[The Complete Works of Whittier by John Greenleaf Whittier]@TWC D-Link book
The Complete Works of Whittier

CHAPTER VI
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Lord Jesus, if thou wilt catch me, do; if not, I will venture in thy name!" The English revolution of the seventeenth century, while it humbled the false and oppressive aristocracy of rank and title, was prodigal in the development of the real nobility of the mind and heart.

Its history is bright with the footprints of men whose very names still stir the hearts of freemen, the world over, like a trumpet peal.

Say what we may of its fanaticism, laugh as we may at its extravagant enjoyment of newly acquired religious and civil liberty, who shall now venture to deny that it was the golden age of England?
Who that regards freedom above slavery, will now sympathize with the outcry and lamentation of those interested in the continuance of the old order of things, against the prevalence of sects and schism, but who, at the same time, as Milton shrewdly intimates, dreaded more the rending of their pontifical sleeves than the rending of the Church?
Who shall now sneer at Puritanism, with the Defence of Unlicensed Printing before him?
Who scoff at Quakerism over the Journal of George Fox?
Who shall join with debauched lordlings and fat-witted prelates in ridicule of Anabaptist levellers and dippers, after rising from the perusal of Pilgrim's Progress?
"There were giants in those days." And foremost amidst that band of liberty-loving and God- fearing men, "The slandered Calvinists of Charles's time, Who fought, and won it, Freedom's holy fight," stands the subject of our sketch, the Tinker of Elstow.

Of his high merit as an author there is no longer any question.

The Edinburgh Review expressed the common sentiment of the literary world, when it declared that the two great creative minds of the seventeenth century were those which produced Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim's Progress.
THOMAS ELLWOOD.
Commend us to autobiographies! Give us the veritable notchings of Robinson Crusoe on his stick, the indubitable records of a life long since swallowed up in the blackness of darkness, traced by a hand the very dust of which has become undistinguishable.


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