and powerful corporations, all that the individual efforts of the boldest and most experienced private adventurers, stimulated by the most glowing imaginations of the gains which awaited their grasp, could do, had been done, and done in vain. Means and motives of this sort had effected nothing, indeed, on the whole North American Continent, after more than half a century of uninterrupted operation, but a little settlement at one extremity by the Spanish, (St. Augustine, in 1565,) a couple of smaller settlements at the other extremity by the French, (Port Royal, in 1605, and Quebec, in 1609,) and smaller and more precarious than either, the Jamestown settlement, about midway between the two; this last being the only shadow- and but a shadow it was of English colonization on the whole continent.

But the Atlantic coast of North America, and especially that part of it which was to be known as New England, was destined to date its ultimate occupation to something higher and nobler than the chivalry of adventurers, the greediness of corporations, or the ambition of kings. The lust of new dominion, the thirst for treasure, the quest for spoil, had found an ample field, reaped an overflowing harvest, and rioted in an almost fatal surfeit on the southern Continent. It might almost seem, in view of the lofty destinies which were in store for the northern, in contemplation of the momentous influences it was to exert upon the welfare of mankind and the progress of the world, as if Providence had heaped those treasures and clustered those jewels upon the soil of Peru and Mexico, to divert the interest, absorb the passions, cloy the appetite and glut the rapacity which were naturally aroused by the discovery of a New World. We might almost imagine the guardian Spirit of the Pilgrims commissioned to cast down this golden fruit, and strew this Hesperian harvest along the pathway of the newly awakened enterprise, to secure the more certainly for the subjects of its appointed care, the possession of their promised land their dowerless, but chosen Atalanta.

But I am anticipating an idea which must not be thus summarily dismissed, and to which I may presently find an opportunity to do better justice. Meantime, however, let me remark, that we are not left altogether to supernatural agency for at least

the secondary impulse under which New England was colonized. Nor were the earthly princes and potentates of whom I have already spoken,- Elizabeth, her Minister of Justice, and her successor in the throne, though so signally frustrated in all their direct endeavors to that end, without a most powerful, though wholly indirect and involuntary, influence upon its final accomplishment.

The daughter of Ann Bullen could not fail to cherish a most hearty and implacable hatred towards that Church, in defiance of whose thunders she was conceived and cradled, and in the eye and open declaration of which she was a bastard, a heretic, an outlaw, and a usurper. So far, at any rate, Elizabeth was a friend to the Reformation. But she had almost as little notion as her father, of any reformation which reached beyond releasing her dominions from the authority of the Pope, and establishing herself at the head of the Church. And, accordingly, the very first year of her reign was marked by the enactment of laws exacting, under the severest penalties, conformity to the doctrines and discipline of the English Church-a policy which she never relinquished.

For a violation of these laws and others of subsequent enactment, but of similar import, a large number of persons in her kingdom, whose minds had been too thoroughly inspired with disgust for the masks and mummeries of Catholic worship, to be content with a bare renunciation of the temporal or spiritual authority of the Pope, were arrested, imprisoned, and treated with all manner of persecution. At least six of them were capitally executed, and two of these, as it happened, were condemned to death by that very Lord Chief Justice whom we have seen a few years afterwards at the head of the Plymouth Company, engaged in so earnest but unavailing an effort to colonize the New England coast. Little did he know that his part in that work had been already performed.

In an imaginary "dialogue between some young men born in New England, and sundry ancient men that came out of Holland and Old England," written in 1648, by Governor Bradford a name which before all others should be this day remembered with veneration the young men are represented as asking of

"We the old men, how many Separatists had been executed? know certainly of six," replied the ancient men, "that were publicly executed, besides such as died in prisons.

Two of them were condemned by cruel Judge Popham, whose countenance and carriage was very rough and severe towards them, with many sharp menaces. But God gave them courage to bear it, and to make this answer:

"My Lord, your face we fear not,

And for your threats we care not,

And to come to your read service we dare not.'”

Nor did King James depart from the footsteps of his predecessor in the religious policy of his administration. Though from his Scotch education and connections, and from the opinions which he had openly avowed before coming to the English throne, he had seemed pledged to a career of liberality and toleration, yet no sooner was he fairly seated on that throne than he, too, set about vindicating his claim to his new title of “ Defender of the Faith," and enforcing conformity to the rites and ceremonies of the English Church. And he cut short a conference at Hampton Court, between himself and the Puritan leaders, got up at his own instigation, in the vainglorious idea that he could vanquish these heretics in an argument, with this summary and most significant declaration" If this be all they have to say, I will make them conform, or I will harry them out of the land."

The idea of banishment was full of bitterness to those to whom it was thus sternly held up. They loved their native land with an affection which no rigor of restraint, no cruelty of persecution could quench. Death itself, to some of them at "We crave," was least, seemed to have fewer fears than exile. the touching language of a Petition of sixty Separatists, in 1592, who had been committed unbailable to close prison in London, where they were allowed neither meat, nor drink, nor lodging, and where no one was suffered to have access to them, so as no felons or traitors or murderers were thus dealt with, "We crave for all of us but the liberty either to die openly or to live openly in the land of our nativity. If we deserve death,

it beseemeth the majesty of justice not to see us closely murdered, yea, starved to death with hunger and cold, and stifled in loathsome dungeons. If we be guiltless, we crave but the benefit of our innocence, that we may have peace to serve our God and our Prince in the place of the sepulchres of our fathers."

But there were those among them, notwithstanding, to whom menaces, whether of banishment or of the block, even uttered thus angrily by one, who, as he once well said of himself, "while he held the appointment of Judges and Bishops in his hand, could make what law and what gospel he chose," were alike powerless, to prevail on them to conform to modes and creeds which they did not of themselves approve. They heard a voice higher and mightier than James's, calling to them in the accents of their own consciences, and saying, in the express language of a volume, which it had been the most precious result of all the discoveries, inventions, and improvements of that age of wonders to unlock to them" Be ye not conformed, but be ye transformed" and that voice, summon it to exile, or summon

it to the grave, they were resolved to obey.

Foiled, therefore, utterly in the first of his alternatives, the King resorted to the last. It was more within the compass of his power, and he did harry them out of the land. Within three years after the utterance of this threat, (namely, in 1607,) it is recorded by the Chronologist, that Messrs. Clifton's and Robinson's church in the north of England, being extremely harassed, some cast into prison, some beset in their houses, some forced to leave their farms and families, begin to fly over to Holland for purity of worship and liberty of conscience.

Religions, true and false, have had their Hegiras, and institutions and empires have owed their origin to the flight of a child, a man, or a multitude. Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh ; but he returned to overwhelm him with the judgments of Jehovah, and to build up Israel into a mighty people. Mahomet with his followers fled from the magistrates of Mecca; but he came back, with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, and the empire of the Saracens was soon second to none on the globe. "The young child and his mother" fled from the fury of Herod; but they returned, and the banner of the Cross

was still destined to go forth conquering and to conquer. The Pilgrim Fathers, also, fled from the oppression of this arbitrary tyrant, and, although their return was to a widely distant portion of his dominions, yet return they did, and the freedom and independence of a great republic, delivered from the yoke of that tyrant's successors, date back their origin, this day, to the principles for which they were proscribed, and to the institutions which they planted.

But let us follow them in their eventful flight. They first settle at Amsterdam, where they remain for about a year, and are soon joined by the rest of their brethren. But finding that some contentions had arisen in a church which was there before them, and fearing that they might themselves become embroiled in them, though they knew it would be very much "to the prejudice of their outward interest" to remove, yet "valuing peace and spiritual comfort above all other riches" they depart to Leyden, and there live "in great love and harmony both among themselves and their neighbor citizens for above eleven years."

But, although during all this time they had been courteously entertained and lovingly respected by the people, and had quietly and sweetly enjoyed their church liberties under the States, yet finding that, owing to the difference of their language, they could exert but little influence over the Dutch, and had not yet succeeded in bringing them to reform the neglect of observation of the Lord's day as a Sabbath, or any other thing amiss among them, — that owing, also, to the licentiousness of youth in that country and the manifold temptations of the place, their children were drawn away by evil examples into extravagant and dangerous courses, they now begin to fear that Holland would be no place for their church and their posterity to continue in comfortably, and on those accounts to think of a remove to America. And having hesitated a while between Guiana and Virginia, as a place of resort, and having at last resolved on the latter, they send their agents to treat with the Virginia Company for a right within their chartered limits, and to see if the King would give them liberty of conscience there. The Company they found ready enough to grant them a patent with ample privileges, but liberty of conscience under the broad