so they will ever remain; while religion and political wisdom in Europe will slowly approach, and finally reach, the American standard of moral freedom in all the great conditions of Christian progress. In the mean time, the two great thoughts and facts, the Church and the State, are slowly revealing their common identity of life, development, and mission. In the spirit of this truth, wherever in this country the State institutes a college or university, Christian life fills and develops it, or it dies. Wherever the Church organizes a college or university, the State incorporates it, and sometimes (more rarely heretofore than it will hereafter) assists in endowing or supporting it with the Christian wealth of a Christian State; and whether its patronage includes money or land, or only influence, it absorbs the rising goodness and talent, the public virtue and power, which the Church, through her institutions, generates. Hence it is that we cannot know education nor the State, in the Great Republic, apart from the influence of the Church.

Here therefore, as elsewhere, we are not surprised to find the Church, in her evangelical departments, the great organizer and inspirer of educational enterprise. The Bible, prayer, and regeneration come in to give life and direction to study and training; and consciously or unconsciously, officially or unofficially, the highest institutions of learning in America take their mould and receive their distinction from ecclesiastical life and action. Let the following table of facts illustrate these remarks. It is imperfect; but, compiled by the Andover, Lane, and Chicago Societies of Inquiry, it is reliable for the purposes of this discussion.

To a very large extent, the intelligent liberality inspired by our holy religion has produced these institutions; and they are hence thoroughly pervaded by the religious spirit. With what propriety, therefore, is one day in every year devoted by the evangelical churches to fervent prayer to God for his blessing on the colleges of our land!

Our universities are generally colleges, and not, as on the continent of Europe, a higher grade for advancing the education of graduates from the gymnasium or college; nor, as in England, grand corporations, including colleges, fellowships, sinecures, professorships, and their ancient and peculiar traditions. We have, however, several universities. including schools of law, medicine, and divinity.

Learning in America, it may be conceded, is rather general than great or profound; but we can claim an increasing number of scholars who are recognized and felt throughout the scientific and literary world.

THE PRESS.

In 1822, Lord John Russell mentioned before the House of Lords "the multiplication and improvement in newspapers, as gratifying evidences of the augmented wealth and expanding culture of the middle classes in Great Britain." Some eighty years later, Mr. Kennedy said of America, "A free press has become the representative, and, for the masses, the organ, of that free speech which is found indispensable to the development of truth, either in the religious, the political, the literary, or the scientific world." Both these remarks are now receiving their fulfilment in the United States. Our periodical literature has become one of our grand "popular educators;" and the "augmented wealth and expanding culture" of our free citizens have given, at the same time, evidence of the power of a free press, and scope for the development of its power. The United States has been called "a newspaper-reading na

tion." In 1860, we published 4,051 papers and periodicals, amounting to 927,951,548 copies, valued at $39,678,043; which would be 34.36 copies to each white man, woman, and child of the country. Our book-printing amounted to $11,843,459; job-work, to $7,181,213. In twenty States,

New England, Western, and Middle, and the District of Columbia, the work of the press, in its various departments, reached, in the single year 1860, $39,678,043.

The increase of this power is beyond all parallel. A single religious publishing-house has turned out more than twelve bound books a minute for every working minute of a year; an indication of the reading-matter actually demanded and paid for by the American people.

It is of little avail to attempt to estimate the power of the press in this Republic. It has its vicious elements; is seized by infidels, Romanists, spiritists, and demagogues to mislead the people for selfish ends, or to promote a perverted class interest. But this exceptional use of the great power of the nineteenth century does by no means render its freedom questionable, or its influence, as a whole, pernicious. Its teachings, good and bad, illustrate the freedom of true republicanism; while its collisions of mind and principle reveal the safety of free discussion, and bring out with enhanced power all the great doctrines of liberty. Licentiousness in the press as well as in every thing else must, of course, be suppressed; but the Americans are sensitive with regard to any other limitations. The purest and noblest in our nation say, "Let the battle go on; let error and fiction war with truth; let the selfish passions of leaders and parties dash against the fortress of liberty; let infidelity and superstition assault the pure principles of the gospel and the true church of God: there is no danger."

"Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again;

The eternal years of God are hers:
While Error, wounded, writhes in pain,
And dies amid her worshippers."

In the art of printing, the Americans have made great improvements. Conceding priority in experimental inventions for stereotyping to Vander Mey in Leyden, Ged of Edinburgh, M. Firmin Didot, France, and the Earl of Stanhope, England, it may be affirmed that American genius has carried the art to its highest present point of utility. The same may be claimed in regard to electrotyping, an important branch of electro-metallurgy; a department of industrial art, the power of which, for convenience, beauty, economy, and despatch, cannot be regarded as yet fully developed. Type-setting and distributing-machines, invented by William H. Mitchell of New York, and C. W. Felt of Salem, Mass., indicate the labor-saving power of genius, and mark the progress of practical art in America.

Perhaps nothing more distinctly indicates this progress than the contrast between the printing-press used by Franklin, and preserved in Washington as a sacred relic, and the rapid power-press of to-day. England, through the inventive genius of William Nicholson in 1790, may claim the honor of commencing experiments which led to the invention of power-presses. Friederich König of Saxony, beginning in 1804 under the patronage of T. Bentley and R. Taylor of London, made vigorous efforts in this direction, but did not reach practical success. He abandoned the attempt to work a hand-press by power. He, however, by

the help of A. F. Bauer, a German of Stuttgard, made further experiments; and Nov. 28, 1814, "The London Times" was printed on a steam-press constructed secretly by these Germans.

Cowper and Applegath, both Englishmen, gave new form and considerable advancement to this important department of mechanism; producing a cylinder-press which struck off six thousand two hundred copies per hour, and worked daily for more than ten years.

In the mean time, "Isaac Adams of Boston, Mass., took up the problem abandoned by König, of working a hand