The first settlers in New England were eminently Protestant. They were men who loved the Word of God, and they sought to organize society in this new country upon its holy principles. This new colonization had its birth amid the agonizing throes of martyrdom. The "Pilgrim Fathers" had been persecuted and driven from home for Christ's sake. They sought the desert that they might have freedom to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences; and they braved the dangers of the almost untraveled deep, and the perils of an inhospitable shore in mid-winter, to lay the foundations of a new empire which should be the home of liberty, and the sanctuary of piety for themselves and their children. The Puritan love of freedom and reverence for religion has left its impress on the mind and character of the American people, upon their modes of thought, and upon the institutions of their country. The ideas of universal liberty and equal justice are interwoven in her Constitution, and, in general, the spirit of her legislation has been in accordance therewith. A relic of barbarism landed at Jamestown, in Virginia, which after a fierce struggle of years was finally conquered, and the rank offense was expiated by tears and blood. God has destroyed slavery in America by "the breath of his mouth," and its death-knell has sounded all over the globe. The cause of freedom is stronger in Europe as the reflex of her triumphs here. Finally, a remarkable characteristic of the civilization of the New World is the emancipation of man from the dominion of nature. By an amazing fertility of mechanical contrivance man is here rapidly "subduing the earth." Released from merely local and hereditary ties, he spreads freely over the vast territory, and rapidly multiplies the means of easy locomotion. The soil is being extensively cultivated; the climate, even, modified; the physiognomy of nature changed by the intelligence of man; and a regenerated earth is to be, at last, the consequence of a regenerated race. Physical nature sympathizes with the intellectual and moral condition of man. Science is anticipating the time "when the earth will only produce cultivated plants and domestic animals; when man's selection shall have supplanted 'natural selection;' and when the ocean alone will be the only domain in which that power can be exerted which for countless cycles of ages ruled supreme over the earth."[404] "The whole creation has groaned and travailed together in pain until now,... waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God." "Verily there is a God" that not only judges in the earth, but guides and instructs the nations, and who in the development of the earth and of history "worketh all things according to his eternal counsel and purpose," that for the rational creation "God may be all in all." CHAPTER IX. SPECIAL PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER.