with might and main is apt to be something quite different from the end we dreamed of as we started on our arduous labour.  So it was with the Puritan settlers of New England.  The religious liberty that we enjoy to-day is largely the consequence of their work; but it is a consequence that was unforeseen, while the direct and conscious aim of their labours was something that has never been realized, and probably never will be. [Sidenote:  The migration was not intended to promote what we call religious liberty]

The aim of Winthrop and his friends in coming to Massachusetts was the construction of a theocratic state which should be to Christians, under the New Testament dispensation, all that the theocracy of Moses and Joshua and Samuel had been to the Jews in Old Testament days.  They should be to all intents and purposes freed from the jurisdiction of the Stuart king, and so far as possible the text of the Holy Scriptures should be their guide both in weighty matters of general legislation and in the shaping of the smallest details of daily life.  In such a scheme there was no room for religious liberty as we understand it.  No doubt the text of the Scriptures may be interpreted in many ways, but among these men there was a substantial agreement as to the important points, and nothing could have been further from their thoughts than to found a colony which should afford a field for new experiments in the art of right living.  The state they were to found was to consist of a united body of believers; citizenship itself was to be co-extensive with church-membership; and in such a state there was apparently no more room for heretics than there was in Rome or Madrid.  This was the idea which drew Winthrop and his followers from England at a time when—­as events were soon to show—­they might have stayed there and defied persecution with less trouble than it cost them to cross the ocean and found a new state. [Sidenote:  Theocratic ideal of the Puritans]

Such an ideal as this, considered by itself and apart from the concrete acts in which it was historically manifested, may seem like the merest fanaticism.  But we cannot dismiss in this summary way a movement which has been at the source of so much that is great in American history:  mere fanaticism has never produced such substantial results.  Mere fanaticism is sure to aim at changing the constitution of human society in some essential point, to undo the work of evolution, and offer in some indistinctly apprehended fashion to remodel human life.  But in these respects the Puritans were intensely conservative.  The impulse by which they were animated was a profoundly ethical impulse—­the desire to lead godly lives, and to drive out sin from the community—­the same ethical impulse which animates the glowing pages of Hebrew poets and prophets, and which has given to the history and literature of Israel their commanding influence in the world.  The Greek, says Matthew Arnold, held that the perfection of happiness was