of this nature, let us not forget that but for them, fallible
and inconsistent as they were, the seeds of liberty, wafted from a
thousand shores, and gathered through thousands of ages, might not have
been transplanted to this continent, nor this mighty banyan of American
freedom have struck its million roots into the soil far and wide, and
stretched its million interlacing arms abroad, a sure and safe refuge
for the nations.

It is not as a _sect_ that I admire the Puritans. Away with all party
lines, all sectional prejudices, all barriers of creed or sect at such a
time as this, when all nations and creeds and colors are forming in
serried ranks, a close and impervious breakwater, to resist the
threatening tide of rebellion and ruin whose sullen roar is in our ears,
and when 'heaps of brothers slain' look into the sad face of heaven from
fields where they fell, battling heroically to preserve the common
heritage. No! a better day is dawning--a day of fairer promise, of more
tranquil beauty, of more enduring blessedness, than ever before
gladdened the hearts of men. To see that day come, all the good and true
and loyal are waiting and working, no matter of what faith, or tongue,
or nationality. I do not regard the sins of the Puritans as resulting
from the principles by which they professed to be governed, but rather
as something extraneous and antagonistic to them. Their ideas and
principles resulted in the broadest constitutional liberty, while the
free thought, free speech, free inquiry, the wide individual freedom,
which, as a church, under the influence of a stern theological despotism
they sought to stifle, under those very institutions they founded are
to-day the pride, the life, the glory of free and progressive New
England.

It is only in this broad sense, then, that I use the term _Puritan_, to
denote the agency whereby Providence saw fit to inaugurate the ideas
which were to form the foundation of our national polity.

The Puritan idea, then, predominated in the principles embodied in the
Declaration of Rights and in the Constitution. But says one, Washington
was no Puritan, nor Jefferson, nor the majority of the first framers of
our Government. Granted that they were not born on Puritan soil, _par
excellence_, but were they not of the spirit and understanding of the
Puritans? (In fact, I suspect that Washington was a Puritan of the
Puritans.) A Virginia Puritan, a cavalier Puritan even, was not then the