Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/30

Rh the Baptist enjoys the natural right to be baptized after the apostolic fashion; the Unitarian to deny the Holy Trinity; the Universalist to affirm the eternal blessedness of all men; and the philosophical critic to examine the claims of Christianity as of all religions, to sweep the whole ocean of religious consciousness, draw his net to land, gather the good into vessels, and cast the bad away.

The spirit of freedom contended against the claims of ancestral gentility. In the woods of New England it was soon found that a pair of arms was worth more than a "coat of arms," never so old and horrid with griffins. A man who could outwit the Indians, " whip his weight in wild cats," hew down tress, build ships, make wise laws, and organize a river into a mill, or men into towns and states, was a valuable person ; and if born at all was well born. " Men of no family" grew up in the new soil, and often overtopped the twigs cut from some famous tree. In the humblest callings of life, I have found men of the most eminent European stocks. But it was rare that men of celebrated families settled in America: monarchy, nobility, prelacy did not emigrate, it was the people who came over. And in 1780, the Convention of Massachusetts put this in the first Article of the Constitution of the State: "All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights." All distinction of gentle and simple, bond and free, perished out of Massachusetts. The same thought is repeated in the constitutions of many Northern States.

This spirit of freedom contended against the claims of England. "Local self-government" was the aim of the colonies. Opposition to centralization of authority is very old in America. I hope it will be always young. England was a hard master to her western children ; she left them to fight their own battles against the Indians, against the French; and this circumstance made all men soldiers. In King Philip's war every man capable of bearing arms took the field, first or last. The frontier was a school for soldiers. The day after the battle of Lexington, a hundred and fifty men, in a large farming town of New Hampshire, shouldered their muskets and marched for Boston, to look after their brethren.

It was long before there was a clear and distinct expres-