the midst of this period, which has so profoundly affected both English
and American history. It has not worked out into such visible political
forms. But any movement that makes for larger spiritual life makes for the
strengthening of the entire life of the nation. The mere figures of the
early Wesleyan movement are almost appalling. Here was a man, John Wesley,
an Oxford scholar, who spent nearly fifty years traveling up and down and
back and forth through England on horseback, covering more than two
hundred and fifty thousand miles, preaching everywhere more than forty
thousand times, writing, translating, editing two hundred works. When
death ended his busy life there were in his newly formed brotherhood one
hundred and thirty-five thousand members, with five hundred and fifty
itinerants who were following his example with incessant preaching and
Bible exposition. It was the old Wiclif-Lollard movement over again. And
here was the other Wesley, Charles, teaching England to sing again,
teaching the old truths of the Bible in rhyme to many who could not read,
so that they became familiar, writing on horseback, in stage-coaches,
everywhere, writing with one passion, to help England back to the Bible
and its truth. Such activity could not leave the nation unmoved; all its
religious life felt it, and its political life from serf to king was
deeply affected by it. It is a common saying that the Wesleyan movement
saved English liberty from European entanglement. Yet the Wesleyan
movement issued from the Bible and led England back to the Bible.
But apart from these wide movements and the great souls who led them,
there is time for thought of one typical character on each side of the sea
who did not so much make a movement as he proved the point around which a
great fluid idea crystallized into strength. Across the sea the character
shall be that man whom Carlyle gave back to us out of obloquy and
misunderstanding, Oliver Cromwell. Choosing him, we pass other names which
crowd into memory, names of men who have served the need of England
well--Wilberforce, John Howard, Shaftesbury, Gladstone--who drew their
strength from this Book. Yet we choose Cromwell now for argument. On this
side it must be that best known, most beloved, most typical of all
Americans, Abraham Lincoln.
An English historian has said that the most influential, the most
unescapable years in English history are those of the Protectorate. That
is a strong saying. They were brief years. There were many factors in
them. Oliver Cromwell was only one, but he was chief of all. He was not
chief in the councils which resulted in the beheading of Charles I. on
that 30th of January, 1649, though he took part in them. Increasingly in
the movements which led to that event and which followed it he was growing
into prominence. After Marston Moor, Prince Rupert named him Ironsides,
and his regiment of picked men, picked for their spirit, went always into
battle singing psalms, "and were never beaten." As he rode out to the
field at Naseby (1645) he knew he faced the flower of the loyalist army,
while with him were only untrained men; yet he smiled, as he said
afterward, in the "assurance that God would, by things that are not, bring
to naught things that are." Then he adds, "God did it." Never did he raise
his flag but in the interests of the liberty of the people, and back of
every movement of his army there was his confidence in the Bible, which
was his mainstay. They offered him the throne; he would not have it. He
dissolved the Parliament which had dragged on until the patience of the
people was exhausted. He called another to serve their need. The evening
before it met he spent in meditation on the One hundred and third Psalm.
The evening before the second Parliament of his Protectorate he brooded on
the Eighty-fifth Psalm, and opened the Parliament next day with an
exposition of it. The man was saturated with Scripture. Yes, the times
were rude. It was an Old Testament age, and in right Old Testament spirit
did Cromwell work. And it seemed that his work failed. There was no one to
succeed him, and soon after his death came the Restoration and the return
of Charles II., of which we have already spoken, in which occurred that
hint of the real sentiment of the English people which a wise man had
better have taken. Yet, recall what actually happened. Misunderstanding
the spirit of the English people, which Cromwell had helped to form, but
which in turn had made Cromwell possible, the servile courtiers of the
false king unearthed the Protector's body, three years buried, hanged it
on a gallows in Tyburn for a day, beheaded it, and threw the trunk into a
pit. His head they mockingly set on a pinnacle of the Parliament Hall,
whence for some weeks it looked over the city which he had served. Then,
during a great storm, it came clattering down, only a poor dried skull,
and disappeared no one knows where. But when you stand opposite the great
Parliament buildings in London to-day, the most beautiful buildings for
their purpose in the world, the buildings where the liberties of the
English express themselves year after year, whose is the one statue that
finds place within the inclosure, near the spot where that poor skull came
rattling down? Not Charles II.--you shall look in vain for him. Not George
Monk, who brought back the King--you shall not find him there. The one
statue which England has cared to plant beside its Parliament buildings is
that of Oliver Cromwell, its Lord Protector. There he stands, warning
kings in the interests of liberty. John Morley makes no ideal of him. He
thinks he rather closed the medieval period than opened the modern period;
but he will not have Cromwell compared to Frederick the Great, who spoke
with a sneer of mankind. Cromwell "belonged to the rarer and nobler type
of governing men, who see the golden side, who count faith, piety, hope
among the counsels of practical wisdom, and who for political power must
ever seek a moral base." That is a rare and noble type of men, whether
they govern or not. But no man of that type governs without red blood in
his veins; and the iron that made this man's blood run red came from the
English Bible.
It is a far cry from Oliver Cromwell to Abraham Lincoln--far in years, far
in deeds, far in methods, but not far in spirit. Great men are kindred,
generations over. We pass from the Old Testament into the New when we pass
from Cromwell to Lincoln; but we still feel the spirit of liberty. From
the days of the Puritans, the Quakers and the Dutch, history had been
preparing for this time. Benjamin Franklin had done his great work for
human liberty; he had summed up his hope for the nation in his memorable
address in 1787, when he stood eighty-one years old, before the convention
assembled to frame a constitution for the new government. He reminded them
that at the beginning of the contest with the British they had had daily
prayers in that room in Philadelphia for the Divine protection, and said:
"I have lived for a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing
proof I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if
a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable
that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the
sacred writings, that 'Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain
that build it.' I firmly believe this, and I also believe that without His
concurring aid we shall proceed in this political building no better than
the builders of Babel. I therefore beg leave to move that, henceforth,
prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven and its blessing on our
deliberation be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to
business, and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to
officiate in that service."
George Washington sounded a familiar note in his farewell address: "Of all
the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion
and morality are indispensable supports. A volume could not trace all
their connection with private and public felicity. Let us with caution
indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.
Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of
peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that
national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles."
Thomas Jefferson, of whom it is sometimes said that he was indifferent to
religion, had yet done his great work under inspiration, which he himself
acknowledges in his inaugural address, when he speaks of the nation as
"enlightened by a benign religion, professed indeed, and practised in
various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance,
gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling
Providence, which by all its dispensation proves that it results in the
happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter." Greater than
Jefferson had appeared John Marshall, greatest of our Chief Justices, like
in spirit to that John Marshall Harlan, whose death marked the year which
has just closed, of whom his colleagues said that he went to his rest each
night with one hand on the Bible and the other on the Constitution of the
United States, a description which could almost be transferred to his
great predecessor in that court. Moreover, when Lincoln came, Joseph
Story, the greatest teacher of law which our country had produced, had
only just died from his place on the Supreme Bench. In his Phi Beta Kappa
address at Harvard (1826), in a brilliant and masterful analysis of "The
Characteristics of the Age," he had paid tribute after tribute to the
power of religion and the Bible. He had declared his belief that the
religion of the Bible had "established itself in the hearts of men by all
which genius could bring to illumine or eloquence to grace its sublime
truths." Of the same period with Lincoln was also Webster, who was called
the "concordance of the House." Many of his stately periods and great
ideas came from the Bible. Indeed, there is no oratory of our history,
which has survived the waste of the years, which does not feel and show
the power of the Scriptures. The English Bible has given our finest
eloquence its ideas, its ideals, its illustrations, its phrases.
The line is unbroken. And it leads to this tall figure, crowned with a
noble head, his face the saddest in American history, who knew Gethsemane
in all its paths. The heart of the American people has always been touched
by his early years of abject poverty. But there were compensations. He had
few books, and they entered his blood and fiber. In his earliest formative
years there were six books which he read and re-read. Nicolay and Hay name
the Bible first in the list, with _Pilgrim's Progress_ as the fourth. Mr.
Morse calls it a small library, but nourishing, and says that Lincoln
absorbed into his own nature all the strong juice of the books.[46] How
much he drew from the pages of the Holy Book let any reader of his
speeches say. Quotation, reference, illustration crowd each other. The
phrases are familiar. The man is full of the Book. And what the man does
is part of the work of the Book.
One of his biographers says that there is nothing in the life or work of
Lincoln which cannot be explained without reference to any supernatural
influence or power. That depends on what is meant by supernatural. There
were no miracles, no astounding visions nor experiences. But there ran
into Lincoln's life from his young manhood onward this steady and strong
current of ideas and ideals from the Bible. In his second inaugural
address he worded the thought that was the deepest horror of the Civil
War--that on both sides of the strife men were reading the same Bible,
praying to the same God, and invoking His aid against each other! In that
very brief inaugural Mr. Lincoln quotes in full three Bible verses, and
makes reference to two others, and the whole address lasted barely four
minutes. There could be no mistaking the solemn importance of the fact to
which he referred in the inaugural, the presence on the other side of men
who held their Bibles high in regard. "Stonewall" Jackson was devout
beyond most men. The two books always at his hand were his Bible and the
_Manual of the Rules of War_. Robert E. Lee was a cultured, Christian
gentleman, as were many others with him, while throughout the South were
multitudes who loved and reverenced the Bible as fully as could any in the
North. As we look back over half a century, this comes out plainly: that
so far as the American civil war was a strife about union pure and simple,
having one nation or two here in our part of the continent, it was matter
of judgment, not of religion. There grew around that question certain
others of national honor and obligation, which were not so clear then as
now. But men on opposite sides of the question might read the same Bible
without finding authoritative word about it. In so far, however, as the
war had at its heart the matter of human slavery, it was possible for men
to differ only when one side read the letter of the Bible while the other
read its manifest spirit. Written in times when slavery was counted matter
of course, its letter dealt with slavery as a fact. It could be read as
though it approved slavery. But long before this day men had found its
true spirit. England had abolished slavery (1808) under the insistence
that it was foreign to all right understanding of God's Word. Lincoln knew
its letter well; he cared for its spirit more, and he found his strength
not in the familiar saying that God was on his side, but in the more
forceful one that he believed himself to be on God's side. So he became a
point around which the great fluid idea crystallized into strength--a
point made and sustained by the influence of the Bible, which he knew only
in the King James version.
* * * * *
We have spoken of some wide movements and of men around whom they
crystallized, finding in them the influence of the Bible. It will be well
to note two outstanding traits of the Bible which in English or any other
tongue would inevitably tend to strong and favorable influence on the
history of men. Those two traits are, first, its essential democracy, and,
secondly, its persistent moral appeal.
Here must be recalled that century before the King James version, when by
slow filtration the fundamental ideas of the Bible were entering English
life. Surely it is beyond words that the Bible made Puritanism, though it
was in strong swing when James came to the throne. Now John Richard Green
is well within the fact when he says that "Puritanism may fairly claim to
be the first political system which recognized the grandeur of the people
as a whole."[47] It was the magnifying of the people as a whole over
against some people as having peculiar rights which marked Puritanism, and
which is democracy. Shakespeare knew nothing of it, and had no influence
on the movement for larger democracy. After we have said our strong word
of Shakespeare's powerful influence upon literature it yet must be said
that it is difficult to lay finger on one single historical movement
except the literary one which Shakespeare even remotely influenced. The
Bible, meanwhile, was absolutely creating this movement. Under its
influence "the meanest peasant felt himself ennobled as the child of God,
the proudest noble recognized a spiritual equality with the meanest
saint." That was the inevitable result of a fresh reading of the Bible in
every home. It assured each man that he is a son of God, equal in that
sonship with all other men. It assured him no man has right to lord it
over others, as though his relation to God were peculiar. The Bible
constantly impresses men that this relation to God is the essential one.
Everything else is incidental. Granted now a people freshly under the
influence of that teaching, you have a large explanation of the movement
which followed the issuance of this version.
James opened his first parliament (1604) with a speech claiming divine
right, a doctrine which had really been raised to meet the claim of the
right of the pope to depose kings. James argued that the state of monarchy
is the supremest thing on earth, for kings are not only God's lieutenants
on earth and set upon God's throne, but even by God Himself are called
gods. (He never found that in the Genevan version or its notes!) As to
dispute what God may do is blasphemy, so it is sedition in subjects to
dispute what the king may do in the height of his power. "I will not be
content that my power be disputed on." The House of Commons sat by his
grace and not of any right.
Set that idea of James over against the idea which the Bible was
constantly developing in the mind of the people, and you see why Trevelyan
says that the Bible brought in democracy, and why he thinks, as we have
already seen, that the greatest contribution England has made to
government is its treatment of the Stuarts, when it transferred
sovereignty from the king to Parliament. Among the men who listened to
that kind of teaching were Eliot, Hampden, Pym, all Puritans under the
spell of the Bible. But the strife grew larger than a merely Puritan one.
The people themselves were strongly feeling their rights. "To the devout
Englishman, much as he might love his prayer-book and hate the
dissenters, the core of religion was the life of family prayer and Bible
study, which the Puritans had for a hundred years struggled not in vain to
make the custom of the land." It was this spirit which James met.
We have already thought sufficiently of the events which actually
followed. The final rupture of Charles I. with parliamentary institutions
was due to the religious situation. There were many Bible-reading
families, learning their own rights, while kings and favorites were
plotting war. Laud and the bishops forbade non-conforming gatherings, but
they could not prevent a man's gathering his household about him while he
read the great stories of the Bible, in which no king ruled when he had
ceased to advance his kingdom, in which each man was shut up to God in the
most vital things of his life. The discussion of the time grew keen about
predestination and free-will. One meant that only God had power; the other
meant that men, and if men, then specially kings, might control other men
if only they could. Not fully, but vaguely, the crowd understood. Very
fully, and not vaguely, the leaders understood. Predestination and
Parliament became a cry. That is, control lifted out of the hands of the
free-will of some monarch into the hands of a sovereign God to whom every
man had the same access that any other man had. Laud decreed that all such
discussion should cease. He revived an old decree that no book could be
printed without consent of an archbishop or the Bishop of London. So the
books became secret and more virulent each year. The civil war (1642-46)
between Charles and Parliament was a war of ideas. It is sometimes called
a war of religion, not quite fairly. It was due to the religious
situation, but actually it was for the liberties of the people against the
power of the king. And that question rooted far down in another regarding
the rights of men to be free in their religious life. Charles struck his
coin at Oxford with the Latin inscription: "The Protestant religion; the
laws of England; the liberties of Parliament." But he struck it too late.
He had been trifling with the freedom of the people, and they had learned
from their fireside Bibles and from their pulpits that no man may command
another in his relation to God. It was long after that Burns described
"The Cottar's Saturday Night"; but he was only describing a condition
which was already in vogue, and which was having tremendous influence in
England as well as in Scotland:
"The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face,
They, round the ingle, form a circle wide;
The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace,
The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride:
His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside,
His lyart haffets wearing thin an' bare;
Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,
He wales a portion with judicious care,
And 'Let us worship God!' he says, with solemn air."
Under such guidance as this the people of England, Puritans and others,
relaxed the power of the Stuarts and became a democracy. For democracy is
not a form of government. It can exist under monarchy, provided the
monarchy is a convenience of the will of the people, as it is in England.
It can exist under institutions like our own, provided they also are held
as a convenience of the people. This was no rebellion against some form of
monarchy. It was simply a claim of every man to have his rights before
God. Under the Parliament of eighteen years duration, the Independents,
Presbyterians, and all other non-conforming bodies suffered as heavily as
under James and Charles, yet they did not flee the land. Their battle was
really won. They believed the time would come when they as part of "the
people" who now governed should assert themselves. If they were
persecuted, it was under a government where yet they might hope for their
rights. Fleeing from England in 1620 was heroism; fleeing in 1640 would
have been cowardly. It is impossible to calculate what was the revelation
to the readers of the English Bible of their rights.
Let Trevelyan tell the story: "While other literary movements, however
noble in quality, affect only a few, the study of the Bible was becoming
the national education. Recommended by the king, translated by the
Bishops, yet in chief request with the Puritans, without the rivalry of
books and newspapers, the Bible told to the unscholarly the story of
another age and race, not in bald generalization and doctrinal harangue,
but with such wealth of simple narrative and lyrical force that each man
recognized his own dim strivings after a new spirit, written clear in
words two thousand years old. A deep and splendid effect was wrought by
the monopoly of this Book as the sole reading of common households, in an
age when men's minds were instinct with natural poetry and open to receive
the light of imagination. A new religion arose, of which the mythus was
the Bible stories and the pervading spirit the direct relations of man
with God, exemplified in the human life. And, while imagination was
kindled, the intellect was freed by this private study of the Bible. For
its private study involved its private interpretation. Each reader, even
if a Churchman, became in some sort a church to himself. Hence the hundred
sects and thousand doctrines that astonished foreigners and opened
England's strange path to intellectual liberty. The Bible cultivated here,
more than in any other land, the growth of intellectual thought and
practice."[48]
All that has seemed to refer only to England, but the same essential
democracy of the Bible came to America and founded the new nation. It was
a handful of Puritans turned Pilgrims who set out in the Mayflower to give
their Bible ideas free field. In a dozen years (1628-40), under Laud's
persecution, twenty thousand Englishmen fled to join those Pilgrims. And
how much turned on that! Suppose it had not happened. Then the French of
the North and the cavaliers of Virginia, with the Spanish of the South,
would have had only the Dutch between them. And of the four, only the
Dutch had free access to the Bible. The new land would not have been
English. It is an English writer who says that North America is now
preparing the future of the world, and English speech is the mold in which
the folk of all the world are being poured for their final shaping.[49]
It is the democracy of the Bible which is the fundamental democracy of
America, in which every man has it accented to him that he is so much a
child of God that his rights are inalienable. They cover life and liberty
and the pursuit of happiness. And though we have held that principle of
democracy inconsistently at times, and have paid a terrible price for our
inconsistency in the past, and may pay it in the future again, it is still
true that the fundamental democracy of our American life is only that
essential democracy of the Bible, where every man is made the equal of his
fellow by being lifted into the same relation with Almighty God.
* * * * *
The Bible makes its moral appeal on the same basis. If a man is a child of
God, then he is shut up to duties which cannot be avoided. Some one else
may tell a man his duty in a true monarchy. In a democracy each man stands
alone at the most solemn point of his duty. There is no safe democracy
where men refuse to stand alone there. In Jefferson's great speech,
replying to the forebodings of Patrick Henry, he insisted that if men were
not competent to govern themselves they were not competent to govern
other people. The first duty of any man is to take his independent place
before God. Democracy is the social privilege that grows out of the
meeting of these personal obligations.