thies, to the throne of the Infinite,
from which, in his low, fettered, and sinful estate, he is an alien; and
all this through the love and mercy of the Infinite One Himself. This I
conceive to be the true intent and glorious result of Christianity, when
allowed to have free and unimpeded action on the soul of man. It will
be seen to be wellnigh limitless--a power adequate to the work to be
accomplished, and in this sense is truly 'the power of God and the
wisdom of God.' This power is dominant, either consciously or
unconsciously, over every relation of life in New England, being
interwoven in the very life of her institutions. I believe this secret,
quiet, yet active, all-pervading influence is very little understood,
and yet it will explain much in the Puritan character that no other key
will unlock. I have mentioned a pure morality, which is the effect,
before a pure Christianity, which is the cause, simply because the
effect is more obvious at first glance.

The third great characteristic of the Puritan idea is a _pure
republicanism_. In the largest sense, I hold this also to be the effect
of the one just mentioned; for, if tested, the whole spirit and tone of
Christianity are republican. On New England soil, from the hour when the
little band of pilgrim heroes first set foot on an inhospitable shore,
by their footprints upon it making a barren rock a holy shrine for the
world's love and veneration, has ever been a sure refuge, a very
palladium of republican institutions, of human liberties. It was not
alone its religious tendencies that excited the persecution and
detestation of Puritanism in the Old World which gave impulse to the
resolution to transplant themselves to a land where freedom, if nothing
else, was to be found. It was equally as much its republican and
democratic theories. Souls made free by the spirit of the Lord, as the
souls of those grand old Puritans were, could no more brook the tyranny
of the Charleses and Georges of Britain, and so, through blood and fire
and sword and chains, was the germ of liberty borne across the watery
waste, to be sown anew, as they thought and proposed, in the genial soil
of the region bordering on the Hudson, but, as God willed it, in the
perverse and barren soil of rockbound, sea-washed New England. Truly
this was a novel spectacle. Never in the history of peoples before was
it seen that a bare idea was strong enough to lay the foundations of a
great state, through