Europe. It decided that government by the people and for the people
should not then perish from the earth. It placed free England in a
position of such moral advantage that within another century the
English Idea of political life was able to react most powerfully upon
continental Europe. It was the study of English institutions by such men
as Montesquieu and Turgot, Voltaire and Rousseau, that gave shape and
direction to the French Revolution. That violent but wholesome clearing
of the air, that tremendous political and moral awakening, which ushered
in the nineteenth century in Europe, had its sources in the spirit
which animated the preaching of Latimer, the song of Milton, the solemn
imagery of Bunyan, the political treatises of Locke and Sidney, the
political measures of Hampden and Pym. The noblest type of modern
European statesmanship, as represented by Mazzini and Stein, is the
spiritual offspring of seventeenth-century Puritanism. To speak of
Naseby and Marston Moor as merely English victories would be as
absurd as to restrict the significance of Gettysburg to the state of
Pennsylvania. If ever there were men who laid down their lives in the
cause of all mankind, it was those grim old Ironsides whose watchwords
were texts from Holy Writ, whose battle-cries were hymns of praise.
[Sidenote: Influence of Puritanism upon modern Europe]

It was to this unwonted alliance of intense religious enthusiasm with
the instinct of self-government and the spirit of personal independence
that the preservation of English freedom was due. When James I. ascended
the English throne, the forces which prepared the Puritan revolt had
been slowly and quietly gathering strength among the people for at least
two centuries. The work which Wyclif had begun in the fourteenth century
had continued to go on in spite of occasional spasmodic attempts to
destroy it with the aid of the statute passed in 1401 for the burning
of heretics. The Lollards can hardly be said at any time to have