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Not satisfied with great principles, they were avaricious of great achievements. They subdued forests, organized emigration, marched westward under the star of empire. They achieved Louisburg and Concord and Lexington, and Paul Revere's ride and the Charter Oak and Bennington and Gaspee Point, and Harvard and Yale and Bowdoin and Dartmouth. They preserved the union, annihilated slavery, crushed repudiation, made the promises of the nation equal to gold. They have spoken the word of protest and pleading in behalf of the Chinaman and the Indian and the African, in behalf of a reformed civil service, and of honest elections. And where has there been a battle for God and humanity that they and their sons have not been in it? - Herman Lincoln Wayland They (the Pilgrims) believed in the existence of right and wrong, and in the infinite supremacy of righteousness. They believed in the intense reality of God and of the unseen and the spiritual; they held that these were the real, and that everything else was the shadow. - Herman Lincoln Wayland The Pilgrims were right in affirming the paramount authority of the law of God. If they erred in seeking that authoritative law and passed over the Sermon on the Mount for the stern Hebraisms of Moses; if they hesitated in view of the largeness of Christian liberty; if they seemed unwilling to accept the sweetness and light of the good tidings--let us not forget that it was the mistake of men who feared more than they dared to hope, whose estimate of the exceeding awfulness of sin caused them to dwell upon God's vengeance rather than His compassion; and whose dread of evil was so great that, in shutting their hearts against it, they sometimes shut out the good. - John Greenleaf Whittier With our sympathy for the wrongdoer we need the old Puritan and Quaker hatred of wrongdoing; with our just tolerance of men and opinions a righteous abhorrence of sin. * * * The true life of a nation is in its personal morality, and no excellence of constitution and laws can avail much if the people lack, purity and integrity. Culture, art, refinement, care for our own comfort and that of others are well, but truth, honor, reverence, and fidelity to duty are indispensable. * * * It is well for us if we have learned to listen to the sweet persuasion of the Beatitudes, but there are crises in all lives which require also the emphatic "Thou shalt not" of the decalogue which the founders wrote on the gateposts of their commonwealth. * * * The great struggle through which we have passed (the Civil war) has taught us how much we owe to the men and women of the Plymouth colony--the noblest ancestry that ever a people looked back to with love and reverence. - John Greenleaf Whittier Displaying page 2 of 2 for this topic: << Prev 1 [2]
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