Again, it is no doubt true, and may be stated as a characteristic correlated to the one above mentioned, that nowhere else is a purer gospel preached than in New England. The piety of the New England heart is deep and strong, if not demonstrative and fervent. It is not like the sweep of the winds, nor the rush of the torrents; its faith may be burning, but it is the steady burning of the hidden fire, a vestal flame, not the glare of the conflagration. It rather reminds me, in its depth and strength and purity, of the ocean, calm, uniform, and monotonous outwardly, but concealing under its surface many a swift current and strong countercurrent, many a fair expanse, many a lovely secret of life, beauty, and glory. The religious faith of New England fully and devoutly receives those sublime doctrines of Christianity which were given as good news, indeed, to the race; not to a favored few, but to the individual man and woman of the race. It credits in a real and literal sense the declaration of Paul that 'God hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth;' and the opening sentence of the Declaration of Rights is something more to them than a 'glittering generality.' A deep, intelligent religious faith may be said to underlie all the institutions of New England, political and social. For what is that genius of Christianity that has ever found its truest exponent in the teachings of the New England theology, and in the lives and practice of her people? Is it not the liberty of every person, without respect to color or condition, but simply in consideration of his humanity, to learn and to obey every law of his being, physical, moral, intellectual, social, and religious? To be untrammelled in following out the best light conscience and revelation may afford him as to the constitution and laws of his being, his duty to himself, his fellow man, and his Creator, and his destiny, which he himself is to determine? The Christian religion may be comprehensively defined as the golden circlet which includes all the complex duties, interests, and affections of the most complex being, man, and lifts him up, and binds him back, with all his capacities, hopes, and sympathies, to the throne of the Infinite, from which, in his low, fettered, and sinful estate, he is an alien; and all this through the love and mercy of the Infinite One Himself. This I conceive to be the true intent and glorious result of Christianity, when allowed to have free and unimpeded action on the soul of man. It will be seen to be wellnigh limitless a power adequate to the work to be accomplished, and in this sense is truly 'the power of God and the wisdom of God.' This power is dominant, either consciously or unconsciously, over every relation of life in New England, being interwoven in the very life of her institutions. I believe this secret, quiet, yet active, all-pervading influence is very little understood, and yet it will explain much in the Puritan character that no other key will unlock. I have mentioned a pure morality, which is the effect, before a pure Christianity, which is the cause, simply because the effect is more obvious at first glance.
The third great characteristic of the Puritan idea is a pure republicanism. In the largest sense, I hold this also to be the effect of the one just mentioned; for, if tested, the whole spirit and tone of Christianity are republican. On New England soil, from the hour when the little band of pilgrim heroes first set foot on an inhospitable shore, by their footprints upon it making a barren rock a holy shrine for the world's love and veneration, has ever been a sure refuge, a very palladium of republican institutions, of human liberties. It was not alone its religious tendencies that excited the persecution and detestation of Puritanism in the Old World which gave impulse to the resolution to transplant themselves to a land where freedom, if nothing else, was to be found. It was equally as much its republican and democratic theories. Souls made free by the spirit of the Lord, as the souls of those grand old Puritans were, could no more brook the tyranny of the Charleses and Georges of Britain, and so, through blood and fire and sword and chains, was the germ of liberty borne across the watery waste, to be sown anew, as they thought and proposed, in the genial soil of the region bordering on the Hudson, but, as God willed it, in the perverse and barren soil of rockbound, sea-washed New England. Truly this was a novel spectacle. Never in the history of peoples before was it seen that a bare idea was strong enough to lay the foundations of a great state, through persecution, exile, and death, and untold privations worse than death. O you who would bring discredit on the memory and name of the Puritans, recall this noblest era of time; rise for one hour, if your souls have any wings, to the height of this grandeur, and bid calumny and defamation be dumb!
This germ of republican freedom took deep root, and acquired an ineradicable hold of their civil polity, and the whole machinery of their civil government; and, spreading from New England to the adjoining colonies, and from these to others, soon permeated the whole confederation, at length forming the basis of a national government, a national condition which has heretofore represented the highest civilization of the world.
Is it not plain, then, why they do so, who oppose and hate the influence and ideas of New England? If anything could measure the utter vileness of slavery and its degrading effect on the mind, it would be the consideration of the unblushing assurance with which its lovers defend it, and at the same time assail those sacred principles which lie at the root of our national life, and without which we are dead and cumbering the ground. Our nation holds in trust certain principles, for the successful carrying out of which the nations of the earth wait in hushed and anguished expectancy, and in the failure of which we should be no better than any of the effete, defunct peoples of buried ages; or, rather, in the failure to bring them to a triumphant vindication, we had far better be as Sodom and Gomorrah. These principles are now the stake for which the loyal men of the land are gladly offering up life, treasure, children, all, so they but win.
We hear a great deal, nowadays, from rebel sources, of the different race which settled Virginia and Carolina from that which peopled New England, and the immeasurable superiority of the former. If the mouthpiece of the confederacy, Mr. Jefferson Davis, may be believed, the latter and their descendants are not worthy even to be the slaves of the former, and are a degree lower in the scale of creation than the hyenas! Differing in language, manners, customs, ideas, there is no possibility of a peaceable union, say the confederate organs. In fine, language is exhausted of epithets expressive of their scorn, contempt, and hatred of the Yankees, as they are opprobriously nicknamed. But do these men ignore the fact that the original settlers of both New England and Virginia were purely English? They were from the same stock precisely. As to the character of each, I cannot do better than to quote from a work of which Americans may well be both glad and proud, a work that has set us and our institutions in a truer and juster light than any before it. I allude to the work of M. De Tocqueville on 'Democracy in America.' In volume first, chapter fifth, he says:
'The men sent to Virginia were seekers of gold, adventurers without resources and without character, whose turbulent and restless spirits endangered the infant colony, and rendered its progress uncertain. The artisans and agriculturists arrived afterward; and although they were a more moral and orderly race of men, they were in no wise above the level of the inferior classes in England. No lofty conceptions, no intellectual system, directed the foundation of these new settlements.'