sense of Jehovah's control; there was the same migration to a strange land; the same limitation and exclusiveness of creed. New England was, indeed, practically constructed on the model of the Old Testament. Its laws were Hebraic, and its children were baptized with the names of Barzillai and Ephraim, of Deborah and Mehitabel. But, underlying all these likenesses of detail, there is the profound analogy which my text describes, the unconscious and unintended preparation by the Puritans for better things.

The Puritan has been called the founder of our civil and religious liberty; and, in a large sense, this is true. Yet the fact is that nothing was farther than this intention from his conscious thought. On the contrary, he meant to found a commonwealth of extreme illiberality. "Democracy," wrote John Cotton in 1636, "I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government either in Church or Commonwealth." The Puritan exiled Roger Williams as a disturber of the peace. He dealt with the Quakers under the name of "persistent intruders." No man might be a freeman except as a member of his church. So felt the Hebrews to the

despised stranger in their midst, and the Puritans simply regarded themselves as another peculiar people of God in the midst of the unconverted.

And yet, as there was a greater Israel, so there was a greater Puritanism. Within that gnarly shell of stern conformity there was ripening, half unrecognized by Puritanism itself, a more genial fruit. All unawares, the lesser Puritanism gave way, and the greater Puritanism emerged. The letter perished, and the spirit had life. The Puritan thought he could have the exclusive domination of a small colony, and his scheme failed; but, instead of realizing his scheme, he became the spiritual inspiration of a continent. He meant to identify Church and State, and establish an intolerant oligarchy; but again he failed, and within twenty years after Plymouth was settled Church and State began to be separated, and the Puritan became the sponsor of religious liberty. He meant to be loyal to his mother country, but again he failed; and it was his independent spirit which foreordained the republic. He meant to be loyal to his mother Church. His first ministers were ordained priests of the

Church of England; and as Higginson sailed for Salem, he is said to have stood at the stern of the ship, and cried: "We will not say, as the Separatists are wont to say at their leaving of England, 'Farewell, Babylon! farewell, Rome!' but we will say, 'Farewell, dear England! farewell, the Church of God in England!' We do not go to New England as separatists from the Church of England, but we go to practice the positive part of Church reformation." So the Puritan intended; but within that very year he had joined with those Separatists in their ways of worship, and Governor Bradford came from Plymouth to give - as the record says – approbation and concurrence" at the ordination of Higginson over a church whose only charter was the New Testament, and whose only allies were those same Separatists.

Finally, the leaders of Puritanism meant to make of this College a minister-governed institution, and it is quite terrible to consider how near Cotton Mather came to being our president; but, with a wisdom which must have been almost instinctive, not a word of such limitation crept into the stat

utes of the College, and from its beginning, and at the hands of a community apparently dominated by a narrow ecclesiasticism, the College was dedicated to comprehensiveness, liberty, and truth. Thus, like the people of Israel, the Puritans builded better than they knew. It was as if some timid band of sailors should plan to cruise along a well-known coast, and as if, in the night, a great current of the ocean should sweep their vessel away through the darkness, until they should wake to find themselves the discoverers of a land nobler than their own familiar shores, but which they had never meant to reach. So the Puritanism of the letter was swept on by the current of the Puritanism of the spirit, with its conscious purpose in the hands of that greater destiny foretold for it in the words of its prophet, John Robinson: "If God shall reveal anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as ever you were to receive anything by my ministry; for I am confident that God hath more truth yet to break forth out of His holy word."

We live in a time which finds in this grim

and sober past an object, for the most part, of amusement or contempt. There was in Puritanism so much of hardness and sternness, so little of playfulness and joy, such a Sabbath view of life, and such a Spartan view of duty, that we rejoice in the era of a softer temper and a kindlier creed. And yet what serious observer of the present time can doubt that there is a message which Puritanism has still to give? Is it not plain that the weakness of our age lies just where the Puritan was strong? Is it not true that, while the Puritan method has finally and happily disappeared, the special perils of American life to-day lie in the threatened disappearance from among us of the Puritan spirit? Look for a moment at this greater Puritanism, the unconscious and unintended bequest of that rugged past to the America of to-day, and consider whether it is an inheritance to be despised or lightly thrown away.

First of all, the Puritan stood for simplicity. His habit of life was unostentatious, thrifty, democratic, plain. And to-day we have come upon a degree of luxury in American life, of vulgar ostentation and tasteless extravagance and competitive fool