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lect is free, where exclusiveness is mitigated, and sympathies and friendships are not bounded by the limits of a creed.

But I must forbear. Enough has already been said, to justify the reverence which every son of New England must ever feel for an ancestry, who united to an earnest religious faith, an ardent love for liberty; who ennobled labor by associating it with intelligence and virtue; and who, in asserting the most sacred rights of man, exhibited a moral heroism unsurpassed in the history of the world.

I cannot, however, bring these remarks to a close, without alluding to a feature in their history, to which good-natured critics delight to refer, when, on occasions like this, we are accustomed to indulge in panegyrics they deem to be excessive.

With what justice, these often ask, is it claimed that the first settlers of New England were the vindicators of the most sacred of human rights, when their own annals are stained with persecution?

The charge is admitted; the answer is sufficiently obvious. Great principles never burst upon the world in the full maturity of their development. Christianity, more than eighteen centuries ago, asserted the immortal dignity of man, and the sublime principle of universal love; and yet, within two centuries, the slave

trade has been the prize of competition between chris

tian nations.

Clouds of error which have been gathering for centuries, can only be entirely dispelled by the full blaze of the noon-day sun.

When the Puritans of England asserted for man, the right, with the bible in his hands, to form his own faith, or of any number of men to organize themselves into an independent church, they asserted principles which, whether objectionable or not in some of their tendencies, were as certain to overthrow every form of religious tyranny, as that truth shall, in the end, triumph

over error.

The logical result of these principles is, and has been, religious liberty. The genius of Milton, the libertyloving spirit of Vane, and the clear intellect of Roger Williams, enabled them, in advance of their age, to comprehend the full bearing of these great principles. But the great body of the New England puritans were yet enslaved by the spirit of the age. They asserted for themselves rights, which with gross inconsistency they refused to others. They recognized not the full import of principles, in the maintenance of which they planted religious institutions, which have finally produced their natural result in the entire separation of Church from State, and the most absolute religious liberty.

When Lord Baltimore proclaimed universal toleration in Maryland, it was but the mere accident of his personal character, leading to results directly opposite to his own religious system. It was a boon granted, not a right asserted; and gave to the world no guaranty for the rights of conscience. It was an act which, if protestantism had become extinct in the next half century, would have been unimportant and unnoticed in history. But when the Puritans of New England vindicated for themselves, sanctity of conscience, on grounds as broad and immortal as humanity itself, however inconsistent their own practice, the final result was inevitable as that the rising sun, whose early beams shed from the eastern horizon, are obscured by the mists and clouds of the morning, shall from the zenith inundate the world with floods of light.

We claim for those men no exemption from error; we assert not their freedom from bigotry; we know not and care not, whether many of their dogmas were not false; we fully admit that persecution and suffering had given to their religion a stern and severe character which approached to fanaticism; but we do claim for them, the possession of lofty christian virtues; of the most heroic fortitude; of a faith in God, which permeated their very life; and over all, and above all, we claim for them, the successful assertion of princi

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AN ADDRESS, DELIVERED BEFORE THE N. E. SOC. OF MICH.

ples of civil and religious liberty, which are changing the face of the world.

Such, sons of New England, were your ancestors; such, Americans, the principles upon which the massive pillars of your free institutions rest.

These men lived in the midst of obscurity, toil and suffering; they died, and no man knoweth the place of their sepulchre; but they are transfigured in the clear light of history; and time, that overthrows cloudcapp'd towers and solemn temples, and crumbles to dust the mausoleums of kings, has but just begun to erect the ever enduring monuments of their fame.

THOUGHTS ON HISTORY,

A LECTURE,

Delivered before the Detroit Young Men's Society,

BY

SAMUEL BARSTOW.

A writer, more remarkable for brilliancy than profoundness, has defined "history" to be, "philosophy teaching by example." This definition is alike deficient in clearness and comprehensiveness. The idea it conveys is at once indistinct and narrow. Most attempts of this kind, to reduce to the limits of a philosophical formula subjects of great comprehension and magnitude, tend to perplex rather than to assist the mind, and not unfrequently, as in this very case, give currency to superficial, rather than profound and universal views.

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History is not philosophy, neither does the term example" embody or express the whole, or even the most important of its manifold teachings.

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