he keys to Puritanism when he said: "No
man loves what he endures, but he may love to endure." The Puritan loved
to endure. To expect resistance and to meet it unmoved; to welcome
calumny and reviling with a steadfast mind; to transform a hostile
verdict of the majority into an unconscious award of merit:--such was
the Puritan temper in its most distinguished representatives.

III

In England the Puritan temper was given its effective edge during the
latter years of Elizabeth and the reigns of the first Stuarts. The
Armada was scarcely destroyed before the queen assumed a less
complaisant attitude toward dissent. James I warned the clergy at
Hampden Court that he would make them conform or harry them out of the
land. The third decade of the century witnessed the triumph of
Anti-Christ on every hand: in Germany the success of imperial arms was
crowned by the Edict of Restitution; with the capture of Rochelle, the
Huguenots in France lost their towns of refuge and found themselves at
the mercy of the state; and in England itself the first Charles, more
absolutist and more Catholic than his father, was thought to aim at
nothing less than the ruin of Parliament and the restoration of the
Roman religion. Under the stress of opposition there was accordingly a
marked accentuation of the Puritan and the Separatist spirit. To
Nonconformist and Independent alike the truth became more clear the more
it was traduced and maligned. Year by year there was a deepening sense
of being in the world but not of it; and to those who were already
spiritual exiles, the idea of removing to America came to seem but the
outward expression of an inner fact: "All the churches of Europe have
been brought under desolation; it maybe feared that the like judgements
are coming upon us; and who knows but God hath provided this place to be
a refuge for many, whom he meanes to save out of the generall
callamitie."

It was not the Puritan Nonconformists who first sought refuge on
American shores, but a less aggressive people, who were called Brownists
in derision, but who called themselves Separatists. Robert Browne first
formulated the doctrines of the sect; but its origin, and the reasons
for its persistence in the face of bitter persecution, are not
altogether clear. Poor in purse and feeble in numbers, Separatism found
adherents chiefly in London and Norfolk, and among the lower classes of
artisans and countrymen. It was in London and Norfolk that