missioners both the colonies receded from their
positions. Again, the commissioners recommended the granting of aid to
Harvard College, and that institution consequently received from
Connecticut and New Haven annually for many years a regular allowance,
in return for which it presented the Connecticut colony with nearly
sixty graduates in the ensuing half-century well equipped to combat
latitudinarianism and heresy. The commissioners fulfilled their
obligation as guardians of the purity of the Gospel, both in their
support of the synod of 1646-1648 and in their strenuous efforts to
check the increase of religious discontent due to the narrow definition
of church membership--efforts which eventually resulted in that
"illogical compromise," the Half-Way Covenant. They recommended the
driving out of "Quakers, Ranters, and other Herritics of that nature,"
and urged that the true Gospel might be spread among the Indians. They
upheld the work of the Society for the Promoting and Propagating of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England, and they directed and guided the
labors of its missionaries, most notable of whom was the famous John
Eliot, apostle to the Indians and translator of the Bible into their
language.

The most important business of the confederation concerned the defense
of New England against the Indians, the Dutch, and the French. The
Indians were an ever-present menace, near and far; the Dutch disputed
the English claims all the way from New Amsterdam to Narragansett Bay,
and resented the attempts already made to encroach upon their trading
grounds; and the French at this time were strenuously denying the right
of the English, particularly those of Plymouth, to establish
trading-posts at Machias and on the Penobscot, and were laying claim to
all the Nova Scotian territory as far west as the Penobscot.

Though the French, in their effort to drive out all the English settlers
east of Pemaquid in Maine, had destroyed two Plymouth posts in that
region, the commissioners were called upon to decide not so much what
should be done about this act of aggression, as which of the claimants
among the French themselves it was wiser for the colonies to support. A
certain Charles de la Tour had been commissioned by the Governor-General
of Acadia or Nova Scotia as lieutenant of the region east of the St.
Croix, and another, Charles de Menou, Sieur d'Aulnay-Charnise, as
lieutenant of the region between the St. Croix and the