Most High God founded a church, which would send its life through the new nation, and, in a century, number more than a million of souls.

Here was a form of the Reformation which belonged to the universal religion. No restrictions of creed or of spirit shut it up in cloisters, bound it in conscience, or erected a barrier between it and the mass of mankind. It moved over the oceans, and out into the forests; proclaimed its glad tidings in the West Indies, and amid the Puritans in New England. At length there appeared a man at its head, a grand pioneer bishop, directing its heralds, and organizing its bands for the conquest of the world. Asbury was in his saddle, moving from city to city, from town to country, over mountains and rivers, far out into the frontier, proclaiming the glorious liberty of redemption, and gathering the weeping throngs into the fold of the Redeemer.

Now, precisely here is the mistake of historians. They regard religion as a thing by itself; the great revivals under Whitefield and Edwards, Asbury and Payson, as isolated spiritual movements, having no connection with the great events of national history: whereas they constitute the very soul of civil life and political development.

When Whitefield and Jesse Lee moved through New Eng land, they were the heralds of freedom. They bore a new revelation to the Puritan mind, which at first roused the most obstinate resistance, but soon quickened the inner life, and extended it to the life of the State; at length sweeping away every vestige of intolerance, and revealing the marvellous identity of the liberty for which the Pilgrims fled to America, which honest Episcopalians, Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists were demanding at their hands, and which Christ came to proclaim to universal man.

When Asbury and Coke and Strawbridge opened the batteries of freedom in Maryland, they swept down the re strictions which Romanism had thrown around the con science, and proclaimed emancipation from the fetters of

priest-craft. As they moved through Virginia and the Carolinas, they sounded the death-knell of Prelatical tyranny, and thundered in the ears of oppressors the crime of slavery.

"The fervid spirit of Edwards, seeing with Bossuet, in all history, only the history of redemption,' dreamed, in his New-England retirement, of a millennium which was to dawn in the New World, and thence burst upon the nations, and irradiate the globe." *

Recognizing this spirit of evangelization as truly abroad upon its mission of love and liberating power, Dr. Baird says, "No American Christian who takes a comprehensive view of the progress of religion in his country, and considers how wonderfully the means and instrumentalities employed are adapted to the extent and the wants of that country, can hesitate for a moment to bless God for having, in his mercy, provided them all. Nor will he fail to recognize in the Methodist economy, as well as in the zeal, the devoted piety, and the efficiency of its ministry, one of the most powerful elements in the religious prosperity of the United States, as well as one of the firmest pillars of their civil and political institutions." †

This divine afflatus, limited, as we have shown, to no age or sect or clime, was powerful and evident in the days of which we write.

Liberty received its new inspiration from the baptisms of love which came in the fresh evangelism of the great Reformation, and moved out to become truly national in the American Republic.

* Stevens's Methodist-Episcopal Church, i. 18.
† Baird's Religion in America, p. 497.

CHAPTER II.

THE TIME CHOSEN SHOWS THE PROVIDENTIAL ADVENT OF THE NATIONAL LIFE.

"America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the world's history shall reveal itself. It is the land of desire for all who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe."-HEGEL.

"Westward the course of empire takes its way."— BERKELEY.

Ir is to be observed that God does not make abrupt and arbitrary changes in the social state, as man would frequently prefer to do. He does not produce a tree before the seed, the germ, and the growth; no more does he suddenly project upon the world a completed form of civil and political order. With much longer delay than we can comprehend, through the conflicts of ages he carries truth on to its destination in the future. Sometimes it appears sparkling upon the surface like the gurgling mountain rill, revealing its fertilizing power by the freshness of the verdure upon its banks; and then, plunging from sight amid arid sands and desert wastes, it appears again with accumulated power farther on towards the great ocean.

Slowly, therefore, it might be expected the great preparations for a new era of freedom would move on under the guidance of Providence; and in the fulness of time the plans of God would be evident to men. As numerous attempts had sufficiently shown, it was rashness in man to precipitate events. The result could only be the exposure of human folly, and the destruction of hopes based upon mere finite discretion and power; but God could use even these experiments and calamities to correct the mistakes of men.

HISTORICAL CYCLES MUST PRECEDE.

Time must be allowed for human depravity to work out its legitimate results. This was realized in the antediluvian age; and the desolations of the Flood were the appropriate termination of the first grand epoch of human madness and sin.

The moral and political force of learning and the arts must be accurately measured; and this occurred in the history of Greece, under the genius of Aristotle, Themistocles, and Solon.

The irresistible energy of the sword must work out its results; and this was done in the life of Rome.

The competency of a symbolic religion must be ascertained; and this had been seen in the extraordinary development of the Hebrew institutes and people, reaching back to the infancy of the race.

Old and decaying systems of human wisdom and folly must be crumbled to atoms to make way for the foundations of modern civilization; and this was achieved by the wandering, barbarous hordes of Tamerlane and Gengis Khan.

The age of chivalry had reached its climax and spent its force in the wild and fiery crusades to the Holy Land.

Feudal rights and lordly pretensions had expired under the agency of their own usurpations and the rising power of the masses.

Spiritual and temporal despotism had tried their strength, separately and combined, in grappling with the inherent rights of man; and all questions of human progress had been answered by the aggrandizement of the sovereign alone.

Compromise between the most concentrated individualism and the rising power of the people had done its best, and rapidly completed its circle back to the unmitigated tyranny in which it had its origin.

Then the time had come for projecting upon the plane of human vision the grand experiment of government by the people. Had it been carlier, its appeal to enlightened reason would have been far less conclusive and powerful.

DESPOTIC GOVERNMENTS AND IMPERISHABLE IDEAS.

The patriarchal principle arises naturally out of the constitution of the human mind and the existence of family. It was adapted to a perfect, moral condition. Had this continued, it would undoubtedly have remained, as it was, at first, God's mode of conducting a universal theocracy. This primitive, simple, and charming method of order gave place to monarchy, which, under the power of extending depravity, became the vilest usurpation.

But it was still a favorite method, and must be tried over and over again. Its natural development in one form, it was assumed, could not be accepted as demonstration of its inadequacy in another. Its growth and extension gave it power to command respect, and win the confidence of vast generations of men; while its violent abuses, its revolutions. and decay, it was presumed, were attributable to accidental defects in men, or obtrusive modifying circumstances over which it would be possible for superior wisdom to exert adequate control.

Time was necessary to allow it to prove historically its inadequacy to solve the great political problems ever returning to perplex the thoughtful and the wise. It must fail, in the hands of numberless dynasties, in all its endless variety of forms, with every conceivable advantage, in order to loosen its hold upon the confidence of men. Its popular power must be virtually destroyed to make way for the true principle of civil order, upon a scale sufficiently large to insure its success.

To understand this historical teaching, it must be remembered that ideas are imperishable. Individuals and nations pass away; but their acts remain. In numberless forms, their acquisitions of experience and philosophy diffuse themselves through the social fabric, and descend with their precise and legitimate power amid the antagonisms of the future.

This result does not depend upon historical organizations.