remarkable degree, the original New England Puritan type, who had known me from the cradle, and to whom the elevation I had reached was as gratifying as it could possibly be to anybody.  But when he saw the smile of favor focussed on me there, and me, I dare say, appearing to bask somewhat in it, the dear old man took alarm.  He was apprehensive of the consequences to that youngster.  And so, taking me by the hand and wrestling down his natural feelings—­he was ready to cry for joy—­he said:  “Well, Joseph, I hope you’ll live to preach a great deal better than that!” [Laughter.] It was an exceedingly appropriate remark, and a very tender one if you were at the bottom of it.

That severe, undemonstrative New England habit, that emotional reserve and self-suppression, though it lingers here and there, has mostly passed away and is not to be regretted.  As much as could be has been made of it to our forefathers’ discredit, as has been made of everything capable of being construed unfavorably to them.  They to whom what they call the cant of the Puritan is an offence, themselves have established and practise a distinct anti-Puritan cant with which we are all familiar.  The very people who find it abhorrent and intolerable that they were such censors of the private life of their contemporaries, do not scruple to bring to bear on their private life a search-light that leaves no accessible nook of it unexplored, and regarding any unpretty trait espied by that unsparing inquest the rule of judgment persistently employed—­as one is obliged to perceive—­tends to be:  “No explanation wanted or admitted but the worst.” [Applause.]

Accordingly, the infestive deportment characteristic of the New England colonist has been extensively interpreted as the indisputable index of his sour and morose spirit, begotten of his religion.  I often wonder that, in computing the cause of his rigorous manners, so inadequate account is wont to be made of his situation, as in a principal and long-continuing aspect substantially military—­which it was.  The truth is, his physiognomy was primarily the soldier stamp on him.

If you had been at Gettysburg on the morning of July 2, 1863, as I was, and had perused the countenance of the First and Eleventh Corps, exhausted and bleeding with the previous day’s losing battle, and the countenance of the Second, Third, and Twelfth Corps, getting into position to meet the next onset, which everybody knew was immediately impending, you would have said that it was a sombre community—­that Army of the Potomac—­with a good deal of grimness in the face of it; with a notable lack of the playful element, and no fiddling or other fine arts to speak of.

As sure as you live, gentlemen, that is no unfair representation of how it was with the founders of the New England commonwealths in their planting period.

The Puritan of the seventeenth century lived, moved, and had his being on the field of an undecided struggle for existence—­the New England Puritan most emphatically so.  He was under arms in body much of the time—­in mind all the time.  Nothing can be truer than to say that.  And yet people everlastingly pick and poke at him for being stern-featured and deficient in the softer graces of life.