Its blind
stirrings, its apparently aimless seeking hither and thither, are but the
driving of an instinct to be done with its parturient function toward
these principles of future life and power. Puritanism, believing itself
quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the
egg of democracy. The English Puritans pulled down church and state to
rebuild Zion on the ruins, and all the while it was not Zion, but
America, they were building. But if their millennium went by, like the
rest, and left men still human; if they, like so many saints and martyrs
before them, listened in vain for the sound of that trumpet which was to
summon all souls to a resurrection from the body of this death which men
call life,--it is not for us, at least, to forget the heavy debt we owe
them. It was the drums of Naseby and Dunbar that gathered the minute-men
on Lexington Common; it was the red dint of the axe on Charles's block
that marked One in our era. The Puritans had their faults. They were
narrow, ungenial; they could not understand the text, "I have piped to
you and ye have not danced," nor conceive that saving one's soul should
be the cheerfullest, and not the dreariest, of businesses. Their
preachers had a way, like the painful Mr.
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