anters what Hawthorne, Whittier,
Longfellow, and others have done in casting the glamour of poetry and
romance over the lives of the founders of New England.

Cotton Mather, in his _Magnalia_, quotes the following passage from one
of those election sermons, delivered before the General Court of
Massachusetts, which formed for many years the great annual
intellectual event of the colony:

"The question was often put unto our predecessors, _What went ye out
into the wilderness to see_? And the answer to it is not only too
excellent but too notorious to be dissembled. . . . We came hither
because we would have our posterity settled under the pure and full
dispensations of the Gospel, defended by rulers that should be of
ourselves." The New England colonies were, in fact, theocracies.
Their leaders were clergymen, or laymen whose zeal for the faith was no
whit inferior to that of the ministers themselves. Church and State
were one. The freeman's oath was only administered to church members,
and there was no place in the social system for unbelievers or
dissenters. The pilgrim fathers regarded their transplantation to the
New World as an exile, and nothing is more touching in their written
records than the repeated expressions of love and longing toward the
old home which they had left, and even toward that Church of England
from which they had sorrowfully separated themselves. It was not in
any light or adventurous spirit that they faced the perils of the sea
and the wilderness. "This howling wilderness," "these ends of the
earth," "these goings down of the sun," are some of the epithets which
they constantly applied to the land of their exile. Nevertheless they
had come to stay, and, unlike Smith and Percy and Sandys, the early
historians and writers of New England cast in their lots permanently
with the new settlements. A few, indeed, went back after 1640--Mather
says some ten or twelve of the ministers of the first "classis" or
immigration were among them--when the victory of the Puritanic party in
Parliament opened a career for them in England, and made their presence
there seem in some cases a duty. The celebrated Hugh Peters, for
example, who was afterward Oliver Cromwell's chaplain, and was beheaded
after the Restoration, went back in 1641, and in 1647 Nathaniel Ward,
the minister of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and author of a quaint book
against toleration, entitled _The Simple Cobbler of Agawam_; written in