9 Human progress is ever like that of a ship beating to windward, in the very eye of the tempest. Civilization, like the oak, is the result of an assimilation of seemingly destructive elements, and its sheltering branches, as the tree's, are bright with the spoil of a thousand hurricanes. Even Christianity, from its rude cradle, down through all its mighty triumphs in long antiquity, has fulfilled the same law, and grown strong through antagonisms. So that the consummation of God's most stupendous purpose, was achieved, not by the ministry of singing angels, but through human antagonisms, with treachery and a cross. Now, studied where you will, this will seem the great law of all national life, and most manifestly of our own. American nationality is rather a growth than a production. Not a social edifice, planned by human genius, and realized by man's art and device, but a social organism, growing from a germ, and silently, under God's law of development. The horoic men who planted these colonies, and whose social virtues and sublime Christian faith have shaped and colored our destiny, seem not even to have foreseen, much less projected, this great Republican Commonwealth. But, as the oak in an acorn, unperceived by man, came, in the rough old Puritanism, the national germ, and its development has been through this law of antagonisms. At first, the colonists were not only a feeble, but a widely scattered, and unsympathizing folk—uncongenial communities, dwelling each in its own
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