Berkeley’s interest in church preferment was not personal. He saw in it only means to an end. In March, 1723, he surprised Lord Percival by announcing, in a letter from London, a project which it seems for some time had occupied his thoughts. “It is now about ten months,” he says, “since I have determined to spend the residue of my days in Bermuda, where I trust in Providence I may be the mean instrument of doing great good to mankind. Whatever happens, go I am resolved, if I live. Half a dozen of the most ingenious and agreeable men in our College are with me in this project, and since I came hither I have got together about a dozen Englishmen of quality, who intend to retire to those islands.” He then explains the project, opening a vision of Christian civilisation radiating from those fair islands of the West, whose idyllic bliss poets had sung, diffused over the New World, with its magnificent possibilities in the future history of mankind. I find no further record of the origin of this bright vision. As it had become a practical determination “ten months” before March, 1723, one is carried back to the first months after his return to Dublin and to the _Essay_ that was called forth by the South Sea catastrophe. One may conjecture that despair of England and the Old World—“such as Europe breeds in her decay”—led him to look westward for the hopeful future of mankind, moved, perhaps, by the connexion of the catastrophe with America. His active imagination pictured a better Republic than Plato’s, and a grander Utopia than More’s, emanating from a College in the isles of which Waller had sung.