "Farewell, dear England!"* Though contemptuously treated by James I. and Charles I., yet they spoke of being desirous of "enlarging his Majesty's dominions." The Plymouth settlers did not wish to remain in Holland, because "their posterity would in a few generations become Dutch, and lose their interest in the English nation; they being desirous to enlarge his Majesty's dominions, and to live under their natural prince." And much as they had suffered from the prelacy of the Established Church, unnatural stepmother as she had been to them, nothing could extinguish the love that they felt for her, and for the many dear children of God whom she retained in her communion.

Sixth, and last. Their religion was favorable to liberty of conscience. Not that they were sufficiently enlightened to bring their laws and institutions into perfect accordance with that principle at the outset; but even then they were, in this respect, in advance of the age in which they lived: and the spirit of that religion which had made them and their fathers, in England, the defenders of the rights of the people, and their tribunes, as it were, against the domination of the throne and the altar, caused them, at last, to admit the claims of conscience in their full extent.

The fathers of New England were no mean men, whether we look to themselves or to those with whom they were associated in England -the Lightfoots, the Gales, the Seldens, the Miltons, the Bunyans, the Baxters, the Bateses, the Howes, the Charnocks, the Flavels, and others of scarcely inferior standing, among the two thousand who had labored in the pulpits of the Established Church, but whom the Restoration cast out.

Such were the men who founded the New England colonies, and their spirit still survives, in a good measure, in their descendants after six generations. With the exception of some tens of thousands of recently-arrived Irish and Germans in Boston, and other towns on the sea-board, and of the descendants of those of the Huguenots who settled in New England, that country is wholly occupied by the progeny of the English Puritans who first colonized it. But these are not the * See Mather's Magnalia, b. iii., c. i., s. 12.

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whole of their descendants in America; for besides the 2,728,116 souls forming the population of the six New England States in 1850, it is supposed that an equal, if not a still greater number, have emigrated to New York, to the northern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and into all parts of Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, and Minnesota: carrying with them, in a large measure, the spirit and the institutions of their glorious ancestors. Descendants of the Puritans are also to be found scattered over all parts of the United States, and many of them prove a great blessing to the neighborhoods in which they reside.

How wonderful, then, was the mission of the founders of New England! How gloriously accomplished! How rich in its results!

CHAPTER V.

RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE EARLY COLONISTS.-FOUNDERS OF THE

SOUTHERN STATES.

WIDELY different in character, I have already remarked, were the early colonists of the Southern from those of the Northern States. If New England may be regarded as colonized by the Anglo-Saxon race, with its simpler manners, its more equal institutions, and its love of liberty, the South may be said to have been colonized by men very Norman in blood, aristocratic in feeling and spirit, and pretending to superior dignity of demeanor and elegance of manners. Nor has time yet effaced this original diversity. On the contrary, it has been increased and confirmed by the continuance of slavery in the South: an institution which has not prevailed much at any time in the North, but has immensely influenced the tone of feeling and the customs of the Southern States.

If the New England colonies are chargeable with having allowed their feelings to become alienated from a throne from which they had often been contemptuously spurned, with equal truth might those of the South be accused of going to the opposite extreme, in their attachment to a line of monarchs alike undeserving of their love, and incapable of appreciating their generous loyalty.

We might carry the contrast still further. If New England was the favorite asylum of the Puritan "Roundhead," the South became, in its turn, the retreat of the "Cavalier," upon the joint subversion of the altar and the throne in his native land. And if the religion of the one was strict, serious, in the regard of its enemies unfriendly to

innocent amusements, and even morose, the other was the religion of the court, and of fashionable life, and did not require so uncompromising a resistance "to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life."

Not that from this parallelism, which is necessarily general, the reader is to infer that the Northern colonies had exclusive claims to be considered as possessing a truly religious character. All that is meant is to give a general idea of the different aspects that religion bore in the one and the other.

Virginia, as we have already stated, was of all the colonies the first in point of date. Among its neighbors in the South it was what Massachusetts was in the North-the mother, in some sense, of the rest, and the dominant colony. Not that the others were planted chiefly from it, but because, from the prominence of its position, the amount of its population, and their intelligence and wealth, it acquired from the first a preponderating influence, which it retains as a State to this day.

The records of Virginia furnish indubitable evidence that it was meant to be a Christian colony. The charter enjoined that the mode of worship should conform to that of the Established Church of England. In 1619, for the first time, Virginia had a Legislature chosen by the people; and by an act of that body, the Episcopal Church was, properly speaking, established. In the following year the number of boroughs erected into parishes was eleven, and the number of pastors five, the population at the time being considerably under three thousand. In 1621-22, it was enacted that the clergy should receive from their parishioners fifteen hundred pounds of tobacco and sixteen barrels of corn each, as their yearly salary, estimated to be worth, in all, £200. Every male colonist of the age of sixteen or upward was required to pay ten pounds of tobacco and one bushel of corn.

The Company under whose auspices Virginia was colonized, seems to have been influenced by a sincere desire to make the plantation the means of propagating the knowledge of the Gospel among the Indians. A few years after the first settlement was made, in the body of their instructions they particularly urged upon the governor and Assembly "the using of all probable means of bringing over the natives to a love of civilization, and to the love of God and His true religion." They recommended the colonists to hire the natives as laborers, with the view of familiarizing them to civilized life, and thus to bring them gradually to the knowledge of Christianity, that they might be employed as instruments "in the general conversion of their countrymen, so much desired." It was likewise recommended "that each town, borough, and hundred should procure, by just means, a

certain number of Indian children, to be brought up in the first elements of literature; that the most towardly of these should be fitted for the college, in building of which they purposed to proceed as soon as any profit arose from the estate appropriated to that use; and they earnestly required their earnest help and furtherance in that pious and important work, not doubting the particular blessing of God upon the colony, and being assured of the love of all good men upon that account."*

Even the first charter assigns as one of the reasons for the grant, that the contemplated undertaking was "a work which may, by the providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the glory of His Divine Majesty, in the propagating of the Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God."†

The Company seem early to have felt the importance of promoting education in the colony. Probably at their solicitation, the king issued letters to the bishops throughout England, directing collections to be made for building a college in Virginia. The object was at first stated to be "the training up and educating infidel (heathen) children in the true knowledge of God."‡ Nearly £1,500 had already been collected, and Henrico had been selected as the best situation for the building, when, at the instance of their treasurer, Sir Edwin Sandys, the Company granted ten thousand acres to be laid off for the new "University of Henrico;" the original design being at the same time extended, by a resolve that the institution should be for the education of the English as well as the Indians. Much interest was felt throughout England in the success of this undertaking. The Bishop of London gave £1,000 toward its accomplishment, and an anonymous contributor gave £500 exclusively for the education of the Indian youth. It had warm friends in Virginia also. The minister of Henrico, the Rev. Mr. Bargrave, gave his library, and the inhabitants of the place subscribed £1,500 to build a hostelry for the entertainment of strangers and visitors.§ Preparatory to the college or university, it was proposed that a school should be established at St. Charles's City, to be called the East India School, from the fact that the first donation toward its endowment had been contributed by the master and crew of an East Indiaman on its return to England.

* Burk's "History of Virginia," pp. 225, 226.

1 Charter.-1. Hazzard's State Papers, 51. This work of the late Mr. Hazzard contains all the charters granted by the sovereigns of England for promoting colonization in America.

Stith's "History of Virginia," pp 162, 163. § Holmes's Annals, p. 173.