n their
terms were expired, became families of themselves, which gave increase
hereunto. Another and maine reason hereof was, that men, finding so many
godly disposed persons willing to come into these parts, some began to
make a trade of it, to transport passengers and their goods, and hired
ships for that end; and then, to make up their freight and advance their
profite, cared not who the persons were, so they had money to pay them.
And also ther were sente by their freinds some under hope that they
would be made better; others that they might be eased of such burthens,
and they kept from shame at home that would necessarily follow their
dissolute courses. And by this means the country became pestered with
many unworthy persons, who, being come over, crept into one place or
other."

Such unworthy persons doubtless swelled the mass of uncovenanted. Yet
the historian is apt to think that for many, honest and good men enough,
the cold inner temple of the ideal commonwealth must have proved more
forbidding than its wind-swept outer courts. To enter its portals was an
ordeal which the average man will not readily undergo, involving, as an
initial procedure, a confession of faults and a profession of faith, a
public revelation of inner spiritual condition, an exposure of soul to
the searching and curious inspection of the sanctified. And the covenant
itself was found to be no warmed and cloistered retreat, secure from the
rude impact and impertinent gaze of the world. Quite the contrary! To
enter the covenant was to renounce all private spiritual possessions, to
give one's intimate convictions into the keeping of others, to subscribe
to a very communism of the emotional life. This un-Roman Church was after
all but a public confessional, in which every brother was a confessor,
and life itself a penance for constructive sin. The soul that is
constantly exposed grows callous or diseased; and the New England
covenant provided a regimen well suited to repel the normal mind or
induce in its patients a fatal spiritual anaemia.

And with every decade the house of the covenant became at once more
difficult to enter and less comfortable to abide in. The Puritan was not
necessarily a sad or solemn person. Yet the light heart and the merry
mind were not the salient characteristics even of the cheerful Winthrop
or the genial Cotton; while the conditions of life in the
wilderness--the unrelieved round of exacting labor, the ever present