Nothing more is known of his youth except that he received a university education, and, like others who have been foremost in missionary labours, had a gift for the comparison of languages and study of grammar. He studied the Holy Scriptures in the original tongues with the zeal that was infused into all scholars by the knowledge that the Authorized Version was in hand, and by the stimulus that was afforded by the promise of a copy of the first edition to him who should detect and correct an error in the type.
The usual fate of a scholar was to be either schoolmaster or clergyman, if not both, and young Eliot commenced his career as an assistant to Mr. John Hooker, at the Grammar School at Little Baddow. He considered this period to have been that in which the strongest religious impressions were made upon him. John Hooker was a thorough-going Puritan of great piety and rigid scruples, and instructed his household diligently in godliness, both theoretical and practical. Eliot became anxious to enter the ministry, but the reaction of Church principles, which had set in with James I., was an obstacle in his way; and imagining all ceremonial not observed by the foreign Protestants to be oppressions on Christian liberty, it became the strongest resolution of the whole party to accept nothing of all these rites, and thus ordination became impossible to them, while the laws were stringent against any preaching or praying publicly by any unordained person. The instruction of youth was likewise only permitted to those who were licensed by the bishop of the diocese; and Mr. Hooker, failing to fulfil the required tests, was silenced, and, although forty-seven clergy petitioned on his behalf, was obliged to flee to Holland.
This decided Eliot, then twenty-seven years of age, on
leaving England, and seeking a freer sphere of action in the newly-founded colonies of New England, which held a charter from Government. He took leave of his betrothed, of whom we only know that her Christian name was Anne (gracious), and that her nature answered to her name, and sailed on the 3rd of November, 1631, in the ship Lyon, with a company of sixty persons, among whom were the family of Governor Winthrop.
They landed at Boston, then newly rising into a city over its harbour, and there he found his services immediately required to conduct the worship in the congregation during the absence of the pastor, who had gone to England finally to arrange his affairs.
On his return, Mr. Eliot was found to be in such favour, that the Bostonites strove to retain him as an assistant minister; but this he refused, knowing that many friends in England wished to found a separate settlement of their own; and in less than a year this arrangement was actually carried out, a steep hill in the forest-land was selected, and a staunch band of East Saxons, bringing with them the gracious Anne, came forth. John Eliot was married, elected pastor, ordained, after Presbyterian custom, by the laying on of the hands of the ministers in solemn assembly, and then took possession of the abode prepared for him and of the building on the top of the hill, where his ministrations were to be conducted.
These old fathers of the United States had found a soil, fair and well watered; and though less rich than the wondrous alluvial lands to the west, yet with capacities to yield them plentiful provision, when cleared from the vast forest that covered it. Nor had they come for the sake of wealth or luxury; the earnestness of newly-awakened, and in some degree persecuted, religion was upon them, and they regarded a sufficiency of food and clothing as all that they had a right to seek. Indeed, the spirit of ascetiscism was one of their foremost characteristics. Eliot was a man who lived in constant self-restraint as to both sleep and diet, and, on all occasions of special prayer, prefaced them by a rigorous fast—and he seems to have been in a continual atmosphere of devotion.
One of his friends objected (oddly enough as it seems to us) to his stooping to pick up a weed in his garden. “Sir, you tell us we must be heavenly-minded.”
“It is true,” he said, “and this is no impediment unto that; for, were I sure to go to heaven to-morrow, I would do what I do to-day.”
And, like many a good Christian, his outward life was to him full of allegory. Going up the steep hill to his church, he said, “This is very like the way to heaven. ’Tis up hill! The Lord in His grace fetch us up;” and spying a bush near him, he added, “And truly there are thorns and briars in the way, too.”