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coadjutors, however, gave to the world the first grand impulse towards freedom, by bursting the shackles of ignorance and superstition. Up to the middle of the seventeenth century, the nations of Europe were at a low state of civilization. A new era then dawned upon mankind, by the discovery of the Western continent; and there the spirit of religious and civil liberty found its temple and its home. There Liberty had a most bold and adventurous priesthood-men of heroism and virtue, the pioneer-missionaries of the cross.

"The Puritans were men whose minds had derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests. Not content with acknowledging, in general terms, an overruling Providence, they habitually ascribed every event to the will of the Great Being, for whose power nothing was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too minute. To know him, to serve him, to enjoy him, was with them the great end of existence. They rejected with contempt the ceremonious homage which other seats substituted for the pure worship of the soul. Instead of satching occasional glimpses of the Deity through an obscuring veil, they aspired to gaze full on the intolerable brightness, and to commune with him face to face. Hence originated their contempt for terrestrial distinctions. The difference between the greatest and meanest of mankind seemed to vanish, when compared with the boundless interval which separated the whole race from him on whom their own eyes were constantly fixed. They recognized no title to superiority but his favor; and, confident of that favor, they despised all the accomplishments and all the dignities of the world. If they were unacquainted

a DECLARATION, by a whole people, of what before existed, and will always existthe native equality of the human race, as the true foundation of all political, of all human institutions. It was an ASSERTION that we held our rights, as we hold our existence, by no charter, except from the KING OF KINGS. It vindicated the dignity of our nature. It rested upon this 'one inextinguishable truth, which never has been, and never can be wholly eradicated from the human heart, placed as it is in the very core and centre of it by its Maker: that man was not made the property of man; that human power is. a trust for human benefit, and that when it is abused, resistance becomes justice and duty.'"-Sprague.

with the works of philosophers and poets, they were deeply read in the oracles of God. If their names were not found in the registers of heralds, they felt assured that they were recorded in the Book of Life. If their steps were not accompanied by a splendid train of menials, legions of ministering angels had charge over them. Their palaces were houses not made with hands; their diadems crowns of glory which should never fade away! On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles and priests, they looked down with contempt; for they esteemed themselves rich in a more precious treasure, and eloquent in a more sublime language,-nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand. The very meanest of them was a being to whose fate a mysterious and terrible importance belonged; on whose slightest action the spirits of light and darkness looked with anxious interest; who had been destined, before heaven and earth were created, to enjoy a felicity which should continue when heaven and earth should have passed away. Events which short-sighted politicians ascribed to earthly causes, had been ordained on his account. For his sake, empires had risen, and flourished, and decayed. For his sake, the Almighty had proclaimed his will, by the pen of the evangelist and the harp of the prophet. He had been rescued by no common deliverer from the grasp of no common foe. He had been ransomed by the sweat of no vulgar agony— by the blood of no earthly sacrifice. It was for him that the sun had been darkened, that the rocks had been rent, that the dead had arisen, that all nature had shuddered at the sufferings of her expiring God!

"Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men—the one self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion; the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker; but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans, and tears. He was half maddened by glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of angels, or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam of the Beatific Vision, or woke screaming from dreams of

everlasting fire. Like Vane, he thought himself intrusted with the sceptre of the millennial year. Like Fleetwood, he cried, in the bitterness of his soul, that God had hid his face from him. But, when he took his seat in the council, or girt on his sword of war, these tempestuous workings of the soul had left no perceptible trace behind them. People who saw nothing of the godly, but their uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but their groans and their whining hymns, might laugh at them. But those had little reason to laugh who encountered them in the hall of debate, or in the field of battle. These fanatics brought to civil and military affairs a coolness of judgment, and an immutability of purpose, which some writers have thought inconsistent with their religious zeal, but which were in fact the necessary effects of it. The intensity of their feelings on one subject made them tranquil in every other. One overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred, ambition and fear. Death had lost its terrors, and pleasure its charms. They had their smiles and their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, but not for things of this world. Enthusiasm had made them Stoics, had cleared their minds from every vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means. They went through the world like Sir Artegle's iron man Talus with his flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors-mingling with human beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities; insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain; not to be pierced by any weapon, not to be withstood by any barrier.

"Such we believe to have been the character of the Puritans. We perceive the absurdity of their manners. We dislike the sullen gloom of their domestic habits. We acknowledge that the tone of their minds was often injured by straining after things too high for mortal reach; and we know that, in spite of their hatred of Popery, they too often fell into the worst vices of that bad system-intolerance and extravagant austerity; that they had their anchorites and their

erusades, their Dunstans and their De Montforts, their Dominics and their Escobars. Yet, when all circumstances are taken into consideration, we do not hesitate to pronounce them a brave, a wise, an honest, and a useful body."

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But we ask-Where are the free nations of antiquity?

"Gone, glimmering through the dream of things that were,

A school-boy's tale, the wonder of an hour."

It has been said that no civilized nation has, at any period of its history, so completely thrown off its allegiance to the past, as the American. The whole essay of our national life and legislation has been a prolonged protest against the dominion of antiquity. This disregard of ancient precedent is quite consistent with the intrepid daring and sagacious policy of the revered founders of our national institutions. It would be impossible to institute any analogy between the governments of the ancient republics and our own; yet we should be willing to profit by the voices of antiquity-be warned by its errors, and incited and sustained by its virtuous examples.

* Macaulay.

SPARTA AND ATHENS.

"Unrivalled Greece! where every power benign
Conspired to blow the flower of human kind."
THOMSON.

"The taste, love, and intuition of the Beautiful stamped the Greeks above all nations."

BULWER'S ATHENS.

GREECE, with her matchless schools of learning and philosophy, her arts and civilization, lustrous with the triumphs and trophies of her splendor, has for twenty centuries ceased to exist, save in the imperishable monuments of her intellectual glory and a few broken columns of her once superb temples, her Parthenon, some of the beautiful creations of Phidias, as well as the classic Vale of Tempé, the rugged defiles of Thermopylæ, and the towering heights of Areopagus. We naturally ask whence did this mighty people derive the elements of their greatness? Some, by a fanciful conceit, have suggested that it was in part superinduced by the influences of climate and the scenery by which they were surrounded; that the physical geography of Greece-a combination of sea and mountains-served to make it the cradle of a bold and free people; or, as Wordsworth apostrophizes it

"Two voices are there: one is of the sea,

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One of the mountains each a mighty voice.
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice:
They are thy chosen music-Liberty."

Such a theory is, however, manifestly untenable, as the abortive at-
tempt, in modern times, to resuscitate Athens sufficiently attests.
""Tis Greece, but living Greece no more!

So coldly sweet, so deadly fair,

We start, for soul is wanting there!"*

Leaving the solution of the problem with the ingenuity of the curious * Byron.

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