brought to New England the best that the Old England had to give. Permanent Influence of the Puritans. If we inquire what influences this great party has left with the English-speaking races, the answer will be: Free governments, by the people, and for the people, on both sides of the Atlantic; a free press; an enlightened public opinion, which controls princes and Cabinets; free public schools open to the children of the people; a nobler Christian manhood; a fuller comprehension of the religion of Christ, which brings help and comfort to the poor, which brings liberty to the slaves as those redeemed by the Saviour of the world; the separation of Church and state; the equality of all branches of the Church before the law; freedom within the Church, whether it be Prelatical or Presbyterian or Congregational; a quiet Sunday, with its opportunities for the culture of the spiritual nature; and a free pulpit, in sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men; preaching in pagan lands, and in those that are Christian; the Gospel for all such as labor and are heavy laden. The Pilgrim and the Puritan: Which? THE history of the Puritan party in England prepares us to appreciate the early settlers of New England. That strong and peculiar type of men had been developed by the experiences of three generations in the Mother Country. They brought with them the principles for which they had been struggling. They came to the New World because they hoped to lay the foundations of a free state, and a free Protestant Church such as they had tried to develop in the land of their fathers. The success of the earlier English colonies on this side of the Atlantic had not been so great as to awaken any enthusiasm for emigration. There had been severe privations, and some disastrous failures. The evidence is conclusive that our forefathers came to New England not as adventurers, but, as the friends of liberty and of the Protestant religion, to found a state in which they could work out the principles for which they had been contending, and which they had come to believe could not be developed in the Old World. The Two We shall do well to study, first of all, the characteristics of the two earliest colonies. For it is well known that the Province of Colonies. Massachusetts, which was constituted in the year 1692, was made up from two original colonies, -the Plymouth Colony, or, as we say, the Old Colony; and the Colony of Massachusetts Bay. We have already seen that the two colonies were settled at different times, by different classes of people. The Pilgrims had come from their life in Holland, where the influence of William the Silent had given a free and tolerant spirit to the earnest Protestants who had stood heroically against the armies of Spain. They could not forget the country where they had found refuge from persecution. They were the disciples of Robert Browne, and they had founded a Separatist Church in the new settlement. The Puritans were fresh from the great national contest for their rights as Englishmen under Magna Charta, in the times of Charles the First and Bishop Laud. They brought with them the principles of Sir John Eliot, John Hampden, and John Pym. They had a great dread of Popery, and they believed the Church of England was relapsing into the superstitions of Romanism. Each Colony was developing its political and religious institutions in its own way. In many |