, but
turned backward. It is reckoned that within four generations from that
time more persons went to old England than originally came thence. The
beginnings of this return were of high importance. Among the home-going
companies were men who were destined to render eminent service in the
reconstruction of English society, both in the state and in the army,
and especially in the church. The example of the New England churches,
voluminously set forth in response to written inquiries from England,
had great influence in saving the mother country from suffering the
imposition of a Presbyterian hierarchy that threatened to be as
intolerant and as intolerable as the tyranny of Laud.

For the order of the New England churches crystallized rapidly into a
systematic and definite church polity, far removed from mere Separatism
even in the temperate form in which this had been illustrated by
Robinson and the Pilgrim church. The successive companies of emigrants
as they arrived, ship-load after ship-load, each with its minister or
college of ministers, followed with almost monotonous exactness the
method adopted in the organization of the church in Salem. A small
company of the best Christians entered into mutual covenant as a church
of Christ, and this number, growing by well-considered accessions, added
to itself from time to time other believers on the evidence and
confession of their faith in Christ. The ministers, all or nearly all of
whom had been clergymen in the orders of the Church of England, were of
one mind in declining to consider their episcopal ordination in England
as conferring on them any spiritual authority in a church newly gathered
in America. They found rather in the free choice of the brotherhood the
sign of a divine call to spiritual functions in the church, and were
inducted into office by the primitive form of the laying on of hands.

In many ways, but especially in the systematized relations of the
churches with one another and in their common relations with the civil
government, the settled Nationalism of the great Puritan migration was
illustrated. With the least possible constraint on the individual or on
the church, they were clear in their purpose that their young state
should have its established church.

Through what rude experiences the system and the men were tested has
been abundantly told and retold.[100:1] Roger Williams, learned,
eloquent, sincere, generous, a man after their own heart, wa