ew England.

To secure the object which they sought, "they were content to earn a bare
subsistence by a life of frugality and toil. They asked nothing from the
soil but the reasonable returns of their own labor. No golden vision threw
a deceitful halo around their path.... They were content with the slow but
steady progress of their social polity. They patiently endured the
privations of the wilderness, watering the tree of liberty with their
tears, and with the sweat of their brow, till it took deep root in the
land."

The Bible was held as the foundation of faith, the source of wisdom, and
the charter of liberty. Its principles were diligently taught in the home,
in the school, and in the church, and its fruits were manifest in thrift,
intelligence, purity, and temperance. One might be for years a dweller in
the Puritan settlements, "and not see a drunkard, or hear an oath, or meet
a beggar."(448) It was demonstrated that the principles of the Bible are
the surest safeguards of national greatness. The feeble and isolated
colonies grew to a confederation of powerful States, and the world marked
with wonder the peace and prosperity of "a church without a pope, and a
state without a king."

But continually increasing numbers were attracted to the shores of
America, actuated by motives widely different from those of the first
Pilgrims. Though the primitive faith and purity exerted a wide-spread and
moulding power, yet its influence became less and less as the numbers
increased of those who sought only worldly advantage.

The regulation adopted by the early colonists, of permitting only members
of the church to vote or to hold office in the civil government, led to
most pernicious results. This measure had been accepted as a means of
preserving the purity of the state, but it resulted in the corruption of
the church. A profession of religion being the condition of suffrage and
office-holding, many, actuated solely by motives of worldly policy, united
with the church without a change of heart. Thus the churches came to
consist, to a considerable extent, of unconverted persons; and even in the
ministry were those who not only held errors of doctrine, but who were
ignorant of the renewing power of the Holy Spirit. Thus again was
demonstrated the evil results, so often witnessed in the history of the
church from the days of Constantine to the present, of attempting to build
up the church by the aid of the state, of appealin