Lancaster daily intelligencer. [volume] (Lancaster, Pa.) 1864-1928, 1885-06-09
PURITAN PRINCIPLES.
THEIR EFFECT ON THE DIFFERENT
EPOCRS OF THE REPUBLIC.
Extracts from the Address by George william
Curtis at the Unwilling of the Pilgrim
statue Presented Ia New York City by
tho New England Society.

IlITtcle vi tHS sCtiiO Wbunu us Ills hauuy WV n
lss wrought Here upon this teeming island n
he children of New Netherlands and of New
England have together built the metropolis 8
If the continent, the far shining monument Il
Of their united energy, enterprise and skill | U
Together at the head of yonder river, richer
in romance and legend than any American | G
stream, the Puritan and the Hollander with :
their associate colonists meditated the :
American Union. Together in this city, In
the stamp act Congress, they defed the
power of Great Britain I; and once more, upon
the Hudson, the Puritan and tho Cavalier
and the Hollander, born again as Americans,
resistlessly envcloped and overwhelmed the
army Of Burgoyne, and in his surrender
beheld the end of British authority in the
colonies. Here, then, shall tho statue stand, |
imperishable memorial of imperishable
friendship; blending the heroic memories of
two worlds and two epochs, the soldier OF the
Netherlands the soldier of old England and
the soldier Of New England, at different
times and under different conditions, but
with the same unconGuerable enthusiasm and
courage battling for liberty.
GO If ever England had an heroic age II was
that which began by supporting the Tudor IN
his rupture with Rome, then asserted MS
own logical principle against his daughters |
claim, and after a tremendous contest ended
by seeing the last of the Stuart Kings exiled
forever an impotcnt pensioner OF France
This was the age of Puritan England, the
England in which liberty finally organized
itself in constitutional forms 50 flexible and |
enduring that for nearly two centuries the |
internal peace of the kingdom, however |
threatened and alarmed, has never been |
broken Tho modern England that we
know is the England of the Puritan en-
larged, liberalized graced, adorned = the
England which, despite all cstrangement ana
| jealousy and misunderstanding, despite The
alienation of the Revolutionary and OF the
second war, the buzz of cockney gnats, aud
| ntli nj In ptir civ IL
| ilict, is still the mother country OF our dis
| tinctive America, the mother of our language
| and its literature, of our characteristic ma
tional impulse, and of the great muniments
| OF our individual liberty. TO what land upon
| the globe beyond his own shall the country
man of Washington turn with pride and en-,
thusasm and sympathy, If not to the land oi
John Seldcn and John Hampden aud John
| Milton, and what realm shall touch so deeply
| the heart of the fellow-citizen OF Abraham
| Lincoln IA that whose soil, and long before
| our own, was too sacred for the fOOtsiep OF
| slave? She is not the mother Of dead EN-
pires, but of tho greatest political descendant
| that ever the world knew. Our own Revolu-
| ton was the defense Of England against her
self She has sins enough to answer for
| But while Greece gave US art and Rome gave
us law, in the very blood that beats in our
hearts and throbs along our veins England
gavo us liberty.
NOT sANCrIMoNIous sECTARIANIsM.
awe must not think of Puritanism as
mere acrid defiance and sanctimonious sec
tarianism, nor of the Puritans as "A band oi
, | ignorant and half crazy zealots. Yet mainly
from the vindctive caricature of n voluptu
Gus court and seryile age is derived the
: | popular conception of tho Puritan. Iio was
d only slandered by Ben Johnson's 'Tribula
@ ton Wholesome and Zeal Land Busy.
The Puritan of whom Macaulay, following
> Hume, said that he hated bear batting, no
, because it gave pain to the bear, but because
l Il to tln ntnrnr 4
"a Puritan of tho plays Of Charles IL, wher
: Shakespeare had been replaced by Aphri
, | Behn, and the object of the acted drama wa
/, to stimulate passion palled by indulgence
= and taste brutalized by debauchery. 1t i
not the futile ribaldry of fop5 and frbbles, O
c courtiers and courtesans, of religious SLAYER,
r and political despotisn, whose fatal spel
r. over England the Puritan had broken Tor
Of ever, which can truly portray the Puritan
g. He apprehended his own principle, indeed
10 often blindly, often narrowly, never II
" its utmost amplitude and splepdoi
y The historic Puritan was a man OF the seven
o. teenth century, not of the nineteenth. III
y. saw through glass darkly, but he saw. Th
ro acorn is not yet tho oak, tho well spring
~ not yet the river. But AZ tho harvest
III folded in the seed, so the largest freedom
~ political and religious liberty, not federation
le | not permission, not endurance, but the rigi
Of absolute individual liberty, subject onl
to the equal right of Others, is the ripene
at fruit of the Puritan principle.
to "Ihe Puritan came 10 America Scckin
so freedom TO worship God. He meant onl
M freedom TO worship God in his own way, nC
- in the Quaker way, not i'm the Baptist way
or not the Church of England way, but tii
seed that he brought was immortal. II
. purpose was TO feed with it his own barn
I'd yard fowl, but it quickened into an illin
MT table forest covering contne mt
ar | grateful shade, the home of every bird tn;
1t | flies. Freedom to worship God is univers;
lie freedom, tree state ~ well as free churci
~ and that was the ineXorable but unconsciot
20 logic of Puritansm. Holding that the trt
% rule of religious faith and worship was wri
ne ten in the Bible, and that every man mu
" read and judge for himself the Puritan col
ed ceived the church as body of independei
ril seekers and interpreters of the truth, dispei
or sing with priests and priestly orders and fun
\, tons organizing itself and calling no ma
IL master. But this sense of equality befo
lg God and toward each other in the religion
re congregation, affecting and adjusting Il
he highest and most eternal OF all huma
ut | relations, that of man to his Maker, appli,
he itself instinctively to the relation of man
man in human society, and thus populi
government flowed out of the Reform
ton, and the republic became the nat
raj political expression of PuritanisI
'l- Banished, moreover, by the pitiess Englis
81 persecution, the Puritans, eXiles and poor
til | a foreign land, IA colony in Holland beio
is they were colony in America, were con
~ | PEELED to seltgovernment, 10 a common syn
:, pathy and support to bearing one another
Is burdens, and so by the stern experience
or actual life they We're trained in the virtu,
SIX | most essential for the fuliillment OF the
IL august but unimagined destiny. The patrio
90 Of the Continental Congress seemed to Lor
nd Chatham imposing beyond the lawgivers
in Greece and Rome. The constitutional col
"a vention hundred years ago was an assembl
er SO wise that its accomplished work is reve
,i- emily received by continuous generations
| the children of Israel received the tables
N the law which Moses brought down from I'll
it holy mount. Happy, thrice happy, the peop
or | which to such scenes in their history can ad
be the simple grandeur of the spectacle in tl
" cabin of the Mayflower, the Puritans signin
Int the compact which was but the formal o,
nd preston of the government that voluntaril
"a they had established-the scene which make
lie Plymouth Rock a stepping stone from til
ID freedom of the solitary Alps and the di
err | puted liberties of England to the fully d,
ne veloped constitutional and well-ordered +,
public of the United States.
THE PURITAN IN THE SECOND EPOCH.
"ln our second historical epoch, that
the Union, the essential controversy, undo
X whatever plea and disguise, was that of tn
fundamental principle of free government
W with social, political and industrial syster
TO which that principle was absolutely hos
!, tile. There was but one force which coul
" oppose the vast and accumulated power G
4. slavery in this country, and that was tn
l. L.. Il.