little
company of emigrants as its shores faded from their sight. "Our hearts,"
wrote Winthrop's followers to the brethren whom they had left behind,
"shall be fountains of tears for your everlasting welfare, when we shall
be in our poor cottages in the wilderness."

[Sidenote: New England.]

For a while, as the first terrors of persecution died down, there was a
lull in the emigration. But no sooner had Laud's system made its
pressure felt than again "godly people in England began to apprehend a
special hand of Providence in raising this plantation" in Massachusetts;
"and their hearts were generally stirred to come over." It was in vain
that weaker men returned to bring news of hardships and dangers, and
told how two hundred of the new-comers had perished with their first
winter. A letter from Winthrop told how the rest toiled manfully on. "We
now enjoy God and Jesus Christ," he wrote to those at home, "and is not
that enough? I thank God I like so well to be here as I 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." With the strength
and manliness of Puritanism, its bigotry and narrowness crossed the
Atlantic too. Roger Williams, a young minister who held the doctrine of
freedom of conscience, was driven from the new settlement to become a
preacher among the settlers of Rhode Island. The bitter resentment
stirred in the emigrants by persecution at home was seen in their
abolition of Episcopacy and their prohibition of the use of the Book of
Common Prayer. The intensity of its religious sentiments turned the
colony into a theocracy. "To the end that the body of the Commons may be
preserved of honest and good men, it was ordered and agreed that for the
time to come no man shall be admitted to the freedom of the body politic
but such as are members of some of the churches within the bounds of the
same." But the fiercer mood which persecution was begetting in the
Puritans only welcomed this bigotry. As years went by and the contest
grew hotter at home, the number of emigrants rose fast. Three thousand
new colonists arrived from England in a single year. Between the sailing
of Winthrop's expedition and the assembling of the Long Parliament, in
the space, that is, of ten or eleven years, two hundred emigrant ships
had crossed the Atlantic, and twenty thousand Englishmen had found a
refuge in the West.

CHAPTER VII

THE RIS