CHAPTER IV.
PHILOSOPHY.
Humanhistory is a perpetual exodus, and its promised land has ever been in the West. Bondage to escape, seas to cross, miracles to witness, conquests to win, a wilderness to traverse, and a Goshen to attain, institutions to create, and all the seeds of a newer and nobler civilization to propagate, ever has been, is now, and evermore will be, the destiny and recompense of our race.
Greece collected the materials of ideas for the work of universal civilization, Rome consolidated a heterogeneous mass from every department of thought, and our Teutonic ancestors put all anterior results into generalized systems, preparatory to the ultimate perfection of civilized society on this continent and throughout the world. We are perfecting the last republic possible in space, ending the girdle of the globe we were created to redeem. As remote as is our comprehensive sphere from the beginning of historic development, we are indissolubly linked to the one divinely identical purpose. Our Union constitutes the final member of an association truly majestic and holy, the design of which is to elevate all classes and conditions of men to the utmost heights of wisdom and worth.
The nations are not destined to find a precarious calm in their degradation. They can never be subjugated by force, even should their volitions be chained for a season, while their sentiments are enervated in the service of the licentious. The great law of human progress will not long permit its apathetic subjects to be passive and mute spectators, impelled, like a vile horde, from one power to another. Revolutions will multiply, and, at the same time, become less and less calamitous, until all subjects shall become citizens, no longer excluded from political equality and moral improvement. No enterprise shall then be interdicted to adequate skill, and noarbitrary action impede the pursuit of honorable gain. The popular currency of opinion, law, and affection, must eventually be coined, and circulated in mutual confidence, and bear a premium in every land. Progress in human society is necessitated by its primary constitution. The social union of men, and their habitual communication with each other, produces a certain advancement of sentiments, ideas, and reasonings, which can not be suspended. This constitutes the march of civilization, and the perpetual order of the day is—forward! It leads us, necessarily, to successive epochs, sometimes peaceable and virtuous, and sometimes criminal and agitated, sometimes glorious, and at others, opprobrious; and, according as Providence casts us into one condition or the other, we gather the happiness or the suffering attached to the age in which we live. On that our tastes, opinions, and habitual impressions, in a great measure depend. Transient events may modify this law, but no finite power can wrest from society its varied progress. In this course of human development, the accompanying circumstances which most nearly assume the form of an exception are themselves so enchained as most strongly to corroborate the general rule. Taken as a whole, the race of Adam, enlightened or benighted, pursues a determined route, and accomplishes a prescribed progress, as do the stars. Now clear, and anon obscure, at one time slow, and at another rapid their apparent flight, nothing arrests the inevitable career, nor prevents the accumulative good. Letters shine, science advances, the arts are perfected, and splendors on every side are multiplied; then arrives the moment when the opinions generally adopted, and the prevailing disposition of all leading spirits are in conflict with existing institutions. The crash of revolution resounds, and governments are overthrown; forms of religion become obsolete, customs change, disorder reigns, and prolonged suffering prostrates the people. At length the tempest exhausts itself, and calm is restored. The necessity of repose renders the populace docile for a season, and they lose the fiery zeal which at first characterized their newly conquered opinions. A new order of things becomes established upon a higher platform, in the tranquil enjoyment of which the happy inheritors forget the sorrows of their fathers. Then begins a newer, if not a sadder advance, which leads popular ideas again into conflict with existinginstitutions, whose overthrow results in yet wider catastrophes. It is thus that civilization, by vicissitudes of repose and agitation, more or less contiguous and saddening, conducts the nations to consummate perfection.
Contempt toward mankind, doubt as to their virtues, and despondency with respect to their ultimate fortunes, recur but too often in the historians of philosophy. But it is more noble and more truthful never to despair respecting human weal, since it is only in the light of hope that we can trace a route for virtue and honor, in which an impulse may be given and a reward found for the brave, virtuous, and good. At the moment mediocrity complains of deepest gloom, genius is wont to perceive and proclaim the advent of ascending day, the fresh dawn of which rapidly develops the germs of all that is requisite to create a new world and invest it with transcendant charms. The decemvirs augmented their tyranny over Rome, until a particular event rendered the weight insupportable, and it was cast down. The British parliament despaired of rendering the nation happy under the domineering Stuarts, and the dynasty was changed. The American colonies found themselves oppressed by an arbitrary tax, and declared themselves independent. Through a similar course of opinions, the sufferers in common arrived at a stage where the existing order of things needed to be overthrown. Fresh ardor and new activities seized upon and impelled all spirits; each one was impatient under a common wrong, and ready to enter the battle for common rights. At such a crisis is manifested the maturity of a thousand remote but cumulative circumstances which bear in their bosom a salutary principle as mighty to soothe as to excite the pangs of its birth. It comes with an additional proof that the chain of national enthrallment is not unending or insufferable, but that the crimes of revolutions will decrease in proportion as their exciting cause is removed. Such was the series of struggles through which Greece bloomed in consummate beauty; such was the convulsion which conducted Rome from crude republicanism to imperial grandeur, across the field of outrageous proscriptions and civil wars; and such was the long commotion which the Europe of our day experienced in the establishment of reform: a bloody period which marked the passage from effete and oppressive institutions to the new order of things.
In the year 1800, Lucien Bonaparte remarked, "We are standing amid the grave of old and beside the cradle of new institutions." It was indeed true that the dawn of the nineteenth century beheld the world invested with a contrast the most striking and strange; night and storm, day and calm, were clearly separated. Even Asiatic immobility was broken up; and Egypt, the cradle of civilization, was rocked from side to side in the tempests of northern ambition. All the old powers of Europe were alarmed and exhausted by disorders without a parallel since the Roman empire sank in fragments beneath the crash of barbaric arms. The New World alone, happily isolated from the convulsed parent states by a wide expanse of waters, was permitted to develop in peace its primary elements of personal worth and national greatness. The sudden summons of death had just removed him who was so justly designated the "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen;" but sublimely through the universal gloom occasioned by such a bereavement, the sun of intelligence and philosophic freedom rose clear and unchangeable above the tomb of Washington.
Throughout the whole range of progressive philosophy, it will be found that there exists a constant and necessary harmony between cotemporary needs and knowledge. Each successive age produces its appropriate agents who in their own persons both resume the past and enlarge the future, by making a clearance in their sublime field, so as to reconstruct a broader and more brilliant system of ideas. The philosophy of the middle ages was distinguished for submission to authority other than that of reason, the overthrow of which vassalage it was reserved for the seventeenth century to inaugurate. In the eighteenth century, the sentiment of humanity was developed, consentaneously with mental independence, and thus a great step forward was taken in the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy. A sounder and more luminous psychology was originated which enabled thinkers guided thereby to render to themselves a reasonable account of what passes in self-consciousness, which is the visible scene of the soul. The Cartesian revolution came to illuminate the chaos of scholasticism, and Brucker led the mighty host of mental liberators who forever prevented philosophy from re-entering the mediæval age. From east to west the ameliorating progress arose and spread with constantly-increasedpower and profit. As early as 1725, Vico, at Naples, demonstrated that the organic development of great transitional epochs, so manifest in the connected history of our race, contains proof of the divine supervision, and a higher manifestation of order, justice, and continuous advancement among men, than any argumentà priorican supply. Herder fortified this idea with a still more comprehensive grasp of intellect and illustration, which constituted him the founder of the philosophy of history. He took man as he is, the microcosm of the universe, and, by a higher philosophy, did much to escape the sensualism and shallowness of the eighteenth century. From the Romanic negativeness which prevailed till the opening of our age, Herder and his successors advanced into Teutonic positiveness, and began that order of reconstructive philosophy which now so happily prevails. Shem, with all his obsolete traditions, was superseded, and the universalized fabric of Japhetic thought arose to confer a greater good. France powerfully co-operated in the ameliorating endeavors of that mighty crusade of which Montesquieu was a patriarch and Condorcet a martyr. Leibnitz believed in the law of progress in all the concerns of life. The present, he asserted, was born of the past, and is pregnant of the future. The vision of general peace he regarded as a practical idea, and anticipated a universal language, from which eventually every trace of linguistic confusion would disappear, and the union of all hearts be consummated in the blending of harmonious speech. Descartes had entertained like views, and these earlier prophets of a lofty destiny were worthily succeeded by Pascal, who wrote as follows: "By a special prerogative of the human race, not only each man advances day by day in the sciences, but all men together make a continual progress, as the universe grows old; because the same thing happens in the succession of men which takes place in the different ages of an individual. So that the succession of men, in the cause of so many ages, may be regarded as one man, who lives always, and who learns continually. From this we see with what injustice we respect antiquity in philosophers; for, since old age is the period most distant from infancy, who does not see that the old age of this universal man must not be sought in the times nearest his birth, but in those which are the most remote. They, whom we entitleAncients, were indeed new in all things, and properly formed the infancy of mankind; and since to their knowledge we have joined the experience of the ages which have followed them, it is in ourselves that is to be found that antiquity which we revere in others."
England is constitutionally negative in philosophy, and was especially so during the desolate eighteenth century, while her best minds were driven westward over ocean to flame back from afar. But even then, so predominant was the idea of progress in the greatest promoter of philosophic "Learning," that "The Advancement" thereof was the spontaneous title given to his greatest work. Bacon was also author of the saying that "Antiquity was the youth of the world;" a maxim afterward cordially adopted and learnedly illustrated by Dr. Price, the friend and correspondent of Turgot. To adopt imagery like that used by the great founder of the inductive method, if we hear little else than a dissonant screeching of multitudinous noises now, which only blend in the distance into a roar like that of the raging sea, it behooves us to hold fast to the assurance that this is the necessary process whereby the instruments are to be tuned for the heavenly concert. Chaos is undergoing a perpetual curtailment of his empire, and eventually must be cast out of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual world, as entirely as out of the material.
The epoch of Anglo colonization in America was one of philosophical transition in Europe. Antiquated systems were decomposed in the old world, and another order, as auspicious as it was youthful, was constructed in the new. Such was the use which Providence made of that Cerberus of rationalism, Voltaire, whose school brought the doctrine of Spinoza, Hobbes, and Bayle to a stop at deism, on the ruins of the prevailing religious system. The materialism of Locke easily degenerated into the dogmas of Helvetius, according to whom there is no mind extant, for matter is every thing, and who proved to the satisfaction of his age that selfishness, vanity, and gross enjoyments are the only true guides and rational ends of enlightened men; in fact, the only realities of human life. Thus, the way was fully prepared for the congenial spirit of Diderot boldly to proclaim the wish—"that the last king might be burned on a funeral pile, composed of the body of the last priest."
Despairing of free thought and wholesome progress on the ancient fields of human development, the most aspiring minds and hearts of the philosophic world followed the mild splendors of the retiring sun, and laid their visions of a better destiny in the wilderness of America. Among those whose fond expectations were thither turned, even down to our own day, were Rousseau, Bernardin de St. Pierre, and Chateaubriand. But a greater and better philosopher than they, though equally imaginative, at an earlier period, came personally to our stormiest coast, and thereon planted the first elements of a lofty culture. George Berkeley left rich worldly emoluments on the western extremity of the old world, and voluntarily bore the quintessence of all its dialectical skill to enrich the eastern extremity of the new. From that day to this, the region of the primary fountain has ever remained the chief source of philosophical worth. Francis Wayland yet lives a near neighbor to Berkeley's retreat in Rhode Island, and is not remoter from "the minute philosopher" in time than in his ethical system; but it was reserved for our great countryman to give America and the world a fitting climax to all preceding disquisitions in "Moral Science." Modern writers have differed much concerning the foundation or obligation of virtue. Hobbes placed it in political enactment; Mandeville, in the love of praise; Dr. Clarke, in the fitness of things; Adam Smith, in sympathy for our race; Grotius and Puffendorf, in the duty of improvement; Hume and Paley, in personal utility; while Hutcheson, Cudworth, Butler, Reid, Stuart, and others, derive it from a moral sense or natural impulse to do right, implanted by the Creator. Repeated editions of the Moral Philosophy based on conscience, and other kindred works, first used in Brown University, and now adopted as hand-books in many educational establishments in this and other lands, attest the high estimation in which the last and best expression of progressive philosophy is held.
Nothing goes back—every thing advances. Philosophy gained in passing from Asia into Greece, from Athens to Rome, and thence through the middle ages to modern times. The advancement made during the past sixty years abundantly indicates that the grand goal which Berkeley descried from afar, by a Pisgah-view on the border of the land he himself was not permitted to penetrate,will yet be triumphantly attained. Born of yesterday on our soil, an immense future lies before the career of philosophic thought toward the unbounded West; where, next to religion, the most exalted sphere is reserved for the indefinite expansion of her ameliorating spirit. It is the destiny of this mighty moral agent to make the tour of the world, in following the physical movements of lands and peoples, correspondent with the governing epochs we have described. Having arrived at this ultimate centre of earth's fermentation and fruitfulness, philosophy, with all subordinate elements of civilization, will prosecute the last stage of her journey, and return upon the mountains whence she originally descended, permitted at last to contemplate thence a world redeemed.
But, in perfecting the grand restoration of society, let us first of all be convinced that time is the primary instrument to be employed, and that successive generations must pass before the nations are fully prepared. Every thing under the sway of Providence is developed through a progressive movement, which is continued and regular; a law whose application is universal, and never subject to a failure. No violence can for an instant hasten the growth of a blade of grass, much less can force accelerate the march of society. The impossible of to-day may become possible to-morrow; but the movement must be natural, and then will the greatest speed, as well as most enduring safety, be found in the deepest and broadest current. It is the manifest will of God that mankind should be concentrated in one uniform march of progression, found only and evermore in the development of that liberty which is essential to all human beings. The common mind may not be the axe which hews the throne down to a block, but it is the handle without which the axe is of little use. Before common rights come to be a common possession, the people may be yet more persecuted and tormented, but they will never be conquered. Every great cause triumphs only at the expense of grand sacrifices. The highest liberty exacts the noblest martyrs, who descend into the dungeon, or expire on the cross, but their agony is transformed into balm for universal wounds, and their death brings life to the nations at large.
In all lands, and all epochs, the privileged classes, jealous of the advantages they possess, constitute themselves into a permanentwar against the mass of the people whom they are ambitious to disinherit and oppress. Almost every page of history furnishes an example. Greece was not free from the curse; and at Rome, it was exemplified in the conflict between the plebeian and patrician classes. In mediæval times, the partially enfranchised communities struggled against feudal arrogance; and in our own day it is reproduced in the antagonisms which characterize the struggles of the conservative and progressive parties. The agents of evil love darkness and resist light. They can with comparative ease deprive men of their rights, if they can but prevent their knowing them. They must be degraded intellectually, in order to be kept in social degradation; hence tyranny always brutalizes its victims as much as possible, that they may with impunity be treated as brutes. When force is allowed to begin the oppression, ignorance is the best auxiliary by which it is perpetuated. Among the many things which render despotism detestable is the absolute opposition it of necessity wages against human nature and its predestined perfection; in which resistance it is obliged to repel light, augment gloom, and fight incessantly against truth, against goodness, against God. The primordial law of humanity is perpetually to know more, love more, and concur with a constantly increased efficiency in the universal realization of the progressively divine plan.
As civilized society is the daughter of knowledge and freedom, nothing can be respected, which does not harmonize with this double source of her mission. It is not upon force that we subsist, but by a superiority produced through veneration, and that obedience which is the spontaneous submission of one will to another. It is the mutual action of mind identical in purpose. When the Spartans proposed in their hearts to die for the salvation of Greece, they inscribed this appeal on the rocky pass at Thermopylæ:—"Traveler, go tell the Lacedemonians that we fell here in obedience to their sacred laws." This was not the submission peculiar to a few heroes, but was demanded for the salvation of a whole people; it was the voice of a whole people, living as well as dead, and there was not a soul in the republic which would not have responded to the soul of the three hundred.
As bishop Butler suggested, nations may get mad as well as individuals, but in their wildest frenzy they usually produce works andspeak words superior to any thing attained by their predecessors. The most authentic and binding record asserts that "God hath made of one blood all nations who dwell upon the face of the earth;" and the obdurate who dare not or will not believe this truth may find it verified when all their gushing veins mingle in a common retribution. The great Father never formed the limbs of his children to be chafed with fetters, nor their faculties to wither in gloom. Action that is enforced regardless of freedom, is like the relation of a brute to the fierce rider upon his back, or the tingle of a lash to the skin of a slave. For all such, the lowliest as well as the loftiest, was vouchsafed the intellectual sun which illumines every man who comes into the world. It will never descend beneath the horizon, neither can any clouds long obscure it, but augment its effulgence rather. In the accumulated heritage which each generation gathers from its precursors, nothing is accepted that has not life. For this reason, the progress of society is continual, however slow sometimes; and this progress, which comprises all the conquests made by man through the principal branches of ameliorating civilization, is in fact a succession of triumphs over ignorance, and will end not merely in the gain of a battle but in the complete success of the war.
Revolutions are the sudden explosions of slowly aggregated facts, often brought about by some particular occasion, but seldom or never premeditated by any one man, system, or party. They result from a general and spontaneous feeling that liberty is not less necessary to the moral, than to the political, perfection of a people.
Hence the prodigious shock that was given to the world, when the colossus of American independence, rending from his limbs the chains imposed by monarchical power, stood erect in the full possession of inalienable rights, and went forth to emancipate mankind. As heterogeneous metals dissolve and amalgamate anew in the white heat of a furnace, so under the burning breath of colonial eloquence all the settlements of the Atlantic coast blended in the aspirations of one spirit, and contended for civil and religious freedom as a common boon. The great hero whose name it is one of the numerous glories of the present age to bear, was the visible destiny of his day, and invincible in his genius, like the new ideas of which he was the champion.
Washington established firmly and forever that principle of representation, which is the political glory of the Teutonic race; and which was destined, under the brilliant skies of this newly discovered continent, to create and control a republican confederacy, outrunning all preceding empires, and, unlike them, not founded in the subjection of particular classes, but on the enjoyment of equal and universal rights. The structure of nature, and the conquests of truth together indicate the direction and accelerated surety with which this sublime purpose is becoming realized. All the historic lands of antiquity, massed in a huge group of continents, barely extend through similar climatic zones; while America alone traverses every clime of earth, abounds in every variety of natural phenomena, and is most profuse in all sorts of valuable productions. The plains of the Amazon and of the Mississippi, compared with those of Siberia and Sahara, show the natural contrast and indicate the divine design. God has made the southern extremities of the two hemispheres little, pointed, and barren, while they grow broader toward the north, and teem most abundantly with material and mental wealth in the west.
As we have shown in respect to the occidental advancement of other civilizing elements, it was appropriate that the first fountain of philosophic wisdom among us should be opened in the oriental metropolis of New England, and that all modifying theories for a while should thence be derived. That wise people, like their fathers, until recently seemed content with the metaphysics of the sensations, and were accustomed to assume for fundamental principles, as a primary basis, truths obtained only through the judgment, by means of the observation of external phenomena. But philosophers have happily receded from that narrow view, and are beginning to perceive that this species of insight never ascends to the supreme order of truth necessary and absolute. They are in fact only conclusions deduced from sensation, and are capable of being or not being, according as the exterior objects are presented under one aspect or another. But the generic and immutable principles of freedom, art, science, and morals, in no sense find their source in the deductions drawn from external objects and attributes; they rest entirely on those primitive and necessary ideas which form part of the soul, and originate anterior to all reflection or comparison.This more spiritual philosophy spreads luminously with expanding day, and promises to be perfected near the meridian of high noon. As communications become facile, rapid, and extensive among men, isolated causes decrease in influence and philosophic truths are rapidly fortified. Individual action is less perceived, while the masses swell and rise in importance. Opinions, like the sea, become clear and constant in proportion to their depth and free action. In no age or condition has human nature ever disinherited the faculties originally given for justice, veracity, beauty, humanity and religion; it never acts legitimately without cultivating these, by repelling the passions and obstacles opposed to their growth.
The number of original thinkers constantly increases, and it is this progress which mortifies presumption, while it justifies hope. Philosophy does not dampen literary enthusiasm, nor clip the wings of divine art, but follows in their flight, and measures both their object and powers. It is the history of this mastership in the realms of intellect which affords the light by which alone we can know and comprehend all other histories; while its generalization contains not merely the most important truths, but all that can be strictly called truth. War may sometimes be inevitable, and is not to be regarded as the greatest evil, since it conduces to that succession of ideas which ministers to the perfection of human nature. Each victorious age endures for a time, and then passes away, to give place to a mightier and a better; but humanity is superior to all epochs, outlives all, and is benefited by them. That society is already fatally sick which, instead of anticipating in the future an improved succession of the present, only fears its destruction. Under the direction of Providence, great revolutions are more and better than the mere shifting of scenery on a stage; not only do they give an electric shock to the spectators, and quicken their intellectual energies for the hour, but they also effect substantial good by creating an enduring change. But fortunately the chief battles of our age are moral rather than martial. A spiritual music prevails over the wildest tempests, crying Peace. Reason carries a white flag which she will plant on the central mountains of America, and bid it wave on free breezes as the banner and blessing of the world.
Popular education renders a people morally incapable of adoptingany other than republican institutions. The qualities which belong to high culture, and which may be dangerous when confined to a few, are of unspeakable advantage when dispersed among the many. Demagogues are disarmed, when constituents are enlightened. The tendency, in every thing connected with the knowledge or interests of man in our country and age, is to derive light from every quarter, in one consistent and comprehensive scheme of thought. The literature and philosophy of the age now transpiring superabound in vast materials for progress, accumulated in all past time, and which render it probable that we are on the eve of an intellectual transition, similar to that of the seventeenth century, but on a vastly higher and broader scale. Never was there a combination of all human knowledge in a more complete and systematic form; nor has any preceding epoch been so remarkable for the manner in which it has contributed to investigate, define, and establish the principles of philosophy as a science. And it is our joy that the "finality" is not yet reached. Every to-day announces some new victory, which is the sure forerunner of a better achievement to-morrow. It was once said to the great Napoleon, "Sire, your son must be brought up with the utmost care, in order to be able to replace you." "Replace me!" he replied: "I could not replace myself; I am the child of circumstances." He felt that the power lent him was for a given purpose, up to an hour which he could neither hasten nor retard, and that when his mission was accomplished it could never be repeated. When a social transformation has become necessary, vitality abandons the superseded and transports itself into a new vehicle of progress, augmenting and fortifying that which is already a felt need, and openly demanded by the enlarged wants of a more advanced age. A higher sagacity requires then that we disregard the inferior offshoots of a past growth, and apply ourselves only to second the perfect development of that indestructible germ whose true worth is seen only in its matured fruit. To restrain the future by the past, is to mingle death with life; it is to violate all the laws of nature, and consequently to create social misery just so far as mankind are thus diverted from their legitimate career. If we transpose the order of Providence a moment, and place the highest perfection in antiquity the most remote, or allow that a greater good lies behind thepresent hour, all philosophical laws are instantly inverted, and we can arrive at nothing but chaos to support a supposition so absurd.
When Camillus besieged the city of Falerii, a schoolmaster offered to betray the children of the people into his hands, and secure for him the conquest of the city; and the magnanimous Roman caused the miscreant to be scourged to his dwelling by the children he sought to betray. Thank God, that is the spirit of our own Great West! Earth never bore such mighty billows of patriotic intelligence as are now bounding from the Atlantic to the Pacific shores. It is on this immense area, and with enhanced glories near the now wilder regions, that the grandest humanitary work of philosophic amelioration under heaven will be performed. The hardy pioneer, free as the air he breathes, and fervid as the flames he kindles to enlarge and render fruitful the precincts of a happy home, feels that a vast difference exists between himself and irrational creatures. The progress of a brute, purely individual and limited within fixed bounds, never extends to its species, they being immutably stationary; while the human race, like the individual, perfects itself by a continuous development. In this august privilege man has opened before him a career as vast as the duration of time, and beyond that is presented the fullness of that great end he was created to attain. Whenever human society arrives at a condition wherein it can not perfect its progress, it must dissolve, in order to renew and establish a fresh and firm foundation which no longer reposes on the past. But no dissolution between the earlier members of our confederacy is possible in the presence of the great conservative energies latent in the newer States. Their numerical preponderance is one guaranty of national perpetuity, but their superior love of untrammeled thought is the greatest and best. It is in the far West that mental heroes will arise, who, from a comprehensive analysis of history, will elaborate the thread which is needful to conduct us through the labyrinth of revolutions, systems, and schools. Borne on the wings of divine inspiration, they will hover above all the peculiarities of eras or sects, to comprise in one all harmonizing generalization, not the actual merely, but the possible also, and the manifestly designed, which embraces in one vast idea, God, man, the universe, and universal amelioration.
We have said above that time is the first great requisite in executing the high behests of humanity. Let it here be added that the intervention of civil power, or arbitrary constraint in any form, so far from expediting human improvement, will retard it indefinitely. No reform is real and enduring, save as it is the fruit of profound persuasion. It works a change, not in the relations of things, but in the conditions of intelligence. Above the ruins of obsolete civilization, then, let us elevate the sacred flambeau of immortal truth so high, that it may shine upon all eyes, and diffuse its effulgence through the mists of error everywhere, to reclaim wanderers from their deceptive paths. This noble and pacific conquest through the agency of divine philosophy, will, step by step, cause all nations to assume the places assigned them by the Creator, in the most perfect of cities, under the most perfect laws. The exalted enterprise, committed by Jehovah to those of his people who possess the richest harvest of his gifts, accumulated for our use in the instrumental salvation of our race, will gather from the extremes of vassalage and ignorance a sublime unity, at once the source and perfection of that wisest freedom which is realized in the liberty of the children of God.
Every emancipation that is reasonable, and therefore enduring, implies the previous acquisition of mental illumination and moral force sufficient to render their possessor competent to enter the society of the free. If this condition is neglected from personal considerations, and with fanatical intent, the premature enterprise will end in the destruction of its presumptuous leaders as its first victims. It is the fable of Orpheus or Prometheus unhappily realized. The general law of right is eternal and unchangeable; the particular claim to the benefit thereof must be admitted as soon as there is a capacity for its exercise. All laws, customs, and institutions which array themselves against the genius of progressive improvement are fatal to the people whose material energies they petrify, and whose spiritual aspirations they destroy. Whatever in man becomes actually stationary, begins that instant to decay, and the charnel-house presents the only recommendation such conservatism can claim. Races and nations so circumstanced speedily resemble those cities of the desert whose dusty ruins serve only as the frightful lair of vermin the most ferocious and abject. It is a greatwaste of cotton and sweet gums to embalm the dead on this side the globe; we had much better spend those and other like commodities in promoting the welfare of the living. It is equally useless to resist the flow of waters, the budding of trees, and the growth of plants in unfolding spring; in the name of winter to protest against the fecundity of nature, while the sun is ascending, and moist zephyrs re-open in her bosom all the sources of life.
The immense work of universal regeneration through the agency of righteousness and love has already commenced, and must proceed. Until its complete triumph, there will be no repose, because until that consummation, humanity can not cease to suffer. But the inevitable day hastens on, when the people will have but one will and one action, as they are actuated by one interest only, and its dawn will be the advent of universal joy. Let us not fear, but labor with cheerful courage, since for the attainment of an end so magnificent, no exhausting toil should be denied. What better employment for the few days allotted us on earth? If sometimes we suffer lassitude in our repeated endeavors, let us raise our eyes with our hearts, and contemplate at once the omnipotent decree which insures final success, and the ennobled generations who hail their benefactors from afar. After long ages of servitude, be certain that the people will arise, brave and powerful to sweep away the contracted boundaries within which they have been so long packed, and will demand all those rights which have been wrested from them by iniquitous laws. Then will open a new era to abused humanity, when God will recognize and bless the noblest of his creatures, man, for he will then have entered upon the way which from eternity had been assigned. Equality and liberty, become for the people a sacred dogma forever affirmed in the common reason and conscience, will then effectively realize itself in the comprehensive social organizations and philosophical perfection it will spontaneously create.