Such, then, were the men most concerned in founding and framing our
grand old commonwealth. They were men of faith, men of thorough
culture, men of mark by birth and station, men who had learned to
grapple with the great problem of human rights, human happiness, human
needs, and human relations to heaven and earth. They believed in God,
in the revelation of God, in the Gospel of Christ, in the
responsibility of the soul to its Maker, and in the demands of a
living charity toward God and all his creatures. And their religious
faith and convictions constituted the fire which set them in motion
and sustained and directed their exertions for the noble ends which it
is ours so richly to enjoy. Had they not been the earnest Christians
that they were, they never could have been the men they proved
themselves, nor ever have thought the thoughts or achieved the
glorious works for ever connected with their names.
We are apt to contemplate Christian faith and devotion only in its
more private and personal effects on individual souls, the light and
peace it brings to the true believer, and the purification and hope it
works in the hearts of those who receive it, whilst we overlook its
force upon the great world outside and its shapings of the facts and
currents of history. We think of Luther wrestling with his sins,
despairing and dying under the impossible task of working out for
himself an availing righteousness, and rejoice with him in the light
and peace which came to his agonized soul through the grand and
all-conditioning doctrine of justification by simple faith in an
all-sufficient Redeemer; but we do not always realize how the breaking
of that evangelic principle into his earnest heart was the
incarnation of a power which divided the Christian ages, brought the
world over the summit of the water-shed, and turned the gravitation of
the laboring nations toward a new era of liberty and happiness. And so
we refer to the spiritual training of a Gustavus Adolphus and an Axel
Oxenstiern in the simple truths of Luther's Catechism and the restored
Gospel, and to the opening of the heart of a William Penn to the
exhortations of Friend Loe to forsake the follies of the corrupt world
and seek his portion with the pure in heaven, and mark the unfoldings
of their better nature which those blessed instructions wrought;
whilst we fail to note that therein lay the springs and germs which
have given us our grand commonwealth and established for us the free
institutions of Church and State in which we so much glory and
rejoice.
Ah, yes; there is greatness and good and blessing untold for man and
for the world in the personal hearing, believing, and heeding of the
Word and testimony of God. No man can tell to what new impulses in
human history, or to what new currents of benediction and continents
of national glory, it may lead for souls in the school of Christ to
open themselves meekly to the inflowings of Heaven's free grace. It
was the sowing of God's truth and the planting of God's Spirit in
these men's hearts that most of all grew for us our country and our
blessed liberties.