break. Such faith is freedom; and this spiritual freedom is the source and strength of all other freedom.

Thus it came to pass that the religious wars and persecutions of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a training-school for the political independence of the United States of America in the eighteenth century. Diverse and seemingly incongruous as were the nationalities represented in the Colonies, - Dutch, French, German, Swedish, Scotch, Irish, English, they had all imbibed, either by experience or by inheritance, something of the spirit of personal independence, and especially of religious liberty. Gustavus Adolphus designed his colony of Swedes for the benefit of "all oppressed Christendom." Penn the Quaker established Pennsylvania as "a free colony for all mankind," where the settlers "should be governed by laws of their own making." The first charter of the Jerseys which were largely peopled by Quakers, and Scotch and Irish Presbyterians-declared that "no person shall at any time, in any way, or on any pretence, be called in question, or in the least punished or hurt, for opinion in religion." And Oglethorpe's Colony of Georgia was founded to be a refuge for "the distressed people of Britain, and the persecuted Protestants of Europe:" there the German Moravian settled side by side with the French Huguenot and the Scotch Presbyterian, under the motto, "We toil not for ourselves, but for others."

So in all the Colonies the diverse elements of race, of education, of belief, were fused in the broader elements of religious liberty, and regard for man, even as the diverse modes of political organization, begun in diverse modes and motives of colonial settlement, were fused in the broader spirit of popular representation and local government. In a word, the elements of fusion in the Colonies were more powerful, if less numerous, than the elements of rivalry and discord. But the crystallizing centre around which those elements should gather and cohere was the political organization of New England, the unit of which was the town-meeting, in which society was the state, and right was law.

That organization had its perfect type in the Colony of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, which anticipated by more

than a hundred and fifty years the American doctrine of government by the people, through equal laws made by themselves, and officers chosen by themselves, under a written covenant or constitution as the supreme and final authority. In that little band on "The Mayflower" were developed the principles of liberty,- spiritual, political, ecclesiastical, with a breadth of base, a harmony of proportion, a union of justice, order, and authority, with freedom, that no political philosophy has yet transcended, and no political society attained. That covenant which they framed and signed on board the vessel as she lay at anchor at Cape Cod, in which, "for the more orderly carrying-on of their affairs, by mutual consent they entered into a solemn combination, as a body politic, to submit to such government and governors, laws and ordinances, as should by a general consent from time to time be made choice of and assented unto,"- that simple covenant of twenty lines, which has served as the model of a free constitutional government, has sometimes been ascribed to the accident of the ship being carried so far to the northward of her intended port, that the patent of settlement under which the voyagers sailed was made void and useless, and they were obliged to take measures to govern and protect themselves. But how came the forty-one men who signed that covenant by a political wisdom so far above that to be found in any average company of colonists or emigrants? How came they, in an unexpected emergency, to frame a civil government so as to combine justice with equality, popular legislation with magisterial authority, personal freedom with the general good of the Colony? They had acquired this wisdom through their experience of self-government in the Church, and from the teaching and training of their pastor. He had taught them spiritual freedom, that Freiheit des Geistes that Germany won by her Thirty-Years' war, yet has to contend for anew in this generation. Winslow, the third governor of the Plymouth Colony, has left on record the parting words of their pastor to the Pilgrims as they set sail from Leyden. "He charged us before God to follow him no farther than he followed Christ; and, if God should reveal any thing to us by any other instrument of his, to be ready to receive it as ever we were to receive

any truth by his ministry; for he was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy word. He took occasion also miserably to bewail the state of the reformed churches, who were come to a period in religion, and would go no farther than the instruments of their reformation. The Lutherans could not go beyond what Luther saw; for, whatever part of God's word he had further revealed to Calvin, they had rather die than embrace it; and so, you see, the Calvinists they stick where he left them. A misery much to be lamented: for though they were precious shining lights in their times, yet God had not revealed his whole will to them; and, were they now alive, they would be as ready to receive further light as that they had received. . . . For it is not possible the Christian world should come so lately out of such anti-Christian darkness, and that full perfection of knowledge should break forth at once."1

In these wise, liberal, and noble counsels, spiritual freedom and progress are based upon the broad and enduring principle of allegiance to truth, the duty of the soul to seek for light, to accept light from whatever source, and to obey and follow truth above and beyond all teachers and authorities whatsoever. There is no basis of personal independence so deep and firm as this. Men so trained could never submit to tyranny in Church or in State.

A like lesson in ecclesiastical freedom the Pilgrims had learned from their pastor, who taught that "any competent number of believers in Christ have a right to embody into a church for their mutual edification;" that, "being embodied, they have a right to choose all their officers;" that " "that"no churches or church-officers whatever have any power over any other church or officers, to control or impose upon them, but are all equal in their rights and privileges, and ought to be independent in the exercise and enjoyment of them." "The Papists," said he, "place the ruling power in the pope; the Episcopalians, in the bishop; the Puritan, in the presbytery: we put it in the body of the congregation, the multitude, called the church." But, while he insisted thus strenuously upon the completeness and the independence of the

1 New England's Memorial, p. 407.

local church, he held also the communion of the churches in counsel and brotherhood, and the unity of all believers in the one body of Christ, the only true, spiritual, holy, universal church.

In such teachings and practice was laid the foundation for local government in matters of immediate and personal concern, and also for co-operation and sympathetic unity in things of the higher general welfare. Men who had been accustomed to choose their own spiritual teachers and guides, to administer the affairs of the church by their direct votes or by officers of their choice, were prepared to take the direction of civil government also, when this was thrust upon them by the necessity of their position. And their wise, far-sighted pastor had provided them for this also. He who had trained them in spiritual independence and ecclesiastical freedom gave them counsel how to combine the exercise of popular sovereignty with that dignity, order, and authority which are the true divine right in the State. In his farewell letter he said, "Whereas you are to become a body politic, using amongst yourselves civil government, and are not furnished with persons of special eminency above the rest to be chosen by you into office of government, let your wisdom and godliness appear not only in choosing such persons as do entirely love and will promote the common good, but also in yielding unto them all due honor and obedience in their lawful administrations; not beholding in them the ordinariness of their persons, but God's ordinance for your good; not being like the foolish multitude, who more honor the gay coat than either the virtuous mind of the man, or the glorious ordinance of God. But you know better things, and that the image of the Lord's power and authority which the magistrate beareth is honorable, in how mean persons soever; and this duty you may the more willingly, and ought the more conscionably, to perform, because you are to have them for your ordinary governors which yourselves shall make choice of for that work." 1

A government ordered with such wisdom and goodness would more than realize the Republic of Plato.

1 New England's Memorial, p. 18. ·

The

pastor of the Pilgrim Church was also the founder of the Pilgrim Commonwealth, though he remained in Holland, and died an exile from England, and a stranger to America. The birthplace of that freedom, civil and religious, which at length incorporated itself in the United States, was not Lexington, nor Philadelphia, nor Yorktown, but Leyden; and the father of American liberty was not Adams, nor Franklin, nor Henry, nor Jefferson, nor Warren, nor Washington, but John Robinson, who found in his New Testament the warrant for freedom of conscience, freedom of the church, and freedom of the commonwealth.

What manner of men such a discipline produced is read in the history of New England for generations. Hume sneers at the Puritan emigrants to New England as men "who had resolved forever to abandon their native country, and fly to the other extremity of the globe, where they might enjoy lectures and discourses of any length or form which pleased them;" yet in the same breath he gives the honest praise, that "they laid the foundations of a government which possessed all the liberty, both civil and religious, of which they found themselves bereaved in their native country."

Now, it was this very determination to hear sermons in the form that pleased them, and to endure sermons of any length, provided they were full of sound doctrine, and strong, clear reasoning, that showed and stamped the intellectual and moral character of the early New-England commonwealths. To the first settlers, sermons were spiritual gymnastics. They had few books, and fewer newspapers; and the sabbath service supplied the social and intellectual excitement of the week. I doubt if the world had ever seen, or can now produce, just such a yeomanry as the yeomanry of New England down to the days of the Revolution, so thoughtful, so earnest, so devout, so disciplined in manly thinking and heroic faith by the pulpit, at once the freest and the strongest power of that simple age. What that pulpit was we know from the sermons of Cotton, Shepard, Prince, Wise, Davenport, Edwards, Hopkins, Bellamy, and their peers, - preachers

1 Hume: History of Great Britain, chap. lii.