ns were emancipating themselves from feudal control, and
by means of their wealth and industrial activities were winning
recognition as independent and largely self-sufficing units. The gild, a
closely compacted brotherhood, existing partly for religious and
educational purposes and partly for the control of handicrafts and the
exchange of goods, became the center of middle-class energy, and in
thousands of instances hedged in the lives of the humbler artisans.
Thus it was largely from those who knew no wider world than the fields
which they cultivated and the gilds which governed their standards and
output that the early settlers of New England were recruited.

Equally important with the social changes were those which concerned
men's faith and religious organization. The Peace of Augsburg, which in
1555 had closed for the moment the warfare resulting from the
Reformation, not only recognized the right of Protestantism to exist,
but also handed over to each state, whether kingdom, duchy, or
principality, full power to control the creed within its borders.
Whoever ruled the state could determine the religion of his subjects, a
dictum which denied the right of individuals or groups of individuals to
depart from the established faith. Hence arose a second revolt, not
against the mediaeval church and empire but against the authority of the
state and its creed, whether Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, or
Calvinist, a revolt in which Huguenot in France battled for his right to
believe as he wished, and Puritan in England refused to conform to a
manner of worship which retained much of the mediaeval liturgy and
ceremonial. Just as all great revolutionary movements in church or
state give rise to men who repudiate tradition and all accretions due to
human experience, and base their political and religious ideals upon the
law of nature, the rights of man, the inner light, or the Word of God;
so, too, in England under Elizabeth and James I, leaders appeared who
demanded radical changes in faith and practice, and advocated complete
separation from the Anglican Church and isolation from the religious
world about them. Of such were the Separatists, who rejected the
Anglican and other creeds, severed all bonds with a national church
system, cast aside form, ceremony, liturgy, and a hierarchy of church
orders, and sought for the true faith and form of worship in the Word of
God. For these men the Bible was the only test of religiou