Turn first now for a moment to the old English Puritans, the fathers of
our fathers, of whom came, of whom were, planters of Ipswich, of
Massachusetts, of New England,--of whom came, of whom were, our own
Ward, Parker, and Saltonstall, and Wise, Norton, and Rogers, and
Appleton, and Cobbet, and Winthrop,--and see whether they were likely to
be the founders of a race of freemen or slaves. Remember then, the true,
noblest, the least questioned, least questionable, praise of these men
is this: that for a hundred years they were the sole depositaries
of the sacred fire of liberty in England after it had gone out in
every other bosom,--that they saved at its last gasp the English
Constitution,--which the Tudors and the first two Stuarts were rapidly
changing into just such a gloomy despotism as they saw in France and
Spain,--and wrought into it every particle of freedom which it now
possesses,--that when they first took their seats in the House of
Commons, in the early part of the reign of Elizabeth, they found
it the cringing and ready tool of the throne, and that they reanimated
it, remodeled it, reasserted its privileges, restored it to its
constitutional rank, drew back to it the old power of making laws,
redressing wrongs, and imposing taxes, and thus again rebuilt and opened
what an Englishman called "the chosen temple of liberty," an English
House of Commons,--that they abridged the tremendous power of the crown
and defined it,--and when at last Charles Stuart resorted to arms to
restore the despotism they had partially overthrown, that they met him
on a hundred fields of battle, and buried, after a sharp and long
struggle, crown and mitre and the headless trunk of the king himself
beneath the foundations of a civil and religious commonwealth. This
praise all the historians of England--Whig and Tory, Protestant and
Catholic, Hume, Hallam, Lingard, and all--award to the Puritans. By what
causes this spirit of liberty had been breathed into the masculine,
enthusiastic, austere, resolute character of this extraordinary body of
men, in such intensity as to mark them off from all the rest of the
people of England, I cannot here and now particularly consider. It is a
thrilling and awful history of the Puritans in England, from their
first emerging above the general level of Protestants, in the time of
Henry VIII. and Edward VI., until they were driven by hundreds and
thousands to these shores; but I must pass it over. It was just when the
nobler and grander traits--the enthusiasm and piety and hardihood and
energy--of Puritanism had attained the highest point of exaltation to
which, in England, it ever mounted up, and the love of liberty had grown
to be the great master-passion that fired and guided all the rest,--it
was just then that our portion of its disciples, filled with the
undiluted spirit, glowing with the intensest fervors of Protestantism
and republicanism together, came hither, and in that elevated and holy
and resolved frame began to build the civil and religious structures
which you see around you.
Trace now their story a little farther onward through the Colonial
period to the War of Independence, to admire with me the providential
agreement of circumstances by which that spirit of liberty which brought
them hither was strengthened and reinforced; until at length, instructed
by wisdom, tempered by virtue, and influenced by injuries, by anger and
grief and conscious worth and the sense of violated right, it burst
forth here and wrought the wonders of the Revolution. I have thought
that if one had the power to place a youthful and forming people like
the Northern colonists, in whom the love of freedom was already vehement
and healthful, in a situation the most propitious for the growth and
perfection of that sacred sentiment, he could hardly select a fairer
field for so interesting an experiment than the actual condition of our
fathers for the hundred and fifty years after their arrival, to the War
of the Revolution.
They had freedom enough to teach them its value and to refresh and
elevate their spirits, wearied, not despondent, from the contentions and
trials of England. They were just so far short of perfect freedom that
instead of reposing for a moment in the mere fruition of what they had,
they were kept emulous and eager for more, looking all the while up and
aspiring to rise to a loftier height, to breathe a purer air, and bask
in a brighter beam. Compared with the condition of England down to
1688,--compared with that of the larger part of the continent of Europe
down to our Revolution,--theirs was a privileged and liberal condition.
The necessaries of freedom, if I may say so,--its plainer food and
homelier garments and humbler habitations,--were theirs. Its luxuries
and refinements, its festivals, its lettered and social glory, its
loftier port and prouder look and richer graces, were the growth of a
later day; these came in with independence. Here was liberty enough to
make them love it for itself, and to fill them with those lofty and
kindred sentiments which are at once its fruit and its nutriment and
safeguard in the soul of man. But their liberty was still incomplete,
and it was constantly in danger from England; and these two
circumstances had a powerful effect in increasing that love and
confirming those sentiments. It was a condition precisely adapted to
keep liberty, as a subject of thought and feeling and desire, every
moment in mind. Every moment they were comparing what they had possessed
with what they wanted and had a right to; they calculated by the rule of
three, if a fractional part of freedom came to so much, what would
express the power and value of the whole number! They were restive and
impatient and ill at ease; a galling wakefulness possessed their
faculties like a spell. Had they been wholly slaves, they had lain still
and slept. Had they been wholly free, that eager hope, that fond desire,
that longing after a great, distant, yet practicable good, would have
given way to the placidity and luxury and carelessness of complete
enjoyment; and that energy and wholesome agitation of mind would have
gone down like an ebb-tide. As it was, the whole vast body of waters all
over its surface, down to its sunless, utmost depths, was heaved and
shaken and purified by a spirit that moved above it and through it and
gave it no rest, though the moon waned and the winds were in their
caves; they were like the disciples of the old and bitter philosophy of
paganism, who had been initiated into one stage of the greater
mysteries, and who had come to the door, closed, and written over with
strange characters, which led up to another. They had tasted of truth,
and they burned for a fuller draught; a partial revelation of that which
shall be hereafter had dawned; and their hearts throbbed eager, yet not
without apprehension, to look upon the glories of the perfect day. Some
of the mystery of God, of Nature, of Man, of the Universe, had been
unfolded; might they by prayer, by abstinence, by virtue, by retirement,
by contemplation, entitle themselves to read another page in the clasped
and awful volume?