Page:Historical and biographical sketches.djvu/208

204 is difficult to understand. Surely there is enough of romance to please the fancy, and much food for rugged thought, in the career of that son of a fighting old English admiral, who forsook the paths which seemingly led direct to fame and fortune, and, assuming the quaint ways and plain garb of a despised sect, preached its peaceful faith. Caleb Pusey, going out unarmed into the forest to meet a threatened attack of the savages, is a more heroic figure than blustering Miles Standish, girt with the sword he fought with in Flanders. Lloyd, Logan, and Pastorius, trained in the schools of Europe, and versed in all the learning of their day, were men whose peers are rarely found among colonists. The Quaker, the Mennonite and the Moravian, mindful of how their fathers were harried from place to place with the prison behind and the stake threatening before, bringing across the ocean with them their Bibles and often nothing else, with hearts warm enough and a creed broad enough to embrace the religious wayfarer and wanderer, as well as the negro and Indian, contrast favorably with the narrow and intolerant Puritan whose hand fell heavily upon all of different race, habits or belief from his own. Unfortunately, however, the German has been hard to assimilate, the Quaker repressed tendencies which seemed to him to partake of the vanities of the world, and the descendants of both have been slow to grope with the lamp of the historian amid the lives of their forefathers. Much which ought to have been preserved has therefore been irretrievably lost; but there still remain in neglected and out of the way places rich harvests to be garnered by the future investigator, when a higher culture and the growth of a more correct taste have taught him their value. After all the materials have been gathered and winnowed so that the true measure of the