Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/263

Rh No doubt the Bible contained the imperfection of the men and ages concerned in writing it. The hay tastes of the meadow where it grew, of the weather when it was made, and smells of the barn wherein it has been kept; nay, the breath of the oxen housed underneath comes down to market in every load. But in its many-coloured leaves, the Bible likewise holds the words of great men, free and making free; it was full of the old blossoms of piety, and rich in buds for new and glorious life, ay, and beauty too. The cup of prophets mainly, not of priests, it ran over with water of life from the mythologic well in the wilderness and Bethesda^s pool which angels stirred to healing power;—it gave men vigorous strength and hardy life. Instead of the bloodhound, the pilgrims sent the schoolmaster to his work;—they put their fetters on the little streams that run among the hills, and those river gods must saw, and grind, and spin for mortal men; not the Inquisition, but the printing press, was the type and symbol of this Northern work.

They had the traditions of the human race, but also its momentum acquired in the movement of many a thousand years. They brought the best political institutions the world had then known. They had the English common law,—which had slowly got erected in the practice of this liberty-loving people, its Cyclopean walls built up by the Lesbian rule,—with its forms and precedents, its methodical schemes of procedure, itself a popular judicium rusticum; they had the habit of local self government; the right—though then not well understood—of popular legislation, also founded in immemorial usage; dim notions and the certain practice of representative government—the democracy of law-making; the trial by jury—the democracy of law-administration. They brought Congregational Protestantism—the democracy of Christianity, involving, what they neither granted nor knew, the universal right of search for truth and justice, the natural right to take or reject, as a man’s own spirit should require.

Besides the organized institutions—visible as tools of industry or politics, or invisible in literature, science, settled and admitted principles of private morality or of public law,—which represent the history and achievements of mankind, they brought also ideas not organized in either