A NEW INSPIRATION.

Recognizing, as historical fidelity has compelled us to do, the great facts of the limitation, if not the exhaustion, of all the important forces which have passed before us, it is time to bring prominently forward that power, which, released from outward restrictions, and brought into thorough legitimate action, would complete the liberation of the American mind, and, by vitalizing and organizing liberty, prepare it for its mission of power among men.

The Bible was the great book of the Puritans. They received it as the revelation of God, and would allow no man to shut it, or wrest it from them. It was everywhere with them. In its light they undertook to form their system of government, their churches, and their schools. Whatever of traditional bigotry they had inherited, or of proscriptive exclusiveness had arisen from the recoil of their free spirits from the assaults of persecution, the pure truth of the Bible would work quietly, but steadily and bravely, against it. Their tendency to rigid formalism it would antagonize; and, so far as the free consent and the trusting faith of individuals would allow, it would bring to their souls the power of the atonement, and the new life" born of the Spirit."

To a large extent, this power from above pervaded the masses, and gave them the right to say, "This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." Sufficient introversion, and a clear, strong development of this force, would have given them liberty completed: undue attention to the external and to the outward battles of technical Puritanism brought them to their limits, and demanded help.

Many of the Puritans were Presbyterians. They came in considerable numbers about the commencement of the civil war in England, and at the period of the Restoration. The Dutch who began the settlement of New York were Presbyterians; the Germans who came into Pennsylvania and Northern Virginia were generally Presbyterians; the Hu

guenots from France were nearly all Calvinists and Presbyterians. All these had separate organizations corresponding with their traditions in the Old World. They assumed different names accordingly, but were all Presbyterian in distinction from Episcopal. From Scotland and Ireland came multitudes of very devout but very rigid Presbyterians. The first presbytery was organized in Philadelphia in 1705. In these incipient churches was much of the indomitable, unconquerable spirit of the Scotch Presbyterians, but also the devout glowing piety of John Knox and the martyr-heroes of the Reformation.

Here we identify again the vital power which liberated the soul from the fetters of sin, and which bore heavily against the bondage of Puritanism. Practically independent of all limitations, the great preachers and noble laymen of this church moved into the future with the blast of freedom sounding from their lips; and extensive revivals, and the consequent extension of liberty, showed that from this great evangelical communion would come large accessions to the common vital power which would emancipate the nation.

The Episcopal Church, trammelled by State prerogatives, and fearfully restricted by formalism and aristocratic pretensions, nevertheless bore in its bosom much of the life of God, a part of which had come down from the days of Cranmer and Latimer, Burnet and Butler, but a much larger proportion of which came from the great revival of the eighteenth century. Its extremes would repel each other; but the church of the Wesleys, of Oglethorpe, and of Bishops White and Hobart, would make large contributions to the aggregation of spiritual power which would contend mightily with the intolerance of caste, and give most effective aid to the nation struggling to be free.

The life of God in the soul of the devout Quaker wrought powerfully on the same side.

The Baptists, in their fervent piety and native independence, contained in large measure the spirit which was des

tined to achieve completed liberty for the American nation. They were at first chiefly from Wales, then from England and the Continent; but, from whatever country they came, they loved liberty. If there were tendencies to exclusiveness in any of their doctrines and their single mode of baptism, these were practically overcome by the deep and earnest spirit of piety, which, by inevitable laws, connected them with the goodly fellowship of believers everywhere, and with the freedom-side of all the great controversies of Church and State.

The great Roger Williams, though, as we have seen, deemed irregular in his views and acts with regard to the baptismal succession, was nevertheless, in a strong sense, a Baptist. Concerning him and his brethren, Chief Justice Story said, "In the code of laws established by them in Rhode Island, we read, for the first time since Christianity ascended the throne of the Cæsars, the declaration that conscience should be free, and men should not be punished for worshipping God in the way they were persuaded he requires."

Let me now be distinctly understood. Ecclesiastical organizations may, in their peculiar structure and sectarian cast, be for or against the doctrines of liberty; but, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made them free, they are not sectarian, they are not exclusive. This we have identified in all as the common life-force by which God intended to organize, perfect, and develop civil and religious freedom on this continent for the world. Its origin was divine, its channel the Bible, and its scope the world. There is yet another grand historical development of this common life-force of the Great Republic.

Now let us look to England again. "Man's extremity," says Augustine, "is God's opportunity." "While Secker was deploring the demoralization of England, as threatening to 'become absolutely fatal,' and the aged Burnet saw imminent ruin hanging over the Church' and over the whole

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Reformation; while Watts was writing that 'religion was dying in the world,' and Butler, that it had come to be taken for granted that Christianity was no longer a subject of inquiry, but at length was discovered to be fictitious;' when, in fine, the Anglican Church had become an ecclesiastical system, under which the people of England had lapsed into heathenism, and nonconformity was rapidly in course to be found nowhere but in books;' and meanwhile, across the Channel, rationalistic infidelity was invading the strongholds of the Reformation, and the French philosophers were spreading moral contagion through Europe, God was preparing the means, apparently disconnected, but providentially coincident, which were to resuscitate the 'dying' faith, and introduce the era of modern evangelism in the Protestant world."* From Oxford came an indigent student, who, by faith in Jesus, after lying prostrate on the ground for whole days in silent or vocal prayer, had received a new life from heaven.

This was George Whitefield, soon to become the greatest preacher of his age. His rebukes of sin in high places were too scathing, and his appeals to the conscience too overwhelming, for the churches: and it was well; for no church could hold his audiences. Ten, fifteen, and even twenty thousand anxious human beings gathered in the fields to hear from his lips the way of salvation by faith. The Holy Spirit fired his great soul with a zeal which no ocean or continent could limit. Scarcely had the echoes of his voice died away in England before it broke upon the ears of New England, rousing the slumbering " orthodoxy" of " the standing order," and pouring a new life-current through the masses from Maine to Georgia. Back and forward over the ocean and the continents this wonderful man flew like the wind, until it seemed that he was the very angel of the Apocalypse, "having the everlasting gospel to preach unto men."

This was the very spirit which moved the great Edwards, and the multitudes around him, during "the great awakening;" which gave such zeal and holy power to Payson and

* Stevens's History of Methodism, i. 33.

the Tennants, causing thousands to cry out for mercy, and then to triumph in "the blood of the Lamb." These great revivalists were of the school of Calvin in divinity: and thus God brought the powerful principle of "soul-liberty" to wrestle with the assumed limitations of the will in the same individuals; and the limitations, however firmly guarded by careful logic, opposed no effective resistance to the power of a free gospel and a triumphant faith. Whatever might be the metaphysics of freedom, and whatever its relations to God's plans, it was nevertheless a great fact, which was now rapidly translating itself into action, and opening a new world to the American mind.

A little English boy had been snatched from the upper window of a house in flames. His mother had, with special devotion and remarkable grasp of intellect, consecrated him henceforth to God. He had become a student at Oxford, and then an awakened sinner, and then a missionary to Georgia, "to convert the Indians," as he supposed, but, in God's purposes, to bring him into communication with Peter Bohler, and the spirit of deep and living German piety. He was at length at home a new man, and before the gathered multitudes in groves and fields, proclaiming "liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound."

The whole kingdom was moved. The Anglican Church received a new infusion of spiritual life; the missionary spirit was roused. Wesley was in Ireland. Many received the word which was in demonstration of the "Spirit and of power." Barbara Heck and Philip Embury were among them. They had fled from Romish persecutions in the Palatinate in Germany; but God brought them thence in time to receive. the new life through the labors of this great evangelist. And they were soon in John Street, New York. Humbly they sought to win the approbation of Heaven, and the souls of men, by proclaiming the "liberty wherewith Christ had made them free." In October, 1766, these servants of the