The Sabbath has been called the “poem of New England,” and it is that always, whether rung out by the city’s chiming bells or whispered in the sacred repose of the country church. But it was never so truly a poem as on that first New England Sabbath, when the church was a weather-beaten ship, its support the lashing waves, and the worshippers “a handful of sad, stern men and women kneeling in their spray-stiffened garments to thank God for freedom to worship him.”
New England’s best traits, then, are but her rightful inheritance; traits “lineally descended” from her founders, softened and purified in the transmitting many times, as in the case of their sectional loyalty. “They seemed to shrink from trying to get to heaven by any other road than that which their fathers travelled, lest they should miss them at their journey’s end.”
And in these days, thank God! religious toleration is creeping over the forbidding rock of New England theology, much as the delicate vines of the May-flower crept over and beautified the hard, unyielding soil.
Thus New England stands, in her freedom, love of education, and all those homely domestic traits which make her the comfortable, clever, strong, and tender mother she is, while under and through and over all her traits runs, like a strain of restful music, her great, all powerful, far-reaching faith.
EDITOR’S TABLE.
A great stride of advancement has been taken in the cultivation of that rarest of supernal graces, Christian charity, since the ancient patriarchs of New England fell asleep. Occasionally opportunity is given us of measuring “with the eye” the distance which has been travelled. More than a hundred and fifty years ago Dr. Cotton Mather spoke of Rhode Island as “the Gerizzim of New England, the common receptacle of the convicts of Jerusalem and the outcasts of the land.” The island itself, as a portion of God’s creation, he was willing to think worthy of all praise. He seems to have felt regarding it as Bishop Heber felt about India when he wrote his immortal missionary hymn:—
“And every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile.”
“The island is, indeed, for the fertility of its soil, the temperateness of its air, etc., the best garden of all the colony, and were it free from serpents I would call it the Paradise of New England.” As things were, however, the good old man could only say regretfully, “Bona terra, mala gens.” He evidently fancied that the serpent was not a native of the original home of human innocence, or else his special affection for the people of Rhode Island led him to wish for them an exemption from exposures which God had not thought necessary to the safety and happiness of Adam. The serpent was an honorable member of the animal community in Paradise before Ithuriel’s “spear of heaven-tempered steel” discovered Satan, in the shape of a toad, breathing into the ear of the sleeping “Mother of Mankind” deadly insinuations of disobedience and rebellion, just as freedom in religion—the serpent so unworthily abhorred by New England Puritanism—was a divinely chartered and precious privilege of mankind long before the founding of Rhode Island colonies or the birth of Roger Williams. The vagaries and fantasies of freedom, its excesses, outrages, and crimes, are something fearful to contemplate, but freedom is, has been, and must ever continue to be, the essential condition of human power and excellence. It has ever been the madness of men—and madness that could not claim the poor excuse of method—to think of cutting down the tree of liberty, and still hope to retain the benefits and blessings of its shade.