as got weapons and
sinews; it has firearms, war-navies; it has cunning in its ten fingers,
strength in its right arm; it can steer ships, fell forests, remove
mountains;--it is one of the strongest things under this sun at present!

In the history of Scotland, too, I can find properly but one epoch:
we may say, it contains nothing of world-interest at all but this
Reformation by Knox. A poor barren country, full of continual broils,
dissensions, massacrings; a people in the last state of rudeness and
destitution; little better perhaps than Ireland at this day. Hungry
fierce barons, not so much as able to form any arrangement with each
other _how to divide_ what they fleeced from these poor drudges; but
obliged, as the Colombian Republics are at this day, to make of every
alteration a revolution; no way of changing a ministry but by hanging
the old ministers on gibbets: this is a historical spectacle of no very
singular significance! "Bravery" enough, I doubt not; fierce fighting in
abundance: but not braver or fiercer than that of their old Scandinavian
Sea-king ancestors; _whose_ exploits we have not found worth dwelling
on! It is a country as yet without a soul: nothing developed in it but
what is rude, external, semi-animal. And now at the Reformation, the
internal life is kindled, as it were, under the ribs of this outward
material death. A cause, the noblest of causes kindles itself, like a
beacon set on high; high as Heaven, yet attainable from Earth;--whereby
the meanest man becomes not a Citizen only, but a Member of Christ's
visible Church; a veritable Hero, if he prove a true man!

Well; this is what I mean by a whole "nation of heroes;" a _believing_
nation. There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a
god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great
soul! The like has been seen, we find. The like will be again seen,
under wider forms than the Presbyterian: there can be no lasting good
done till then.--Impossible! say some. Possible? Has it not _been_, in
this world, as a practiced fact? Did Hero-worship fail in Knox's case?
Or are we made of other clay now? Did the Westminster Confession of
Faith add some new property to the soul of man? God made the soul
of man. He did not doom any soul of man to live as a Hypothesis and
Hearsay, in a world filled with such, and with the fatal work and fruit
of such--!

But to return: This that Knox did for his Nation, I say, we may re