There is a class of writers and critics in our country, who imagine it
is quite clear that our fathers cannot have been the proper founders of
our American liberties, because it is in proof that they were so
intolerant and so clearly unrepublican often in their avowed sentiments.
They suppose the world to be a kind of professor's chair, and expect
events to transpire logically in it. They see not that casual opinions,
or conventional and traditional prejudices, are one thing, and that
principles and morally dynamic forces are often quite another; that the
former are the connectives only of history, the latter its springs of
life; and that if the former serve well enough as providential guards
and moderating weights overlying the deep geologic fires and
subterranean heavings of the new moral instincts below, these latter
will assuredly burst up at last in strong mountains of rock, to crest
the world. Unable to conceive such a truth, they cast about them
accordingly to find the paternity of our American institutions in purely
accidental causes. We are clear of aristocratic orders, they say,
because there was no blood of which to make an aristocracy; independent
of king and parliament, because we grew into independence under the
natural effects of distance and the exercise of a legislative power;
republican, because our constitutions were cast in the molds of British
law; a wonder of growth in riches, enterprise, and population, because
of the hard necessities laid upon us, and our simple modes of life.
There is yet another view of this question, that has a far higher
significance. We do not understand, as it seems to me, the real
greatness of our institutions when we look simply at the forms under
which we hold our liberties. It consists not in these, but in the
magnificent possibilities that underlie these forms as their fundamental
supports and conditions. In these we have the true paternity and spring
of our institutions; and these, beyond a question, are the gift of our
founders.
We see this, first of all, in the fixed relation between freedom and
intelligence, and the remarkable care they had of popular education. It
was not their plan to raise up a body of republicans. But they believed
in mind as in God. Their religion was the choice of mind. The gospel
they preached must have minds to hear it; and hence the solemn care they
had, even from the first day of their settlement, of the education of
every child. And, as God would have it, the children whom they trained
up for pillars in the church turned out also to be more than tools of
power. They grew up into magistrates, leaders of the people, debaters of
right and of law, statesmen, generals, and signers of declarations for
liberty. Such a mass of capacity had never been seen before in so small
a body of men. And this is the first condition of liberty--the
Condensation of Power. For liberty is not the license of an hour; it
is not the butchery of a royal house, or the passion that rages behind
a barricade, or the caps that are swung or the _vivas_ shouted at
the installing of a liberator. But it is the compact, impenetrable
matter of much manhood, the compressed energy of good sense and public
reason, having power to see before and after and measure action by
counsel--this it is that walls about the strength and liberty of a
people. To be free is not to fly abroad as the owls of the night when
they take the freedom of the air, but it is to settle and build and be
strong--a commonwealth as much better compacted in the terms of reason,
as it casts off more of the restraints of force.
Their word was "Reformation"--"the completion of the Reformation"; not
Luther's nor Calvin's, they expressly say; they cannot themselves
imagine it. Hitherto it is unconceived by men. God must reveal it in the
light that breaks forth from him. And this he will do in his own good
time. It is already clear to us that, in order to any further progress
in this direction, it was necessary for a new movement to begin that
should loosen the joints of despotism and emancipate the mind of the
world. And in order to this a new republic must be planted and have time
to grow. It must be seen rising up in the strong majesty of freedom and
youth, outstripping the old prescriptive world in enterprise and the
race of power, covering the ocean with its commerce, spreading out in
populous swarms of industry,--planting, building, educating, framing
constitutions, rushing to and fro in the smoke and thunder of travel
along its mighty rivers, across its inland seas, over its mountain-tops
from one shore to the other, strong in order as in liberty,--a savage
continent become the field of a colossal republican empire, whose name
is a name of respect and a mark of desire to the longing eyes of
mankind. And then, as the fire of new ideas and hopes darts electrically
along the nerves of feeling in the millions of the race, it will be
seen that a new Christian movement also begins with it. Call it
reformation, or formation, or by whatever name, it is irresistible
because it is intangible. In one view it is only destruction. The State
is loosened from the Church. The Church crumbles down into fragments.
Superstition is eaten away by the strong acid of liberty, and spiritual
despotism flies affrighted from the broken loyalty of its metropolis.
Protestantism also, divided and subdivided by its dialectic quarrels,
falls into the finest, driest powder of disintegration. Be not afraid.
The new order crystallizes only as the old is dissolved; and no sooner
is the old unity of orders and authorities effectually dissolved than
the reconstructive affinities of a new and better unity begin to appear
in the solution. Repugnances melt away. Thought grows catholic. Men look
for good in each other as well as evil. The crossings of opinion by
travel and books, and the intermixture of races and religions, issue in
freer, broader views of the Christian truth; and so the "Church of the
Future," as it has been called, gravitates inwardly towards those terms
of brotherhood in which it may coalesce and rest. I say not or believe
that Christendom will be Puritanized or Protestantized; but what is
better than either, it will be Christianized. It will settle thus into a
unity, probably not of form, but of practical assent and love--a
Commonwealth of the Spirit, as much stronger in its unity than the old
satrapy of priestly despotism, as our republic is stronger than any
other government of the world.