pure and copious. We must keep the New England ideal rounded and perfect in her actual.

There are some things New England cannot be. She cannot be the granary of the nation, a great agricultural producer. A single prairie lot, where the horses trot at the plough in one straight furrow of miles before they turn, and where, later, the reapers seem struggling like wrecked mariners in the wide, tawny harvest sea,

"Rari nantes in gurgite vasto,"

would swallow as a little morsel all the farming life within our borders. She cannot be a grower of tropical fruits and flowers, breathing from red, ripe lips the fragrance of tropical airs; a tiller of the vine, the orange, and the olive; a nurse of pale invalids hurrying from cold coast winds to seek soft bowers and sunny vales. She cannot show in her granite cliffs and rude ravines the yellow, glittering scales to which the greed of all nations should come rushing and trampling, hewing down her hills, and turning her peaceful wilds back into the bald desolations of old chaos. But she can be the fountain-head of intelligence for the people, kindling in every little vale and hamlet, for the poorest and humblest, the lights of letters and learning, building on favored heights her tall towers of Science, to scatter their rays afar, calling to her classic halls the wisest teachers of the day, shedding upon all the paths of her children, from the untiring enginery of her press, the white leaves of daily knowledge and high research, as orchard trees shed the blossoms of spring, as this January sky sheds

its snowflakes to-day. She can be the schoolmistress of the land, teaching the alphabet of all good nurture, leading her pupils up through the great volumes of wisdom, and quarrying out the massive granite of her thoughts for all intellectual builders.

She can be the mother of art and of invention, so that the right hand of all labor, whether of the mind, the shop, or the field, shall stretch itself out to her for the most facile implements of its craft.

She can be the asserter and defender of all humane and noble principles, so that every champion of truth and freedom, every lover of the right and of his fellow-man, shall draw inspiration from her words and strength from her steadfastness.

She

Her generous

She can especially be the mother and nurse of men. This is her royal staple. The sands of the Cape are barren and rough, and bleak are the Berkshire hills; but the barren sands and the bleak hills grow men. To train the generations of her sons and daughters is the most peculiar work of New England within her borders. does not put her infants out to nurse. breasts suckle all her babes. She is to take each newborn child of every home, and to solve over it this problem: Given a fresh young life, how to conduct it to the noblest manhood, the purest womanhood! From the cradle to the fullest prime, and onward to the chamber of rest, she is to be to this life, in all its physical, mental, and moral culture, the institutions that, from first to last, shall develop, mould, and guard it, the atmosphere that shall fill its lungs, and drape it round about, a wise and faithful

foster-parent. Beyond all the newer and more unfurnished portions of our country, she is to provide within her rocky portals a nursery for the children of the Republic.

There is one word which, more than any other, holds before our thought the whole New England ideal. It is not only a descriptive, but an inspiring word. It leads us back to the presence and the heroisms of our dead fathers. There throb in it the stern, strong pulses of martyr life. It is keyed to the music of our early forest temples, in which the Pilgrims worshipped God,

"And the sounding aisles of the dim woods rang

To the anthems of the free."

Oh that our New England might be, late and forever, what she was at first, PURITAN! Once a word of reproach, veined with sneering irony,- History has written it as our proudest eulogy. To keep it unblotted down the ages is our most sacred trust.

For this there must be a real, practical, public faith in God. We must believe that he is a God nigh at hand, and not afar off. We must not exile him to the seventh heavens, a cold, remote, hazy spectre. There must be with us a reverent sense of his constant presence and a devout recognition of the mingling of his counsel and his hand in all our private and public affairs. How near he was to our fathers; they walked with him, and talked with him, and questioned his will at every step of life! Their eye sought his, their hand touched his in every strait. We must not be afraid to name him, and avouch

him, and appeal to him, in our proclamations and State papers and legislative acts and judicial decisions. We ought to be afraid to leave him out, and to withdraw our public life from the shadow of those tutelar sanctities. If ever we cease to be here a God-fearing people; if we drift away from the faith of a divine, revealed religion, and its rightful control of human affairs; if we give up the Christian Sabbath, as an effete institution; if we discard the Bible as God's code of laws for individuals and for States; if we dissociate politics and religion, breaking up the old Puritan bridal, which wedded them, and pronounced over them this nuptial benediction, "What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder;" if we make our public days of thanksgiving and of humiliation mere festive holidays, in which we seek our own pleasure rather than to please and propitiate God; if we divorce thus the voice of the State, the course of law, the decrees of justice, and the popular life from the word and authority of God, we shall have emptied our old baptismal name of all its significance, -keeping the form, but not the life; the shadow, not the substance, and in that hour and in that act the sceptre of New England's power will be broken, her crown lost, and her banner that she planted in the wilderness, with its ancient heraldry, "Christo et ecclesia," trail dishonored in the dust.

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Let all of us rather conspire to lift up again the old Puritanic ideal. "It is certain," declares one of the early New England voices, "that civil dominion was but the second motive, religion the primary one, with our ancestors in coming hither. . . . It was not so much their de

sign to establish religion for the benefit of the State, as civil government for the benefit of religion." Another voice, a century earlier, testified that the fathers "came not hither for the world, or for land, or for traffic, but for religion, and for liberty of conscience in the worship of God, which was their only design."

This sacred interest was first everywhere. "As near the law of God as they can be," was the instruction of the General Court of Massachusetts, in old time, to its committee appointed to frame laws for the Commonwealth.

Only in the reproduction and general diffusion of this spirit can we hope to make the New England of the past the New England of the future, a power and a glory in the land.

Looking forward now and beyond our own confines, we may say, in the third place, that it belongs to us to live in and for the future of the whole country.

This, too, is one part of our inheritance from a Puritan ancestry. Our fathers were builders for the future. They lived for all the coming ages. They laid deep foundations whereon they hoped there might rise, after their day, the walls of a Christian empire, to stand until earth's "cloud-capped towers" should fall. We are fond of saying, "They builded more grandly than they knew." Perhaps that is true in respect to the political fabric of which they laid the corner-stone, and the material results that have followed their work. But they had a vision of a spiritual temple that should rise from their humble beginnings, until its dome should span the continent and its arches echo the psalms of meeting and mingling nations.