Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/382

 with desire to become apostles of Christ among the Indians, and to live in the New World “a life wholly and entirely consecrate to the glory of God.” They desired to make of Georgia a religious colony. “The age in which religious and political excitements were united was passed,” adds Bancroft, from whose “History of the United States” I have taken the above narrative; “and with the period of commercial influence fanaticism had no sympathy. Mystic piety, more intense by its aversion to the theories of the eighteenth century, appeared as the rainbow; and Wesley was as the sower, who comes after the clouds have been lifted up, and the floods have subsided, and scatters his seed in the serene hour of peace.”

After this we find Oglethorpe at the head of the English army in the war with the Spaniards in Florida, and here he was brave and victorious, foremost always in danger, sharing with the common soldier all the hardships of the camp, and even amid all the excitements of war regardful of the property of the peaceable inhabitants; and in victory humane and gentle towards his captives. In July, 1742, Oglethorpe ordered a general thanksgiving throughout Georgia, for the re-establishment of peace.

Thus was Georgia colonised and defended; and when its founder and preserver, James Oglethorpe, approached his ninetieth year, he was able to look back to a good work, to a flourishing state—the boundaries of which he extended and established, and the spiritual and material life of which he was the founder, so that it well merited the praise that was given to it in England—“never has a colony been founded on a more true or more humane plan.”

He was spoken of, even in the last year of his life, as one of the finest figures that had ever been seen; a type of venerable old age. His faculties and his senses were as fresh as ever, and his eye as bright: on all occasions he