Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/121

Rh far-shining eloquence of Demosthenes and Cicero came out of the stormy cloud which bore ruin to Athens and to Rome. In the piping times of peace they had reared no great flocks of oratory. It is the weight of a nation's fall which presses such sad prophetic wisdom from Kossuth's mighty heart. The best age of England was the time of her greatest calamity. That hundred years which saw the Spanish Armada on the coast, the scaffold of King Charles in London, and witnessed the exile of his son, saw also Bacon, Harvey and Hobbs, Hooker and Taylor, Fox and Bunyan, Hampden and Vane, Spenser, Herbert, Shakspeare, Milton, Jonson, and the long line of England's noble sons; saw Blake on the water, Cromwell on the land, and Newton in the heavens. Her greatest literature, science, and character, came from that century of storms. And when her own heart bled with the world's oppression, she reached to the Alps, and protected the Waldenses whom the Pope was treading under his foot. It was in such an age that England bore her fairest bud, which sorrow broke off from the Saxon tree and planted in this land, with no hedge of shelter but the wild woods, no husbandry save that of beasts and savage men. Yet New England grew by neglect, and prospered in spite of pains to kill. The little Puritan bud looked up to heaven, and God, “who holds creation as a rose-bush in his hand,” smiled, and it opened into rath prophetic bloom.

The best age of the Christian Church came before “the fatal dower which the first wealthy Pope received;” it was when all the world opposed her, and Heathenism bared its sword and struck at Christendom's young neck. What an age it was when the Christian Church was bordered with the red flowers of martyrdom on the outskirts of her every province; nay, when the metropolis of Christendom bloomed only scarlet! No “lower-law divines” in that day. What an age it is when the Catholic Church has no blossom more radiant than the Cardinal's hat—its only passion-flower! The great plants of humanity grow in that little rocky belt of land between the ocean and the fertile soil; and they bloom maturest when they drink the salt dew of oceanic storms. Then and there grow the warriors, lawgivers, orators, philosophers, poets, prophets, saints, patriots, and martyrs, who form a chaplet of beauty