He was a late comer in the enterprise. In the year after Endecott had brought over a colony composed mostly of servants of the company and of the individual patentees, a second company of emigrants had been sent over with a commission to Endecott as governor on the place, assisted by a council. A church had been formed at Salem. Now set in a larger agitation in favor of migration to New England. The course of events in England was so adverse to Puritanism that those who were devoted to that purified church, which was as yet invisible, except to the eye of faith, began to look toward America. Every door for public action in state or church was closed to the Puritans in England, closed and barred by Courts of High Commission, by the Star Chamber, and by the Tower. Into one of the gloomiest rooms of the latter had lately gone, at the arbitrary command of the king, that high-spirited martyr to constitutional liberty, Sir John Eliot. Finding no way by which to come out again except a postern of dishonor, Eliot deliberately chose to languish and die in prison. The almost hopeless outlook at home, the example set by Endecott's emigration to New England in 1628, and by that of Higginson's company in 1629, perhaps also the ever-active propagandism of "Father White" of Dorchester, set agoing among the Puritans a widespread interest in the subject. Some of the leading minds thought it a noble work to organize a reformed church in a new country, since, in their view, the Church of England, under Laud, had taken up its march backward. This purpose of planting a Puritan church in America now began to take the first place; even the conversion of the Indians, which had been the chief avowed purpose hitherto, fell into the background. [Sidenote: Winthrop's paper.] The manuscript paper entitled Reasons for New England, to which reference has already been made, was widely but secretly circulated, and frequently copied, after a fashion of that time, prevailing especially in the case of tracts or books of a kind to shrink from print. It contained arguments in favor of removing to New England, with answers to the various objections made against emigration. Several copies of these Reasons, or Considerations, have come down to us in various handwritings, and the authorship has been attributed now to one, now to another; to Winthrop, to White of Dorchester, to Sir John Eliot himself. It appears to have been in its earliest form the production of Winthrop. There were horseback journeys, some of them by night, made about this time for the purpose of secret consultation. [Sidenote: His character.] [Sidenote: Note 5.]