There was a mighty educational problem before the church. The Episcopalians had failed to take up that work in England; it was from their midst that Wm. Brewster, a Cambridge graduate, John Robinson, who also was graduated from Cambridge in 1600, and William Bradford, afterward governor of Plymouth for thirty years, withdrew to form the nucleus of the Congregational Church, which had its origin at Scrooby, England, and ended in Plymouth. What Episcopalianism had overlooked in the matter of education in England it now became the duty and privilege of the new church to begin on the virgin soil of America. [Sidenote: The New England theocracy] The reader is familiar with the fact that the Puritans, leaving England because of civil and religious oppression, the result of a union of church and state, came to America for freedom, and, contrary to what one would expect, especially at a casual glance, they here developed a theocracy. “The aim of Winthrop and his friends in coming to Massachusetts was the construction of a theocratic state which should be to Christians ... all that the theocracy of Moses and Joshua and Samuel had been to the Jews.... In such a scheme there was no room for religious liberty.... The state they were to found was to consist of a united body of believers; citizenship itself was to be co-extensive with church membership.”[158] [Sidenote: Educational work breaks the theocracy] It is equally well known, however, that this theocratic form was soon broken; and while the United States is beginning to find herself again approaching this mode of government, it is a remarkable fact, and one well worthy of our closest consideration, that _the ancient theocracy of New England was broken by the power of the educational system_ there introduced. When this is read from the pages that follow, let the reader answer the question whether or not the _repudiation of Protestant principles and the principles of republicanism by the United States in the nineteenth century is equally due to the present system_. Bear in mind the question as we proceed. The educational history of the United States may conveniently be studied in three sections; 1, colonial; 2, revolutionary; 3, nineteenth century. I. THE COLONIAL PERIOD. [Sidenote: The founding of Harvard] Since Harvard College, the American Cambridge, “accomplished,” as Boone says, “a much needed work, with manifold wholesome reactions upon society and government, so that it has been affirmed, with show of truth, that ‘the founding of Harvard College hastened the Revolution half a century,’”[159] our study of the schools of the colonial period will center around this institution. It can be stated with safety that the history of Harvard, its leading men, and its varying attitude toward different Colonial problems, throws light on the development of the question of education at the time when the foundations of our national government were laid.