was in the revival from the Paganism with which classical tastes had infected the Church, that the spirit of missions again awoke, stimulated, of course, by the wide discoveries of fresh lands that were dawning upon the earth. If from 1000 to 1500 the progress of the Gospel was confined to the borders of the Slavonic nation, the space of time from 1500 onwards has been one of constant and unwearied effort to raise the standard of the Cross in the new worlds beyond the Atlantic.
Spain, Portugal, France, as nations, and the great company of the Jesuits as one mighty brotherhood, were the foremost in the great undertaking; but their doings form a history of their own, and our business is with the efforts of our own Church and country in the same great cause.
Our work was not taken up so soon as theirs, partly because the spirit of colonization did not begin amongst us so early as in Spain and Portugal, and partly because the foundations of most of our colonies were laid by private enterprise, rather than by public adventure, and moreover some of the earlier ones in unsettled times.
It may be reckoned as one peculiarity of Englishmen, that their greatest works are usually not the outcome of enthusiastic design, but rather grow upon them by degrees, as they are led in paths that they have not known, and merely undertake the duty that stands immediately before them, step by step.
The young schoolmaster at Little Baddow, near Chelmsford, who decided on following in the track of the Pilgrim Fathers to New England, went simply to enjoy liberty of conscience, and to be free to minister according to his own views, and never intended to become the Apostle of the Red Indians.
Nothing is more remarkable than the recoil from neglected truths. When, even in the earliest ages of the Church, the Second Commandment was supposed to be a mere enhancing of the first, and therefore curtailed and omitted, there was little perception that this would lead to popular, though not theoretical, idolatry, still less that this law, when again brought forward, would be pushed by scrupulous minds to the most strange and unexpected consequences, to the over-powering of all authority of ancient custom, and to the repudiation of everything symbolical.
This resolution against acknowledging any obligation to use either symbol or ceremony, together with the opposition of the hierarchy, led to the rejection of the traditional usages of the Church and the previously universal interpretation of Scripture in favour of three orders in the ministry. The elders, or presbytery, were deemed sufficient; and when, after having for many years been carried along, acquiescing, in the stream of the Reformation, the English Episcopacy tried to make a stand, the coercion was regarded as a return to bondage, and the more ardent spirits sought a new soil on which to enjoy the immunities that they regarded as Christian freedom.
The Mayflower led the way in 1620, and the news of the success of the first Pilgrim Fathers impelled many others to follow in their track. Among these was John Eliot. He had been born in 1604 at Nasing in Essex, and had been bred up by careful parents, full of that strong craving for theological studies that characterized the middle classes in the reign of James I.
Nothing more is known of his youth except that he received a university education, and, like others who have been foremost in missionary labours, had a gift for the comparison of languages and study of grammar. He studied the Holy Scriptures in the original tongues with the zeal that was infused into all scholars by the knowledge that the Authorized Version was in hand, and by the stimulus that was afforded by the promise of a copy of the first edition to him who should detect and correct an error in the type.
The usual fate of a scholar was to be either schoolmaster or clergyman, if not both, and young Eliot commenced his career as an assistant to Mr. John Hooker, at the Grammar School at Little Baddow. He considered this period to have been that in which the strongest religious impressions were made upon him. John Hooker was a thorough-going Puritan of great piety and rigid scruples, and instructed his household diligently in godliness, both theoretical and practical. Eliot became anxious to enter the ministry, but the reaction of Church principles, which had set in with James I., was an obstacle in his way; and imagining all ceremonial not observed by the foreign Protestants to be oppressions on Christian liberty, it became the strongest resolution of the whole party to accept nothing of all these rites, and thus ordination became impossible to them, while the laws were stringent against any preaching or praying publicly by any unordained person. The instruction of youth was likewise only permitted to those who were licensed by the bishop of the diocese; and Mr. Hooker, failing to fulfil the required tests, was silenced, and, although forty-seven clergy petitioned on his behalf, was obliged to flee to Holland.
This decided Eliot, then twenty-seven years of age, on leaving England, and seeking a freer sphere of action in the newly-founded colonies of New England, which held a charter from Government. He took leave of his betrothed, of whom we only know that her Christian name was Anne (gracious), and that her nature answered to her name, and sailed on the 3rd of November, 1631, in the ship Lyon, with a company of sixty persons, among whom were the family of Governor Winthrop.
They landed at Boston, then newly rising into a city over its harbour, and there he found his services immediately required to conduct the worship in the congregation during the absence of the pastor, who had gone to England finally to arrange his affairs.
On his return, Mr. Eliot was found to be in such favour, that the Bostonites strove to retain him as an assistant minister; but this he refused, knowing that many friends in England wished to found a separate settlement of their own; and in less than a year this arrangement was actually carried out, a steep hill in the forest-land was selected, and a staunch band of East Saxons, bringing with them the gracious Anne, came forth. John Eliot was married, elected pastor, ordained, after Presbyterian custom, by the laying on of the hands of the ministers in solemn assembly, and then took possession of the abode prepared for him and of the building on the top of the hill, where his ministrations were to be conducted.
These old fathers of the United States had found a soil, fair and well watered; and though less rich than the wondrous alluvial lands to the west, yet with capacities to yield them plentiful provision, when cleared from the vast forest that covered it. Nor had they come for the sake of wealth or luxury; the earnestness of newly-awakened, and in some degree persecuted, religion was upon them, and they regarded a sufficiency of food and clothing as all that they had a right to seek. Indeed, the spirit of ascetiscism was one of their foremost characteristics. Eliot was a man who lived in constant self-restraint as to both sleep and diet, and, on all occasions of special prayer, prefaced them by a rigorous fast—and he seems to have been in a continual atmosphere of devotion.
One of his friends objected (oddly enough as it seems to us) to his stooping to pick up a weed in his garden. “Sir, you tell us we must be heavenly-minded.”
“It is true,” he said, “and this is no impediment unto that; for, were I sure to go to heaven to-morrow, I would do what I do to-day.”
And, like many a good Christian, his outward life was to him full of allegory. Going up the steep hill to his church, he said, “This is very like the way to heaven. ’Tis up hill! The Lord in His grace fetch us up;” and spying a bush near him, he added, “And truly there are thorns and briars in the way, too.”
He had great command of his flock at Roxbury, and was a most diligent preacher and catechiser, declaring, in reference to the charge to St. Peter, that “the care of the lambs is one-third part of the charge to the Church of God.” An excellent free school was founded at Roxbury, which was held in great repute in the time of Cotton Mather, to whom we owe most of our knowledge of this good man. The biography is put together in the peculiar fashion of that day, not chronologically, but under heads illustrating his various virtues, so that it is not easy to pick out the course of his undertakings. Before passing on to that which especially distinguished him, we must give an anecdote or two from the “article” denominated “His exquisite charity.” His wife had become exceedingly skilful in medicine and in dealing with wounds, no
