prove a failure. There came a time in the history of the Jewish Church when the theocracy established by Jehovah Himself began to wax old, and was ready to vanish away. It was so with the theocracy of New England. Its framers sought to compass that which was impossible. 'Perhaps," said Plato of that perfect republic of which he dreamed, "some image of it remaineth for us in the heavens." Yes, in heaven, but not upon earth! There is something not a little pathetic in what Cotton Mather says of Davenport, the nobleminded founder of New Haven: "After all, the Lord gave him to see that in this world a Church-State was impossible, whereinto there enters nothing which defiles." The Puritans of New England soon began to see that no dyke which they could possibly construct could keep out of their Arcadia the tide of surging corruption. Laxity, both of creed and conduct, worldly conformity, indulgence and chartered libertinism,-the scum which ever rise to the surface of a free commonwealth, and fills timid and faithless souls with panic and with dark foreboding,these began to sap the virtue and threaten the very life. of the young struggling republic. But this blotted page belongs to a chapter in the annals of New England later than that embraced within the scope of our present plan. And there are brighter pages which follow; for, if there are periods of decadence, there are also epochs of revival, resurrections of those very virtues which men deem to be dead and extinct. It has ever thus been with the soul or spirit of Puritanism. It was from the hour of its seeming downfall that its real victory began. The Restoration of 1660 seemed to deal it its death-blow, but Mr. Green is speaking the words of truth and soberness when he says that the whole history of English progress on its moral and spiritual side has been the history of Puritanism. Puritanism never dies. The form in which it clothes itself changes, must change, from age to age, and its history both in England and America, shows that much that has seemed to be inevitably associated with it is destined to pass away; but the spirit of Puritanism lives on, and not until conscience is dethroned from its chief and controlling place in human affairs, and righteousness ceases to run down as a mighty stream, will it ever perish, or cease to be a force to be reckoned with by the rulers and peoples of the world. |