And what a marvel it was, when you stop to think, that in conditions so hard, so utterly prosaic, calculated to clip the wings of generous thought, they maintained themselves in that elevation of sentiment, that supreme estimate of the unmaterial, the ideal factors of life that distinguished them—­in such largeness of mind and of spirit altogether.  While confronting at deadly close quarters their own necessities and perils, their sympathies were wide as the world.  To their brethren in old England, contending with tyranny, every ship that crossed the Atlantic carried their benediction.  Look at the days of thanksgiving and of fast with which they followed the shifting fortunes of the wars of Protestantism—­which were wars for humanity—­on the continent!  Look at the vital consequence they attached to the interest of education; at the taxes that in their penury, and while for the most part they still lived in huts, they imposed on themselves to found and to sustain the institution of the school! [Applause.]

“Child,” said a matron of primitive New England to her young son, “if God make thee a good Christian and a good scholar, thou hast all that ever thy mother asked for thee.”  And so saying she spoke like a true daughter of the Puritans.

They were poets—­those brave, stanch, aspiring souls, whose will was adamant and who feared none but God.  Only, as Charles Kingsley has said, they did not sing their poetry like birds, but acted it like men. [Applause.] It was their high calling to stand by the divine cause of human progress at a momentous crisis of its evolution, and they were worthy to be put on duty at that post.  Evolution!  I hardly dare speak the word, knowing so little about the thing.  It represents a very great matter, which I am humbly conscious of being about as far from surrounding as was a simple-minded Irish priest I have been told of, who, having heard that we were descended from monkeys, yet not quite grasping the chronology of the business, the next time he visited a menagerie, gave particular and patient attention to a large cage of our alleged poor relations on exhibition there.  He stood for a long time intently scrutinizing their human-like motions, gestures, and expressions.  By and by he fancied that the largest of them, an individual of a singularly grave demeanor, seated at the front of the cage, gave him a glance of intelligence.  The glance was returned.  A palpable wink followed, which also was returned, as were other like signals; and so it went on until his Reverence, having cast an eye around to see that nobody was observing him, leaned forward and said, in a low, confidential tone:  “Av ye’ll spake one w-u-r-r-d, I’ll baptize ye, begorra!” [Laughter.]

But, deficient as one’s knowledge of evolution, scientifically and in detail, may be, he may have attained to a not unintelligent perception of the all-embracing creative process called by that name as that in which, in the whole range of the advancing universal movement of life, what is ascends from what was, and fulfils it.