that the world might not entirely lose the benefit of so important a scheme, he undertook to smuggle it into the public view in the way which has been already indicated.

It is these speculations, such as they are, which the German philosophy has substituted for the Bible. All authority of revelation being discarded, the human mind there is like a man wandering in a prairie; there is on every side a boundless prospect; there is neither pathway nor guide; there is in every direction the same profusion of plants and flowers, without any diversities sufficient to mark his progress; and the proud wanderer, disdaining to turn his eyes toward the luminaries of heaven which might direct him, pushes onward and onward with laborious diligence, and applauds himself for his rapid progress, when he is only returning again and again upon his own track without knowing it. Just so it will be here, if the guidance of revelation be abandoned for the brilliant mazes of transcendentalism, to which, it must be confessed, there is now a strong tendency. But some boast of the independence of the human mind, and rejoice in these developments as proofs of its exercising that independence. The human mind is not independent, and independent it cannot be. It was created limited, and of course dependent. It feels its own dependence in its inmost heart. From the very necessity of its nature, it must have some God to worship, some authority to lean upon. In Germany, where the authority of revelation has been so generally rejected, the mind has no more independence than it has here, where the authority of revelation is still so generally respected. As the ancient Egyptians in their wisdom despised the God of the Hebrews, and worshipped crocodiles and calves, so literary Germany in her pride has despised Jesus Christ, and worshipped her Hegels and her Goethes, both, as the Apostle Paul expresses it, receiving within themselves that recompense of their errors that was meet.

God, who created the soul and knows its wants, has given his holy Word, the Bible, as authority in all questions of re

ligion, and whosoever rejects this authority, wars against his own soul, and sooner or later will be compelled, if he persist in this rejection, to sink down on some other and far inferior authority, from a God to a reptile. Are not the "montes parturientes," and the "ridiculus mus" of the Teutonic Philosophy sufficient to warn us against rejecting the good old Bible of our forefathers, and accepting transcendentalism in its stead?

I believe there are truths in philosophy altogether beyond what Locke or his disciples have developed, and every honest well directed attempt to ascertain these deeper truths I would welcome and honor.

But these depths are not to be discovered and sounded by casting aside the chart and plummet of divine revelation, and trusting the unaided efforts of the human mind. It is to be done only by a deeper study of the Word of God and the Book of Nature, a more laborious comparison of one with the other, a more patient, intense, earnest searching out of the analogies between them; a work only just commenced by Butler, but which no man has since completed or even carried much beyond the rude though noble beginnings, which that master spirit has left behind him.

Think over again the systems of philosophy which have now been exhibited, and which are the foundation of all the unbiblical philosophies of our times, and see whether there really is any thing in them worthy of your confidence; any thing to justify your forsaking the Bible and going after them. Are they adapted to the wants of human nature? Are they fitted to exert an influence for good over man? control the wicked? Can they comfort the sad? is not forsaking the sun for the flame of a taper, it is rejecting the light of the imperishable heavens for the glow of a rotten tree. It is at best but a magic lantern, either entirely dark or producing only phantasmagoria by its feeble light.

Can they

Oh! this

But one extreme usually begets another and its opposite, and the folly of rejecting the authority of Scripture is now equalled by the opposite folly of encumbering this authority

We can

with ecclesiastical traditions, and a pretended inherent church power derived through an external organization, and not at all dependent on or productive of spiritual communion with God, a moral sympathy between the soul and its Maker. Transcendentalism and ecclesiasticism both put man in the place of God, but transcendentalism still has this advantage, that it compels the would-be God-man to prove his divinity by the power of his intellect, by the exertions of his soul; while ecclesiasticism pretends to give man his divine power, by the performance of certain trivial, external acts, which might just as well be done by a piece of clockwork, or by a steam engine of a one-mouse power, as by a man. not go back to the infancy of the world or to the middle ages to get rid of the evils of the present; we must go forward. Society will not retrograde, it must advance. What man in his senses will now prefer a pyramid to a railroad, a cathedral to a Croton aqueduct! Will it be said that the pyramid and the cathedral embody a great idea? So does also the railroad, and that too a very active and useful idea. Say not thou what is the cause that the former days were better than these, for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this. God is in heaven and man on earth, and the truths of the Bible, believed and obeyed, felt and practised, are the connecting medium between God and man, and not the external ritethe visible church organization. These are but the necessities of earthliness-the body and not the soul-which, so far from conferring spiritual good of themselves when the soul has departed, are corrupting, offensive, nauseating; disgusting to intelligent men, and an abomination in the sight of God.

But the follies of transcendentalism and the fooleries of ecclesiasticism are usually the resort of idle minds, which have nothing else to employ themselves upon; or of desponding, timid minds, which can trust neither in themselves nor in God.

We in this country have so much to excite us, and so much to do, that we have no right to be either idle or timid, no excuse for becoming either transcendentalists or monks.

Here is an empire to be reared under auspices more favorable than have ever attended the rearing of an empire before; here the whole commonwealth is free as no commonwealth ever was free before; here all nations flow together as nations. never flowed together before; here every individual mind has full opportunity for self-development as individual mind has never had opportunity before; here the religion of the bible has a fair unencumbered field for the full manifestation of its power such as it has never had before. All depends on what is now done. This is the crisis. The prize is put into our hands, and here is employment enough to use up all our superfluous activity, without chasing after the hallucinations of a Hegel or of an Ignatius Loyola, or of any of the brood of Ignatiuncula, his feeble imitators, with which even Protestantism now abounds. We have enough to do for a long time to come within the limits of revelation, and where revelation can help us, before we get beyond it into transcendentalism or ecclesiasticism; and if we are wise men, if we are benevolent men, let us do with our might what our hands find to do, or very soon it will be forever too late.

And what do we want for our country, and especially for the West? and toward what point should our labors be directed?

For one who has been brought up amid New England institutions, who has witnessed the influence of these institutions on the great mass of the people, and has contrasted the New Englanders in respect to intelligence, activity, thrift, and prevalent morality, with the inhabitants of other lands, there can be but one answer to this question. We want for the West a more extensive and permanent establishment of New England institutions, a larger infusion of the New England spirit, than is now to be found there; and toward this point ought the most strenuous efforts of New England men to be directed.

It is a fact universally acknowledged by the political philosophers of the old world, a fact well known among the intelligent statesmen of our own land, that most of that which

is peculiar in our national development, which characterizes our institutions, political, educational, and religious, is mainly of New England origin and growth. The present tendencies of civilization throughout the world, the tendency to the equalization of rights, to the elevation and the comfort of the many, to the annihilation of privileged orders, to universal education, to religious liberty, to a free press and an open Bible, owe, if not their origin, at least their most fresh and healthful growth, to the fathers of New England. These are now the prevailing tendencies of civilization throughout the world; and in our Western country, had there been no large foreign immigration, this tendency would have been at the present moment the prevailing and unrivalled one. But foreign immigration has brought in the opposite pole of civilization, the civilization of Rome, which is, in all points, the antipode of the civilization of New England. Weakened and discouraged in Europe, it acquires fresh strength and boldness in the new and fertile districts of the Western States; and the intention of the French government, centuries ago, to command that whole Western valley, by a chain of forts from the Gulf of Mexico to the great lakes, was not a whit more manifest than is the present design of the powers of Rome to command the same region by a chain of ecclesiastical and educational establishments, permanently located, richly endowed, and strongly manned. Very well. We give them full liberty to build their churches and their schools, to preach, and print, and publish, to their heart's content; and while they use only fair and honorable means we object not to their efforts; in this, giving a most striking illustration of the difference between their civilization and ours, for, wherever they have the power, they prohibit all rivalry; a church or a school or book opposed to them is crushed as if it were a poisonous viper in their path; and good old Pope Gregory, while he avails himself of the universal liberty here enjoyed to plant his religion in every nook and corner of our land, and calls us bigoted because we choose to have our own Bible read by our own children in our own schools, so far from reciprocating our liberality, is beyond