IN the history of literature in New England during the colonial time, one fact stands out above all others, the

intellectual leadership of the clergy, and that, too, among a laity neither ignorant nor weak. This leadership was in every sense honorable, both for the leaders and the led. It was not due alone to the high authority of the clerical office in New England; it was due still more to the personal greatness of the men who filled that office, and who themselves made the office great. They were intellectual leaders because they deserved to be; for, living among a well-educated and high-spirited people, they knew more, were wiser, were abler, than all other persons in the community. Of such a leadership, it was an honor even to be among the followers. And in our record of the literary achievements of New England in the colonial time, the clergy fill by far the largest space, because, in all departments of writing, they did by far the largest amount of work.

     After the first half century of New England life, another fact comes into notice,—the advance of the laity in literary activity. By that time, many strong and good men, who had been educated there in all the learning of the age, either not entering the clerical profession or not remaining in it, began to organize and to develop the other learned professions—the legal, medical, and tuitionary—and, appealing to the public through various forms of literature, to divide more and more with the clergy the leadership of men’s minds. Moreover, in the last decade of the seventeenth century, an attempt was made to establish a newspaper in New England. The attempt failed. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, another attempt was made, and did not fail; and long before the end of our colonial epoch, a new profession had come into existence, having a power to act on the minds of men more mightily than any other,—the profession of journalism.

     Thus, as public discussion grew in the number of those who were participators in it, so also did it increase in the variety of its methods, and in the range of its themes. Henceforward we may trace the intellectual life of New

England, not merely in sermons, in formal theological treatises, in grave narratives of civil and military experience, in sombre and painful religious poetry, but likewise in compact literary essays, in pamphlets sprightly or brutal or stupid, in satires, in almanacs, in popular songs, in editorial articles. Public discussion became secularized. At last, even this world began to receive some attention, and to be written about. Witchcraft, state-craft, the small-pox, the behavior of the royal governors, the words and deeds of preachers, quarrels of churches, quarrels of towns and of colonies, agriculture, the currency, repudiation, manufactures, the training of soldiers, the founding of colleges, Whitefield, religious mania, dress, drunkenness, wars with the Indians, wars with the French, earthquakes, comets, the new wonders of science, the impiety of averting lightning by the “electrical points,” the truth of Christianity, the damnation of infants, the right to think, the conquest of Canada, the consolidation of the English colonies in America, the grand future of the American continent, the virtues of the English kings, the love and loyalty of America for England,—these were some of the subjects that, year by year, along our second colonial period, possessed the thoughts of men and women in New England, and found some sort of utterance in literature.

     In 1691, a thrifty old merchant of Boston, Joshua Scottow,¹ who had grown up with the colony almost from the beginning, published a little book of senile lamentations over the degeneracy of the age. It was called “Old Men’s Tears for their own declensions.”² Encouraged by this

stroke at authorship, he gave to the press, three years afterward, “A Narrative of the Planting of the Massachusetts Colony,”¹ beginning with 1628, and particularly accenting the fact of “the Lord’s signal presence the first thirty years.” Both books have some historical and psychological value, but as literature are worthless. His method of expression is spasmodic, ecstatic, full of apocalyptic symbols, cant, forced allusions, and the croakings of decrepitude. In the dedication of his second book to Simon Bradstreet, he had the good sense to anticipate that his writings might be pronounced “the delirious dotage of his puerile and superannuated brains.”

     The paroxysms of terror and of frenzy into which, during the last decade of the seventeenth century, multitudes of people in New England were thrown by the witchcraft excitement, gave birth to numerous publications, chiefly hortatory, minatory, and inflammatory; and to one publication that was at least rational, “More Wonders of the Invisible World,” published in London in 1700, and written by a merchant of Boston, Robert Calef, then forty-eight years of age.² Though the book is quite destitute of literary expertness; is without symmetry in substance or felicity in form; is, indeed, a hodge-pudding of facts, hints, queries, and conjectures; it is not destitute of expertness of other kinds, particularly that kind of expertness which, in a time of general enravishment, may enable one cool head to be an antidote to a multitude of hot ones. It is a reservoir of weird psychological phenomena, first frankly described in the credulous speech of the brotherhood and sisterhood of victims, then chilled and taken to pieces by a process of Sadducean counter-evidence and cross-examination. It is, also, a monument of the moral courage and the intellectual poise of its author; of his firm, placid tenacity in demanding some real evidence

as the price of his belief; of his obstinate incredulity to the end; all this in contrast with the intolerant eagerness of his contemporaries to rush headlong into folly; their hectic mental spasms; and their appetency—at once voracious and ferocious—for marvels, born in malice or in madness, and ending in infamy and in death. For the chief clerical leaders in the witchcraft excitement, especially the two Mathers, this book, both by its scepticism and by its personal irreverence, was most exasperating. The younger of these two divines wreaked his rage upon the book by calling it “a firebrand thrown by a madman;”¹ and the elder of them, at that time president of Harvard College, tried to extinguish the book by having it publicly burned in the college-yard. But its peculiar power could not be stifled in a hangman’s smudge; and one may truly say of it, that it went far to unmadden a whole population of devout and learned lunatics.

     There is one form of writing—the diary—that costs little to produce; that is usually valued at little by its producers; but that often gathers incalculable worth with time, outlives many laborious and ambitious literary monuments, and becomes a storehouse of treasures for historians, poets, and painters. It cannot be said that our ancestors failed to write diaries. Unluckily, however, the diaries that they wrote in great abundance, were generally records of events which took place only inside of them; psychological diaries, more or less mystical and unhealthy; chronicles of tender, scrupulous, introverted natures, misled into gratuitous self-torture; narratives of their own spiritual moods fluctuating hour by hour, of the visitations of Satan, of dulness or of ecstasy in prayer, of doubts or hopes respecting their share in the divine decrees; itineraries

of daily religious progress, aggravated by overwork, indigestion, and a gospel of gloom.

     There has come down to us, however, from our second literary period, one specimen of the diary, which, though crude enough in texture, is refreshingly carnal, external, and healthy. It is “The journal” kept by Mistress Sarah Kemble Knight, a dame of Boston—buxom, blithe, and debonair—who in October, 1704, being then thirty-eight years of age, a wife and a mother, travelled on horseback from Boston through Rhode Island and southern Connecticut to New Haven, a journey of five days; thence, in December, to New York, a journey of two days; returning home by the same route, and reaching Boston in March, 1705. In the pauses of her journey each day, she carefully jotted down her adventures and her own comments upon them, doing this with no little sprightliness and graphic power. The roads were rough, often uncertain; the crossings of the rivers were perilous; the inns were abominable; the manners of the people churlish, their speech a jargon of disgusting slang. Her “Journal,” published for the first time in 1825,¹ is an amusing little book, and has special value as a realistic picture of rural manners in New York and New England in the first decade of the eighteenth century. She had no companions upon her expedition, except as she hired them or fell in with them by the way; and she bore the annoyances of the journey with a sort of mocking and recalcitrant resignation, which was only saved from going to pieces altogether by help of an eye quick to see the ludicrous aspects of disagreeable things—particularly as soon as they were past. Her note-book, indeed, was a sovereign safety-valve to her, forming a harmless conduit through which she could pour her hourly vexations, in playful little puffs of prose and verse. Thus, having to cross a certain river, and not daring to do so by

fording it on horseback, she went over it in a wretched canoe—a far less safe ferry-boat than her horse would have been. “The canoe was very small and shallow, so that when we were in,” it “seemed ready to take in water, which greatly terrified me, and caused me to be very circumspect, sitting with my hands fast on each side, my eyes steady, not daring so much as to lodge my tongue a hair’s breadth more on one side of my mouth than t’other, nor so much as think on Lot’s wife; for a wry thought would have overset our wherry.”1 On another day, as she relates, the road was furnished even worse than usual “with accommodations for travellers, so that we were forced to ride twenty-two miles by the post’s account, but nearer thirty by mine, before we could bait so much as our horses, which I exceedingly complained of. But the post encouraged me by saying we should be well accommodated anon at Mr. Devil’s, a few miles further; but I questioned whether we ought to go to the Devil to be helped out of affliction. However, like the rest of deluded souls that post to the infernal den, we made all possible speed to this Devil’s habitation; where, alighting in full assurance of good accommodation, we were going in; but meeting his two daughters, (as I supposed, twins—they so nearly resembled each other, both in features and habit, and looked as old as the Devil himself, and quite as ugly,) we desired entertainment, but could hardly get a word out of them, till with our importunity . . . they called the old sophister; who was as sparing of his words as his daughters had been. . . . He differed only in this from the old fellow in t’other country-he let us depart. However, I thought it proper to warn poor travellers to endeavor to avoid falling into circumstances like ours, which at our next stage I sat down and did, as followeth:

     A strong, gentle, and great man was Samuel Sewall, great by almost every measure of greatness,—moral courage, honor, benevolence, learning, eloquence, intellectual force and breadth and brightness. Both his father and his grandfather were among the pioneers of New England colonization; although his father, who founded the town of Newbury, Massachusetts, seems to have passed and repassed between England and America without bringing hither his wife and children, until 1661, when the boy, Samuel, was nine years old. This boy, destined to great usefulness and distinction in the new world, thus came to it in time to have that personal shaping for his life here, only to be got from early and direct contact with it. He had the usual education of a New England gentleman in those days. He was graduated at Harvard College. He tried his hand for a time at preaching,—a vocation for which he was well qualified, but from which he was diverted into a prosperous and benign secular career. He became a member of the board of assistants, then of the council, judge of the supreme court, and finally its chief-justice, holding the latter office until 1728, two years after which date he died. He was a man built, every way, after a large pattern. By his great wealth, his great offices, his learning, his strong sense, his wit, his warm human sympathy, his fearlessness, his magnanimity, he was a visible potentate among men in those days.

     He had the courage to rebuke the faults of other people; he had the still greater courage to confess his own. Having, in 1692, fallen into the witchcraft snare, and having from the bench joined in the sentence of condemnation upon the witches, five years later—when more light had broken into his mind—he made in church a public confession of his error and of his sorrow. The Indians of Massachusetts had then no wiser or more generous friend than he; and he was, perhaps, the first of Americans to see and renounce and denounce the crime of negro slavery as then practised in New England. In 1700, he spoke out plainly on this subject, publishing a tract named “The Selling of Joseph;”² an acute, compact, powerful statement of the case against American slavery, leaving, indeed, almost nothing new to be said a century and a half afterward, when the sad thing came up for final adjustment. In this pamphlet one sees traces both of his theological and his legal studies; it is a lawyer’s brief, fortified by Scriptural texts, and illuminated by lofty ethical intuitions. Within those three pages he has left some strong and great words—immortal and immutable aphorisms of equity: “Liberty is in real value next unto life; none

ought to part with it themselves or deprive others of it, but upon most mature consideration.”¹ All men, as they are the sons of Adam, are co-heirs, and have equal right unto liberty, and all other outward comforts of life.”² “Originally and naturally there is no such thing as slavery.”³ “There is no proportion between twenty pieces of silver and liberty.”⁴

     All his lifetime he made the Biblical prophecies his favorite study,—a study out of which all manner of marvels, not always edifying, may be educed upon occasion; and the special marvel drawn from them by this sagacious Puritan judge was their palpable predictions of America as the final “rendezvous for Gog and Magog,” and as the true seat of the New Jerusalem. In his “Phaenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica; . . . or . . . a Description of the New Heaven as it makes to those who stand upon the New Earth,” a book first published in 1697,⁵ he unfolds this theory, going over the applicable prophecies clause by clause. Toward the end of his book, he replies to the objections that might be urged against his doctrine,—one of them being that in America the human race inevitably deteriorates, becomes barren, dies off early. The accusation he repels with an affluence of facts illustrating the productiveness and longevity of the human family here; and having done so, he rises into this rhythmical and triumphant passage, which in its quaint melody of learned phrase, and in a gentle humor that lurks and loses itself in the stiff folds of his own solemnity, has a suggestion of the quality of Sir Thomas Browne: “As long as Plum Island shall faithfully keep the commanded post, notwithstanding all the hectoring words and hard blows of the proud and boisterous ocean; as long as any salmon or sturgeon shall swim in the streams of Merrimac, or any perch or pickerel in Crane Pond; as long as the sea-fowl

shall know the time of their coming, and not neglect seasonably to visit the places of their acquaintance; as long as any cattle shall be fed with the grass growing in the meadows, which do humbly bow down themselves before Turkey-Hill; as long as any sheep shall walk upon Old-Town Hills, and shall from thence pleasantly look down upon the River Parker, and the fruitful marshes lying beneath; as long as any free and harmless doves shall find a white oak or other tree within the township, to perch, or feed, or build a careless nest upon, and shall voluntarily present themselves to perform the office of gleaners after barley-harvest; as long as Nature shall not grow old and dote, but shall constantly remember to give the rows of Indian corn their education by pairs; so long shall Christians be born there, and being first made meet, shall from thence be translated to be made partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.”¹

     It gives still another charm to the memory of this practical and hard-headed mystic of New England, this wide-souled and speculative

to discover, that, in a matter of very serious concern, he had the chivalry to come forward as the champion of woman. He tells us that once, while “waiting upon a dear child in her last sickness,” he took up a book to read. It was a book called “The British Apollo.” Presently, his eye fell upon a startling question, worded thus: “Is there now, or will there be at the resurrection, any females in heaven; since there seems to be no need of them there?”

Very likely he then closed the book; and there, by the death-bed of his daughter, over whose resurrection this question threw its cold shadow, his mind set to work upon the problem thus presented; and afterward he fully resolved it, in an essay bearing this delectable title: “Talitha Cumi; or, An Invitation to Women to look after their Inheritance in the Heavenly Mansions.” He begins by quoting the question that he had met with; then he proceeds to say: “This malapert question had not patience to stay for an answer, as appears by the conclusion of it—‘since there seems to be no need of them there.’ ‘Tis most certain there will be no needless, impertinent persons or things in heaven. Heaven is a roomy, a most magnificent palace, furnished with the most rich and splendid entertainments; and the noblest guests are invited to partake of them. But why should there seem to be no need of women in heaven? . . . To speak the truth, God has no need of any creature. His name is exalted far above all blessing and praise. But by the same argument there will be no angels nor men in heaven, because there is no need of them there.” He then discusses, with judge-like care and fulness, all the arguments, on both sides, that may be drawn from reason, Scripture, and the ancient and modern theologians, reaching at last this assertion: “There are three women that shall rise again,—Eve, the mother of all living; Sarah, the mother of the faithful; and Mary, the mother of our Lord. And if these three rise again, without doubt all will.” In the course of the discussion he meets the objection that, upon a certain branch of his subject, “the ancients are divided in their opinions.” His answer to this objection comes edged by a flash of wit “If we should wait till all the ancients are agreed in their opinions, neither men nor women would ever get to heaven.”¹

     When Chaucer visited the house of the goddess Fame, he observed that the outer gate

     It is an illustration of the caprice which everywhere prevails in the domain of this goddess, that the one American who, upon the whole, was the most powerful and brilliant prose-writer produced in this, country during the colonial time, and who in his day enjoyed a sovereign reputation in New England, should have passed since then into utter obscurity; while several of his contemporaries, particularly Increase and Cotton Mather, who were far inferior to him in genius, have names that are still resounding in our memories. This writer was John Wise, born at Roxbury, probably in 1652; graduated at Harvard College in 1673; and, from 1680 until his death in 1725, minister of the Second Church of Ipswich. He had almost every quality that gives distinction among men. He was of towering height, of great muscular power, stately and graceful in shape and movement; in his advancing years, of an aspect most venerable. His parishioners long remembered with pride how a certain famous and blustering hero from Andover, the mighty wrestler of all that region, once came down to Ipswich for the purpose of challenging their stalwart parson to a friendly trial of strength at wrestling; and how the parson, after much solicitation,

at last reluctantly consented, but had scarcely wrapped his arms in iron hug around his antagonist, when the latter lay outstretched upon the earth, with his curiosity respecting the Reverend Mr. Wise completely satisfied.

     The soul of this man was of the same large and indomitable make. He had a robust joy in nature and in human nature; the creed of a democrat, without fear and without truculence: to him the griefs of the oppressed and the aggressions of the oppressor were alike insupportable. In 1687, when Sir Edmund Andros sent down to Ipswich his lawless order for a province-tax, the young parson braved the tyrant’s anger, by advising his people not to comply with that order; for which he was arrested, tried, deposed from the ministry, fined, and thrown into prison. In 1689, when Sir Edmund was overthrown, John Wise was back again in his parish; and, both there and in Boston, he was at the front among the bravest, who then sought to prevent the recurrence of such despotism, by making examples of the petty English despot and of his still pettier American accomplices. In 1690, when the new governor of Massachusetts, Sir William Phips, led an expedition against Canada, John Wise, by request of the colonial legislature, accompanied him as chaplain, distinguishing himself in the campaign by feats of heroism, endurance, and military skill, as well as by fidelity in preaching and praying.

     Thus far in his life, he had been noted chiefly for traits of physical and moral greatness, a devout, benignant, valiant, and blameless manhood; but within a few years afterward, there came upon the country an event that made him famous for the exertion of intellectual powers, both in thought and speech, the most rugged, versatile, and splendid.

     In the year 1705, on the fifth of November—ominous day!—there was issued at Boston a very shrewd document, without any signature attached, but purporting to have been framed by an association of ministers in and

near that city. It was addressed to the churches and ministers of New England. It bore the unassuming title of “Question and Proposals.” Masked under deferential and harmless phrases, it was really a project for taking away the power of the laity in all the churches of New England, for annulling the independence of each church, and for substituting in place of both the will of the clergy. The document was understood to have been the work of the two Mathers, backed by a coterie of clerical admirers, and representing an inclination widely cherished, even if concealed. The document had a meek look, innocuous, even holy; it sought only the glory of God and the good of man; it was not loud, peremptory, dogmatic; it only asked and suggested. But John Wise, from his rural study in Ipswich, saw its true character,—a plot for an ecclesiastical revolution, and a revolution backward; and having given ample time for the scheme to work its way into general discussion, at last he lifted up his hand, and, at one blow, crushed it. His blow was a book, “The Churches’ Quarrel Espoused,” published at Boston in 1710,—a book that by its learning, logic, sarcasm, humor, invective, its consuming earnestness, its vision of great truths, its flashes of triumphant eloquence, simply annihilated the scheme which it assailed.

     His introduction is planned with exceeding art to conciliate the reader, to rouse the suspicion of the public against the men who had proposed the revolutionary scheme, and to confirm the popular conviction that the order of church-government already established, had upon the whole worked satisfactorily: “The scheme seems to be the spectre . . . of Presbyterianism; . . . yet if I don’t mistake, in intention there is something considerable of Prelacy in it. . . . There is also something in it which smells very strong of the infallible chair. . . . For the clergy to monopolize both the legislative and executive part of canon law, is but a few steps from the chair of universal pestilence; and by the ladder here set up, clergymen may,

if they please, clamber thus high. . . . Who can limit their power, or shorten their arm in their executions? Their Bulls can now, upon any affront, bellow and thunder out a thousand terrible curses; and the poor affrighted and envassaled laity . . . must forfeit their salvation, if they don’t tamely submit.”¹

     He then takes up, one by one, the several proposals; and exposes the danger and folly of each, with great power of logic, humor, and sarcasm. Thus, in commenting upon the proposed mode of receiving candidates into the ministry, he argues that it will surely lead to the evils of clerical corruption seen elsewhere: “How oft is it repeated that poor, sordid, debauched wretches are put into holy orders, whenas they were fitter to be put into the stocks, or sent to Bridewell for madmen, than to be sent with their testimonials to work in Christ’s vineyard! How long have the Indies, the seas, the provinces, and many other parts of the empire, groaned under this damnable way of cheating God of his glory and the world of salvation!”²

     It was, however, objected that under the present system, candidates often got into the Ministry too young. He replies: “What then? . . . If Christ be preached, all is well. . . . Despise not the day of small things. All men must have a beginning, and every bird which is pretty well fledged must begin to fly. And ours are not of the nest where Icarus was hatched, whose feathers were only glued on; but these belong to the angelic host, and their wings grow out from their essence; therefore, you may allow them with the lark now and then to dart heavenward, though the shell or down be scarce off from their heads.”³

     It was urged, likewise, that the scheme has quite a harmless look; and in reply, he shows that, in spite of that, it involves the possibility of great expansion into mischief “Though it be but a calf now, yet in time it may grow—

being of a thrifty nature—to become a sturdy ox that will know no ‘whoa,’ and, it may be, past the churches’ skill then to subdue it. For if I am not much mistaken, . . . that great and terrible Beast with seven heads and ten horns . . . was nothing else, a few ages ago, but just such another calf as this is. It was, indeed, finely shaped and of neat limbs, . . . insomuch that the great potentates of the earth were much ravished with its aspect and features; some offered to suckle it on the choicest cows amongst all the herds of royal cattle, . . . hoping to stock their own countries with the breed; and when it was grown to a considerable magnitude, to render it more shapely and fair, they put iron tips on to its horns, and beset its stupendous bulk with very rich ornaments. . . . But alas, poor men! they have paid dear for their prodigality and fondness; for this very Creature, that was but a calf when they first begun to feed it, is now grown to be such a mad, furious, and wild Bull, that there is scarce a Christian monarch on earth . . . —the best horseman or huntsman of them all—that dare take this Beast by the horns, when he begins to bounce and bellow. Indeed the Emperor, within these few years, has recovered so much courage that he took him by the tail, to drive him out of his royal granges, being quite angry and weary with his cropping and browsing on the flowers of his imperial crown. But, otherwise, the Beast generally goes at large, and does what he will in all princes’ dominions, and keeps them in awe. Therefore, to conclude, . . . ‘Obsta principiis!’ It is wisdom to nip such growths in the bud, and keep down by early slaughter such a breed of cattle.”¹

     The document that he is exposing, is dated “November the fifth.” He does not let this incident slip; and having, with wonderful effectiveness, developed his argument that the scheme contained in that document is a treasonable conspiracy, he proceeds to give the authors of

it a terrible thrust. Beginning with some “astrological remarks” upon the document, he says: “I find its nativity full of favorable aspects to English churches. The fifth day of November has been as a guardian angel to the most sacred interest of the empire; it has rescued the whole glory of church and state from the most fatal arrest of hell and Rome. . . . Had I been of the cabal . . . which formed these proposals, so soon as I had seen . . . the date, . . . I should have cried out, ‘Miserere nostri Deus,’—the good Lord have mercy upon us. This is the ‘gun-powder-treason day;’ and we are every man ruined, being running Fawkes’s fate! Why, gentlemen, have you forgot it? It is the day of the gun-powder-treason, and a fatal day to traitors. . . . I have such an awe upon my mind of this very day, that I have made a settled resolution, that of all the days of the whole year, I will never conspire treason against my natural prince, nor mischief to the churches, on the fifth day of November. And so, farewell, gentlemen; for I dare not join with you in this conspiracy.”¹ But again, in the discussion, he returns to this date, and he addresses to it a fervid and brilliant apostrophe: “Blessed! thrice blessed day! uphold and maintain thy matchless fame in the calendar of time; and let no darkness or shadow of death stain thee; let thy horizon comprehend whole constellations of favorable and auspicious stars, reflecting a benign influence on the English monarchy; and upon every return, in thy anniversary circuits, keep an indulgent eye open and wakeful upon all the beauties, from the throne to the footstool, of that mighty empire! And when it is thy misfortune to conceive a Monster, which may threaten any part of the nation’s glory, let it come crippled from the womb, or else travail in birth again, with some noble hero or invincible Hercules, who may conquer and confound it.”²

     This noble passage is near the victorious close of the

book; and having thus abundantly implied the infamous character of the conspiracy, he magnanimously tells the conspirators themselves that, for the present, and on their good behavior, they are safe; for he will not reveal their names: “Where the place was, or the persons who were present in this rendezvous, shall never be told by me, unless it be extorted by the rack. And though I have endeavored with freedom of argument to subvert the error, I will never stain their personal glory by repeating or calling over the muster-roll. Therefore, as Noah’s sons cast a garment upon their father’s nakedness, so . . . their names for me shall repose under a mantle of honorable pity and forgetfulness.”¹

     Upon the whole, this book has extraordinary literary merit. It is, of its kind, a work of art; it has a beginning, a middle, and an end,—each part in fit proportion, and all connected organically. The author is expert in exciting and in sustaining attention; does not presume upon the patience of his readers.; relieves the heaviness and dryness of the argument by gayety and sarcasm; and has occasional bursts of grand enthusiasm, of majestic and soul-stirring eloquence. In tone it is superior to its time; keen and urgent in its reasoning, showing no pity for opposing principles, it is full of forbearance and even of urbanity for opposing persons. It is a piece of triumphant logic, brightened by wit, and ennobled by imagination; a master-specimen of the art of public controversy.

     ”The Churches’ Quarrel Espoused” is an exposition of the theory of democracy, in the Christian church, but the argument is developed according to the exigencies of a special occasion. In 1717, seven years after the publication of that book, John Wise published a systematic treatise upon the same subject, expounding in a formal and didactic way the principles of ecclesiastical polity then adopted in New England. He entitled this work,

“A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches.”

     His theory of the best government for the church derives its character from his fundamental ideas of what is the best government for the state; and the treatment of the latter subject leads him into a broad discussion of the rights of man, the nature of civil obligation, and the various forms of civil polity.

     He first deals with man in his natural state, “as a freeborn subject under the crown of Heaven, and owing homage to none but God himself. . . . He is the favorite animal on earth, in that this part of God’s image, namely, reason, is congenerate with his nature, wherein by a law immutable, enstamped upon his frame, God has provided a rule for men in all their actions, obliging each one to the performance of that which is right, . . . the which is nothing but the dictate of right reason founded in the soul of man. . . . The second great immunity of man is an original liberty enstamped upon his rational nature. . . . I shall waive the consideration of man’s moral turpitude, but shall view him” as “the most august animal in the world. . . . Whatever has happened since his creation, he remains at the upper-end of nature.” Man’s natural liberty consists in three things: first, man has “a faculty of doing or omitting things according to the direction of his judgment;” second, “every man must be conceived to be perfectly in his own power and disposal, and not to be controlled by the authority of any other;” third, there is “an equality amongst men, which is . . . to be cherished and preserved to the highest degree, as will consist with all just distinctions amongst men of honor, and shall be agreeable with the public good. For man has a high valuation of himself, and the passion seems to lay its first foundation, not in pride, but really in the high and admirable frame and constitution of human nature. . . . Since, then, human nature agrees equally with all persons, and since no one can live a sociable life with another that does

not own and respect him as a man, it follows as a command of the law of nature, that every man esteem and treat another as one who is naturally his equal, or who is a man as well as he. . . . The noblest mortal in his entrance on the stage of life is not distinguished by any pomp . . . from the lowest of mankind; and our life hastens to the same general mark. Death observes no ceremony, but knocks as loud at the barriers of the court as at the door of the cottage. . . . Nature having set all men upon a level and made them equals, no servitude or subjection can be conceived without inequality, and this cannot be made without usurpation in others, or voluntary compliance in those who resign their freedom and give away their degree of natural being.”¹

     In treating of man in a civil state, he shows that “the true and leading cause of forming governments and yielding up natural liberty, and throwing man’s equality into a common pile . . . was . . . to guard themselves against the injuries men were liable to interchangeably; for none so good to man as man, and yet none a greater enemy So that the first . . . original of civil power is the people. . . . The formal reason of government is the will of a community, yielded up and surrendered to some other subject, either of one particular person or more.”² He, then, speaks of “the three forms of a regular state,”—democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy; and of the first he says: “This form of government appears in the greatest part of the world to have been the most ancient. . . . Reason seems to show it to be most probable that when men . . . had thoughts of joining in a civil body, they would without question be inclined to administer their common affairs by their common judgment, and so must necessarily . . . establish a democracy.”³

     Having thus spoken of each of these civil forms, he next deals with their analogous forms in church organization.

He begins with the ecclesiastical monarchy, and of course finds this embodied in the Papacy: “It is certain his Holiness, either by reasonable pleas or powerful cheats, has assumed an absolute and universal sovereignty; this fills his cathedral chair, and is adorned with a triple crown.” His claim is that “the Almighty has made him both key-keeper of heaven and hell, with the adjacent territories of purgatory, and vested in him an absolute sovereignty over the Christian world. . . . He therefore decks himself with the spoils of the divine attributes, styling himself, Our Lord God, ‘Optimum, maximum, et supremum numen in terris;’ a God on earth, a visible Deity, and that his power is absolute, and his wisdom infallible. And many of the great potentates of the earth have paid their fealty as though it was really so. . . . He has placed his holy foot on the monarch’s profane neck, as crushing a vermin crawling out of the stable of his sovereignty; and others very frequently kiss his toes with very profound devotion. . . . But the sad inquiry is, whether this sort of government has not plainly subverted the design of the gospel, and the end for which Christ’s government was ordained, namely, the moral, spiritual, and eternal happiness of men. But I have no occasion to pursue this remark with tedious demonstrations. It is very plain; it is written with blood in capital letters, to be read at midnight by the flames of Smithfield and other such like consecrated fires,—that the government of this ecclesiastical monarch has, instead of sanctifying, absolutely debauched the world, and subverted all good Christianity in it. . . . Without the least show of any vain presumption, we may infer that God and wise Nature were never propitious to the birth of this Monster.”¹

     As regards the aristocratic form of church government, which he finds embodied in the Episcopacy, he thinks that Christianity “has been peeled, robbed, and spoiled” by it

     He then comes to the ecclesiastical democracy, and of course advocates it, doing so with calm, rational, and powerful arguments: “This is a form of government which the light of nature does highly value, and often directs to, as most agreeable to the just and natural prerogatives of human beings.”²

     Throughout this entire work, the author shows abundant learning; but always he is the master of his learning, and not its victim. He lays out his propositions clearly and powerfully; marshals his arguments with tact and effect; is nowhere freakish, or extravagant; never fails in good temper, or in good sense.

     Upon the whole, no other American author of the colonial time is the equal of John Wise in the union of great breadth and power of thought with great splendor of style; and he stands almost alone among our early writers for the blending of a racy and dainty humor with impassioned earnestness.

     His force and brilliance in statement cannot be fully represented in sentences torn from their connection; yet on almost every page one meets terse and quotable sayings, here and there long passages grand for their nobility of feeling, their truth, and the music of their words. “Order,” says he, “is both the beauty and safety of the universe. Take away the decorum whereby the whole hangs together, the great frame of nature is unpinned, and drops piece from piece; and out of a beautiful structure we have a chaos.”³ “If men are trusted with duty,” he exclaims, “they must trust that, and not events. If men are placed at helm to steer in all weather that blows, they must not be afraid of the waves or a wet coat.”⁴

     Here is his stately and passionate chant of homage to religion: “Religion, in its infallible original, the wisdom and authority of God; in its Infinite Object, the ineffable Persons and Perfections of the Divine Essence; in its means, the gospel of salvation; in its inspired wakeful and capacious ministry; in its subject, the inestimable immortal soul of man; in its transcendent effects, in time the charming peace and joys of conscience, in eternity the joyful retreat and shouts of glory;—is the most incomparable gift of Palladium which ever came from heaven. Amongst all the favors of the Father of Lights, there is none parallel with this; when disclosed in its beauty, it ravisheth all the intellects of the universe; and challenge may be made that the prerogatives and glory belonging to all the crowned heads in the world, do bow and wait upon its processions through the earth, to guard it from its innumerable and inveterate enemies. . . . It is certain that the church of Christ is the pillar of truth, or sacred recluse and peculiar asylum of Religion; and this sacred guest, Religion, which came in the world’s infancy from heaven to gratify the solitudes of miserable man, when God had left him, hath long kept house with us in this land, to sweeten our wilderness-state; and the renowned churches here are her sacred palaces. Then, certainly, it is not fair for her lovers, under pretence of maintaining her welcome in greater state, to desolate her pleasing habitations, though they stand somewhat low like the myrtle grove.”¹

     Perhaps even greater than the distinction he deserves for his brilliant writing, is the distinction due him for the prophetic clearness, the courage, and the inapproachable ability with which, in that unfriendly time, he, almost alone among Americans, avowed his belief in civil governments founded on the idea of human equality. He was the first great American democrat. In the earlier years of the eighteenth century, he announced the political ideas that,

fifty years later, took immortal form under the pen of Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, in 1772, when the doctrine of human right had come to be a very urgent and very practical one among men, the two books of John Wise were called for in Boston by the Revolutionary leaders; they were reprinted in response to this call; and they proved an armory of burnished weapons in all that stern fight. “The end of all good government is to cultivate humanity and promote the happiness of all, and the good of every man in all his rights, his life, liberty, estate, honor, and so forth, without injury or abuse to any.”¹ No wonder that the writer of that sentence was called up from his grave, by the men who were getting ready for the Declaration of Independence!

     Not long before the Revolutionary War, a distinguished clergyman of Boston, Charles Chauncey, then an aged man, said, in a letter to President Stiles, that of all the eminent men he had known in New England, Jeremiah Dummer was “for extent and strength of genius” one of the three greatest. By all contemporary allusions it is evident that this man was regarded in his day as having extraordinary ability. Certainly no other American of that period began life with more brilliant promise; perhaps none ended it under sadder disappointment. He was born in Boston about 1679, of a family prominent and honorable in the country from its earliest settlement. He was graduated at Harvard College in 1699, where his student-life was long perpetuated in splendid tradition. Being at that time of a singularly devout spirit, he chose theology for his profession, and entered upon the study of it with his usual ardor and thoroughness. He soon went abroad for larger opportunities of instruction, taking

his doctor’s degree at the University of Utrecht;¹ and upon his return to New England, probably in 1704, he brought with him testimonials to his industry and blameless life while in Europe. To his friends and to himself he now probably seemed fully ripe for the illustrious service among the churches of New England to which he had been destined. He began to preach in the pulpits of Boston; but somehow, in spite of all his genius and all his vast academic preparation, his preaching did not make any impression. It was without fault, and without effect. Thus, on the twenty-ninth of October, 1704, he preached “A Discourse on the Holiness of the Sabbath Day.” It was immaculate for orthodoxy, fitting even the most ascetic Puritan variety of that article; it had an abundance of Biblical, theological, and classical learning in it; it was smooth and liquid in style; indeed, it had nearly every quality of a speech, except fitness for being spoken. It was simply a labored literary essay, quite too bookish, ornate, and fine to have any practical effect either on saints or sinners. The sermon, however, was at once published,² under the high sanction of the venerable Increase Mather, who, in the preface, spoke of Dummer’s unequalled success as a student at home and abroad, and of his personal excellence in creed and deed, but concluded with the alarming intimation that unless the churches of New England should make haste to possess themselves of this clerical prodigy, he would be very likely to withdraw into some other quarter of the universe.

     The menace was unheeded. Dummer preached here and there for a time, but found no acceptable pulpit to which he was acceptable; and at last he gave up the quest. Five years later, 1709, he once more emerged into view. This time it was in London, in a new character, on a new

theme. He had dropped his theological profession, and his theology, and, very likely, his religion; he had gone to England to be a politician, and to make for himself there a great career in secular life. He had arrived not long before the formation of the Tory ministry under Harley and St. John; and to the anguish of his friends in America, he soon allied himself with the latter powerful and profligate statesman; adopted his politics, and even his morals; served him in various secret negotiations; and had from him promises of high promotion. But, in 1714, the Queen died; Bolingbroke fled in disgrace to France; and poor Dummer, damned by such an alliance, found all his hopes of a political career in England blasted.¹ It was impossible for him to confess his failure by a return to his native land; and in England he remained during the rest of his days, becoming a member of the Middle Temple, and indulging in certain respectable laxities of conduct more suggestive of his later friends than of his earlier ones; at last, in 1739, he died, without ever grasping any of that glory in the world for which he had so laboriously qualified himself, almost unknown in the country which he had adopted, and long before forgotten in the country in which he was born.

     Yet on behalf of Jeremiah Dummer it remains to be said, that whatever else, of true and good, he may have given up when he turned his back upon his own country, he never gave up his love for that country, or his passion to promote her welfare by his best labors. From 1710 to 1721, he served Massachusetts as its agent in London; and when that office was taken from him, he continued to serve her still, without appointment and without pay, whenever he found occasion. However much of an Englishman he may have become, he never ceased to be an American. Whatever he wrote for the public, is upon American topics; and his letters to his friends in this

country showed at times a pensive and affectionate regret for the land and the life that he could never return to. His memory as a writer will rest upon two publications, both being proofs not only of his fine literary accomplishments, but of his vigilant and laborious zeal for his country. The first was printed, in London, in 1709,¹ and is entitled, “A Letter to a Noble Lord concerning the late Expedition to Canada,” wherein he makes three points first, that the conquest of Canada was of great importance to England; second, that the late expedition was wisely planned; third, that its failure cannot be charged upon New England. It is an able and convincing essay, written in urbane and graceful style, everywhere bright and readable. It contains some striking illustrations of the adroitness with which the French missionaries in Canada aided the political designs of France; for instance, teaching their Indian converts that “the Virgin Mary was a French lady, and that her Son, the Saviour of the world, was crucified by the English.” The book also denotes how early and passionate among the English colonies in America was the dread of the American power of France; thus, even in 1709, he says that those colonies can never be easy or happy “whilst the French are masters of Canada.”²

     But the second of Dummer’s political publications is much the abler: “A Defence of the New England Charters.” It was published in London in 1728,³ at a time when there was danger of a bill passing the House of Commons, annulling the charters granted to the New England colonies. It opens with a fine sketch of the origin and growth of those colonies, and of the circumstances under which the charters were given to them; and then proceeds to establish these four propositions: first, that the charter-governments have a good right to their charters; second,

that they have not forfeited them; third, that if they had, it would not be the interest of the crown to accept the forfeitures; and, fourth, that it is inconsistent with justice to disfranchise the charter-colonies by act of parliament. It is an admirable specimen of argumentative literature; strict in logic, strong in fact, clear, flowing, graceful, occasionally rising into noble enthusiasm, but always temperate, courteous, and cosmopolitan.

     No one who would penetrate to the core of early American literature, and would read in it the secret history of the people in whose minds it took root and from whose minds it grew, may by any means turn away, in lofty literary scorn, from the almanac,—most despised, most prolific, most indispensable of books, which every man uses, and no man praises; the very quack, clown, pack-horse, and pariah of modern literature, yet the one universal book of modern literature; the supreme and only literary necessity even in households where the Bible and the newspaper are still undesired or unattainable luxuries.

     The earliest record of this species of literature in America carries us back to the very beginning of printed literature in America; for, next after a sheet containing “The Freeman’s Oath,” the first production that came from the printing-press in this country was “An Almanac calculated for New England, by Mr. Pierce,” and printed by Stephen Daye, at Cambridge, in 1639.¹ Thenceforward for a long time, scarcely a year passed over that solitary printing-press at Cambridge, without receiving a similar salute from it. In 1676, Boston itself grew wise enough to produce an almanac of its own. Ten years afterward, Philadelphia began to send forth almanacs—a trade in which, in the following century, it was to acquire special glory. In

1697, New York entered the same enticing field of enterprise. The first almanac produced in Rhode Island, was in 1728; the first almanac produced in Virginia, was in 1731.¹ In 1733, Benjamin Franklin began to publish what he called “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” to which his own personal reputation has given a celebrity surpassing that of all other almanacs published anywhere in the world. Thus, year by year, with the multiplication of people and of printing-presses in this country, was there a multiplication of almanacs, some of them being of remarkable intellectual and even literary merit. From the first, they contained many of the traits that had become conventional in printed almanacs in Europe, ever since their first publication there in the fifteenth century; particularly astrological prophecies, or, as they were called, “prognostications,” relating both to mankind and to the weather, and representing the traditional belief in the influence of the heavenly bodies upon mundane affairs. Gradually, to these were added other things,—scraps of wisdom, crumbs of history, snatches of verse, proverbs, jests, all scattered through the little book according to the convenience of the printer and the supposed benefit of the reader. Throughout our colonial time, when larger books were costly and few, the almanac had everywhere a hearty welcome and frequent perusal; the successive numbers of it were carefully preserved year after year; their margins and blank pages were often covered over with annotations, domestic and otherwise. Thus, John Cotton, it will be remembered, used the blank spaces in his almanacs as depositories for his stealthy attempts at verse. So, also, the historian, Thomas Prince, recorded in his almanacs the state of his accounts with his hair-dresser and wig-maker. A writer of some note,² born in Connecticut during the American Revolution, has left a vivid description of his own excitement,

as a child, in reading again and again the literary treasures of the household, consisting, in large part, of a file of almanacs for fifty years.

     One of the numerous myths still prevailing in the world with reference to Benjamin Franklin, describes him as the first founder of an almanac blending those qualities of shrewd instruction and keen mother-wit, that are to be seen in his famous series; a French encyclopædist, for example, declaring that Franklin “put forth the first popular almanac which spoke the language of reason.”¹ In truth, much of the wisdom and wit introduced by Franklin into his almanac was borrowed from Bacon, Rabelais, Rochefoucauld, Steele, Swift, De Foe, and others:² but even the idea of introducing into an almanac wit and wisdom whether original or borrowed, had been thought of and put into practice before Franklin’s “Poor Richard” was born. In 1728, five years before that event, Franklin’s brother, James, sent forth the first number of “The Rhode Island Almanac;” and in its pages, year by year, one may find no little of that sagacity, humor, and knack of phrase, that did so much for the fortunes of his own runaway apprentice. But even three years before James Franklin’s almanac appeared, Nathaniel Ames,³ a physician and innkeeper of Dedham, Massachusetts, a man of original, vigorous, and pungent genius; began the publication of his “Astronomical Diary and Almanac;” which he continued to publish till his death in 1764; which, under his management, acquired an enormous popularity throughout New England; and which, from the first, contained in high perfection every type of excellence afterward illustrated in the almanac of Benjamin Franklin. Indeed, Ames’s almanac was in most respects better than Franklin’s, and was, probably, the most pleasing representative we have of a

form of literature that furnished so much entertainment to our ancestors, and that preserves for us so many characteristic tints of their life and thought.

     Nathaniel Ames made his almanac a sort of annual cyclopædia of information and amusement,—a vehicle for the conveyance to the public of all sorts of knowledge and nonsense, in prose and verse, from literature, history and his own mind, all presented with brevity, variety, and infallible tact. He had the instinct of a journalist; and, under a guise that was half-frolicsome, the sincerity and benignant passion of a public educator. He carried into the furthest wildernesses of New England some of the best English literature; pronouncing there, perhaps for the first time, the names of Addison, Thomson, Pope, Dryden, Butler, Milton; and repeating there choice fragments of what they had written. Thus, eight years before Benjamin Franklin had started his almanac, Nathaniel Ames was publishing one that had all of its best qualities, fact and frolic, the wisdom of the preacher without his solemnity, terse sayings, shrewdness, wit, homely wisdom, all sparkling in piquant phrase.

     As the public expected the almanac-maker to be a prophet, Nathaniel Ames gratified the public; and he freely predicted future events, but always with a merry twinkle in his eye, and always ready to laugh the loudest at his own failure to predict them aright. He mixes, in delightful juxtaposition, absurd prognostications, curt jests, and aphorisms of profound wisdom, the whole forming a miscellany even now extremely readable, and sure, at that time, to raise shouts of laughter around thousands of fireplaces where food for laughter was much needed. Thus,

January 1. “About the beginning of the year expect plenty of rain or snow.”
      “Warm and clears off cold again.”

May 22. “Some materials about this time are hatched for the clergy to debate on.”

October 21. “He that lives by fraud is in danger of dying a knave.”

November 9. “These aspects show violent winds and in winter storms of driving snow; mischiefs by Indians, if no peace; and among us, feuds, quarrels, bloody-noses, broken pates—if not necks.”

November 24. “If there was less debating and more acting, ‘twould be better times.”

December 7-10.	“Ladies, take heed,    Lay down your fans,  And handle well    Your warming-pans.”
December 15-18.	“This cold, uncomfortable weather  Makes Jack and Gill lie close together.”
December 20-22.	“The lawyers’ tongues—they never freeze,  If warmed with honest clients’ fees.”1

     Having been laughed at for his false predictions, he uses the almanac for 1729 to join in the laugh, and to turn the occasion of it into a witty and instructive home-thrust at every reader:

     Sometimes, in a more serious tone, he gives his real opinion about this traditional department of the almanac, and helps to lift his readers above the demand for it: “He who has foreordained whatsoever comes to pass, knows, and he only knows with absolute certainty, what will come to pass. The Book of Fate is hid from all created beings. . . . Indeed, the Devil does not know so much of future events, as many expect an almanac-maker should foretell; although it must be owned that they are willing to allow him the help of the Devil for his information.”²

     But everywhere it is plain enough that the author wears

his mask of jester, only to hide a most earnest and friendly face; and having by his mirth gained admission to every New England cabin, he sits down with the family around the great crackling fire, and helps them to a wisdom that will enable them to keep on laughing. Thus; in the almanac for 1754, he has a preliminary address to the reader, uttered in the tone of a Cobbett or a Greeley,—a born tribune of the people: “I have filled the two last pages with an essay on regimen. I don’t pretend to direct the learned; the rich and voluptuous will scorn my direction, and sneer or rail at any that would reclaim them; but since this sheet enters the solitary dwellings of the poor and illiterate, where the studied ingenuity of the learned writer never comes, if these brief hints do good, it will rejoice the heart of your humble servant, Nathaniel Ames.”

February 24-27. “If you fall into misfortunes, creep through those bushes which have the least briers.”

March 21-23. “Expectation waits to know whether the mountain bears a mouse or no.”

October 25-28. “There are three faithful friends—an old wife, an old dog, and ready cash.”

November 6-8. “Were things done twice, many would be wise.”¹

July 16-27. “Every man carries a fool in his sleeve; with some he appears bold, with some he only pops out now and then, but the wise keep him hid.”

September 12-16. “To some men their country is their shame; and some are the shame of their country.”

     He sprinkles his pages with wholesome suggestions about health-getting and health-keeping. For September, 1762, he says: “This month is a proper season to recruit the unhealthy, by taking Dr. Horse and riding long journeys—though moderately.” The gospel that he preaches is the gospel of health, virtue, economy, industry, content; he shows that always grumbling is either a vice or a disease, and that whichever it be, the first duty of every man is to rid himself of it:

     The almanac for 1736 ends with a brief prose essay, which is an amusing miscellany of physical learning and humor, all intended to interest the reader and to advertise the merits of a certain invaluable medicine—wormseed for children; concluding with this paragraph worthy of the shrewdness of Poor Richard himself: “Some nurses are so superstitious that they dare not give their children worm-seed without pounding and sifting it, affirming that every seed that escapes being bruised in the mortar will become a live worm in the bowels of the child. But, by the by, it is an excellent medicine for the purpose, and they need not be afraid to use it; for, if they will prove that it can breed worms in children, I can as easily prove that it can breed children in women; and so those unhappy persons who have had the ill-luck to have children without fathers, need not lie under the imputation of scandal, if they can produce sufficient evidence that they have taken worm-seed.”

     His pages are sprinkled with verses from the English poets and from his own pen,—the latter often of great vigor and sprightliness. For 1736, he spreads over the almanac a poem of twelve stanzas, one stanza being prefixed to each month. The subject of the poem is the Day of Judgment, and is so vivid and powerful in its descriptions, and is so blended with ominous references to the stars and to the warring elements, that it must have carried awe into many impressible minds, as if the omniscient almanac-maker intended actually to announce the coming of the awful day that very year. This is the stanza for January:

     So, with fascinating gloom opens the year; and thus it proceeds, with variations of poetic horror, month by month. In March, we have this mystic and dreadful description of the moon and stars:

     In the following month things grow rapidly worse. The stars, it will be remembered, have fallen:

In May,

     It must have given some relief to sensitive readers to cast the eye further down the page, and to read in the author’s prose his cheerful prophecies concerning the course of the weather for that very month; for he assures them of “a fine pleasant air, with gentle gales,” and of “fair, pleasant, growing weather.” And although there is an ominous threat of combustibility during the last week—“This week will afford heat and thunder”—yet the prospect is redeemed by the subsequent promise of “now and then a sprinkling of rain,”—which, of course, must defer the general’ conflagration. The stanza for July concludes with this couplet:

which harmonizes admirably with the weather probabilities for the same time; “The month ends with thunder and hot weather.”

     The almanac for 1749, the year succeeding the close of King George’s War, has a fine literary tone, and its poetic motto, on the title-page, is a noble prophecy of peace in the world:

     The essay at the end of the almanac for 1758, is of unusual merit for thought and vivacity of expression. It is a fine specimen of what we now call a leading editorial article—terse, epigrammatic, vigorous, formed to catch and to hold the attention; and it is a very creditable example of literary style. It was written in the midst of the struggle between France and England for the empire of America. It is upon “America—its Past, Present, and Future State.” With reference to the Past, he says “Time has cast a shade upon this scene. Since the creation, innumerable accidents have happened here, the bare mention of which would create wonder and surprise; but they are all lost in oblivion. The ignorant natives, for want of letters, have forgot their stock, and know not from whence they came, or how, or when they arrived here, or what has happened since.” Then glancing at the events that have happened in America since the arrival of the Europeans, he describes the magnificent territory of the North-West then in dispute: “Time was when we might have been possessed of it; at this time two mighty kings contend for this inestimable prize. Their respective claims are to be measured by the length of their swords. The poet says, ‘the Gods and Opportunity ride post;’ that you must take her by the forelock, being bald behind. Have we not too fondly depended upon our numbers? Sir Francis Bacon says, ‘The wolf careth not how many the sheep be.’ But numbers, well-spirited, with the blessing of heaven, will do wonders when by military skill and discipline the commanders can actuate, as by one soul, the most numerous bodies of armed people. Our numbers will not avail till the colonies are united. . . . If we do not join heart and hand in the common cause against our exulting foes, but fall to disputing amongst ourselves, it may really happen as, the governor of. Pennsylvania told his assembly, ‘We shall have no privilege to dispute about, nor country to dispute in.’”

     His treatment of the Future State of America shows a

remarkable grasp of facts relating to the physical resources of the continent, and an unusual power of reason in constructing the possibilities of civil and material development, especially in the West: “Here we find a vast stock of proper materials for the art and ingenuity of man to work on,—treasures of immense worth, concealed from the poor, ignorant, aboriginal natives. . . . As the celestial light of the gospel was directed here by the finger of God, it will doubtless finally drive the long, long night of heathenish darkness from America. . . . So arts and sciences will change the face of nature in their tour from hence over the Appalachian Mountains to the Western Ocean; and as they march through the vast desert, the residence of wild beasts will be broken up, and their obscene howl cease forever. Instead of which, the stones and trees will dance together at the music of Orpheus, the rocks will disclose their hidden gems, and the inestimable treasures of gold and silver be broken up. Huge mountains of iron ore are already discovered; and vast stores are reserved for future generations. This metal, more useful than gold and silver, will employ millions of hands, not only to form the martial sword and peaceful share alternately, but an infinity of utensils improved in the exercise of art and handicraft amongst men. . . . Shall not then these vast quarries that teem with mechanic stone,—those for structure be piled into great cities, and those for sculpture into statues, to perpetuate the honor of renowned heroes—even those who shall now save their country?” He then closes with this appeal to posterity: “O ye unborn inhabitants of America! should this page escape its destined conflagration at the year’s end, and these alphabetical letters remain legible when your eyes behold the sun after he has rolled the seasons round for two or three centuries more, you will know that in Anno Domini, 1758, we dreamed of your times.”