whose sight a king was but God’s vassal.  When Englishmen had to come in contact with John Calvin, the iron of his free spirit became steel, and then Puritanism was born, and at that time God raised the curtain that hung over a whole hemisphere, and gave that hemisphere to these free Teutonic English people.  We know how they conquered the country for this free spirit, and how the Revolutionary War came on, and Samuel Adams, awakening to the sound of those cannon at Concord on that spring morning, said, in spite of all the forebodings of a long and deadly struggle, “How glorious is this morning,” because he foresaw what God could work here in a free Christian land.  And so on that following Fourth of July those men assembled in Philadelphia and put forth the Declaration of Independence.  There is no better commentary on it than Lincoln’s words when he said, in those dark days just before the war:  “In their enlightened view nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on or degraded or imbruted by its fellows.”

They set up a beacon for their children and their children’s children.  Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when at some remote time some man, or faction, or interest should arise, and say that none but rich men, or none but white men, or none but Anglo-Saxon white men were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, their children’s children should look back to the Declaration of Independence, and should take heart to begin again the battles their forefathers fought, that thus truth and liberty and righteousness and justice and all the Christian virtues might not be lost in the land; and none might dare limit and circumscribe the principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.  Thus, by these centuries of growth and life God said to our people, “I have given you this key to your history, the union of liberty and an enlightened faith—­faith and freedom.  Be true to these.  This do and thou shalt live.”  It seems plain enough.  And yet, in this garden of liberty there were sown tares.  In the bosom of this free land the deadly foe of freedom, slavery, was here.  In slavery was the evident and necessary foe of all that God had foreplanned for our Nation, because slavery denies the rights of men.  Men tried to deal with this problem; they tried to circumscribe it; they said it was a local question, and Webster stood in the Senate and boasted that he had never spoken of slavery on that floor.  How the way of liberty was choked, how the tree of liberty withered!  And then God spoke in the earthquake, and the fire, the war came on, and the slave was set free; and it seemed as if again we had come into sight of God’s plan for the race, that liberty and Christian faith should be the watchword of our national life.