riting.
But the far more important Puritan emigration to Massachusetts under
Winthrop aimed not so much at "freedom" as at the establishment of a
theocracy according to the Scriptures. These men straightway denied
freedom of worship, not only to newcomers who sought to join them, but
to those members of their own company who developed independent ways of
thinking. The list of motives for emigration ran the whole gamut, from
missionary fervor for converting the savages, down through a commendable
desire for gain, to the perhaps no less praiseworthy wish to escape a
debtor's prison or the pillory. A few of the colonists were rich. Some
were beggars or indentured servants. Most of them belonged to the middle
class. John Harvard was the son of a butcher; Thomas Shepard, the son
of a grocer; Roger Williams, the son of a tailor. But all three were
university bred and were natural leaders of men.

Once arrived in the wilderness, the pioneer life common to all of the
colonists began instantly to exert its slow, irresistible pressure upon
their minds and to mould them into certain ways of thinking and
feeling. Without some perception of these modes of thought and emotion
a knowledge of the spirit of our literature is impossible. Take, for
instance, the mere physical situation of the first colonists, encamped
on the very beach of the wide ocean with an illimitable forest in their
rear. Their provisions were scanty. They grew watchful of the strange
soil, of the new skies, of the unknown climate. Even upon the voyage
over, John Winthrop thought that "the declination of the pole star was
much, even to the view, beneath that it is in England," and that "the
new moon, when it first appeared, was much smaller than at any time he
had seen it in England." Here was a man evidently using his eyes with
a new interest in natural phenomena. Under these changed skies the mind
began gradually to change also.

At first the colonists felt themselves an outpost of Europe, a forlorn
hope of the Protestant Reformation. "We shall be as a city upon a hill,"
said Winthrop. "The eyes of all people are upon us." Their creed was
Calvinism, then in its third generation of dominion and a European
doctrine which was not merely theological but social and political. The
emigrant Englishmen were soon to discover that it contained a doctrine
of human rights based upon human needs. At the beginning of their
novel experience they were doubtless unaware of any al