the demon of America cast out forever from the earth,

thrust down forever to the lowest hell.

"Up then, in Freedom's manly part,
From gray-beard eld to fiery youth,
And on the nation's naked heart

Scatter the burning coals of Truth.
Now break the chain- the yoke remove,
And smite to earth oppression's rod,
With those mild arms of Truth and Love,
Made mighty through the living God."

"THE YEAR OF THE RIGHT HAND OF THE MOST HIGH."- Ps. lxxiii. 10.

HE year 1666 was long known in British annals as Annus Mirabilis, The Wonderful Year. Dryden celebrated its marvels in one of his ablest poems. Yet its wonders consisted solely in a few forgotten victories over the Dutch and the great fire of London. Much more will the year 1864 stand forth in our annals as wonderful.

The year naturally divides itself in two parts-our progress in arms, our greater progress in principles. Let us first consider the least, though the seeming greatest.

I. Our military progress is a cause of the highest national exultation. One year ago our situation was far inferior to what it is to-day. We held, under menace, Chattanooga and the Rapidan. We were beleaguered in Knoxville; a proud and confident foe ranged through the valleys of East Tennessee. We were holding foolish revelry in New Orleans, while the enemy, growling and hungry, were prowling through the whole interior, and often upon the banks

A sermon preached in Boston, January 1, 1865.

of the Mississippi, looked in contemptuously upon our silly junketings. Great activity prevailed through the hostile region in the recruiting of their armies and the replenishing of their military stores. Never were their ranks so full; never their cannon so numerous; never their muskets so many and so good; never their spirits or their stock so high. They were sure that this year would conclude the war in their favor. Their friends, here and abroad, were not the less sanguine. Six times had we sought, under as many different commanders, to break the line of their Richmond approaches, and each time had been bloodily repulsed. The opening of the year was disastrous. Our gay and festive army at New Orleans abandoned its gayety and festivity for a season, and sailed pompously out, down the coast of Texas, only to sail back again, shorn of their pomp, but not their vanity. Again they essay a land attack; and, like Braddock in the equipage of a muster field, with trains of cotton speculators in their ranks or rear, they march into the deadly ambuscades of Shreveport. The scattered fragments pick their perilous way back to the hilarious city, and the conquered hero comes North to receive an ovation from his exultant fellow-citizens. At Chattanooga the results were equally disastrous. We had sought to move out southward, only to be surprised and nearly annihilated at the bloody streamlet of Chickamauga. One wing and one chieftain alone preserved us from complete destruction -the same chief that has just crowned himself with fresh and unfading glory in his utter annihilation at Nashville of the same army that there so nearly routed ours.

Driven back into Chattanooga, the enemy had followed, and the hills about the city were covered with the insulting foe. The railroads were under their control; means of subsistence had failed; their shot and shell dropped daily into a defenceless camp, and the extinction of the army of

the Cumberland was daily expected-would soon have been consummated. From this calamity General Grant had saved us; and under his bold generals had stormed the hights of Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, and forced the foe back from the bloody fords of Chickamauga. Here he had paused; and here only did a gleam of sunshine glitter upon our bayonets till more than a third of the year had passed. Nay, so thick was the darkness, that as late as May our fortified posts on the North Carolina coast were attacked, and all but Newbern captured. Forrest made sacred forever the waters of the Mississippi with the blood of our massacred soldiers blood that, flowing from dusky veins, gave the stream the holy redness of our flag of national freedom and fraternity the holier redness of the heart of Christ. With insolent ferocity he raged through Kentucky, and made good his boast that he would water his horses in the Ohio. Of our three armies, one was annihilated, one barely holding its own in the heart of the rebellion, and the last, long considered the first, held at bay in the same spot, beyond which it had essayed for three years in vain to march.

Now witness the contrast. In these eight months we have thrown our army upon Richmond, and held it there. Steadily have we pushed our lines around the fated city, and the line once formed has never been broken. In a series of battles that have had no equal on this continent, and no superior on any, have we won our way to its gates. Its chief line of communication is sundered. Its army, cooped up within its walls, is constrained to helplessly behold the overthrow of its coördinate armies in other sections of the field. Its general, by far the greatest, almost the only great one in its service, looks painfully on the desolations that are made in the very heart of his territory, but with no power to stay the march of the desolator. He awaits in sullen silence his own steadily approaching doom. The

troops that lay in Chattanooga, helpless under the fiery shower from the surrounding summits, now look upon the blue sea, in possession of the second commercial seat of the rebellion, after a fierce and deadly march of over two hundred miles, to the seat of the armaments and military factories of the rebellion, and with a subsequent march of three hundred miles, most agreeable, most peaceful, most triumphant.

The deluded foe seeks to take vengeance by recapturing one of its own cities, that it now with a prophetic instinct calls ours, only to meet with complete and everlasting destruction. Thus rests the field to-day. One repulse alone shades the picture—that of Wilmington; offset, however, by the victory of Farragut at Mobile, who shows that on the sea, as with England in the days of Nelson, we have one captain that always conquers. To him the two remaining posts of the rebellion may bow, as the two greatest have, unless Sherman captures them by land as he has Savannah.

In this military review we should not fail to see the different status of affairs between this winter and last, in the langour that invades the spirits and the purposes of the rebellious leaders. A year ago they were alive with activity. The conscription was everywhere gathering in its strong grasp their idle or cowardly subjects. They were a unit in purpose and in action. To-day distractions rule their counsels, inactivity pervades their movements; no new levies, except those of slaves; no new armies springing out the earth to cope with our victorious legions; the faintness, the chill, the tremor, the horror of death invade this huge, tyrannic frame. The Giant Despair rages in blind passion, and staggers to his eternal doom.

How dark was the prospect last May. How impenetrable the gloom of last August the darkest month of the whole war. How wonderful the brightness of this new