1635 Harvard College Founded. 113 their roots in the great forests of New England. Their peculiarities may indeed amuse us. The Old Testament was their statute-book, and they deemed that the institutions of Moses were the best model for those of New England. They made attendance on public worship compulsory. They christened their children by Old Testament names. They regulated female attire by law. They considered long hair unscriptural, and preached against veils and wigs. The least wise among us can smile at the mistakes into which the Puritan Fathers of New England fell; but the most wise of all ages will most profoundly reverence the purity, the earnestness, the marvellous enlightenment of these From their incessant study of the Bible they drew a love of human liberty unsurpassed in depth and fervor. Coming from under despotic rule, they established at once a government absolutely free. men. education of his The Pilgrims bore with them across the sea a deep persuasion that their infant state could not thrive without education. Three years after the landing, it was reported of them among the friends they left in London, that "their children were not catechised, nor taught to read." The colonists felt keenly this reproach. They utterly denied its justice. They owned, indeed, that they had not yet attained to a school, much as they desired it. But all parents did their best, each in the own children. In a very few years schools began to appear. Such endowment as could be afforded was freely given. Some tolerably qualified brother was fixed upon, and "entreated to become schoolmaster." And thus graduually the foundations were laid of the noble school system of New England. Soon a law was passed that every town containing fifty householders must have a common school; every town of a hundred householders must have a grammar school. Harvard College was established within fifteen years of the landing. The founders of New England were men who had known at home the value of letters. Brewster carried with him a library of two hundred and seventy-five volumes, and his was not the largest collection in the colony. The love of knowledge was deep and universal. New England has never swerved from her early loyalty to the cause of education. Twenty-three years after the landing of the Pilgrims the population of New England had grown to twenty-four thousand. Forty-nine little wooden towns, with their wooden churches, wooden forts, and wooden ramparts, were dotted here and there over the land. There were four separate colonies, which hitherto had maintained separate governments. They were Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven. There appeared at first a disposition in the Pilgrim mind to scatter widely, and remain apart in small self-governing communities. For some years every little band which pushed deeper into the wilderness settled itself into an independent State, having no political relations with its neighbors. But this isolation could not continue. The wilderness had other inhabitants, whose presence was a standing menace. Within "striking distance" there were Indians enough to trample out the solitary little English communities. On their frontiers were Frenchmen and Dutchmen, natural enemies, as all men in that time were to each other. For mutual defence and encouragement, the four colonies joined themselves into the United Colonies of New England. This was the first confederation in a land where confederations of unprecedented magnitude were hereafter to be established. |