field those cavaliers went down before that terrible charge like reeds before the wind. Cromwell's promise "they shall not be beaten," was fulfilled. "From the time when the army was remodeled to the time when it was disbanded," writes Macaulay, "it never found either on the British islands or on the continent an enemy who could stand its onset. In England, Scotland, Ireland, Flanders, the Puritan warriors, often surrounded by difficulties, sometimes contending against threefold odds, not only never failed to conquer, but never failed to destroy and break in pieces whatever force was opposed to them. Turenne was startled by the shout of stern exultation with which his English allies advanced to the combat, and expressed the delight of a true soldier when he learned that it was ever the delight of Cromwell's pikemen to rejoice greatly when they beheld the enemy; and the banished cavaliers felt an emotion of pride when they saw a brigade of their countrymen, outnumbered by foes and abandoned by allies, drive before it in headlong rout the finest infantry of Spain, and force a passage into a counterscarp which had just been pronounced impregnable by the ablest of the marshals of France."

The time came for this army to be disbanded. Fifty thousand men accustomed to the profession of arms were to be thrown upon the world. What was the result? Did they fill the country with disorder, violence, and crime? Hear Macaulay once more: "In a few months there remained not a trace indicating that the most formidable army in the world had just been

absorbed into the mass of the community. The royalists themselves confessed that in every department of honest industry the discarded warriors prospered beyond other men, that none was charged with any theft or robbery, that none was heard to ask an alms, and that if a baker, or a mason, or a wagoner, attracted notice by his diligence and sobriety, he was in all probability one of Cromwell's old soldiers."

These were the canting hypocrites against whom Hume launched his invectives and Walter Scott his caricatures. But what a commentary do they form on the efficacy of religious principle to make genuine freedom! With a nation of such men, what justice and peace would there be in every department of life at home, and what a front of defiance to any foreign foe! Meanwhile, too, under the government of Cromwell, the "arch hypocrite," the candid historian is obliged to assert that "justice was administered between man and man with an exactness and purity not before known in England," and that the country which for half a century "had been of scarcely more weight in European politics than Venice or Saxony at once became the most formidable power in the world."

In truth so thoroughly is the power of Christian principle adapted to meet all the conditions of the best government activity and control, equality of right and subordination to authority, elevation of the wisest and best, fidelity of functionaries, union and patriotism in the populace, protection for the humblest, and, in the admirable words of the Mayflower compact, "equal

laws for the general good" - that the briefest and best definition of true republicanism would be "Christianity embodied in social usages and institutions." Such being its inherent influence to fit men for freemen and to adjust the outer state to the men, we are prepared to see that

III. Religious principle alone has historically developed free institutions. The history of human society has been chiefly a history of oppression. Slavery slavery absolute — is older than history and has penetrated every portion of the globe except Australia. At the entrance of Christianity it held the greater part of the race in degradation, often brutal. But oppression in some form has been still more extensive and thoroughgoing than slavery. Under its heavy burdens the mass of the human race have groaned and "travailed in pain together" until now, the world through. There have been privileged individuals and privileged classes; the rest have been unprivileged. The pyramids of Egypt look down from the ages past and mutely tell a solemn tale of a time when a hundred thousand men toiled twenty years to build the tomb of a king. The Mahmoudean canal of modern Egypt, fifty miles in length, tells also of a time when a hundred and fifty thousand men were toiling for a despot, and twenty thousand of them perished in a twelvemonth. As the eye traverses the dreary waste of the world in the early times, there is little to relieve the sight, save one bright spot on the eastern end of the Mediterranean, where the institutions of true religion carried justice and

humanity to every household and every individual. As the eye ranges downward over the ages between, it catches here and there the word republic, and is deluded. It sees but a mirage. The word designated only the rule of a brilliant aristocracy. At the time when Demosthenes was uttering his words of fire to one hundred thousand freemen of Athens, those men were holding in chains four hundred thousand of their fellow beings; and Sparta was still worse. The freemen of the Roman republic were vastly outnumbered by the unprivileged classes, and both together by the slaves. The republics of the middle ages were a set of mere oligarchies. Florence, Venice, Genoa, and Pisa were not in reality free; they were dynasties in which a few individuals had usurped the rights and disposed of the fortunes of the great bulk of their fellow citizens. The citizens of Venice were but twenty-five hundred. During the most flourishing period of their history the citizens of all the Italian republics did not amount to twenty thousand; and these privileged classes held in subjection as many millions. Indeed in Florence the privileges of these privileged classes were at length usurped by the great merchant princes, the Medici; and when Savonarola urged Lorenzo the Magnificent on his deathbed to restore these lost privileges to his townsmen, the dying man turned his face to the wall and held his peace. The free towns of Flanders confined their freedom to the burghers. Among our own Saxon ancestors, not half the population could assert the right to freedom; they often sold their kindred into

slavery on the continent, and "the price of a man was but four times the price of an ox."

For all this heathenism had no remedy. It offered none. The most brilliant minds, like Aristotle, defended even slavery on the ground of national inferiority—a plea that is, always and everywhere, a heathen plea. The first voice, the only voice, and the oftuplifted voice during the middle ages in behalf of the poor crushed creature of God was the voice of religion pleading for a brother man, made of one blood with us, the soul for whom Christ died, the fellow traveler to the judgment seat and the kingdom of heaven. That voice unceasingly declared that in Christ Jesus "there is neither bond nor free." Among the earliest records of the primitive Church are found tokens of freedom for the bondmen, and from the time of Constantine manumission was most commonly performed in church at religious festivals. The popes repeatedly uttered themselves against slavery. Charters of freedom were granted "for the love of God," "for the relief of the soul." The clergy broke up the slave-markets at Bristol, Hamburg, Lyons, and Rome. It was confessedly the felt antagonism of the gospel, chiefly, which swept the institution out of Europe. In our own country, one hundred and fifty years ago, so deep was the conviction from New England to Carolina that "to be baptized was inconsistent with being a slave " that South Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia had to negative the notion by special enactment; and it was the same underlying inextinguishable antagonism which at last