their hearts to lead the people along the line of God's thought. To get
at something of God's thought for us, we must go back even into those
dark Teutonic forests into which the Roman world peered with so much
fear and awe, and out of which came those freemen who knew how to leap
upon that Roman world in its pride and its weakness and re-assert human
liberty.

Those old ancestors of ours knew what freedom was; but as they came
against that Roman world, they themselves were in part conquered by it,
and they lost something of that freedom. But God set apart one corner of
the European world for them, and called over the English Channel in the
fifth century those forefathers of ours, there to watch for a century
and a half that tremendous conflict in which the very plow-share of the
Teutons went through the roots of the Roman life in Britain and left
nothing but Teutonic fields remaining. And then God brought into this
Britain, thus set apart, the gospel of Christ, and our forefathers
became Christians--not Christians such as there were in other parts of
Europe, but having that free and independent Christian life that shone
forth in men like Wyckliffe, denying the power of the keys to Rome
except where Rome spoke with Christ's voice, and in men like Latimer,
before whom the proud Henry trembled.

All over England were sown these seeds of a free Christian faith; so
that when Luther came, it was in England as in our country when the
forest fires have ceased, and suddenly there spring up from the sod a
new forest because the seeds lie in the prairie from age to age. So in
our English soil there were those seeds of Christian freedom that sprung
forth and gave us a free and Protestant England. And then, in the
reaction, when Mary was on the throne, and the fire at Smithfield was
kindled, the Christian men of England went to Geneva and there met John