Note Note 7, page 278 — BOOK III. CENTRIFUGAL FORCES IN COLONY-PLANTING.

Self-consciousness of the Massachusetts community. It was a community that believed in its own divine mission. It traced the existence of its settlements to the very hand of God—the God who led Israel out of Egypt. The New England colonists never forgot that they were a chosen people. Upon other American settlers—the Dutch in New Netherland, the Virginia churchmen, the newly landed Marylanders, with their admixture of papists—they looked with condescension if not with contempt, accounting them the Egyptians of the New World. Note 7. The settlers on the Bay of Massachusetts were certain that their providential exodus was one of the capital events in human history; that it had been predesigned from eternity to plant here, in a virgin world, the only true form of church government and to cherish a church that should be a model to the Old World in turn, and a kind of foreshadowing of the new heaven and the new earth. Some dreamed that the second coming of Christ would take place among the rocky woodlands of New England. The theocratical government was thought to be the one most pleasing to God, and a solemn obligation was felt to import into this new theocracy the harsh Oriental intolerance which had marked that fierce struggle in which the Jewish tribes finally shook off image worship.