The republican government of the United States, when first originated by
the fathers of the commonwealth, was regarded by the old fossil
despotisms with secret dread and a strange foreboding; and neither the
ridicule which they heaped upon it, nor the professed contempt wherewith
its name was bandied from throne to throne, could wholly mask their
trepidation. They looked upon it, in the privacy of their chambers, as
the challenge of a mighty rebellion of the people against all kingly
rule and administration; they saw in it the embodiment of those popular
ideas of freedom, equality, and self-government, which for so many
centuries had been struggling for adequate utterance in England and
France, and they knew that the success of this sublime experiment must
eventually break asunder the colossal bones of the European monarchies,
and establish the new-born democracy upon their ruins.
That they saw truly and judged wisely in these respects, the history of
modern Europe, and the current revolutions of our time, bear ample
testimony. There is no luck nor chance in human events, but all things
follow each other in the legitimate sequences of law. The American
republic is no bastard, but a true son and heir of the ages; and sprang
forth in all its bravery and promise from the mammoth loins of the very
despotism which disowns and denounces it.
We have a full and perfect faith in the mission of this republic, which
breaks open a new seal in the apocalypse of government, and unfolds a
new phase in the destiny of mankind. Feudalism has had a sufficient
trial, and, on the whole, has done its work well. After the
dismemberment of the Roman Empire, we do not see how it was possible for
society to have assumed any other form than that of kings and princes
for rulers, and the people for passive and more or less obedient
subjects. It was a great problem to be resolved how society should exist
at all, and history gives us the solution of it. Despotism in politics
and authority in religion was the grand, primal, leading, and executive
idea of it. What learning and culture existed was confined to the guild
of the ecclesiastics, and they, for the most part, ruled the rulers as
well as the people, by _virtue of their intelligence_. It required many
centuries to usher in the dawn of unfettered thought, and generate the
idea of liberty. And when at last the epoch of Protestantism arrived,
and Luther, who was the exponent and historical embodiment of it,
gathered to its armories the spiritual forces then extant in Europe, and
overthrew therewith the immemorial supremacy of kings and priests over
the bodies and souls of men, he made all subsequent history possible,
and was the planter of nations, and the founder of yet undeveloped
civilizations.[A]
[Footnote A: A doubtful assertion. We, the children of the Puritans, and
educated in their views and prejudices, have still many lessons to learn
in the school of charily. It was not 'Luther who rendered subsequent
history possible,' but the ever onward growth of humanity itself. Luther
had no broader views of liberty of conscience than the church with which
he struggled. Mr. Hallam says: 'It has been often said that the
essential principle of Protestantism and that for which the struggle was
made, was something different from all we have mentioned: a perpetual
freedom from all authority in religious belief, or what goes by the name
of private judgment. But to look more nearly at what occurred, this
permanent independence was not much asserted, and still less acted upon.
The Reformation was a _change of masters_, a voluntary one, no doubt, in
those _who had any choice_, and in this sense an exercise, for the time,
of their personal judgment. But no one having gone over to the
Confession of Augsburg or that of Zurich, was deemed at liberty to
modify these creeds at his pleasure. He might, of course, become an
Anabaptist or Arian, but he was not the less a heretic in doing so than
if he had continued in the Church of Rome. By what light a Protestant
was to steer, might be a problem which at that time, as ever since, it
would perplex a theologian to decide: but in practice, the law of the
land which established one exclusive mode of faith, was the only safe,
as, in ordinary circumstances, it was, upon the whole, the most eligible
guide.' Speaking, in another place, of the causes which brought about
the decline of Protestantism, etc., Mr. Hallam says: 'We ought to reckon
also among the principal causes of this change, those perpetual
disputes, those irreconcilable animosities, that bigotry, above all, and
persecuting spirit, which were exhibited in the Lutheran and Calvinistic
churches. Each began with a common principle--the necessity of an
orthodox faith. But this orthodoxy meant nothing more than their _own_
belief as opposed to that of their adversaries; a belief acknowledged to
be fallible, yet maintained as certain; rejecting authority with one
breath and appealing to it in the next, and claiming to rest on sure
proofs of reason and Scripture, which their opponents were ready with
just as much confidence to invalidate.'
Luther was one of the many reformers who, feeling the necessity of
freedom for themselves, never dream of according it to others. His
self-hold, his 'me,' was masterful, and led him far astray from the
inevitable logic of his perilous position. His 'I-ness' was so supreme
that he mistook his own convictions for the truths of the Most High--a
common mistake among reformers! He did not feel the sovereignty of man
with regard to his fellow man, his positive inalienable right to deal
with his God alone in matters of faith and religious conviction. The
golden rule of our Master, 'Do as you would be done by,' seems simple
and self-evident, and yet it is a late fruit in the garden of human
culture. Mr. Roscoe says: 'When Luther was engaged in his opposition to
the Church of Rome, he asserted the right of private judgment with the
confidence and courage of a martyr. But no sooner had he freed his
followers from the chains of papal domination, than he forget other in
many respects equally intolerable: and it was the employment of his
latter years to counteract the beneficial effects produced by his former
labors.'
Any system which saps the foundation of religious liberty, which forces
itself between man and his Maker, cannot guarantee to us one of the main
objects of all free governments--security in the pursuit of happiness.
The Reformation did not give us religious freedom, therefore it did not
give or suggest to us our democratic institutions. All that is true and
pure in them springs from the very heart of Christianity itself. 'Where
the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty.' Much of the manifestation
of the philosophy of freedom depends on individual character. Pope
Alexander III., A.D. 1167, writes: 'Nature having made no slaves, all
men have an equal right to liberty.' Luther, in 1524, says to the German
peasants; 'You wish to emancipate yourselves from slavery, but slavery
is as old as the world. Abraham had slaves, and St. Paul established
rules for those whom the laws of nations reduced to that state.' Many of
our modern priests reecho these sentiments! Guizot says: 'The
emancipation of the human mind and _absolute_ monarchy triumphed
simultaneously.' The truth is we want a philosophical history of the
Reformation, written neither from a Catholic, Protestant, nor infidel
point of view, that we may rightly estimate what we lost, what gained in
its wild storms. In judging this, we should not quite forget that it was
the Catholic Lord Baltimore and Catholic colonists of Maryland who in
1648 first proclaimed on these shores the glorious principle of
_universal toleration_, while the Puritans were persecuting in New
England and the Episcopalians in Virginia. 'Nothing extenuate nor aught
set down in malice,' should be the rule of our souls. Humanity means
eternal Progress, and its path is onward.--ED. CON.]
It would, however, be by no means difficult, were it in accordance with
our present design and purpose, to show that the first germ of
republican liberty sprang into life amid the sedges and savage marshes
of uncultivated ages, far remote even from the discovery of America, and
trace it through successive rebellions, both of a political and
religious character, from and before the times of Wycliffe, down to
Oliver Cromwell and George Washington; for all through English history
it has left a broad red mark behind it, like the auroral pathway of a
conqueror. The first man who prayed without book, and denied the
authority of the church over the human soul, as the brave Loilards did,
was the pioneer of Protestantism and the father of all the births which
ushered this mighty epoch upon the stage of the world; Protestantism,
which means so much and includes so many vast emprises--establishing for
freedom so grand a battle ground, and for philosophy and learning so
wide and magnificent a dominion.
The same spirit which made nonconformists of the first seekers and
worshippers of God apart from the churches and cathedrals of Rome, in
the sublimer cathedrals of nature, when the Roman hierarchy was master
of Europe--made republicans also of the first rebels who resisted the
tyranny of kings. Political and religious liberty are the two sides of
the democrat idea, and have always marched hand in hand together. They
culminated in England during the Commonwealth, and became thenceforth
the base and dome of popular government.
The republic of America was born of this idea, and is the last great
birth of Protestantism, big already with the destinies of mankind. Here,
upon this mighty platform, these destinies, as we believe, have to be
wrought out by their final issues, and close the drama of human
development. All things are possible for America under the beneficent
institutions and laws of the republic, now that the hideous skeleton of
black slavery is to pollute the soil no more nor make brother war
against brother any more on account of it; and at no distant period the
awful conflict which at present shakes the earth with the thunder of its
clashing and embattled hosts, shall give lasting place to the
interchanges of commerce and the peaceful enterprises of civil life.
It was impossible that American society could hold together with this
accursed African vulture eating at its heart. Nor could the aristocratic
idea of the South, which slavery had interwoven through every fibre of
the people, through all the forms of its social condition, and into all
its State laws and institutions, exist side by side with the democratic
idea of the North, without an inevitable conflict sooner or later. The
present war is but a renewal of the old battles which make up the sum of
history, between liberty and despotism, civilization and barbarism. No
one can doubt in whose hands will be the victory; and happy will the
result be for future generations.
Hitherto we have exhibited to the world the amazing spectacle of a
republic which, proclaiming the freedom and equality of every one of its
subjects, holds four millions of men in a terrible and appalling
bondage. So frightful a mockery of freedom, perpetrated in her great
name, and sanctioned by tradition and the authority of law, could not,
ought not, be suffered to grin its ghastly laughter in the face of the
world. And when the hour was ripe, and the doomsday of the monstrous
iniquity was proclaimed aloud by the dreadful Nemesis of God, the people
of the free North clothed themselves in the majesty of the nation, and
rose as one man to sweep it from the soil in whirlwinds of fire and
wrath.
Slavery has been an unmitigated curse to America in every one of its
aspects and especially to the South, out of which it has eaten, with its
revengeful and retributive teeth, all the vitalities and grandeurs of
character which belong to the uncorrupted Anglo-Saxon race. It has
destroyed all the incentives to industry, all self-reliance, and
enterprise, and the sterner virtues and moralities of life. It has put a
ban upon trade and manufactures, and a premium upon indolence. The white
population--the poor white trash, as the very negroes call them--are
ignorant, brutal, and live in the squalor of savages. It has driven
literature and poetry, art and science, from its soil, and robbed
religion of all its humanity and beauty. Worse than this, if worse
be possible, it has darkened with the shadow of its apparition the
minds of the Southerners themselves, and defaced their highest
attributes--confounding within them the great cardinal distinctions
between right and wrong, until, abandoned by Heaven, they were given
over to their own lusts, and to a belief in the lie which they had
created under the very ribs of the republic.
We do not speak this as partisans, nor in any spirit of enmity against
the South as a political faction. It is the fact which concerns us, and
which we deal with as history, and not here and now in any other sense.
Nor do we blame the Southern aristocracy for riding so long on the black
horse, which has at last thrown and killed them. For proud and insolent
as they have ever shown themselves in their bearing toward the North,
they were in reality mere pawns on the chessboard of Fate, necessary
tools in working out the game of civilization on this continent. Who can
calculate the sum of the divine forces which the institution of slavery,
and its blasphemous reversion of the commands of the Decalogue, and all
its cruel outrages and inhuman crimes, have awakened in the souls of the
freemen of the North? The loathsomeness of its example and the infernal
malice of its designs against liberty and truth, righteousness and
justice, and whatsoever holy principles in life and government the
saints, martyrs, and apostles of the ages have won for us, by their
agony and bloody sweat upon scaffolds and funeral pyres--regarding them
as a cheap purchase, though paid for by such high and costly
sacrifices--these appalling instances, we say, have at last produced so
powerful a reaction in the national mind that millions of men have
marshalled themselves into avenging armies to rid the earth of their
presence.
That, too, was fated and necessary, and a part of the predestined
programme. The nation could not progress with this corrupting monster in
its pathway; and the battle between them has not come an hour too soon.
The monster must be exterminated, and that, too, without mercy and
without compassion, as the sworn and implacable enemy both of God and
man. Otherwise this glorious country, which has so long worn the garland
and surging robe of liberty, will become a dungeon of desolation from
the Atlantic to the Pacific, resounding only with the shrieks of
mandrakes and the clank of chains.
This obstruction removed, there is, as we said above, no height of
greatness which the American people may not reach. Then, and then only,
shall we begin to consolidate ourselves into a nation, with a distinct
organon of principles, feelings, and loyalties, to which the mighty
heart and brain of the people shall throb and vibrate in pulsations of
sublime unity. At present we are only a people in the making, and very
few there are calling themselves Americans who have any idea of what
America is and means in relation to history. By and by we shall all
apprehend the riddle more wisely, and be more worthy of the great name
we bear.
In the meanwhile it is no marvel that we are not a homogeneous people.
Our time has not come for that, and may yet lie afar off in the shadowy
centuries. Consider how and through what alien sources we have
multiplied the original population of the associated colonies as they
existed when our fathers raised them to a nationality. There is not a
nation in all Europe, to say nothing of Asia and the islands, which is
not represented in our blood and does not form a part of our lineage. It
is true that the old type predominates, and that we have the virtues and
the vices of the Anglo-Saxons in us; but we are far too individual at
present, Celt and Dane and Spaniard and Teuton, and all the rest of our
motley humanities, will have to be fused into one great Anglo-American
race, before we can call ourselves a distinct nation. It took England
many centuries to accomplish this work, and fashion herself into the
plastic form and comeliness of her present unity and proportion. We, who
work at high pressure and make haste in our begettings and growth, can
scarcely hope to make a national sculpture at all commensurate with the
genius of the people and the continent, in one or two or even half a
dozen generations; for we cannot coerce the laws of nature, although it
is quite certain, from what we have done, that we can perform anything
within the range of possible achievement.
We have all the elements within and around us necessary to constitute a
great people. We started on our career with a long background of
experience to guide and to warn us. We saw what Europe had done for
civilization with her long roll of kings and priests, her despotic
governments, and her unequal laws--the people in most cases ciphers, and
in all cases ignorant and enslaved--with no room for expansion, and
little or no hope of political or social betterment; every inch of
liberty, in every direction, which they had gained, wrung from their
oppressors piecemeal, in bloody throes of agony.
Our fathers had not the best materials out of which to build up a
republic; neither, in all cases, were they themselves sufficiently ripe
for the experiment. They had the old leaven of European prejudice
largely intermingled in their minds and character. They could not help,
it is true, their original make, nor the fashioning which their age,
time, and circumstances had put upon them. All this has to be taken into
the estimate of any philosophical judgment respecting their
performances. But they had learned from the past to trust the present,
and to span the future with rainbows of hope. They stood face to face
with the people, and each looked into the others' eyes and read there
the grounds and sureties of an immortal triumph. Instead, therefore, of
resting the supreme power of government in the hands of a person, or a
class, making the former a monarch, and creating the other an
aristocracy, those grand magistrates and senators of human liberty who
framed the Constitution of the new American Nation, made the nation its
own sovereign, and clothed it with the authority and majesty of
self-government.
A venture so daring, and of an audacity so Titanic and sublime, seemed
at that time and long afterward to require the wisdom and omnipotence of
gods to guide it over the breakers, and steer it into the calm waters of
intelligent government. All the world, except the handful of thinkers
and enthusiasts scattered here and there over Europe, was against it,
mocked at its bravery and aspirations, and sincerely hoped and believed
that some great and sudden calamity would dissolve it like a baleful
enchantment. But the hope of the republic was in the people, and they
justified the fathers and the institution.
Here, therefore, was opened in all the directions of human inquiry and
action a new world of hope and promise. The people were no longer bound
by old traditions, nor clogged by any formulas of state religions, nor
hampered by the dicta of philosophical authority. Their minds were free
to choose or to reject whatever propositions were presented to them from
the wide region of speculation and belief. The Constitution was the only
instrument which prescribed laws and principles for their unconditional
acceptance and guidance; and this was a thing of their own choice, the
charter and seal of their liberties, to which they rendered a cheerful
and grateful obedience.
With this mighty security for a platform, they pursued their daily
avocations in peace, trusting their own souls, and working out the
problem of republican society, with a most healthy unconsciousness.
Sincere and earnest, they troubled themselves with no social theories,
no visions of Utopia, nor dreams of Paradise and El Dorados, leaving the
spirit which animated them to build up the architecture of its own
_cultus_, with an unexpressed but perfect faith in the final justice and
satisfaction of results.
Religion, therefore, and politics--literature, learning, and art--trade,
commerce, manufactures, agriculture--and the amenities of society and
manners, were allowed to develop themselves in their own way, without
reference to rule and preconcerted dogmas. Hence the peculiarities which
mark the institutions of America--their utter freedom from cant and the
shows and pageantry of state. Bank, titles, and caste were abolished;
and the enormous gulfs which separate the European man from the European
lordling were bridged over by Equality with the solid virtues of
humanity.
What a stride was here taken over time and space, and the historic
records of man, in the fossil formations of the Old World during the
ante-American periods! It had come at last, this long-prophesied reign
of Apollo and the Muses, of freedom and the rights of man. Afar off, on
the summits of imaginative mountains, were beheld, through twilight
vistas of night and chaos, the proud ruins of dead monarchies, and the
cruel forms of extinct tyrannies and oppressions, crowned and mitred no
more; whose mandates had once made the nations tremble, and before whose
judgment seats Mercy pleaded in vain, and Justice muffled up her face
and sat dumb and weeping in the dust. Over the wolds of their desolation
hyenas prowled, snuffing the noisome air as for a living prey; ghouls
and vampyres shrieked in hellish chorus, as they tore up forgotten
graves; and all manner of hateful and obscure things crawled familiarly
in and out of palaces and holy places, as if they were the ghosts of the
former inhabitants; and, high above them all, in the bloody light of the
setting sun, wheeled kites and choughs and solitary vultures; owls and
dismal bats flitting, ever and anon, athwart the shadows of their grim
processions.
No matter that this vision was in reality but the symbolism of
imagination and poetry, that Europe was not dead, but alive with the
struggling vitalities of good and evil, and all those contending forces
out of which American freedom was born--the vision itself was not the
less true, either as feeling or insight; for Europe was now literally
cut adrift from America, and the hopes and aspirations of the young
republic were entirely different from hers, and removed altogether from
the plane of her orbit and action.
The liberalists and thinkers of the age expected great things from a
people thus fortunately conditioned and circumstanced. For the first
time in modern history a genuine democratic government was inaugurated
and fairly put upon its trial. The horizon of thought was now to be
pushed back far beyond the old frontiers into the very regions of the
infinite; and a universal liberty was to prevail throughout the length
and breadth of the land. No more dead formalities, nor slavish
submissions, but new and fuller life, self-reliance, self-development,
and the freest individuality. Gladly the people accepted the
propositions and principles of their national existence. Not a doubt
anywhere of the result; no faltering, no looking back; but brave hearts,
everywhere, and bold fronts, and conquering souls. Before them, through
the mists of the starry twilight, loomed the mountain peaks and shadowy
seas of the unventured and unknown future; and thitherward they pressed
with undaunted steps, and with a haughty and sublime defiance of
obstructions and dangers; fearing God, doing their best, and leaving the
issue in His hands.
We know now, after nearly a hundred years of trial, what that issue in
the main is, and whitherward it still tends. During that little
breathing time, which, compared with the life of other nations, is but a
gasp in the record, what unspeakable triumphs have been accomplished!
Nearly a whole continent has been reclaimed from the savage and the wild
beasts, and the all-conquering American has paved the wilderness, east,
west, north, and south, with high roads--dug canals into its hidden
recesses, connected the great Gulf with the far-off West by a vast
network of railways and telegraphs--planted cities and villages
everywhere, and fashioned the routes of civilization; bound Cape Race to
the Crescent City and the Atlantic to the Pacific, sending human
thoughts, winged with lightning, across thousands of miles of plains and
mountains and rivers, and making neighborly the most distant peoples and
the most widely sundered States of the mighty Union. Let any man try to
estimate the value of this immense contribution to human history and
happiness; let him try to measure the vast extent of empire which it
covers, and sum up the mighty expenditure of physical and intellectual
labor which has conquered those savage wilds, and converted them into
blooming cornfields and orchards; which has built these miraculous
cities by the sea, and made their harbors populous with native ships and
the marine of every nation under heaven; those busy inland cities, the
hives of manufacturing industry and the marts of a commerce which
extends over all the regions of civilization, from the rising to the
setting sun; those innumerable towns of the great corn-growing
districts; those pleasant hamlets and pastoral homes which fringe the
forest, and girdle the mountains as with the arms of human affection and
the passion of love; those mills on the far-off rivers, whose creaking
machinery and revolving wheels are the prelude of a yet unborn, but
rapidly approaching civility, and whose music, heard by the right ears,
is of the divinest depth and diapason, and in full concord with the
immeasurable orchestra of triumph and rejoicing which the nation
celebrates in the perpetual marches of her starry progress.
No man can compass this vast dominion, and no intellect can plumb its
soundings or prophesy of its upshot. Who could have foretold what has
already happened on this continent, had he stood with the Pilgrim
Fathers on Plymouth Rock, that memorable day of the landing? Looking
back to that great epoch in American history, we have no dim regions of
antiquity to traverse, no mythic periods as of Memnon and the Nile, but
a mere modern landscape, so to speak, shut in by less than two
centuries. And yet what unspeakable things are included in that brief
period! If we have made such vast strides and so rapid a development in
those few years of our national life, with the heterogeneous and
unmalleable materials with which we had to deal, converting the filth of
Europe into grass and flowers for the decoration of the republic, what
may we not achieve hereafter, when this dreadful war is over, and the
negro question is adjusted, and the sundered States are reunited, and
the Western wilderness is clothed with the glory of a perfect
cultivation, and the genius of the people, no longer trammelled by
Southern despotism, shall have free room to wing its flight over the
immeasurable future?
There will be no likeness, in any mirror of the past, to the American
civilization that is to be. New manners, customs, thinkings, literature,
art, and life, will mark our progress and attest the mission of the
nation. We are fast outgrowing the ideas and influences of that brave
company of Puritans out of whose loins our beginning proceeded; and
already each man goes alone, insular, self-reliant, and self-sustained.
We owe the Puritans a large debt, but it is altogether a pretty fiction
to call them the founders of American civilization. They helped to lay
in the foundation stones of that early society, and kept them together
by cementing them with their love of religious truth and liberty, so far
as they understood these primal elements of a state; and we are likewise
their debtors for the integrity which they put into their laws and
government. But it is too high a demand to claim for them that they were
the founders of the republic, and the originators of those great ideas
which are embodied in our institutions and literature.
They came to this country with no very enlarged notions, either of
religion or freedom, although they were perfectly sincere in their
professions of regard for both; and it was this very sincerity which
gave solidity and permanence to their colonies. We suppose we may repeat
what history has made notorious respecting them, that they were, both in
belief and civil practice, very narrow and limited in their
outlooks--by no means given to intellectual speculations--and with but
little faith in the intellect itself--which, indeed, was proscribed as a
sort of outlaw when it stood upon its own authority, outside the pale of
_their_ church. The religion which they established had its origin in
the reign of Elizabeth, and was a sort of revived Lollardism, which last
dated as far back as Wycliffe, long before the Reformation. They thought
they could worship God in conventicles, and in the great open-air
cathedrals of nature, with quite as much purity of motive and heavenly
acceptance as in regularly consecrated churches, and that the right of
praying and preaching was inalienable, and secured to all godly men by
the charter and seal of Calvary.
They had no idea, however, of non-conformity which was not based upon an
orthodox creed, upon _their_ creed, as they subscribed it on Plymouth
Rock. They fled from persecution themselves, and sought freedom for
themselves in the barren regions of our dear and now hospitable New
England; and they, in their simplicity and good faith before God, sought
to organize a system of civil and religious polity which should incrust
all future generations, and harden them into a fossil state of perpetual
orthodoxy.
They were a stern, implacable race, these early fathers, in all that
related to belief, and the discipline of moral conduct; and we owe many
of the granite securities which lie at the bottom of our social life and
government to this harsh and unyielding sternness. It held the framework
of the colonies together until they were consolidated into the United
States, and until the modern culture of the people relaxed it into a
universal liberty of thought and worship.
The Puritans, however, had no notion of such a result to their teachings
and labors; and would have looked with pious horror upon them if they
could have beheld them in some Agrippa's mirror of the future.
The truth--unpalatable as it may be--is simply this about the Puritans:
they were narrow-minded, bigoted, and furious at times with the spirit
of persecution; sincerely so, it is true, and believing they did God
service; but that does not alter the fact. They had no conception
of the meaning of liberty--and especially of religious liberty as a
development of Protestantism. Their idea of it was liberty for
themselves--persecution to all who differed from them; and this, too,
for Christ's sake, in order that the lost sheep might be brought back,
if possible, to their bleak and comfortless folds. They could not help
it; they meant no wrong by it, and the evil which they thus did was good
in the making, and sprang from the bleeding heart of an infinite love.
We like them, nevertheless; and cannot choose but like them, thinking it
generous and loving to invest them with as much poetry as we can command
from the wardrobes of the imagination. But we can never forgive them--in
critical moods--for their inhuman, although strictly logical persecution
of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who represented in his
person all the liberal-thoughts-men, both in religion and speculation,
then existing on this continent.
This man of capacious intellect and most humane heart was hunted by them
out of the associated colonies, as if he had been some ferocious beast
of prey, because he differed from them in his religious opinions; and
this drove him to found a state in accordance with the most liberal
interpretation of Christianity. He had more than once, by his influence
with the Indians, saved them from a general massacre; but their
theological hate of him was so intense that they would not allow him to
pass through their territories on a necessary journey; and once, on his
return from England, where he had been negotiating with ministers for
their benefit, they capped the climax of their bigoted ingratitude by
refusing him permission even to land on their soil, lest his holy feet
should pollute it.
It is a little too much, therefore, to say that all our ideas of liberty
and religion have sprung from this stout race of persecutors. They were
pioneers for us, bu nothing more. Our progress has been the untying of
their old cords of mental oppression, and the undoing of many things
which they had set up. This was so much rubbish to be moved out of the
path of the nation, and by no means aids to its advancement, except as
provocatives. What we now are, we have become by our own culture and
development, and by the inflowing of those great modern ideas which have
affected all the world, and helped to build up its civilization into
such stately proportions.
Puritanism, as it then existed in its exclusive power, is, to all
intents and purposes, dead upon this continent. The form of it still
lingers in our midst, it is true, and in the Protestant parts of Europe
its ritual survives, and pious hearts, which would be pious in spite of
it, still cling to its dead corpse as if it were alive, and kindle their
sacred fires upon the altar of its wellnigh forsaken sanctuaries. We
should count it no gain to us, however--the extinction of this old and
venerable faith--if we had no high and certain assurance that a nobler
and sublimer religion was reserved for our consolation and guidance. We
cannot afford, in one sense, to give up even the semblances and shows of
religion, and these will survive until the new dayspring from on high
shall supersede the necessity of their existence. 'Take care,' said
Goethe, in some such words as these, 'lest, in letting the dead forms of
religion go, you sacrifice all reverence and worship, and thus lose
religion itself!' There is great danger of this in the transition state
of human thought and speculation which marks the present crisis of
American history. We are not a religious people, and shall not present
any development of that sort until the intellectual reaction which has
set in among us against the old modes and organons of belief has
exhausted the tests of its crucibles, and reduced the dross to a
residuum of gold which shall form the basis of a new and sacred
currency, acceptable to all men for the highest interchanges.
In the mean while we must work out the problem of this religion of the
future in any and all ways which lie open to us--doubting nothing of the
final issues. The wildest theories of Millerites, Spiritists,
Naturalists, and Supernaturalists, are all genuine products of the time,
and of the spirit of man struggling upward to this solution--blindly
struggling, it is true, but gradually approaching the light of the
far-off truth, as the twilight monsters of geology gradually approached
the far-off birth of man, who came at last, and redeemed the savage
progressive, the apparent wild unreason of the terrestrial creation.
It is more than probable that this great fratricidal war with which we
are now struggling, will prove, in its results, of the very highest
service to the nation, and make us all both better and wiser men than we
were before. We have already gained by it many notable experiences, and
it has put our wisdom, and our foolishness also, to the test. It has
both humbled and exalted our pride. It has cut away from the national
character all those inane excrescences of vanity and brag which
judicious people everywhere, who were friendly to us, could not choose
but lament to see us exercise at such large discretion. It has brought
us face to face with realities the most terrible the world has ever
beheld. It has measured our strength and our weakness, and has developed
within us the mightiest intellectual and physical resources. All the wit
and virtue which go to make up a great people have been proven in a
hundred times and ways during the war, to exist in us. Courage,
forethought, endurance, self-sacrifice, magnaminity, and a noble sense
of honor, are a few of the virtues which we have cropped from the bloody
harvest of the battle field.
It is true that wicked men are among us--for when did a company, godly
or otherwise, engage in any work, and Satan did not also fling his
wallet over his shoulder and set out with them for evil purposes of his
own?--but after all, these are but a small minority, and their efforts
to ruin the republic and bring defeat and dishonor upon the Federal
arms, have not yet proved to be of a very formidable nature. These, the
enemies of America, though her native-born sons, the people can afford
to treat with the contempt which they merit. For the rest, this war will
make us a nation, and bind us together with bonds as strong as those of
the old European nationalities. It will make us great, and loving
patriots also; and root out from among us a vast amount of sham and
political fraud, to the great bettering of society.
We shall have reason in many ways to bless its coming and its
consequences. It was indeed just as necessary to our future national
life and happiness as the bursting out of a volcano is to the general
safety of the earth. It will destroy slavery for ever, and thus relieve
us from the great contention which has so long and so bitterly occupied
the lives of our public men and the thoughts of the world. In reality,
we have never yet given republicanism a fair trial upon this continent.
With that dreadful curse and crime of slavery tearing at its heart and
brain, how was it possible for equality and self-government to be
anything else but a delusion and a mockery? This cleared out of our
pathway, and we have enough virtue, intelligence, and wealth of physical
resources in the land to realize the prophecy and the hope of all noble
thinkers and believes on the planet, and place America first and
foremost among the nations--the richest, the wisest, the best, and the
bravest.