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For many years European adventurers
continued to resort to the American coast in the hope of finding the way to
immediate wealth. Some feeble attempts had been made to colonize. Here and
there a few families had been planted. But hunger or the Indians always
extinguished those infant settlements. The great idea of colonizing America
was slow to take possession of European minds. The Spaniard sought for
Indians to plunder. The Englishman believed in gold-mines and the north-west
passage to India. It was not till America had been known for a hundred years
that men began to think of finding a home beyond the Atlantic.
The courage and endurance of the early voyagers excite
our wonder. Few of them sailed in ships so large as a hundred tons burthen.
The merchant ships of that time were very small. The royal navies of Europe
contained large vessels, but commerce was too poor to employ any but the
smallest. The commerce of imperial Rome employed ships which even now would
be deemed large. St. Paul was wrecked in a ship of over five hundred tons
burthen. Josephus sailed in a ship of nearly one thousand tons. Europe
contented herself, as yet, with vessels of a very different class. A ship of
forty or fifty tons was deemed sufficient by the daring adventurers who
sought to reach the Land of Promise beyond the great sea. Occasionally
toy-ships of twenty or twenty-five tons were used. The brother of Sir Walter
Raleigh crossed the Atlantic in such a ship, and perished in it as lie
attempted to return to England.
It was not a pleasant world which the men and women of
Europe had to live in during the sixteenth century. Fighting was the
constant occupation of the Kings of that time. A year of peace was a rare
and somewhat wearisome exception. Kings habitually, at their own
unquestioned pleasure, gathered their subjects together, and marched them
off to slay and plunder their neighbours. Civil wars were frequent. In these
confused strifes men slew their acquaintances and friends as the only method
they knew of deciding who was to fill the throne. Feeble Commerce was
crushed under the iron heel of War. No such thing as security for life or
property was expected. The fields of the husbandman were trodden down by the
march of armies. Disbanded or deserted soldiers wandered as "masterless men"
over the country, and robbed and murdered at their will. Highwaymen abounded
- although highways could scarcely be said to exist. Epidemic diseases of
strange type, the result of insufficient feeding and the poisonous air of
undrained lands and filthy streets, desolated all European countries. Under
what hardships and miseries the men of the sixteenth century passed their
days, it is scarcely possible for us now to conceive.
The English Parliament once reminded James I. of
certain "undoubted rights" which they possessed. The King told them, in
reply, that he "did not like this style of talking, but would rather hear
them say that all their privileges were derived by the grace and permission
of the sovereign." Europe, during the sixteenth century, had no better
understanding of the matter than James had. It was not supposed that the
King was made for the people. It seemed rather to be thought that the people
were made for the King. here and there some man wiser than ordinary
perceived the truth, so familiar to us, that a King is merely a great
officer appointed by the people to do certain work for them. There was a
Glasgow professor who taught in those dark days that the authority of the
King was derived from the people, and ought to be used for their good. Two
of his pupils were John Knox the reformer, and George Buchanan the
historian, by whom this doctrine, so great and yet so simple, was clearly
perceived and firmly maintained. But to the great mass of mankind it seemed
that the King had divine authority to dispose of his subjects an(l their
property according to his pleasure. Poor patient humanity still bowed in
lowly reverence before its Kings, and bore, without wondering or murmuring,
all that it pleased them to inflict. No stranger superstition has ever
possessed the human mind than this boundless mediaeval veneration for the
King—a veneration which follies the most abject, vices the most enormous,
were not able to quench.
But as
this unhappy century draws towards its close, the elements of a most benign
change are plainly seen at work. The Bible has been largely read. The Bible
is the book of all ages and of all circumstances. But never, surely, since
its first gift to man was it more needful to any age than to that which now
welcomed its restoration with wonder and delight. It took deep hold on the
minds of men. It exercised a silent influence which gradually changed the
aspect of society. The narrative portions of Scripture were especially
acceptable to the untutored intellect of that time; and thus the Old
Testament was preferred to the New. This preference led to some mistakes.
Rules which had been given to an ancient Asiatic people were applied in
circumstances for which they were never intended or fitted. It is easy to
smile at these mistakes. But it is impossible to over-estimate the social
and political good which we now enjoy as a result of this incessant reading
of the Bible by the people of the sixteenth century.
In nearly all European countries the King claimed to
regulate the religious belief of his subjects. Even in England that power
was still claimed. The people were beginning to suspect that they were
entitled to think for themselves—a Suspicion which grew into an indignant
certainty, and widened and deepened till it swept from the throne the
unhappy House of Stuart.
A
little way into the seventeenth century America overcame the refuge of those
who would not receive their faith at the bidding of the King. The best part
of American colonization resulted from the foolish and insolent oppressions
of Europe. At the beginning, however, it was not so. It was from an impulse
of vagrant blackguardism that the first American colony sprang.
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