words would have called them the ravings of fanaticism. But they are more than fulfilled. His grandest dreams are trivial by the side of the realities of history. Our last incubus is cast off, cut away from us by the sharp knife of the Divine Surgeon, with great loss of blood, and almost with loss of national life. Yet we survive, and ere this century of our Lord concludes its course such a progress is to be witnessed materially and spiritually as we never yet imagined.

Europe, Asia, and probably Africa, will pour forth their millions over the fat earth of the West and South; the mines will cast their inexhaustable treasures into the national lap. The negro will rise to posts of honor and authority in all the land, will sit in Congress, will rule as governor where till yesterday he toiled as a slave, will be settled as pastors in the highest pulpits, will be partners in our largest houses, guests in our most aristocratic parlors, residents in our richest palaces, and men shall smile at the idea of distinction of color, as they now do at the divinity of slavery. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ shall renew the land in holiness and love. The Churches will melt into harmonious oneness, each esteeming the others better than itself. Law will everywhere forbid the sale of intoxicating drinks as a beverage, will give universal education and universal protection.

Thus shall the regeneration of all the lands be perfected. The Church shall rise to her true hights of divine brotherhood, the State and society shall conform to her in all their lower but powerful activities. The inward holiness shall be wrought into outward virtue. The Sabbath work shall crown with its ineffable glory the humbler labors of preceding generations. The earth shall rest in gladness and laugh in harvests. The industry of man shall find full rewards. The unity and married calm of States shall be perfect and perpetual. The people of God shall be one people,

none biting and devouring each other, but all moving like a mighty army of many battalions and many commanders, under the Captain of our salvation, to the bloodless victory of the human race and the consummation of a perfect. eternity.

"Then comes the statelier Eden back to man;

Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm;
Then springs the crowning race of humankind,

000

ربع

AMERICA'S PAST AND FUTURE.*

"TO-MORROW SHALL BE AS THIS DAY, AND MUCH MORE ABUNDANT. Isaiah lvi. 12.

H

OW many weary years contribute to the triumph of this hour. Standing on this summit, beholding the glory that is breaking forth upon all our land, feeling the joy that pervades every breast, we can hardly fail to look back upon the steps that slowly led, through indifference, hostility, storms of war, and streams of blood, to these Delectable Mountains. One who hung delighted over the peaceful Paradise, where Adam and Eve in their fresh-created perfection walked in a garden of calm and fragrance, could not refrain from vivifying the scene by contrasting it with the previous elemental war, the darkness and confusion of chaos, creatures fierce and gross of nature, that filled the mighty carboniferous forests with their roar, the whole abhorent, unelevating scene:

* A sermon preached at Medford Massachusetts, on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 1868, on the election of Ulysses S. Grant to the Presidency of the United States.

"Wrapt in impervious mists, which ever steamed
Up from its boiling oceans, without form
And void, it rolled around the sun, which cast
Strange lurid lights on the revolving mass,
But pierced not to the solid globe beneath:
Such vast eruption of internal fires

Had mingled sea and land.

Earth to its center shook; and what were seas
Unsounded, were of half their waters drained;
And what were wildernesses, ocean-beds;
And mountain ranges, from beneath upheaved,
Clave with their granite peaks primeval plains,
And rose sublime above the water floods;
Floods overflowed themselves with seas of mist,
Which swathed in darkness all terrestrial things,
A world unfurnished, empty, void, and vast.”

Out of this wreck of matter came the perfection of Eden, and the blessedness of the holy parents of our race. As the angels beheld the darkness and destruction, how could they anticipate the coming light and life? Only the consciousness of an indwelling and overruling God of infinite right, and love, and power, gave them the desired assurance. Resting calmly in that knowledge, they beheld the prevailing darkness, the baleful government of the Prince of the Power of the Air, the mighty conflict, the ever increasing signs of the progress of the kingdom of God, the subjugation of one foe after another, of fire and fog, of savagest beast, huge, amorphous, with many a scaly fold, voluminous and vast, whose presence, whether as lizard, mammoth, or winged and web-footed monsters, would have made the earth uninhabitable to man. They saw the conflict increase in fierceness as it began to consummate itself in the final victory; the death-ocean of ice from pole to pole being the last, and, to other eyes than those of faith, the complete annihilation of all life positive and possible. But in faith they still looked and labored. Conspiring with their Creator,

they aided in the resurrection of the earth from this sepulcher of being, and again beheld it glowing in more beautiful and more abundant life on the Paradisaic morn of the human creation and their Edenic home .

I. So we can note the mighty war of spiritual, and even of material elements, that has attended this new creation of our land and people in the truth and love of God. We can look back over centuries, and behold the beginnings of that iniquity whose overthrow this victory completes. Nay, centuries measure not its horrid life. From the first sin, this principle has possessed the hearts of men; from the first sinner, it has found foothold in human society. "Thou shalt rule over her," was the estate into which one half of the race was plunged by the first transgressor. "Thou shalt rule over him," the first declaration made to Cain concerning Abel, cast a large portion of the other half into the same chains. The husband held his wife as property, and beat, petted, or sold her, as his passions prompted. The father owned his children, the eldest son his brothers. In fact, the law of sin was a law of bondage. Slavery was the first-born of Satan and the fallen pair; slavery of mind, and heart, and body. It is the favorite term of Scripture to express the relation of the lost soul to its lost master.

This iniquity developed rapidly, and prevailed like the flood over all the earth. Whole nations were made slaves in an hour; one mighty overthrow of its protecting army by an invading host reduced every person in the realm to property. Cities were thus changed from liberty to slavery in a moment; states were transformed in a day. All Israel went into captivity after one battle. All Egypt was reduced to vassalage by one conquering hour of Persian, Grecian, or Roman arms. India's multitudinous millions fell thus beneath the victorious stroke of a foreign general. All Northern Europe became the slaves of Cæsar.

"He hath brought many captives home to Rome,"