Rise of the United Empire Loyalists

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART HI.?CHAPTER I. The New England Colony and Government?Founding of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies. It was the distinctive purpose of establishing an independent state that prompted the Massachusetts colonization. It was to set up a commonwealth without a king and a church without a bishop as...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART HI.?CHAPTER I. The New England Colony and Government?Founding of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies. It was the distinctive purpose of establishing an independent state that prompted the Massachusetts colonization. It was to set up a commonwealth without a king and a church without a bishop as wrote the old chronicalists. But the development of Nature will have course, in spite of men's minds to the contrary and their adverse enactments. As Momsen discovered of this law among the ancients, that even in democracy It has at its core a monarchical principle in which the idea of a peri- clean commonwealth floats ever before the minds of its best citizens. Now the reason for the attempt to set up a community without a king and without a bishop is traced to the preceding religious controversy in England. The king was included with the bishop, solely because the king for the time became a religious partizan and countenanced the bigotry of church ordinances. The ruler of a state must be superior to creeds and churches. It was in 1604 when England began to turn bigot. The Bishop of London in that year procured the ratification of a Book of Canons of 141 articles, non-conformation to which was punishable with outlawry, excommunication and imprisonment. At this time, Holland was more liberal than England; so a congregation of people from Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, and Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, under leadership of Rev. Richard Clifton, Prof. John Robinson and William Brewster, Esq., after many risks and persecutions, succeeded in escaping to Leyden, in Holland, in the year 1608. Here it may be added that the rigors of the doctrine of these puritan people were if anything severer than the papal and semi-papal from which they fled; for those who did not b...