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the direct and immediate influence of this great movement upon the fortunes of America was great, its indirect and remote effects have been still more important. One of these effe

d failed or were burdened with debt, or had become involved in ill repute or crime, and hoped to make a new start in a new land. Many sought the New World as many still press to the frontier, from sheer restlessness and recklessness, from the love of adventure,

e pressed into naval service; paupers were handed over to the colonizing companies to be shipped to their settlements; repeatedly the prisons were emptied to provide colonists, and commissions were appointed, as in

ber of years became a familiar form of commutation of the death penalty

partly led by religious motives; many of the changes in Europe that unsettled men and made them more ready to leave their old homes were results of the Reformation. Religiou

where it was strongest, there were more than twenty thousand. The later churchmen of Virginia and the Carolinas, the Catholics of Maryland, the Quakers of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and a great body of Presbyteri

between 1517 and 1555, and obtained more or less extensive recognition and power from imperial, princely, or city authorities. Lutheranism, the most moderate and widely accepted form of Protestantism, was officially established in most of the central and northern and in some of the southern states and cities; Calvinism, less widely extended but

in the Netherlands and in Switzerland, there was much preaching and formation of independent religious communities quite apart from, and indeed in opposition to, the official Reformation. [Footnote: Moeller, Hist, of the Christian Church (English trans.), III., 36, 64, 88, 94.] These radical preachers and their followers represented very different beliefs and practices. That which was common t

t lines en masse. An austere piety, the wearing of plain clothes, the avoidance of forms of social respect, the refusal to take an oath or to hold civil office, an assertion of the sinfulness of paying or recei

mers proclaimed it in opposition to Zwingli at Zurich in 1523. Everywhere advocacy of an exact adherence to the verbal teaching of Holy Writ and a rejection of the claims of an established church, were accompanied by opposition to infant baptism. In 1525 for the first time the logical deduction from their premises was made; those baptized only in their infancy were asserted not to have been effectively baptized at all, and were rebaptized as

ime, and the history of Anabaptism in Germany is the history of a long martyrdom. In Catholic and Protestant countries alike these radicals were persecuted. From Strasburg and Nu

general body of Anabaptists-that is to say, the duty of taking up temporal arms to overthrow the existing powers and to introduce the New Jerusalem. The old episcopal city was seized by the Anabaptist leaders

nts' Revolt; and their persecutions became correspondingly harsher. Nevertheless, they continued to form communities and to spread through Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The attractiveness of the teachings of wandering Anabaptist pre

n. During the two great religious wars they suffered especial hardships, and in the midst of the Thirty Years' War they were rigorously expelled by the emperor from all his hereditary dominions, even from Moravia, where they had been allowed to exist for almost a century. [Footnote: Moeller, Hist. of the Christian Church (English trans.), III., 437- 442.] Either from original differences of doctrine and personal influence, or from later divisions and reorganization, gre

ated living under burdensome restrictions. The rising colonies of the New World, especially those which promised religious liberty, and above all that one of them whose Quaker founder held doctrines so like their own, must have exerted, notwithstanding their alien race and tongue, an almost irresistible attraction u

n, Beginners of a Nation, 266-346.] The results were shown in the characteristics of Rhode Island and Connecticut, of Germantown and Bethlehem, in some of the principal contrasts between New France and New England, and in many of the lesser diversities that have distinguished different sections of America in their subsequent history. Many influences combined to give form and character

of others; they pitted Catholic states against Protestant states, they weakened Germany, France, and the

venated in the sixteenth century, so as to reach a Protestant movement in Seville, the sailing-point for the American fleets; and this was made an excuse for the introduction of a stricter and more vigorous policy of orthodox uniformity in Spain.

hope that they might be places of refuge for oppressed Huguenots. The first French colonies which had any successful outcome, however, were the creation of the other religious party; for Richelieu, when he took up the establishment of colonies in 1624, insisted on Catholic orthodoxy in the religion of the colonists. This precaution was doubtless due to the Huguenot effor

of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, persecution sent a stream of Huguenots to the various English colonies of A