fondly cherishing the active instinct for personal freedom, secure possession, and legislative power, such as belonged to it before the Reformation, and existed independent of the Reformation, had made its dwelling-place in the empire of Powhatan. With consistent firmness of character, the Virginians welcomed representative assemblies; displaced an unpopular governor; at the overthrow of monarchy, established the freest government; rebelled against the politics of the Stuarts; and, uneasy at the royalist principles which prevailed in its forming aristocracy, soon manifested the tendency of the age at the polls.

The colonists, including their philosophy in their religion, as the people up to that time had always done, were neither skeptics nor sensualists, but Christians. The school that bows to the senses as the sole interpreter of truth had little share in colonizing our America. The colonists from Maine to Carolina, the adventurous companions of Smith, the proscribed Puritans that freighted the fleet of Winthrop, the Quaker outlaws that fled from jails with a Newgate prisoner as their sovereign,—all had faith in God and in the soul. The system which had been revealed in Judea, the system which combines and perfects the symbolic wisdom of the Orient and the reflective genius of Greece, the system, conforming to reason, yet kindling enthusiasm; always hastening reform, yet always conservative; proclaiming absolute equality among men, yet not suddenly abolishing the unequal institutions of society; guaranteeing absolute freedom, yet invoking the inexorable restrictions of duty; in the highest degree theoretical, and yet in the highest degree practical; awakening the inner man to a consciousness of his destiny, and yet adapted with exact harmony to the outward world; at once divine and humane, — this system was professed in every part of our widely extended country, and cradled our freedom.

Our fathers were not only Christians; they were, even in Maryland by a vast majority, elsewhere almost unanimously, Protestants. Now the Protestant Reformation, considered in its largest influence on politics, was the awakening of the common people to freedom of mind.

During the decline of the Roman empire, the oppressed invoked the power of Christianity to resist the supremacy of brute force; and the merciful priest assumed the office of protector. The tribunes of Rome, appointed by the people, had been declared inviolable by the popular vote; the new tribunes of humanity, deriving their office from religion, and ordained by religion to a still more venerable sanctity, defended the poor man's house against lust by the sacra ment of marriage; restrained arbitrary passion by a menace of the misery due to sin unrepented and unatoned; and taught respect for the race by sprinkling every new-born child with the water of life, confirming every youth, bearing the oil of consolation to every death-bed, and sharing freely with every human being the consecrated emblem of God present with man.

But from protectors priests grew to be usurpers. Expressing all moral truth by the mysteries of symbols, and reserving to themselves the administration of seven sacraments, they claimed a monopoly of thought, and exercised an absolute spiritual dominion. Human bondage was strongly riveted; for they had fastened on the affections, the understanding, and the reason. Ordaining their own successors, they ruled human destiny at birth, on entering active life, at marriage, when frailty breathed its confession, when faith aspired to communion with God, and at death.

The fortunes of the human race are embarked in a lifeboat, and cannot be wrecked. Mind refuses to rest; and active freedom is a necessary condition of intelligent existence. The instinctive love of truth could warm even the scholastic theologian; but the light which it kindled for him was oppressed by verbal erudition, and its flickering beams, scarce lighting the cell of the solitary, could not fill the colonnade of the cloister, far less reach the busy world.

Sensualism also was free to mock superstition. Scoffing infidelity put on the cardinal's hat, and made even the Vatican ring with ribaldry. But the indifference of dissoluteness has no creative power; it does but substitute the despotism of the senses for a spiritual despotism; it never brought enfranchisements to the multitude.

The feudal aristocracy resisted spiritual authority by the sword; but it was only to claim greater license for their own violence. Temporal sovereigns, jealous of a power which threatened to depose the unjust prince, were ready to set prelacy against prelacy, the national church against the Catholic Church; but it was only to assert the absolute liberty of despotism.

By slow degrees, the students of the humanities, as they were called, polished scholars, learned lessons of freedom from Grecian and Roman example; but they hid their patriotism in a dead language, and forfeited the claim to higher influence and enduring fame by suppressing truth, and yielding independence to the interests of priests and princes.

Human enfranchisement could not advance securely but through the people; for whom philosophy was included in religion, and religion veiled in symbols. There had ever been within the Catholic Church men who preferred truth to forms, justice to despotic force. "Dominion," said Wycliffe, "belongs to grace;" meaning, as I believe, that the feudal government, which rested on the sword, should yield to a government resting on moral principles. And he knew the right method to hasten the coming revolution. "Truth," he asserted with wisest benevolence, “truth shines more brightly the more widely it is diffused;" and, catching the plebeian language that lived on the lips of the multitude, he gave England the Bible in the vulgar tongue. A timely death could alone place him beyond persecution; his bones were disinterred and burnt, and his ashes thrown on the waters of the Avon. But his fame brightens as time advances; when America traces the lineage of her intellectual freedom, she acknowledges the benefactions of Wycliffe.

In the next century, a kindred spirit emerged in Bohemia, and tyranny, quickened by the nearer approach of danger, summoned John Huss to its tribunal, set on his head a huge paper mitre begrimed with hobgoblins, permitted the bishops to strip him and curse him, and consigned one of the gentlest and purest of our race to the flames. Holy simplicity!" exclaimed he, as a peasant piled fagots on the

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fire; still preserving faith in humanity (the Quakers afterwards treasured up the example), though its noblest instincts could be so perverted; and, perceiving the only mode through which reform could prevail, he gave as a last counsel to his multitude of followers: "Put not your trust in princes." Of the descendants of his Bohemian disciples, a few certainly came to us by way of Holland; his example was for all.

Years are as days in the providence of God and in the progress of the race. After long waiting, an Augustine monk at Wittenberg, who had seen the lewd corruptions of the Roman court and who loathed the deceptions of a coarse superstition, brooded in his cell over the sins of his age and the method of rescuing conscience from the dominion of forms, till he discovered a cure for these vices in the simple idea of justification by faith alone. With this principle, easily intelligible to the universal mind, and spreading, like an epidemic, widely and rapidly, a principle strong enough to dislodge every superstition, to overturn every tyranny, to enfranchise, convert, and save the world, he broke the wand of papal supremacy, scattered the lazars of the monasteries, and drove the penance of fasts, and the terrors of purgatory, masses for the dead, and indulgences for the living, into the paradise of fools. That his principle contained a democratic revolution, Luther saw clearly; he acknowledged that "the rulers and the lawyers needed a reformer;" but he "could not hope that they would soon get a wise one," and in a stormy age, leaving to futurity its office, accepted shelter from feudal sovereigns. "It is a heathenish doctrine," such was his compromise with princes, "that a wicked ruler may be deposed." "Do not pipe to the populace, for it anyhow delights in running mad." "God lets rogues rule for the people's sin." "A crazy populace is a desperate, cursed thing; a tyrant is the right clog to tie on that dog's neck." And yet, adds Luther, "I have no word of comfort for the usurers and scoundrels among the aristocracy, whose vices make the common people esteem the whole aristocracy to be out and out worthless." And he praised the printing-press, as the noblest gift of

human genius. He forbade priests and bishops to make laws how men sl all believe; for, said he, "man's authority stretches neither to heaven nor to the soul." Nor did he leave Truth to droop in a cloister or wither in a palace, but carried her forth in her freedom to the multitude; and, when tyrants ordered the German peasantry to deliver up their Saxon New Testament, "No," cried Luther, "not a single leaf." He pointed out the path in which civilization should travel, though he could not go on to the end of the journey. In him, freedom of mind was like the morning sun, as it still struggles with the sickly dews and vanishing spectres of darkness.

In pursuing the history of our country, we shall hereafter meet in the Lutheran kingdom of Prussia, of which the dynasty had become Calvinistic, at one time an active ally, at another a neutral friend. The direct influence of Lutheranism on America was inconsiderable. New Sweden had the faith and the politics of the German reformer; no democratic ideas distracted its single-minded loyalty.

As the New World sheltered neither bishops nor princes, in respect to political opinion, the Anglican church in Virginia was but an enfranchisement from popery, favoring humanity and freedom. The inhabitants of Virginia were conformists after the pattern of Sandys and of Southampton, rather than of Whitgift and Laud. Of themselves they asked no questions about the surplice, and never wore the badge of non-resisting obedience.

The meaner and more ignoble the party, the more general and comprehensive are its principles; for none but principles of universal freedom can reach the meanest condition. The serf defends the widest philanthropy; for that alone can break his bondage. The plebeian sect of Anabaptists, "the scum of the Reformation," with greater consistency than Luther, applied the doctrine of the Reformation to the social relations of life, and threatened an end to kingcraft, spiritual dominion, tithes, and vassalage. The party was trodden under foot, with foul reproaches and most arrogant scorn; and its history is written in the blood of myriads of the German peasantry; but its principles, safe in their