I THANK GOD for John Calvin. To be sure, he burned Servetus;
but the Puritans, or at least, their immediate descendants, hung the witches;
George Washington held slaves; and wherever you go up and down history, you
find men, not angels. Of course, you find imperfect men; but you find great
men; men who have marked their own age, and moulded the succeeding; men to
whose might, daring, and to whose disinterested suffering for those about them,
the succeeding generations owe the larger share of their blessings; men whose
lips and lives God has made the channel through which his choicest gifts come
to their fellow-beings. John Calvin was one of these — perhaps the profoundest
intellect of his day; certainly, one of the largest statesmen of his
generation. His was the statesmanlike mind that organized Puritanism, that put
ideas into the shape of institutions, and in that way organized victory, when,
under Loyola, Catholicism, availing itself of the shrewdest and keenest
machinery, made its reactive assault upon the new idea of the Protestant
religion. If in that struggle Western Europe came out victorious, we owe it
more to the statesmanship of Calvin than to the large German heart of Luther.
We owe to Calvin — at least it is not unfair to claim, nor improbable in the
sequence of events to suppose, that a large share of those most eminent and
excellent characteristics of New England, which have made her what she is, and
saved her for the future, came from the brain of John Calvin.
Luther's biography is to be read in books. The plodding
patience of the German intellect has gathered up every trait and every trifle —
the minutest — of his life, and you may read it spread out with loving
admiration on a thousand pages of biography. Calvin's life is written, in
Scotland and New England, in the triumphs of the people against priestcraft and
power. To him, more than to any other man, the Puritans owed Republicanism —
the Republicanism of the Church. The instinct of his own day recognized that
clearly distinguishing this element of Calvinism. You see it in the wit of
Charles the Second, when he said, "Calvinism is a religion unfit for a
gentleman." It was unfit for a gentleman of that day; for it was a
religion of the people. It recognized — first since the earliest centuries of
Christianity — that the heart of God beats through every human heart, and that
when you mass up the millions, with their instinctive, fair-play sense of
right, and their devotional impulses, you get nearer God's heart than from the
second-hand scholarship and conservative tendency of what are called the
thoughtful and educated classes. We owe this element, good or bad, to
Calvinism.
Then we owe to it a second element, marking the Puritans
most largely, and that is — action. The Puritan was not a man of
speculation. He originated nothing. His principles are to be found broadcast in
the centuries behind him. His speculations were all old. You might find them in
the lectures of Abelard; you meet with them in the radicalism of Wat Tyler; you
find them all over the continent of Europe. The distinction between his case
and that of others was, simply, that he practised what he believed. He believed
God. He actually believed him, just as much as
if he saw demonstrated before his eyes the truth of the principle. For it is a
very easy thing to say; the difficulty is to do. If you
tell a man the absolute truth, that if he will plunge into the ocean, and only
keep his eyes fixed on heaven, he will never sink you can demonstrate it to him
— you can prove it to him by weight and measure — each man of a thousand will
believe you, as they say; and then they will plunge into the water, and nine
hundred and ninety-nine will throw up their arms to clasp some straw or
neighbor, and sink; the thousandth will keep his hands by his body, believing
God, and float — and he is the Puritan. Every other man wants to get hold of
something to stay himself; not on faith in God's eternal principle of natural
or religious law, but on his neighbor; he wants to lean on somebody; he wants
to catch hold of something. The Puritan puts his hands to his side and his eyes
upon heaven, and floats down the centuries Faith personified.
These two elements of Puritanism are, it seems to me, those
which have made New England what she is. You see them every where developing
into institutions. For instance, if there is any thing that makes us, and that
made Scotland, it is common schools. We got them from Geneva. Luther said,
"A wicked tyrant is better than a wicked war." It was the essence of
aristocracy: "Better submit to any evil from above than trust the
masses." Calvin no sooner set his foot in Geneva than he organized the
people into a constituent element of public affairs. He planted education at
the root of the Republic. The Puritans borrowed it in Holland, and brought it
to New England, and it is the sheet-anchor that has held us amid the storms and
the temptations of two hundred years. We have a people that can think; a people
that can read; and out of the millions of refuse lumber, God selects one in a
generation, and he is enough to save a State. One man that thinks for himself
is the salt of a generation poisoned with printing ink or cotton dust. The
Puritans scattered broadcast the seeds of thought. They knew it was an error,
in counting up the population, to speak of a million of souls because
there were a million of bodies — as if every man carried a soul! — but
they knew, trusting the mercy of God, that by educating all, the martyrs and
the saints — that do not travel in battalions, nor ever come to us in
regiments, but come alone, now and then one — would be reached and unfolded,
and save their own times. Puritanism, therefore, is action; it is
impersonating ideas; it is distrusting and being willing to shake off, at
fitting times, what are called institutions. They were above words; they went
out into the wilderness, outside of forms. The consequence was that, throughout
their whole history, there is the most daring confidence in being substantially
right. They asked not of safety; they never were frightened by appearances;
they did the substantially right thing, and left the statesmen of a hundred
years after, at a safe distance, to find out the reasons why they were right.
The consequence is that, when conservatism comes together to-day, whether in
the form of a "Union meeting" — dead men turning in their graves and
pretending to be alive — whether it be in this form or any other, its
occupation is to explain how, a hundred years ago, the course taken was right,
and not to see the reflection of a hundred years ago staring them in the face
to-day. Like the sitting figure on our coin, they are looking back-they have no
eyes for the future. The souls that God touches have their brows gilded by the
dawn of the future. A man present at the glorious martyrdom of
the 2d of December, said of the hero-saint who marched out of the jail,
"He seemed to come, his brow radiant with triumph." It was the dawn
of a future day that gilded his brow. He was high enough, in the providence of
God, to catch, earlier than the present generation, the dawn of the day that he
was to inaugurate.
This is my idea of Puritan principles.
Nothing new in them. How are we to vindicate them? Eminent
historians and patriots have told us that the pens of the Puritans are their
best witnesses. It does not seem to me so. We are their witnesses. If they
lived to any purpose, they produced a generation better than themselves. The
true man always makes himself to be outdone by his child. The vindication of
Puritanism is a New England bound to be better than Puritanism; bound to look
back and see its faults and meet the exigencies of the present day, not with
stupid imitation, but with that essential disinterestedness, that faith in right
and God, with which they met the exigencies of their time. Take an
illustration. When our fathers stood in London, under the corporation charter
of Charles, the question was, "Have we a right to remove to
Massachusetts?" The lawyers said, "No." The fathers said,
"Yes; we will remove to Massachusetts, and let law find the reason fifty
years hence." They knew that they had the substantial right. Their motto
was not "Law and Order"; it was "God and Justice" — a much
better motto. Unless you take "Law and Order" in the highest meaning
of the words, it is a base motto — if it means only recognizing the majority.
"Crime," says Victor Hugo, "comes to history gilded and crowned,
and says, 'I am not crime; I am success." And history, written by a soul
girded with parchments and stunned with half a dozen languages, says,
"Yes, thou art success; we accept thee." But the faithful
soul below cries out, "Thou art crime! Avaunt!" There is so much in
words.
This is the lesson of Puritanism—how shall we meet it
to-day? Every age stereotypes its ideas into forms. It is the natural tendency;
and when it is done, every age grows old and dies. It is God's beneficent
providence — death When ideas have shaped themselves and become fossil and
still, God takes off the weight of the dead men from their age, and leaves room
for the new bud. It is a blessed institution — death! But there are men running
about who think that those forms, which the old and the experience of the past
have left them, are necessarily right and indispensable. They are
Conservatives. The men who hold their ears open for the message of the present
hour, they are the Puritans.
I know these things seem very trite; they are very
trite. All truth is trite. The difficulty is not in truth. Truth never stirs up
any trouble mere speculative truth. Plato taught— nobody cared what he taught;
Socrates applied truth in the streets, and they poisoned him. It is when a man
throws himself against society that society is startled to persecute and to
think. The Puritan did not stop to think. He recognized God in his soul,
and acted. If he acted wrong, our generation would load down his
grave with curses. He took the risk. He took the curses of the
present, but the blessings of the future swept them away, and God's sunlight
rests upon his grave. That is what every brave man does. It is an easy
thing to say. The old fable is of Sysiphus rolling up a stone,
and the moment he gets it up to the mountain top, it rolls back again. So each
generation, with much trouble, and great energy and disinterestedness,
vindicates for a few of its sons the right to think; and the moment they have
vindicated the right, the stone rolls back again — nobody else must think! The
battle must be fought every day, because the body rebels against the soul. It
is the insurrection of the soul against the body-free thought. The gods piled
Ætna upon the insurgent Titans. It is the emblem of the world piling mountains—banks,
gold, cotton, parties, Everetts, Cushings, Couriers — every
thing dull and heavy—to keep down thought. And ever again, in each generation,
the living soul, like the bursting bud, throws up the incumbent soil, and finds
its way to the sunshine and to God; and is the oak of the future, leafing out,
spreading its branches, and sheltering the race and time that is to come.
I hold in my hand the likeness of a child of seventeen
summers, taken from the body of a boy, her husband, who lies buried on the
banks of the Shenandoah. He flung himself against a State for an idea; the
child of a father who lived for an idea; who said, "I know that Slavery is
wrong; thou shalt do unto another as thou wouldst have another do
to thee" — and flung himself against the law and order of his time.
Nobody can dispute his principles. There are men who dispute his acts. It is
exactly what he meant they should do. It is the collision of admitted
principles with conduct which is the teaching of ethics; it is the Normal
school of a generation. Puritanism went up and down England and fulfilled its
mission. It revealed despotism. Charles the First and James, in order to rule,
were obliged to persecute. Under the guise of what seemed government, they had
hidden tyranny. Patriotism tore off the mask, and said to the enlightened
conscience and sleeping intellect of England, "Behold! that is
despotism!" It was the first lesson; it was the text of the English
Revolution. Men still slumbered in submission to law. They tore off the
semblance of law; they revealed despotism. John Brown has done the same for us
to-day. The Slave system has lost its fascination. It had a certain picturesque
charm for some. It called itself "chivalry," and "a state."
One assault has broken the charm—it is Despotism! Look how barbarous it is!
Take a single instance. A young girl throws herself upon the bosom of a
Northern boy, who himself had shown mercy, and endeavors to save him from the
Christian rifles of Virginia. They tore her off, and the pitiless bullet found
its way to the brave young heart. She stands upon the streets of that very town,
and dare not avow the motive—glorious, humane instinct—that led her to throw
herself on the bosom of the hapless boy! She bows to the despotism of a brutal
State, and makes excuses for her humanity! That is the Christian Virginia of
1859. In 1608, an Indian girl flung herself before her father's tomahawk on the
bosom of an English gentleman, and the Indian refrained from touching the
traveller whom his daughter's affection protected. Pocahontas lives to-day, the
ideal beauty of Virginia, and her proudest names strive to trace their lin eage
to the brave Indian girl. That was Pagan Virginia, two centuries and a half
ago.
What has dragged her down from Pocahontas in 1608 to John
Brown in 1859, when humanity is disgraceful, and despotism treads it out under
its iron heel? — who revealed it? One brave act of an old Puritan soul, that
did not stop to ask what the majority thought, or what forms were, but acted.
The revelation of despotism is the great lesson which the Puritan of our month
has taught us. He has flung himself, under the instinct of a great idea,
against the institutions beneath which we sit; and he says, practically, to the
world, as the Puritan did, "If I am a felon, bury me with curses. I will
trust to a future age to judge betwixt you and me. Posterity will summon the
State to judgment, and will admit my principle. I can wait." Men say it is
anarchy; that this right of the individual to sit in judgment cannot be
trusted. It is the lesson of Puritanism. If the individual, criticising law,
cannot be trusted, then Puritanism is a mistake; for the sanctity of individual
judgment is the lesson of Massachusetts history in 1620 and '30. We accepted anarchy
as the safest. The Puritan said, "Human nature is sinful"; so the
earth is accursed since the Fall; but I cannot find any thing better than this
old earth to build on; I must put up my corner-stone upon it, cursed as it is;
I cannot lay hold of the battlements of heaven." So Puritanism said,
"Human nature is sinful; but it is the best basis we have got. We will
build upon it, and we will trust the influences of God, the inherent
gravitation of the race towards right, that it will end right."
I affirm that this is the lesson of our history: that the
world is fluid; that we are on the ocean; that we cannot get rid of the people,
and we do not want to; that the millions are our basis; and that God has set us
this task: "If you want good institutions, do not try to bulwark out the
ocean of popular thought—educate it. If you want good laws, earn them."
Conservatism says, "I can make my own hearthstone safe: I can build a
bulwark of gold and bayonets about it high as heaven and deep as hell, and
nobody can touch me, and that is enough." Puritanism says, "It
is a delusion; it is a refuge of lies; it is not safe. The waters of popular
instinct will carry it away. If you want your own cradle safe, make the cradle
of every other man safe and pure. Educate the people up to the law you
want." How? They cannot stop for books—show them manhood—show them a brave
act. What has John Brown done for us? The world doubted over the horrid word
"insurrection," whether the victim had a right to arrest the course
of his master, and, even at any expense of blood, to vindicate his rights; and
Brown said to his neighbors in the old school-house at North Elba, sitting
among the snows—where nothing grows but men—wheat freezes—"I can go South,
and show the world that he has a right to rise and can rise." He went,
girded about by his household, carrying his sons with him. Proof of a life
devoted to an idea! Not a single spasmodic act of greatness, coming out with no
background, but the flowering of sixty years. The proof of it, that every thing
around him grouped itself harmoniously, like the planets around the central
sun. He went down to Virginia, took possession of a town, and held it. He says,
"You thought this was strength; I demonstrate it is weakness. You thought
this was civil society; I show you it is a den of pirates." Then he turned
around in his sublimity, with his Puritan devotional heart, and said to the
millions, "Learn!" And God lifted a million hearts to his gibbet, as
the Roman cross lifted a million of hearts to it, in that divine sacrifice of
two thousand years ago. To-day, more than a statesman could have taught in
seventy years, one act of a week has taught these eighteen millions of people.
What shall it teach us? "Go thou and do likewise."
Do it, by a resolute life. Do it, by a fearless rebuke. Do it, by preaching the
sermon of which this act is the text. Do it, by standing by the great example
which God has given us. Do it, by tearing asunder the veil of respectability
which covers brutality, calling itself law. We had a "Union meeting"
in this city a while ago. For the first time for a quarter of a century,
political brutality dared to enter the sacredness of the sick chamber, and
visit with ridicule the broken intellect, sheltered from criticism under the
cover of sickness. Never, since I knew Boston, has any lip, however embittered,
dared to open the door which God's hand had closed, making the inmate sacred,
as he rested in broken health. The four thousand men who sat beneath the
speaker are said to have received it in silence. If so, it can only be that
they were not surprised at the brutality from such lips. And those who sat at
his side—they judge us by our associates—they criticise us, in general, for the
loud word of any comrade—shall we take the scholar of New England, and drag him
down to the level of the brutal Swiss of politics, and judge
him indecent because his associates were indecent? Gladly do I seize the
opportunity of protesting, in the name of Boston decency, against the brutal
language of a man,—thank God, not born on our peninsula,—against the noble and
benighted intellect of Gerrit Smith, whom God bless with new health.
On that occasion, too, a noble island was calumniated. The
New England scholar, bereft of every thing else on which to arraign the great
movement in Virginia, takes up a lie about St. Domingo, and hurls it in the
face of an ignorant audience—ignorant, because no man ever thought it worth
while to do justice to the negro. Edward Everett would be the last to allow us
to take an English version of Bunker Hill, to take an Englishman's account of
Hamilton and Washington, when they ordered the scaffold of Andre, and read it
to an American audience as a faithful description of the scene. But when he
wants to malign a race, he digs up from the prejudice of an enemy they had
conquered a forgotten lie—showing how weak was the cause he espoused, when the
opposite must be assailed with falsehood, for it could not be assailed with any
thing else. I said that they had gone to sleep, and only turned in their graves
— those men in Faneuil Hall. It was not wholly true. The chairman came
down from the heart of the Commonwealth, and spoke to Boston safe words in
Faneuil Hall, for which he would have been lynched at Richmond, had he uttered
them there that evening. I rejoice that a hunker cannot live in Massachusetts,
without being wider awake than he imagines. He must imbibe fanaticism.
Insurrection is epidemic in the State; treason is our inheritance. The Puritans
planted it in the very structure of the State; and when their children try to
curse a martyr, like the prophet of old, half the curse, at least, turns into a
blessing. I thank God for that Massachusetts! Let us not blame our neighbors
too much. There is something in the very atmosphere that stands above the ashes
of the Puritans, that prevents the very most servile of hearts from holding a
meeting which the despots of Virginia can relish. It is a hard task to be
servile within forty miles of Plymouth. They have not learned the part; with
all their wish, they play it awkwardly. It is the old, stiff Puritan
trying to bend, and they do it with a marvellous lack of grace. I read encouragement
in the very signs—the awkward attempts made to resist this very
effort of the glorious martyr of the Northern hills of New York. Virginia
herself looks into his face and melts; she has nothing but praises. She tries
to scan his traits; they are too manly, and she bows. Her press can only speak
of his manhood. One must get outside the influence of his personal presence
before the slaves of Virginia can dig up a forgotten Kansas lie, and hurl it
against the picture which Virginian admiration has painted. That does not come
from Virginia. Northern men volunteer to do the work which Virginia, lifted for
a moment by the sight of martyrdom, is unable to accomplish. A Newburyport man
comes to Boston, and says that he knows John Brown was at the
massacre of Pottawattomie. He was only twenty-five miles off! The Newburyport
orator gets within thirty miles of the truth, and that is very near — for him!
But Virginia was unable—mark you!—Virginia was unable to criticise. She
could only bow. It is the most striking evidence of the majesty of the action.
There is one picture which stands out in bright relief in
this event. On that mountain-side of the Adirondack, up among the snows, there
is a plain cottage — "plain living, and high thinking," as Wordsworth
says. Grouped there are a family of girls and boys, hardly over twenty; sitting
supreme, the majestic spirit of a man just entering age—life one purpose. Other
men breed their sons for ambition, avarice, trade; he breeds his for martyrdom,
and they accept serenely their places. Hardly a book under its roof but the
Bible. No sound so familiar as prayer. He takes them in his right hand and in
his left, and goes down to the land of bondage. Like the old Puritans of two
hundred years ago, the muskets are on one side and the pikes upon the other;
but the morning prayer goes up from the domestic altar, as it did from the lips
of Brewster and Carver, and no morsel is ever tasted without that same grace
which was made at Plymouth and Salem; and at last he flings himself against the
gigantic system, which trembles under his single arm. You measure the strength
of a blow by the force of the rebound. Men thought Virginia a Commonwealth; he
reveals it a worse than Austrian despotism. Neighbors dare not speak to each
other; Courts cannot wait for the slow step of Saxon forms and safeguards;
startled Judges have no time to take notes of testimony; no man can travel on
the highway without a passport; the telegraph wires are sealed, except with a
permit; the State shakes beneath the tramp of cannon and armed men. What does
she fear? Conscience. The apostle has come to torment her, and he finds the
weakest spot herself. She dares not trust the usual forms of justice. Arraigned
in what she calls her court, is a wounded man, on a pallet, unable to stand.
The civilized world stands aghast. She says, "It is necessary." Why?
"I stand on a volcano. The Titans are heaving beneath the mountains. Thought—the
earthquake of conscience—is below me." It is the acknowledgment of
defeat. The Roman thought, when he looked upon the Cross, that it was the
symbol of infamy — only the vilest felon hung there. One sacred sacrifice, and
the cross nestles in our hearts, the emblem of every thing holy. Virginia
erects her gibbet, repulsive in name and form. One man goes up from it to God,
with two hundred thousand broken fetters in his hands, and henceforth it is
sacred forever.
I said, that to vindicate Puritanism, the children must be
better than the fathers. Lo, this event! Brewster, and Carver, and Bradford,
and Winthrop faced a New England winter and defied law for themselves. For us,
their children, they planted and sowed. They said, "Lo! our rights are
trodden under foot; our cradles are not safe; our prayers may not ascend to
God." They formed a State, and achieved that liberty. John Brown goes a
stride beyond them. Under his own roof, he might pray at liberty; his own
children wore no fetters. In the catalogue of Saxon heroes and martyrs, the
Ridleys and the Latimers, he only saw men dying for themselves; in the brave
souls of our own day, he saw men good as their fathers; but he leaped beyond
them, and died for a race whose blood he did not share. This child of seventeen
years gives her husband for a race into whose eyes she never looked. Braver
than Carver or Winthrop, more disinterested than Bradford, broader than Hancock
or Washington, pure as the brightest names on our catalogue — nearer God's
heart, for, with a divine magnanimity he comprehended all races - Ridley and
Latimer minister before him. He sits in that heaven of which he showed us the
open door, with the great men of Saxon blood ministering below his feet. And
yet they have a right to say, "We created him."
Lord Bacon, as he takes his march down the centuries, may
put one hand on the telegraph and the other on the steam engine, and say,
"These are mine, for I taught you to invent." So the Puritans may
bless John Brown, and say, "You are ours, though you have gone beyond us,
for we taught you to believe in God. We taught you to say, God is God, and
trample wicked laws under your feet." And now, from that Virginia gibbet,
he says to us, "The maxim I taught you, practise it! The principle I have
shown you, apply it! If the crisis becomes sterner, meet it! If the battle is
closer, be true to my memory! Men say my act was a failure. I showed what I
promised, that the slave ought to resist, and could. Sixteen men I placed under
the shelter of English law, and then I taught the millions. Prove that my
enterprise was not a failure, by showing a North ready to stand behind it, I am
willing, in God's service, to plunge with ready martyrdom into the chasm that
opens in the forum, only show yourselves worthy to stand upon my grave!"
It seems to me that this is the lesson of Puritanism, as it
is read to us to-day. "Law" and "order" are only names for
the halting ignorance of the last generation. John Brown is the impersonation
of God's order and God's law, moulding a better future, and setting for it an
example.
_______________
* A Discourse delivered before the Twenty-eighth
Congregational Society, (Rev. Theodore Parker's,) in the Music Hall, Boston, on
Sunday, December 18, 1859.
SOURCE: James Redpath, Editor, Echoes of Harper’s
Ferry, pp. 105-18
