There must have been a certain exhilarant reaction in the minds of the Puritans when at last they were clear of the English coast and free from the authority that had put so many constraints upon them. There were preachings and expoundings by beloved preachers with no fear of pursuivants. The new religious freedom was delightful to intoxication. "Every day for ten weeks together," writes one passenger, they had preaching and exposition. On one ship the watches were set by the Puritan captain with the accompaniment of psalm-singing. Those who all their lives long had made outward and inward compromises between their ultimate convictions and their obligations to antagonistic authority found themselves at length utterly free. It was not that action was freed from the restraint of fear, so much as that thought itself was freed from the necessity for politic compromises. Every ship thus became a seminary for discussion. Every man now indulged in the unwonted privilege of thinking his bottom thought. The tendency to swing to an extreme is all but irresistible in the minds of men thus suddenly liberated. To such enthusiasts the long-deferred opportunity to actualize ultimate ideals in an ecclesiastical vacuum would be accepted with joy. What deductions such companies would finally make from the hints in the New Testament was uncertain. The only sure thing was that every vestige of that which they deemed objectionable in the English church would be repressed, obliterated, in their new organization. [Sidenote: Rise of the Congregational form in New England.] [Sidenote: Cotton to Salonstall in Hutch. Papers.] [Sidenote: Hubbard's Hist. of New Eng., 117.]