ad contented themselves with the
powers conferred upon them by their respective charters, without looking
beyond the seal of the royal parchment for the measure of their rights
and the rule of their duties. The founders of Plymouth had been impelled
by the peculiarities of their situation to examine the subject with
deeper and more comprehensive research. After twelve years of banishment
from the land of their first allegiance, during which they had been
under an adoptive and temporary subjection to another sovereign, they
must naturally have been led to reflect upon the relative rights and
duties of allegiance and subjection. They had resided in a city, the
seat of a university, where the polemical and political controversies
of the time were pursued with uncommon fervor. In this period they had
witnessed the deadly struggle between the two parties, into which the
people of the United Provinces, after their separation from the crown of
Spain, had divided themselves. The contest embraced within its compass
not only theological doctrines, but political principles, and Maurice
and Barnevelt were the temporal leaders of the same rival factions, of
which Episcopius and Polyander were the ecclesiastical champions.

That the investigation of the fundamental principles of government was
deeply implicated in these dissensions is evident from the immortal
work of Grotius, upon the rights of war and peace, which undoubtedly
originated from them. Grotius himself had been a most distinguished
actor and sufferer in those important scenes of internal convulsion,
and his work was first published very shortly after the departure of
our forefathers from Leyden. It is well known that in the course of the
contest Mr. Robinson more than once appeared, with credit to himself, as
a public disputant against Episcopius; and from the manner in which
the fact is related by Governor Bradford, it is apparent that the whole
English Church at Leyden took a zealous interest in the religious part
of the controversy. As strangers in the land, it is presumable that
they wisely and honorably avoided entangling themselves in the political
contentions involved with it. Yet the theoretic principles, as they were
drawn into discussion, could not fail to arrest their attention, and
must have assisted them to form accurate ideas concerning the origin and
extent of authority among men, independent of positive institutions.
The importance of these circumstances w