Beacon Lights of History, Volume 11 | Page 7

Archbishop Laud in the reign of Charles I. The
Pilgrims--as the small company of Separatists were called who
followed their Puritanism to the extent of breaking entirely away from
the Church, and who left Holland for America--came to barren shores,
after having learned many things from the Dutch. Their pilgrimage was
taken, not with the view of improving their fortunes, like the more
aristocratic settlers of Virginia, but to develop their peculiar ideas. It
must be borne in mind that the civilization they brought with them was
a growth from Teutonic ancestry,--an evolution from Saxon times,
although it is difficult to trace the successive developments during the
Norman rule. The Pilgrims brought with them to America an intense
love of liberty, and consequently an equally intense hatred of arbitrary
taxation. Their enjoyment of religious rights was surpassed only by
their aversion to Episcopacy. They were a plain and simple people, who
abhorred the vices of the patrician class at home; but they loved
learning, and sought to extend knowledge, as the bulwark of free
institutions. The Puritans who followed them within ten years and
settled Massachusetts Bay and Salem, were direct from England. They
were not Separatists, like the Pilgrims, but Presbyterians; they hated
Episcopacy, but would have had Church and State united under
Presbyterianism. They were intolerant, as against Roger Williams and
the "witches," and at first perpetrated cruelties like those from which
they themselves had fled. But something in the free air of the big
continent developed the spirit of liberty among them until they, too,
like the Pilgrims, became Independents and Separatists,--and so,
Congregationalists rather than Presbyterians.
The first thing we note among these New Englanders was their
town-meetings, derived from the ancient folk-mote, in which they
elected their magistrates, and imposed upon themselves the necessary
taxes for schools, highways, and officers of the law. They formed
self-governed communities, who selected for rulers their ablest and
fittest men, marked for their integrity and intelligence,--grave, austere,
unselfish, and incorruptible. Money was of little account in comparison
with character. The earliest settlers were the picked and chosen men of

the yeomanry of England, and generally thrifty and prosperous. Their
leaders had had high social positions in their English homes, and their
ministers were chiefly graduates of the universities, some of whom
were fine scholars in both Hebrew and Greek, had been settled in
important parishes, and would have attained high ecclesiastical rank
had they not been nonconformists,--opposed to the ritual, rather than
the theological tenets of the English Church as established by Elizabeth.
Of course they were Calvinists, more rigid even than their brethren in
Geneva. The Bible was to them the ultimate standard of authority--civil
and religious. The only restriction on suffrage was its being
conditioned on church-membership. They aspired, probably from
Calvinistic influence, but aspired in vain, to establish a theocracy,
borrowed somewhat from that of the Jews. I do not agree with Mr. John
Fiske, in his able and interesting history of the "Beginnings of New
England," that "the Puritan appealed to reason;" I think that the Bible
was their ultimate authority in all matters pertaining to religion. As to
civil government, the reason may have had a great place in their
institutions; but these grew up from their surroundings rather than from
study or the experience of the past. There was more originality in them
than it is customary to suppose. They were the development of Old
England life in New England, but grew in many respects away from the
parent stock.
The next thing of mark among the Colonists was their love of learning;
all children were taught to read and write. They had been settled at
Plymouth, Salem, and Boston less than twenty years when they
established Harvard College, chiefly for the education of ministers,
who took the highest social rank in the Colonies, and were the most
influential people. Lawyers and physicians were not so well educated.
As for lawyers, there was but little need of them, since disputes were
mostly settled either by the ministers or the selectmen of the towns,
who were the most able and respectable men of the community. What
the theocratic Puritans desired the most was educated ministers and
schoolmasters. In 1641 a school was established in Hartford,
Connecticut, which was free to the poor. By 1642 every township in
Massachusetts had a schoolmaster, and in 1665 every one embracing
fifty families a common school. If the town had over one hundred

families it had a grammar school, in which Latin was taught. It is
probable, however, that the idea of popular education originated with
the Dutch. Elizabeth and her ministers did not believe in the education
of the masses, of which we read but little until the 19th century. As
early as 1582 the Estates of Friesland decreed