Such was the situation, brought about with full knowledge and intention, and as long as possible persisted in, by the Puritan leaders. Those leaders, as we have such clear proof in the case of the noblest of them, John Winthrop, seem to have come to Massachusetts with three distinct and clearly understood objects. They wished, first, to found and develop a peculiar type of community, best expressed by the term Bible-Commonwealth, in which the political and religious elements, in themselves and in their relations to one another, should be but two aspects of the same method of so regulating the lives of individuals as to bring them into harmony with the expressed will of God, as interpreted by the self-appointed rulers. Secondly, both as religious zealots, who felt that they had come into possession of ultimate truth, and as active-minded Englishmen, desirous of an outlet for their administrative energies, they considered themselves as the best qualified rulers and the appointed guardians for the community which they had founded. Lastly, having been largely determined by economic considerations in venturing their fortunes in the enterprise, they looked with fear, as well as jealousy, upon any possibility of allowing control of policy, of law and order, and of legislation concerning person and property, to pass to others. In such a church-state, no civil question could be considered aside from its possible religious bearings; no religious opinion could be discussed apart from its political implications. It was a system which could be maintained permanently only by the most rigid denial of political free speech and religious toleration. Fortunately, however, it contained within itself the seeds of its own dissolution. Apart from other factors, the church-covenant idea, brought by the Pilgrims, accepted by Endicott, and indorsed by the three churches formed by the Winthrop colonists, in 1630, at Dorchester, Charlestown, and Watertown, was the seed of a democratic conception of the state, which grew so persistently as to defy all efforts of its own planters to destroy it. The attitude of the two most influential Massachusetts leaders, lay and ecclesiastical, is not a matter of inference. “Democracy,” wrote Winthrop, after stating that there “was no such government in Israel,” is “amongst civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government.” To allow it in Massachusetts would be “a manifest breach of the 5th. Commandment.”[339] “Democracy,” wrote John Cotton to Lord Say and Sele, “I do not conceive that ever God did ordeyne as a fit government eyther for church or commonwealth. If the people be governers, who shall be governed?”[340] We have already quoted Gooch's statement that “democracy is the child of the Reformation, not of the Reformers.” The democracy of Massachusetts, slow in developing, was the child of the church-covenant and of the frontier, not of the Puritan leaders. Footnote 339: