——“the stars heard and the sea! And the sounding isles of the dim woods rang To the anthem of the free.” CHAPTER XX. EBENEZER. “Behold, they come, those sainted forms, Unshaken through the strife of storms; Heaven’s darkest cloud hangs coldly down, And earth puts on its rudest frown; But colder, ruder was the hand, That drove them from their own dear land.” SPRAGUE. “These are the living lights, That from our bold, green heights, Shall shine afar, Till they who name the name Of freedom, towards the flame Come, as the Magi came Towards Bethlehem’s star.” PIERPONT. While the Plymouth Pilgrims, through these initial years, were engaged in a stern tussle with unkempt nature, in a wrestling-match with froward men, and in an essay to survive the “thousand natural ills that flesh is heir to” in new settlements, writing _victoria sine clade_ on every page of the struggle, the Scripture party in England was floundering in a “slough of despond.” Charles I. was that most strange and baleful of anomalies, a treacherous moralist. He was the painting of a virtue. Outwardly he was Cato; inwardly he was Iago. “This prince,” says Bolingbroke, “had sucked in with his mother’s milk those absurd principles which his father was so industrious, and, unhappily, so successful in propagating.”[581] Back of him stood a powerful faction, omnipotent in the church, regnant in the state, as wedded as himself to the tenets of absolutism, and eager to cry Amen to his most doubtful acts—often, indeed, instigating them.