The American Union owes a large measure of its genesis to the European struggle for reform. The Germans who came with Penn to this country were strongly attached to the doctrines of Luther, and immediately began to build churches and es tablish schools in that interest. The Dutch who settled in New York and the adjacent country brought with them a fervent love of Protestantism, which had been the creative force of their nation at home, and which their fathers had bought at the price of their treasure and blood. The Swedes of New Jersey and Delaware were animated by the same ardent spirit which had burned in their hearts in their ancestral home. The Huguenots, who settled in many places along the coast from Massachusetts down to Georgia, found that safe asylum which was denied them at home because of their fidelity to conscience. The Pilgrims, who came over in the Mayflower and became the strong est nucleus in the development of our Northern colonies, were fugitives from oppression in their native England. All these elements, the finest wheat from the trampled harvest-fields of Europe, combined on these shores and became a unit in this Western planting of evangelical Christianity.
The promotion of learning was not the least benefit conferred upon the world by the Reforma tion. Cultured men were its first advocates. The universities were the cradles of Protestantism. The translation of the Scriptures had the eaect to formulate and solidify the languages as no other literary movement had been able to do it. Wy cliffe's Bible preserved the Saxon tongue, and our Authorized Version, or King James' Bible, shows its constant dependence upon his translation. Luther found German a mere conglomeration of rude and coarse dialects. In his translation of the Bible he grouped the best and purest idioms and for the first time made the German language a unit.
Universities took on new life and were multi plied as an immediate fruit of the Reformation. The University of Leyden was the first creation of the new nation, after the siege of that city was raised and the Spanish troops withdrawn. Dur ing the centuries since the Reformation more than twenty universities, three-fourths of which are Protestant. have been founded in Germany alone. Holland has built up in addition to the University of Leyden five other universities, all of which arc the direct results of her Protestantism. Not until now, and only as a fruit of the Reformation, was the gospel generally preached in the popular lan guage. When the Reformation was once in prog ress the printing press was free. The study of
all the languages became a new fascination which no edict could destroy. Public schools, though crude at first, were introduced in Germany, di rectly through Luther's labors. The intermediate schools, between the primary and highest educa tion, were soon established. The German gym nasium of our times owes its real origin to the period of the Reformation. Wherever the Re formation triumphed and became a permanent force, the cause of education, good morals, and political liberty advanced securely and rapidly.
(11) The American Period. Europe in the sixteenth century was in convulsions. The reformatory movements reacted on the political life of all the central na tions. Every land was divided into factions. One class, receiving its inspiration from Rome, wished to continue the old order, with the pope as prac tical sovereign. Another class, craving liberty and an accommodation to the new order, was wil ing to break loose from the Roman see, but de sired to retain many of the Roman usages. A third class saw nothing but antichrist in Rome, and found hope only in casting off every reminder of papal doctrine and custom.
The transfer of the conflicts of Europe to Amer ica marked the new era. Whenever a colony came to America, it no sooner settled in its new habitat than it revived, under broader conditions, the struggle in which it had been engaged in the mother country. The Cavalier of the Virginia Colony surrendered none of his old attachment to the Church of England. The Plymouth Pil grim was even more intense in his revolt against both Romanism and Protestant Episcopacy than he had been when a Brownist at Scrooby, a parishioner of Robinson at Leyden, or a Pil grim on the Mayflower. In the New World were fought out by contestants, fewer in number and more widely scattered, the issues which had driven the colonists to the Western wilds.
The religious motive was supreme in the mind of all the best colonists. To enjoy the free exer cise of conscience was the Pilgrim's one pas sion, whose bright flame no distance from native land, nor stormy seas, nor rigor of climate, nor danger of death by savage hands, could quench. Our first settlers came as Christians, lived as Christians, and planted the religious principles as the richest inheritance for their posterity. They brought the best aspirations of the Old \Vorld and determined to realize them in the New. The hour of American colonization was the fittest one in all modern times for the New World to receive the best which the Old had to give.