Very full and curiously interesting information about the principles, persons, and events connecting the Puritan controversy in the Old World with the settlement of New England, may be found in the now well-nigh innumerable volumes containing the history of our oldest towns and churches. In their earlier pages or chapters these histories find the town and the church a common theme. Grateful occasions have been found in commemorations of bi-centennial or longer periods, from the settlement of municipalities or the foundation of parishes, to review the past, and to trace in the old land the men who brought here in their exile, for free and successful enjoyment, principles for which they had there suffered. The history of the Reformation and of Nonconformity might indeed be largely written from the pamphlets and the volumes called out by these local commemorations, so numerous during the last decade of years. Traces of matter of a similar character may also be found in the personal and historical references, in text or note, of the first volume of the _Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Harvard University_, by John Langdon Sibley. In connection with the public and formal observance of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the First Church of Boston,—in the fifth in order of the edifices in which it had worshipped,—a son of the present pastor (the seventeenth in the line of succession) prepared and published a work with the following title: _History of the First Church in Boston. 1630-1880. By Arthur B. Ellis. With an Introduction by George E. Ellis. Illustrated._ Boston, 1881. Pages lxxxviii + 356. [Illustration] CHAPTER VIII. THE PILGRIM CHURCH AND PLYMOUTH COLONY. BY FRANKLIN B. DEXTER, _Professor of American History in Yale College._ THE preceding chapter has outlined the growth of Separatism in England, and prepared the way for the story of the fortunes of that remarkable congregation which has given a new significance to the name “Pilgrim.” [Illustration] Elizabeth’s policy of Uniformity, so sternly pursued by her last Archbishop of Canterbury, Whitgift (1583-1604), was ostentatiously adopted by her successor, James I., at the Hampton Court Conference held in his presence by learned men of the Puritan and High Church parties in the first year of his reign; and when this conference was quickly followed by the elevation of Bancroft, a more arbitrary Whitgift, to Whitgift’s vacant place, those who were earnest in the opposite opinions were forced to choose between persecution and exile. [Illustration: SITE OF THE MANOR-HOUSE.