originate. Who can deny that the existence of such a country presents a subject for human congratulation! Who can deny that its gigantic advancement offers a field for the most rational conjecture! At the end of the very next century, if she proceeds as she seems to promise, what a wondrous spectacle may she not exhibit! Who shall say for what purpose mysterious Providence may not have designed her! Who shall say that when in its follies or its crimes the old world may have buried all the pride of its power, and all the pomp of its civilization, human nature may not find its destined renovation in the new! when its temples and its trophies shall have mouldered into dust,when the glories of its name shall be but the legend of tradition, and the light of its achievements live only in song; philosophy will revive again in the sky of her Franklin, and glory rekindle at the urn of her Washington. Is this the vision of romantic fancy? Is it even improbable? Is it half so improbable as the events, which, for the last twenty years, have rolled like successive tides over the surface of the European world, each erasing the impressions that preceded it? Many I know there are, who will consider this supposition as wild and whimsical; but they have dwelt with little reflection upon the records of the past. They have but ill observed the never-ceasing progress of national rise and national ruin. They form their judgment on the deceitful stability of the present hour, never considering the innumerable monarchies and republics, in former days, apparently as permanent, their very existence become now the subject of speculation-I had almost said of scepticism. I appeal to history! Tell me, thou reverend chronicler of the grave, can all the illusions of ambition realized, can all the wealth of an universal commerce, can all the achievements of successful heroism, or all the establishments of this world's wisdom, secure to empire the permanency of its possessions? Alas, Troy thought so once; yet the land of Priam lives only in song! Thebes thought so once; yet her hundred gates have crumbled, and her very tombs are but as the dust they were vainly intended to commemorate! So thought Palmyra-where is she! So thought Persepolis, and now

"Yon waste, where roaming lions howl,

Yon aisle, where moans the gray-eyed owl,
Shows the proud Persian's great abode,

Where sceptred once, an earthly god,

His power-clad arm controlled each happier clime,

Where sports the warbling muse, and fancy soars sublime."

So thought the countries of Demosthenes and the Spartan; yet Leonidas is trampled by the timid slave, and Athens insulted by the servile, mindless, and enervate Ottoman! In his hurried march, Time has but looked at their imagined immortality, and all its vanities, from the palace to the tomb, have, with their ruins, erased the very impression of his footsteps! The days of their glory are as if they had never been; and the island that was then a speck, rude and neglected in the barren ocean, now rivals the ubiquity of their commerce, the glory of their arms, the fame of their philosophy, the eloquence of their senate, and the inspiration of their bards! Who shall say, then, contemplating the past, that England, proud and potent as she appears, may not one day be what Athens is, and the young America yet soar to be what Athens was! Who shall say, when the European column shall have mouldered, and the night of barbarism obscured its very ruins, that that mighty continent may not emerge from the horizon, to rule, for its time, sovereign of the ascendant.

Such, sir, is the natural progress of human operations, and such the unsubstantial mockery of human pride.

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY.-WM. GASTON.

I AM opposed, out and out, to any interference of the state with the opinions of its citizens, and more especially with their opinions on religious subjects. Law is the proper judge of action, and reward or punishment its proper sanction. Reason is the proper umpire of opinion, and argument and discussion its only fit advocates. To denounce opinions by law is as silly, and

unfortunately much more tyrannical, as it would be to punish crime by logic. Law calls out the force of the community to compel obedience to its mandates. To operate on opinion by law, is to enslave the intellect and oppress the soul-to reverse the order of nature, and make reason subservient to force. But of all the attempts to arrogate unjust dominion, none is so pernicious as the efforts of tyrannical men to rule over the human conscience. Religion is exclusively an affair between man and his God. If there be any subject upon which the interference of human power is more forbidden than on all others, it is on religion. Born of Faith-nurtured by Hope-invigorated by Charity-looking for its rewards in a world beyond the graveit is of Heaven, heavenly. The evidence upon which it is founded, and the sanctions by which it is upheld, are addressed solely to the understanding and the purified affections. Even He, from whom cometh every pure and perfect gift, and to whom religion is directed as its author, its end, and its exceedingly great reward, imposes no coercion on His children. They believe, or doubt, or reject, according to the impressions which the testimony of revealed truth makes upon their minds. He causes His sun to shine alike on the believer and the unbeliever, and His dews to fertilize equally the soil of the orthodox and the heretic. No earthly gains or temporal privations are to influence their judgment here, and it is reserved until the last day for the just Judge of all the earth to declare who have criminally refused to examine or to credit the evidences which were laid before them. But civil rulers thrust themselves in, and become God's avengers. Under a pretended zeal for the honor of His house, and the propagation of His Revelation,

Snatch from His hand the balance and the rod;
Rejudge His justice-are the God of God;

define faith by edicts, statutes, and constitutions; deal out largesses to accelerate conviction, and refute unbelief and heresy by the unanswerable logic of pains and penalties. Let not religion be abused for this impious tyranny-religion has nothing to do with it. Nothing can be conceived more abhorrent from

the spirit of true religion than the hypocritical pretensions of kings, princes, rulers, and magistrates, to uphold her holy cause by their unholy violence.

WAR AND PEACE.-SUMNER.

The

WHATEVER may be the judgment of poets, of moralists, of satirists, or even of soldiers, it is certain that the glory of arms still exercises no mean influence over the minds of men. art of war, which has been happily termed by the French divine, the baleful art by which men learn to exterminate one another, is yet held, even among Christians, to be an honorable pursuit; and the animal courage, which it stimulates and develops, is prized as a transcendent virtue. It will be for another age, and a higher civilization, to appreciate the more exalted character of the art of benevolence,—the art of extending happiness and all good influences, by word or deed, to the largest number of mankind, which, in blessed contrast with the misery, the degradation, the wickedness of war, shall shine resplendent the true grandeur of peace. All then will be willing to join with the early poet in saying at least:

"Though louder fame attend the martial rage,

'Tis greater glory to reform the age."

Then shall the soul thrill with a nobler heroism than that of battle. Peaceful industry, with untold multitudes of cheerful and beneficent laborers, shall be its gladsome token. Literature, full of sympathy and comfort for the heart of man, shall appear in garments of purer glory than she has yet assumed. Science shall extend the bounds of knowledge and power, adding unimaginable strength to the hands of men, opening innumerable resources in the earth, and revealing new secrets and harmonies in the skies. Art, elevated and refined, shall lavish fresh streams of beauty and grace. Charity, in streams s of milk and honey, shall diffuse itself among all the habitations

of the world. Does any one ask for the signs of this approaching era?

The increasing beneficence and intelligence of our own day, the broad-spread sympathy with human suffering, the widening thoughts of men, the longings of the heart for a higher condition on earth, the unfulfilled promises of Christian Progress, are the auspicious auguries of this Happy Future. As early voyagers over untried realms of waste, we have already observed the signs of land. The green twig and fresh red berry have floated by our bark; the odors of the shore fan our faces; nay, we may seem to descry the distant gleam of light, and hear from the more earnest observers, as Columbus heard, after midnight, from the mast-head of the Pinta, the joyful cry of Land! Land! and, lo! a new world broke upon his early morning gaze.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION.-M. HOPKINS.

THAT onward movement in the march of creation, how grand it is! How mysterious in its origin! How inscrutable, how utterly beyond the scope of science are its issues! Only after the dethronement of chaos, and during the first epoch in which there were orderly arrangements and recurrent movements, was science possible. Then she might have pitched her tent, and polished her glasses, and built her laboratory, and have begun her observations and her records. She might have counted every scale on the placoids, and every spot on the lichens, and every ring on the graptolites, and have analyzed the fog from every standing pool; and so have gone on thousands of years, feeling all the time that her tent was a house with stable foundations, and her recurring movements an inheritance for ever. "Do you suppose," she might have said, "that this fixed order will be broken up?" "Do you not see that since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were?"

But that epoch came to its close. The placoids, and lichens, and graptolites, and all the science connected with them, were