pointed also the time when the colonization of our country should successfully begin. The continent was not discovered until the Old World had emerged from the ignorance of the Dark Ages and had fought its way back to the civilization and learning of the brightest periods of the past. It was discovered just as those silent influences were beginning to operate in the heart of Europe, by which the religious and intellectual character and opinions of the world were destined to be revolutionized. While the sages of Greece and Rome, Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca, and the Divine Author of our religion and his apostles were once more speaking to the world, the printing press had come to carry their words to all the earth. It was a fit time for the new world to be opened, upon which this flood of learning, human and divine, should be poured. But if the settlement of our country had at once begun, whether through the agency of Spain, or Portugal, or France, or England, the foundations of no such grand republic as that which now covers this continent could have been laid. For in no one of these countries were liberty and law, education and toleration, so understood and cherished as they must be by the people who should successfully found the great republic which to-day protects the humblest and the highest alike, whether foreign born or native, and secures to all its citizens absolute equality before the law, and unlimited freedom of conscience and opinion. And so England, not knowing what she did, waited. Five sovereigns of the Tudor dynasty, from Henry VII to the great Elizabeth, one after another, passed away. England had become in the highest sense one of the great powers of the world.

Her commerce, her industry, her literature had received an almost divine inspiration. Spencer and Hooker and Bacon and Shakespeare had written. And then, in the reign of James I, while the religious and intellectual influence of the Elizabethan Era were still giving to England a glory which no lapse of time has been able to diminish, our first colony was planted at Jamestown, just before the birth of Milton. America is the child of England, born in the hour of England's highest historical and literary fame.

At her birth, men had already learned the value of liberty and were ready to fight and to die for it. Already that bloody contest was preparing in England in which Charles I lost his head and the race of Stuarts the crown. It is the one characteristic common to all the settlers of our country that they placed the highest value upon human rights, upon religious and political liberty. Had they come at any time before the Elizabethan Era, they could not have brought with them these grand ideas to which we are indebted to-day for the possession of a country which, with all its faults, is the glory of the world.

Yet in the first government established in Virginia there was not a single element of popular liberty. The political power was in the hands of the king and council. Religion was established by law. Indifference to it was punished by stripes; infidelity, by death. It was twelve years before Virginians enjoyed the rights of Englishmen. Then a General Assembly was constituted. It met on the 30th day of July, 1619, and was the first elective body ever assembled on this continent. The system of repre

sentation was thus established and thereafter true principles of government prevailed in Virginia.

But now, only one year after Virginia had thus secured for herself a freedom more complete than had yet been attained in England, she suddenly becomes the home of the worst species of bondage and receives into her bosom an institution destined to be the cause of "all our woe." In August a Dutch man-of-war landed twenty negroes and they were sold as slaves. The greatest evil and the greatest good have alike but small beginnings. Three months later the Mayflower, bearing one hundred two Pilgrims, came in sight of the shores of Massachusetts. Is there a God in history? Has the Mayflower any mission to fulfill in relation to that Dutch slave ship? Has that solemn compact of government signed in the cabin of the Mayflower, and which Bancroft pronounces "the birth of constitutional liberty," any influence to exert upon the political future of our country with reference to slavery? Have "that democratic liberty and independent Christian worship" which "at once existed in America as the Pilgrims landed" any connection with the future national sentiment respecting slavery? I see in the coming years the chains carried from Virginia to Texas, new links constantly forged and new victims manacled, till at last they are numbered by millions. But I see the institutions and principles of the Pilgrims taking possession of New England, of the great Middle States, of the mighty Northwest, on to the shores of the Pacific; carried everywhere by the sturdy settlers who fell the forests and plant civilization; proclaimed and advocated from ten thousand pulpits not of their faith only but of every Christian faith.

As I watch these two forces moving along resistlessly in parallel lines across the continent, I see that one of these is the agent in God's hands for the destruction of the other. And when the irrepressible conflict shall come, as come it will, as come it must, in that supreme moment of mortal agony when a great nation shall plunge into a sea of blood for its own purification from a great crime, may God be with the brave defenders of liberty and union!

What has given these men of Plymouth their influence? Not the greatness of their colony, for it never became great. It was their possession of a grand idea and their fidelity to it. This idea was not created by them. "For the spirit of Puritanism," as the historian Palfrey remarks, "was no creation of the sixteenth century. It is as old as the truth and manliness of England." Nor does he in this assert anything surprising. History is not a record of the accidental workings of blind causes. Revolutions are never unaccountable. The great men, who, in the various centuries, have been the leaders of thought, who have lifted the people up to their platform, and swept them onward to action and to victory, have not been the creations of the hour. The learning, the experience, and the thought of previous ages have contributed to make them. Luther was not the creation of the sixteenth century. Forces long working culminated in power in his day, and, if he had never lived, there would have come another Luther to break the silence which to so many thousands had become unendurable. Lincoln was not the creation of the nineteenth century. His Proclamation of Emancipation, by which the shackles were struck from the limbs of four millions of slaves,

was the voice of American humanity which had been gathering volume for two centuries; and at last amid the horrors of civil war and the impending ruin of the noble structure of constitutional freedom erected by our fathers, sounded forth to the world and to the ages the sublime fiat of universal emancipation. So with the men of New England. They were the exponents of an idea older than themselves. It was this, a living principle of individual faith and action, which soon transformed New England, bleak and dreary as she appeared to the Pilgrims on that memorable December morning, and made the wilderness blossom as the rose. It was this which felled the forests, created villages, established churches, erected school-houses, and organized the whole system of Anglo-Saxon independent local self-government, with its executive and legislature, its churches and church-meeting, its ecclesiastical societies and society-meetings, its towns and town-meetings, its schools and school-meetings. No matter what a man's interests were, it put into his own hands the management of those interests and infused into him a spirit of self-reliance and all-conquering activity. Do you wonder now that, although only 21,000 Englishmen found a home in New England in the first period of immigration, yet in less than ten years, before this immigration had ceased, six republics had sprung up in New England and the foundations of the seventh were laid. Admire the wisdom and ability with which the governments of these little republics were administered. Where can you find truer statesmanship than that of the older Winthrop, justly entitled to be called the father of New Eng land, or that of the younger Winthrop, to whom Con