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upon, a heroic age and a heroic race, which it may not falsely call its own. I mean by a heroic age and race, not exclusively or necessarily the earliest national age and race, but one, the course of whose history and the traits of whose character, and the extent and permanence of whose influences, are of a kind and power not merely to be recognized in after time as respectable or useful, but of a kind and a power to kindle and feed the moral imagination, move the capacious heart, and justify the intelligent wonder of the world. An age" doctrinal and exemplary," from whose personages, and from whose actions, the orator may bring away an incident, or a thought, that shall kindle a fire in ten thousand hearts, as on altars to their country's glory; and to which the discouraged teachers of patriotism and morality to corrupted and expiring states may resort for examples how to live and how to die.

II. FOUNDATIONS OF PURITANISM

Mr. Choate holds that it was the spirit of the Reformation which impelled the Pilgrim Fathers to make untold sacrifices for independence of thinking. "I seem to myself to trace it, as an influence on the English race a new theology, new politics, another tone of character, the opening of another era of time and of liberty."

I confess that I love to trace the pedigree of our transatlantic liberty backwards through Switzerland, to its native land of Greece. I think this the true line of succession, down which it has been transmitted. There was a liberty which the Puritans found, kept, and improved in England. They would have changed it, and were not able. But that was a kind which admitted and demanded an inequality of many, a subordination of ranks, a favored eldest son, the ascending orders of a hierarchy, the vast and constant pressure of a superincumbent crown. It was the liberty of feudalism. It was the liberty of a limited monarchy, overhung and shaded by the imposing architecture of great antagonistic elements of the state. Such was not the form of liberty which our fathers brought with them. Allowing, of course, for that anomalous tie which connected them with the English crown three thousand miles off, it

was republican freedom, as perfect the moment they stepped on the rock as it is to-day. It had not been all born in the woods of Germany; by the Elbe or Eyder; or the plains of Runnymede. It was the child of other climes and days. It sprang to life in Greece. It gilded next the early and the middle age of Italy. It then reposed in the hallowed breast of the Alps. It descended at length on the iron-bound coast of New England, and set the stars of glory there. At every stage of its course, at every reappearance, it was guarded by some new security; it was embodied in some new element of order; it was fertile in some larger good; it glowed with a more exceeding beauty. Speed its way; perfect its nature!

Take, Freedom! take thy radiant round,
When dimmed revive, when lost return,

Till not a shrine through earth be found,
On which thy glories shall not burn.

Thus were laid the foundations of the mind and character of Puritanism. Thus, slowly, by the breath of the spirit of the age, by the influence of undefiled religion, by freedom of the soul, by much tribulation, by a wider survey of man, nature, and human life, it was trained to its work of securing and improving the liberty of England, and giving to America a better liberty of her own. Its day over and its duty done, it was resolved into its elements and disappeared among the common forms of humanity, apart from which it had acted and suffered, above which it had to move, out of which by a long process it had been elaborated. Of this stock were the Pilgrim Fathers. They came of heroical companionship.

The planting of a colony in a new world, which may grow, and which does grow, to a great nation, where there was none before, is intrinsically, and in the judgment of the world, of the largest order of human achievement. To found a state upon a waste earth is first of heroical labors and heroical glories. To build a pyramid or a harbor, to write an epic poem, to construct a system of the universe, to take a city, are great, or may be, but far less than this.

He, then, who sets a colony on foot designs a great work. He designs all the good, and all the glory of which, in the series of

ages, it may be the means; and he shall be judged more by the lofty ultimate aim and result than by the actual instant motive.

I distinguish this enterprise of our fathers, in the first place, by the character of the immediate motive, and that was, first, a sense of religious duty. They had adopted opinions in religion, which they fully believed they ought to profess, and a mode of public worship and ordinances, which they fully believed they ought to observe. They could not do so in England; and they went forth across an ocean in winter to find a wilderness where they could. To the extent of this motive, therefore, they went forth to glorify God, and by obeying his written will, and his will unwritten, but uttered in the voice of conscience concerning the chief end of man.

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It was, next, a thirst for freedom from unnecessary restraint, which is tyranny, - freedom of the soul, freedom of thought, a larger measure of freedom of life; a thirst which two centuries had been kindling, a thirst which must be slaked, though but from the mountain torrent, though but from drops falling from the thunder cloud, though but from fountains lone and far, and guarded as the diamond of the desert.

These were the motives the sense of duty and the spirit of liberty. Great sentiments, great in man, in nations, “pregnant with celestial fire!" Wherewithal could you fashion a people for the contentions and honors and uses of the imperial state so well as by exactly these? To what, rather than these, would you wish to trace up the first beatings of the nation's heart? If, from the whole field of occasion and motive, you could have selected the very passion, the very chance, which should begin your history, the very texture and pattern and hue of the glory which should rest on its first days, could you have chosen so well? The sense of duty, the spirit of liberty, not prompting to vanity or luxury or dishonest fame, to glare or clamor or hollow circumstance of being; silent, intense, earnest, of force to walk through the furnace of fire, yea, the valley of the shadow of death, to open a path amid the sea, to make the wilderness to bud and blossom as the rose, to turn back half a world in arms, to fill the amplest measure of a nation's praise.

These motives and these hopes · the sacred sentiments of duty, obedience to the will of God, religious trust, and the spirit of liberty -have inspired, indeed, all the beautiful and all the grand in the history of man. The rest is commonplace. "The rest is vanity; the rest is crime."

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III. STRUGGLES AT PLYMOUTH

"the spring

Mr. Choate declares that the trials in the New World were of character and motive from which the current of our national fortunes has issued forth." Representative government was organized on board the Mayflower. Here was the exemplification of elementary democracy.”

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Choate compares the heroism of the Pilgrims to that of Leonidas and the Spartans at Thermopylæ, for of the hundred who came on the Mayflower one half died within a year and most of these within the first three months.

I acknowledge the splendor of that transaction [Thermopyla] in all its aspects. I admit its morality, too, and its useful influence on every Grecian heart, in that her great crisis. And yet do you not think that who so could by adequate description bring before you that first winter of the Pilgrims; its brief sunshine; the nights of storms slow waning; its damp or icy breath felt on the pillow of the dying; its destitution; its contrasts with all their former experience of life; its isolation and utter loneliness; its deathbeds and burials; its memories; its apprehensions; its hopes; the consultations of the prudent; the prayers of the pious; the occasional hymn which may have soothed the spirit of Luther, in which the strong heart threw off its burden and asserted its unvanquished nature; do you not think that who so could describe them calmly waiting in that defile, lonelier and darker than Thermopylæ, for a morning that might never dawn, or might show them when it did, a mightier arm than the Persian, raised as in act to strike, would he not sketch a scene of more difficult and rarer heroism,

a scene, as Wordsworth has said, Melancholy, yea dismal, yet consolatory and full of joy," a scene even better fitted than that to succor, to exalt, to lead the forlorn hopes of all great causes till time shall be no more?

I can seem to see, as that hard and dark season was passing away, a diminished procession of these Pilgrims following another, dearly loved and newly dead, to that bank of graves, and pausing sadly there before they shall turn away to see that face no more. In full view from that spot is the Mayflower still riding at her anchor, but to sail in a few days more for England, leaving them alone, the living and the dead, to the weal or woe of their new home. I cannot say what was the entire emotion of that moment and that scene; but the tones of the venerated elder's voice, as they gathered round him, were full of cheerful trust, and they went to hearts as noble as his own. "This spot," he might say, "this line of shore, yea, this whole land, grows dearer daily, were it only for the precious dust which we have committed to its bosom. I would sleep here and have my own hour come, rather than elsewhere, with those who shared with us in our exceeding labors, whose burdens are now unloosed forever. I would be near them in the last day, and have a part in their resurrection. And now," he proceeded, "let us go from the side of the grave to work with all our might that which we have to do. It is on my mind that our night of sorrow is well-nigh ended, and that the joy of our morning is at hand. The breath of the pleasant southwest is here, and the singing of birds. The sore sickness is stayed; somewhat more than half our number still remain; and among these some of our best and wisest, though others are fallen to sleep. Matter of joy and thanksgiving it is, that among you all, the living and the dead, I know not one, even when disease had touched him, and sharp grief had made his heart as a little child's, who desired, yea, who could have been entreated, to go back to England by yonder ship. Plainly is it God's will that we stand or fall here. All his providences these hundred years declare it as with beams of the sun. Did he not set his bow in the clouds in that bitterest hour of our embarking, and build his glorious ark upon the sea for us to sail through hitherward? Wherefore, let us stand in our lot! If he prosper us, we shall found a church against which the gates of hell shall not prevail; and a colony, yea, a nation, by which all other

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