The first public act of the three friends was, to placate a long smouldering feud between Winthrop and Dudley. Winthrop was accused of over-leniency in his politics; Dudley was charged with undue severity. A friendly convention was held; the questions at issue were kindly talked over. Vane and Peters counselled mutual forbearance; and the quarrel ended with a “loving reconciliation” never afterwards broken.[900]
Some little time after Winthrop and Dudley, under Vane’s auspices, had given each other the kiss of peace and gone home arm in arm, with the fire of their differences definitively quenched, measures were matured to plant a college in New England. Nothing more finely exhibits the wisdom of the Pilgrim Fathers than their watchful and ample provision for education, which Bacon has fitly termed the “sheet-anchor of peaceful commonwealths.” In their estimation, its importance was second to nothing but religion, whose handmaid it was.
They longed to rear a race of cultured men—to plant a school which should elbow out of America those wicked universities which were then the pests of Europe—vicious sinks which Beza called Flabella Satanæ, Satan’s fans; and which Luther styled Cathedras pestilentiæ et antichristi luminaria, seats of pestilence and beacons of antichrist; where, under the tuition of the Jesuits, immorality was made a fine art, and ferocity was taught as a cardinal virtue.
With this twofold object, a public school was called into life at Cambridge in 1636; and in that same year the General Court made a grant of four hundred pounds, which formed the legs on which the infant university first toddled.[901] Later, John Harvard bequeathed eight hundred pounds and his library to help forward the scholastic venture; whereupon the grateful authorities eternized the donor’s name by calling the school Harvard College.[902]
Henceforth New England had a “city of books.” Harvard college speedily became a nursery of piety, and was to America, as Livy said of Greece, sal gentium.[903] In narrating this achievement, the quaint divine who heaped together the mingled wheat and chaff of the Magnalia, cites triumphantly the language of the orator who chanted pæans to the English Cambridge: “We have now provided—and let envy be as far removed from this declaration as is falsehood—that in popular assemblies stone shall not talk to stone; that the church shall not lack priests, or the bar jurists, or the community physicians; for we have supplied the church, the government, the senate, and the army, with accomplished men.”[904]
Thus the new university was rightly esteemed an ornament and a civilizer; for learning, as the poet has hymned it,
“Chastens the manners, and the soul refines.”[905]
The school is at once preserver and benefactor; it is urbis medicus, the physician of the state.
And now the settlements along the coast-line of Massachusetts were become “like hives overstocked with bees; and many of the new inhabitants began to entertain the thought of swarming into plantations farther in the interior.” The fifteen thousand settlers in Massachusetts felt crowded. They longed to imitate the Plymouth Pilgrims, who had sent out a forlorn hope to colonize Windsor, and the venture of the younger Winthrop at Saybrook. They too, longed
“To descry new lands,