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early New Englanders will not suffer in comparison, if tested by their power to produce those strong Christian virtues which are so earnestly insisted on in every part of the Word of God, and without which-if I read that Word aright—whether there be a Christ or no Christ, no man shall enter into the kingdom of Heaven. Had the New Englander's conception of God's government, justice, and holiness been less solemn than it was, had his standard of morality been lower than it was, the fruits of the civilization which he founded, and of the Christianity which he cherished, would not be so precious as they are even now.

Again, it was owing to New England ideas and the same conciliating spirit in politics that has characterized Congregationalists in religious work, that patriotic men in the South were made prominent as leaders in the struggle for our national independence, and that by a practical unity of the whole country, our independence was so early gained and a republican form of government established.

In the development of this government and the establishment of universal freedom, New England ideas, though for a time overpowered, have at last been triumphant. Was it an accident that within three months after that Dutch manof-war had landed twenty negroes on the coast of Virginia, and they had been sold as slaves, the Mayflower appeared off the coast of Massachusetts bearing one hundred and two pilgrims? I see in the coming years the chains carried from Virginia to Texas, new links constantly forged and new victims manacled, until they are numbered by millions. But I see the institutions and principles of the Pilgrims, taking possession of New England, of the great Middle States, of the mighty Northwest, on to the shores of the Pacific; carried everywhere by the sturdy settlers who fell the forests and plant civilization; proclaimed and advocated from ten thousand pulpits, not of their faith only but of every Christian faith. As I watch these two forces, slavery and barbarism at the South, freedom and civilization in the North, moving along resistlessly in parallel lines across the continent, I see that one of these is the agent in God's hands for the destruc

tion of the other. And when the irrepressible conflict came, as come it must, in that supreme moment of mortal agony, when a great nation plunged into a sea of blood for its own purification from a national crime, God, the God of our New England fathers, gave the victory to New England ideas, and secured, in name at least, to every man, woman, and child in the country, without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude, the same freedom and the same rights which we, the children of New England, have always enjoyed. Whether this universal freedom shall in coming generations be the heritage of every child of the Republic, will depend upon the unity and firmness with which the children of New England shall stand by the ideas of New England.

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