December 22, 1860 (Saturday)

                                           Freedom, Liberty

240th Year Anniversary of Pilgrim landing celebrated yesterday:

"There seem to be long Winters in history as well as nature, out of which Spring suddenly springs; whose growth, slowly preparing through many months, is almost like enchantment.  The human soul broke forth from profound darkness and captivity, with as sudden a glory as that which roused the shepherds on the plains of Bethlehem. 

The hundred years preceding the Pilgrim period was one continuous outbreak and advance of the human mind towards Liberty!  Scholarship was revived.  Printing was bringing the democratic element to learning and intelligence.  There was tumult in every department of society.  The world had completed a full season and was entering a new period.  No one could then have said so.  A darkness lay upon all men.  In all the one hundred years in which the Reformation stands central--not a prophet appeared!

The history of the Pilgrims is the proper epic of humility. They did not know their own worth, or suspect their own grandeur.  They heard God's voice speaking in their age, and they obeyed it.  It was a nice ear that could hear it.  It was a pious soul that accepted it.  It was a bold heart that could obey it.  No Moses was with them.  No miracle authenticated their moral convictions.  No fire or cloud guided them.  The invisible truth was their guide!

Despotism consolidates -- Liberty opens, diffuses, relaxes.  Growth in tyrannies is only petrifaction.  Freedom develops as a tree does.  First is the seed of some pine, dropped by the hand of frost, caught in the rift of some rock, and let down toward the scanty soil by the melting ice.  It sprouts, and no voice announces it birth.  It struggles for room.  Its roots seek for nourishment from rocks, and yet it thrives.  And as it grows, it divides and divides again, united in the trunk but diverse in the boughs, until in full stature it lifts up ten thousand separate branches, each one with liberty, but all of them fibril, back to a common root.

Free speech is to the soul what free air is to the body.  To deny or suppress it is to take sides with deceit and wickedness.  No righteous cause suffers by open search.  No cause dreads a Free Press, unless it has reason for dreading it. 

This is the molecule, the atomic cell of Puritanism.  Men need governments of restraint, just in proportion to the degree in which they are not developed and free.  As the individual becomes educated and strong in his whole nature, moral and intellectual, he needs no government.  For God made the human soul sufficient for all its own exigencies.  It is a perfect state.  It is competent to entire sovereignty!"  (Rev. Dr. Henry Beecher, New York Times, December 21, 1860)