For myself, holding as I do the office of a public teacher, a constraint of conscience is upon me which I dare not resist, requiring me to attempt what will be confessed to be a much needed analysis of our national infirmities and defects, as they now stand revealed to us under the light of these flaming judgments of God. Assuming that this nation, like every other, has its easily besetting sin, some one type of evil peculiarly its own, my task now is, if possible, to determine what it is. The delicacy of the task, imagined or real, shall cause me no disquietude. Honest plainness of speech, inspired by the fear of God, and by a love for our common country, which only deepens under disaster, can surely offend no honest hearer, if he be either a Christian or a patriot. The inherent difficulty of the task is quite another matter. It is not easy for a man to understand exactly his own nation or his own age. A philosophic foreigner like De Tocqueville will sometimes see more in a month than any native had ever seen. And yet it seems to me that the rawness of our national character has given it a boldness of outline, which precludes the possibility of any very serious misjudgment.

Were I required to express, in a single word, what strikes me as the grand characteristic of our American civilization, that one word would be, Materialism-employing the word in its etymological and largest sense. Not materialism as a speculation in philosophy, but materialism as the passion and the presiding ge

nius of our life.

A slight historic survey, which need not detain us long, will suffice to set this matter in its proper light, and show us precisely where we stand. The middle ages, hirsute and turbulent as in some respects they may have been, were yet singularly thoughtful and spiritual ages. In politics, they laid the foundations of modern Europe. In art, they reared Gothic cathedrals and hung their walls with Madonnas. In science, they have bequeathed us prodigies of metaphysical and theological acuteness and power. But in agriculture and manufactures, they were rude and clumsy. They had almost no commerce, and no physical science. Men were consequently poor; wore coarse garments; lived on earthen floors; ate from wooden trenchers; had, in short, scarcely one of our modern luxuries, and but very few even of our modern comforts. We now build our barns better tham most of those medieval saints and heroes built their houses. Such was the Europe of the middle ages.

But in the fifteenth century, the whole aspect of society underwent a sudden and signal change. There came on a crop of wonderful discoveries and inventions which put the world upon a new stadium of its career, discoveries and inventions for several of which we are indebted to the monks of the Papal Church. Printing, gunpowder, the mariner's compass, the doubling of the

Cape of Good Hope, the discovery of America, and the revival of classical learning consequent upon the fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Turks in 1453 - these are the things we name as of chiefest significance in modern history. Printing cheapened books immensely, and so sent knowledge down in due time into the peasant's cottage. Gunpowder revolutionized the art of war, bringing in artillery to decide the fortunes of battles and the fate of empires. The mariner's compass gave daring to timid sailors, whitening dangerous seas with swelling canvas. The new passage to the East-Indies shifted the theater of commerce from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The discovery of America gave not merely a new continent to geography, but a new life to the world; while the revival of classical learning waked up the slumbering fires of geuius like a new inspiration. Close upon the heels of this remarkable cluster of inventions and discoveries trod the great leaders of the long procession of our modern workers and heroes: Erasmus, Luther, and Melancthon, followed at due intervals by Gustavus Adolphus, and Lord Bacon, and Oliver Cromwell, and George Washington, and the two Napoleons; in whose train are votaries of natural science, inventors of useful machines, steamboats, and telegraphs, such as Whitney, Fulton, Morse, merchant princes rolling in wealth, newspapers, socialistic reformers, and many-minded revolutionizers of society and governments without number and without end.

These names, events, and features of our modern civilization, as you readily perceive, are mostly Protestant. The Roman Catholic part of Christendom has been jealous of all this stir and thrift. If France and Belgium are industrious and thrifty without being Protestant, it is in part, and in large part, because they were both of them quickened by the Reformation, receiving an impulse which could not be lost. It can not be denied that Roman Catholic Europe, left to itself, is mostly poor and torpid; Protestant Europe, rich and enterprising. Commerce and the mechanic arts, though not begotten of Protestantism, were quickly adopted by it, baptized at its altars, and made to fight its battles for the dominion of the world.

This continent now underneath our feet, though discovered by Roman Catholics, first colonized and desperately struggled for by them, soon passed into Protestant hands; and, of all Protestant countries, this is the most intensely Protestant. The adventurous energy which came of the Lutheran Reformation, subsidizing the inventions and discoveries which shortly preceded it, has found here its amplest and most congenial theater. Every thing about the continent, and about its history, has served to stimulate to the utmost the material development of its occupants. Its vast and virgin territory, which had been for centuries gathering fatness;

its bays, and lakes, and rivers, offering its harvests a ready exit to market; its varied and boundless mineral resources; its population, a cunning amalgam of the boldest blood of the best races of Europe; its free institutions, electrifying the character of every immigrant these things have all told upon us with tremendous power, impelling us, as no people were ever before impelled, to: ward a rank and rampant materialism.

I am no extravagant eulogist of the middle ages. I do not stand up here to depreciate the achievements of modern times. I admit, without reluctance, that great improvements have passed upon the whole face and the whole structure of human society. We must certainly believe in progress, as we believe in Providence, whose wheels roll ever forward and not backward. We may certainly allow that the world is manifestly nearer its millennium than it was six hundred years ago; and yet, let us not fail to observe, that this entire mass of improvements, which distinguish the modern age, is distinctively material rather than spir itual. The mind of the middle ages, loyal to the Organon of Aristotle, as then interpreted and applied, was introspective and metaphysical; its social and public life unthrifty, but chivalric; its piety ascetic and cloistered, but meditative and climbing. The mind of the modern age, loyal to the Organon of Bacon, and swayed still more by his example, gazes and travels ever outward amongst the phenomena of time and sense. Use is its watchword. It levels forests, builds factories, bridles rivers, tunnels mountains, bridges oceans, and sends the mysterious whispers of its intelligence like lightning around the globe. In science, the branches most honored have been astronomy, geology, chemistry, and the like, since these help us most in commerce, agriculture, and the mechanic arts. Our social life is noisy, flaunting, and feverish. Even our religion is more of the hands and the head, than of the heart. Men would rather carry the Gospel amongst the gray ruins of Asia or into the wilds of Africa, than into the unexplored territory of their own souls. They would rather assault some outward institution than a bosom sin. They would rather serve God by doing good, than by being good.

And so the genius of our age, especially in Protestant lands, and preeminently in our own, is distinctively mechanical, objective, and practical. An age by no means to be utterly decried. On many accounts, an age to be admired and applauded rather. We give it credit for seeking to realize, as it never has been realized, the noble idea of man's dominion over nature; wrestling to subdue to itself all material elements and forces and all brute instincts, making them docile and subservient to human uses. It has added largely to the sum total of human comfort and happiness; emancipating the race from many grievous burdens and afflictions, formerly endured; and holding forth the promise of

still wider conquests, and still more splendid benefactions, in the ages to come. These are the good points and cheering aspects of

our case.

But there are other points and aspects, as already intimated, which are not so good and cheering. It is distinctively an industrial and not a spiritual civilization which is thus multiplying its triumphs and strophies. A material enterprise like that which now galvanizes the world, issues, of course, in wealth. The leading nations, especially the Protestant nations of the earth, have all been immensely enriched within the last two or three hundred years; and, as a natural result, there has arisen an immensely enhanced regard for riches. Those who have wealth are more courted and honored and envied, while those who have it not are more mad after it. Solid and homely comforts, it is true, are vastly more abundant. The fowl, which Henry the Fourth desired for the peasant's pot on Sunday, has found its way thither almost every day in the week. From comforts, the masses have pushed on fast and far toward luxuries which enervate. Men have become dainty, self-indulgent, and selfish. A passion for display comes in-display in. dress, in equipage, and in the entire economy of the household. Large expenditures are rendered necessary, and these lead too often to embarrassments, out of which there is no exit but by atrocious forgeries and frauds. Thus on all sides there is an impatient chafing against the straight and sober boundaries of virtue. This madness invades all ranks and orders of society. It seizes upon the farmer behind his plow, making him unhappy over his slow returns. It makes the mechanic restive under his incessant and heavy toil. It tempts the merchant to engage in desperate ventures in the hope of extemporizing a fortune. It degrades the physician, who should be an honor to science and an angel of mercy, into a drudge for fees. It turns the lawyer aside from high endeavors after a strictly professional reputation, to be a mere broker of estates and stocks. Instead of statesmen, proud of being poor in their country's service, it sends us politicians, who are hunters of place for the sake of pelf. It assails even the sacred office of the Gospel ministry, thinning its ranks, and scaring candidates away from its gates by raising the cry of poverty. The finer kinds of reputation, friendship, duty, honor, the things which, in more chivalric ages, used to be esteemed and died for, are now under a cloud. The insane passion for gain has been overriding all. There never, probably, was a time since the world began, when, throughout all classes and conditions of men, the sense of property was so acute as now; when fortunes were so intensely coveted, and indigence so intensely feared. In short, the age, in its dominant ideas and activities, is preeminently a commercial age. All higher ideas are, of course, imperiled. Science, art, religion-all must suffer. "With all thy gettings,

get wisdom," is the reading of the ancient Scriptures. But, according to the modern gospel of Mammon, the injunction is: "By all means get money; honestly, if you can; dishonestly, if you

must."

What is thus true of all Protestant Christendom, is, as I have said before, preeminently true of us. England is bad enough, with her greedy fingers out all over the globe. We are worse. Here, on this magnificent continent, hid away for ages behind the western horizon, and sternly interdicted to Europe till Europe had cradled the Reformation, a continent washed on either side of it by the chief oceans of the globe, these oceans now swarming with our ships; our broad acres groaning beneath the burden of their harvests; our mountains stuffed with coal and iron and gold; our institutions about us as free as the breezes of the sky-here we are, a nation of sturdy workers; athletic, eager, adventurous Nimrods of a boundless material invasion and conquest. Nimrods, did I say? Titans, rather; for not content to subdue the earth, we are also storming the heavens.

It requires no special insight to catalogue our national offenses. They are known and read of all men: the offenses committed by us in our organic capacity; with those other individual offenses, of such general prevalence as to be fairly chargeable on us as a people. Foremost amongst our organic offenses, some would reckon the apparent, though doubtless undesigned, atheism of our national Constitution, which is silent in regard to the divine authority and providence. This silence is certainly unfortunate, but can not be allowed to militate against the universally admitted fact, that our institutions rest upon a Christian basis. Our highest legal authorities have again and again pronounced us a Christian people. But most unchristian, surely, has been that territorial rapacity which, from generation to generation, has been so sternly crowding the red man toward the setting sun; which has sent our conquering arms into the Halls of the Montezumas; and which has menaced Spain with the seizure of her wealthiest colony. Most unchristian is that cruel greed of gain which has doomed the black man to a vassalage, abhorrent to the laws of nature and offensive to the genius of our religion. These are palpable, organic offenses, laying the heavy burden of their guilt more or less upon the nation as a whole. But they are all only

branches of a single tree, whose noxious roots have been fed by the common soil of the continent. In all sections alike there rages a madness for material good, crowning cotton as its king. in the South, crowning corn in the North; a madness which has debauched the general conscience of the nation, so as nearly to have wrecked our fortunes, and blasted all our hopes as a republic. Now, indeed, we are at length aroused, flinging our treasures and our lives into the deadly breach; but who can recall