is the way our poet puts it-who went forth seeking "not gold, but God." Are we their children? that is the question which, in face of what confronts us, we need to keep asking. At the Pilgrim Festival in New York in 1850, Webster pictured Elder Brewster entering the room, in his simple, mild austerity, and dwelling with amazement on all that the country had become since the small beginnings at Plymouth. "Are you our children?" he finally makes him exclaim. "Does this scene of elegance, of riches, of luxury, come from our labors?" And he adds: "We envy you not, we reproach you not. Be rich, be prosperous, if such be your allotment on earth; but live always to God and to duty." So long as the children still cherished an undying love for civil and religious liberty, so long the great orator was sure that the great Elder would breathe his benediction on their festivals. And so he would. But could he come to some of the festitivals to-day of those who name themselves still by the Pilgrim name,- could he mark the ostentation, the indulgence, the arrogance, the pride,he would take, be sure, no such easy departure. Far, far indeed would he pronounce all this from the spirit and the aims and the atmosphere of the men who signed the compact on the "Mayflower." Not gold, but God; not ourselves, but mankind. "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide." It comes with the fullness of powers, comes when the man and the nation are passing from youth into maturity. Emerson has told us how it comes to the young scholar. So it comes to the nation,- the temptation to cease the eagle's flight, to temper the strenuousness of the spirit, to pause in the high emprise, with its stern demands, to accept the beaten path, the easier task, the quick profit, the old way. Get land and money. What is this freedom which you seek for men? What is this peace on earth? If, nevertheless, sounds still the Puritan voice from the heavens above to every nation under heaven, God has called you to the service of progress, called you to be pioneers of liberty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, As others do, so will I; if others will be spoilers, so will I; I, too, will trust in my great guns; I will eat the good of the land, and let equality and fraternity go until a more convenient season,-then dies the soul in you, then once more die the buds of hope and prophecy and blessing and divine opportunity, as they have died already in the hundred nations whose wrecks are strewn on the shores of the ages. God save our dear republic from "the great refusal"! God will save it. And he will save it precisely because, as the wise English thinker told us here in Boston twenty years ago, it had a Puritan youth and has had, more than any other nation, the Puritan discipline. The only real politicians, said Socrates to the Athenians, who were so sadly and so soon to prove its truth, were those who kept insisting on the good of righteousness and the unprofitableness of iniquity. And our republic shall stand because there shall not fail a sufficiency of teachers and of righteous men who shall cherish and make potent the Puritan's faith in the sovereignty of God, the fear of God, which alone is the bulwark of liberty, as it is the beginning of wisdom. "O ye who boast In your free veins the blood of sires like these, Turn ye to Plymouth's beach, and on that rock |