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into the icy labyrinths of the northern seas; yet loving home, and dearly attached to their modest freeholds. At Boston a society was formed for promoting domestic manufactures on one of its anniversaries, three hundred young women appeared on the common, clad in homespun, seated in a triple row, each with a spinning-wheel, and each busily transferring the flax from the distaff to the spool. The town built "a manufacturing house," and there were bounties to encourage the workers in linen. How the board of trade were alarmed at the news! How they censured Shirley for not having frowned on the business! How committees of the house of commons examined witnesses, and made proposals for prohibitory laws, till the Boston manufacturing house, designed to foster home industry, fell into decay! a commentary on the provident care of England for her colonies. Of slavery there was not enough to affect the character of the people, except in the south-east of Rhode Island, where Newport was conspicuous for engaging in the slave-trade; and where, in two or three towns, negroes composed even a third of the inhabitants.

In the settlements which grew up in the interior, on the margin of the greenwood, the plain meeting-house of the congregation for public worship was everywhere the central point; near it stood the public school, by the side of the very broad road, over which wheels enough did not pass to do more than mark the path by ribbons in the sward. The snug farm-houses, owned as freeholds, without quit-rents, were dotted along the way; and the village pastor among his people, enjoying the calm raptures of devotion, "appeared like such a little white flower as we see in the spring of the year, low and humble on the ground, standing peacefully and lovingly in the midst of the flowers round about; all, in like manner, opening their bosoms to drink in the light of the sun. In every hand was the Bible; every home was a house of prayer; in every village all had been taught, many had comprehended, a methodical theory of the divine purpose in creation, and of the destiny of man.

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Child of the Reformation, closely connected with the past centuries and with the greatest intellectual struggles of

mankind, New England had been planted by enthusiasts who feared no sovereign but God. In the universal degeneracy and ruin of the Roman world, when freedom, laws, imperial rule, municipal authority, social institutions, were swept away; when not a province, nor city, nor village, nor family was safe, — Augustine, the African bishop, with a burning heart, confident that, though Rome tottered, the hope of man would endure, rescued from the wreck of the Old World the truths that would renew humanity; and sheltered them in the cloister, among successive generations of men, insulated by their vows from decaying society, and bound to the state neither by ambition, nor by allegiance, nor by the sweet attractions of wife and child.

After the sighs and sorrows of centuries, in the dawn of serener days, an Augustine monk, having also a heart of flame, seized on the same great ideas; and he and his followers, with wives and children, restored them to the world. At his bidding, truth leaped over the cloister walls, and challenged every man to make her his guest; aroused every intelligence to acts of private judgment; changed a dependent, recipient people into a reflecting, inquiring people; lifted each human being out of the castes of the middle age, to endow him with individuality; and summoned man to stand forth as man. The world heaved with the fervent conflict of opinion. The people and their guides recognised the dignity of labor; the oppressed peasantry took up arms for liberty; men reverenced and exercised the freedom of the soul. The breath of the new spirit moved over the earth; it revived Poland, animated Germany, swayed the north; and the inquisition of Spain could not silence its whispers among the mountains of the peninsula. It invaded France; and, though bonfires of heretics, by way of warning, were lighted at the gates of Paris, it infused itself into the French mind, and led to unwonted free discussions. Exile could not quench it. On the banks of the Lake of Geneva, Calvin stood forth the boldest reformer of his day; not personally engaging in political intrigues, yet, by promulgating great ideas, forming the seed-plot of revolution; bowing only to the Invisible; acknowledging no sacrament

of ordination but the choice of the laity, no patent of nobility but that of the elect of God, with its seals of eternity.

Luther's was still a Catholic religion: it sought to instruct all, to confirm all, to sanctify all; and so, under the shelter of princes, it gave established forms to Protestant Germany, and Sweden, and Denmark, and England. But Calvin taught an exclusive doctrine, which, though it addressed itself to all, rested only on the chosen. Lutheranism was, therefore, not a political party; it included prince and noble and peasant. Calvinism was revolutionary; wherever it came, it created division; its symbol, as set up on the "Institutes " of its teacher, was a flaming sword. By the side of the eternal mountains and perennial snows and arrowy rivers of Switzerland, it established a religion without a prelate, a government without a king. Fortified by its faith in fixed decrees, it kept possession of its homes among the Alps. It grew powerful in France, and invigorated, between the feudal nobility and the crown, the long contest, which did not end, till the subjection of the nobility, through the central despotism, prepared the ruin of that despotism, by promoting the equality of the commons. It entered Holland, inspiring an industrious nation with heroic enthusiasm; enfranchising and uniting provinces; and making burghers, and weavers, and artisans, victors over the highest orders of Spanish chivalry, the power of the inquisition, and the pretended majesty of kings. It penetrated Scotland, and, while its whirlwind bore along persuasion among glens and mountains, it shrunk from no danger, and hesitated at no ambition; it nerved its rugged but hearty envoy to resist the flatteries of the beautiful Queen Mary; it assumed the education of her only son; it divided the nobility; it penetrated the masses, overturned the ancient ecclesiastical establishment, planted the free parochial school, and gave a living energy to the principle of liberty in a people. It infused itself into England, and placed its plebeian sympathies in daring resistance to the courtly hierarchy; dissenting from dissent, longing to introduce the reign of righteousness, it invited every man to read the Bible, and made itself dear to the common mind, by teach

ing, as a divine revelation, the unity of the race and the natural equality of man; it claimed for itself freedom of utterance, and through the pulpit, in eloquence imbued with the authoritative words of prophets and apostles, spoke to the whole congregation; it sought new truth, denying the sanctity of the continuity of tradition; it stood up against the middle age and its forms in church and state, hating them with a fierce and unquenchable hatred.

Imprisoned, maimed, oppressed at home, its independent converts in Great Britain looked beyond the Atlantic for a better world. Their energetic passion was nurtured by trust in the divine protection, their power of will was safely intrenched in their own vigorous creed; and under the banner of the gospel, with the fervid and enduring love of the myriads who in Europe adopted the stern simplicity of the discipline of Calvin, they sailed for the wilderness, far away from "popery and prelacy," from the traditions of the church, from hereditary power, from the sovereignty of an earthly king,- from all dominion but the Bible, and "what arose from natural reason and the principles of equity."

The ideas which had borne the New England emigrants to this transatlantic world were polemic and republican in their origin and their tendency. And how had the centuries matured the contest for mankind! Against the authority of the church of the middle ages, Calvin arrayed the authority of the Bible; the time was come to connect religion and philosophy, and show the harmony between faith and reason. Against the feudal aristocracy, the plebeian reformer summoned the spotless nobility of the elect, foreordained from the beginning of the world; but New England, which had no hereditary caste to beat down, ceased to make predestination its ruling idea, and, maturing a character of its own,

Saw love attractive every system bind.

The transition had taken place from the haughtiness of its self-assertion against the pride of feudalism, to the adoption of love as the benign spirit which was to animate its new teachings in politics and religion.

From God were derived its theories of ontology, of ethics, of science, of happiness, of human perfectibility, and of human liberty.

God himself, wrote Jonathan Edwards, is, "in effect, universal Being." Nature in its amplitude is but "an emanation of his own infinite fulness; "a flowing forth and expression of himself in objects of his benevolence. In every thing there is a calm, sweet cast of divine glory. He comprehends "all entity and all excellence in his own. essence." Creation proceeded from a disposition in the fulness of Divinity to flow out and diffuse its existence. The infinite Being is Being in general. His existence, being infinite, comprehends universal existence. There are and there can be no beings distinct and independent. God is "All and alone."

The glory of God is the ultimate end of moral goodness, which in the creature is love to the Creator. Virtue con

sists in public affection or general benevolence. But as to the New England mind God included universal being, so to love God seemed to include love to all that exists; and was, therefore, in opposition to selfishness, the sum of all morality, the universal benevolence comprehending all righteous

ness.

God is the fountain of light and knowledge, so that truth in man is but a conformity to God; knowledge in man, but "the image of God's own knowledge of himself." Nor is there a motive to repress speculative inquiry. "There is no need," said Edwards, "that the strict philosophic truth should be at all concealed from men." "The more clearly and fully the true system of the universe is known, the better." Nor can any outward authority rule the mind; the revelations of God, being emanations from the infinite fountain of knowledge, have certainty and reality; they accord with reason and common sense; and give direct, intuitive, and all-conquering evidence of their divinity.

God is the source of happiness. His angels minister to his servants; the vast multitudes of his enemies are as great heaps of light chaff before the whirlwind. Against his enemies the bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made

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