Here are the beginnings of the Revolution.  Every settler’s hearth was a school of independence; the scholars were apt, and the lessons sunk deeply; and thus it came that our country was always free; it could not be other than free.

As deeply seated as was the principle of liberty and resistance to arbitrary power in the breasts of the Puritans, it was not more so than their piety and sense of religious obligation.  They were emphatically a people whose God was the Lord.  Their form of government was as strictly theocratical, if direct communication be excepted, as was that of the Jews; insomuch that it would be difficult to say where there was any civil authority among them entirely distinct from ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

Whenever a few of them settled a town, they immediately gathered themselves into a church; and their elders were magistrates, and their code of laws was the Pentateuch.  These were forms, it is true, but forms which faithfully indicated principles and feelings; for no people could have adopted such forms, who were not thoroughly imbued with the spirit, and bent on the practice, of religion.

God was their King; and they regarded him as truly and literally so, as if he had dwelt in a visible palace in the midst of their state.  They were his devoted, resolute, humble subjects; they undertook nothing which they did not beg of him to prosper; they accomplished nothing without rendering to him the praise; they suffered nothing without carrying their sorrows to his throne; they ate nothing which they did not implore him to bless.

Their piety was not merely external; it was sincere; it had the proof of a good tree in bearing good fruit; it produced and sustained a strict morality.  Their tenacious purity of manners and speech obtained for them, in the mother country, their name of Puritans, which, though given in derision, was as honorable an appellation as was ever bestowed by man on man.

That there were hypocrites among them, is not to be doubted; but they were rare.  The men who voluntarily exiled themselves to an unknown coast, and endured there every toil and hardship for conscience’ sake, and that they might serve God in their own manner, were not likely to set conscience at defiance, and make the service of God a mockery; they were not likely to be, neither were they, hypocrites.  I do not know that it would be arrogating too much for them to say, that, on the extended surface of the globe, there was not a single community of men to be compared with them, in the respects of deep religious impressions and an exact performance of moral duty. 
                                                      F. W. P. Greenwood.

Note.—­The Pentateuch is the first five books of the Old Testament.  The word is derived from two Greek words, (pente), five, and (tenchos), book.

LVIII.  LANDING OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS. (226)