he fabled mountains. And
with this westward move there passed away that old vision of wholesale
Christianizing.

CHAPTER VIII. ROYAL GOVERNMENT

In November, 1620, there sailed into a quiet harbor on the coast of what
is now Massachusetts a ship named the Mayflower, having on board one
hundred and two English Non-conformists, men and women and with them
a few children. These latest colonists held a patent from the Virginia
Company and have left in writing a statement of their object: "We...
having undertaken, for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian
faith, and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first
colony in the northern parts of Virginia--". The mental reservation is,
of course, "where perchance we may serve God as we will!" In England
there obtained in some quarters a suspicion that "they meant to make a
free, popular State there." Free--Popular--Public Good! These are words
that began, in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, to shine
and ring. King and people had reached the verge of a great struggle. The
Virginia Company was divided, as were other groups, into factions. The
court party and the country party found themselves distinctly opposed.
The great, crowded meetings of the Company Sessions rang with
their divisions upon policies small and large. Words and phrases,
comprehensive, sonorous, heavy with the future, rose and rolled beneath
the roof of their great hall. There were heard amid warm discussion:
Kingdom and Colony--Spain--Netherlands--France--Church and
State--Papists and Schismatics--Duties, Tithes, Excise Petitions of
Grievances--Representation--Right of Assembly. Several years earlier
the King had cried, "Choose the Devil, but not Sir Edwyn Sandys!" Now
he declared the Company "just a seminary to a seditious parliament!" All
London resounded with the clash of parties and opinions.* "Last week
the Earl of Warwick and the Lord Cavendish fell so foul at a Virginia...
court that the lie passed and repassed.... The factions... are grown so
violent that Guelfs and Ghibellines were not more animated one against
another!"

* In his work on "Joint-stock Companion", vol.II, pp. 266
ff., W. R. Scott traces the history of these acute
dissensions in the Virginia Company and draws conclusions
distinctly unfavorable to the management of Sandys and his
party.--Editor.

Believing that the Company's sessions foreshadowed a "seditious
parliame