bed of the avalanche. Its trunk went up erect, gnarled, seamed, not riven by the bolt; the evergreen enfolded its branches, its blossom was like that ensanguined flower, inscribed with woe.

"In all its stages, all the disciples of the Reformation, wherever they lived, were in some sense, a single brotherhood, whom a diversity of speech, hostility of government, and remoteness of place, could not wholly keep apart. Local persecutions drew the tie closer. In the reign of Mary, a thousand learned Englishmen fled from the stake at home to the happier seats of Continental Protestantism. Of them, great numbers, I know not how many, came to Geneva. There they awaited the death of the Queen; and then, sooner or later, but in the time of Elizabeth, went back to England. I ascribe to that five years in Geneva, an influence that has changed the history of the world. I seem to myself to trace to it, as a new influence on the English race, a new theology, a new politics, another tone of character, the opening of another era of time and of liberty. I seem to myself to trace to it a portion, at least, of the objects of the great civil war in England, the Republican Constitution framed in the cabin of the Mayflower, the divinity of Jonathan Edwards, the battle of Bunker Hill, and the independence of America. In that brief season English Puritanism was changed fundamentally and forever. Why should we think this so extraordinary? There are times when whole years, pass over the head of a man, and work no change at all. There are others, again, when in an hour, old things pass away, and all things become new. A verse of the Bible, a glorious line of some old poet dead a thousand years before, the new-made grave of a child, a friend killed by a thunderbolt, as in the case of Luther, the gleam of rarer beauty in the lake or in the sky, draws tears from him in the twinkling of an eye. When, before or since, in the history of the world, was the human character subjected to an accumulation of agents, so fitted to create it all anew, as those which encompassed the English exile at Geneva?

"I do not make much account of this in the material grandeur and beauty which burst on their astonished senses. It is of the moral agents of which I would speak. In the giant hands of guardian mountains, ascending from their 'silent sea

of pines,' above the thunder-clouds, and reposing there calmly, amidst the encircling stars, whilst the storm raved by below, before which forests and the cathedral-tombs of kings went down; on the banks of a lake, lovelier than a dream of fairyland; in a valley which might have been hollowed out to enclose the last home of liberty, there smiled an independent, peaceful, law-abiding, and prosperous commonwealth. There was a people governed by laws of their own making, and by rules of their own choosing. I confess myself to be of the opinion of those who trace to that spot, and to that time, the Republicanism of the Puritans; I confess, too, that I love to trace the pedigree of our trans-Atlantic liberty, thus backwards, through Switzerland, to its native land of Greece. There was a liberty, no doubt, which the Puritans found, and kept, and improved, in England. They would have changed it, but were not able. But that was a kind of liberty which admitted and demanded an inequality of man, an insubordination of ranks, a favored eldest son, the ascending orders of a hierarchy, the vast and constant pressure of a superincumbent crown. Such was not the form of liberty which our fathers brought with them. It had not all been born in the woods of Germany; or between the Elbe and the Oder, or in the level of Runnymede. It was the child of other climes and other days. It sprang to life in Greece. It gilded next the early and middle age of Italy. It then reposed in the hollow breast of the Alps. It descended, at length, on the iron-bound coast of New England, and 'set the stars of glory there.' At every stage of its course, in every new re-appearance, it was guarded by some new security; it was embodied in some new element of order; it was fertile of some larger good; it glowed with a more exceeding beauty.

'Take, freedom! take thy radiant round,
When dimm'd, revive, when lost, return!
Till not a shrine on earth be found,
On which thy glory shall not beam.'"*

Such is the liberty which we have received, and which we are bound to preserve unimpaired, and transmit to other times. We have received all that the Puritans, the Pilgrims, the fol

*Choate: Ann, Ora. Land. of the Pilgrims.

lowers of George Fox, the Huguenots, struggled for; all that they regarded as of so much value that life was to be sacrificed rather than that; all that they deemed of so much worth that to enjoy it they were willing to leave the graves of their fathers, and to plunge into an unknown wilderness, to meet unknown enemies in savage forms there. We of this age stand between the generations past and the generations to come; receiving an inestimable inheritance in trust, to send forward to future times; we are "debtors" to all mankind to show what the glorious light of Protestant Christianity can do for the nations of the earth.

ARTICLE II."

THE SCOTCH-IRISH ELEMENT OF PRESBYTERIANISM.*

"WHAT We have heard and known, and our fathers have told us, we will not hide from their children, showing to the generations to come, the praises of the Lord, and his strength and his wonderful works that he hath done. For he established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children; that the generations to come might know them, even the children which should be born, who should arise and tell them to their children; that they might set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments."+

The spirit of this ancient statutory regulation, we conceive is still binding on God's people. This obligation, and not the pride of ancestry, or glorification of man, makes the facts and records, the written and unwritten history of Presbyterianism so precious, and the investigation and elucidation of them, a labor of love to her loyal sons. With a little modification, we

* The following Article was delivered at New York, as a Discourse, by Rev. David H. Riddle, D. D., before the General Assembly, at the request of the Presbyterian Historical Society. It was subsequently repeated, by request, before the Associate Reformed General Synod, at Allegheny City. We have preserved the form of the Address. EDITORS.

Psa. lxxviii. 3–7.

may adopt the sentiment of a recent historian. "A people who take no pride"-rather pleasure-" in remembering and recording the deeds of their forefathers, will not be likely to do anything worthy to be remembered or preserved by posterity." "The glory of children is their fathers."†

The common denominator, Presbyterian, belongs alike to all persons and bodies who agree in one principle: that the Church should be governed by a Presbytery, either parochial, provincial, or national, over against Prelacy, on the one hand, or Independency on the other. All are Presbyterians, who hold to representative Republicanism in the house of God, instead of the polar extremes of one man power, or ultra Democracy. In this feature of Presbyterianism, many bodies do homologate: our two General Assemblies, the German Reformed, Dutch Reformed, the Associate, the Reformed, the Associate Reformed, and the Cumberland Presbyterians, in our country; the Genevan, French Calvinist, Dutch and German Reformed, Scotch and Irish Churches in Europe, while the Methodists, Lutherans and Baptists, fall under the categories either of Prelacy or Independency. Presbyterianism, as a distinctive system, obviously, therefore, embraces many types or elements. which had their origin in other countries and times, and are represented in our country and times still; all yet we hope, and sometimes expect, to be unified into an American Presbyterian Church, so making "one new man."‡

We propose, on this occasion, to consider one type only, of this generic whole, THE SCOTCH-IRISH ELEMENT OF PRESBYTERIANISM, an element which has demonstrated its claims to our consideration by its influence on the ecclesiastical and civil institutions of our nation, and certainly deserves a history. This subject, to some of us, has a specific interest and charm, because we trace to this source, our blood and parentage. As we explore the foundations and facts of Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism, we can say with Cowper :

My boast is not that I deduce my birth,

From loins enthroned and rulers of the earth;
But higher far my proud pretensions rise,
The child of parents passed into the skies.

* Macaulay.

† Prov. xvii. 6.

Eph. ii. 15.

We do not blame, nay, we commend our Puritan brethren, when they refer so often and joyously to the "Mayflower" and "Plymouth Rock." We hope they will succeed in the monument they are projecting on that spot, to tell to generations following what their fathers did and suffered in their behalf. This is all right. But we are not ashamed or unwilling to acknowledge that our forefathers belonged to "the Lagan forces," were among the besieged in Derry and Enniskillen, and that the germs of our institutions, under the guardianship of Livingston, Blair and their companions, were once cradled on the broad Atlantic within the limits of the "Eagle Wing.'

The term Scotch-Irish, as a distinctive appellation, describes those who have Scotland as the land of their forefathers, and Ireland as the place of residence, birth or adoption. The first, Scotch, distinguishes them from the descendants of the aboriginal Irish; the second, Irish, from those who remained in their native land. The term itself and the demands of history, carry us to the province of Ulster in Ireland, and to the period of James I. of England and VI. of Scotland.

In the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth, Ulster was almost desolated by intestine wars. Its religious condition may be gathered from the fact, that "Divine service had not for years together been used in any parish church, except in cities and principal towns." Yet, significantly enough, a Catholic historian* says of this period, "Ulster was most constant in maintaining its liberty and preserving the Catholic religion."

At the death of Elizabeth, in 1603, James succeeded to the' crowns of Great Britain and Ireland. He seemed, at first, disposed to be conciliatory to the Irish Catholics, allowing them many special privileges. Afterwards, however, more from apprehension of interference with his own temporal prerogatives, than from antipathy to their doctrines, he became more rigid and oppressive. This change of policy occasioned the famous 'conspiracy," "insurrection," or "rebellion," as it is variously styled, headed by the Catholic Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, in the year 1605, and not long after another, by O'Dougherty. These noblemen, on the discovery of their conspiracy, fled the country, and applied successively to the courts of France

* Dupin.