, He
was there also as well as here.--Hah! These men, I think, had a work!
The weak thing, weaker than a child, becomes strong one day, if it be
a true thing. Puritanism was only despicable, laughable then; but
nobody can manage to laugh at it now. Puritanism has got weapons and
sinews; it has fire-arms, 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 the sun at
present!

[5] Neal (London, 1755), i. 490.

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 Columbian 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 practised fact? Did Hero-worship fail in
Knox's case? Or are we made of other clay now? Did the Westminste