against corruption in Church or in State, with hearts that no more failed, and brows that no more blanched, than does the granite before the rush of the storm; the same temper which was in our fathers two hundred and seventy years ago, when they left whatever was beautiful at home, in obedience to conscience, and faced, without flinching, the sea and the savage; when they sought not high things, and were joyfully ready to be stepping-stones for others, if they might advance the kingdom of God; but when they gave to this New England a life which has moulded its rugged strength from that day to this, has made it a monument surpassing all others which man can build, and a perpetual living seminary of character and of power for all the land;-a life, please God! which shall never be extinct, among the stronger souls of men, till the earth itself shall have vanished like a dream. X THE SOURCES AND GUARANTEES OF NATIONAL PROGRESS An Oration delivered at the Celebration of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the settlement of Southold, Long Island, August 27, 1890. X THE SOURCES AND GUARANTEES OF NA. TIONAL PROGRESS MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: It is a happy and wholesome impulse which prompts us to look back from principal anniversaries to the character and the work of those from whose life our own has sprung, and of the fruit of whose labors we gratefully partake. No effects which are not morally beneficent can follow celebrations like that of to-day; and I gladly respond to the courtesy which invites me-though a stranger to most of you, not a descendant of the settlers of Southold, only incidentally connected with its history through the fact that an ancestor of mine, a hundred and twenty-seven years ago, became pastor of its church, with the smaller fact that I have a pleasant summer-home within its old bounds-to take part with you in this commemoration. The special line of thought presenting itself to me in connection with the occasion will want, of course, the sparkling lights and shifting colors of local reminiscence, but I hope that it may not seem unsuited to the day, or wholly unworthy of that kind attention on which I am sure that you will suffer me to rely. The two and a half centuries of years which have silently joined the past since the settlement by English men of this typical American town have witnessed, as we know, a wide, various, in the aggregate effect an astonishing, change in the conditions and relations of peoples, especially of those peoples whose place in modern history is most distinguished, and with which our public connection has been closest. We get, perhaps, our clearest impression of the length of the period which presents itself for review as we recall some particulars of the change; and it is a fact of encouraging significance that almost uniformly the lines of change have been in the direction of better things: toward the limitation of despotic authority, the wider extension and firmer establishment of popular freedom, toward a more general education, with a freer and more animating Christian faith; toward improved mechanisms, widened commerce, the multiplication. within each nation of the institutes and ministries of a benign charity, the association of nations in happier relations. This prevailing trend in the general movement of civilized societies can hardly be mistaken. A rapid glance at some prominent facts of the earlier time, with our general remembrance of the courses on which Christendom has advanced, will make it appar ent. It is a circumstance which at once attracts an interested attention that in the same year in which Pastor Youngs and his associated disciples here organized their church, and within a fortnight of the same date, the memorable Long Parliament was assembled at Westminster, the convening of which had been made inevitable by darkening years of royal imposition and popular discontent, the public spirit and political ability combined in which had probably been equaled |