nd left
nothing but Teutonic fields remaining. And then God brought into this
Britain, thus set apart, the gospel of Christ, and our forefathers
became Christians--not Christians such as there were in other parts of
Europe, but having that free and independent Christian life that shone
forth in men like Wyckliffe, denying the power of the keys to Rome
except where Rome spoke with Christ's voice, and in men like Latimer,
before whom the proud Henry trembled.

All over England were sown these seeds of a free Christian faith; so
that when Luther came, it was in England as in our country when the
forest fires have ceased, and suddenly there spring up from the sod a
new forest because the seeds lie in the prairie from age to age. So in
our English soil there were those seeds of Christian freedom that sprung
forth and gave us a free and Protestant England. And then, in the
reaction, when Mary was on the throne, and the fire at Smithfield was
kindled, the Christian men of England went to Geneva and there met John
Calvin, whose system of Christian thought set the soul of man forth, in
his awful agony of sin, and in God's redemption for him--set him forth
independent of kings and rulers, and in 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