that the Brownist or Congregational worship had been
adopted by Endicot and his party before the arrival of Dudley; but the
scope and evident design of his letter was to assure the Countess of
Lincoln and his friends in England that no new Church worship had been
established at Massachusetts Bay, when the reverse must have been known
to Dudley, and when he, in support of the new Brownist or Congregational
worship, became a fierce persecutor, even to old age, of all who would
not conform to it; for, as Mr. Bancroft says, "the rugged soul of Dudley
was not mellowed by old age."

But while Dudley, in Massachusetts, was denying to his English friends
the existence of ecclesiastical changes there which all history now
declares to have taken place, the "Patriarch of Dorchester," the father
of the whole enterprise--the Rev. John White, a conformist clergyman of
the Church of England, even under Archbishop Laud--wrote and published a
pamphlet called "The Planters' Plea,"[52] in which he denied also that
any ecclesiastical changes, as alleged, had taken place in the
Massachusetts Plantation, and denounces the authors of such allegations
in no measured terms. This pamphlet contains a "Brief Relation of the
Occasion of the Planting of this Colony." After referring to the third,
or "great emigration under Winthrop,"[53] the author proceeds:

"This is an impartial though brief relation of the occasion of planting
the colony; the particulars whereof, if they could be entertained, were
clear enough to any indifferent judgment, that the suspicious and
scandalous reports raised upon these gentlemen and their friends (as if,
under the colour of planting a colony, they intended to raise a seminary
of faction and separation), are nothing than the fruits of jealousy of
some distempered mind or, which is worse, perhaps savour of a desperate
malicious plot of men ill affected to religion, endeavouring, by casting
the undertakers into the jealousy of the State, to shut them out of
those advantages which otherwise they might expect from the countenance
of authority. Such men would be entreated to forbear that base and
unchristian course of traducing persons under these odious names of
Separatists, and enemies of Church and State, for fear lest their own
tongues fall upon themselves by the justice of His hand who will not
fail to clear the innocency of the just, and to cast back into the bosom
of every slanderer the filth that he rakes up to th