.. that these men have
provoked the Lord!" [Footnote: _Idem_, pp. 18, 19.]
Yet, notwithstanding the Mathers' piteous prayers, God heeded them not,
and the rising tide that was sweeping over them soon drowned their cries.
Brattle Street congregation became an honored member of the orthodox
communion, the principles which animated its founders spread apace, and
the name of Benjamin Colman waxed great in the land. The liberals had
penetrated the stronghold of the church.
CHAPTER IX.
HARVARD COLLEGE.
For more than two centuries one ceaseless anthem of adulation has been
chanted in Massachusetts in honor of the ecclesiastics who founded Harvard
University, and this act has not infrequently been cited as
incontrovertible proof that they were both liberal and progressive at
heart. The laudation of ancestors is a task as easy as it is popular; but
history deals with the sequence of cause and effect, and an examination of
facts, apart from sentiment, tends to show that in building a college the
clergy were actuated by no loftier motive than intelligent self-interest,
if, indeed, they were not constrained thereto by the inexorable exigencies
of their position.
The truth of this proposition becomes apparent if the soundness of the
following analysis be conceded.
There would seem to be a point in the pathway of civilization where every
race passes more or less completely under the dominion of a sacred caste;
when and how the more robust have emerged into freedom is uncertain, but
enough is known to make it possible to trace the process by which this
insidious power is acquired, and the means by which it is perpetuated.
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