on the various communities in which they fixed their abode is beyond
computation. But had the Puritan fathers been as ordinary men: had they
come hither for ends of gain and aggrandizement: had they not been united
by the most inviolable ties that can bind men--community in religious
faith, brotherhood in persecution for conscience' sake, and an intense,
inflexible enthusiasm for liberty--their descendants would have had no
spiritual inheritance to disseminate. Many superficial changes have come
upon our society; there is an absence of a fixed national type; there are
many thousands of illiterate persons among us, and of those who are still
ignorant of the true nature of democratic institutions; all the tongues of
Europe and of other parts of the world may be heard within our boundaries;
there are great bodies of our citizens who selfishly pursue ends of
private enrichment and power, indifferent to the patent fact that
multitudes of their fellows are thereby obstructed in the effort to earn a
livelihood in this most productive country in the world; there are many
who have prostituted the name of statesmanship to the gratification of
petty and transient ambitions: and many more who, relieved by the thrift
of their ancestors from the necessity to win their bread, have renounced
all concern in the welfare of the state, and live trivial and empty lives:
all this, and more, may be conceded. But such evil humors, be it repeated,
are superficial, attesting the vigor, rather than the decay, of the
central vitality. America still stands for an idea; there is in it an
immortal soul. It was by the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay that this soul
was implanted; to inspire it was their work. They experienced the
realities, they touched the core of things, us few men have ever done; for
they were born in an age when the world was awakening from the spiritual
slumber of more than fifteen hundred years, and upon its bewildered eyes
was breaking the splendor of a great new light. The Puritans were the
immediate heirs of the Reformation (so called; it might more truly have
been named the New Incarnation, since the outward modifications of visible