education of
every child. And, as God would have it, the children whom they trained
up for pillars in the church turned out also to be more than tools of
power. They grew up into magistrates, leaders of the people, debaters of
right and of law, statesmen, generals, and signers of declarations for
liberty. Such a mass of capacity had never been seen before in so small
a body of men. And this is the first condition of liberty--the
Condensation of Power. For liberty is not the license of an hour; it
is not the butchery of a royal house, or the passion that rages behind
a barricade, or the caps that are swung or the _vivas_ shouted at
the installing of a liberator. But it is the compact, impenetrable
matter of much manhood, the compressed energy of good sense and public
reason, having power to see before and after and measure action by
counsel--this it is that walls about the strength and liberty of a
people. To be free is not to fly abroad as the owls of the night when
they take the freedom of the air, but it is to settle and build and be
strong--a commonwealth as much better compacted in the terms of reason,
as it casts off more of the restraints of force.

Their word was "Reformation"--"the completion of the Reformation"; not
Luther's nor Calvin's, they expressly say; they cannot themselves
imagine it. Hitherto it is unconceived by men. God must reveal it in the
light that breaks forth from him. And this he will do in his own good
time. It is already clear to us that, in order to any further progress
in this direction, it was necessary for a new movement to begin that
should loosen the joints of despotism and emancipate the mind of the
world. And in order to this a new republic must be planted and have time
to grow. It must be seen rising up in the strong majesty of freedom and
youth, outstripping the old prescriptive world in enterprise and the
race of power, covering the ocean with its commerce, spreading out in
populous swarms of industry,--planting, building, educating, framing
constitutions, rushing to and fro in the smoke and thunder of travel
along its mighty rivers, across its inland seas, over its mountain-tops
from one shore to the other, strong in order as in liberty,--a savage
continent become the field of a colossal republican empire, whose name
is a name of respect and a mark of desire to the longing eyes of
mankind. And then, as the fire of new ideas and hopes darts electrically
along the nerves of feelin