and assumed a jurisdiction more deep and wide than that asserted by any government on earth. Asserting as it did a constant and infallible guidance by the Spirit of God, and professing to be his vicegerent on the earth, it extended its authority to the very soul, and under the awful penalty of eternal retributions demanded the submission of thought itself to the decrees of popes and councils. Hence science was regarded as inimical to this absolute fettering of thought, and Galileo was permitted to review his astronomy in the prison of the Inquisition, for presuming to know what the church had not taught. The Romish theologians of Paris solemnly decreed "that religion was undone if the study of Greek and Hebrew was permitted." A fair specimen, perhaps, of the spirit of the Papacy at this time, in reference to these pursuits, may be conveyed in an extract from a book published by Conrad de Heresbach, a grave and respectable writer of this period. Speaking of this point, he says, "A new language has been invented which is called Greek guard carefully against it; it is the mother of every species of heresy. I observe in the hands of a great many people a book written in this language, which they call the New Testament: it is a book full of thorns and vipers. With respect to Hebrew, it is certain, my dear brethren, that all who learn it, are instantly converted to Judaism." This was the prevailing spirit of the Papacy before, and even at the time of, the Reformation. It is true Leo X. and some of the cardinals were patrons of literature and the arts; but they by no means represented the spirit of the church, and even they began soon to suspect that they had committed an error in giving any countenance to this partial development of a form of science, which, cherishing as it did an enthusiasm for antiquity, was one of the forms least dangerous to the church. Popery thus ranked herself against the rising spirit of inquiry and thirst for knowledge that had begun to move throughout Europe. This was to her a most fatal error. There was a current setting strongly toward the emancipation of thought that could not be successfully resisted. The dispersion of so many Hellenists as were scattered through Europe by the fall of Constantinople; the consequent revival of classical studies; the discovery of printing; the improvements in painting and engraving; the changes in the relations of nations produced by the discovery of America and the southern passage to India; the introduction of gunpowder into war, and the compass into navigation, produced a swelling of the tide of thought to wider expansion, that would have shivered and swept away in its onward flow broader and mightier barriers than the decayed and enfeebled embankments of the Papacy. As it, however,

attempted to restrain and curb the proud waves of this swelling torrent, the Reformation became ipso facto the channel in which flowed this enlargement of mind, and thus assumed its mixed character. It became thus, by this position of Popery, a revolt of the awakened mind of Europe against absolute authority in matters of thought, civil and religious, and an assertion of the liberty in both secured by the Bible.

That this movement tended toward liberty, cannot for an instant be doubted. How could it be otherwise? The instinctive logic of the mind was, if the tyranny of priests be wrong, why not that of kings? If it be intolerable in religion, why not in politics? Was it wrong in the greater, and right in the less? Indeed, the mere withdrawal of the coercive jurisdiction of ecclesiastics was itself a great advance toward liberty. It was the removal of one species of authority, and the substitution of nothing in its stead.

There was another and more important advance made in popular emancipation. In the attempt to overthrow the external symbols of the Romish worship, the people began to feel their might and appreciate its value. The tiers etat, in time to become so terrible to tyrants, began to feel the pillars of their prison house and test their strength. Before, like a giant charmed and fettered by a spell or a talisman, they had meekly bowed to the will of their masters but now, like that giant, when it became manifest that he had been mocked and chained by words, they turned in fury on their oppressors. Hence, in the war of the peasants in Germany, their demand was first, freedom from the tyranny of priests; and next, freedom from the oppression of their feudal lords.

Indeed, the Reformation was forced in self-defense to assert the right of free inquiry, liberty of speech, and popular freedom. It had no sooner arisen than it met with persecution. In order to show the injustice of this persecution and defend their opinions, liberty of thought, speech, and action, were indispensable to the reformers; and hence, strongly asserted and maintained. The first books written against the absolute power of governments were written by Protestants. The Puritans of England, the Huguenots of France, and the Dutch and German reformers, were the bold advocates of the rights of the people. To this ground they were forced in sheer self-defense by their persecutors. Whatever be the reason of the fact, it still remains true, that the reformers promulged the great truths of freedom and popular rights, and to them are to be traced the results of these truths as we find them speedily beginning to be developed. It is true, like a powerful medicine, the first effects on the body politic were violent and exhausting, as we

see in the thirty years' war, the war of the Swabian peasants, the excesses of the Anabaptists of Germany, and of the Fifth Monarchy men of England. But these eruptions and spasms are to be charged rather on the morbid humors of the diseased and corrupted system, than on the remedies applied for its cure.

But although the immediate effects of this resurrection of the mind of the world may have been apparently evil, its ultimate effects were not only good, but they tended by a necessary progression to prepare the way and secure the success of the American Revolution. The treaty of Westphalia, which is the charter of the liberties of modern Europe, was the direct result of the Reformation. Then followed the check on the grasping ambition of Austria; the rise of liberal views and extension of rights in France, under Henry of Navarre; the firm establishment of the Helvetian republics; and the two revolutions in England by which the rights of the people were so much extended: all of which were not only the results of the Reformation, but the establishment of principles which were essential to the success of the American struggle. If to this we add the great awakening of mind effected by it, in which every department of thought produced its giants, national jurisprudence became a science, and popular rights an acknowledged entity, the point in question will be still more firmly established. The latter part of the sixteenth and the seventeenth century produced more men of gigantic girth and stature in every province of intellect, more discoveries of importance to the human race, and established in northern Europe more great ideas and principles concerning popular rights, than any period of time since the creation of the world. The spirit of enterprise thus created in England produced the establishment of British power in India; and this exerted, perhaps, a more direct influence on the success of our revolutionary struggle, than men commonly suppose. Laying aside all national prejudice, it might perhaps be difficult for an intelligent mind to show, that if British relations in India had been different in the latter part of the eighteenth century; if her hold there had been less precarious, and the hopes of France to obtain this glittering prize less sanguine, the revolutionary struggle might not have been more serious, at least, if not less successful.

It may, perhaps, be difficult for us to estimate the precise obligation of the American Revolution to this general awakening of mind produced by the Reformation: but can any one doubt the fact? Would such a revolution have been dreamed of before the Reformation? Would it have been projected since in any country that had not shared in this resurrection of mind? Would it have been

attempted, even by Englishmen, before the two great revolutions of the middle and end of the seventeenth century, in which so many popular rights were established? and were not these revolutions the direct result of the Reformation? Or if attempted, is not its fate illustrated in that of France, which, maddened by the cruel abuses of Popery, confounded it with Christianity, and in rejecting the impiety of men, renounced all piety to God; and not content with retaliating the cruelties of the revocation of the edict of Nantes and St. Bartholomew's eve, having once tasted blood, like an infuriated tiger continued to gorge its horrid appetite until, wearied with its bloody banquet, it sought refuge and quiet in the very cage and fetters from which it had escaped? Or would it not have been a parallel to the fate of the South American revolutions, which, attempting to apply the principles of the age to those who were behind its spirit, have shown that there is a deeper spring of political prosperity than the strife of war or the shifts of statesmanship are able to reach?

In the nature of things it was necessary that this general outbursting of thought and feeling, caused by the Reformation, should have ultimately a channel in which to discharge its waters. Such a channel was the American Revolution. There was none previously that can be fairly regarded as the receptacle of these fountains. The only events that can at all claim to be so regarded, are the revolution which beheaded the first Charles, and that which dethroned the second James. These movements, although memorable and important, were yet not full developments of this free spirit of the Reformation; for many lingering remnants of ancient tyranny, civil and ecclesiastical, remained, some of which are not yet extinct. As there was no other event in the world earlier than the American Revolution that can lay any claim to be considered a development of these new and important principles; and as in the nature of things some such development was as necessary as a channel to a fountain, and as the American Revolution did rest on precisely the principles asserted by the Reformation, we are necessarily led to regard it as that development. This great event gathering in its mighty tide the mingled waters unsealed by the hands of Luther, Calvin, and Knox, swept onward like our own father of waters; at first struggling with opposing difficulties, but soon swelling and widening in the majesty of its resistless might until it became the outlet for half a world. Hence, in the same sense in which we assert Christianity to be the source of many of the elements of modern civilization, or any one great historical event the cause of another in which it found its natural development,

may we assert that the Reformation is the source of American liberty.

The last point to be discussed, which must be treated with more brevity than it deserves, considering its intrinsic importance and its value in the argument, is, that the American Revolution is under great obligation to the Reformation, owing to the direct influence exerted by that event, or its legitimate consequences, on the minds and souls, the habits and feelings, the principles and maxims, of those who were the chief actors in that vast and glorious achievement. It is an interesting fact in our early history, that the first colony ever planted in North America was planted by the direct influence of the Reformation. Half a century before the landing of the Pilgrims, and a quarter of a century before Raleigh attempted to colonize Virginia, a colony was planted through the energy of the brave and devoted but unfortunate Coligny, who afterward perished in the massacre of St. Bartholomew's eve. In May, 1562, a colony was founded at Port Royal Inlet, now embraced by the county of Beaufort, S. C., and a fort built which was called Carolina, in honor of Charles IX., the subsequent murderer of so many thousand brave and unsuspecting Protestants. The object of this colony was to give a place of refuge to the persecuted Huguenots, who, from the time that Francis I. opposed the Reformation because he thought it destructive to monarchy, had been the objects of dislike and ill-disguised persecution. The object of its noble founder was to establish a vast French Protestant empire in the new world, which should fully imbody the great ideas of the Reformation. Had not this plan been frustrated by the frenzy and cruelty of Popery in the assassination of Henry IV., the revocation of the edict of Nantes, the bloody massacre of St. Bartholomew's eve, and their subsequent results, the project would probably have been successful; and America, instead of being an offspring of England, would have been a child of ancient and chivalrous France, to whose warm and generous impulses it has always had more affinity of feeling, than to the cold reserve and stately pride of the haughty and self-styled mistress of the ocean. And we may remark in passing, that it can be shown with undoubted clearness, that but for these same causes, by which the Reformation was so nearly crushed in France, the French Revolution in its bloody form would most likely never have occurred; the structure and character of the French government would have been entirely different, and the destinies of the world would not have been written in blood and hell-fire as we now see them recorded. These speculations, however, we forbear.