We have already seen some of the incentives that induced men to become Puritans. As the movement grew, worldly motives, aside from the purely religious or purely patriotic, would tend to influence an increasing number. We have noted above how the financial sacrifice was frequently made by the Churchman and not by the Puritan. Indeed, “many of wit and parts,” wrote one of the most attractive of English Puritan women, “who could not obtain the preferment their ambition gaped at, would declare themselves of the puritan party,” while “others, that had neither learning, nor friends, nor opportunities to arrive to any preferments, would put on a form of godliness, finding devout people that way so liberal to them, that they could not hope to enrich themselves so much in any other way.”[188] Footnote 188: L. Hutchinson, _Memoirs of Col. Hutchinson_ (Everyman's Library, 1913), p. 65. Moreover, there had for some time been growing up into prominence a new class, which we now call the middle, and which had had no assigned position under the feudal form of society. In the Stuart period, this class was, for the first time, to impress its character deeply upon national affairs. The activities by which, during the preceding two centuries or more, its members had been gradually rising into their new position had given a marked quality to their minds and characters. Looked down upon by the noble, and disliked by the peasant, they returned these feelings with interest. When the noble disdained their birth and breeding, they in turn condemned the immorality of those above them in both. Again the element of negation entered, and the Puritan fostered an ideal which was the reverse of the lives of those who looked down upon him. Puritanism became the “reasoned expression of the middle-class state of mind,”[189] which it has always remained. Footnote 189: C. L. Becker, _Beginnings of the American People_ (New York, 1915), pp. 81-85. Among the leaders, however, as among the middle class and country gentry, there was a group which had a very great influence, not only upon the party in England, but upon colonization in America, and which will concern us more directly. We must now turn to examine the settlement of those two colonies in the New World which represented, in the main, the earlier religious, and the later economic and political, aspects of the English Puritan movement. CHAPTER V THE FIRST PERMANENT SETTLEMENTS