“Considering that the things contained in their pamphlet, are a deep apostasy, in conjunction with such open impiety, and profane scurrility against the holy wayes in which our fathers walked, in case it become the sin of the land, (as it will do if not duely testified against) we may fear that some heavy judgment will come upon the whole land. And will not the holy Lord Jesus Christ, who walks in the midst of his golden candlesticks, make all the churches to know ... 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. A flood of light has, moreover, been shed on this class of subjects by the recent remarkable investigations among the Zuñis. [Footnote: Made by Mr. F. H. Cushing, of the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution.]