There was one other consideration still more difficult for men of our day to understand. Political and military reverses had apparently well-nigh wrecked Protestantism on the Continent. Many Protestants in the Palatinate and elsewhere were making peace by becoming Roman Catholics. "All other churches of Europe are brought to desolation, & our sinnes, for which the Lord beginnes allreaddy to frowne upon us & to cutte us short, doe threatne evill times to be comminge upon us." These words are set down in the Reasons for New England as the second consideration. In another part of the same paper it is urged that the "woefull spectacle" of the ruin of "Churches beyound the Seas," "may teach us more wisdome to avoide the Plauge when it is foreseene & not to tarry as they did till it overtake us." The dominance of Old Testament ideas is easily seen here. But this fleeing from judgments that were to fall not on the lives or possessions of men, but on the churches themselves--judgments of a spiritual nature, apprehended only by inference--was a refinement of Hebraism never known to the Hebrews. The delusion that Laud meant to hand over the English church bound hand and foot to Rome may have made such judgments seem visibly imminent. VI. [Sidenote: Rise of the Massachusetts Company.] [Sidenote: Compare The Planter's Plea.] The project for a Puritan colony languished at first on account of the failure of the semi-Puritan, semi-commercial Dorchester farming and fishing colony on Cape Ann; but White of Dorchester continued to agitate the planting of a colony. He had, no doubt, efficient help in the proceedings against the Puritan clergy. From Dorchester the plan was carried to London, where it soon became, in the phrase of that time, "vulgar," or, as we should say, popular. Its countenance to the world, and especially toward the government, was that of a commercial venture like the planting of Virginia, but in its heart it was a religious enterprise. In March, 1628, the Council for New England gave to the Massachusetts projectors a patent for lands extending from the Merrimack to the Charles and three miles beyond each river. The western boundary of this tract was the Pacific Ocean, for holders of grants could afford to be generous in giving away the interior of an unexplored continent about which nothing was known but that it abounded in savages. VII. [Sidenote: Leadership and character of Endecott.] [Sidenote: 1628.] [Sidenote: Bentley's Description of Salem.] [Sidenote: Eliot's Biography, 195.]