had nothing in it of the wonderful or unforeseen. The wonder would have
been if it had not occurred. It was, indeed, a happy and glorious event,
but by no means unnatural; and I intend no slight to the revered actors in
the Revolution when I assert that their fathers before them were as free
as they--every whit as free.

The principles of the Revolution were not the suddenly acquired property
of a few bosoms: they were abroad in the land in the ages before; they had
always been taught, like the truths of the Bible; they had descended from
father to son, down from those primitive days, when the Pilgrim,
established in his simple dwelling, and seated at his blazing fire, piled
high from the forest which shaded his door, repeated to his listening
children the story of his wrongs and his resistance, and bade them
rejoice, though the wild winds and the wild beasts were howling without,
that they had nothing to fear from great men's oppression.

Here are the beginnings of the Revolution. Every settler's hearth was a
school of independence; the scholars were apt, and the lessons sunk
deeply; and thus it came that our country was always free; it could not be
other than free.

As deeply seated as was the principle of liberty and resistance to
arbitrary power in the breasts of the Puritans, it was not more so than
their piety and sense of religious obligation. They were emphatically a
people whose God was the Lord. Their form of government was as strictly
theocratical, if direct communication be excepted, as was that of the
Jews; insomuch that it would be difficult to say where there was any civil
authority among them entirely distinct from ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

Whenever a few of them settled a town, they immediately gathered
themselves into a church; and their elders were magistrates, and their
code of laws was the Pentateuch. These were forms, it is true, but forms
which faithfully indicated principles and feelings; for no people could
have adopted such forms, who were not thoroughly imbued with the spirit,
and bent on the practice, of religion.

God was their King; and they regarded him as truly and literally so, as if
he had dwelt in a visible palace in the midst of their state. They were
his devoted, resolute, humble subjects; they undertook nothing which they
did not beg of him to prosper; they accomplished nothing without rendering
to him the praise; they suffered nothing without carrying their sorrows to
his t