Pioneers and Founders | Page 5

of Assisi, or Raymond
Lull, that the possibility of trying to bring over a single Saracen to the
faith was imagined.
It was in the revival from the Paganism with which classical tastes had
infected the Church, that the spirit of missions again awoke, stimulated,
of course, by the wide discoveries of fresh lands that were dawning
upon the earth. If from 1000 to 1500 the progress of the Gospel was
confined to the borders of the Slavonic nation, the space of time from
1500 onwards has been one of constant and unwearied effort to raise
the standard of the Cross in the new worlds beyond the Atlantic.
Spain, Portugal, France, as nations, and the great company of the
Jesuits as one mighty brotherhood, were the foremost in the great
undertaking; but their doings form a history of their own, and our
business is with the efforts of our own Church and country in the same
great cause.
Our work was not taken up so soon as theirs, partly because the spirit
of colonization did not begin amongst us so early as in Spain and
Portugal, and partly because the foundations of most of our colonies
were laid by private enterprise, rather than by public adventure, and
moreover some of the earlier ones in unsettled times.
It may be reckoned as one peculiarity of Englishmen, that their greatest
works are usually not the outcome of enthusiastic design, but rather
grow upon them by degrees, as they are led in paths that they have not
known, and merely undertake the duty that stands immediately before

them, step by step.
The young schoolmaster at Little Baddow, near Chelmsford, who
decided on following in the track of the Pilgrim Fathers to New
England, went simply to enjoy liberty of conscience, and to be free to
minister according to his own views, and never intended to become the
Apostle of the Red Indians.
Nothing is more remarkable than the recoil from neglected truths.
When, even in the earliest ages of the Church, the Second
Commandment was supposed to be a mere enhancing of the first, and
therefore curtailed and omitted, there was little perception that this
would lead to popular, though not theoretical, idolatry, still less that
this law, when again brought forward, would be pushed by scrupulous
minds to the most strange and unexpected consequences, to the
over-powering of all authority of ancient custom, and to the repudiation
of everything symbolical.
This resolution against acknowledging any obligation to use either
symbol or ceremony, together with the opposition of the hierarchy, led
to the rejection of the traditional usages of the Church and the
previously universal interpretation of Scripture in favour of three orders
in the ministry. The elders, or presbytery, were deemed sufficient; and
when, after having for many years been carried along, acquiescing, in
the stream of the Reformation, the English Episcopacy tried to make a
stand, the coercion was regarded as a return to bondage, and the more
ardent spirits sought a new soil on which to enjoy the immunities that
they regarded as Christian freedom.
The Mayflower led the way in 1620, and the news of the success of the
first Pilgrim Fathers impelled many others to follow in their track.
Among these was John Eliot. He had been born in 1604 at Nasing in
Essex, and had been bred up by careful parents, full of that strong
craving for theological studies that characterized the middle classes in
the reign of James I.
Nothing more is known of his youth except that he received a
university education, and, like others who have been foremost in

missionary labours, had a gift for the comparison of languages and
study of grammar. He studied the Holy Scriptures in the original
tongues with the zeal that was infused into all scholars by the
knowledge that the Authorized Version was in hand, and by the
stimulus that was afforded by the promise of a copy of the first edition
to him who should detect and correct an error in the type.
The usual fate of a scholar was to be either schoolmaster or clergyman,
if not both, and young Eliot commenced his career as an assistant to Mr.
John Hooker, at the Grammar School at Little Baddow. He considered
this period to have been that in which the strongest religious
impressions were made upon him. John Hooker was a thorough-going
Puritan of great piety and rigid scruples, and instructed his household
diligently in godliness, both theoretical and practical. Eliot became
anxious to enter the ministry, but the reaction of Church principles,
which had set in with James I., was an obstacle in his way; and
imagining all ceremonial not observed by the foreign Protestants to be
oppressions on Christian liberty, it became the strongest resolution of
the