SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1660 27
ultimately wrecked it. But it will be noted that the
driving force in these critical early years, whether on
the side of uniformity or on that of diversity, was
religion.
In the Royal Charter granted to the Massachusetts
Bay Company by King Charles I in March 1629,
conversion of the heathen finds a place towards the
end of the Charter. The words used were explicit
and notable and may well be quoted. The Company
was empowered to make laws and provisions for the
directing, ruling and disposing of all other matters
and things whereby the said people, inhabitants there,
may be so religiously, peaceably and civilly governed,
as their good life and orderly conversation may will
and incite the natives of that country to the knowledge
and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of
mankind, and the Christian Faith, which, in our royal
intention and the adventurers’ free profession, is the principal
end of this plantation.
This was a striking pronouncement at the outset of
a very great English colony, that the principal object
of its foundation was to spread the Gospel, and, further,
that proselytes were to be made through the object
lesson presented by the lives of the white settlers.
In New England, in the hands of such men as
Thomas Mayhew and John Eliot, missionary work
became a reality. Eliot, the apostle of the North
American Indians, went out in 1631 with the ship
which carried Winthrop’s family, Winthrop himself
having gone in the previous year. Eliot set himself
! The Charter will be found at pp. 22-26 of the Documentary Source
Book of American History, 1606-1913 (Macmillan Co.. 1018). new edition.