paths of the Baptists were paths of freedom, pleasantness, and peace.
Luther finished his mission in the heart of Germany, under the safeguard of princes.
In Geneva, a republic on the confines of France, Italy, and Germany, Calvin, appealing to the people for support, continued the career of enfranchisement by planting the intlive; to protect itself against feudal aristocracy, it infused itself into the mercantile class, and the inferior gentry; to secure a life in the public mind, in Geneva, in Scotland, wherever it gained dominion, it invoked intelligence for the people, and in every parish planted the common school.
In an age of commerce, to stae.
Do not stand still with Luther and Calvin, said the father of the Pilgrims, confident in human advancement.
From Luther to Calvin, there was progress; from Geneva to New England, there was more.
Calvinism,—I speak of its political character, in an age when politics were controlled by religious sects; I pass no judgment on
uments and records, the colonization of the twelve oldest states of our Union.
At the period of the great European revolution of 1688, they contained not very many beyond two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom Massachusetts, with Plymouth and Maine, may have had forty-four thousand; New Hampshire and Rhode Island, with Providence, each six thousand; Connecticut, from seventeen to twenty thousand; that is, all New England, seventy-five thousand souls;
Neal, II. 601. Sir Wm. Petty, 75, say religion, as the people up to that time had always done, were neither skeptics nor sensualists, but Christians.
The school that bows to the senses as the sole interpreter of truth, had little share in colonizing our America.
The colonists from Maine to Carolina, the adventurous companions of Smith, the Puritan felons that freighted the fleet of Winthrop, the Quaker outlaws that fled from jails with a Newgate prisoner as their sovereign,—all had faith in God and in the soul.
The system which
terwards treasured up the example,) though its noblest instincts could be so perverted; and, perceiving the only mode through which reform could prevail, he gave as a last counsel to his multitude of followers—Put not your trust in
Chap XVIII.} princes.
Of the descendants of his Bohemian disciples, a few certainly came to us by way of Holland; his example was for all.
Years are as days in the providence of God and in the progress of the race.
After long waiting, an Augustine monk at Wittenberg, who had seen the lewd corruptions of the Roman court, and who loathed the deceptions of a coarse superstition, brooded in his cell over the sins of his age, and the method of rescuing conscience from the dominion of forms, till he discovered a cure for its vices in the simple idea of justification by faith alone.
With this principle, easily intelligible to the universal mind, and spreading, like an epidemic, widely and rapidly,—a principle strong enough to dislodge every superstition, to
