Very probably. Strange if it had not been. Of course, it was. But if
they were stern-visaged in their day, it was that we in our day, which
in vision they foresaw, might of all communities beneath the sun have
reason for a cheerful countenance. [Applause.]

They achieved immense great things for us, those Puritan men who were
not smiling enough to suit the critics. The real foundation on which the
structure of American national liberty subsequently rose was laid by
them in those first heroic years.

And what a marvel it was, when you stop to think, that in conditions so
hard, so utterly prosaic, calculated to clip the wings of generous
thought, they maintained themselves in that elevation of sentiment, that
supreme estimate of the unmaterial, the ideal factors of life that
distinguished them--in such largeness of mind and of spirit altogether.
While confronting at deadly close quarters their own necessities and
perils, their sympathies were wide as the world. To their brethren in
old England, contending with tyranny, every ship that crossed the
Atlantic carried their benediction. Look at the days of thanksgiving and
of fast with which they followed the shifting fortunes of the wars of
Protestantism--which were wars for humanity--on the continent! Look at
the vital consequence they attached to the interest of education; at the
taxes that in their penury, and while for the most part they still lived
in huts, they imposed on themselves to found and to sustain the
institution of the school! [Applause.]

"Child," said a matron of primitive New England to her young son, "if
God make thee a good Christian and a good scholar, thou hast all that
ever thy mother asked for thee." And so saying she spoke like a true
daughter of the Puritans.

They were poets--those brave, stanch, aspiring souls, whose will was
adamant and who feared none but God. Only, as Charles Kingsley has said,
they did not sing their poetry like birds, but acted it like men.
[Applause.] It was their high calling to stand by the divine cause of
human progress at a momentous crisis of its evolution, and they were
worthy to be put on duty at that post. Evolution! I hardly dare speak
the word, knowing so little about the thing. It represents a very great
matter, which I am humbly conscious of being about as far from
surrounding as was a simple-minded Irish priest I have been told of,
who, having heard that we were descended from monkeys, yet not quite
grasping