ountry, where appointment to
parishes was chiefly in the hands of the aristocracy or the crown.
Either the king, or the lord chancellor, or the universities, or the
nobility, or the county squires had the gift of the "livings," often
bestowed on ignorant or worldly or inefficient men, the younger sons of
men of rank, who made no mark, and were incapable of instruction or
indifferent to their duties. In New England the minister of the parish
was elected by the church members or congregation, and if he could not
edify his hearers by his sermons, or if his character did not command
respect, his occupation was gone, or his salary was not paid. In
consequence the ministers were generally gifted men, well educated, and
in sympathy with the people. Who can estimate the influence of such
religious teachers on everything that pertained to New England life and
growth,--on morals, on education, on religious and civil institutions!

Although we have traced the early characteristics of the New England
Colonists, especially because it was in New England first and chiefly
that the spirit of resistance to English oppression grew to a sentiment
for independence, it is not to be overlooked that the essential elements
of self-controlling manhood were common throughout all the Colonies. And
everywhere it seems to have grown out of the germ of a devotion to
religious freedom, developed on a secluded continent, where men were
shut in by the sea on the one hand, and perils from the fierce
aborigines on the other. The Puritans of New England, the Hollanders of
New York, Penn's Quaker colony in Pennsylvania, the Huguenots of South
Carolina, the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of North Carolina, Virginia,
Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, were all of Calvinistic training
and came from European persecutions. All were rigidly Puritanical in
their social and Sabbatarian observances. Even the Episcopalians of
Virginia, where a larger Norman-English stock was settled, with
infusions of French-Huguenot blood, and where slavery bred more men of
wealth and broader social distinctions, were sternly religious in their
laws, although far more lax and pleasure-loving in their customs.
Everywhere, this new life of Englishmen in a new land developed their
self-reliance, their power of work, their skill in arms, their habit of
common association for common purposes, and their keen, intelligent
knowledge of political conditions, with a tenacious grip on their r