Francis Higginson gathered his wife and eight children on the deck of their departing ship to watch the English coastline disappear over the distant horizon. "Farewell, dear Enland," he cried, "and all the Christian friends there!" Higginson and his family were among the first of a colossal wave of Puritan emigrants who followed the Pilgrims from England to distant America in the 1630s. "Our heads and hearts," wrote one to those left behind, "shall be fountains of tears for your everlasting welfare, when we shall be in our poor cottages in the wilderness." In extraordinary numbers, England's Puritans abandoned the familiar surroundings of the Old World and set their faces toward the New. An initial surge brought two hundred emigrants to New England's Massachusetts Bay in 1630. It was followed by eight hundred more. Then another seven hundred arrived. Then three thousand in a single year__as ship after ship spilled these devout people of the Book onto the wilderness shores of New England.
# 2 - Never had England recorded such an exodus of its people. They did not come in a single weather-beaten vessel, as did the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower. Instead, they were ferried across the Atlantic in fleets__seventeen ships transported one thousand passengers at one point. In a single decade, from 1630 to 1640, more than twenty thousand English Puritans immigrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony. So massive was the transfer of population that it became known as "the Great Migration"__and it would mold the culture of America in a mighty way. Who were these Puritan people? And why did they leave England in such a mass immigration?
# 3 - The name "Puritan" was originally a term of ridicule__applied to Christians who wanted to purify the Church of England of practices they deemed unbiblical. Their concerns were rooted in the Protestant Reformation. In 1517, Martin Luther, a Roman Catholic priest in Germany, had spoken the Reformation by calling for the Church to return to key biblical doctrines distorted or abandoned in the early Middle Ages. Luther and other Reformers preached salvation by God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, rather than by a combination of faith and human works. They proclaimed the "priesthood of believers," teaching that any Christian should be able to read the Bible without the oversight of a minister or priest. They upheld the authority of the Bible over Church tradition and papal rulings, and they denounced the Church would lessen the punishment for sin in the afterlife.
