Men constitute a State, and the character of the State depends upon the character of the men. One of the most impartial foreign judges of our own country is reported to have given, as the result of his study and observation, that the American institutions are good, but the people not good enough to support them. We pray God that this may not prove to be true. But let us run over some of the Elements necessary to National Greatness, and see what among them we possess, and of what we are destitute.

1. In the first place, A GOOD PARENTAGE is requisite. Hereditary qualities may be traced in nations as in individuals. The forty years' history of the Hebrews in the wilderness teaches a lesson of importance. It was necessary that that generation should all die, that they should turn, return, and toil upon their pilgrimage, till the whole race of hereditary bondmen had become extinct; and even then the taint of idolatry and slavery remained in them. Now we may justly love to speak of our parentage as a people. And we may take courage in dwelling upon the love of God in rocking the cradle of our ancestry by storms and discipline, instead of the syren lullaby of a sensual court and a gorgeous hierarchy. If a man is ever to be one of God's great instruments of good to his race, the preparation must be made in laying the foundations of his character. It is too late to seek to form new men for the occasion when the crisis has come, and the habits are already no more than those of ordinary manhood. A man's discipline must commence and go for

ward with the other causes, which God is making to operate for the world's changes, or it cannot be produced in a night. No man can go to sleep a common man, to awake, on the morning of a political or ecclesiastical revolution, a hero or a deep Christian. Napoleon's character was forming with the silent progress of the causes which prepared the French revolution. And Luther's character, by as much greater than Napoleon's as his cause was nobler and holier, was cut as with the point of a diamond, and wrought into its unchanging, steadfast, reliable qualities, in lonely spiritual discipline, in the cloisters at Erfurth. What is true of men is true of nations. The "yoke" must be "borne in the youth," if we would have qualities that shall awe the world in manhood.

The discipline of our ancestors in laying the foundations of many generations in this country, was what we might suppose it would be, if God intended that in the coming era of glory in the world we should be found among the number of his favoured nations, when, in a national sense, God shall "make up his jewels." If ever a free people wrought out an inheritance of liberty through trials, it was our pilgrim ancestors. They went out from one fire into another fire that seemed ready to devour them. What the wolves of despotism and church tyranny had left undone in one hemisphere, the wolves and savages of the woods in another seemed ready to finish. By trials they were prepared for trials. They were the best part of the population of Europe; but it was necessary that in Europe itself they should put off their European taint, and receive those germinating principles, which

be transplanted with them, to rise in a fresh soil above that great growth of underweeds, which otherwise in Europe would have overpowered them.

They were a race that grew out of the noblest principles of the Reformation. Until the Reformation had begun to purify the world, there was no such race in existence; God and man might have looked about in vain for the materials of a virtuous colonization of this country. We cannot help remarking how wonderful was that Divine Providence, which turned aside the ships of Columbus from the Northern Coasts of this great Continent; which kept the forests and the rocks of New England hidden from the world at a time when nothing but the auri sacra fames, the accursed thirst of gold, occupied men's souls; at a time when there was neither religion nor patriotism to colonize a new country, but avarice bigotry, and despotism to oppress it; hidden, until a race of men should be ready for His purposes. "Had New England been colonized immediately on the discovery of the American Continent," says the accomplished native historian of our own country," the old English institutions would have been planted under the powerful influence of the Roman Catholic religion; had the settlement been made under Elizabeth, it would have been before the activity of the popular mind in religion had conducted to a corresponding activity of mind in politics. The Pilgrims were English Protestants; they were exiles for religion; they were men disciplined by misfortune, cultivated by opportunity of external observation, equal in

* Mr. Bancroft.

rank as in rights, and bound by no code but that of religion or the public will." I should add to this, that the public will would no more have bound our Puritan ancestors than private despotism, had they felt it to be opposed to the dictates of religion. And I must reiterate, what we ought never to forget, when the character of the Puritans is in question, that remarkable eulogium bestowed upon them by Hume, – that amidst the absolute authority of the Crown, "the precious spark of liberty had been kindled, and was preserved BY THE PURITANS ALONE; and it is to this sect that the English owe THE WHOLE FREEDOM OF THEIR CONSTITUTION." I wonder at this historian, and with my whole heart I thank him, that with all his partialities and prejudices, he should have penned concerning the Puritans a paragraph of such high, bold, undaunted truth.

As natives of New England, we are proud of the claims of a Puritan and a Protestant ancestry. These two appellatives have comprehended about as much virtue, nobleness, freedom, and piety, as the world is ever likely to witness in combination. And as to the sterner virtues of our Puritan ancestors, which it has become fashionable in some quarters to depreciate, I do not wonder that a sensual world. and a self-indulgent spirit carp at them. "Indeed," said the great Edmund Burke, on a great occasion, "the whole class of the severe and restrictive virtues are at a market almost too high for humanity." Nevertheless, it is by the spirit of those virtues alone, that our institutions can be preserved, or that we, as a people, can be made, what we hope we yet

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may be, the salt of freedom and religion to the world. Our Puritan ancestors were disciplined by self-denial; this comprehends the whole foundation of their character; for selfdenial is, and to fallen beings ever must be, the ground of all virtue. The inheritance which, in the exercise of "the severe and restrictive virtues," they procured for us by suffering, can be preserved by us, or imparted to the world, only through a participation in the same discipline. Luxury on our part, and sarcasms on our fathers' virtues, will never do it.

2. One of the qualities which distinguished our Puritan ancestors was A HIGH REGARD FOR THE WORD OF GOD and high views of its inspiration. This is one of the qualities, by which, as the world approaches its state of glory, nations must be distinguished as well as men. This quality must be a national element, above all sectarianism, entering into all developements of national life, in whatever organizations, but especially in Common Schools. Our common schools are to the nation what the lungs are to the body; and any foul or bitter elements that enter into them will be followed by disease and paleness in our national existence. A pure atmosphere of divine truth is as necessary to the health and life of these national vitalities, as a due quantity of oxygen to the physical play of the lungs. Suffer your schools to be turned from their noble purposes for party ends, or to be defrauded of the Word of God, and you put the seeds of consumption in the vital organs of your country; sooner or later the fruits