Pioneers and Founders | Page 6

whole party to accept nothing of all these rites, and thus ordination
became impossible to them, while the laws were stringent against any
preaching or praying publicly by any unordained person. The
instruction of youth was likewise only permitted to those who were
licensed by the bishop of the diocese; and Mr. Hooker, failing to fulfil
the required tests, was silenced, and, although forty-seven clergy
petitioned on his behalf, was obliged to flee to Holland.
This decided Eliot, then twenty-seven years of age, on leaving England,
and seeking a freer sphere of action in the newly-founded colonies of
New England, which held a charter from Government. He took leave of
his betrothed, of whom we only know that her Christian name was
Anne (gracious), and that her nature answered to her name, and sailed
on the 3rd of November, 1631, in the ship Lyon, with a company of
sixty persons, among whom were the family of Governor Winthrop.
They landed at Boston, then newly rising into a city over its harbour,
and there he found his services immediately required to conduct the
worship in the congregation during the absence of the pastor, who had

gone to England finally to arrange his affairs.
On his return, Mr. Eliot was found to be in such favour, that the
Bostonites strove to retain him as an assistant minister; but this he
refused, knowing that many friends in England wished to found a
separate settlement of their own; and in less than a year this
arrangement was actually carried out, a steep hill in the forest-land was
selected, and a staunch band of East Saxons, bringing with them the
gracious Anne, came forth. John Eliot was married, elected pastor,
ordained, after Presbyterian custom, by the laying on of the hands of
the ministers in solemn assembly, and then took possession of the
abode prepared for him and of the building on the top of the hill, where
his ministrations were to be conducted.
These old fathers of the United States had found a soil, fair and well
watered; and though less rich than the wondrous alluvial lands to the
west, yet with capacities to yield them plentiful provision, when cleared
from the vast forest that covered it. Nor had they come for the sake of
wealth or luxury; the earnestness of newly-awakened, and in some
degree persecuted, religion was upon them, and they regarded a
sufficiency of food and clothing as all that they had a right to seek.
Indeed, the spirit of ascetiscism was one of their foremost
characteristics. Eliot was a man who lived in constant self-restraint as
to both sleep and diet, and, on all occasions of special prayer, prefaced
them by a rigorous fast--and he seems to have been in a continual
atmosphere of devotion.
One of his friends objected (oddly enough as it seems to us) to his
stooping to pick up a weed in his garden. "Sir, you tell us we must be
heavenly-minded."
"It is true," he said, "and this is no impediment unto that; for, were I
sure to go to heaven to-morrow, I would do what I do to-day."
And, like many a good Christian, his outward life was to him full of
allegory. Going up the steep hill to his church, he said, "This is very
like the way to heaven. 'Tis up hill! The Lord in His grace fetch us up;"
and spying a bush near him, he added, "And truly there are thorns and

briars in the way, too."
He had great command of his flock at Roxbury, and was a most diligent
preacher and catechiser, declaring, in reference to the charge to St.
Peter, that "the care of the lambs is one-third part of the charge to the
Church of God." An excellent free school was founded at Roxbury,
which was held in great repute in the time of Cotton Mather, to whom
we owe most of our knowledge of this good man. The biography is put
together in the peculiar fashion of that day, not chronologically, but
under heads illustrating his various virtues, so that it is not easy to pick
out the course of his undertakings. Before passing on to that which
especially distinguished him, we must give an anecdote or two from the
"article" denominated "His exquisite charity." His wife had become
exceedingly skilful in medicine and in dealing with wounds, no small
benefit in a recent colony scant of doctors, and she gave her aid freely
to all who stood in need of help. A person who had taken offence at
something in one of his sermons, and had abused him passionately,
both in speech and in writing, chanced to wound himself severely,
whereupon he at once sent his wife to act as surgeon; and when the
man, having