THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES. 305 



large part in colonization. Phoenician Melkarth was the companion 

 and protector of Tyrian colonies. The Hebrew colonization of Pal- 

 estine 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 

 " oekist." 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 col- 

 ony. It is in modern times that the maturity of the religious senti- 

 ment 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 the- 

 ocracy 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. Wliere religious enthusiasm does not generate col- 

 onies, 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 com- 

 munities of French farmers and Dutch Boers in South Africa had 

 religious dissent as their raison d'etre, and still have a strong reli- 

 gious faith as their chief social bond. In our own time two remark- 

 able 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 out- 

 come of the disruption of the Kirk in 1843 and of the Tractarian 

 movement in the same decade. Both societies had all the character- 

 istics of church settlements : the emigration was homogeneous and of 

 an excellent class; the clerical element had a large share in the gov- 

 ernment; and many of the institutions had an ecclesiastical tinge. 

 But neither of them was a theocracy even of the mitigated seven- 

 teenth-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 com- 

 munities 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." 

 VOL. Liii. — 22 



