gs 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.