by those of the moral world, and both seemed fraught with anarchy and desolation. The bonds of society were loosened; altars, and thrones, and empires fell; and their destroyers, wild with conquest and frantic with impiety, threatened to blot out the light of revelation, and subvert the throne of God. The philosophers of the day discarded the Christian hope of another world, a world of immortality and perfect bliss, and gave us in exchange, the vision of complete happiness, equality, and perpetuity here, to be realized by the omnipotence of human energy. This sparkling bubble has burst-and at their theories men smile now, as at the incoherencies of slumber, or the ravings of insanity. But the reaction has been too strong. Society, like the individual, is liable to passion; may be intoxicated with hope, or paralized by despair. Events then fired their expectations; but they mistook the direction of the current, and were dashed upon the rocks. They connected their extravagancies with the rational hope of an immense improvement in the state of mankind; and there is danger lest both should be exploded together; lest a valuable truth should be discarded because it has been linked with baseless reveries and palpable absurdities. An opposite system has been raised on. the ruins of this: a system not less deadly to the hopes and best feelings of mankind. We are forbidden to hope more than a temporary ad

vance, to be compensated by succeeding gloom. Because men no longer imagine, with some, that man may raise himself even to immortality; they abandon the prospect of improvement, for the heartless notion of running an eternal round of transitory prosperity, followed by war and vice and misery. To this, a celebrated Essay on Population has greatly contributed; though the facts there adduced, by no means warrant all the inferences of the author himself, still less those of many of his followers; yet they have made it the fashion to despair. Because man read not rightly then the page of observation, he is now taught to doubt that of revelation. The avenues of the mind are barred against hope, as though she were the most unwelcome visitant. It is true these fancied chains are but withs, which need no Herculean strength to tear them asunder: the verbal critic nibbles at a text, and thinks that when he has mangled a word, he has destroyed a principle. The philosopher sets up a calculation of the impossibilities that impede Omnipotence; and the politician points to the supposed failure of one attempt to ameliorate the state of man as a demonstration of his miserable and degraded destiny. Let not the sneers of such, or the dread of reputed enthusiasm, prevent the assertion of what is true, scriptural, important, useful, and consolatory, at a time when most it is needed. Let us cling to Scripture; let us lay hold on

prophecy on the summit of that mountain all is brightness and sunshine, while clouds darken and desolate the plain below. The two systems are in full contrast. How different the views they give us of God and man, the present and the future! We may surely demand that a belief so abhorrent to our nature should rest on no slight foundation. On no partial evidence let that sentence be pronounced, which consigns to the darkness of the grave our dearest expectations.

"If that be true which Nature never told,

Let Wisdom smile not on her conquered field;
No rapture dawns, no treasure is reveal'd!
Oh! let her read, nor loudly, nor elate,
The doom that bars us from a better fate;
But, sad as angels for the good man's sin,
Weep to record, and blush to give it in !”

The first appeal is to experience. What is the language of the past? Has the human race been stationary, gradually deteriorating, alternating between improvement and degradation, or gradually advancing? Let facts decide. Not minute, partial, isolated events, but the broad facts of universal history. Was the human race ever in a state superior to the present? If so, point to the record, and in that interesting narrative, let us forget the humiliating contrast. Was it in that first, dimly-seen stage of being, the infancy

of mankind, when man was scarcely distinguished, but by name, from his fellow-tenants of the earth; -when his language was little more than inarticulate cries, the summit of his science to construct the cabin that should be a little shelter from the storm, and to procure a bare subsistence, the summit of his bliss? Was it when these wretched individuals formed savage hordes, their abode unfixed, their occupation war or hunting, their religion the worship of stars or clouds, no law but force, and no restraint on their passions but the physical impossibility of their gratification? Was it in the next stage of society, when these hordes were amalgamated under a barbarous despotism, in which boundless power was wielded by individual caprice for purposes of wanton cruelty, and men became like beasts, unreasoning as the most senseless, oppressed as the most enduring, or bloody as the most savage? Was it when civilization was confined to a few small states in Greece, and even there threefourths were slaves, holding life at the capricious will of their masters, those proud masters themselves the slaves of ignorance, and the dupes of priestcraft-fluctuating between external war and internal commotion, anarchy and tyranny? Was it even in the best days of Rome, of Rome polluted by the abomination of domestic slavery, and waging eternal war with the world, offering only the alternative of subjection or extermination;

rude in arts, with no philosophy, and a religion whose gods and ceremonies make one blush or shudder? Was it in subsequent times of confusion, persecution, and distraction; or in yet later ages, when kings tyrannized over people, and priests over kings; when every petty chieftain had a property of men; when perversions of justice, and corruptions of Christianity, passed unreproved and unnoticed? To what point will ye turn back the wheels of time and bid them stop as at a season of higher improvement than the present? Or what branch of knowledge can be selected, connected with the happiness of mankind, which has experienced a retrograde motion? Did the ancients ever rival, or approximate to the moderns in the useful arts? Did they cultivate the ground with greater skill, or frame more commodious dwellings, or temper the ore with nicer art, or did their looms produce robes more gorgeous, or clothing more commodious than ours? Or are their mariners and coasting-boats to be compared with the vessels and skill of those by whom the boundless ocean has been traversed, and new worlds discovered? From the arts turn to the sciences. Contrast their egregious errors, and cloudy theories, with the accumulated facts, and solid principles, and stupendous discoveries, of later ages. Are political institutions selected? In these perhaps they most excelled-but with all the boasted freedom of the