136

OverviewTranscribeVersionsHelp

Facsimile

Transcription

Status: Page Status Transcribed

42

and I act and speak; and neither in my history or my
observation do I find unmitigated wrong in the Church
of Rome. Indeed I find her in all time, the representa-
tive of much that is of the most civilizing and salutary
influence on the highest purposes and duties of life.
She has often given the loftiest expression and the most
energetic forms to the most exalted tendencies of human
nature; and under her teachings, too, some of the
holiest virtues have attained their most exquisite as-
pect of loveliness, the purest, tenderest, most graceful
developments of the heart and mind. Her subtlety and
ferocity have dealt with the sterner faculties of man.
Her grace and tenderness have often times smoothed
away these harsher asperities. In our own country the
Roman Church has yielded promptly to the glorious
Americanism of free conscience and free worhsip. The
Roman Catholic State of Maryland was perhaps the first
to graft it on her Constitution. Then, in what I have
said and shall say, I speak of Papal Rome, which has
always penetrated the despotisms of Continental Europe,
but falls harmless before the shield of American freedom.

To resume. Even amid this turmoil of which I have
spoken, amid the rude blasts of war, or beneath the
poisonous breath of Papal debauchery, amid rivers of
blood, or steeped in an atmosphere loaded with the
pestilential vapors of the "Campagna," the lambent
flame on the altar of the apostolic Anglo-Saxon Church,
flickered it may be, but lived and lighted and warmed
the cloistered recesses of Oxford and Cambridge. There,
true christianity, tended by her chaste and veiled hand-
maids, divine philosophy and diviner liberty, sat in pa-
tient hope gazing on the wild tumult without, waiting
for her votaries to return. And soon the ashes of Wick-
liffe fell upon her altar, and the seed of the Reformation
shot forth at her feet; a Franciscan Monk, leaving his
howling on the waste mountain side, came as a little
child, and with the magic wand of ancient thought, laid
before her some of nature's most hidden secrets, and
again soon, the descendants of Alfred brought banners
on which were written a monarch's oath sworn at
Runymede, beneath the frown and uplifted sword of
young Liberty, and she knew her triple offspring again.

43

I dare not detain you with the historical detail which,
with feeble ray, but still with unquestioned directness,
comes down to us and tells us how steadily, how un-
swervingly, the English Church blended with its divinest
mission the pursuits of knowledge and the largest ex-
pansion of civil liberty. All through the dreary, fright-
ful waste and desert of the centuries from the Norman
Conquest to the perfect establishment of the Reforma-
tion, I could walk with you along the pleasant banks of
a little silver current of pure Christianity, hidden at
times beneath brambles and thorns, and sometimes al-
most lost in a fearful morass, but at intervals emerging
and glimmering in the bright sun, and fertilizing its
borders to grow some sweet flower of poesy, or washing
in its limpid water the ooze of time from a precious
crystal of philosophy, or passing along the root, which it
waters, of some sturdy ever enduring oak of human
right, or cotching in its fall some daring human hope,
and bearing it along, even down to us, here to-day, its
universal beneficiaries.

Leave me with the solemn, deep-shaded cloisters of
august old Magdalen, and turning away from the re-
sounding echo of the vaulted corridors, pass over that
little grass plot which Chaucer watered, and that flower
bed which Cranmer and Sidney, and Milton and Hamp-
den cultured, and through the casement beyond, see the
bright moonlight sparkling on the Thames. There is a
tradition I have heard, but know not where, that the
brightest fountain of the Thames rises beneath that
grass plot in the yard of old Magdalen College. But
just where this little stream, out of Oxford, meets the
River, a bark is moored with magic powers. In holy
confidence take your place; I know its destination. It
glides away and meets a coming tide, and rises, and
swells and strengthens, and gathers rich freight as it
sweeps through the heart of England, until rushing on-
ward to the great ocean, it sails away beyond the far
Atlantic, to these farthest shores, and pours out here its
freightage, and we have come to-day to garner it up and
diffuse it in richest charity over this land of ours. It
was contemporaneous with this long struggling dawn of
light in England, I have indicated that science and art

Notes and Questions

Nobody has written a note for this page yet

Please sign in to write a note for this page