The rude houses of Hooker’s congregation were bought by a newly arrived company, the flock of the Rev. Thomas Shepard. This firm but gentle leader, who left a deep impress on the habit of the town, was a youth of thirty-one, and a graduate, like many of the Massachusetts leaders, of Emanuel College, at Cambridge. He came to New England with a company of earnest followers, actuated, as he wrote, by desire for “the fruition of God’s ordinances. Though my motives were mixed, and I looked much to my own quiet, yet the Lord let me see the glory of liberty in New England, and made me purpose to live among God’s people as one come from the dead to His praise.” His brave young wife died “in unspeakable joy” only a fortnight after his settlement at Cambridge, and was soon followed by the chief man of his flock and his closest friend, Roger Harlakenden, another godly youth of the manly type of English pioneers. At once, too, Shepard was plunged into the stormy debates of the antinomian controversy which nearly caused a permanent division in the Congregational churches. The general election of 1637, which was held on the Common at Newtowne, was a tumultuous gathering, and discussion over the merits of “grace” and “works” ran high till John Wilson, minister of the Boston church, climbed up into a big oak tree, and made a speech which carried the day for John Winthrop to the confusion of the heretical disciples of Anne Hutchinson. Through these stormy waters Shepard [Illustration: “THE MUSES’ FACTORIES.”--LOWELL.] steered his course so discreetly that he came into high favor among all people as a sound and vigilant minister, and Cotton Mather tells us that “it was with a respect unto this vigilancy and the enlightening and powerful ministry of Mr. Shepard, that, when the foundation of a college was to be laid, Cambridge, rather than any other place, was pitched upon to be the seat of that happy seminary.” The founding of Harvard College by the little colony was surely one of the most heroic, devout and fruitful events of American history. Upon the main entrance to the college grounds is written to-day an inscription taken from one of the earliest chronicles, entitled _New England’s First Fruits_. We read that: “After God had carried us safe to New England and wee had builded our houses and provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship and settled the Civil Government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”