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