all official efforts to force conformity upon them. The printing press, the revival of pagan literature, the multiplication of books on travel, commerce, and economy, the translation of the Bible into English so that the multitude could read it and dispute over matters of interpretation, and the corroding insinuations of business and natural science produced a luxuriant variety of religious sectarianism.
On the right were partisans of the Established Church who clung to the lawful order and, more extreme than they, the Catholics who hoped for a return to the vanished past; on the left were Independents, or Separatists, who proposed to abandon the Establishment or to abolish it altogether. In the center were Puritans who merely wished to "purify" the Anglican system by minor changes in creed and ceremony. Scattered along the line at different points stood Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, and other sects, each proclaiming its own gospel and its particular path to heaven.
Bewildered at first by the welter of dogmas, the king, the Anglican clergy, and their adherents tried to stem the rushing tides, bringing various engines of oppression to bear upon the dissident elements. In pursuing this policy, they unwittingly aided the work of colonization. It was then that the members of the congregation at Scrooby who afterward found their way to Plymouth "were hunted and persecuted on every side. . . . Some were taken and clapped up in prison; others had their houses beset and watched night and day . . . and the most were fain to fly and leave their houses and habitations."
In the end the advocates of uniformity and suppression failed. Out of the clash of sects, the ferment of opinion, the growth of doubt, and the direction of intellectual energies to practical considerations, finally came a degree of religious toleration which counted more heavily in successful colonization than religious oppression. If the English kings and their advisers hated the heretics, they did not follow the example of the Bourbon monarchs in France by excluding them from the territories lying far away.
