With the evils and abuses of the English church more and more exaggerated in their thoughts, the sin of separation readily came to seem less heinous than before. There was no longer any necessity for professing loyalty to the church nor any further temptation to think ill of those at Plymouth, who, like themselves, had suffered much to avoid what both Separatists and Puritans deemed unchristian practices. A common creed and common sufferings, flight from the same oppression to find refuge in what was henceforth to be a common country, drew them to sympathy and affection for their forerunners at Plymouth. The Plymouth people were not backward to send friendly help to the newcomers. The influence of the physician sent from Plymouth to Endecott's party in the prevailing sickness soon persuaded the naturally radical Endecott to the Plymouth view of church government. Winthrop's associates, or the greater part of them, drifted in the same direction, to their own surprise, no doubt. There was a lack of uniformity in the early Massachusetts churches and some clashing of opinion. Some ministers left the colony dissatisfied; one or more of the churches long retained Presbyterian forms, and some stanch believers in presbyterial government lamented long afterward that New England ecclesiastical forms were not those of the Calvinistic churches of Europe. But the net result was that Robinsonian independency became the established religion in New England, whence it was transplanted to England during the Commonwealth, and later became the prevailing discipline among English dissenters. [Sidenote: Note 10.] Thus the church discipline and the form of government in Massachusetts borrowed much from Plymouth, but the mildness and semi-toleration--the "toleration of tolerable opinions"--which Robinson had impressed on the Pilgrims was not so easily communicated to their new neighbors who had been trained in another school. ELUCIDATIONS. [Sidenote: Note 1, page 191.]