“Great Meadow, hearken! What is our English word to-day? Liberty! Then I speak to you of Liberty. What have we done? We have said to the Bishops, ‘God in us the ruler in his own matters—not you!’ We have said to the House of Lords, ‘You have thought that you were born to rule over us—but you were not!’ We have said to the King, ‘Only in the divine is there divine right!’ And the Bishops rule no more, nor the Lords, and the King has suffered death. Now is the New Commons sitting in London!”
His words made way against all difficulties. “Aye, aye!” cried the crowd, arrested. “We in England rule ourselves! We and Oliver rule ourselves!”
Osmund laughed, standing on the churchyard steps. His laughter was not bitter, but clear and large. “So we say. ‘Lo,’ we say, ‘England is free!’ Freer than we were—that is sooth! But not free. No more so than is the prisoner who has broken one ward when there are twenty yet to break. Yet is that prisoner freer by just that broken ward, and stronger to work on by the new hope that is in him! Let him take courage and break ward after ward!”
“What ward, now? Now, what ward? Now shall we have Osmund’s doctrine!”
“Break ward after ward! Said Christ Jesus, ‘Put not new wine into old bottles, nor new cloth upon the old garment.’—O English folk, let us deepen and widen and heighten freedom until there stands the new vessel for the new wine, and for the patched the whole, fair, shining garment! Nowhere yet—no, not by many a ward—full freedom, full escape! Not in England, not upon earth. Freedom in part—light in part! Your task and mine never to rest until the whole is come and the part melts within it!”
“Osmund’s doctrine! ‘Let women rule, too!’ He always begins something like this, and then he ends, ‘Let women rule, too!’”
“Be sure he leads a lewd life!”
The more violent sort broke forth again. “Pull him down! Have away with him! In Warwick it was gaol for him, and in Coventry cart tail and pillory! Heinousness! Heinousness and blasphemy!” Clamour arose and a movement from within the throng toward the steps and Osmund upon them. Then appeared the Great Meadow constable and his men. “Order—order here, in the name of the Commonwealth!”
Osmund cried on. “Men are not free to-day, and women are less free! Were women as free to-day as are men, still would men and women have many a thousand wards to break, as many well-nigh as the sands of the sea! We use the word ‘freedom,’ but we are to be freedom! So I do not end, Great Meadow, with ‘Let women rule, too!’ But in this hour I preach, ‘What freedom there is, let us share and share alike! What freedom there is, let it be for women as for men! What freedom there is, let it run healthily through the whole body!’”
“He is a Friend! He is a Quaker! He and George Fox are birds of a feather!”