I. It is a matter of indisputable fact that the founding of our
commonwealth was one of the direct fruits of the revived Gospel of
Christ. But a little searching into the influences most active in the
history is required to show that it was religious conviction and
faith, more than anything else, that had to do with the case.
Changes had come. Luther had found the Bible chained, and set it free.
Apostolic Christianity had reappeared, and was re-uttering itself with
great power among the nations. Its quickening truths and growing
victories were undermining the gigantic usurpations and falsehoods
which for ages had been oppressing our world. Conscience, illuminated
and revived by the Word of God, had risen up to assert its rights of
free judgment and free worship, and resentful power had drawn the
sword to put it down. Continental Europe was being deluged with blood
and devastated by relentless religious wars to crush out the evangelic
faith, whose confessors held up the Bible over all popes and secular
powers, and would not consent to part with their inalienable charter
from the throne of Heaven to worship God according to his Word. And
amid these woeful struggles the good providence of the Almighty opened
up to the attention of the nations the vast new territories of this
Western World.
From various motives, indeed, were the several original colonies of
America founded. Some of the colonists came from a spirit of
adventure. Some came for territorial aggrandizement and national
enrichment. Some came as mercantile speculators. And each of these
considerations may have entered somewhat into the most of these
colonization schemes. But it was mainly flight from oppression on
account of religious convictions which influenced the first colony of
New England, and a still freer religious motive induced the
colonization of Pennsylvania.
All the men most concerned in the matter were profoundly religious
men and thorough and active believers in revived Christianity; and it
was most of all from these religious feelings and impulses that they
acted in the case.