expense of Brewster and his Puritan friends in establishing religion as they understood it were likely to be rendered futile by the governors of the church. "He and many more of those times begane to looke further into things," says Bradford. Persecution begot Separatism. The theory was the result of conditions, as new theories are wont to be. IX. [Sidenote: The Scrooby Church.] [Sidenote: Magnalia, Book ii, c. i, 2.] Here, as elsewhere, the secession appears to have begun with meetings for devotion. By this supposition we may reconcile two dates which have been supposed to conflict, conjecturing that in 1602, when Brewster had lived about fifteen years in the old manor-house, his neighbors, who did not care to attend the ministry of ignorant and licentious priests, began to spend whole Sundays together, now in one place and now in another, but most frequently in the old manor-house builded within a moat, and reached by ascending a flight of stone steps. Here, Brewster's hospitality was dispensed to them freely. They may or may not have been members of the Separatist church at Gainsborough, as some have supposed. It was not until 1606 that these people formed the fully organized Separatist church of Scrooby. It was organized after the Barrowist pattern that had originated in London--it was after a divine pattern, according to their belief. Brewster, the nucleus of the church, became their ruling elder. [Sidenote: The ruling elder.] [Sidenote: Bradford's Plimoth Plantation, 408-414.] [Sidenote: Hunter's Founders, _passim_.] [Sidenote: Winsor's Elder William Brewster, a pamphlet.] [Sidenote: F. B. Dexter in Narrative and Crit. Hist., iii, 257-282.] It was in these all-day meetings at the old manor-house that the Separatist rustics of Scrooby were molded for suffering and endeavor. The humble, modest, and conscientious Brewster was the king-post of the new church--the first and longest enduring of the influences that shaped the character of these people in England, Holland, and America. Brewster could probably have returned to the court under other auspices after Davison's fall, but as master of the post at Scrooby, then as a teacher and as founder of a printing office of prohibited English books in Leyden, and finally as a settler in the wilderness, inuring his soft hands to rude toils, until he died in his cabin an octogenarian, he led a life strangely different from that of a courtier. But no career possible to him at court could have been so useful or so long remembered. X. [Sidenote: John Robinson.] [Sidenote: Note 3.]