7 rural districts, yet conscious of the liberty with which Christ had made them free, and therefore bold enough to confront ecclesiastical and even royal authority in the capital. Serious as became their religious profession, they grew under persecution to be grave, formal, and austere. Chosen emissaries of God, as they believed, they willingly became outcasts among men. Divinely constituted depositaries of pure and abounding truth, as they thought, they announced, as their own rule of conduct, that no article of faith, no exercise of ecclesiastical authority,■ no rule of discipline, and not even a shred of ceremonial or. sacrament, should be accepted, unless sanctioned by direct warrant from the Scriptures as interpreted by themselves, in the free exercise of their own consciences, illuminated by the Holy Spirit. God, although a benevolent Father, was yet, as they believed, jealous towards disobedience of His revealed will, and would punish conscious neglect of its commandments. These were the Puritans. They came into the world to save it from despotism; and the world comprehended them not. They.refused to acquiesce in the compromise,, because it involved a surrender of natural rights, and a dereliction from duty toward God. Nevertheless, they were true Christians, and therefore they declined to set up their own convictions as a standard for others who subscribed to the Christian faith, and freely allowed to all their fellow subjects the same broad religious liberty which they claimed for themselves. They persisted in non-conformity. The more hardly pressed, the more firmly they persisted. The more firm their persistence, the more severe and unrelenting was the persecution they endured. More than an hundred years virtually outlawed as citizens and subjects, and outcasts from the established church, the Puritans bore unflinchingly their unwavering testimony against the compromise, before magistrates and councils, in the pillory, under stripes, in marches, in camps, in prison, in flight, in exile, among licentious soldiery and dissolute companions in neighboring lands; on -the broad and then unexplored ocean, when the mariners lost their reckoning, and the ship’s supplies became scanty and her seams opened to the waves; on unknown coasts, homeless, houseless, famishing, and dying in the leafless forest, surrounded by ice and snow, fearful of savage beasts and confronting savage men. The compromise policy failed. Civil and religious liberty was not overborne; it rose erect; it triumphed; it is still gaining new and wider and more enduring triumphs ; and tyrants have read ' anew the lesson, so often wasted upon them before, that where mankind stand upon their convictions of moral right and duty, in disobedience to civil authority, there is no middle course of dealing with them, between the persecution that exterminates, and the toleration that satisfies. The Puritans were not exterminated, they were not satisfied. The Puritans thus persisted and prevailed because they had adopted one true, singular, and sublime principle of civil conduct, namely: that thesubject in every State has a natural right to religious liberty of conscience. They knew too well the weakness of human guaranties of civil liberty, and the frailty of civil barriers against tyranny. They therefore did not affect to derive the right of toleration from the common law, or the statutes of the realm, or magna charta, or even from that imaginary contract between the sovereign and the subject, which some publicists had about that time invented as a basis for civil rights. They resorted directly to a law broader, older, and more stable, than all these—a law universal in its application and in its obligation, established by the Creator and Judge of all men, and therefore paramount to all human constitutions. Algernon Sidney, Locke, and Bacon, and even Hooker, chosen and ablest champion of the Church of England, demonstrated the existence of this law, deriving the evidences of it, and of its universal nature and application, from natural and revealed religion, in the high debates of the seventeenth century. Blackstone, Mattel, and Montesquieu, have built upon it their respective systems of municipal law, public law, and government; and our own Congress of lTTS sunk into the same enduring foundation the corner-stone of this vast and towering structure of American freedom. The Puritans could therefore lay no claim to
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