WHEN

CHAPTER V.

THEN the Pilgrim Fathers who had settled at Plymouth wrote to their friends in England and told them how free and happy they were, and how they worshipped God according to their conscience, without ever even hearing of the King or his bishops, the English Puritans began to cast longing eyes upon the shores of New England. They were still suffering persecution at the hands of the King and the courtiers, and were often forced to meet and pray by stealth, for fear of the royal soldiers and constables. They knew that if they left their comfortable homes in England and removed to the forests of America, they would have to encounter cold, and hunger, and sickness, and hardships of every kind; but they cared very little for these so long as they were free, and could worship God in their

own way.

At this time ships crossed every year from England to America, and traders and fishermen built huts at various places along the coast. SIR FERDINANDO GORGES, a nobleman who had taken great interest in the settlement of the country, and a sailor named JOHN MASON, equipped vessels to fish along the coast, and planted little colonies wherever the fishing was good.

After a time Mason and Gorges divided their set

tlements, and Mason gave to his share the name of NEW HAMPSHIRE-being himself a native of Hampshire, in England. It contained two little villages, which are now called Portsmouth and Dover.

It was between Mason's settlements in New Hampshire and the old colony at New Plymouth that the Puritans resolved to establish themselves.

Το prepare the way for them they sent out a small party under the command of JOHN ENDICOTT, a man of great courage and perseverance, of cheerful temper, and kind heart. With seven or eight companions he explored the trackless woods around Massachusetts Bay, and found several places proper for settlement.

· Then other Puritans began to arrive. One party settled on the coast, and founded a village, to which they gave the pretty name of Salem.

Another-and this was the largest that had ever sailed to America, comprising one thousand persons, in fifteen ships-settled at the head of Massachusetts Bay, on a three-headed hill, which they christened BOSTON, after the small town of that name in Lincolnshire whence many of the principal settlers

came.

They had obtained from CHARLES THE FIRST, who was then King of England, a royal charter, or constitution, which they thought a great deal more of than it was worth, as you will see presently. It gave them permission to elect a Governor, and accordingly they chose JOHN WINTHROP, a pious, gentle, warm-hearted man, whose expression of face was as mild as a woman's. Under his rule the MAS

SACHUSETTS colony passed safely through the usual sufferings from disease, cold, and want.

At first they lived in tents and wretched huts, through which the rain beat, and the cold winter winds blew. The water was bad, and, as at Plymouth, disease broke out among them, and they "saw their friends drop down weekly, nay, daily before their eyes." Their first winter at Boston was bitterly cold and to add to all, they were scantily supplied with food.

In five months two hundred died, among others the son of Governor Winthrop, who wrote about this time to his wife in England: "We here enjoy God and Jesus Christ, and is not this enough? I thank God I like so well to be here, and do not repent my coming. I would not have altered my course though I had foreseen all these afflictions. I never had more content of mind."

When I think of this Christian gentleman-with famine, and disease, and death on every side around him, his son's coffin freshly laid under the sod, and the snow drifting through the crevices in his hutwriting to his wife that he "never had more content of mind," I am not at all surprised that New England should have grown so great and glorious a country.

Before four years had passed, the days of trial had ended, and the colonists had every reason to be happy. They had found many fertile spots, and sown large fields of corn, and built mills to grind it. They had seven churches, and stores in abundance. They had built two ships, and traded to Jamestown in Virginia, and to New Amsterdam.

Boston was already an important place, and several villages had been planted on the coast, on the banks of rivers, and in the interior. The settlers were on good terms with the Indians, who were glad to sell them furs for knives and other tools which they could not make themselves.

But the chief source of their happiness was the right they enjoyed of worshipping God according to their own conscience, and establishing a society on the Bible model. They had been so cruelly persecuted in England by the courtiers and the King's Church, and they had heard their fathers speak so often of the persecutions they had suffered from the Roman Catholic Church, that they resolved to prevent, by every means in their power, either the customs of the court or these two churches ever gaining a foothold on Massachusetts Bay.

When, therefore, they found among them any man who did not think as they did on religion, they would not allow him to remain, but bade him begone. All the settlers were obliged to go to church, and to conduct themselves in a pious, orderly manner at home. They were required to dress soberly and plainly, and were forbidden to give balls or indulge in other gayeties, which were believed to be contrary to the Word of God.

In these and some other particulars, the laws of the old Puritans of New England referred to matters with which our laws do not interfere, and a great many smart things have been said about them in consequence.

It is very easy to make jokes about the Puritans

forbidding the wearing of wigs or the eating of mince pies, as they did; but if we had been chased by royal soldiers, bullied by royal courtiers, pilloried by order of bishops, cropped by hangmen, fined and imprisoned because we would not keep Christmas-day as the King chose, driven to read our Bibles in dark holes and corners where the spies of the King and the bishops could not see us, and at last obliged to run away from our homes to worship God in peace according to our own conscience, I think it very likely that we should have taken as good care as the Puritans did to keep our old tormentors out of the place where we took refuge, and I dare say we might have hated every thing which reminded us of them enough to make a law against wigs and mince pies.

It would certainly have been a very happy thing for the colonists to have known the inestimable value of LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE, and to have allowed every one to worship God in his own way. Had they understood—as we do—that prisons, and fines, and cruel punishments can never alter the convictions of an honest mind, and that the truth does not need the aid of violence or oppression to prevail, they would have been spared the only blots which stain the bright page of their history.

But at the time they lived-more than two hundred years ago these things were not known any where. All over the world it was supposed that the strong had a right to force the weak to worship God in their fashion, and to punish those who refused.

It seems a very ridiculous thing to us that men