s a turning-point in Massachusetts history--the beginning of the end
of Winthrop's Bible Commonwealth.

The end was doubtless hastened by the Stuart Restoration and the recall
of the charter; but the theocratic ideal, carrying the germ of its own
decay, was predestined to failure. For the founders of the Bible
Commonwealth it was an axiom that Church and State were but two sides of
the same shield; a matter of course that the "body of the commons" must
be "preserved of honest and good men"; a reasonable hope that all good
men would be found within the churches. And the circumstances of the
migration seemed, indeed, a miraculous preparation for this easy
solution of human government; for persecution was taken to be but "a
strange contrivance of God" to gather "a chosen company of men"--the
sifted wheat for planting an ideal commonwealth. Yet of the first
settlers more than half refused to take the covenant, thus renouncing
the privileges of the ideal commonwealth without obtaining relief from
its burdens. A most disconcerting circumstance this at the beginning,
and of ill omen for the future! Doubtless some strange perversity of the
natural man, some inscrutable judgment of God for the discipline of his
people, must have kept so many outside the fold.

But in truth not all who came to Plymouth or Massachusetts were of the
sifted wheat. Under the stress of persecution and the stimulus of
migration, the mass of the first settlers doubtless caught something of
the spiritual exaltation which inspired the leaders. But it was not for
the many to live on that high level of purposeful resolution and
enduring courage. It is a significant fact that of those who came over
with Winthrop and Dudley two hundred returned in the ships that brought
them out; and of those who remained who shall say how many met the stern
realities of the New World with a sinking sense of disillusionment,
finding the material conditions of life harder and the spiritual peace
less satisfying than they had imagined? And many there were who had
never been touched by the Puritan ideal. "Men being to come over into a
wilderness," says the kindly Bradford, "in which much labour and servise
was to be done about building and planting, such as wanted help in that
respecte, when they could not have such as they would, were glad to take
such as they could, and so, many untoward servants, sundry of them
proved, were thus brought over, both men and women kind; who, whe