The American Missionary — Volume 44, No. 01, January, 1890 by Various
page 16 of 96 (16%)
page 16 of 96 (16%)
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Calvin, whose system of Christian thought set the soul of man forth, in
his awful agony of sin, and in God's redemption for him--set him forth independent of kings and rulers, and in whose sight a king was but God's vassal. When Englishmen had to come in contact with John Calvin, the iron of his free spirit became steel, and then Puritanism was born, and at that time God raised the curtain that hung over a whole hemisphere, and gave that hemisphere to these free Teutonic English people. We know how they conquered the country for this free spirit, and how the Revolutionary War came on, and Samuel Adams, awakening to the sound of those cannon at Concord on that spring morning, said, in spite of all the forebodings of a long and deadly struggle, "How glorious is this morning," because he foresaw what God could work here in a free Christian land. And so on that following Fourth of July those men assembled in Philadelphia and put forth the Declaration of Independence. There is no better commentary on it than Lincoln's words when he said, in those dark days just before the war: "In their enlightened view nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on or degraded or imbruted by its fellows." They set up a beacon for their children and their children's children. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when at some remote time some man, or faction, or interest should arise, and say that none but rich men, or none but white men, or none but Anglo-Saxon white men were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, their children's children should look back to the Declaration of Independence, and should take heart to begin again the battles their forefathers fought, that thus truth and liberty and righteousness and justice and all the Christian virtues might not be lost in the land; and none might dare limit and circumscribe the |
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