that might have flamed up and burnt out on European battlefields now spread round the earth and precipitated contests for dominion in the four quarters of the globe. The settlement of Virginia under the English flag was, among other things, an act of defiance, directed against the sovereigns of Spain and Portugal to whom Pope Alexander VI had assigned the American continents.
In no relation can the religious motive in English expansion be neglected without doing violence to the record, even though dynastic and economic elements were mingled with the operations of Protestant missionaries as they sought to bring Indians into their own fold and to check the extension of papal authority. The first duty of Virginians, declared Captain Smith, was to "preach, baptise into the Christian religion, and by the propagation of the Gospel to recover out of the arms of the devil, a number of poor and miserable souls wrapt up unto death in almost invincible ignorance." Still more significant in English expansion than the work of preachers in quest of souls to save were the labors of laymen from the religious sects of every variety who fled to the wilderness in search of a haven all their own.
Thus it must be said that as faith in Mahomet inspired the armies that carried forward the scimitar under the crescent, threatening to subdue three continents, so faith in Christ inspired the missionaries who served with the forerunners of expanding Europe and mingled with the hopes and passions of the colonists who subdued the waste places of the New World to the economy and culture of the Old. And to this religious motive must be added the love of adventure, curiosity about the unknown, forced sale into slavery, the spirit of liberty beckoning from the frontiers of civilization, the whip of the law, and the fierce, innate restlessness which seizes uncommon people in rebellion against the monotonous routine of ordered life.
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