Chap. X.} |
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enemy of Massachusetts, caused all men to stay in
England in expectation of a new world.
Yet a nation was already planted in New England; a commonwealth was matured; the contests in which the unfortunate Charles became engaged, and the republican revolution that followed, left the colonists, for the space of twenty years, nearly unmolested in the enjoyment of virtual independence.
The change which their industry had wrought in the wilderness, was the admiration of their times.
The wigwams and hovels in which the English had at first found shelter, were replaced by well built houses.
The number of emigrants who had arrived in New England before the assembling of the Long Parliament, is esteemed to have been twenty-one thousand two hundred. Two hundred and ninety-eight ships had borne them across the Atlantic; and the cost of the plantations had been almost a million of dollars—a great expenditure and a great emigration for that age. In a little more than ten years, fifty towns and villages had been planted; between thirty and forty churches built; and strangers, as they gazed, could not but acknowledge God's blessing on the endeavors of the planters.
A public school, for which on the eighth of September, 1636, the general court made provision, was, in the next year, established at Cambridge; and when, in 1638, John Harvard, a nonconformist clergyman, a church member and freeman of Charlestown, esteemed for godliness and the love of learning, bequeathed to it his library and half his fortune, it was named Harvard College. ‘To complete the colony in church and commonwealth-work,’ Jesse Glover, a worthy minister, able in estate, ‘and of a liberal spirit, in that same ’
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