gagement, taking the trade of the Colony for six years, to pay all their debts, and transport the remainder of the Church from Leyden to Plymouth. By means of this arrangement, thirty-five of their friends with their families were enabled to join them in 1629, their expenses being paid, from 30 to 50 pounds a family; "besides giving them houses, preparing them grounds to plant on, and maintaining them with corn and other necessaries above 13 or 14 months, before they had a harvest of their own production." The names of the Pilgrims by whom this difficult work was accomplished, in connexion with the friendly Adventurers above named, were Governor Bradford, Edward Winslow, Thomas Prince, Miles Standish, William Brewster, John Alden, John Howland, and Isaac Allerton.

But their charge did not end here. In May, 1630, another company of their Leyden brethren arrived in the harbor of Salem, the cost of whose provision and transportation from Holland to England, from England to Salem, and from Salem with their goods to Plymouth, was all cheerfully borne by the same "New Plymouth Undertakers," before named; amounting to above five hundred and fifty pounds sterling, "besides the providing them housing, preparing them ground, and maintaining them with food for sixteen or eighteen months, before they had a harvest of their own; all which came to nearly as much more. A rare example of brotherly love and Christian care in performing their promises to their brethren, even beyond their power."

These were great charges, but the Pilgrims had now everything under their own control. The perplexities of their copartnership with the Adventurers were at an end; in their business arrangements they might deal now only with brethren and friends; and they regarded the coming of the remainder of the Leyden Church, which once seemed

*Bradford in Prince, 201.

so hopeless, as a recompense from Heaven with a double blessing. They received the new companies of “godly friends and Christian brethren, as the beginning of a larger harvest to Christ, in the increase of his people and Churches in these parts of the earth, to the admiration of many, and almost wonder of the world."

CHAPTER IV.

THE PILGRIM CHURCH IN ENGLAND, AND THE FIRST CHURCH COMPACT.

WHILE men were contriving their pilgrimages and colonies of gain, God was arranging his of principle, and was selecting its instruments. It was the work of his Church. It was simply the early dispensation renewed, when men of God, scattered abroad by persecution, went preaching the word, and founding word-colonies of grace, amidst the wilderness of a Pagan civilization. But now a whole church was to be transplanted. Its materials must first be gathered and disciplined; and for these God went into the despised non-conforming cottages and conventicles of England. There were noble preachers of God's Word then, even amidst all the turmoil and persecution about ceremonies; and the minister who would be a free and fearless preacher of God's Word at such a time, teaching God's fear, not by the precepts of men, would likely be God's honored instrument in preparing the materials for his intended Church Colony.

Divine grace, as well as human wrath, must have been at work with great power at that period. Men who became Christians under such oppressions as they had to endure if they embraced the new discovered, but ancient truth of the independence of the Church under Christ only, would likely become such through deep and powerful experience.

"I am afraid," said Sir Walter Raleigh, in a speech deprecating their banishment from England by oppression, "I am afraid there are nearly twenty thousand of these men; and when they are driven out of the Kingdom, who shall support their wives and children?" But mere driving. them out of the Kingdom had been mercy, in comparison with the treatment they received. One whole Church, perhaps the earliest on independent principles formed in England, was hunted out by the sharp and eager cruelty of the Commissioners of Queen Elizabeth, the very year of its formation in London, in 1592, and fifty-six of its members were imprisoned, beaten, put to death in various ways, some by the inhuman cruelties of their confinement, some upon the gallows. The Queen's Commissioners, when these victims of the Protestant Persecutor refused to play the hypocrite by going to the State-Church, let them know that it was not piety to God they wished for, but obedience to the Queen; and that with that they might do and be whatever of evil in religion they pleased. "Come to Church," said they, "and obey the Queen's laws; and be a dissembler, a hypocrite, or a devil, if thou wilt." So this band of Christ's followers perished in England. It was not quite yet God's time for the sacred Colony.

The foundation of the Pilgrim Church, and therefore the tap-root of New-England, runs back to the year 1602, when, in Governor Bradford's words, "several religious people near the joining borders of Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire, finding their pious ministers urged with subscriptions, or silenced, and the people greatly vexed with Commissary Courts, Apparitors, and Pursuivants, which they bare sundry years with much patience, till they were occasioned by the continuance and increase of these troubles, and other means, to see further into these things by the light of the Word of God,-shake off this yoke of anti-Christian bondage; and as the Lord's free people, join themselves by covenant into a church-state, to walk in

all his ways, made known, or to be made known to them, according to their best endeavors, whatever it cost them."

The clearer and further insight, which these religious men, by means of these trials and persecutions obtained, by the light of God's Word, are stated by Governor Bradford to have been "that the ceremonies prescribed were unlawful, and also the lordly and tyrannous power of the prelates, who would, contrary to the freedom of the Gospel, load the consciences of men, and by their compulsive power make a profane mixture of things and persons in divine worship; that their offices, courts, and canons were unlawful, being such as have no warrant in the Word of God, but the same that were used in Popery, and still retained."*

This little church compact, among a few despised persons, totally unknown in the world and uncared for, was one of the greatest events that had then ever taken place in the world's history. Out of that grew the celebrated civil and religious compact on board the May Flower; out of that, indeed, sprang all the institutions of civil and religious freedom in our country. That Church Compact in the Old World was the beginning both of form and life to the New.

That little church covenant, that phenomenon of dissent and conventicles, unnoticed at that time, except by the great red dragon of the twelfth of Revelations, was as the ridge of a mountain breaking suddenly out of the polished scurf and dust of established church despotisms, and rising to throw that bondage from the world. It is still rising, all over the earth, and the mountain of the Lord's House shall be established upon this top of the mountains, and all nations shall at length flow into it. It was a free, voluntary church, gathered by the Spirit of the Lord, and not by man's sacramental oaths and rubrics. A world was now to be

* Bradford in Prince, 4.