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168 had small time to consider forms of speech. Their passion for knowledge, however, took on all the vitality that had forsaken English ground, and that from that day to this, has made the first thought of every New England community, East or West, a school. Their corner-stone "rested upon a book." It has been calculated that there was one Cambridge graduate for every two-hundred and fifty inhabitants, and within six years from the landing of John Winthrop and his party, Harvard College had begun its work of baffling "that old deluder, Sathan," whose business in part it was "to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures." To secular learning they were indifferent, but every man must be able to give reason for the faith that was in him, and the more tongues in which such statement could be made the more confusion for this often embarrassed but still undismayed Sathan. Orders of nobility among them had passed. Very rarely were they joined by even a simple "Sir," and as years went on, nobility came to be synonymous with tyranny, and there was less and less love for every owner of a title. To them the highest earthly distinction came to be found in the highest learning. The earnest student deserved and obtained all the honors that man could give him, and his epitaph even recorded the same solemn and deep-seated admiration. "The ashes of an hard student, a good scholar, and a great Christian."

Anne Bradstreet shared this feeling to the full, and might easily have, been the mother of whom Mather writes as saying to her little boy: "Child, if God make thee a good Christian and a good scholar, thou hast all that thy mother ever asked for thee." Simon