COLONIAL WOMAN AND RELIGION


_I. The Spirit of Woman_

With what a valiant and unyielding spirit our forefathers met the
unspeakable hardships of the first days of American colonization! We of
these softer and more abundant times can never quite comprehend what
distress, what positive suffering those bold souls of the seventeenth
century endured to establish a new people among the nations of the
world. The very voyage from England to America might have daunted the
bravest of spirits. Note but this glimpse from an account by Colonel
Norwood in his _Voyage to Virginia_: "Women and children made dismal
cries and grievous complaints. The infinite number of rats that all the
voyage had been our plague, we now were glad to make our prey to feed
on; and as they were insnared and taken a well grown rat was sold for
sixteen shillings as a market rate. Nay, before the voyage did end (as I
was credibly informed) a woman great with child offered twenty shillings
for a rat, which the proprietor refusing, the woman died."

That was an era of restless, adventurous spirits--men and women filled
with the rich and danger-loving blood of the Elizabethan day. We should
recall that every colony of the original thirteen, except Georgia, was
founded in the seventeenth century when the energy of that great and
versatile period of the Virgin Queen had not yet dissipated itself. The
spirit that moved Ben Jonson and Shakespeare to undertake the new and
untried in literature was the same spirit that moved John Smith and his
cavaliers to invade the Virginia wilderness, and the Pilgrim Fathers to
found a commonwealth for freedom's sake on a stern and rock-bound coast.
It was the day of Milton, Dryden, and Bunyan, the day of the