One of the most prominent features which distinguished our forefathers,
was their determined resistance to oppression. They seemed born and
brought up for the high and special purpose of showing to the world that
the civil and religious rights of man--the rights of self-government, of
conscience, and independent thought--are not merely things to be talked of
and woven into theories, but to be adopted with the whole strength and
ardor of the mind, and felt in the profoundest recesses of the heart, and
carried out into the general life, and made the foundation of practical
usefulness, and visible beauty, and true nobility.
Liberty, with them, was an object of too serious desire and stern resolve
to be personified, allegorized, and enshrined. They made no goddess of it,
as the ancients did; they had no time nor inclination for such trifling;
they felt that liberty was the simple birthright of every human creature;
they called it so; they claimed it as such; they reverenced and held it
fast as the unalienable gift of the Creator, which was not to be
surrendered to power, nor sold for wages.
It was theirs, as men; without it, they did not esteem themselves men;
more than any other privilege or possession, it was essential to their
happiness, for it was essential to their original nature; and therefore
they preferred it above wealth, and ease, and country; and, that they
might enjoy and exercise it fully, they forsook houses, and lands, and
kindred, their homes, their native soil, and their fathers' graves.
They left all these; they left England, which, whatever it might have been
called, was not to them a land of freedom; they launched forth on the
pathless ocean, the wide, fathomless ocean, soiled not by the earth
beneath, and bounded, all round and above, only by heaven; and it seemed
to them like that better and sublimer freedom, which their country knew
not, but of which they had the conception and image in their hearts; and,
after a toilsome and painful voyage, they came to a hard and wintry coast,
unfruitful and desolate, but unguarded and boundless; its calm silence
interrupted not the ascent of their prayers; it had no eyes to watch, no
ears to hearken, no tongues to report of them; here, again, there was an
answer to their soul's desire, and they were satisfied, and gave thanks;
they saw that they were free, and the desert smiled.
I am telling an old tale; but it is one which must be told when we speak
of those men. It is to be added, that they transmitted their principles to
their children, and that, peopled by such a race, our country was always
free. So long as its inhabitants were unmolested by the mother country in
the exercise of their important rights, they submitted to the form of
English government; but when those rights were invaded, they spurned even
the form away.
This act was the Revolution, which came of course and spontaneously, and
had nothing in it of the wonderful or unforeseen. The wonder would have
been if it had not occurred. It was, indeed, a happy and glorious event,
but by no means unnatural; and I intend no slight to the revered actors in
the Revolution when I assert that their fathers before them were as free
as they--every whit as free.
The principles of the Revolution were not the suddenly acquired property
of a few bosoms: they were abroad in the land in the ages before; they had
always been taught, like the truths of the Bible; they had descended from
father to son, down from those primitive days, when the Pilgrim,
established in his simple dwelling, and seated at his blazing fire, piled
high from the forest which shaded his door, repeated to his listening
children the story of his wrongs and his resistance, and bade them
rejoice, though the wild winds and the wild beasts were howling without,
that they had nothing to fear from great men's oppression.
Here are the beginnings of the Revolution. Every settler's hearth was a
school of independence; the scholars were apt, and the lessons sunk
deeply; and thus it came that our country was always free; it could not be
other than free.
As deeply seated as was the principle of liberty and resistance to
arbitrary power in the breasts of the Puritans, it was not more so than
their piety and sense of religious obligation. They were emphatically a
people whose God was the Lord. Their form of government was as strictly
theocratical, if direct communication be excepted, as was that of the
Jews; insomuch that it would be difficult to say where there was any civil
authority among them entirely distinct from ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
Whenever a few of them settled a town, they immediately gathered
themselves into a church; and their elders were magistrates, and their
code of laws was the Pentateuch. These were forms, it is true, but forms
which faithfully indicated principles and feelings; for no people could
have adopted such forms, who were not thoroughly imbued with the spirit,
and bent on the practice, of religion.
God was their King; and they regarded him as truly and literally so, as if
he had dwelt in a visible palace in the midst of their state. They were
his devoted, resolute, humble subjects; they undertook nothing which they
did not beg of him to prosper; they accomplished nothing without rendering
to him the praise; they suffered nothing without carrying their sorrows to
his throne; they ate nothing which they did not implore him to bless.
Their piety was not merely external; it was sincere; it had the proof of a
good tree in bearing good fruit; it produced and sustained a strict
morality. Their tenacious purity of manners and speech obtained for them,
in the mother country, their name of Puritans, which, though given in
derision, was as honorable an appellation as was ever bestowed by man on
man.
That there were hypocrites among them, is not to be doubted; but they were
rare. The men who voluntarily exiled themselves to an unknown coast, and
endured there every toil and hardship for conscience' sake, and that they
might serve God in their own manner, were not likely to set conscience at
defiance, and make the service of God a mockery; they were not likely to
be, neither were they, hypocrites. I do not know that it would be
arrogating too much for them to say, that, on the extended surface of the
globe, there was not a single community of men to be compared with them,
in the respects of deep religious impressions and an exact performance of
moral duty.
F. W. P. Greenwood.
NOTE.--The Pentateuch is the first five books of the Old Testament. The
word is derived from two Greek words, (pente), five, and (tenchos), book.