site for a fortified town, and, with Samuel Sharpe, master gunner of ordnance, was to muster all such as lived under the government, both planters and servants, and at appointed times to exercise them in the use of arms. A store of cattle, horses, and goats was put on shipboard. Before sailing, servants of ill life were discharged. "No idle drone may live among us," was the spirit as well as the law of the dauntless community. As Higginson and his companions were receding from the Land's End, he called his children and others around him to look for the last time on their native country, not as the scene of sufferings from intolerance, but as the home of their fathers, and the dwelling-place of their friends. During the voyage they "constantly served God, morning and evening, by reading and expounding a chapter in the Bible, singing and prayer." On "the sabbath they added preaching twice, and catechising;" and twice they "faithfully" kept "solemn fasts." The passage was "pious and Christian-like," for even "the ship-master and his religious company set their eight and twelve o'clock watches with singing a psalm and with prayer that was not read out of a book."

In the last days of June, the band of two hundred arrived at Salem. They found eight or ten pitiful hovels, one larger tenement for the governor, and a few cornfields, as the only proofs that they had been preceded by their countrymen. The old and new planters, without counting women and children, formed a body of about three hundred, of whom the larger part were "godly Christians, helped hither by Isaac Johnson and other members of the company, to be employed in their work for a while, and then to live of themselves."

To anticipate the intrusion of John Oldham, who was minded to settle himself on Boston bay, pretending a title to much land there by a grant from Robert Gorges, Endecott with all speed sent a large party, accompanied by a minister, to occupy Charlestown. On the neck of land, which was full of stately timber, with the leave of Sagamore John, the petty chief who claimed dominion over it, Graves, the surveyor, employed some of the servants of the company in building a "great house," and modelled and laid out the form of the town, with streets about the hill.

To the European world the few tenants of the huts and cabins at Salem were too insignificant to merit notice; to themselves, they were chosen emissaries of God; outcasts from England, yet favorites with Heaven; destitute of security, of convenient food, and of shelter, and yet blessed as instruments selected to light in the wilderness the beacon of pure religion. They were not so much a body politic as a church in the wilderness, seeking, under a visible covenant, to have fellowship with God, as a family of adopted sons.

"The governor was moved to set apart the twentieth of July to be a solemn day of humiliation, for the choyce of a pastor and a teacher at Salem." After prayer and preaching, "the persons thought on," presenting no claim founded on their ordination in England, acknowledged a twofold calling: the inward, which is of God, who moves the heart and bestows fit gifts; the outward, which is from a company of believers joined in covenant, and allowing to every member a free voice in the election of its officers. The vote was then taken by each one's writing in a note the name of his choice. Such is the origin of the use of the ballot on this continent; in this manner Skelton was chosen pastor and Higginson teacher. Three or four of the gravest members of the church then laid their hands on Skelton with prayer, and in like manner on Higginson: so that "these two blessed servants of the Lord came in at the door, and not at the window;" by the act of the congregation, and not by the authority of a prelate. A day in August was appointed for the election of ruling elders and deacons. The church, like that of Plymouth, was self-constituted, on the principle of the independence of each religious community. It did not ask the assent of the king, or recognise him as its head; its officers were set apart and ordained among themselves; it used no liturgy; it rejected unnecessary ceremonies, and reduced the simplicity of Calvin to a still plainer standard. The motives which controlled its decisions were so deeply seated that its practices were repeated spontaneously by Puritan New England.

There were a few at Salem by whom the new system was disapproved; and in John and Samuel Browne they found able leaders. Both were members of the colonial council;

both were reputed "sincere in their affection for the good of the plantation;" they had been specially recommended to Endecott by the corporation in England; and one of them, an experienced lawyer, had been a member of the board of assistants. They refused to unite with the public assembly, and gathered a company, in which "the common prayer worship" was upheld. But should the emigrants, thus the colonists reasoned, give up the purpose for which they had crossed the Atlantic? Should the success of the colony be endangered by a breach of its unity, and the authority of its government overthrown by the confusion of an ever recurring conflict? They deemed the co-existence of their liberty and of prelacy impossible; anticipating invasions of their rights, they feared the adherents of the establishment as spies in the camp; and the form of religion from which they had suffered was repelled, not as a sect, but as a tyranny. "You are separatists," said the Brownes, in self-defence, "and you will shortly be Anabaptists." "We separate," answered the ministers, "not from the church of England, but from its corruptions. came away from the common prayer and ceremonies, in our native land, where we suffered much for non-conformity; in this place of liberty we cannot, we will not, use them. Their imposition would be a sinful violation of the worship of God." The supporters of the liturgy were in their turn rebuked as separatists; their plea was reproved as sedition, their worship forbidden as a mutiny; and the Brownes were sent back to England, as men "factious and evil conditioned," who could not be suffered to remain within the limits of the grant, because they would not be conformable to its government. Thus was episcopacy professed in Massachusetts, and thus was it exiled.

We

The Brownes, on their arrival in England, raised rumors of scandalous and intemperate speeches uttered by the ministers in their public sermons and prayers, and of rash innovations begun and practiced in the civil and ecclesiastical government. The returning ships carried with them numerous letters from the emigrants, and a glowing description of "New England's Plantation" by Higginson which was immediately printed and most eagerly and widely sought for.

CHAPTER XIV.

SELF-GOVERNMENT IN MASSACHUSETTS.

THE Concession of the Massachusetts charter seemed to the Puritans like a summons from Heaven, inviting them to America. England, by her persecutions, proved herself weary of her inhabitants, esteeming them more vile than the earth on which they trod. Habits of expense degraded men of moderate fortune; and the schools, which should be fountains of living waters, had become corrupt. What nobler work than to plant a church without a blemish where it might spread over a continent?

But was it right, a scrupulous conscience demanded, to fly from persecutions? Yes, they answered, for persecutions might lead their posterity to abjure the truth. The certain misery of their wives and children was the most gloomy of their forebodings; but a stern sense of duty hushed the alarms of affection, and set aside all consideration of physical evils as the fears of too carnal minds. Respect for the rights of the natives offered an impediment more easily removed; much of the land from the Penobscot to Plymouth had been desolated by a fatal contagion, and the good leave of the surviving tribes might be purchased. The ill success of other plantations could not chill the rising enthusiasm; former enterprises had aimed at profit, the present object was purity of religion; the earlier settlements had been filled with a lawless multitude, it was now proposed to form a "peculiar government," and to colonize "THE BEST." Such were the "Conclusions," which were privately circulated among the Puritans of England.

At a general court, held on the twenty-eighth of July, 1629, Matthew Cradock, governor of the company, who had

engaged himself beyond all expectation in the business, following out what seems to have been the early design, proposed "the transfer of the government of the plantation to those that should inhabit there." At the offer of freedom from subordination to the company in England, several "persons of worth and quality," wealthy commoners, zealous Puritans, were confirmed in the desire of founding a new and a better commonwealth beyond the Atlantic, even though it might require the sale of their estates, and hazard the inheritance of their children. To his father, who was the most earnest of them all, the younger Winthrop, then about four-and-twenty, wrote cheeringly: "I shall call that my country where I may most glorify God, and enjoy the presence of my dearest friends. Therefore herein I submit myself to God's will and yours, and dedicate myself to God and the company, with the whole endeavors both of body and mind. The Conclusions which you sent down are unanswerable; and it cannot but be a prosperous action which is so well allowed by the judg ments of God's prophets, undertaken by so religious and wise worthies in Israel, and indented to God's glory in so special a service."

On the twenty-sixth of August, at Cambridge, in England, twelve men, of large fortunes and liberal culture, among whom were John Winthrop, Isaac Johnson, Thomas Dudley, Richard Saltonstall, bearing in mind that the adventure could grow only upon confidence in each other's fidelity and resolution, bound themselves in the presence of God, by the word of a Christian, that if before the end of September an order of the court should legally transfer the whole government, together with the patent, they would themselves pass the seas to inhabit and continue in New England. Two days after this covenant had been executed, the subject was again brought before the court; a serious and long-continued debate ensued, and on the twenty-ninth of August a general consent appeared, by the erection of hands, that "the government and patent should be settled in New England."

This vote, by which the commercial corporation became the germ of an independent commonwealth, was simply a decision of the question where the future meetings of the