undermine the foundations and destroy the influence of Christian discipline, and to turn the mind and heart of many to infidelity and licentiousness. The same baleful spirit has moved upon the fountains of human learning and science, and so secularized the philosophy of the times as to have set the high faculty of human reason at variance with the sacred majesty of religion, and to have plunged thousands upon thousands of our young men into a sea of splendid sophistry and subtlety and all the ruinous speculation of a proud but vain imagination. Meanwhile, from the hearts of multitudes the dignity of honest labor and the dictates of a sober and frugal economy have died out, on the one hand increasing pauperism and crime and lending to misfortune the aggravation of human improvidence, and on the other fostering habits of false show, and thus increasing the temptation to deception, fraud, peculation, and all the dishonesties of the most high-pampered extravagance and excess. Moreover, the wanton neglect or abuse of our providential blessings, and the unconscious apostasy from every sentiment of purity and virtue, have served greatly to defile and degrade the mind of a large portion of the community, and fill the centres of population with a low and vulgar herd, who throng the open temples of obscenity and infamy. Thus the materials are prepared for human guilt and wretchedness, whose catalogue of crimes and woes exhausts the power of language to express them. Beyond all this, political controversy and partisan strife for the reins and spoils of power, conducted without principle, and reeking with abuse, have taken so fierce a form as often to have driven the best men from the arena and left the worst upon the field. The selfish and profligate stand forward to control the nominations and elections to office, and afterwards gamble with its duties and obligations without shame and without remorse. Nor is this all. Our wrongs to the Indian and the African, continued from the beginning, have brutalized the temper, darkened the understanding, and perverted the judgment of the nation in regard to the plainest principles of common humanity and justice. The tide of emigration from the Old World has borne to our shores a large element of the foreign-born, who speedily become imbued with our native and inexorable prejudice in this respect. Thus, while we claim to be a free government, we have cherished institutions in our midst which are a mockery

of the name of liberty and have become our standing shame and curse in the sight of the whole world. Involved in a criminality so grave, we have not failed to exhibit its usual concomitants, arrogance and self-conceit. Our vast facilities of production, trade, and transportation have filled us with high notions of our superiority, and at the same time degraded us to dispositions of covetousness and cruelty. And from the long period of our tranquillity we have come at length to a pitch of wickedness that has culminated in one of the most gigantic and desolating civil wars the world has ever seen. Our unparalleled liberty has degenerated into dissolute indulgence; we have been so long without the burdens of government as to have almost forgotten the price of our birthright and to have cast away the only safeguards of its continuance; we have proved ourselves unworthy of our inheritance, in our contempt of that virtue which alone affords protection to society, in our blind disregard of the Christian foundations on which alone the great interests of a nation can permanently rest. Thus, at last, a majority of the people have grown wholly unmindful of the authority and prerogative of God, and of the duties we owe to him and to his creatures. The true life and soul of Christianity has been to a great degree emasculated, and the very titles of Jehovah and the tokens of his awful majesty in the earth have become to multitudes among us as idle and unmeaning as the Grecian myths, used, indeed, to furbish a paragraph with classic elegance or round a period with sonorous emphasis, but completely divested of those great, grand, solemn, and glorious thoughts which never can dwell with vulgarity, profanation, and irreve

rence.

Now, if, under such conditions, Christianity should resume her sway and bring the masses of the nation back to the pure and simple virtues and to the stern and heroic spirit which marked the age of our Revolutionary fathers, it will prove to be a moral miracle equal to her first triumphs in apostolic days. Yet to this object all good men should devote their energies and their prayers. In the firm conviction that virtue must finally be supreme, and that a wise and beneficent Providence has designed this continent to be the theatre of the yet more glorious conquests of Christianity, it is the mission and the duty of all friends of evangelical truth to combine in the attempt to hold and appropriate this country, with its resources, monuments, and insti

tutions, for an empire devoted to the spread of God's kingdom in the earth, and the universal reign of Jesus Christ.

And it is high time that we had begun to see our duty and to feel our obligation. God's great "judgments are already in the land:" shall not its inhabitants begin "to learn righteousness"? The associated moral and spiritual power of a Christian people ought now to be making itself felt in every part of the land and in all that concerns the existence and welfare of the country. It is the settled conviction of many of the most intelligent and purest minds that the time has come when the Christian people of America should take into their own hands the work of reclaiming the government and wielding its power more decisively for the glory of God and the highest good of human nature, and that for this purpose the true and the good should sternly separate themselves from all connection with the openly vicious and corrupt, and from all countenance and support of those whose life and example will not bear the scrutiny of common decency and morality. And if in a representative government like ours there must be political divisions, and a conflict of the suffrages of the people, let there be a Christian party, a party that will not sustain by their sympathy or their votes men who are known to be in sentiment and life, by precept and example, unchristian and untrue to the great principles of the Christian faith; for the highest treason of which mankind are capable is treason against the authority and law of the Divine government itself; and the most deadly enemies to human government are they who, with a great pretence of loyalty, are nevertheless daily insulting the majesty of Him who has power to destroy nations at his will.

The fountain of political turbulence and corruption undoubtedly lies in the primary assemblies of the people, as conducted upon the principle of party caucus, which for a long period has amounted to little else than a system of chicanery and venality too humiliating to describe. This kind of imposition upon the free action of American citizenship has been carried to such an extent as wellnigh to neutralize the title of suffrage itself, and make of the boasted ballot-box a mockery of American privilege. For the caucus, then, let the Church be substituted, not any one sect or denomination of Christians, but the whole Church catholic,-not with a view to exciting mutual jealousies and creating hostile prejudices, but standing

on the platform of Christian character supposed to be exemplified in the sincere adherents of every Christian Church. Let the weight of every vote tell what is the conviction, the intelligent, sober, and matured judgment, of the Christian mind of this nation as to the value to our country of personal integrity and upright manhood. If it were well established that such would be the policy of the truly Christian portion of the people in all the Christian churches of the country, the very fact would carry with it a moral influence which even the most brazen and unscrupulous politician could not altogether despise or resist. And in connection with this position it must be seen that our Christian duty requires us also to set our faces as a flint against the current of social and moral degradation which flows in the popular fashions, tastes, customs, and amusements of the day,-in the factitious and dishonest principles of business life,-in the whole circle of immoral and dangerous practices and pursuits which ensnare the multitude and draw them on to ruin. We must be more diligent and faithful with the early years of childhood. Christian parents must resume the discipline and religious training over their sons and daughters which prevailed in the earlier and purer days of the republic. And all the departments of government must be filled with men who will administer their power for the suppression of whatever is deleterious in its influenee, and for the encouragement of whatever is of a beneficent and elevating tendency. The Church of Christ must purge itself of worthless members, who now, through the laxity of discipline, continue a scandal and a reproach, cumbering its progress and dragging down its sacred name into the dust. All the educational and eleemosynary institutions and organizations of the times should be pervaded by the ruling spirit of the Christian faith, and quickened and animated by the living principle of evangelical purity and power. In the liberal professions and in all the stations of political prominence from which decidedly Christian men have been pushed aside partly through their own timidity and partly by the audacity of bold and scheming demagogues, there must be made an earnest and persevering effort to establish the tried and faithful representatives of a higher morality and a more stainless character. In all these respects the evils of our delinquency have been multiplying from year to year. Christian men have been unwilling or

afraid to unite upon the distinctive principles of a common Christianity, and have shrunk from the sacrifice, scarcely ready to suffer whatever of temporary defeat, expense, or reproach it might cost, and tamely submitting to be overruled by the boldness, the assiduity and energy of the evil-minded who assume to control and dictate the public policy and manners of the nation. In this way we have been swiftly sinking into the grossest perversions of ethical truth and the obligations of duty. We have confounded almost every distinction in morals; "we have put good for evil, and evil for good; we have called bitter sweet, and darkness light." In the unrestrained freedom of our experience, with no bonds and no restrictions of government or law that we could feel sensibly resting upon us, and permitted alike under divine and human authority to live in our lusts and to develop in monstrous proportions the sentiment of individual importance, we have come to exhibit little real regard for magistrates of our own choosing, and scarcely less disrespect for the very existence and form of civil government itself. Our very thoughts have been dissolved in the infatuation of personal sovereignty, until oaths and compacts, written charters and constitutions confirmed by the highest sanctions possible to man, are ruthlessly violated, rebellion is inaugurated, and we are brought to the very door of anarchy itself. It could not be otherwise with a people who have in the name of liberty struck at the vital interests of one whole race of men, and through these have aimed an impious blow at the prerogatives of God himself.

And now the day of vindication and of vengeance has burst upon us. The storm which uncovers the social and moral heart of the nation reveals the melancholy fact of a widespread demoralization amid the deepest corruption and the grossest profligacy of great multitudes of the people. Rebellion in favor of perpetuating a system of human bondage is held by many to be the crowning glory of men. Sedition, treachery, perjury, violence, and blood are counted as deeds of fame to immortalize their authors and abettors. Meanwhile, there are not wanting those who, utterly unprincipled, in the guise of pretended friendship, are gloating over the scene, and, like the fabled harpies of Tartarus, are plucking their gorge from the miseries of the nation, already reeling in the agonies of a mortal conflict. This is the spectacle