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Show Page 6 Page 6 America into the Promised Land. This Canaan may have stirred in Obadiah Pratt an awareness of the quasi-Biblical character of his family's sojourn in the New World. He was fourth in descent from Non-Conformists who had fled to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1633. Lt. William Pratt and his brother, John Pratt, emigrated from Stevanage, Hertfordshire, England, during the wave of civil and religious persecution by King Charles' courts of high commission and the famous "Star Chamber." Lt. Pratt and his brother found brief refuge in "New Towne," a three-year-old village northwest of Boston, later to become Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the same year, possibly in the same company, arrived the Reverend Thomas Hooker, who became pastor of the settlement. Hooker had fled from the Royal Court of High Commission, which had indicted him for Non-Conformist preaching, but soon found himself chafing even against the strict theological discipline exercised by the presbyters of Massachusetts Bay, in particular John Cotton. Hooker and Cotton were both products of the Puritan schools of divinity at Cambridge University, possibly at the same time, and Hooker disputed his associate's right to dictate to the churches. In the Pratts, Hooker found ready disciples as he contemplated another move, this time deeper into the wilderness, where liberty of conscience would find no constraints. 5 So it was that the iconoclastic Pratts left Cambridge in 1636, leaving:._ the petrifaction of New England Puritanism to develop into a solid intellectual dictatorship. William Pratt helped establish Hooker's community of Hartford, now the capital of Connecticut. Along with Roger Williams' colony at Rhode Island, the settlement became the seat of New England religious independency, and from here were disseminated the democratic principles which gave rise to the revolutionary spirit in America. Little is known of William Pratt's |