Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/321

 large part in colonization. Phoenician Melkarth was the companion and protector of Tyrian colonies. The Hebrew colonization of Palestine was God-guided. Apollo, through the Delphic oracle, was the instigator and director of not a few Greek colonial settlements. Sometimes he nominated a founder; of two cities the god himself was “œkist.” Perhaps we may say that all the later Greek and Roman colonies were placed under divine guardianship, but religion was too closely bound up with government to be of itself the basis of a colony. It is in modern times that the maturity of the religious sentiment has given rise to independent social formations. The great Puritan settlements of New England are unapproachable examples of the strength, cohesion, durableness, and power of generating new communities which that sentiment can give. Its complexion may vary. There are many degrees between the ecclestiastical theocracy of Massachusetts and the secular theocracy of Pennsylvania and west New Jersey, with the transcendental theocracy of Rhode Island as a middle term. In east New Jersey three distinct types were blended. Where religious enthusiasm does not generate colonies, it endows them with a principle of life. Commercial New York might have remained an inorganic community of traders but for the influx of exiles from all Protestant Europe, who gave it the energy of a world-city. If Canada was founded by fishermen and adventurers, it was built up by religious zealots. The sturdy communities of French farmers and Dutch Boers in South Africa had religious dissent as their raison d’être, and still have a strong religious faith as their chief social bond. In our own time two remarkable colonies have been established in the south seas on religious or at least ecclesiastical principles. The Otago Association and the Canterbury Association, which settled the southern parts of New Zealand about the middle of the century, were respectively the outcome of the disruption of the Kirk in 1843 and of the Tractarian movement in the same decade. Both societies had all the characteristics of church settlements: the emigration was homogeneous and of an excellent class; the clerical element had a large share in the government; and many of the institutions had an ecclesiastical tinge. But neither of them was a theocracy even of the mitigated seventeenth-century type, and the lapse of thirty years sufficed to show how ill-adapted were both of them, as originally designed, to the new surroundings. Yet the large and elevated part played by these communities in the history of New Zealand, the importance of similar smaller nuclei in other Australasian colonies, the immense influence of the Puritan, Presbyterian, and Quaker States in North America lend no small countenance to those who believe, with Quinet, that religion is “the substance of humanity.”