Our puritan forbears

ADDRESS BEFORE THE NEW ENGLAND

SOCIETY AT ITS EIGHTY-EIGHTH ANNIVERSARY

DECEMBER 22, 1893

Mr. President, and Fellow-men-The honors of this opportunity, as I well know, are not my own, but belong to my college mother. That college, to which you owe your new President, tonight to be inducted; to whom Hartford owes those two great citizens, Senator Hawley and that delightful speaker whom presently we are to hear, and whose "journeys in the world" have never weaned him from his Alma Mater. [Applause.]

We bear the name and studiously expound the fame of that Scottish Huguenot than whom this imperial State never claimed a nobler or more potent son. Patriot, jurist, financier, orator, statesman, father of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton [strong applause], clarum et venerabile nomen-who of this company, in the city where his dust waits the last reveille, will not gladly acknowledge the legacy of that great Federalist, who said: "If they break this Union they will break my heart!” To us he is dear as the counsellor of our beginnings—our generous first almoner, our earliest trustee. [Applause.]

I come from a village named for that Scotch-Irishman who so long governed this Commonwealth, George Clinton, and from the glint of the stream which a little to the north witnessed that bloody afternoon of the Oriskany fight, where with shattered knee Herkimer sat smoking his pipe and issuing orders, while the German colonists of the valley blocked St. Leger and saved Stanwix and the Mohawk and the Hudson and New England and the cause. [Prolonged applause.] We who

were born in her lap will not let you forget your debt to the pioneers of Oneida County.

Right on the earliest slope of our college hill a stone becarved with totems notes the secant of the "line of property which by Johnson's treaty of 1768 set a "thus far only" to the East and bounded the perpetual West.

In the earlier days their loving missionary, and thereby strong with the Oneidas in those good diplomacies which in their critical value made Washington and Hamilton and Steuben his friends - Samuel Kirkland, son of Connecticut, came thither again in 1793 to be the founder whom we venerate, and the spirit of whose prayer to "the God of Wisdom" we would ever maintain. There he wrought and there he sleeps.

Where gentlemen, can we turn and not find common ancestors who were strong, true and prophetic? The best of our heritage is our lineage. Only supine ignorance and recreant neglect can alienate it. No anodyne, but a tonic-the story of those sturdy, believing, irreparable men- should tutor our courage while it shames our vanity. [Applause.]

One has shrewdly said: "When a man's talk is mainly of his ancestors, you may know that the best of the family is underground." [Laughter.] That is keen, but it is not true when retrospect teaches humility and stirs emulation. To come here to "garnish the sepulchres of our prophets" may be a sorry self-accusation, or it may be a regenerate pledge to those immortal and ever ennobling issues which their fidelities defined. [Applause.] Let that be true of us each which our Yankee Montaigne said of Landor: "He has examined before he has expatiated." If all the tale has long since been copyrighted, we may at least make repetition original by the accent of a new purpose, by an emphasis that-life, fortune, honorshall add to our forbears- ourselves. No torso of rhetoric shall be such a tribute as the whole resemblance of a manhood that utters an intelligent noblesse oblige.

He was a sapient fellow who thought it "so fortunate that all the great cities had great rivers to run by them:" but when

we merely flatter our Fathers for having ourselves as children we make the same ludicrous inversion of cause and effect. [Laughter and applause.] They are no discovery or invention of ours. They are the rivers, and well may we build by them.

Not about any slender and scantling facts has your society gathered all these years, and these facts are accessible and heroic. Levity ill becomes their gravity. I for one would as soon attempt a parody of the Dies Irae as to make mirth of that manly price which obtained the freedom into which we were born.

A certain sea captain wrote in his log: "The first mate drunk all day." "But," protested that officer, "it was but once for a year, and your record implies that I am a common sot." "Is it true?" asked the captain. "Then let it stand." The mate's turn came to write the log and he set down: "The captain has been sober all day." "What do you mean, sir?" roared the irate shipmaster. "Is it not true!" was the reply. [Laughter.]

We can distort facts by isolating them. We may caricature the Puritan by diverting to the wart of his foibles that heed which we owe to his full-length virtues. It promotes fun and also falsehood. The way in which some cross-eyed critics of these men, who so largely wore their ears snipped, “damn the sins they have no mind to," the sins of austere conviction and of obstinate righteousness, reminds me, in a way, of an authentic story of Pius IX. Il Papa was a wit and a smoker. One day in his private apartments, offering cigars to a group of ecclesiastics, one declined with, "No, Your Holiness, I have not that vice." While the rest looked aghast, the Pope with twinkling speed replied, "Ah, my good Bishop, if it were a vice you would have it." [Laughter.]

There is a temper toward our progenitors which, affecting self-complacency, comes close to the perilous edge of hypocrisy, for cant may also wear silk and dine sumptuously. Of the Puritan life, conquering and to conquer, that may be said which, of the same cause, Beza affirmed to the Queen of Navarre: "May it please Your Majesty to remember, the

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Church of God is an anvil that has worn out many hammers." Our forefathers! Where shall we begin and where end? Seven generations back, and they become sixty-four fathers, (you can do it upon your fingers.) A little further back, and there is no end of them. Please God, there shall be no end. They are "after the order of Melchisedec." But who shall be your Atlas to stand up under this great epic?

Alas! I fear to be as that Methodist minister who ended his sermon: "Brethren, I have had a great subject, but it has caved in on me." [Laughter.]

First, in London, and about 1564, the "Puritans" received the nickname that was to become a talisman. But that for which the name stood, of pureness of public law, of religious ceremonial, of private life, was wider than any Tudor domain. It was international. In the name of the rights of God and of the rights of man, it clamored with divers tongues, and in many lands.

Our forefathers! They were Huguenot, Irish, Scotch, Welsh, and withal they had the sinews of the men of Haarlem and Leyden, of that people who, in both the data and the details of human liberty, were, in 1600, a century in the van; that people who educated for the British throne the logical and moral heir of Cromwell, William III., so far as the miscellaneous line of English royalty goes, a man with few predecessors and no heirs.

But if our fathers-polyglot becoming Pentecost-were all these, they were more-they were themselves. They had descent and precedent; they had also originality. Some things they imported, some things were home-made here. But fully and thankfully owning the composite metal which God has brought out of the crucible, let us take that type of the Puritan which we know best.

Those English apostles of all liberty did not go out from the Church as by fiat established. They were thrust out. And yet, deprived, defamed, proscribed, they were the stanchest upholders of the Crown. It took them sixty bitter years to learn how

brittle is a royal oath and to put no confidence in princes. What that selfish Queen would have made them they could not endure, but with their counsel and their courage they were the surest buttresses of her menaced throne. John Stubbs, printer, was one of them. He had written against the calculating flirtation with that saintly demon, Philip III., and for his offensive plainness was condemned to lose his hand. He wrote a plea as chivalrous as any that Sidney could have penned, that sentence might be revoked: but Elizabeth Tudor never knew pity, and he suffered. Leaping up from that mutilation, John Stubbs waved above his head the stump, spouting blood, and cried, "God Save the Queen! God save the--"and so fainted. That was Puritanism then.

Time wrought. From brave Peter Wentworth in the Commons, in 1572, down thro Eliot and Hampden and Pym, the voice sounded out and on for higher law than prerogative, ever deeper, fuller, more resolute. These men knew bonds and mutilations and the loss of all things. They crowded Bridewell, Newgate and the Fleet. They languished unjudged. They dwelt upon intimate terms with death. They were harried by sceptre and crosier. Bancroft and Whitgift lorded it over God's heritage, but their victims were constant. That bad triumvirate, Finch, Strafford and Laud, tormented them, but the cause grew and multiplied.

Came James I., of odious meanness, of adroit duplicity, of unspeakable profligacy. Came Charles I., that master of indecision-model of stubborn irresolution-that James Buchanan of the seventeenth century. [Laughter and applause.] Charles, called the martyr, supple in equivocation, a liar by wholesale and retail, with a royal disregard of oaths, and a regal incapacity for apprehending that the world was moving. Perfidy, sycophancy, usurpation went on; Star Chamber and Court of High Commission, differing in name only from Inquisition, were blind to the writing on the walls. And Cromwell came, the soul and fist of political puritanism, of whom Taine says: "He was a man struck by the idea of duty." A man after the