34 CENTENNIAL HISTORY
I have ventured already to say that such men, inspired by such a spirit, and possessed of such characteristics, created, preserved and nourished the type of the New England man in its high stature, until in the fullness of time when New England became the energizing and sprouting seedbed of the West, he strode over the mountains and won the great interior vallied empire of the west to civilization, to liberty, to welfare and to Christ and his Church. To those of us who are here today, whose recollection reaches back into the first half of the nineteenth century, and who have witnessed no inconsiderable part of this conquest of a continent, the thought comes home with peculiar force that in our inheritance of the traditions and experience even of our immediate fathers our patrimony has indeed been rich and fruitful; it is a source of just pride and an impulse and inspiration for future and high endeavor for us all. I have heard the deserved applause greeting the eloquent plea at the bar; it was of less value than the fact that my own Grandfather was the first petitioner for the incorporation of this ecclesiastical society, I have seen landed domains bounded by leagues of distance; they are less in my estimation than the few roods which my Grandfather gave that this Church might have a local habitation and his townsmen a breathing spot bearing the dear old Saxon name of "Green." I have gazed with wondering delight upon many a venerable pile, many a sculptured shaft and labored dome; none of these has equalled my boyish recollection of this homely New-England "meeting-house,"--
"That tower of strength
Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew."
The swelling organ peal, the silvery chime of the cathedral, the heart-rousing drum-beat,--all these were rude sounds beside the music of the old bell in yonder tower, with which my father for so many years called the people of this community to the worship of their Maker, or told with its mournfully eloquent iron tongue the years of the dead, and noted the last journey,