Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014 https://archive.org/details/popularlecturesaOOcamp POPULAR LECTURES AND ADDRESSES. BT ALEXANDER CAMPBELL, PKMIDENT or BETHANT COLLBGS, TIRGINU. CHRISTIAN PUBLISHING COMPANY ST. LOUIS, MO. TO ^£lina guntinjgton (Eampbdl, MY DUTIFUL AND AFFECTIONATE WIFE, WHO HAS GREATLY ASSISTED ME IX MY LABORS IN THE GOSPEL, THIS, VOLUME OF PUBLIC ADDRESSES, LONG SOLICITED BY MANY FRIENDS, IS AS AN HUMBLE TOKEN OF MY ESTEEM AND AFFECTION. Bbthaky, Va., 1861. A. CAMPBELL. PUBLISHERS' PREFACE. We take great pleasure in presenting to the public this superb work, containing the Lectures and original Essays of Alexander Campbell, President of Bethany College and Minister of the Gospel of Christ. They have been carefully revised and prepared for the press, and now, for the first time, put in a form acceptable to all. They have been collected from his periodicals, covering a space of nearly forty years past, and were delivered and read to large and select audiences in different parts of the United States, and have frequently been required by those who have heard them or have known any thing of his intellectual strength and ability. No man of the present age has been more frequently before the public, both in his addresses, debates, and writings, than Alexander Campbell ; and the impress of his mind he has left on the age, and will leave to future generations. No one can read these Lectures and Essays without being struck with the wonderful powers of reasoning he possesses, the ease with which he masters the most recondite subjects, and the boldness and originality with which he contemplates and handles them. He throws new light upon whatever he touches ; and, as he thinks profoundly and clearly, he brings within the comprehension of all the weighty matters which he discusses. He has labored zeal- ously and successfully to redeem the world from the authority ol great names to the truth of things, and from the fanciful systems of theorists to the established principles of philosophy, morality, and religion. He never substitutes the speculations of men for authenticated facts, nor reasonings for faith, but confines himself publishers' peeface. within the area of nature, society, and religion in their truest, broadest, and largest extent. His works show that he has been no gleaner in the fields of science or of art, no winnower in the waste and rubbish of ages, but has entered the great harvest- fields of truth and observation and has brought home the riches of his herculean labors. This work does not attempt to give the author's views on the subject of the Christian religion at large: these may be found in his numerous publications already before the people, and which have been extensively circulated and read both in Europe and America. His thoughts on collateral themes — literary, educa- tional, philosophic, and moral — are here presented, embracing a wide range of subjects and elaborated in his own masterly and profound manner. We think that no private or public library can well aS'ord to dispense with this work. Every one who wishes to know what one of the most original minds and profound thinkers of the age has said and written on subjects of the greatest interest to our race, will avail himself of the reading and study of this volume. The distinct themes discussed in the book will be found in its opening pages and a full and copious index, alphabetically arranged, at its close. No pains or expense have been spared by the publishers to get it up in a style and form most accept- able to the reader. The portrait is one of the finest, by J. C. Buttre, of New York, from a recent superior photograph, given at our urgent request. We commit it to the public in the full confidence that its just merits will be appreciated by it, and that it will take its place along with the standard publications in the English language. The Publishers. Philadklphia. CONTENTS. PAea ^ Thf Anolo-SaxOxV Language — its Origin, Character, and Destiny,... 17 II. Amelioration of the Social State 47 III. Responsibilitiks of Men of Genius 73 IV. Is Moral Philosophy an Inductive Science 95 V. Literature, Science, and Art 126 VI. Supernatural Facts 142 VII. The Destiny of our Country 163 VIII. Phrenology, Animal Magnetism, Clairvoyance, Spiritual Bappinos. Etc 186 IX. Woman and her Mission 213 X. Education 230 XI. Common Schools , 247 XII. The Philosophy of Memory and of Commemorative Institutions 272 XIII. Colleges 291 XIV. Is Capital Punishment Sanctioned by Divine Authority? 311 (t^. War 342 XVI. Fourth-of-July Oration 367 XVII. Demonology 87» XVIII. Life and Dbath 40S vii viil CONTENTS. PASl XIX. Importance of Unitikq the Moral with the Intellectual Ccltube 07 THE Mind 453 XX. The Corner-Stone of Bethany College 486 XXI. To the Graduates of Bethany College 492 XXII. To the Graduates of Bethany College 504 XXIII. Missionary Address 616 XXIY. Missionary Address 531 XXV. Missionary Address 551 XXVI. Bible Union Address ^ 665 XXVII. Bible Union Adi>re88 600 POPULAR LECTURES AND ADDRESSES. ADDRESS ON THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE: ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTER AND DESTINY. CINCINNATI, 0., 1849. Before we can appreciate our own vernacular, we must have some knowledge of language in general, and of other dialects of speech oesides our own. It is, on all hands, agreed, that reason, language and religion, are God's greatest and best gifts to man ; and that the cultivation and knowledge of these are essential to the development of our nature, and the enjoyment of ourselves and one another. With the immortal Newton, therefore, we say: ''God gave to man reason and religion, by giving to him speech." This being admitted, language is a subject worthy of the highest consideration and regard. Hence, in the judgment of the wisest and best of men, much of our early life is devoted to the acquisition and cultivation of this ennobling faculty of speech; this divine art of acquiring and communicating knowledge,, sentiment and feeling; this mysterious and sublime instrument of enjoying religion, society and truth. To this most interesting theme, then, we ask your indulgent attention, while we endeavor to place it before you in a few of its more important attitudes and relations to ourselves, our country and the world. Language, then, is either oral or written. Oral language, or lan- guage proper, consists of articulate sounds addressed to the ear; written language consists of stipulated symbols addressed to the eye. With th« 2 17 18 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE : absent and with the deaf, we intercommunicate by symbols addressed to the eye ; with those present, by sounds addressed to the ear. These, however, are but definitions of the terms as we use them. What is the thing itself? As applied to man, language is pictured or embodied thought, feel- ing and emotion. It is an embodiment of ideas, volitions and feelingj, in audible sounds, or in visible forms, addressed to others. It is, indeed, the aerial and sensible impersonation of human spirits in com- munion with one another. It is not the mere giving of a name, or a local habitation, to an idea, emotion or volition ; but it is the imparting to that idea, emotion or volition, the power of reproducing itself in the mind of another. It is that ethereal instrument, that spiritual symbol, by which one spirit operates upon another, in simultaneously producing views, feelings and emotions, corresponding with its own. It is, indeed, an endowment of unbounded influence for weal or for woe, bestowed on man, for which he is more accountable than for any other social influence conferred upon him. No uninspired man has given such a picture of the power of human language, for good or for evil, as that drawn, in a few words, by the eloquent Apostle James. To that great instrument of speech he ascribes a transcendent potency. Of an unruly tongue, he says: "The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity ; it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature, and is set on fire of hell. . Every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed by mankind ; but the tongue can no man tame ; it is an unruly evil thing, full of deadly poison. By it," indeed, "we bless God;" but by it, also, "we curse man, created in the image of God. Out of the same mouth proceedeth a blessing and a curse. Brethren, these things ought not so to be." From this high source we learn that there are two kinds of eloquence — the eloquence infernal, and the eloquence supernal. We occasionally hear of the fire of eloquence, but are not always informed whence it comes. It may, indeed, emanate from the fire beneath as well as from the fire above, and is, therefore, all potent in blessing or in cursing man. But, if the tongue is sometimes set on fire by hell, it is sometimes set on fire by heaven ; and hence men are both blessed and cursed by the faculty of speech. How much good feeling and tender afi^ection spring up within us, and gush from our lips, on hearing the kind, and courteous, and sympathizing compellatioas of some kindred spirit — ot some estimable and afi'ectionate friend! If, from wicked words, ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTER AND DESTINY. 19 Bome hearts burn with rage, from kind and benevolent words other hearts overflow with love. But our own words react upon ourselves, according to their import; and hence we are sometimes wrought up to a pathos, a fervor, an ecstasy, indeed, by the mysterious sound of our own voice upon ourselves, as well as by that of others, to which we never could have ascended without it. Hence the superior elo- quence of extemporaneous speaking over that of those who read or recite what they have coolly or deliberately thought at some other time and in some other place. Indeed, our most sincere and pious emotions are stirred up — a more soul-subduing piety is developed — and a height of bliss enjoyed in the fervor of expressed admiration and praise, addressed to the throne of God, under the influence of our own voice, in private and in social worship, than could be produced in silent meditation, prayer or praise. Even the raptures of heavenly biiss are but the sublime consummation of expressed adoration, and the sweetest bliss of heaven is but the effect of a heavenly concert in some lofty ecstasy, uttered by seraphic tongues to the un wasting Fount of universal good. Language is, indeed, a most sublime machinery, by which a man can raise himself, and those whom he addresses, to the loftiest conception of nature and of nature's God, and to the highest personal and social pleasure of which his nature is capable. Volumes have been written in commendation of it, and of the great masters of this divine art ; but who, in his most happy moments, and in his loftiest strains of admi- ration, has ever equalled the transcendent theme? It has been the subject of many a volume, and the theme of many a speech. Sages, philosophers, fabulists and poets, have exhausted their stores of learn- ing and eloquence in commendation and in admiration of the gifts and achievements of human speech. Of Grecian eloquence, an English poet has said : — *' Resistless eloquence that fulmined o'er Greece, And shook the way to Xerxes'' and Artaxerxes' throne." And what is eloquence, but language properly applied ? But we need not the fictions of the fabulist, nor the high- wrought eulogies of the poet ; we need but the great fact, that language has ever been the great minister of civilization and of redemption. It was by the gift of tongues that nations were subdued to the obedience of faith. It was the spirit of wisdom and of eloquence that gave to Him that spoke as mortal man never did, a power, intellectual, moral and •spiritual, transcendent over the destinies of the world. 20 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE: Its power is not only felt on the thrones of kings and on the tri- bunals of justice, but on the throne of God itself. It electrifies the heavenly hosts, and opens the fountains of sympathetic feeling and of profound devotion, in the loftiest spirits that environ the celestial throne. It has awakened emotions in the human heart, and kindled raptures in the soul, that, rising to heaven, have caused the earth to tremble under the knees of adoring saints, and have brought angels down on missions of mercy to mankind. The piety of the saint, and the zeal of the martyr, have, under its hallowed influence, achieved the most splendid victories inscribed on the rolls of time, and have effected revolutions and deliverances on earth that have caused enraptured silence amongst the adoring legions of the skies. But it is not to pronounce an eulogy on its ineffable powers ; it is not to argue its human or divine origin, or discuss the comparative excellence of any one of the dialects of earth in contrast with the claims of any or of every other, that we now appear before you. It is rather to assert the claims of our own vernacular to our especial regard and attention, as destined to pervade the world, and to carry civiliza- tion and salvation to the human race. True, indeed, in attempting this, we must occasionally glance at other tongues ; and it may be due to the occasion to avow, at least, our own conviction, that language, as much as religion, is the special gift of God to man. But to propound the question, Was language human or divine in its origin? as a subject of grave discussion in this enlightened land, in the midst of the nineteenth century, and especially in this city of schools and colleges, would seem to me as inapposite as uncomplimentary to my auditors. Suffice it, then, on the present occasion, to assume it to be a special gift of God to man. That the first man could not have taught himself to speak; that language, like faith, comes by hearing ; that it could not have been conventional; that, without it, assemblies could not have been con- vened or the subject debated; that mankind were not, as Lucretius and Horace sung, sanctioned by the first of Eoman orators, a mutum et turpe pecus — a dumb and brutal race — is self-evident. It would, indeed, require an unusual amount of patience to reason with men who begin by assuming that — "Men out of the earth of old. Dumb and beastly vermin, crawled ;" that from this state of brutal barbarism they degenerated into civilization; that they apostatized from their primitive state into ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTER AND DESTINY. 21 learned and eloquent men ; that from error and vice they fell away into learning and virtue, and give, for proof, that water is purer in the stream than in the fountain ! From such philosophers, or rather philosophists, we must dissent, and confidently assume that language was originally a divine gift to man. The only question, then, is: — Was it given to man by inspi- ration ? or, Did God teach man, viva voce, to speak ? Reason and faith concur in affirming that all things begin in miracle. The course of things is nature; their beginning supernatural, or miraculous. Gf two miracles supposable in the case, we choose the less. That God conversed with man, and taught him, viva voce, is not only rational, but scriptural, and less marvellous than that he taught himself to speak, or that God simply inspired him with wisdom and learning to invent it. God made the human ear for a guide to the human tongue. Hence, the deaf are always dumb. No one ever spoke that did not first hear another speak. Inventing speech is, therefore, in its nature, impossible. Speech is imitation, not invention nor discovery. Hence, we individually and nationally have a mother tongue — a vernacular. But there was one man that never was an infant, that never had a verna, a nurse, or a mother. He had no mother tongue. But he had a father. He must, then, have had a father tongue. That man was Adam, and his father God. The most natural or rational conclusion is, that God taught him to speak, to give names to things and his conceptions of them. God, then, not only gave to man ears and a tongue, but he also taught him to use them; not by inspiration, but by example. According to Moses, — and he is not only the most ancient, but the most learned authority in the world, — God spoke before he made his son Adam. He created the Universe by the power of speech. And is not this the most lofty conception that we can form of the grandeur and divinity of speech — that God, of all means in his power, chose lan- guage as the envelop of omnipotence, and ushered the universe into being by the divine eloquence of words? He said, ''Let there be light, and there was light" At the sound of his voice darkness became the parent of light, and Nothing the mother of all things. He said, and it was done; he commanded, and the universe began to be; he spoke, and truth was .born. The first speech continued, at intervals, for six days. When it ceased, creation was perfect and complete, and ever since but echoes back the voice and the praise of the Lord. From this miniature view of the gift of speech, and its divine origin, 22 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE : we advance another step toward our vernacular. The human family were all of '^one language and of one speech" for almost eighteen hundred years. Since that time the history of language has not been fully written. Still, amidst the confusion of tongues and the tra- ditions of antiquity, and especially from the structure of different dialects of nations, we may arrive at a good degree of certainty as to ihe lineage and descent of the Saxon and Anglo-Saxon tongues. But to discuss all questions that might be propounded on such an exube- rantly fruitful theme, could we respond to them, would be rather the burthen of a volume than the mere item of a popular address. There is no question that the ancient Chaldee or Hebrew was the only language spoken by mankind from Adam to the erection of the Temple of Babel, in the year of the world 1775. This unfortunate and infamous pyramidal temple, rather than the surrounding city, Wcis, we presume, the procuring cause of this sad calamity. The anathema then inflicted upon mankind is immortalized in the name of this ill- fated pile, intended, by its apostate founders, for a centre of attraction ; but, in pursuance of a divine malediction, it became a centre of repul- sion and dispersion. The causes of this eternal mark of divine dis- approbation are not so evident to all as to preclude a doubt whether a refusal to spread themselves over the earth, and locate in different regions, according to a divine intimation, or a desire to erect a temple in honor of some embodiment of divinity, as a form of God, which they or some of their immediate ancestors had vainly imagined, became the cause of this confusion of language and dispersion of noankind. The fact of a flagrant apostasy from the divine will is indisputably evident, explain it as we may. They either refused to obey the patri- arch Noah, allotting, by inspiration, to each family of his great- grandsons, then amounting to seventy-two incipient tribes, such a portion of the earth as God, in his all-superintending wisdom and providence, had allotted to them ; or forgetting, in the vanity of their minds, that God was a Spirit, they sought to embody their conceptions of him in some sensible form, for which they devised a temple, and for themselves a city. To discuss such subjects as these would be foreign to our purpose. It sufficeth our purpose to note the melan- choly fact that the language which God and Adam spoke in his primeval innocence; which Abel, Enoch, Methuselah and Noah spoke; the ver- nacular of Shem, Ham and Japheth, gave way to a confusion of lan- guage, to new sounds and signs, unheard and unknown in the years before the flood. Into what, and how many, forms, human language was now cast, is ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTER AND DESTINY. 23 a subject in which the most learned antiquarians do not altogether narmonize. Some assume three, others sixteen, and others seventy- two new dialects of speech. Those who assume three, allot one to each of the three sons of Noah ; those contending for sixteen, give one to each of his grandsons ; while those who oppose both, assign one to each of his seventy-two great-grandsons. But all these assume that, in journeying from the east to this new location, the posterity of Shem accompanied Ham and Japheth ; that, indeed, all the families of the earth, leaving their former residences in the east, set out in quest of a new location. This is not probable, nor does it so well accord with the subsequent details of sacred history. The stronger probability is that the posterity of Shem had no part in the erection of this tower to Belus, or to whatever divinity it was designed to honor ; and, conse- quently, were not implicated in this grievous apostasy, but, retaining their language and their religion, continued their abode around the location of their venerable father, Noah. Sir William Jones — no mean authority — argues that mankind are divided into three races, corresponding with the three races of Noah, and that each of these had its own distinctive and independent tongue. These he presumes to have been Hindoos, Arabs and Tartars; and their three unconnected and original tongues were, the Sanscrit, Arabic and Slavonian. The Indian, or Hindoo race, comprehends the ancient Persians, Ethi- opians, (whether Asiatic or African,) the Phenicians, Tuscans, Greeks, Chinese, Goths, Celts, Japanese, Burmans, Egyptians, Syrians, Peru- vians and Eomans. This race anciently spoke the Sanscrit, the great parent of the Gothic and Celtic, afterwards blended with the old Ethi- opic, Persian and Armenian. It is alleged that the traditions of Homer are found in Sanscrit poetry, and that, unquestionably, the Greek and Eoman tongues are derived from it. The x\rabic race located themselves between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and from them the Jews, Arabs and Assyrians derived their respective dialects of speech ; rather a modernized form of the ancient and once universal Chaldee, which, with slight variations, is called Aramean, Arabic, Hebrew, Samaritan, Syriac, Coptic. The Tartar race located in the vast regions of Tartary, spreading themselves over Russia, Poland and Hungary. Their language was the Slavonic, whence sprang various dialects of Northern Asia and Northeastern Europe. Coinciding with these views, we are gratified to have the latest and most eminent writers on the subject; amongst whom we place Bryant, Sir William Jones, and the distinguished Faber. 24 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE: Notwithstanding the confusion of speech, it would not be difficult to prove one ancient original tongue. We have only to take a few promi- nent terms, and trace them through all the more ancient tongues down to the modern. Take, for example, the first imperative uttered by the Creator: — God said, ''Let there be light, and there was light." In the old Chaldee, the word rendered light is UR, translated light, or fire. In the Sanscrit, our signifies day, in contrast with night. In all the Eastern languages it signifies light and fire. In the Coptic or Egyptian, or indicates the sun, or light. The Greek aeer is some- times rendered air, sometimes light. In Latin, aura, in Irish, aeer, are formed from the same root. From the same source the Greek has PUR, for which we have substituted fire. Many such examples could be given ; but enough, you will say, of the endless genealogy, transfer- ence and transformation of words. We shall, then, leave Asia, and travel to Europe; but before we leave this cradle of the world, this nursery of the human race, we must remind you that all that is great and good and venerable in human history commenced in Asia. God made the first man of Asiatic clay. There he located Paradise; there he planted the Tree of Life; and when, for the sin of man, he deluged the Old World, he commenced the New in Asia : Noah's ark was anchored there. In Armenia, the smoke of the first postdiluvian sacrifice ascended to heaven. There lived the renowned Patriarchs of the world. The Bible was written first in Asia. In Asia repose the ashes of Bible heroes, saints, mar- tyrs, prophets, apostles and evangelists. There the Saviour of the world was born, lived, died, and rose again. There the first Christian Church was founded. There the Kingdom of the Messiah was first established. From Asia, indeed, religion, language and civilization spread over the world. But there is one section of Asia on which our eye lingers with peculiar interest. Between the Euxine Sea and the Caspian lie the Caucasian Mountains, whence migrated our remote ancestors. Of the five distinct races of men that now people the globe, it is agreed, at least by ourselves, that in all the great attributes that elevate and adorn human nature, the Caucasian race is chief. The people of the seven Caucasian Mountains have filled a thousand volumes with their fame. Some trace to them seventy, others three hundred nations, and almost as many dialects of speech. Without debating these claims and assumptions, we are pleased to be assured that they are our pro- genitors. For great men and beautiful women, their praise resounds through all lands. And in proof that we have not degenerated, we ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTER AND DESTINY. 25 are pleased to learn that seven nations, yet possessing these extensive ranges, still preserve the ancient type of their superiority, and thus confirm our pretensions. Providentially, they have always been the most prolific, enterprising and wide-spreading people in the world. They anciently swarmed over the best portions of Asia and Europe. The Circassians and Georgians, yet residing in those regions, are, at this day, the finest physical models of our species. And we think we do not exaggerate when we say that, for stateliness of person, vigor of intellect, loftiness of imagination, moral capacity and energy of character, they stand pre-eminent amongst all forms and races of human kind. From them sprang the venerable Pelasgic Chiefs, first residents of Greece; and from them, too, the Komans are proud to count descent. Persians, Germans and Gaulatians, are scions from that stock. But there is a higher cause than the cloud-capt eminences of Caucasus and its fertile slopes, for this illustrious race of men. God gave these lofty regions to the sons of Japheth, the first-born of Noah, the great pro- genitor of seven-sixteenths of the human race. His patrimony was the northern highland regions of Asia, and all Europe. His sons encompassed the Euxine Sea and the Caucasian Mountains. Gomer, his first-born, the vigorous germ of a mighty progeny, is most evidently the father of the ancient Gomerians or Germans, sometimes called the Gimmeri or Cimbri. Faber learnedly contends that those first called Cimmeri are called the Cimbri, and the Umbri of Gaul and Italy, and the Cimri, Cambri and Cumbri of Wales and Cumberland, at the present day. Moreover, sundry ancient authors identify with them the Galatse, of Asia Minor, and assign to them the Gaels, Gauls and Celtae ol ancient Europe. Josephus, also, alleges that the Ga- latae were called Gomeriani, from their great ancestor Gomer. After very considerable research into the antiquities of both Euro- pean and Asiatic history, I acknowledge that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to trace, in a continuous and unbroken line, the ancestry and regular descent of any nation in the world down to our day, one only excepted. The Jews, because of one descended from them, of universal interest to the human race, are the only people whose nation- ality, language and religion, can be traced, in one unbroken chain, from Abraham to the present time. The Anglo-Saxon people of all the Japhetic, Caucasian or Gomerian race, are, through Teutones, Goths, Celts, Gauls, Angles, Saxons and Normans, as traceable as any modern nation known to us; and with all that certainty of evidence necessary to our present purpose, though. 26 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE : perhaps, not sufficient according to our modern codes and courts of law, to establish their claims to England, or the United States, if these countries had been exclusively willed to them by their very great-grand- father, Gomer. I am aware that Tacitus, a historian of the highest Roman fame endeavors to supply the place of history by a peculiar grammatic ety- mology of the term German, as simply indicating a war -man. War- men they certainly were, but that fact will not supply the place of his- tory. Some other critic might, from the appellative German affixed to cousin, as logically affirm that the Germans were a nation of cousins* But had he known Jewish history as well as he knew Roman, Tacitus would not have taken a current local meaning of a word to indicate its original import. He would, moreover, have found in Jewish history that places, as well as nations, had given quite another etymology. Some of the school of Tacitus have sought in a similar manner for the meaning of the term Euxine, applied to the sea, around which Japheth 's sons erected their first settlements. One Greek etymologist derives it from axenos, inhospitable, because he did not like the climate. With him the Euxine was an mhospitable sea. Another Greek, as learned as he, but more enamored with the sea, discovered that while a prefixed to xenos was negative, eu prefixed was affirmative of hospitality ; and, consequently, he concluded that euxenos, or Euxine, meant the hospi- table sea. But to a student of the Bible and of ancient history, neither the one nor the other is true, or necessary in the case ; for Askenos, a son of Gomer, had located first on the coast, and from him, according to very ancient custom, it received its name. But still more confirmar tory of this, other sons of Japheth have given their names to settle- ments— such as Magog, Madai, Riphath, Tubal, Meshech. Thus we have the Riphaen mountains, from Riphath — Ezekiel collocates Magog, Tubal and Meshech, sons of Japheth — Greece is called Javan by Daniel, and all Christendom assign the Medes to Madai. I hold it, then, to be established, beyond a doubt, that the Caucasians derive their superiority, not so much from the mountains from which they receive their name, as from their ancestry. There is a promise of enlargement in the very name Japheth. Hence half the world has been allotted to Japheth, and with much probability^ as may yet be shown, half the human race. No physiological writei has yet fully discussed the laws of human increase. But one fact is more or less evident to all, that certain predominating qualities long continue in families, tribes and nations. To this it was providentially owing that Japheth had seven sons — while Shem had but five, and Ham ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTER AND DESTINY. 27' four. Presuming on this principle, I heard a living Bible interpreter once say, that could we obtain a correct census of the world, he did not doubt, that as Noah had only sixteen grandsons, it might be found that seven-sixteenths were from Japheth, five-sixteenths from Shem, and four-sixteenths from Ham. A year after, an estimate of the present population of the globe, col- lected from the best statistics, appeared in some of our annuals. The author of it had no allusion to this view of the subject ; yet, strange to say, no other denominator or common measure but sixteen, would measure or proportionably divide them. The result gave exactly, or with a very inappreciable remainder, the aforesaid ratios of seven- sixteenths to Japheth, five to Shem, and four to Ham ! It is not, however, in fruitfulness only, but in other distinguishing characteristics, both physical and mental, that posterity, for many generations, resemble not merely their immediate, but also their very remote ancestry. The Jews, the Arabs, the Germans, the French, the Spaniards, and last, though not least, the Anglo-Saxons, have, for ages, preserved, and to this day more or less distinctly exhibit, those attributes and peculiarities on account of which their progenitors were distinguished. Some nations, known to history, Jiad their peculiar characters as fully and as clearly drawn a thousand years ago, as they have to-day. Paul once said, and he felt himself authorized to say it, not merely on the authority of the poet Epimenides, but from tradition and observa- tion, that " the Cretans were always liars, evil beasts, lazy bodies." *'As the twig is bent the tree's inclined," is as true of nations, in their infancy, minority and manhood, as it is of the individuals that compose them. Were it otherwise, all history would be fable, and all prognostications of the future delusive and vain. We, therefore, feel ourselves fully warranted to anticipate the career and to estimate tha future character and destiny of a people from their past and present history. At present, however, we merely allude to the history of Japheth, for the sake of one of his sons. The seven sons of Japheth, after their dispersion, spreading over Nortnern Asia, over Scythia and Tartary, as well as through the South and West of Europe, forming new centres of association, as circumstances indicated, did constitute and establish new settlements, and, consequently, in the natural course of things, acquired new names and designations. Hence, in process of time, some of them were called Goths, some Teutones, some Celts, some Gauls, some Cim- brj, some Angles, some Saxons, some Normans. Often, too, the same- 28 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE : tribes and nations were called by different names. No living man, therefore, can now trace their progress or fully write their history. We are too dependent upon the Komans for the history of this portion of the earth, and its manners and affairs. Unfortunately, they never were famous for impartial truth. Eoman glory had such brilliancy, in their eyes, that those who most devoutly sought, or cultivated, or gazed upon it, could see no living glory anywhere else. They are not, then, to be regarded as wholly impartial historians. But, so far as our present object requires, we can find materials enough in their own concessions, or independent of them. Indeed, we have almost enough already. Julius Csesar, from Gaul, sometimes called Gallia Celtica, invaded Britain in the 55th year before the Christian era. On his arrival there, he found much of the same population he had subdued in Gaul. He found those called Celts, not from their blood, but from their having long been inured to living in dense forests; others called Belgse, from their border wars and love of fight; Cimbri, from a corrupted or abbreviated ancestral name; Gauls, from the country in which they had long resided ; Germans, or Gomerans, from their original founder. But in Britain he also found various tribes of them; and, had he then visited Ireland, he could have found other shades of Celts, and other varieties of Asiatic growth, for which we cannot now find an ap])ropriate name. In process of time, however, and after many a hard-fought field, he Komanized them, as the Germans before had Germanized the old Celtic Britons — a more ancient tenantry of the island. After a struggle of almost five centuries, the Britons called for foreign aid, and obtained it. The Jutes, the Angles and the Saxons, promptly obeyed the summons. The Jutes and the Angles then dwelt in the Cimbric Chersonesus, a peninsula of Jutland, (now within the confines of Denmark,) and a portion of Schleswig and Holstein, the province and territory of the Angles. In Holstein there is a district still called Anglen, the true and veritable Old England ; a small king- dom, indeed, but the prototype of a larger and more illustrious do- minion. The Saxons, of Scythian blood and spirit, formerly called Sacae, true sons of Japheth, possessed a large territory south of the Jutes and Angles, reaching from the Weser to the Delta of the Ehine, and occupying countries now called Westphaiia, Friesland, Holstein, and a portion of Belgium. They had, Japheth-like, enlarged," or «pread themselves from the Baltic to the British Channel, and had not ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTER, AND DESTINY. 2^ Lo perform a protracted voyage to aid their friends in Britain. They were known to the Celtic Britons to be as brave as themselves, — alike bold and daring on sea and on land, — a portion of a larger stock issuing from the Gothic and Teutonic hive, and, like all that race, great lovers of the sea, — delighting in storms and tempests, — honored with the very graphic and imposing title of Sea-Kings." To this parentage England owes as much her passion for the ocean, and her success upon it, as she does her Anglo-Saxon tongue. The result of the alliance was the conquest and expulsion of the Romans, the Saxonizing of South Britain, and the changing of its name into Angland, or England. Upon the whole premises which history lays before us, as to the true character of our Pagan Anglo-Saxon forefathers, we must, in all candor, say that they were what we would now-a-days call *^ sea-pirates" and "land-pirates." But, as they had now got as far as they could go westwardly, and finding much in Britain to suit their taste, especially around its coasts, and much congeniality in its population, who, like themselves, had wandered from the East in quest of new adventures, they very readily, after a time, coalesced, and formed, indeed, the most land-loving and the most expert sea-faring nation in the world, greatly softened and subdued by their embracing, after a time, the Christian faith. Although the Roman army was ultimately driven from England by the Britons and their new allies, there still remained a remnant of that people in Wales, and along its borders, retaining their mother tongue, of which many words and phrases were blended with the language of the victors. Nor is it to be supposed that a people possessing so much of the island for five hundred years would not leave at least some fragments of their vernacular amongst them. To this mixture, again, were added, both before and after the Norman conquest, many words and phrases of Danish, Norwegian, and Norman extraction. So that, in truth, even their own language was rather of an eclectic than of an original character, although essentially of Anglo-Saxon origin. Having, so far, ascertained the origin of the Anglo-Saxon tongue, and quite enough for our purpose, we are prepared to consider its peculiar and distinctive character. This we may easily accomplish, by making ourselves somewhat familiar with its structure. It is, in one sentence, a language of lan- guages, whose terminology is mainly selected from almost all the ancient and most finished tongues of the civHized world. A rich, a broad and lofty tongue ; a splendid composite ; a greatly diversified, curiously inwrought, and highly polished Mosaic composition, which can embody 30 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE: and present every form, color and gradation of thought, sentiment and emotion. In religion, ethics, politics, sciences and arts, it haa drawn upon Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German — upon all parent languages •of every nation known to the Anglo-Saxon people, or their ancestors, far back as any living monument, or any written document now extani, attests. But the great end and use of language must be clearly perceived, an-d, indeed, comprehended by every one who presumes to assert the com- parative merit of any tongue, living or dead. That language which can most directly, clearly, fully and impressively utter all the soul, and render transparent to an attentive mind every emotion, thought or desire, is decidedly the best. The Anglo-Saxon possesses all these qualities in as high a degree, and to as full an extent, as any tongue, living or dead. But why should it not possess all conceivable perfection ? The language of any people •Ls but the exponent of the mind and character of that people. And • what is the comparative standing of the Anglo-Saxon people in Europe and America at the present day ? This, with me, if not the most logical, is the most popular and appreciable way of deciding the ques- tion. It is conceded that the 'anguage of every people is but the embodied and pictured mind of that people. The Hebrew, Greek, Roman, French, German or English mind, is all extant, and fully developed, in their respective tongues. If we thought that any one denied or doubted the assumption, that the language of a people is the exponent or measure of the mind of that people, we would make an effort to prove it. But at present, not pre- suming this, I do not volunteer, in advance of the public demand, to perform such a work of supererogation. If any one, however, has a lingering doubt of this fact, I will pro- pound to him but one question, on answering which he may settle it to his own satisfaction. That question is. Why is there not found in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or any other dead language, a single word or phrase to represent a printing-press, an electric machine, a steam- engine, a mariner's compass, &c. &c. ? Because, he must respond, the Hebrew, Greek or Latin mind had not such an idea in it. He may propound the same question to himself in reference to every Pagan nation now extant, not having the Christian religion. Why, in a kun- dred dialects of Asia, Africa and America, is the name of Jesus Christ not found ? Tae answer is as prompt : Because he is not in the mind of these nations. We have, we presume, carried our main point, via. : ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTER AND DESTINY. 31 that the mind and language of a people are commensurate ; that the 'character of the one is essentially the character of the other. The Anglo- ixon language is, therefore, the most comprehensive language ever spoken on earth : because the people whose language it is, have the most enlightened, comprehensive, and, consequently, the most energetic mind of any people now speaking any living tongue in the Old World o' in the New. Think not, however, my respected auditors, that, in affirm- ing this conviction, I have either forgotten or contemned other nations of high respectability, such as Germany, France, Prussia, Eussia, &c. We give them all due credit for every demonstration of intellect and moral greatness which they have given to the world. In saying this, we only affirm their own convictions or concessions. They do homage to the Anglo-Saxon mind; not merely as we do homage to certain master-spirits amongst them, by transferring their works into our lan- guage, but in laying aside their own sciences, arts and inventions, and in adopting ours. Of many proofs of this fact, a few instances must suffice. Let me, then, ask, why did Peter the Great disguise himself, and spend four years in England, learning the art and mystery of ship- building ? Why did he send his emissaries abroad, in quest of Anglo- Saxon arts and sciences ? Why does the present Autocrat of all the Russias clandestinely send his emissaries to peep into our work-shops, our manufactories, our schools and colleges ? Why does he, indirectly, carry home our ploughs, carts, wagons, implements of husbandry, and the useful arts of Old England or New England ? Why employ, at the present time, an American engineer to project and consummate the highways, the railways of his great empire ? Not because he has not some rude form and conception of some of them, but because he has not any one of them, in all its improvements and adaptations, in his own mind. He has neither the ideas nor the appropriate terms in his own language, and, therefore, our vernacular is, at least in these points, himself being judge, before his own. What Anglo-Saxon visits the continent of Europe in quest of new discoveries in useful arts and sciences ? We go there to contemplate the ruins of empires, and to learn the causes of their decline and fall, not to acquire new ideas in the sciences and arts of our own age. But again : the Anglo-Saxon mind, wherever found, is greater — that is to say, it is more acute, comprehensive and vigorous — than the French, the German or the Russian, because it has a more acute, com- prehensive and vigorous language; a more polished machinery of thought ; better instruments to work with ; for, while mind generator 32 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE : language, language generates and polishes mind. In arguing thus we do not, indeed, reason in a circle, any more than when Caesar said, "money will raise soldiers, and soldiers will raise money." In the same sense, ideas create language, and language creates ideas. This is farther proved by the great discoveries and improvements made by the American and English" mind. Whence came the complete, yet sim- plified, steam-engine, and its accompanying machinery ? Whence came the spinning-jenny, the power-loom, the electric telegraph, and all they have given birth to? It is not the spirit of the age, for these have created a new age. They are our contemporaries. We think, we speak, we act, before the age, else a new age would never come. Once more : the Saxon language is the language of Protestantism. I might have said, and I beg leave to correct myself, the ANGLO-Saxon language is the language of Protestantism. Luther, it is true, wsji a Saxon, but John Wickliffe was an ANGLO-Saxon. Calvin was a French- man, but William Tyndal was an Anglo-Saxon. The Germans and the French became reformers ; but the Anglo-Saxons were the first trans- lators and commenders of the Bible, and of universal Bible-reading. These were the morning star, the rising dawn of the Protestant Re- formation. These were the harbingers that pioneered the way and furnished the arms and munitions of that great political and ecclesiastic, as well as spiritual, war. The very word Protestant implies thought, examination, dissent and self-reliance. Who protests without reflection, comparison, deduc- tion, and some degree of mental independence, as well as of self-reliance ? These, too, are verily the elements of all human greatness, of all com- parative excellence. The Protestant Reformation, notwithstanding all that can be said against it, was the regeneration of literature, science, art, politics, trade, commerce, agriculture. Hence, the more Protest- ant a people, the more elevated in all the elements of modern civiliza- tion. Self-thinking — pardon the anomalous expression, for there are millions who possess not the art or mystery of self-thinking ; when they think, their minds are only listening to some other one thinking, speak- ing or moving within them — I say self-thinking and self-relianc» are the two main elements of personal, social, national greatness ano goodness. These are the pillars of true religion, true learning, true science, true prosperity, true greatness. By self-thinking and self- reliance, I do not mean confidence in the flesh, pride, self-conceit; I mean the confident application of our minds to the means of intellectual, moral, political and religious improvement, in the hope of improving ourselves and our condition. ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTER AND DESTINY. 33 Every country, and nation, and people, rise above their contempo- iraries and competitors, every thing else being equal, in the direct ratio of their Protestantism. Who needs to be informed when he passes out of a Protestant into a Eomish community ? Every thing he looks at attests the fact. This strikes every man of observation, when he passes out of the Papal into the Protestant cantons of Switzerland ; out of Papal Ireland into Protestant Ireland ; out of Papal America into Protestant America. Freedom of thought, freedom of speech, mental independence, self-thinking, self-relying, give to Protestant communities a spirit, a character, an elevation, that deeply imprint themselves on all the products of their mind, on all the labors of their hands. They imprison no one for affirming that stars do not fall ; that the earth moves. They exile no one for thinking that there may yet be a new continent, that the number of worlds is incalculable, or that the Pope may err. They put no one to torture or to death for thinking for himself on religion, science or the arts ; therefore, they continually progress, and leave far in the distance behind, those who allow or license one man to think for millions, and sternly command acquies- cence in his dogmas. But we have not yet asserted all the claims of our vernacular, nor do we mean to assert them all on this occasion. We limit ourselves to one object. Nor do we wish to institute invidious comparisons between Protestants and Eomanists, ourselves and the French, the Germans or the ancient Saxons. They are, in blood and affinity, our nearest relations. We do not plead this cause from vanity or pride, or 'personal or national interest or honor, but for suffering humanity. The sequel will demonstrate. We wiU only add, on this topic, that the stature and structure of our language are gigantic. Its capacity is immense. For strength of frame it has the bone and muscle of the Eomans, the Goths and the Saxons. It has the patience and endurance of the German and the Dutch, both High and Low. It partakes of the vivacity of the French, of the genius of the Italian, the wit and sprightliness of the Greek and the Celt. For comprehension, if for nothing else, our language is chief amongst all the dialects of earth. There is nothing written — poetry, philosophy, history, or in the form of literature, ancient or modern — that cannot be translated, body, soul and spirit, into our language. Who of the ancients or moderns, in any one department of science or art, has given to the world an idea that cannot be per- spicuously and fully set forth in Anglo-Saxon ? But could all our 3 34 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE : learning now be expressed in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or any language heretofore spoken by man? Nay, could it all be transferred to any purely Asiatic, African or American tongue now extant ? We have been obliged to fabricate a myriad of new words from dead languages, and to form thousands of new combinations of the words of dead and living tongues, to express all our Anglo-Saxon sciences, arts and literature. But we can translate all their learning into our tongue, and do it so perfectly that the translation is fully equal to the original. As some one said of Pope's Homer: ''If all records were obliterated, and the chronology of nations lost, a time might come when the wonder would be, whether Pope translated Homer, or Homer Pope;" so might it be said of all the most polished works of the most polished nations of antiquity, when set forth in a good suit of Anglo-Saxon words. As Dryden said of Homer, Virgil and Milton — " Three poets, in three distant ages born, • • Greece, Italy and England did adorn ; The first in loftiness of thought surpass'd ; The next in majesty, in both the last ; Th.3 force of nature could no further go — To make a third, she join'd the former two." So we may say, with more than equal truth, the "force of nature" has not yet brought forth any tongue equal to our vernacular; and whether she can, is yet a problem to be demonstrated. There are, indeed, many large and beautiful streams and rivers between the Alleghanies and the Eocky Mountains, wending their courses towards the Valley of the Mississippi, on which are borne the products of millions of acres; but what are these, severally, to the "king of waters," on whose deep current fleets and navies may float, and OD whose broad bosom the annual products of whole States and Territories are carried to the ocean? As the Amazon of South America, the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence of North America, to all other streams on this continent, so is the Anglo-Saxon to the dialects and tongues which have ministered to its origin, its structure and vast comprehension. It is a strange fact in the history of ' Pagandom, corroborative of what we have said, that while all the conquerors of its constituent nations always gave their religion to the conquered, except in the solitary case of the Jews, the Eomans at last received the religion of the nations professing Christianity, whom they had subdued. In that case only, the victors received the religion of the vanquished. So of the languages of the world. In the case of those Pagan nations ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTER AND DESTINY. 35 that vanquished the preceding occupants of both England and Ireland, instead of doing as all other conquerors of nations had done — impose their language on the conquered — they, for once, received the language of the conquered. Now, is it not as strong a proof of the superiority of the language of our ancient Saxon progenitors, as it is of the supe- riority of Christianity to any form of Paganism, that those ancient invaders of England and Ireland, after giving them laws, condescended to receive from them both language and religion? But it may be alleged, that they received the language of the conquered because that language had in it a religion more evidently true and rational than their own. Grant it, and what follows ? That our Eeligion WILL BE A PASSPORT YET TO OUR LANGUAGE INTO ALL THE NATIONS OF THE EARTH. The probability of this conclusion is just the point I wish to carry in the present address. Thus we gain, rather than lose, by the admission. Now, as I was led, as I supposed naturally and logically, from the very meagre sketch I have given of the origin of our vernacular, to make a few remarks upon its character, I am now under the same necessity, to be consistent with myself, and to carry the point all- transcendent and important to my mind, to offer you a few thoughts on the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon. The destiny of our language is to be inferred from the following facts and considerations : I. From the energy of character of those who speak it. II. From the number of those who at present speak it, and are likely to speak it, in our own country and in Great Britain. III. The extent of country now possessed and occupied by the Anglo-Saxon people. IV. The naval and maritime, all-spreading 'commercial power o^ those who speak it. V. The many great discoveries and improvements made by the Anglo-Saxon people in the sciences and arts of the world, treasured up in that language. VI. The religion of those who now speak it. VII. The Anglo-Saxon missionary spirit now pervading all the nations of Christendom. Here is matter for a volume ; but we must despatch these items with comparatively a very few remarks. First : a few words on the energy of the Anglo-Saxon people. We have only, my highly respected audience, to remind you that the mean'ng of the name of our father Japheth is enlargement and 36 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE: PERSUASION. Our father's children have never, since the flood, been at rest. They have, in the age of whip and spur, first galloped over the earth, to see how large it was ; then they went to sea, to ascertain the countries it contained ; then they went to fighting for them ; and I have sometimes opined, that, if God had not set them to speaking a language called Gibberish, our great-grandfather Japheth, and his seven sons, would long ago have driven Shem and Ham, and all their children, into the sea, and, in the reign of Paganism, have drowned them all. But their energies having been thus restrained, they hav© busied themselves to make a fortune and a name. A genuine, unso- phisticated Yankee, from the centre of New England, if we could ever find him at home, is the best representative and embodiment of a genuine, uncorrupted Anglo-Saxon descendent of Japheth. But it would be easier to find him in Oregon, California, or in Commodore Franklin's Northern Expedition, than to find him where he was born. , And such are his notions, his enterprise, and his success, as to have warranted the late Lord Jefii^ey, the founder of the Edinburgh Eeview, or some of his coadjutors, to say, that he believed if a liberal reward were ofi'ered for the best translation of the Septuagint, some Yankee, who did not yet know a Greek letter, would go to work in the Grecian mines of literature, and gain the prize. Let us, then, contemplate the Island of Great Britain for one or two centuries, as afi*ording a demonstration of Anglo-Saxon energy. She had a small territory — a crowded population. She set them to mining, levelling mountains, digging canals, building highways, erect- ing cities, walling out the sea, constructing quays, harbors and wharves, building ships, furnishing navies, raising armies, stretching out her arms to Asia, Africa, America; founding new colonies, or attempting to do it, from Nova Zembla to the Cape of Good Hope, from the Ganges to the Oregon, from Newfoundland to New Zealand, from Labrador to the Falkland Isles. But she lost too much time in travelling on business, and set about devising a more expeditious system. Immediately she moves, with eagle speed, along an iron railway, and traverses the island of Great Britain in a few hours. Next, the ocean is too broad, and voyages too long protracted. She must narrow its width or contract time. Anon the same principle is applied, with equal success, to her packets, and the Atlantic is crossed in a week or ten days. But her thirst foi early news increases. Her sons of genius at home and abroad, in England and America, are tributary to her will, and she wing? intel'igence, not with the wings of a tempest, but with the lightning* ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTER AND DESTINY. 37 of heaven. But the provinces abroad have created work for her people at home, and she needs more operatives to supply them. She needs a generation that will neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor tire; and an Arkwright, in nis creative genius, furnishes her with millions of wooden, iron and brazen men, and animates them with steam. The work is done ; old things have passed away ; a new age is born. Empires change masters, and invention is tortured to preserve them. Wars must cease, or rage with more fury. The people must be em- ployed. The same passions burn eternally in the human breast, and who can quench them ? An agrarian spirit has gone abroad, and who can restrain it ? There is a superabundance of energy, but a great deficit of benevolence. Other new settlements must be formed, new outlets for industry must be created, and more security of reward must be guaranteed. Intelligence and virtue must be cultivated and more extensively diffused, that invention and energy may be still further glorified in warding off evil and diffusing new and greater blessings amongst men. They are at work devising new schemes of diffusing knowledge, com- petence and contentment, amongst those that plough and those that ^' guide the shuttle and direct the loom." The gospel, and its philan- thropy, alone* can dispel the clouds that sometimes lower over the too thickly peopled regions of the old world, in consequence of the too great energy of the Anglo-Saxon race. But the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon tongue is neither to be estimated nor anticipated merely by the energy of those who speak it. True, indeed, that directly tends to multiply those who must learn it, and to extend the territories over which it must bear rule. But the number of those who now speak it must be taken into the account. This, then, is a second point of inquiry. There are in North America, it is presumed from the last census, at least twenty-five millions who speak the Anglo-Saxon. I include the British Provinces and the United States, and feel confident that I will be sustained by the census of 1850. There are in England, Ireland and Scotland, twenty-seven millions ; and should we add three millions more in all her provinces and new settlements, including those on the ocean, in her ships, navies and armies abroad, we should have thirty millions in her empire — making the aggregate, now speaking the Anglo-Saxon, fifty-five millions. And this, so far as Christian civiliza- tion, in any of its forms, is contemplated, is the greatest number of persons speaking one language in the world. In Eussia there are 38 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE! fifty-five or sixty millions, subjects of the Autocrat, but tliey speak forty dialects. In Austria there are thirty-five millions of j-'ubjectS; bat only six millions who speak the German. Other Slavonia)! dialects are spoken in Austria, Hungary, Poland and Eussia. Our third topic is the extent of territory or country over which the Anglo-Saxon people bear rule. In America we have three millions of square miles, and in British America two millions three hundred thousand square miles — an aggregate of five millions three hundred thousand square miles. The British possessions in India are immerse. There is the maritime Bengal, with its Ganges, Burrampooter and Dum- moda, containing one hundred thousand square miles ; the interior Bahar, intersected by the Ganges, the Goosey and the Soane; the more interior province of Allahabad, containing twenty thousand square miles, bordered by the Neibudda; the provinces of Orissa, the Northern Circars, five provinces on the Bay of Bengal. To this we must add the seacoast Carnatic country, stretching over eight degrees of latitude, intersected with numerous rivers. Besides these, there are the allies of Great Britain; Rajahs of Mysore, Madeira, Tanjore and Travancore, giving more than one hundred millions of our species to the control of the little island of Great Britain, con- taining only eighty-eight thousand square miles. In Africa, too, the Anglo-Saxon is spoken. There is the Cape of Good Hope, with its one hundred and twelve thousand square miles of territory, and the colonies of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Then there is another territory, almost equal to all Europe, belonging to Great Britain — Australia, and its circumjacent islands, containing two mil- lions three hundred thousand square miles. Thus giving to Britain, in all, more than six millions square miles, with one hundred and fifty millions of inhabitants. Hence, the Anglo-Saxon people, in the old world, and the new, bear rule over some one-fourth of all the habitable territory of the globe. But to this we must add their dominion and power on the rivers, the lakes, the seas and the oceans of the world. Here, by common con- sent, the Anglo-Saxon race is all-predominant. TL^ir canvas whitens every sea, and is swelled by every breeze. It is no ledger Britannia, but Britannia and America, that rule the seas. The commerce, too, of the Anglo-Saxons, greatly tran'i^'nds that of any other people on the face of the globe ; and of all the elements of national greatness and power, this is chief. Without this great auxi- liary, both agriculture and manufactures are comparativelj unavailing; in giving power to a people. ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTER AND DESTINY. 39 Nothing, indeed, contributes more than commerce to extend the language, as well as to increase the wealth and greatness of a people. The commerce of these two countries, internal and external, if I am not mistaken, is some seven times as great as it was at the commence- ment of the present century ; and, from their rapidly increasing crea- tive power, we have much reason to think that it will long continue to increase in similar ratios. But we must not look merely at the European, American, Asiatic and African territory possessed by the Anglo-Saxons. We must also consider the present unoccupied room on these territories for popula- tion, compared with that of any other portions of the habitable globe, and also the well-authenticated ratios of the increase of that population. On a careful consideration of the most authentic reports on this subject, we confess that we are rather startled at the conclusions which they seem to warrant. The population of England alone, in the first forty years of the present century, doubled, or nearly dou- bled, itself. In the same time, that of the United States has more than trebled itself. We are aware of all the difficulties attending the viifferent theories of the increase of population ; of the errors of Frank- lin, Malihus, and some other rather visionary speculators on this sub- ject, upon which, of course, we cannot now enter. The means of sub- sistence, and the labor by which they are acquired, are, indeed, on all hands, agreed to be the most important conditions of its increase. In our own country, therefore, its ratios of increase must inevitably tran- scend those of any other country on the globe. But still, we dare not think that they will . or ca!n continue one century and a half at the present ratio of trebling every forty years ; for, in that case, we should have on our Anglo-Saxon portion of America alone, more than double the present popu'lation of the globe. For example, say that we are, or will be, in 1850, only twenty-five millions ; then, in 1890, we should be seventy-five millions strong. This is, indeed, very reasonably to be expected, from broad views of our condition and that of the civilized world. In forty years more — that is, in a.d. 1930 — we should be, on the same ratio, two hundred and twenty-five millions. This is start- ling, but yet by no means impossible. But in the next forty, or a.d. 1970, we should be six hundred and seventy-five millions. This is too much for either our faith or our hope. And in forty years more —that is, in a.d. 2015— we should be 2025,000,000! But on what could they subsist, unless one-half of them lived on the fish of the sea and the fowls of the air ? Our past and present ratios arithmetically give these results. But should we deduct one-half, and give away the 40 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE: British Isles into the bargain, the Anglo-Saxon race and language would still be — a.d. 6000 — a thousand millions strong. Eeasoning from the past and present energies, genius and general talents — physi- cal, intellectual and moral — of the Anglo-Saxon people at the end of the current millennium, in the year of the world 6000 — now distant only one hundred and fifty years — they must direct and control the energies and the destiny of the world. Come short we may of this aggregate, in the insoluble problem of the increase of population ; but if we do, other nations in the old world must, in their relative force, come much further short of their present proportional ratios. On these premises the tongue of skepticism must falter, and its face turn pale. All must concede to Noah the spirit of inspiration, as well as to the Apocalyptic John. By what other spirit could Noah have said, God will enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant"? By what other spirit could the Apostle John have foretold the rise, the progress and the fall of empires, and a Christian triumph over all her foes ? Neither history nor our own experience, neither reason nor philosophy, can subtract aught from faith in Noah and in John. ^' If weak thy faith, why choose the harder side?" But, beyond all the advantages yet named, there is a power in oui vernacular to extend itself by other means than natural generation. It is animated by a mighty proselyting spirit and power, arising from the innumerable stores of learning, science, art and new discoveries treasured up in it — the rich behests of Anglo-Saxon genius. If the Greek and Latin tongues, though dead for ages, have, merely for the sake of their elegant diction and polished style, been studied to the present, in all the schools of Christendom, without any internal spirit or rich veins of science contained within them, to reward the labor of five or seven years* study, how much more our vernacular, full of the soundest learning, the truest science, the richest treasures of salutary intelligence to man ! What rich legacy have the Platos, the Socrateses, the Aristotles, of Greek philosophy, bequeathed to the human race, compared with those of a Bacon, a Locke, a Newton? What moral and useful instruction in the poetry of Homer or Hesiod, compared with that of Milton, or Young, or Shakspeare ? What has Demosthenean or Ciceronian eloquence achieved for man, more than that of Sheridan, and Burke, and Curran, and Wilberforce, and Web- ster, and Clay ? But where are the Franklins, the Watts, the Ful- tons, the Arkwrights, or men of that class, to be found amongst Gre- cian and Boman benefactors ? They had a, Cincinnatus, it is true, but ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTER AND DESTINY. 41 we have had a Washington. They had a cloud-compelling Jupiter ; but we have had a host of air and earth and sea compelling heroes — compelling air, and earth, and water, and fire, and their innume- rable elements, to minister to the health, and wealth and happiness of man. These great revealers and masters of nature have been found in hosts among the Anglo-Saxon race, and almost exclusively among them. These are the great benefactors of man — the great reformers of the world. They have transformed the rugged hills and mountains into Sharon and Carmel; they have made "the wilderness and the solitary place glad," and have compelled the desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose." But again : we argue the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon language from the Anglo-Saxon religion. The Anglo-Saxons that conquered and possessed England, were Pagans. But they afterward yielded to the religion of the conquered. They received from Home the Eoman gospel ; but the Roman church then gloried, as she yet glories, in being the Latin church. She still prays and worships in the Latin tongue. But, as before noted, early in the 13th century the Anglo-Saxon Wickliffe was born. He taught that men might read the Bible and pray in Anglo-Saxon. Hence, a controversy arose. It was, in fact, in those days a grave question whether in public worship men might read and pray in Anglo-Saxon, and instead of repeating Pater noster qui es in cxlis, they might say, " Our Father who art in heaven." Wickliffe, like all other innovators, was scoffed at, dishonored and proscribed. Fortunately, however, after his death, the Roman church dug up his bones and burned them ; a very striking symbol that he would yet enlighten the world in that identical tongue.* Tyndal was of the same faith, and, to prevent a second similar illumination, crossed the seas, and printed his Anglo-Saxon version on the Con- tinent. Soon after the Anglo-Saxon spirit revived. Then Luther, of Saxony, was born, who, with a pen more puissant than the club of Hercules, entangled the Roman Bull, caught him by the horns, and exorcised him. * "The bones of Wickliffe were dug out of his grave seventy-five years after his death, and burned for heresy. His ashes were thrown into a river in Warwickshire, on which tome prophet of that day said : The Avon to the Severn runs, The Severn to the sea ; And Wickliffe" s dust shall spread abroad Wide as the oceans be." 42 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE: We never can place in more striking contrast the spirit of Luther and the spirit of Papal Rome, than by contemplating, in their sym- bolic import, his throwing his inkstand at the devil, presuming to terrify him, as he thought ; and. their digging up and burning the bones of WickliflPe. They intended to extinguish the light and the spirit of Wickliffe ; but Luther resolved to write down the evil spirit, by illuminating the world with pen and ink, or by the labors of the press. Hence, after a grand model conception of bringing light out of darkness, he cast his inkstand at the devil and drove him from his cell. From that day to this the Anglo-Saxon spirit, genius and learning have been, with gigantic strides, advancing and rising in the wonder and admiration of the world. Now, this presuming to read the Bible and to pray in Anglo-Saxon, like our Declaration of Independence, though apparently at first a small matter, like an avalanche, is ever progressing with increasing magnitude and accumulating force, till it has shaken the foundation of the Eoman States, and now causes Italy to tremble even to the strongholds of Gaeta. It is worthy of special notice, that as England began to rise soon after she presumed to dissent from the Latin church, and substituted the Anglo-Saxon church, she has continued to rise in all the elements of greatness, so far as she has advocated an Anglo-Saxon Bible, psalter and prayer book. Although she has not at home yet carried out her principles and professions, still, under it she has gained a transcendent influence over the world, that throws into the shade Austria, France and all other nations and powers that prefer the ecclesiastic Latin to Queen Victoria's English. The Bible translated into all dialects, cir- culated freely amongst all the people, and read by every one, in what- ever version he prefers, is the brightest gem that adorns the coronal of the British queen, and the strength and glory of her august govern- ment— the wisest and the most puissant in the old world. But, finally, we argue the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon tongue fi'om the Anglo-Saxon missionary spirit. This is truly a catholic spirit. It embraces the human race, and knows neither language nor caste according to the flesh. The frozen Icelander and the sun-burned Moor" are equally embraced and cherished in the generous bosom of its large philanthropy. Britain sends the Bible and the missionary to every island and territory she calls her own. Feigned or unfeigned,, political or philanthropic the spirit, the work is done. In accomplish- ing this, she is strengthening and enlarging her empire, and alluring the world the moral grandeur of her professed humanity. ITS OEIGIN, CHARACTER AND DESTINY. 43 But one improvement in her missionary operations is suggested, approbated, and, indeed, tested by the wisest and best of her ambas- sadors of peace. Instead of depending so much on the labors of missionaries addressing the natives in their own tongues, they are qualifying and sending out school-masters, to instruct the heathen children in the Anglo-Saxon tongue, that they may learn to under- stand the Anglo-Saxon Bible. This is as sound philosophy as it is genuine philanthropy. It gives to the young an incalculable advantage over the old, and interposes a great barrier between them and their parients, to prevent opposition to what they preach. We cannot but anticipate its general adoption ; and, in that event^ who cannot anticipate the spread of the Anglo-Saxon tongue all over the world? Thus, without indulging in a romantic spirit, we may hope that, as there was at first but one language, there will be at last but one language amongst the sons of Adam. To this, indeed, the pages of prophecy seem to look, when they reveal the glorious fact, that in the day of the triumph of Christianity, there will be acknowledged all over the earth but one Lord. ''For," as saith the prophet, " the Lord shall be King over all the earth, and in that day there shall be one Lord, and his name one." " For then," saith another prophet, " I will turn to the people a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the Lord, to serve him with one consent." Now, it may be presumed that if " the Lord shall be King over all the earth, and if his name shall be one," and only one; and if all nations are " to serve him with one consent," they will address him in one and the same tongue, and under one and the same name celebrate his lofty praise. And is not this the tendency of things under the reign of Christ ? Already many languages have died. Others are dying. Of the hundreds of ancient American and Asiatic tongues, how many have been absorbed or perished from the earth ? And if neither the once boasted universality of the Greek and Eoman sceptres and the Greek and Eoman tongues, nor the classic beauty and polish of these model languages, could give them perpetuity and extension, what other lan- guage can reasonably hope to survive its own nationality, merely from the number or respectability of them w^ho speak it ? Heaven has already frowned on the four great empires claiming universality, because, as we presume, of their unnatural lusts and debasing idolatries. But there are in the Anglo-Saxon tongue ele- ments and treasures of infinite value to mankind; the noblest spe* 44 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE : cimens of Christian genius, learning, science, true religion and pure morality, ever communicated in human speech or treasured up in any dialect spoken by man. Hence we strongly affirm the conviction, that for the sake of these, and in honor of those who, by Bible-translation, Bible-distribution, in all lands and languages, missionary enterprise, missionary zeal, and missionary success in the cause of human advance- ment and human redemption, the Anglo-Saxon tongue will ultimately triumph.' The Lord Almighty, who has now girdled the earth from east to west v/ith the Anglo-Saxon people, the Anglo-Saxon tongue, sciences, learning and civilization, by giving a colossal power and grandeur to Great Britain and the United States over the continents and oceans of earth, will continue to extend that power and magni- ficence until they spread from north to south, as they have already from east to west, until, in one vernacular, in one language and with one consent, they shall, in loud acclaim and in hallowed concert, raise their joyful and grateful anthem, pealing over all lands and from shore to shore, from the Euphrates to the ends of the earth. Then will " they hang their trumpet in the hall, and study war no more." Peace and universal amity will reign triumphant. For over all the earth there will be but one Lord, one faith, one hope and one lan- guage. But in order to do this, what duties and obligations has the Lord of the universe imposed on us ? or what part are we American Anglo- Saxons to act in this great moral revolution ? We must answer this question by taking an inventory of our means of doing good, and of the wants and condition of society at home and abroad ; for, .while charity begins at home, it does not continue at home, but goes abroad on missions of love and mercy to all mankind. But education, intellectual and moral, at home, in the Sunday-school, in the common school, in the academy, in the college, in the church, are amongst the most obvious,, the most important, the most essential, the most puissant means to our advancement — to the filling up of our duties, our usefulness, our glory and our happiness. — God having given to the Anglo-Saxon people the largest portion of the earth vouchsafed to any one people speaking one language and professing one religion ; and not only the largest portion of the earth, but the only really new, fruitful and salubrious portions of the earth — indeed, the only portion of it that can, for one ^undred and fifty years to come, afi'ord space for a population increasing in the current ratios of Britain and America, to such a point as would either equal the present population of the whole earth, or, at least, certainly place ITS ORIGIN, CHARACTER AND DESTINY. 45 the population of the whole earth under the control of the Anglo- Saxon race, language, politics and religion. For the same purpose he has given to us the great oceans of the globe and the means of managing the seas, as if to furnish us for this great work abroad as well as at home. No event in the future, next to the anticipated millennial triumph, appears more natural, more probable, more practicable or more morally certain and desirable, than this Anglo-Saxon triumph in the great work of human civilization and redemption. But, in this view of the subject, in what a sublimely grand and fearfully responsible attitude we are placed! To us are the moral destinies of the human race committed. Our horizon is fearfully, gloriously, transcendently extended beyond the conception of any living man. Numerous races and generations of men yet unborn, swarming not only over this grand continent, but over the newly acquired Asiatic possessions of our Anglo-Saxon relations on the old homestead, in Western Europe, are to be moulded, controlled and des- tined by us. Becomes it not, then, a most imperious duty to preserve and trans- mit, uncorrupted and unimpaired, the institutions, civil, literary, moral and religious, which high Heaven has allotted to us ? Never before lived a people possessing such birthrights — such an unbounded horizon of greatness and glory — as that which spreads itself before the en- raptured vision of every enlightened American citizen. Should the great Anglo-Saxon family of families fall out by the way ; should this great nation of nations, this hallowed and august union of so many sovereign and independent States of one political faith, of one rich and noble eclectic language, and of one divinely true and supremely grand reli- gion, be sacrificed at the demon shrine of any sectional idol, then, indeed, would the measure of our disgrace be complete ; our folly, our fall, would be an eternal shame — an everlasting reproach — the greatest political and moral catastrophe that time could record, involving, in its details, all the vital and grand interests, temporal, spiritual and eternal, not of our country only, but of the whole human race. It cannot be ! Grant it, then, it cannot be. But should we not stand so far aloof from even the appearance of it, as not to encourage a single hope in any tyrant's breast that we, too — a living refutation of all the pretensions and claims of absolutism, as now displayed in the mouldering and tottering thrones of the old world — will yet subscribe its creed, recant our errors, and reconstruct the despotisms of the old world? Let uf * T regard ourselves, and teach our children to regard themselves, as God's own depository of all the great blessings of civilization and salvation for 46 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. the new world, and as his co-operants with all the master-spirits on the eastern continent, with every nation and people who will accept our aid in the great work of disenthralling, evangelizing, redeeming and en- nobling mankind. Let us teach them that we regard it our greatest honor to have deposited with us blessings so numerous, so various and so grand, and that we esteem it to be* our greatest glory to be faithful in the high and holy trust. ADDRESS ON THE AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. LOUISVILLE, KY. Ladies AND G-entlemen: — It is not always that the subject and the object of an address can be made to harmonize. The good of the state, or the glory of God, has been the subject of many a speech; while, alas! too often the object has been the speaker's own. In popular addresses, my predilections are generally on the side of having the subject and the object to agree. On the present occasion, therefore, after considerable indecision, I have chosen the ameliora- tion OF the social state as the subject ; and, however I may succeed in my endeavors, I do assure you that it is the object of my present address. There is also, I am happy to think, a congruity between my subject and the object of the association at whose solicitation I have the honor, on this occasion, to appear before you. The object of that course of lectures, of which this is but the introductory one, as it is of the gentle- men who have volunteered in this cause, is, the improvement of the social condition of man. They have very justly decided that an eleva- tion of the standard of intellectual and moral excellence would be eminently conducive to a higher cultivation and refinement of the social feelings of our nature, and, consequently, to the amelioration of the social state. In pursuance of these views and convictions, they have instituted this series of addresses — not so much, perhaps, to enlighten your understandings, as to enlist your affections, and secure your efforts in the noblest and most benevolent of human undertakings — the positive advancement of the moral conditions of our social existence. But the term society is somewhat vague, and the thing itself covers an area as variegated and diverse as it is immense. Society is not the mere juxtaposition of ten, or ten thousand persons ; it is, in its full comprehension, the union of a simple plurality, or of a multitude, or of 47 48 AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. the human race in all common interests. It is not the local or per- sonal nearness of those who may inhabit the same city, the same village, the same house, the same room, (for these often have as much society with their antipodes as with one another ;) but it is the union, com- munion and copartnery of a few, or of the whole race with one another, in all that is human and divine in our nature. But we sometimes speak of society in a less strict and philosophic sense. We use the term as commensurate with the term community, the entire population of a given district — those united in mere local and political interests. Such masses of our species are frequently styled societies only in reference to some two or thr je general interests, which may be as diverse from one another as the countries and the climates which they inhabit. There is, indeed, in our nature, such a tendency to assimilation, that those societies which inhabit the same quarter of the globe, or have any the least intercourse with one another, do, in process of time, exhibit such points of common resem- blance as easily to distinguish them from those who seldom or never have any intercourse with them. Hence those prominent differential attributes of Asiatic, African, European and American societies. Society, indeed, even in reference to these more prominent points of common interest, is continually in motion, in transition from one state to another, insomuch that in a few centuries the inhabitants of the same country differ from their ancestors in their interests, manners, customs and social rites, as much as the child differs from the sage, or the natives of Nova Zembla from those of the Cape of Good Hope. When, however, we speak of an amelioration of the social state, we have not exclusive reference to that little community of which we may happen to be a component part ; but to that great community of com- munities which fills up the whole circle of our national intercourse. And for our encouragement in the work of amelioration, it is an ex- hilarating truth that no person's influence is necessarily limited to that society in which he moves. Individuals have often, through their im- mediate society, acted upon other societies, and have thus extended their influence from city to city, and from nation to nation, to the utmost ex- tent of an extensive empire. In this way it came to pass that Aristotle, the philosopher of Stagira, Plato of Athens, Paul of Tarsus, and Luther of Saxony, have stamped their image not only upon their own city, their own country or generation, but upon nations and empires for an indefinite series of ages. But it would be necessary to the full completion of our purpose, and it would be as curious as it is necessary, to contemplate society both as AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. 49 1^ wds, and as it now is, in some given district, with special reference to what it ought to he in regard to the entire demands of human nature in its best attainable state in this world. This, indeed, in all its am- plitude, would be a sweep by far too large for a single address. For the sake of a few facts and documents as data, we must, however, glance, very briefly indeed, at the causes that have conspired in giving to modern Europe and to these United States their present civilization, their present superiority over their more remote ancestors, and over all other portions of the human race. The present state of society in this commonwealth, in the United States, in England, in Europe, in the world, is the effect of a thousand causes, both co-operative and antagonist, the history of which it is im- possible to trace. These causes, first hidden in the deep and unexplored recesses of human nature, work for a time, as the secret fires under the mountains, unnoticed, unobserved, till on some favorable crisis they produce a shaking, an earthquake, a revolution ; then, and only then, they impress themselves upon the observation of man, excite his admira- tion, call forth his philosophy, and direct his energies into correspondent action. Such, indeed, have been all the primary causes, facts and events that have conspired and amalgamated in the present improve- ments of European and American society. But as the geographer sees not the atoms that compose the mountains which he describes, so the historian perceives not that infinity of little facts, feelings, motives, actions, which co-operated and combined in one of those grand and prominent facts or events which he records. His task it is to trace these minor agencies who would understand the mysteries of human revolutions from civilization to barbarism, and again from barbarism to civilization. The fall of the Eoman Empire, the last of the four imperial Pagan despotisms, was indeed an awfully sublime and transcendent fact, and essentially connected with the state of society in the city of Louisville at this very moment. But who can trace with persuasive accuracy to the original fountains that memorable series of stupendous revolutions which, in little more than thirteen centuries, broke to atoms that ^' splendid fabric of human greatness" ? Who can trace every little nil, and brook, and stream and river that swelled the current of that mighty flood which swept from the earth those colossal monuments of human genius, science, art and enterprise ? The historian faithfully records that wonderful succession of tri- umphs which, in seven full centuries, raised the municipality of E-ome — a single city — to be the mistress of the world. He records, with 4 50 AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. admiration, the profound policy of its senate, the emulation of its consuls, the valor and heroism of its soldiers, which subjected to the imperial sceptre of Augustus that immense region reaching from the Euphrates on the east to the Atlantic on the west, and from the Ehine and the Danube on the north to the sandy deserts of Arabia and Africa on the south. He tells also of its further extension in the first century — of the conquest of Dacia, of Britain, even to the High- lands of Scotland, and of provinces beyond the Tigris and the Euphrates in the East. As faithfully he records the grand facts that hastened its decline and precipitated its fall; the disastrous defeats which, in rapid suc- cession, humbled its pride and ultimately left scarce a vestige of its former strength and glory. But, in doing all this, how many occult causes are unobserved ; how many secret facts are untold ; how many fortuitous but concurring agencies are unnoticed ; how many recon- dite workings of the human heart are never known, which, though not the immediate, were nevertheless the true and active sources of all that is told by the historian, or commented on by the philosopher ! Notwithstanding these difficulties in our way to comprehend the phenomena of many of the acts in the great drama of states and empires ; of the revolutions and counter-revolutions of society ; he who would understand the past, or anticipate the future, by looking minutely into all that is written, examining and comparing the actors and the actions, and reasoning from the facts passing before him in his daily converse with himself and his fellows, may have a general and a correct, though not a complete, knowledge of the remote and proximate causes of the overthrow and ruin of the ancient states, as well as of the elements and forces that have given, as their natural and proper result, the present society in which we are all so deeply and so necessarily interested. Our American society is the result of Spanish, German, French and English civilization — that is, the result of European civilization — that is, the consequence of the downfall of the Eoman Empire, itself originally composed of the most civilized and improved portions of Asia, Africa and Europe: that fall was the effect of the incursions of those im- mense swarms of Northern barbarians, which, like a torrent from the mountains, rolled, wave after wave, over the whole face of the Roman Empire, from the banks of the Danube to the shores of the Atlantic, and placed itself in whole nations in the finest portions of the sub- jugated lands of the Western Empire. Now, he who would possess just and comprehensive views of Ame- A.MELIOEATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. 51 rican society — of that singular compound of race, of genius and of character which now individualizes, distinguishes and elevates the American family — must not only begin with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but he must push his inquiries to the ancient lands of the Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, the hundred tribes and nations of ancient Germany and Asiatic Scythia ; he must visit the plains beyond the Oxus and the Jaxartes ; he must go to Mount Caucasus, and trace the meanderings of a hundred rivers, along plains five thousand miles in length and one thousand in breadth, before he finds the germs of his own greatness — the root and origin of his own family — and the causes of the political institutions, manners and customs of his own country. This, indeed, is a work as far beyond the ambition as it is beyond the means and opportunities of a vast majority of our con- temporaries. Monsieur Guizot, one of the ablest of the statesmen of France — one of the wisest of her philosophers — in his recent general history of the civilization of modern Europe, a work of great erudition and of thrill- ing interest, in tracing the immediate elements of European society, commences with the fall of the Eoman Empire. He finds the rudi- ments of all European institutions and improvements in a few great facts, of which he speaks with great familiarity and precision. From Rome he supposes we have got the archetypes of all our municipal and imperial ideas. From the barbarians that destroyed it and located themselves within its bounds, we have got our greatest polish — our ideas of liberty, independence and loyalty. Modern civilization, according to this historian, was, at its origin and throughout its whole history, diversified, agitated and confused." At the beginning of the fifth century he has found "Municipal society. Christian society. Barbarian society;" these three agonizing in the same field, and struggling for the ascendant. To use his own words : " We find these societies very differently organized, founded upon principles totally opposite, inspiring men with sentiments altogether difi'erent. We find the love of the most absolute independence by the side of the most devoted submission; military patronage by the side of ecclesiastic domination ; spiritual power and temporal power every- where together : the canons of the church — the learned legislation of the Romans — the almost unwritten customs of the barbarians — everywhere a mixture, or rather co-existence, of nations, of languages, of social nstitutions, of manners, of ideas, of impressions the most diversified." To the confusion, the tossings and jostlings of these elements, he 52 AMELIOEATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. assigns the slow progress of Europe, the storms by whicli she has been buffeted, and the miseries to which she has often been a prey. These, however, are with him the real elements of European civilization. Like a mass of heterogeneous ingredients thrown into the same vessel, by their intestine motion, their antagonistic operations, the soft and more ethereal particles rareified and subtilized ascend, while the grosser and more feculent materials sink to the bottom and leave the pure liquor to be drawn off by itself; so these remains of ancient society, thrown together info the European chaldron, worked, fer- mented, effervesced, till, drawn off in various casks, the new wine of European civilization is found in many nations, and still greatly im- proved by being shipped across the Atlantic and racked off into so many sovereign and independent States. The ruling passion and principle of. Eoman society was the city corporation — the municipal mode of life. Indeed, the Koman Empire, first, midst and last, was but a confederacy of cities. Ancient Italy alone contained eleven hundred and ninety-seven cities ; Graul boasted of twelve hundred ; Spain, of three hundred and ^ixty ; three hundred African cities at one time acknowledged the authority of Carthage ; and in the time of the Caesars, Asia Minor alone counted five hundred populous cities. Here are but five members of the Roman Empire, a mere fraction of its territory, containing three thousand five hundred and fifty-seven cities. On the other hand, the conquerors of Rome came from the immense plains of Scythia, or from the deep and dense forests of ancient Germany — wandering tribes — nations in camps, whose delights were the wild mountains, the deep valleys, the extended plains, the mighty rivers, the ocean's roar, the tented fields, the forest chase, unbounded freedom, the independence of unmeasured tracts of land. In the beginning of the fifth century the Christian religion had been corrupted into a hierarchy — it had become a state engine ; it had, therefore, lost its spirit, its purity, its original power ; yet, as an ecclesiastic institution, it had pow-er over the empire, conquered its conquerors, and was, beyond doubt, the most puissant element of the new compound. Such was the crisis of the dissolution of the Roman Empire, and Buch was the commencement of the new process. In Europe was then found the democratic, the aristocratic, the monarchical, the imperial, the despotic, the theocratic principle at work, in proximity, in amal- gamation, in compromise and in strife, struggling for precedency. Violence ruled the day. There was no legitimacy but might! All AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. 53 claimed something else — antiquity, priority, reason, justice, right; yet it actually was might that gave right to all. For some six or seven centuries the territory of the ancient Eoman Empire was one immense wreck — a perfect chaos — ''a universal jum- ble:" nothing was permanent, nothing systematic : the Koran and the sword in the East ; the Roman hierarchy, legitimacy and persecution, feudalism, despotism, anarchy, mutation, in the West ; freemen, fideles, freedmen, and slaves, made up the four chief masses of the new nations. But all was in motion; ''no man continued long in the same rank; no rank continued long the same." Every thing triumphs in its turn : feudalism triumphs, the church triumphs, monarchy triumphs, the right of compulsion in religion triumphs, the amalgamation o^ spiritual and temporal power in the same hands triumphs, barbarism triumphs. Again, free cities rise, charters rise, new classes rise, central govern- ment and the centralization system rise in public esteem, — Peter the Hermit is born, — the Crusades are planned, — all Europe for the first time sympathizes — the spirit of the recovery of the holy sepulchre, the deliverance of the holy city, inspires all Europe, animates all classes, kings and beggars, church and state, savage and civilized. Millions of men and money are put in motion ; immense armies are raised, commanded by kings in person ; a hundred years scarce quench the fervors of this holy war. But it finally expired. The Koran and the scimetar were too strong for an imagination and a mad impulse, or rather the spirit of the age had changed ; the causes, moral and social, that had thrown Europe into Asia ceased to exist ; new views, new feelings, new objects, seized the European minds. During the Crusades the larity had been too often in Bome ; they had seen too much of the character of their own priesthood, the nakedness of the land appeared, the selfish and worldly spirit of their own pastors in contrast with those of the Turks astonished them. Their newly acquired knowledge inspired them with a freedom of thought, a boldness hitherto unknown in Europe, their souls were enlarged, "more political freedom and more political unity characterized the subsequent age." The compass — printing and gunpowder — the Lutheran reformation and the English revolution, changed the entire aspect of society in those countries that gave the original nucleus of American society. The history of European society may be thrown," says Guizot, into three great periods : first, a period which I shall call that of origin or formation, during which the different elements of society dis- engage themselves from chaos, assume an existence, and show them- selves in their native forms, with the principles by which they axe 54 AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. animated : this period lasted till almost the twelfth century. The second period is a period of experiments, attempts, groping: the dif- ferent elements of society approach and enter into combinations, feeling || each other, as it were, without producing any thing general, regular, or durable : this state of things, to say the truth, did not terminate till the sixteenth century. Then comes the period of development, in which human society in Europe takes a definite form, follows a deter- minate direction, proceeds rapidly and with a general movement towards a clear and precise object : this is the period which began in the sixteenth century and is now pursuing its course." After this general — alas ! too general-^sketch of the progress of social improvement, you will perhaps be curious to know the opinion of so eminent a philosopher and historian as to the present state of civiliza- tion in the most polished nations in Europe — in the world. It is an opinion in which I cordially concur — an opinion in which many of the greatest and most cultivated minds acquiesce. It is this : — Society and civilization are yet in their childhood. However great the distance they have advanced, that which they have before them is incomparably, is infinitely greater." Thus speaks one who, as he imagines, lives at ^Hhe centre, at the focus of the civilization of Europe;" who has made himself intimately acquainted with its past history, and with its present condition. Ladies and gentlemen, after such a declaration you will, perhaps, expect from me a definition of this term ; you will ask. What is meant by civilization? Our historian regards civilization as fact ; ''two circumstances are necessary to its existence — it lives upon two con- ditions— it reveals itself by two symptoms — the progress of society — the progress of individuals — the amelioration of the social system, and the expansion of the mind and faculties of man. Wherever the exterior condition of man becomes enlarged, quickened, improved, and wherever the intellectual nature of man distinguishes itself by its energy, its brilliancy and its grandeur, wherever these two signs concur — and they often do so, notwithstanding the greatest imperfections in the social system — there man proclaims and applauds civilization." So says our philosopher. But, perhaps, for some minds it may be too abstruse — the definition is more unintelligible than the term itself. Well, we shall contrast civilization with barbarism. Savages of all ages, it is agreed, have a common character. Two demons divide the empire of the savage heart — selfishness and terror : lust, hatred and revenge minister to the former; while credulity, superstition and cruelty attend upon the AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. 55 latter. The description given of our savage ancestors, the Huns, the Goths, the Scythians, the Scandinavians, that overran all Europe, from the Caspian Sea to the Thames, admirably illustrates the savage- cha- racter, and demonstrates these simple but strong passions, variously combined and excited by surrounding circumstances, to be the true criteria of barbarism. Now, as we recede from these we advance in civilization. Civilization is not, therefore, merely intellectual culture, refinement of taste, high advances in criticism, eloquence, philosophy ; nor is it eminence in the fine arts of poetry, music, painting, sculpture, archi- tecture. The Greeks and Eomans equalled, if not excelled us far, in most of these attainments; yet, compared with many of this com- munity, they were an uncivilized and barbarous people. They lived and died under the tyranny of selfishness and terror. Their amuse- ments, their exhibitions, their amphitheatres, their gladiator feats and pastimes were cruel, inhuman — full of lust, hatred and revenge. In fact, man, fully civilized, is wholly rescued from the tyranny of selfish- ness, lust, hatred, revenge, terror, cruelty, credulity and superstition. Till this is accomplished, society has not reached that intellectual, benevolent, pacific, moral and blissful goal, to which it has been advancing, with slow but steady pace, since the commencement of the sixteenth century. Man is fully civilized when all the powers of his animal, intellectual, moral and religious nature are fully developed in subordination to his ultimate and eternal destiny ; and society is perfectly civilized when all the members of it, in their respective places, stations and conditions, fully receive and reciprocate all the genuine feelings and expressions of benevolence, brotherly-kindness and charity, dictated by a refined sensibility and guided by an enlarged and cultivated understanding. Thus, by a long and circuitous route, I have arrived at the main subject of my address. I now especially invite your attention to the influence of woman and of the Bible in carrying forward the begun amelioration of the social state. There are two facts pretermitted, two powers unappreciated, by Monsieur Guizot and by all writers on civilization known to me. These are the two superlative agencies in the amelioration of the social state ; they are woman and the Bible ; or if any pleases to make but one out of two, it is the Bible in the hand and heart of woman. I admit that the philosopher gives great power to the church, and makes it the chief element of European civilization. But with him it has not more power than the Koran and the Mosque among the 56 AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. Moslems ; or the temples, altars and priests among the Pagans. The hallowed fanes among the Druids, the altars among the Pagans, and the Mosque among the Mohammedans, have led the way in their civili- zation quite as much as the church of Rome in the dark ages has led the way in ours. Nevertheless I concur with our philosophic historian in giving to the church the precedence in all that appertains to our civilization : for I am persuaded that take that element out of his own compound agencies, and we would have all been barbarians still. But I mean more than the Church as defined by him, when I speak of woman and the Bible. Permit me then to explain myself. Woman, with me, is to society what the spirit is to the body ; for as the body without the spirit is dead, society without woman is dead also. She is then the quickening, animating, conservative element of society. If man on this terraqueous ball be the glory of God, most certainly woman is the glory of man. She is the life, the beauty, the ornament, the glory of society. What a simple, powerful and sublime preface has God written to the volume of her history! ''It is not good," said he, " that man should be alone and instantly out of his side, and by his side, stood blooming, smiling, lovely woman. Never was any being more appropriately named than this woman. She is called Uve, which in our own language is equivalent to her being called life. And Adam called her life, because she is the mother of all living. She is then the fountain and source of society. Now, her intellectual and moral culture, her elevation to her own proper rank, which is not to sit at the foot, but to stand by the side, of man, is af supreme importance to the State, to the Church, to the world, and to the amelioration of the social system. But this subject has never yet taken hold of the head, the heart or the hand of man in the ratio of its importance ; because, perhaps, the power of woman for good or evil, for weal or for woe, has not yet appeared in its full pro- portions to the mental vision of even the sages and the learned of our race. She is, indeed, in some points of view, rightly called " the weaker vessel" of the twain ; but in this her weakness are found some of the main springs of her power. It is essential to our argument, so far as the logic of it is concerned, that we first form a clear and definite idea of the power of woman. But how shall this be done convincingly? Not by reasoning hypo- thetically nor speculatively, out inductively. As we find out the power of any agent in nature, so learn we the power of woman. The power of electricity, of the tempest, of the flood, is seen in their eff'ects ; the power woman is seen and felt in her deeds — I do not say in her AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. 57 good deeds only, but in her had deeds also ; for she, too, as well as man, has some bad deeds. Still, it is fair logic to infer the power of doing good, from her power of doing evil; and in placing this matter before you, ladies and gentlemen, you will a'llow me to avail myself of a fair specimen of female achievements both on the side of virtue and of vice. It is not necessary that we examine the whole history of the sex to be convinced of the potency of woman. The first melancholy proof, and perhaps as striking a proof as universal history affords, of the power of woman is found at the close of the first act of the great drama of human existence — she persuaded her husband to rebel against his God. Adam seems to have been so perfectly fascinated by her charms and bewitched by her blandishments, as to have lost both his reason and his loyalty at the moment that she stretched out her enchanting hand to his lips. He was not deceived" by the serpent, as Paul affirms. May we not thence infer that he was allured and captivated by his wife? How unspeakably great, then, was that power which overcame man in the glory of his strength and prostrated his understanding and his resolution in the very presence of the pledge of inevitable ruin ! Since that moment of triumph of Satan over woman, and of woman over man, who can tithe the spoils of history, or form even a minia- ture view of her power over human destiny? She never had any pre- tensions to physical superiority over man — to physical equality; but really some of the brightest triumphs of genius, of intellect, of con- trivance, of policy, of the arts both of peace and of war, that brighten the annals of human greatness, and throw a halo of glory over our nature, are found in the memoirs of woman. In the first two thousand years of human history, and in all the sacred records of twenty centuries, the names of but five women, good or bad, have escaped the general wreck and oblivion of ancient times. Of these five. Eve, the mother of all living, is the first ; and Sarah, the mystic mother of all the faithful, is the last. Her faith and her virtues, her conjugal affection and devotion, not only overcame the course of nature itself, and gave to her husband and the world the child of promise," but also furnish one of the most perfect models of domestic excellence, of maternal worth and of female complaisance which sacred history affords. Why there should have been so great silence from Adam to Moses of the sayings and doings of woman, is only to be ex- plained on the hypothesis that the dark shade which in an evil hour her folly haf"* entailed upon herself, her husband and posterity, seema 58 AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. to have fallen upon her own history for almost one-third the whole flight of time. The influence of woman is, indeed, a second time ad- duced in the annals of the antediluvian world ; but there, alas ! it is in unison with a second catastrophe of human kind — a second witness, but too strictly accordant with the first, that woman's power in doing evi»l, in congenial circumstances, is not easily exaggerated. The sons of God," says the divine historian Moses, a heavenly style for the faith- ful of all ages, — " the sons of God intermixed with the daughters of men," making their beauty, without regard to moral excellence, the supreme attraction ; till the world was filled with personal combat, murder and rapine, (all couched in the word violence,) and became, even to the long-sufi'ering of Heaven, intolerably wicked. This state of things superinduced that tremendous deluge whose monuments are* stereotyped in the deep valleys and on the lofty mountains that diver- sify the four quarters of the globe. Opening the postdiluvian pages of sacred and profane history, we are, indeed, occasionally furnished with a bright display of feminine power, culminating over the highest summits of masculine ambition. In ascending the stream of Assyrian history almost to its fountain, we see the memory of her greatness, engraven on the proudest trophies of human grandeur. Do we commence our inquiries with the first and most magnificent of earthly empires — the Assyrian? — we shall find her mighty deeds contemporaneous with its origin. Who laid the foundation of mighty Babylon, the city of eternal fame, the wonder of the world — the metropolis of that gigantic empire that stretched from the fountains of the Tigris and the Euphrates to the oceans of the East and of the West — that mighty emipre that withstood the tossings of a thousand tempests, the swellings of angry seas, the tumults of in- censed and impassioned multitudes for more than fourteen hundred years — who before the Macedonian hero led an army of three and a half millions of troops across the Indus to extend her dominions in the East, and for the long term of forty years gave laws to the fairest and best portions of the human race ? I say, do we put these questions to the historians of ancient times ? They give us the name of Semiramis, the widow of the founder of Nineveh, the Queen of the Queens of the East. In the life and achievements of this peerless heroine of fortunes 80 various and splendid, though ultimately disastrous, we discover faculties as enlarged, policies as profound, energy as unbounded, per- severance as untiring, courage as dauntless, ambition as towering, as ever distinguished an Assyrian, Persian or Grecian chief. But if woman have power to create and raise up families, cities. AMELIOEATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. 5^ states and empires, she has power to destroy them. Thus, if Babylon rose, Troy fell, by a woman. The ill fortunes and overthrow of the Trojan commonwealth are as intimately associated in fame with the beauty and perfidy of Helen, as are the rise and glory of Babylon with the intrepidity, energy and varied talents of Semiramis. I am of opinion that there never was a nation, a state or an empire — not even an administration, save that of General Jackson — that was not more or less reared or ruined, strengthened or weakened, controlled or managed, by the policy, the skill or the dexterity of woman. Should any one doubt this opinion, let him examine the records of the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, Koman or modern European women; he will find there were other Kebeccas, Miriams, Deborahs, Delilahs, Jaels, Jezebels, Athaliahs, Esthers, Herodiases, than those written in sacred history. Should he wish for a few samples of the dark as well as the bright side of the picture, let him contemplate the deeds of ven- geance, barbarity and general inhumanity of Amestris, wife of the Per- sian Xerxes. Her demand at a royal banquet for the wife of Masistus, and her treatment of that woman, in more points than one, resembles that of the vengeful Herodias towards John the Harbinger. Let him consider the workings of jealousy and ambition in the bloody and hor- rible deeds of the queen mother of Cyrus. Let him examine the con- federated strength of these evil passions in the proceedings of Queen Parysites, both sister and wife of Darius Nothus, towards the no less cruel Queen Statira, daughter of Darius II. A bear robbed of her whelps was milder far than Queen Parysites towards those who were accessory to the slaughter of Cyrus, her son. Let him read, if he can without inexpressible horror, her cruelties to a Carian soldier, to Mith- ridates, to Mesabates, consummated in the murder of her own daughter- in-law, the beautiful but cruel and murderous Queen Statira. And should he wish for a perfect sample of all this category of attri- butes, we would refer him to the history and fortunes of the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra, the ninth of that name distinguished in ancient- his- tory. This celebrated woman far excelled all her contemporaries in the rarest assemblage of extraordinary endowments and splendid crimes ; possessing wit, imagination, genius, in no ordinary measures, superlative in beauty- of person, in all the bewitching blandishments of elegant manners, in all the captivating arts of fascination, she was the slave of passion, vain, deceitful, ambitious, tyrannical, cruel. Under all her unrivalled charms was concealed a demoniacal heart, full of malignant passions, stratagems, plots, amours, murders, suicide. She permitted herself to be carried into the presence of Julius Caesa.1 60 AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. that she might subdue him by her charms. She did so. She also beguiled and ruined the unfortunate Anthony. Her voyage to Tarsus is one of the most pompous and glittering pageants in ancient history. It is said that the stern of her ship flamed with gold, its sails were purple, its oars inlaid with silver. Her pavilion on deck was of golden cloth, in which she sat robed like Venus, surrounded by the most beautiful virgins of her court, some representing the Nereiades, and others the Graces ; instead of trumpets were heard flutes, haut- boys, harps and innumerable instruments, warbling the softest airs, to which the oars kept time and completed the harmony ; perfumes smoked upon the deck; while the banks of the river, lined with countless multitudes of spectators, gave to the spectacle a brilliancy and pomp never surpassed. The end of this voyage was to captivate the heart of Anthony, in which she was, for him, alas ! too successful. ■She boasted to Anthony that she could spend a million of livres at a single supper. This, indeed, she wellnigh did, by snatching from one of her ears the costliest pearl in the world, worth about that incredible sum, and casting it into a cruse of vinegar, dissolved it, and thus drank the health of the grandson of Cicero, one of the triumvirate of Eome. The Eomans, indeed, always acknowledged the mighty sway of woman. Faustina, daughter of the pious Antonine, celebrated for hei beauty and gallantries, so ruled her husband Marcus, that he not only elevated her lovers to the highest honors, but also so influenced the Senate as to declare her a goddess, and, with the attributes of Juno, Venus and Ceres, to have divine honors paid to her in her temples. Julia Msesa, by her genius and her largesses, raised her grandson, the execrable Bassianus, sometimes called Antoninias, but better known by the name of Elagabalus, a Syrian by birth, first to be the High- Priest of the Sun, and next to be the Emperor of Eome. After he had careered the dark and dismal race of every folly, and covered himself with the infamy of every monstrous deed that could disgrace humanity, murdered by his own indignant praetorians and cast into the Tiber, she still had the address to raise her second grandson by another mother to the imperial throne ; and placed Alexander Severus on the list of Eoman Emperors, while his mother Mamsea really empired over Eome. But lest we should seem to draw from the records of Pagan times too many proofs of woman's ill-fated empire over the destiny of man, ■before we open the annals of modern Europe we shall give another and a somewhat difi'erent picture of female greatness, in the person of AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. 61 the Queen of Palmyra, pupil of the Sublime Longinus," well skilled in the Latin, Greek, Syriac and Egyptian tongues. After avenging the murder of her husband, Zenobia herself filled the vacant throne, and, with the most manly counsel, governed Pal- myra, Syria and the East for five years. The Eoman Senate for a time in vain attempted to curb her power ; she repulsed their general^ and sent him back to Kome alike denuded of his army and his fame. Arabia, Armenia and Persia solicited her alliance. To the dominions of her husband by her prudence she added the populous and fertile kingdom of Egypt. But the Emperor Aurelian with an immense army invaded Asia,, and decided the fortunes of the Queen of the East in two hard-fought battles. Besieged at last in her own beautiful city of Palmyra, re- nowned for its splendid temples, palaces and porticos of Grecian architecture, she was compelled to yield, not by capitulations, but by flight — she was carried to Rome a splendid trophy of Aurelian's good fortune and valor. On entering the city, as Gibbon relates, ''the^ beauteous figure of Zenobia was confined by fetters of gold, a slave supported the gold chain which encircled her neck, and she almost fainted under the intolerable weight of jewels. She preceded on foot the magnificent chariot in which she once hoped victoriously to have entered the gates of Rome." So fades the glory of this world. She was, indeed, treated honorably by the emperor, who, because of his admiration of her splendid talents and public virtues, presented her with a beautiful villa on the bank of the Tiber, about twenty miles from Rome, where the Syrian queen insensibly sunk into a Roman matron. Her daughters married into noble families, and her race continued till the fifth century. But what shall I say of the illustrious women of modern Europe, whose noble deeds, whose splendid follies, whose heroic achievements, whose mighty genius or whose public virtues have thrown a lustre on almost all the principal kingdoms of Europe ? Time would fail me to tell of Margaret, Queen of Denmark, the Semiramis of the North, mistress of three kingdoms — of Margaret of Valois, mother of Henry IV., an authoress, a poetess, a queen — of another Margaret, mother of Henry VII., a patroness of learning, a founder of two colleges, although, allied and related to thirty kings and queens, who spent her leisure hours not in courtly pastimes, but in translating from the French suet pious books as A Kempis on Imitating Christ — of Maria Theresa, Em- press Queen of Hungary, daughter of Charles VI., whose brillian' achievements and whose varied fortunes astonished Europe for fortj 62 AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. years — of her daughter Marie Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria and Queen of France, wife of the unfortunate Louis. Voluptuous and criminal, her prodigality and bad counsels, opposing the convoca- tion of the States, terminated in her own ruin and in that of her husband king, and precipitated the reign of terror — the triumph of atheism in France. I again repeat, time would fail me to tell of the Catharines of France and Russia — the Elizabeths, the Marys, the Annes of England, and a thousand other noble and illustrious names. But I will be asked. Why enumerate so many of regal dignity, of high and elevated place, of illustrious fortune, in exemplifying the power of woman? Because, I answer, amongst these we have the best educated of the sex — those invested with the most ample means of showing off to adv.antage the leading attributes of female character, and those whose deeds are best known in human history. How much more familiar to the million are Josephine, Maria Louisa, Anne Boleyn, Joan of Arc, Lady Jane Grey and the present Victoria, than females of less conspicuous station ! To know the force of character of any individual, he must be placed in a position on a theatre where he has room to act his part fully. Few persons ever know themselves or their most intimate friends and relatives, because of the want of opportunity of developing themselves. If a prophet foretold our future exploits, more than Hazael would ex- claim, " Is thy servant a dog, that he should do such a deed?" One reflection forces itself upon us while these premises are present. Had the females above named enjoyed as much moral as intellectual culture, and been as much under the government of the moral sentiments, as they were under the control of animal passions, how different from what it now is, might have been the fortunes and the character of the world at this hour ! But there are four aspects which I shall henceforth call the four car- dinal points of woman, in which she must be contemplated before her all-controlling influence in society can be duly appreciated, especially her power of doing good. There is no need now-a-days to talk of her talents, nor of her susceptibilities of the most polished intellectual and moral culture. These are no longer matters of doubtful disputation. Notwithstanding the defects in her education, (and, till recently, they were neither few nor small,) she has not merely occasionally, but in fact often, astonished, dazzled, delighted us with the rich and varied resources of her genius, the splendid efforts of her understanding, the finished productions of her taste. She has gathered laurels on Mount Parnassus and wreaths of flowers on Mount Helicon. She has sat in AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. 63 the cells of the philosophers, and walked in the groves of the Acade- mies, and strewed all her paths with flowers of the sweetest odors and of the most beauteous tints. We need not go back to the days of Aspasia, whose genius in poetry and romance Socrates himself, with all his philosophic gravity, could 'lot but admire ; nor to the time of Sappho, the poetess of Mytilene, almost coeval with Eome, whose delicious effusions and richly varied odes obtained for her the honors of the tenth muse. Nor need we call ip the memory of Corinna and her fifty books of epigrams, to show what gifts Pallas, Apollo and Mercury have bestowed on woman. Our own times, alike removed from the ages of superstition and of romance, furnish clearer, more striking, richer and more varied examples, not merely of her power to attain to eminence, but of her successful competition in general literature, science, and in the fine arts of poetry, music, painting, and of living well. I need not speak of the celebrity of Miss Edgeworth as a writer of moral tales ; of Miss Baillie as a tragedian ; of Madame de Stael as a miscellaneous writer of much wit and vivacity ; of Miss Martineau as a tourist; of Mrs. Bowdler as a moralist; and of Miss Sedgwick as a moral instructor. These are not our best models of female excellence even in the didactic art. Nor need I refer to the celebrity of Mrs. Hemans, now commensurate with English literature; nor to that of Mrs. Sigourney, commensurate with our own ; - nor to the miscella- neous and moral productions of Mrs. Hannah More, or Miss Beecher, all excellent in their kind. These are becoming as familiar in our country as weekly visitors or household words. They, indeed, are all honorable vouchers of what woman might be under a more philosophic, rational and moral system of education ; and, together with a thousand names of equal renown, show that the female mind only needs the proper appliances of good education to shine with a lustre, on a general scale, transcending far the humble standards fixed for h in ages, we hope, forever past. But the four cardinal points in woman are quite of a different cate- gory from that of talents and susceptibilities. These are the points of mighty influence from which she radiates her powers over the world. They are those of daughter, sister, wife and mother. A woman is first a daughter — then a sister — then a wife — and then a mother ; and under these potent and enchanting names she exercises all her transforming influence on human destiny. As a daughter, she re-acts on her parents ; she opens new springs of pleasures in their hearts, new hopes, new joy a, new fears, which 64 AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. have a mystic influence over their characters ; either in subduing their spirits to moral influences, or in stimulating their career in the pathiJ of pride, avarice and ambition. As a sister, she either softens, subdues, mollifies and polishes the manners of her brothers ; or she excites them to deeds of chivalrous daring, to bold adventures in the ways of false pride, false shame, false honor. It has been sometimes observed by those who attend more philosophically to what passes under their observation, that it is always a misfortune to a brotherhood to have no sister in the family. Such persons are generally more rude, more awkward, more unpolished ; more uncivilized in their modes and manneris, than, all things else being equal, those fraternities are that enjoy the communion of sisters — "Whose company has harmonized mankind, Soften'd the rude and calm'd the boisterous mind," As a wife, when properly educated, her power is not to be computed. The weaker vessel though she may be, in all that appertains to mere intellectual power; yet in the department of feeling, sensitiveness, promptness, decision, tenderness of affection and self-denying devotion to her husband, she is generally his superior. Her counsels, if not uniformly infallible, are always sincere and cordial. Her motives can never be suspected, though her wisdom may; one, too, so intimately acquainted with his weak as well as his strong side, (for most husbands have two sides,) cannot fail to obtain incalculable ascendency. There is no covenant like the nuptial covenant — no copartnery like the oneness of the matrimonial contract. It is the identification of all the temporalities of two persons for life — an amalgamation of all natural interests, which places the parties in a position supremely to influence one another. But the recondite secret of a wife's power is only found in the superiority of her love. She conquers and reigns by love. Therefore, in the ratio of her affections and her good sense there must ever be her ascendency. As a mother, however, her power is paramount. On that throne she is supreme. The whole world is in her hands, in her arms, in her bosom, while she is intrusted with the moulding of the soft clay of humanity, and forming it after her own image. The discreet and affectionate mother lives forever in the heart of her children. They never can throw off all their allegiance to her, nor rise above her sovereign sway, if indeed she only knows how to wield that potent sceptre which the God of nature has put into her hands. I believe there never was a man both good and great, that adorned with brilliant virtues our fallen race, that did not owe it to his mother. AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. 65 Her wisdom, her piety, her example, led him into the straight paths of true wisdom, goodness and greatness, else his feet had not found them. So true it is, that if a child be brought up in the way that he should go, he will not in advanced years desert it, that it became a proverb in Israel three thousand years ago ; and who can find in the annals of ancient or modern biography an exception to it, or a person of distinguished excellence who had not an excellent mother ? Ladies and gentlemen, this is just the point in which we can de- monstrate woman's power to do good in society. I doubt not you were disappointed when I was instancing, by some names illustrious in history, her power of doing evil, that I did not at least balance the account by giving more bright examples of her power to bless and to do good. The reason, you will soon discover, is, I was not then in the proper place to find such examples. Woman was not made to found cities and empires, to command armies and navies, to enter the arena of political strife, to figure in camps, in tilts and tournaments, to mingle in the intrigues and cabals of kings and courts. She was made for other ends, to move in other circles, and to exert an influence more pure, more powerful, more lasting. She was made to have an empire in the heart of man, and to wield a mild and gracious sceptre over the moral destinies of our race. Hence the domestic circle is the area of which she is the power, the light, the life, the glory. But though this circle be small, it has a paramount sway over every other circle in which man lives and moves. Hence the family institution gives laws to the school, the college, the university, the church, the state, the world. And so it comes to pass that woman's power is confined within this narrow circle that it might be the more concentrated and rebound with more force on all the interests of humanity. And here, while we have the four cardinal points of woman's true and proper sphere before us, and are dwelling on the last and para- mount of these, her power as a mother, it will not be difficult or tedious to demonstrate her illimitable power of doing good. The giving to the world a Moses, a Samuel, a David, a Josiah, a Luther, a Franklin, a Washington, is doing more than did all the Pharaohs, the Ptolemies, the Alexanders, the Caesars, the Gregories, the Bourbons, the Tudors, the Stuart-s, the Hanoverians, the Guelphs, the Napoleons, that ever lived. There is no power in numbers nor in mathematics to compute the amount of good eff'ected by a Luther or a Washington. Not Saxony only, but Germany, Switzerland, Holland, England, Europe, America, the world, temporally, spiritually and eternally, have been advantaged by the deeds of Luther. The annals of eternity alono 5 66 AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. can unfold all the good effects of the life of that reformer. And yet a single bias given by his mother may have been, and doubtless was, the fountain, the mainspring of all this incalculable series of advantages to our race ! Is not the mother of our own Washington the root and origin of all the blessings, civil and social, accruing to this country and to the human race for an indefinite series of ages ? When, like the pious Hannah, a mother undertakes to train a child for the Lord and the human race, and brings him up in the tabern-acles of piety, she aims at a power of doing good that reaches far beyond the landmarks of time — she may anoint the head and the heart of more kings than did the son of Hannah, and with a holier and more fragrant oil than that which from the prophet's horn was poured upon the head of Saul, or on that of the son of Jesse. There is no decree which saith to woman's sway, either as a daughter, a sister, a wife or a mother, as God hath spoken to the waves of the sea, Hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther, and here let all thy efforts be stayed." No, thank Heaven's eternal King, there is no limit set to her power. It may be temporal, spiritual, eternal. If woman has vanquished Samson the strongest of men, Solomon the wisest of men, and Adam the greatest of men, she has been made the mother of the Saviour of men, and may, through the religion of her Son and of her Lord, exert a transcendent power over the destiny of man. She may bless a family, a nation, a generation, a world — not only for a jubilee, an age, a few centuries, but forever and forever. But I said something of the Bible in her heart and in her hand, as next to her, or in conjunction with her, the mightiest and best means of civilizing, refining, elevating and ennobling human nature. I pre- sume so much upon the intelligence and good taste of my audience, as not to have allotted much space or time to the elucidation of this point. It is certainly well known to you, ladies and gentlemen, that women are more susceptible of religious impressions than men. All classic, all Pagan, all political, all sacred history, may be appealed to in proof that female piety is larger in quantity as well as of a finer quality than that of man. Woman figures more eminently in all the walks of piety in New Testament history. Not only in the days of the Christian chief were women most ardent in their attachment to him, more devoted in all their attentions to him, waiting upon his person, minis- tering to his wants — ''last at the cross and earliest at his grave but after his resurrection they rallied in greater numbers to his cause, embraced it with warmer affections, endured persecution with greater AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. 67 constancy, often courting rather than shunning the pains of martyrdom. There is everywhere at this moment a preponderating amount of female devotion, and a very striking numerical superiority of female com- municants at all the altars in our land. The reason of this is found in the superior sensitiveness of woman — in the delicacy of all her susceptibilities of moral influence — and in her seclusion from the corrupting influences, the collisions, the revelries and jarring interests of a commercial, political and worldly spirit. As some one has -very beautifully said, ''The current of female exist- ence runs more within the embankments of home." But home is the centre and the throne of the sanctities as well as of the charities of life. The duties of a mother or of the mistress of a family all tend to piety by warming and softening the intellect and the affections. Women, therefore, are usually the appointed guardians of domestic leligion. They are removed at a more salutary distance from the stirring business, from the ambitions that engross the heart of man and the passions that devour it, and the undeviating processes which fix upon it day by day a thicker and a thicker crust of icy selfishness. Add to this, women need more of the comforts of religion, depend more upon its aid, confide more in its protection, and derive from it more of their real charms and loveliness than from any other source whatever. A pious lady, well educated, (and none are well educated that are not pious, that do not fear Grod and keep his commandments,) has a power above every other female of the same circumstances, of the same personal accomplishments, not only over the good and ex- cellent, but even over the irreligious themselves. Many irreligious, and even profane men, cannot love a woman without religion. When they think of marrying, they always think of a pure, and virtuous, and religious woman. Such only they regard as a crown of glory and honor ; and only under the presidency of such a wife, and mother, and mistress of a house would they dare to commit the destinies of a family. It is, indeed, a noble testimony to religion, that not only good men, but bad men themselves, acknowledge its excellency and prefer an alliance with its friends rather than with those who are destitute of its ornaments and guardianship, or opposed to its purity and power. Religion is, then, the true dignity of woman. The Bible in her heart, on her lips, and in her hand, imparts to her an excellency, a majesty and a power that renders her the most efficient of all the agencies in the universe, to improve, to civilize and bless the world with the highest moral excellence, with the most refined and exalted 68 AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. social pleasures of which our species is susceptible in this state of trial and discipline. I have said the Bible in her heart, and have I exaggerated the influ- ence of that wonderful volume when inscribed upon the female heart ? This I presume to be impossible. There is no hyperbole here. That book widens, deepens, enlarges, strengthens and elevates the intellectual and moral capacities of human nature, of the male and female mind, above all other books, and sciences, and arts ever taught man or woman. The fact is one thing, and the philosophy of it another. But so clear is the evidence of the fact, that the destiny of a nation might be staked upon it. Let two females of equal natural development, of equal capacity for mental and moral improvement, be selected ; let one of them have the Alexandrian or London library at her command, without the Bible ; and the other the Bible only ; and let each of them devote for any definite number of years so many hours, daily, to read- ing and reflection. She who makes the Bible her choice will as cer- tainly excel the other in all the points of which we liow speak, as the Bible itself excels all other books in the world : provided only, that she reads it without prejudice, "and subject to the same canons of inter- pretation to which all other books of distant ages and countries are to be subordinated. We have now no time on hand to eulogize the book of God ; nor is it necessary to this audience. It is a very common theme. It is, how- ever, a noble — a sublime one. It might well occupy the talents of an angel — the descriptive powers of a cherub. It is the book of the Divine nature ; it is, indeed, the book of God — and the book of man. Other books have nations or individual men, or specific sciences or arts, for their subject; this is the book of man. Human nature is here as fully revealed as the Divine. They are revealed in comparison, in con- trast, in things similar, in things dissimilar. The fountains of the great deep of human thought, of human motives, of human action, are broken up ; and man, inward and outward, is contemplated not in the dim taper light of time, but in the strong bright light of eternity ; not merely as respects his position on the terraqueous globe, nor in human society, but as resj octs all his positions and attributes in a whole universe, a boundless future, a vast eternity. The speaker is God; the hearer, man ; the subject, human nature, human relations, human des- tiny; the object, eternal life, immortal glory. The divine mind, the eternal Spirit, breathes through the signs of that book — through its words, its types, its figures, its principles, its precepts, its examples — upon our moral nature. It quiciiens, animates, AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. 69 Durifies, enlaiges, elevates, and dignifies it by an assimilation of it to an incarnation of the Divinity itself ; and capacitates man and woman for higher joys, purer delights, and a more efficient agency in impart- ing bliss to others, than all the documents, volumes, facts and events in all the other records of man, or developments of God visible to mortal eye. But I said I intended neither comment nor encomium on the Bible : I therefore hasten to the capital and closing point of my address. Society is not yet fully civilized. It is only beginning to be. Things are in process, in progress to another age — a golden — a millennial — a blissful period in human history. Selfishness, violence, inordinate am- oition, revenge, duelling, even tyranny, oppression and cruelty, are yet exerting a pernicious influence in society. These are the real draw- backs on human happiness — the loud calls on genuine philanthropy. Woman, I believe, is destined to be the great agent in this grandest of •oil human enterprises — an efibrt to advance society to the acme of its most glorious destiny on earth. Already' she exerts a great influence in all works of benevolence. In the visiting societies, in quest of the destitute, the sick, the wounded, the miserable — in the labors of the Sunday-school — in the active and constant charities of the Christian church, her reputation is commen- surate with the institutions themselves, and her influence is universally acknowledged. These, too, are acts of eternal renown. The great Benefactor gave a fame lasting as time and the human race to the sister of Martha for such an act of love. Such ladies as Mrs. Chaupone, Mrs. Trimmer, Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Hannah More, Mrs. He- mans, &c., have an extensive fame and an extensive usefulness; but the space which they occupy is but a speck compared with that filled with the Mary that anointed the Lord for his sepulture. The labors of Mrs. Fry, or of the Sisters of Charity, are not those of genius, poetry, imagination, but of genuine benevolence. It is not the shedding of a few sympathetic tears over some high- wrought imaginative tale of woe, found in books of fiction, in the volumes of romance, but the pouring of the oil and the wine, the genuine tears of benevolence, into the real wounds of the sons and daughters of anguish, that is inscribed in the book of Heaven's heraldry, and to be divulged in celestial ears with angelic admiration and delight. But we ask, because we expect, more than this. We ask for a female cordon to stretch through the whole length of this land, against the appalling progress of fashionable vices, not merely against the luxurious extravagances of costly raiment, splendid furniture and sumptuous 70 AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. modes of living, which in themselves are great evils, and fast precipi- tating this nation against that fatal rock on which the proudest empires have been dashed to pieces ; but against the remains of barbarism still existing amongst us — duelling, revenge, \;^iolence, oppression, &c. Am I interrogated on what J mean by a female cordon ? I answer, that all ladies of education, of elevated standing, of moral excellence, shall, with one consent, frown from their presence those who delight in such deeds — who either perpetrate them, or take pleasure in those that do them ; that they show a profound veneration for the philan- thropic Author of our religion, who has peremptorily, and on pain of eternal ruin, forbidden all malice, violence, revenge, cruelty, murder and oppression. They can do more than all legislative enactments, than all human codes and punishments, to exterminate these horrible remains of savage paganism, so incongruous with the doctrine and principles of the Prince of Peace. Were it, for example, to be known and depended upon, as certain as death, that every one concerned in a duel was to be enrolled as a coward — as one that feared a whimsical, imaginative, unwritten, unintelligible code of honor, more than the laws of the eternal God — as one that dreaded the scorn of the wicked more than the scorn of all in the heavens, was to be debarred the company of ladies, and to be excluded from the participation of their smiles, I am confident that we should never again hear of a single rencounter of the sort, that the soil of such a community would not again be polluted by the tread of one that in time of peace had passionately, revengefully and recklessjy shed the blood of his brother. But before such consolidated virtue can be warrantably hoped for, the standard of female education must be greatly elevated and im- proved. Incomparably more attention, than at present, must be paid to the training and development of the moral sentiments. The heart, rather than the head, the affections, rather than the intellect, must be the centre of the whole circle of education, on which must operate all the scholastic forces from the lessons of the nursery up to those of the sage philosopher. The dignity of human nature, its sublime origin, its godlike organization, its magnificent and glorious destiny, its mysterious and spiritual relations to an immense universe, to high orders of intel- ligences, to the principalities, authorities and hierarchies of the heavens, must be standing topics in the every-day bill of intellectual and moral fare, from the abecedarian up to the seniors of the highest school in the land. Every subject, every object of thought in all the regions of mind and AMELIOEATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. 71 matter, in literature, science and art, must be laid under tribute to religion and morality. If there be design, utility, beauty, loveliness, apparent in any thing, it must be traced up to the eternal Source of all wisdom, goodness, beauty and loveliness, and made a text to show forth his infinite excellencies to the opening genius of the youthful inquirer. Every thing must be taught and learned in all its connections with the being, perfections and designs of the Creator. The arche- types of the universe must be found in his infinite and eternal intelli- gence, and . every beauty, melody and harmony in nature and society, must be made to engage the afifections more and more to him — " Him first, him last, him midst and without end all nature, science, art and learning, must be made to reveal and extol. This course will, under the dews, the rains and the sunshine of heavenly and divine influence, secure the heart to all that is good, and honorable, and excellent in earth and heaven. Finally, ladies and gentlemen, be it remembered that it is only when woman is viewed in her first cardinal point, that she is within the circle of direct didactic influence. It is only as a daughter that she is immediately under parental education and discipline. She must, while only sustaining this position to the family, be made to comprehend all that is indicated in that very dear and interesting title. But for our consolation it ought to be distinctly and emphatically stated, that when a daughter is so trained and educated as to understand all that is implied in filling up the whole measure of the duties of a daughter, she is an accomplished sister, will make a good wife, an excellent mother. A good daughter must inevitably be a good sister, a good wife, a good mother. If, then, proper care be taken of our daughters, and their education be conducted on rational and moral principles, no person need fear to endorse for the reputation, excellency and moral worth of the sister, the wife or the mother. Who is it, then, who desires a deep and more thorough reformation of public manners and customs, or who is it that seeks for social pleasures of the highest earthly order, and would advance the ameliora- tion of the social state to the highest point within the grasp of rational or religious anticipation ? Let him turn his attention to more rational, scientific, liberal and moral education of woman. Let him bear in mind that she must take the precedence as the most puissant leader in every work of moral reform in society. Hers is the delightful task, as well as the sovereign power, to mould human nature after a divine model. She sows the seed, she plants the germs of human goodness and human greatness. She infixes the generous purpose, the salutary 72 AMELIORATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE. and noble principles in tlie youthful heart. She makes the men and women of future times, and shapes the character and destinies of pos- terity even to the t^ird, and to the fourth, and sometimes to the tenth generation. Ought not, then, every patriot, every philanthropist, every good citizen, every Christian in the land to rally all his forces, to summon all his energies, to co-operate in the great cause of female education? It is not the education of the daughters of the affluent and honorable only, or chiefly, of which we speak — it is the education of all — it is common, it is universal female education, and to a more liberal extent than has yet been imagined — for which we speak, when we plead for that female education indispensable to the full and proper ameliora- tion of the social state. Individual, family or national wealth never can be more advanta- geously appropriated, than in the mental and moral education of all the sons and daughters oi the States. We owe it, then, to ourselves, to our children, to our country, to the world, to bestir ourselves in this most useful, honorable and beneficent of mortal undertakings. Let us, then, awaken to our responsibilities, and to our power of blessing others, and of being blessed, and place our energies and our influence, along with our other means, on the side of woman's high advancement in all the paths of literature and science, of religion and morality. Then must we greatly enhance and sweeten the charms of home — of the social hearth — the domestic circle — the city — the church — the world. Then may we anticipate a day of richer blessings, of purer pleasures, of more lasting joys to the human race ; and, on the weU- fledged wings of vigorous and healthful hope, we may glide down the whole vista of time, to those eternal scenes of holier delight, of more refined ecstasy, which fill the raptured vision of the saint, in those climes of eternal peace and social bliss, where every eye is filled with uncreated light, and every heart witn love. ADDRESS ON THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. TO THE MEMBERS OF THE UNION LITERARY SOCIETY OF MIAMI UNIVERSITY, OHIO, 1844. Mr. President and Gentlemen, Members of the Union Literary Society of Miami University : — Soon as I had obtained my own consent to appear before you on tbe present occasion, in pursuance of the very polite and flattering invi- tation I had received from you, I immediately laid all my powers of invention under tribute to furnish a subject worthy of your attention. But, to my great disappointment, I never knew them pay any tax im- posed upon them with so much. reluctance. Weeks passed away before I could even fix upon any topic; and after I had resolved upon one, new, unexpected and inexorable calls upon my time and labor, so crowded upon me as to leave but a few fragments to devote to a subject which, in my humble opinion, deserves a year rather than a few hours, and a volume rather than a single address. Accustomed only to read what is written, or to speak extempora- neously, and not at all to recite from memory, I have sketched a few thoughts upon the responsibilities of men of genius ; which, with- out further introduction or apology, I now submit to your most kind and candid consideration. Human responsibility, gentlemen, is a momentous theme, and of transcendent importance to the world. In the amplitude of its com- prehension it contemplates man in every power and capacity of his nature, and in all the conditions of his existence. It views him in all his relations to that mysterious and incomprehensible whole, of which he is so important a part, indicated by the all-engrossing terms of Creator and creature. A complete and perfect knowledge of the subject, were it made dependent upon our own exertions, would require an in- umate and perfect acquaintance with the universe. But in this it may 74 RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. be said to correspond with every other subject of thought; as no one ever yet understood an atom of the universe who did not understand it all. We are not, however, made dependent for the science of our duty upon our ability to acquire a knowledge that is wholly unattainable. The divine precept happily comes to our relief, and rescues man from a difficulty absolutely insurmountable. Men, indeed, are not generally satisfied with a clear, broad precept. They are curious to know the reason why it is so commanded. This they have not, in any case, perfectly succeeded in ascertaining; and, in most instances, never can. Still it is some satisfaction to know any of the reasons, and to comprehend the more immediate causes of things, involving either duty or happiness. Hence the pleasure felt in an excursion into the regions of fancy and abstract speculation, even on the most familiar subjects. There is sometimes a very great satisfaction in discovering an end of all human attainments, and in perceiving that there is a fixed goal beyond which even imagination itself cannot stretch its wings. Still reason has something to do with the ascertainment and com- prehension of human responsibility; and it is important just to know how much lies within its lawful precincts, and what lies beyond them. But even this view of the subject is too large for the present occasion; and we have therefore confined our efibrts to a single branch of the mighty theme — viz. the responsibilities of men of genius. I do not, however, expect to escape the difficulties which lie upon the whole subject of human responsibility, by asking your special attention to a single branch of it. This special department cannot, indeed, be considered without a general view of the whole subject. We must have just, if not adequate, conceptions of the responsibilities of man, before we can form a correct estimate of the responsibilities of a particular class of men. But as it is my aim to give a proper direction, if need be, to a particular class of mind, I prefer to solicit your atten- tion, gentlemen, to this very prominent branch of the great subject. And, in the first place, it would, in accordance with well-established usage, seem to be incumbent on me to define a man of genius, as well as our acceptation of the term responsibility. When not in a very great haste to arrive at a given point, or when in quest of entertain- ment as well as of business, I sometimes indulge in a circuitous rather than in a direct approach to the precise point in hand. Allow me, then, to remark that the development of genius as well as of responsibility, has much to do with the proper comprehension of that irost mysterious and sublime something called mind. I speak not ^ RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. 75 of its essence. The whole doctrine of essences, whether of mind or of matter, is contraband in every province of legitimate philosophy. No sane person, trained in the schools of useful learning, in this our age of reason, presumes to scan any essence or quintessence whatever. The doctrine of the fifth essence is now-a-days not more ridiculous than the doctrine of the first essence. If at any time we should be seized with a fit of the Muses, we might with Milton sing of "Ethereal light, quintessence pure, Sprung from the deep." Or, if wrapt in the visions of an hypothetical philosophy, we might, with the genius of Stagy ra, speculate upon " the quintessential purity of a heavenly body immutable." But this matter-of-fact inductive age disdains such idle dreams, and repudiates the ideas and almost the name of essence and of quintessence, with all the retinue of imaginative properties, accidents and ends. The rigid Baconians, to a man, are willing to acknowledge that there are three topics, once the darling themes of all the sons of hypothesis, which now lie beyond the limits of true philosophy. These are the origin, the essence and the end of any thing, mental or material. The phenomena of mind and of matter come honorably and fairly within the empire of observation and of reason. Many of their attri- butes we can and do apprehend, while their essences will forever remain a terra incognita — a subject so metaphysically abstruse that no mind can grasp it in any one of its predicaments. The mind, indeed, may seize • any. thing as gross as ether, or the subtle fluids that roll their invisible currents through the channels of a vein infinitely minute; but the sanctum sanctorum of its own awful residence is not to be approached, much less entered, by the ablest, the most profound and erudite of human kind. Its capacity and elasticity are, indeed, appreciable by those who attentively consider its operations. It grasps a universe,, and yet may be filled with a single idea. Like the human eye, at one time it seizes a hemisphere, and at another it sees only a single animal- cule. Its spirituality is demonstrated by the celerity and compass of its movements. When we spread out upon the largest canvas which the most vigorous imagination has stretched, a universe composed of one hundred millions of suns and two thousand millions of attending planets, moving in orbits wide as those that fill the area of our solar system, the mind finds no difficulty in sweeping the uttermost circle of such a universe, and of still ranging through fields of space far beyond its precincts, from which subtracted, the existing universe would seem to be but an atom. 76 RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. But the celerity of its movement is no less wonderful than tK. almost illimitable extent of its comprehension. Light itself, tha*> bounds eight millions of miles in a minute, moves as the sloth, com- pared with the speed of its flight." Infinite duration and boundless space are the immense fields through which it gambols with inefi'able pleasure. Nor do the unapproachable heights or the unfathomable depths of nature lie beyond its sublime aspirations. These indeed, though beyond an angel's ken and its own comprehension, are never- theless the only areas that seem to aff'ord it room to spend its mighty energies, or fatigue itself in impetuous sallies. That Pagan philosophers should have regarded the human mind as an emanation from the Supreme Divinity, is by no means an irrational or absurd hypothesis; yet it is an undefined and undefinable specu- lation, and explains not at all the mysteries of its awful existence. It is a creature, and therefore no part of the Creator ; and it is a creature of every day's manifestation. Like sparks stricken off from Nature's -eternal and unwasting Sun, there are every moment myriads of them ushering into existence, commencing a career boundless as space and lasting as the years of eternity. While the realms of matter have all been filled up and peopled with their appropriate orbs, so that no new star has been born since the first Sabbath, nor a single new atom added to the masses of the original creation, during the progress of all the ages of time, mind is constantly springing into existence, but never going out; so that the machinery of nature seems to be but one grand laboratory for the continuance, production and manifestation of these new creations ; while all its vast dominions seem to constitute but one splendid and magnificent theatre on which individual minds are to be the eternal actors. Creation, gentlemen, is a very grand and sublime subject. It had its beginning, but where shall it end ? In its alphabet it has no omega, and within its vocabulary the word annihilation is not found. It is matter first, and mind second ; and these combined constitute all its wonders. Now, as the forms of matter are exceedingly variant and numerous, what shall we think of the mysterious and multiform diver- sities of mind and character ! Of these developments one there is to which the ancients have consecrated the name genius; and it is to this manifestation of mind your attention is now specially solicited. What then, gentlemen, mean we by the word genius? Shall we regard it as a supernal spirit suddenly inspired, or a guardian angel Allotted to a good or great man ? This family of genii, it would seem, is now extinct. Once, indeed, it was a large and powerful family, and RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. 77 of illustrious fame; but, like other great families, it had its own feuds and broils. Two parties were formed, each calling itself the good genii and the other the evil genii. A furious w^ar arose between them ; and, after a hundred battles, they agreed to divide between themselves the empire of the world — allotting to every individual a guardan genius, good or evil, as he desired or deserved. But, like other mystic agents, they have gone the way of all fictions, and now gently repose in the bosom of oblivion. Since that time the etymology of the name has been the amusement of the critics. Some would have it, and the word giant, of kindred Grecian extraction, because both alleged to be the ofispring of gignomai, regularly descended from the venerable Geno, alias Geino, of prolific memory. From denoting a sort of sub-divinity, it thus became the- representative of a highly gifted man. But, as gigno, one of its ances- tors, means to beget, it rather indicates one class of great men, of which there are, at least, two illustrious categories — the great in reason, and the great in fancy. Conception and comparison distinguish the former — imagination and invention the latter. These are the men of genius — those the men of talents. Men of genius soar on eagles' pinions to worlds of fancy; while men of talents. Atlas-like, stand under the real world. The loftier regions of fiction and romance delight the former, while the realities of earth and its mighty destinies engross the attention and command the energies of the latter. Men of genius create new worlds — men of talents carry them. Strength (for so talentum, from talao, would seem to indicate) characterizes the one ; while activity and celerity of movement distinguish the operations of the other. While, then, invention is the boast of genius, execution is the glory of talent. Combined, they make earth's great ones ; and, leagued with virtue, constitute the real nobility of human nature. Example, however, is always more intelligible, and generally niore eloquent, than definition. We shall, then, summon its aid. Genius, we have said, is distinguished by invention, creation, origination ; talent by effort, enterprise and great achievements. Energy is prime minister to talent ; the love of admiration, to genius. Homer excelled in genius ; Virgil in talent ; Shakspeare and Milton in both. In the fine arts of painting, sculpture and music, as well as in poetry, oratory, and even in the useful arts, that have contributed to- the progress of civilization and comfort, we have numerous happy illustrations of both genius and talent. Raphael in his cartoons, Michael Angelo in his frescoes, and our own Benjamin West in his historic paintings, are, par excellence, models of genius in the department of 78 RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. painting. In sculpture, Phidias, Praxiteles and Polydore are as bright a constellation of genius as Demosthenes, Cicero or Sheridan, in oratory; or as Milton, Pope or Byron, in poetry. In the useful arts a Fulton and an Arkwright afford as fine specimens of genius as a Mozart in music, or a Scott in romance. On the other hand, we dis- cover in a Butler, a Luther, a Franklin, a Washington, the mighty power of talent; and in a Locke, a Bacon or a Newton, the still superior force of genius and talent combined. Before dismissing the definition of a man of genius, it deserves to be noted that in the question of responsibility we give precedence to genius, not in contrast with talent, but because a man of genius is always more or less possessed of talent; whereas a man of talent is not necessarily a man of genius. Genius, then, in this view, compre- hends talent ; while talent does not necessarily comprehend genius. It is now expedient that we advance more into the interior of our subject, and endeavor to form some conception of the term responsi- bility. The doctrine of responsibility is the doctrine of moral relations between an inferior and a superior — between a dependent and an inde- pendent being ; as well as between such co-ordinates as enter into any social compact implying or involving obligations to each other. It is, therefore, a doctrine of paramount importance, in the social system, to every individual member of it. It is, indeed, the doctrine of human destiny, involving the whole subject of human happiness and human misery. As there is not one lawless atom in the material universe, so there is not one irresponsible agent in the social system. The order of mate- rial nature is, indeed, the outward symbol of the order of spiritual nature, and that is the order of obedient dependence. We shall, then, enter the holy place of moral obligation by passing leisurely through the outer court of physical obligation. In the material universe all the inferior masses are under law to the superior. One of the sublime designs of the Creator is, that all the central masses of the universe shall not only be the largest masses in their respective systems, but also radiating centres to their systems. Thus he has constituted the great masses perennial fountains of bene- ficence to all the subordinate masses that move round them. Our own bright orb, representative of all the suns of creation, is an unwasting fountain of life to its own glorious system. Ko sooner does he show his radiant face than floods of life teem from his bosom upon some thirty attendant planets, which, in sublime majesty and in expressive RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. 79 silence, ceaseless move around him. Light, heat, life and joy emanate from him. These are the sensible demonstrations of his bounty to hia waiting retinue of worlds. "What other emanations of goodness .he vouchsafes to those who obey him are yet unknown, and perhaps unknowable to us while confined to this our native planet. In the purer and more elevated regions of ether he may perhaps generate and mature the ultimate and' more recondite elements of the vital principle, which, combining with our atmosphere, quicken it with all the rudi- mental principles of animal existence. In the realms of matter, so far as fact, observation and analogy authenticate any conclusion, the law is universal, viz. that the minors must be subject to the majors; that the inferior masses shall depend on the superior for all that gives them life and comfort. But that the satellites of all systems and of all ranks requite their suns in some way by receiving from them their beneficence, and thereby maintain- ing, through their respective gravities, their central positions and perpetual quiescence, while they all move forward in one grand concert around the throne of the Eternal, in awful grandeur musing his praise, is not to be questioned or doubted by any one conversant with God's grand system of designs. On these sublime though simple principles are suspended the order, beauty and felicity of the universe. Destroy this, and a scene of disorder, confusion and destruction would in- stantly ensue, that would not leave an atom of the universe unscathed. Such is also the order of the intellectual system. One great mind, nature's spiritual and eternal sun, constitutes the mighty centre around which, in their respective orbits, aU pure minds, primary or second- ary— angelic or human — revolve. In this system the great minds as certainly govern the inferior, as in material nature the large masses govern the less. Now, as the power of mind consists in intelligence, educated mind must as certainly govern uneducated mind, and the more vigorous and talented the less favored, as the great material masses govern the inferior. Some, indeed, argue that all power is in mind, and that volition is the cause of aU motion. Phrenologists, moreover, depose that there is no organ for the will. Hence volition is the mind moving in a certain direction. It is the whole mind in action to efi'ect a change in some person or thing. Hence all changes, aU motions in the universe, are but the volitions of an intelligent agent. So God willed light ; and his iiat, or will expressed in words, gave it being. And as the same volition, guided by intelligence, that created the masses, still upholds them in being and directs aU their movements, may we not affirm that 80 RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. intelligence governs the universe ? Educated mind, or intelligence, is, then, the supreme power in every department of nature. Hence, men of genius must always, every thing else being equal, direct and govern those not so highly gifted as themselves. May we not then conclude that it is Heaven's own law that superior minds must always govern the inferior? But this reasoning supposes mental inequalities ; and who believes that all men {i.e. all minds) are equal, either by nature, education or art? If the sun and planets were all equal, the material universe would stand still. If all minds were equal, there would be no govern- ment in the world. But it might need none. If so, however, it cer- tainly could not move. The sun never would set in one half of the world, and consequently never rise in the other, if it depended on human volition, and if one half of the world had just as much power as the other half. The beauty as well as the happiness of the universe requires in- equality. Equal lines, smooth surfaces and eternal plaias have no beauty. We must have hill and dale, mountain and valley, sea and land, suns of all magnitudes, worlds of all sizes, minds of all dimen- sions, and persons and faces of divers casts and 'colors, to constitute a beautiful and happy world. We must have sexes, conditions and circumstances — empires, nations and families — diversities in person, mind, manners, in order to the communication and reception of happi- ness. Hence, our numerous and various wants are not only incentives to action, but sources of pleasure, both simple and complex — physical, intellectual and moral. Hence the foundation and the philosophy of unequal minas — unequal in power, in capacity and in taste — unequal in intelligence, activity and energy. The inequalities of mind are numerous and various as the inequalities of matter. One mind sports with worlds — another, with atoms. One man perches himself on Mount Chimborazo and communes with the stars — another delves into the earth in search oi hidden treasures, and buries himself in mines and minerals. One man moves along with the tardiness of the ox in the drudgery of life— another ascends in a balloon and soars above the clouds. Here we find a Newton measuring the comet's path, a Franklin stealing fire from heaven, a Columbus in search of a new world; and there a sportsman with his hounds in quest of a fox. One delights in his revelling and song, in riotous living and the giddy dance — another, in locking up his golden pelf in an iron chest. Talk we, then, of minds equally endowed by nature or improved by art ! No such minds ever RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. 81 composed any community. Varieties, all manner of varieties, are essential to society. The world needs the rich and the poor — the young and the aged — the learned and the unlearned — the healthy and the infirm — the cheerful and the melancholic. These call forth all our energies, open channels for all the social virtues, lay the basis of our various responsibilities, and constitute much of the happiness of this life. They furnish opportunities for communicating and receiving benefits. The positive and the negative belong as much to society as to elec- tricity. These relative states belong to all earth's categories. Some are positive, and some negative, in health, wealth, genius, learning, cheerfulness, contentment; the one imparts, and the other receives, blessings, and thus the circle of social happiness is completed. But the world that now is, in more senses than one, is the ofifspring of a world that once was. We have derived more than our flesh, blood and bones from our ancestors. We speak their language, read their books, learn their customs, imbibe their spirit, copy their manners, and are the complex result of all their institutions. Our language, religion and morality, are alike hereditary. We shall just as soon invent a new language as a new religion, objectively considered. Of all crea- tures, man is the most imitative. His whole person, head, face and hands, body, soul and spirit, are, more or less, shaped through the influence of this mysterious law of transformation. We do not only speak the language of our own country, but the provincialisms of our nurseries. The gift of all tongues did not, because it could not, annul the Galilean brogue. Nor does the casual interchange of nations deface the national head, form of person, or gait, of early education and youthful association. Need we further proof that men are, to an extent involving all their essential interests, subject to the law of imitation, and, consequently, example and precept are the two grand formative influences of human destiny ? From this point, then, we may look more earnestly, as well as more intelligently, on the whole subject of human responsibilities. If, indeed, as could be clearly shown, it is most certain that the phy- sical, intellectual and moral constitution of one generation essentially depends upon the intelligence, religion and morality of its immediate predecessor ; and if parents, teachers, and men of more advanced age, unavoidably impress their image on those brought into life, and up to manhood, under their influence ; follows it not, that men of transcend- ent genius have a mighty influence, and are awfully responsible to God for the application of that intellect and influence delegated to them? 6 82 RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. It is a startling proposition, that a truly intelligent and religious com- munity could, according to the laws of our own being, gradually intro- duce a more vigorous, long-living, intellectual and moral population, than is possible to any ignorant and immoral people in existence ; yet it is not more startling than true. But let us, for the sake both of argument and illustration, look for a moment at some of the men of genius that have lived in the world. A mere specimen or two of those of the last and present century must, for the present, suffice. In works of genius and general literature, no writer of the eighteenth century obtained a higher conspicuity or a greater celebrity than Vol- taire. Distinguished from infancy with superior intellectual endow- ments, a sprightly imagination, great versatility of genius, a ready and sparkling wit ; he is said to have written poetry while yet in his cradle. When passing through the College of Louis the Great, comet-like, he dazzled with the lustre of his genius, and the brilliancy of his path, not only his fellow-students, but all the great masters of science and literature which then adorned that royal college. In admiration of his powerful intellect, and captivating eloquence, and in anticipation of his future greatness, Ninon de I'Enclos bequeathed to him two thousand livres to purchase a library. The vivacity of his wit and humor, as well as his devotion to the muses, early drew him away from the study of the law, gave him a passport to the society of men of learning, and introduced him to the courtiers of Louis XIV. Even in his youth he became a favorite both of the tragic and of the comic muse. He successively shone, a star of the first magnitude, amongst the courtiers of St. Cloud, St. James and those of Berlin. His ascendency over the French king, over George 1. and his queen Caroline, and afterwards, over the Prussian monarch, from whom he received a pension of two-and-twenty thousand Kvres, are to be regarded as the trophies of his genius ; as monuments of his extraordinary endowments. In proof of his powers of satire, and that against the government too, the Bastille was honored with his company for one whole year. And had it not been for the admiration of his CEdipus, the first-fruits of his tragic muse, on the part of the Duke of Orleans, he might have been doomed to a longer imprisonment. This admonition did not long restrain the impetuosity of his mind, its recklessness of the moral consequences of its career. His Lettres Fhilosophiques, so profane and dissolute in their witticism, soon obtained the honor of a public conflagration at the hand of the public hangman, and that, too, by RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. 83 Older of the Parliament of France. Despite of all these marks of public displeasure, by the singular merits of his Mahomed, Merope and Alzire, he obtained the honor of the first dramatic poet of the age, and was again introduced to the Court of France, as the peculiaj favorite of Madame de Pompadour. His other works, published while in Geneva, at Ferney and at Paris, both comic and tragic, both philosophical and literary, gave him a very high rank amongst the men of literature and of taste; so that in the esteem of admiring myriads, he commanded the homage and guided the taste of the literati of the whole French Empire, during the last half of the eighteenth century. While at Ferney, in the midst of his little colony of artisans, abounding in wealth, and rich in fame, he was not only in the continual receipt of the adulations of philoso- phers and princes, but also of princely presents, and liberal gifts from some of the sovereigns of Europe. Dissatisfied with these rewards of his genius and labors, and wearied with the luxurious ease of that delightful abode, he languished for the daily incense of praise, and the admiring plaudits of the French capital. Even in his gray hairs, and at the advanced period of fourscore and four years, he returned to the metropolis, as he said, to seek glory and death." Honors extraordinary were crowded thick upon him on his arrival in Paris. The learned critics emulated each other in the despatch with which they ofi'ered incense at his shrine; and, finally, he was crowned with the poetic wreath in a full theatre, amidst applauding thousands. The excitement, however, was too powerful for his en- feebled constitution. The weight of so many honors oppressed him. The complimentary visits of Parisian ceremony stole away sleep from his pillow, and compelled him to resort to opium for relief; one large dose of which finally took away his senses, and immediately despatched him from the worship of infidels to the presence of his God. Thus perished this extraordinary genius ; the founder of a new sect of philosophers, distinguished more for their wit and their licentious- ness, than for the profundity of their science or their influence in the cause of civilization. Thus perished the author of seventy-one octavo volumes, not one of which was seasoned with one pure emotion, with a single tribute to religion or pure morality ; all of them, however, characterized by a great versatility of genius, a glowing imagination, a peculiar ease and fluency of style, and for a great variety of know- ledge, such as it is ; much of it, indeed, incorrect, little of it useful, and all of it poisoned with the seeds of anarchy, libertinism and irre- 84 RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. ligion. Thus perished the fickle-minded, wavering and inconstant Voltaire, who, as some one has justly said, was a free-thinker in Lon- don, a courtesan at Versailles, a Christian at Nantz and an infidel at Berlin. Assuming at one time to be a moralist, pleading for tolera- tion, and dissuading from war ; at another, acting the bufi'oon ; now writing a tragedy, then a farce ; to day a philosopher, cold as Dioge- nes ; to-morrow an enthusiast, ardent as Peter the Hermit ; to-day a parasite, fulsome as Tertullus ; to-morrow a satirist, severe as Juvenal ; now a voluptuary, feasting in princely style, again a miserable ascetic, worshipping mammon ; now as modest as a sage, anon as bold as an atheist, denouncing the Messiah, and contemning the hope of im- mortality. Such was the man whose anarchical theories, whose polished liber- tinism, whose atheistic reasonings, more than those of any other, pol- luted almost all the illustrious youth of France during the reigns of Louis XV. and XVI. Such was the master-spirit of the master-spirits of the French Eevolution; — that reign of terror whose infamous annals are destined to demonstrate to the human race the madness of atheism, the weakness of philosophy, the desolating tumults of passion, and the necessity of religion and righteousness to the prosperity, the honor and the happiness of every nation and people. But on what canvas can be grouped, and by what historic pencil sketched, the ruined myriads, deluded, polluted and destroyed, by the conversation, writings and examples, of such a genius as that of Vol- taire, Volney, Diderot, or that of our own less gifted, but equally morally distempered and licentious, Paine? His Common Sense," and his " Eights of Man," are but the charm through which he fascinated and beguiled untold thousands into the downward paths of ruin and disgrace ; — temporal, spiritual and eternal. He, too, was but the deluded votary of a more gifted and still more depraved genius. And who were the Dantons, the Marats, the Eobespierres, of the age of despotism, the triumph of anarchy ? Men of the school of Voltaire, Diderot and Gabriel Mirabeau. It will remain a secret to the develop- ment of the Great Day, how much poison has been infused into society through the intoxicating cup of a false, though fascinating philosophy, sparkling with the brilliant display of elevated genius, administered by such men as the speculative Hume, the eloquent Gibbon or the accomplished Eousseau. Our two great historians, before they commenced their proud monu- ments of elevated genius, had travelled through France ; and one of RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. 85 them both wrote and spoke the language of Voltaire as fluently and as eloquently as his own vernacular. These men had themselves drunk deeply of the continental philosophy — had become too familiar with the licentious principles of the eighteenth century. The first impulse to delineate the fortunes of England seems to have sprung up in the bosom of a skeptic, who had first conceived a false theory of the genius of human nature, and afterwards sought, in the annals of his country, facts to prove it. Such, it appears, was the character of David Hume. Destined to the law by his parents, ''he preferred Virgil and Cicero to Voet and Vinnius," while his taste for philosophy led him to write an " Inquiry into the Principle of Morals," a " Treat- ise on Human Nature," and an essay on " Natural Eeligion," before he completed a single volume of his history of England. A man of distinguished talents, and an elegant historian, he certainly is ; but the spirit and tendency of his writings are most clearly, though most in- sidiously, irreligious and immoral. His sentiments are often clothed in equivocal and fallacious language, and are intended indirectly to sap and mine the influence of the Bible. With all " the careless in- imitable beauties of Hume," as Gibbon calls them — i.e. "his solecisms, his Scotticisms, his gallicisms, his violations of the rules of English grammar," severely exposed by Dr. Priestley in his philosophical dis- quisitions, he is still, in language and style, the beau ideal of all English historians. But this is a small matter compared with the sly narcotic poison of his infidelity; which has, in truth, perverted the facts of his history, and rendered it rather a panegyric of skepticism - than a faithful record of facts. Like Voltaire, as one of our late re- viewers has said, " Hume adopted history as the vehicle of opinions which he could make palatable to the million in no other way." His swppressio veri, and his suggestio falsi, have beguiled other writers into very great errors, distortions and suppressions of fact. Keight- ley, in his "Outlines of History," Gleig, in his "Family History," and even Mrs. Markham, in her history, so admirably adapted, in many respects, to children, have been imposed on by Hume; and that, too, when his infidelity perverted his genius, and discolored the facts which lay before him in the annals of the world. All this, and perhaps more, might be said of the still more highly endowed and more eloquently accomplished author of the " Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Gifted by nature, and adorned by art, no historian either in our language or in any other known to us, possessed a much more fas- cinating style of narration than Edmvnd Gibbon. If, indeed, second 86 RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. to any English historian, he is second only to the more learned and polished Robertson ; not, indeed, in the rich easy and flowing eloquence of his splendid periods, but in the more sublime, more chaste, nervous and classic character of his general style and manner. But the subtle poison of an insidious skepticism is infused into the whole perform- ance ; and ere the youthful reader is aware of it, he is beguiled into an indefinable incertitude and dubiety on the whole subject of historical veracity, and charmed into an unutterable suspicion that Christianity and polytheism are but modifications of the same superstitious credu- lity of poor human nature. I presume not to descant upon the history of those mighty chiefs — the men of high renown — whose genius, like that of Byron, or that of Napoleon, have been the subject of a thousand comments — orations — .eulogies. Those rare prodigies, like comets of stupendous magnitude, seldom appear in our own horizon, and when they do, are so far beyond the aspiration of our youth as to afford no very strong in- centive to their ambition. As those burning mountains of lofty sum- mit, seldom trodden by human foot, need no parapet to prevent the too near approach of the unwary traveller, so these giants of enormous stature are placed so far above all aspiration, as not to seduce by their example one in a hundred millions of our race. Still their history ia a part of the history of humanity, and, as such, is not without its use. Their towering ambition, transcendent success and tragic end, together with the tendency of their course, are beacons, not without a moral influence to the human mind. The evils they have done while they lived, and the evils they are still doing, and yet to do, cannot be easily computed. The good or evil that men do while they live, lives after them; neither the one nor the other is ''always interred with their bones. Their example lives, and in the long series of cause and effect, in the complex and mysterious concatenation of things, their actions are pregnant with effects on human destiny that whole centuries do not always either unfold or annihilate. Can any one compute the expenditures of human life, the numoer of widows, orphans and bereaved parents, occasioned by the insatiate ambition of the late Emperor of the French ? What tears and groans and agonies, did each of his hundred battles cost the nations in which he sought that harvest of renown, which, for a few years, he reaped in the admiration of the world ! But who can fix, either in time or place, the last effect which his wild career of glory shall have entailed upon the human race? RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. 87 But it is not the military chiefs, the ambitious aspirants after civil or military renown, with whom we have to do. A Voltaire, a Paine, a Byron or a Scott come more legitimately within the precincts of our subject. These all were men of high responsibilities, because of the greatness of their talents, their lofty genius, their rare attainments. But whither tended the labors of their lives? Of the two former, but one opinion obtains amongst all Christians — their whole influence was decisively against religion, morality and good government. The French Eevolution is a lesson known to all men, demonstrating the indissoluble connection between atheism, anarchy and misrule. It was as certainly the offspring of atheism, as the Spanish Inquisition was the child of the Papacy, or the temple of Jupiter Glympus the creation of Paganism. Men reason against both common sense and philosophy, when they argue either themselves or others into the hallucination, that a good civil government can anywhere exist without sound religion and sound morality; or, indeed, that a people can be moral, in the proper sense of the word, without religion. Without temples, altars, priests and religion by civil law established, they may, indeed, be intelligent, religious, moral, and, consequently, prosperous; but without true religion no state can be moral, prosperous and permanent. All em- pires that have fallen, all states and nations that have passed away, have perished thjrough irreligion, immorality and vice. Now, as the master-spirits of the French Eevolution were the dis- ciples of Voltaire and his associates, we read the power, the charactei and the tendency of their genius and talent in that momentous event, prolific of instruction, not only to the living, but to ages yet unborn. If England in the days of her Commonwealth was a proof of the genius of her Cromwell, or if the riches and glory of Israel, at the era of the erection of their temple, constituted a proof of the wisdom and sound policy of their Solomon, so was France in the days of her Pantheon, during the tyranny of her Danton, Eobespierre, Marat, &c., a proof of the philosophy, policy and virtues of her Voltaire, Volney and Gabriel Mirabeau. But why, it may be asked, mention in the same chapter such men as Byron, Burns and Scott? This, indeed, demands an explanation. They are not, then, at all to be classed with such men as Voltaire, Volney or Mirabeau, except as men of genius and favorites of public fame. Still the influence of a Byron, a Burns, a Scott, may be as greatly mischievous as their genius was transcendently great and admirable. That they have all said many beautiful things — that they 88 liave expressed the purest and the noblest sentiments and views in the finest style, in language the most chaste, the most classic and the most exuberantly rich and fascinating, is admitted, with the greatest pride of English literature and of Englishmen. That much of their poetry and fiction is deeply imbued with sentiments of piety and humanity, is also most cheerfully conceded ; and that most men may improve their language, their taste and their style by the perusal and the study of their admirable productions, we also admit. And if any one please to add, that three such men almost contemporaneous have not adorned any nation, ancient or modern, with richer specimens of rare genius of the finest texture and the most exuberant growth, I will not at all dissent from him ; and yet I must say, that in view of the tendency, the whole tendency of the products of their genius, and in my estimate of human responsibility, I would not, for ''all that wealth or fame e'er gave," be the author of their works. I cannot but view them as decidedly tending to impiety, and consequently to im- morality. They may not, indeed, Bulwer-like, have made the libertine a successful adventurer, or the licentious rake a man of honor and of good fortune. They may not have decorated vice with the charms of innocence, or thrown around the sensualist the robes of virtue ; they may not have commended to juvenile fancy a plausible prodigal, or introduced to the favorable regard of unsuspecting youth some amorous knight of easy virtue : still they have so mingled up virtue and vice, piety and impiety, wisdom and folly, moral beauty and moral deformity, as to confound the understanding and blunt the pure sensibilities of our nature. They have created false virtues, and if they have not called good evil and evil good, they have made certain vices of much less frightful mien, under the names of gallantry, patriotism, chivalry, heroism, &c. Human nature is exaggerated, discolored, misrepre- sented, in many points. A wrong direction is given to the mind, false motives are inspired, unworthy principles instilled in the minds of the less discriminative readers of their works, and wrong conceptions of honor, greatness and goodness inculcated upon all. In some respects the author of Waverley is to be excepted from this sweeping censure.' Of a better temperament, of a more moral constitution and of a more religious education, more historic too and descriptive than merely fanciful or imaginative, he is more conversant with fact and reality, and generally more nearly approaches nature and truth, than most of his contemporaries or predecessors. Still he occasionally outrages the moral sense and good taste, by making his outlaws heroic, noble and honorable men ; thus creating false virtues and dishonoring the true. RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEX OF GE^s'IUS. 89 That as life was eking out he condemned his course, the prostitution of his admirable genius and unparalleled powers of description, is to my mind a gratification, though no extenuation of the aberrations of his otherwise splendid and unparalleled career. I have not arrayed before you, gentlemen, a per contra list of the great reformers and benefactors of mankind ; I have not laid before you any samples of the men of genius selected from prophets, apostles, saints or martyrs ; I have not told you of the inventors of useful arts, of the founders of benevolent institutions, or of the great and splendid discoveries of men of science. Nor have the Christian poets, writers, orators, reformers, missionaries, been arrayed before you. We have not spoken of the wide-spread and long-enduring influence of a Claude, a Wickliffe, a Luther, or a Calvin, or of the bright deeds of illustrious fame of a Barnard, a Howard, or a Eobert Raikes. No, these are common and familiar as household words. Yet the last mentioned of these, though of no remarkable genius, by setting on foot the Sunday- school system, has done for the world more than all the conquerors of nations, founders of empires and great political demagogues whose names axe inscribed upon the rolls of fame. Eternity alone can develop the wide-spreading and long-continued series of good and happy conse- quences, direct and indirect, resulting from their schemes of benevolence and deeds of mercy. Their noble influence may be compared in its beginnings to the salient fountain of some of earth's grandest rivers, which, though not ankle-deep, issuing from beneath a little rock on some lofty mounttain's brow, after wending its serpentine way for thousands of miles through many a rich valley and fertile plain, and receiving the contributions of numerous tributary streams, finally" disembogues its deep broad flood into the ocean, carrying on its majestic bosom the products of many climes and the wealth of many nations. So, in the course of ages, the labors of the more distinguished benefactors of mankind, at first humble and circumscribed, yield largely accumulating revenues of glory and felicity ; and carry down, not only to the remotest times and to the most distant nations, manifold blessings; but occasionally, transcending the boundaries of earth and time, they flow into eternity itself, carrying home to God and the universe untold multitudes of pure and happy beings. But, gentlemen, to escape the imputation of merely theorizing on this subject in the form of vague generalities, allow me to press the subject on your attention in the more practical form of a few leading epecifications. First, then, it is a pairamount responsibility resting upon all persons 90 RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. having talents — upon every one possessing genius, to cultivate those noble powers which God has bestowed upon them. The gift of genius is a special call upon its possessor to cultivate and improve it to the highest possible degree. It is already established that men of superior intellect and moral power must govern the world. Men might as successfully legislate against the Ten Commandments, or enact statutes against conjugal affection or filial reverence, as to think of legislating against the subordination of inferior to superior minds. God has so constituted the world. As, then, it must be so, how great the respon- sibility resting upon those possessed by nature of the higher mental endowments, to cultivate them to the , utmost perfection ! The marble in the quarry, the ore in the mountain, or the diamond in the sand, is not susceptible of greater improvement and polish by art, than is the human mind, especially a highly gifted mind. Education adorns as well as enlarges and strengthens the human soul. Demosthenes might always have stammered in his father's blacksmith-shop but for his devotion to intellectual improvement. But it is not intellect alone, however highly cultivated, that commands either the admiration or the reverence of mankind. It is not mere in- tellect that governs the world. It is intellect associated with moral excellence. Hence the necessity of the proper cultivation of the moral nature of man. That the divine similitude of man consists more in his moral than in his merely intellectual constitution, needs neither argument nor proof. And that the Supreme Lawgiver and Governor of the universe reigns over the empire of mind by goodness, justice and truth, rather than by mere intellect, whether called knowledge, wisdom or power, is equally plain to all who can reason, or indeed think on what passes before them in the developments of nature, society and religion. That the moral nature of man is, therefore, to be sedulously and constantly cultivated, is not more obviously evident than is the still more interesting fact, that in the direct ratio of its importance is the facility with which it may be accomplished, provided it be submitted to the proper means, timously commenced, and perseveringly prose- cuted when most susceptible of moral impressions. It is in this department that the law of improvement is necessarily the law of healthful exercise, whose immutable tendency is enlargement and cor- roboration. He, then, that would gain the full advantage of his talents, and secure the legitimate rewards of genius, must pay a supreme regard to the cultivation and high development of his moral nature. In this way only can he obtain and wield an influence commensurate with all his powers of blessing and being blessed. Had Demosthenes, RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. 91 the model orator and statesman of both Greece and Rome, devoted his mighty genius to the moral as well as the intellectual improvement of his mind, the bribe of Harpalus, the parasite of Alexander, would not have tempted him ; nor would he have terminated his days by poison, obscuring the glories of his great name by self-murder, the greatest and meanest of mortal sins. But, in the second place, it is supremely incumbent on all men of genius that they choose a calling most fa,vorable to the promotion of the best and greatest interests of human kind. In the social system there are many offices to be filled, many services to be performed, and consequently many persons needed to perform them. Of these offices there are all degrees of comparison — the needful, the more needful, the most needful — the honorable, the more honorable, the most honor- able. The scale of utility is, indeed, the scale of honor. That calling is always the most honorable that is the most useful ; and that is the most useful which is the most necessary to the completion and perfec- tion of human happiness. ''The glory of God," (a phrase more current than well understood,) the glory of God can best be promoted by promoting the happiness of man. Indeed, it can be promoted in no other way. Now, as man is susceptible of individual and social hap- piness— of animal, intellectual and moral gratifications and pleasures — that happiness is to be regarded the highest which comprehends the greatest variety and the largest amount of blessedness. It so happens, however, that whatever produces the greatest amount of moral felicity also yields the greatest variety of enjoyment. This is founded upon the fact that moral pleasure is not only most exquisite in degree, but is itself founded upon the harmonious fruition of our entire constitution. Hence the virtuous man is always the most happy man, because virtue is essential to the entire enjoyment of his whole animal, intellectual and moral nature. The restraints which virtue imposes upon the minor gratifications are laid only for the purpose of securing the major both in variety and degree. Now, as intellect and society are essential to morality and virtue, those offices and callings which have most to do with these, are most productive of human happiness. From conceptions of this sort arose the preference given to what are usually called the learned professions. But law, physic and theology are but chapters in this great category ; they are not, in my opinion, the component parts of it ; they do not engross the learned professions. For unfortunately it does not always follow that those who engage in these three professions are either learned men or learned in their respective professions, nor is it true 92 RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. that these are the only callings that require much learning. Some of the mechanical arts, politics and agriculture, require as much learning as either law or medicine. The school-master's vocation and that of the professor of language and science ought to be not only regarded, but actually constituted, learned professions. Indeed, all professions would be the better of a little more learning than is usually thought indispensable. A learned carpenter and cordwainer there might be, as well as a learned blacksmith, without any detriment to those callings or to the learned professions. And as all men are in this community, in virtue of our political institutions, constituted politicians, lawgivers, judges and magistrates, whenever the people pronounce their sove- reign fiat, the number of learned professions might be at least doubled, and perhaps quadrupled, without any detriment to the state or any jeopardy of human happiness. In this allusion to learned callings it may be regarded as a culpable omission should I not name the militaiy and naval professions. True, indeed, so far as any callings are purely belligerent, they are not very nearly allied to the theory of human happiness, how important soever they may be to that of human safety. The preservation and enjoyment of human life, rather than the scientific destruction of it, fall more directly within the purview of our present remarks. Generals, heroes and conquerors are very illustrious men in the esteem of the more rude and barbarous nations of the world, but as civilization advances they uniformly fall back into the rank and file of Nimrod, Tamerlane^ Alaric and Company. One of the greatest misfortunes entailed upon society is the opinion that great generals are great and noble men, and that those callings which have the most gunpowder, lead, epaulettes and music about them, are the most splendid, honorable and useful. False views of glory and greatness are not indeed confined to those circles of earth's great ones, but are unfortunately extended to other circles connected as much with the animalism of human nature as they. Political chiefs and successful demagogues are everywhere hailed as men of great parts and good fortunes. Every senator is an honorable man, and every governor is an impersonation of excellency. The worship paid to these political dignitaries deludes the unwary into the idolatry of fiuch offices and officials, and turns their judgment awry from the oracles of reason and the true philosophy of human greatness and human happiness. Indeed, such is the mania for political honors and political office, that more seem to desire the honor of an office than to be an honor to the office. RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. 93 We would not, indeed, divest useful offices of their proper honor. To serve a society faithfully, whether as a scavenger of Kome or as a king of the French, is an honor to any man. But to serve society in any capacity promotive of its moral advancement, is the highest stye and dignity of man. True, indeed, that in the great category of morai improvement there are numerous departments, and consequently many offices. There are authors, teachers of all schools, ministers of all grades, missionaries of all mercies, ambassadors of all ranks, employed as conservators, redeemers and benefactors of men. These, in the tendencies and bearings of their respective functions, sweep the largest circles in human affairs. They extend not only to the individual first benefited, not only to those temporally benefited by him, in a long series of generations, but breaking through the confines of time and space, those benefits reach into eternity and spread themselves over fields of blessings, waving with eternal harvests of felicity to multi- tudes of participants which the arithmetic of time wholly fails to com- pute, either in number or in magnitude. The whole vista of time is but the shaft of a grand telescope through which to see, at the proper angle, the teeming harvests of eternal blessedness flowing into the bosoms of the great moral benefactors of human kind. To choose a calling of this sort, is superlatively incumbent on men of genius. As Wesley said of good music, so say we of good talents. The devil, said the reformer, shall not have all the good tunes ; and we add, nor the law, nor politics, nor the stage, all the good talents. If men are held responsible, not only for all the evil they have done, but also for all the good they might have done — as undoubtedly they will be; and if they are to be rewarded, not for having genius and talent, but for having used them in accordance with the Divine will, and the dictates of conscience, then what immense and over- whelming interests are merged in the question — to what calling should men of great parts and of good education devote themselves ? Taste, inclination and talent are altogether, and always, to be taken into the account in a matter of such thrilling interest. But we are speaking of men of genius in general, and not of a particular class. The historic painter may, like our great West, give us Bible characters and Bible scenes. We may as well have the patriarchal scenes, tabernacle ctnd temple scenes, official personages and festivals upon the walls of Dur rooms and museums, as the island of Calypso, or the ruins of the Capitol, or the Pantheon, or the panorama of Mexico, Paris or Water- loo. The poet may sing of Zion, and Siloam, of Jerusalem and its King, as well as of the wratn of Achilles, the siege of Troy, or the 94 EESPONSIBILITIES OF MEN OF GENIUS. adventures of Eneas. An orator may as well plead for God as for man, for eternity as for time, for heaven as for earth ; he may as well plead for man's salvation, as for his political rights and immunities ; and the same learning and eloquence that gain for a client a good inheritance or a fair reputation, might, also, have gained for him an unfading crown, and an enduring inheritance. It depends upon the taste of the man of genius of any peculiar kind, to what cause he may supremely devote it. It is his duty, however, to bring it to the best market, and to consecrate it to the noblest and most exalted good. But, finally, it is not only incumbent on men of genius that they cultivate their talents to the greatest perfection, and that they select the noblest and most useful calling, but that they also prosecute them with the greatest vigor, and devote themselves to them with the most persevering assiduity. It is not he that enters upon any career, or starts in any race, but he that runs well, and perseveringly, that gains the plaudits of others, or the approval of his own conscience. Life is a great struggle. It is one splendid campaign^ a race, a con- test for interests, honors and pleasures of the highest character, and of the most enduring importance. Happy the man of genius who cul- tivates all his powers with a reference thereunto, who chooses the most noble calling, and who prosecutes it with all his might. Such a one, ultimately, secures to himself the admiration of all the great, the wise, the good. Such a one will always enjoy the approbation of his own judgment and conscience : and, better still, the approbation of his God and Redeemer. How pleasing to him who has run the glorious race, to survey from the lofty summit of his eternal fame, the cumulative results of an active life, developed in the light of eternity! How transporting to contemplate the proximate and the remote, the direct and the indirect beatific fruits of his labors reflected from the bright countenances of enraptured myriads, beaming with grateful emotion to him as the honored instrument of having inducted them into those paths of righteousness which led them into the fruition of riches, honors and pleasures boundless as the universe and enduring as the ages of eternity ! That such, gentlemen, may be your happy choice and glorious destiny, is the sincere desire of your friend and orator. ADDRESS. IS MORAL PHILOSOPHY AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? DELIVERED BEFORE THE CHARLOTTESVILLE LYCEUM, 1840. Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Lyceum : — The desire of knowledge, and the power to acquire it, are, by a benevolent provision of the great Author of Nature, jointly vouchsafed to man. The centripetal principle of self-preservation which pervades every atom of the universe, the great globe itself, with every thing that lives and moves upon it, is not more universal than is the desire to know, in every being that has the power to know. This is the soul of the soul of man, — the energizing principle, which stimulates into action his whole sensitive, perceptive and reflective powers ; and were it our duty to collect and classify the criteria by which to appreciate the intellectual capacity of an individual, we would give to his desire of knowledge an eminent rank among the evidences of his ability to acquire it. To direct into proper channels, and to control within rational limits, the desire of knowledge, have always been paramount objects in every government, human and divine, which has legislated on the subject of education, or sought the rational happiness of man. Indeed, the Divine Father of our race, in the first constitution given to man, sus- pended his destiny on the proper direction and government of this desire. He was pleased to test the loyalty of his children by imposing a restraint, not so much upon their animal appetites as upon their desire to know. The God of reason hereby intimates to all intelli- gences, that the power to control this master passion is the infallible index of man's power of seK-government in every thing else. How wisely and how kindly, then, did he denominate the forbidden tree, " the tree of knowledge of good and evil" ! And perhaps it is just at this point, and from this view of the subject, that we acquire our best conceptions of the reason of high intelligences — of the fall of that 96 IS MORAL PHILOSOPHY mighty spirit whose desire to know, transcended the law of his being and the object of those sublime endowments bestowed upon him. That he was experimentally acquainted with this paramount desire of rational nature, is obvious from the policy of the temptation which he offered. Its point was lo stimulate, not the animal, but the intellectual appetite of our mother Eve, by dogmatically affirming that God forbade the fruit, because he knew that if they should eat it, they would be as gods, knowing both good and evil." But while it appears most probable that all intelligences, angelic and human, embodied and disembodied, are superlatively fallible and vulnerable in this one point, and that their catastrophe was so far, at least, homogeneous, as to afford plausible ground of inference that the not holding or employing any power bestowed upon us in abeyance to the will of the donor, is the radical sin of our nature, and the prolific fountain of all the follies and misfortunes of man ; still the desire of knowledge is one of the kindest and noblest instincts and impulses of our nature. "Without it, the power to know would have been com- paratively, if not altogether, useless to man. The physical wants of the infant do not more naturally nor neces- sarily prompt his first animal exertions to find relief, than does this innate principle, this natural desire of knowledge, urge the mind into the pursuit of new ideas. The ineffable pleasure of the first concep- tion only invites to a second effort ; and success in that, stimulates to a third; and so on, in increasing ratios, till the full-grown man, on his full-fledged wings of intellectual maturity, soars aloft, as the eagle from the mountain-top, in quest of new and greater discoveries. And never did the miser's love of gold bear a more direct proportion to his success in accumulating it, than does the desire of knowledge in the bosom of the successful aspirant after new ideas keep pace with his intellectual attainments. This again suggests to us a good reason for the variety and immen- sity of creation. Man needs such a universe as this, and the universe needs such a being as man, not merely as a component part, but as the worthy guest of it. Every thing that exists is to be enjoyed by a being who has the power of understanding and admiring it. Now, as the human power to know and to enjoy is naturally cumulative and progressive, the objects to be known and enjoyed must be proportion- ably vast and illimitable. And here again arises a new proof of design and adaptation in this grand and eloquent universe of God. For it is not only in the infinitude and variety of its parts — in its physical, intel- lectual and moral dimensions ; but in the immeasurable aggregate of AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? 97 its provisions, as respects variety, extent and duration, that it is so adapted to the human constitution — to this unquenchable thirst for knowledge — this eternally increasing intellectual power of knowing and enjoying, bestowed on our rational and moral nature. In all the language of celestial or terrestrial beings, there is no word of more comprehensive and transcendent import than the term uni- verse. In its mighty grasp, in its boundless extent, it embraces Creator and creature — all past, all present, all future existences within the revolving circles of time, and the endless ages of eternity. Our finite minds, indeed, with all their gigantic powers of acquisition, cannot compass infinite ideas, but they can divide and subdivide the mighty whole into such small parts and parcels as come within their easy management. We have, therefore, divided the universe into innume- rable solar systems spread over fields of space so immense as to make imagination herself flag in her most vigorous efforts to survey them. These systems we have again divided into planets, primary and secondary; and these again into various kingdoms — mineral, vegetable, animal, intellectual. These we have further distributed into genera, species and individuals, until a single individual becomes a distinct theme of contemplation. Even that we often find an object too large for our feeble efforts, and set about separating an individual existence into the primary elements of its nature, the attributes, modes and cir- cumstances of its being, before it comes within the easy grasp of a special operation of our minds. But the feast of the mind, the joy of the banquet, is not found in these distributions and classifications of things, but in viewing every organ and atom of every creature in reference to itself, and to the creature of which it is a part ; then that creature as related to other creatures of its own species and genera; and these again in reference to other ranks and orders belonging to the particular world of which they are atoms ; and that world itself as connected with others ; and then aU as related to the Supreme Intelligence, the fountain and source of all that is wise, and great, and good, and beautiful and lovely — the Parent of all being and of all joy ; and thus to look through universal nature, and her ten thousand portals and avenues, up to nature's uncreated and unoriginated Author. It is, indeed, a sublime and glorious truth that this to us unsearch- able and incomprehensible universe can all be converted into an infinite and eternal fountain of joy, an inexhaustible source of pure and perennial bliss, commensurate with the whole capacity of man. But this, to us, is yet in the boundless future, and must depend upon 7 98 IS MORAL PHILOSOPHY the proper direction given to our desires and pursuits in the contem- plation and study of the universe. The fields of science are innume- rable. But few of them have ever passed under the observation of our greatest masters. Not one of them is yet understood. The whole universe, indeed, is yet to be studied ; and with such care and attention that the worlds, and systems of worlds — of ideas within us, shall exactly correspond to the worlds and systems of worlds without us. As exactly as the image in the mirror resembles the face before it, so must the ideas within us correspond to the things without us, before we can be said to understand them. What ages, then, must pass over man, before the single system to which he now belongs shall have stamped the exact image upon his soul, and left as many sciences within him as there are things cognate and homogeneous without him ! Before this begins to be accomplished, the seven sciences of the ancients will not only have multiplied into the seventy times seven of the modems, but into multitudes that would bankrupt the whole science of numbers to compute. If Socrates, the great master of Grecian philosophy, could only boast that he had attained so much knowledge of the universe as to be confident that he knew nothing about it — comprehended no part of it — how much of that science of ignorance ought we to possess, to whom so many fountains of intelligence have been opened from which the sage of Athens was debarred I But as there is nothing isolated or independent in all the dominions of God, so there cannot be an isolated or detached science in any mind, save that in which the original archetypes of all things were arranged before one of them was called into existence. And this is now, and always has been, the insuperable obstacle to the perfect comprehension of any one science, the basis of which is in the realms of mind or matter. Still the desire to know rises with the consciousness of our ignorance, and even of our present inability, and we promise ourselves a day of grace in which we shall not only know in part, and prophesy in part, but shall see clearly, comprehend fully and know as we are known. Till then we must be content to study the primer of Nature and learn the elements of things around us, as preparatory to our admission into the high-school of the universe. Indeed, the greatest genius, the most gifted and learned in all human science, rises but to the portico of that school, the vestibule of that temple, in which the true science of true bliss is practically taught, and rationally com- municated to man. There is one science, however, in which it is possible to make great AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? 99 proficiency in this life, and which, of all the sciences, is the most popular, and withal the least understood. It has been a favorite in all the schools of the ancients, and of the moderns, but has never been successfully taught by Grecian, Roman, Indian or Egyptian phi- losophy. It is, indeed, neither more nor less than the science of happiness — than the philosophy of bliss. But some of you will im- mediately ask, ''Where shall that science be found? In what temple does she deign to dwell ? By what rites are her ears to be propitiated to our prayers ? And by what less ambiguous name shall she be called?" To introduce her, without proper ceremonies, to your acquaintance, would be as impolitic on my part as it would be perplexing to my inventive powers to find for her a pleasing and familiar name. But, in the absence of such a designation, I will state the five points of which she treats. Whether it is because we have only five senses, five fingers on each hand, or because there are five points in Calvinism, and as many in Arminianism, that this divine science has only five points, I leave it to more learned doctors and sages than your humble servant to decide. But so it is : she has five points peculiarly her own, which no other science in the universe has ever been able to develop with either certainty or satisfaction to any man. These five points are — the origin, the nature, the relations, the obligations and the destiny of man. Many, indeed, of the teachers, admirers and votaries of a science sometimes called ''moral philosophy," as taught by the ancients and by the moderns, have, with a zeal and devotion truly admirable, and worthy of a better cause, inculcated upon the youth of past and present times the sufficiency of human reason, or of human philosophy, to clear up all doubts and uncertainty upon every subject connected with man's relations and responsibilities to the universe. That there are sciences physical, mental and moral, truly and properly so called, I doubt not ; but that the science sometimes called "moral philosophy," which professes, from the mere light of nature, to ascertain and establish — indeed, to originate and set forth — the origin, nature, relations, obligations and destiny of man — is a true Bcience of the inductive order, founded upon facts, upon observation and experiment, and not upon assumption, plagiarism, imagination, I cannot admit. If, then, we cannot set forth the science of happiness, nor find for it, at this time, an appropriate name ; we shall attempt to expose, in part at least, the fallacy and imposition of all human science (especially of moral philosophy, which in this particular arrogates to 100 IS MORAL PHILOSOPHY itself more than every other science) in attempting to settle or develop any one of these five points with any degree of certainty, authority or evidence, either salutary or satisfactory to any man of sense. This is neither the time nor the place for mere definitions, meta- physical arguments, nor for abstract reasonings. A definition or two we may have occasion to ofier; but we shall rely much more upon a safer and more palpable evidence in demonstrating the perfect impo- tency of philosophy and human reason, however cultivated, possessing only the mere light of nature, to decide and enforce any one of these five cardinal points. It will, I presume, be conceded by all persons of education and good sense, that human happiness demands the full enjoyment of all our powers and capacities, in harmony with all our relations and obliga- tions to the creation of which we are a part, and that a knowledge of those relations and obligations is essential to the fulfilment and enjoy- ment of them; consequently there is a very great intimacy between the knowledge of these points and the philosophy of bliss. It. will also be conceded that the knowledge of our obligations and relations presupposes a knowledge of our origin and destiny; and, therefore, whatever system of reasoning, whatever science, fails to reveal these, cannot possibly develop those. These things premised, I hasten to show, that while moral philosophy proposes to do all this, she has never done it in any one instance — her greatest masters and most eloquent and powerful pleaders being accepted as credible testi- mony in the case. That moral philosophy assumes to teach man his obligations and relations to Creator and creatures, and to make him virtuous and happy, is first to be proved. Whose testimony, then, shall we hear ? That of the greatest of Roman philosophers — the most learned of her scholars — the most profound of her reasoners— the most eloquent of her orators — the most accomplished of her citizens — the unrivalled Cicero ? He was, indeed, an honor to human nature ; and, without exaggeration, in my opinion, the greatest man Pagan Rome ever pro- duced. Many a fine encomium on philosophy may be gleaned from his numerous writings ; but a few sentences will suffice to imprint his views on every mind. Philosophy," says he, ''is the culture of the mind that plucketh up vice by the roots — the medicine of the soul that healeth the minds of men. From philosophy we may draw all proper helps and assistance for leading virtuous and happy lives. The cor- rection of all our vices and sins is to be sought for from philosophy. AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? 101 0 Philosophy!" adds he, ''the guide of life — the searcher out of virtue and the expeller of vice, what would we be, nay, what would be the life of man, without thee ! Thou wast the inventress of laws, the mistress of morals, the teacher of discipline ! For thee we plead — from thee we beg assistance. One day spent according to thy precepts is preferable to an immortality spent in sin."* So spake the gigantic Roman, standing on the shoulders of the more gigantic Greek phi- losophers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and a hundred others of minor fame. We shall next hear the oracle of modern philosophers who filled the chair of Dugald Stewart, the greatest of metaphysicians. Philo- sophy," says he — quoting the most renowned of the stoics of Roman fame, the distinguished Seneca — ''Philosophy forms and fashions the soul, and gives to life its disposition and order, which points out what is our duty to do, and what is our duty to omit. It sits at the helm, and in a sea of peril directs the course of those who are wandering through the waves." "Such," says our model philosopher in American schools. Brown of Edinburgh, ''is the great practical object of all philosophy." "It comprehends," adds this standard author, ''the nature of our spiritual being, as displayed in all the phenomena of feeling and of thought — the ties which bind us to our fellow-men and to our Creator, and the prospect of that unfading existence, of which life is but the first dawning gleam." (Vol. i. ch. 14.) Such, then, are the pretensions of philosophy, mental and moral, in the esteem of Christian as well as in that of Pagan sages. I believe this to be the orthodox creed of all the popular schools in Britain and in America. Indeed, both Hartley and Paley might be quoted as going still further, in ascribing to moral philosophy an almost superior excellence in some points even to Revelation itself. But we need not such exaggerated views. The preceding will suffice for a text. We shall now look for the exemplification of the fruits of this boasted and boastful philosophy in the admissions, declarations and acts of its teachers, and in the lives and morality of its students and admirers. The witnesses to be heard in this case are the Grecian and Roman lawgivers and philosophers. We have not time to hear them depose singly and separately : we shall therefore examine them in companies. The Greek philosophy is all arranged in three lines ; as the learned, * See Cic. Tuscul. Disputations, lib. 2, caps. 4 and 5 ; lib. 3, cap. 3; lib. 4, cap. 88 j lib. 5, cap. 2 102 IS MOEAL PHILOSOPHY since and before the revival of literature, have conceded. These three great lines are the Ionic, the Italic and the Eleatic. The Ionic was founded by the great Thales of the Ionian Miletus ; the first natural philosopher and astronomer of Greece, who divided the year into three hundred and sixty-five days ; observed the diameter of the sun ; and foretold eclipses, about the middle of the sixth century before Christ. The Italic was founded by that great lawgiver and philosopher, Pytha- goras, who established a school in Italy a little after the middle of the fifth century before Christ. The Eleatic was founded by Leucippus and Parmenides, of Elae, early in the fifth century before Christ ; the chiefs of which may be alluded to in the sequel. These schools are all named from the country or place in which they were originally located. The Eleatic school was wholly atheistic, root and branch. Leu- cippus first taught the doctrine of atoms, afterwards adopted by the learned and facetious Democritus. While Heraclitus, the great Ephe- sian philosopher, wept over the follies of men, Democritus laughed at them, and taught that the universe was but the fortuitous concourse of atoms. The more refined and accomplished Epicurus speculated at great length upon the same theories, somewhat modified ; and each of these great names headed a sect of atheists, who, while they agreed in the essential doctrine, difi'ered in minor points. The essential doc- trines of all the sects of the Eleatic school were, that the world was made by the god Chance — a fortuitous concourse of atoms ; that it is governed by no intelligence, ruled by no governor and preserved by no providence. That the soul, if there be any, dies with the body ; consequently there is no future life. That there is neither virtue nor vice, moral good nor moral evil by nature, or any other law than that of custom and public utility. That pleasure is the chief good, and pain the greatest evil, to man. With the moral theories of this school other distinguished philoso- phers concurred, amongst whom Laertius ranks Theodorus, Archelaus and Aristippus, teaching that upon fit occasions (that is, when not likely to be detected) theft, sacrilege, and other enormities which we cannot name, might be committed, because nothing was by nature or of itself base, but by law and custom. I shall certainly be allowed to dismiss this school without further hearing, without a more formal proof that moral philosophy, in their hands, was not what our great moral philosophers, from Cicero down to Stewart and Brown of Scotch and American fame, have affirmed, viz. ''The guide of life, the stand- ard of ''artue, the path to happiness." AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? 103 We shall now hear the second school — the Italic. Pythagoras him- self, the great Grecian father of the Metempsychosis, and his distinguished pupil, the Locrian Timaeus, have opened the mysteries of this line in their leading differential attributes. This school believed in souls, and taught their immortality too. But curious souls they were, and un- enviable their immortality. " The soul of the world," said they, is an immortal soul, and human souls are but emanations from it; to which, after some ages of transmigrations, they return and are re- absorbed." This is a miniature of the darling peculiarity of Pytha- goreanism. These emanation souls were, by an insuperable necessity, to make the tour of some definite number of human bodies — clean and unclean ; and on their return to the anima mundi, to lose their indi- viduality and identity, and to be amalgamated with it. This soul of the world, moreover, was, by the god Necessity, compelled to change worlds. Hence a succession of new worlds and of new transmigrations of the soul of the world was to fill up the series of infinite ages. This was illustrated by a bottle of sea-water, well corked, tossing about in the tumults of the ocean until the cork decayed, or till the bottle dashed upon a rock. In either event its soul, or the water within, mingled with the water of the ocean, and so lost its identity ; yet it was as im- mortal as the ocean, because a part of it. If the illustration was good, the proof was better. This learned lawgiver and philosopher, blessed with a retentive memory, was able to prove his doctrine by narrating nis own various and numerous transmigrations, antecedent to the name and body of Pythagoras. His delighted followers heard of his curious and brilliant intrigues and singular freaks while his soul was taber- nacling in other mortal tenements. If any one can find reasons of morality or of piety, motives to virtue or sources of joy in this school, he must excel the ingenious Ovid himself, who had to amend it in one or two points to suit the licen- tiousness of his own poetry. If not elegantly, he is correctly trans- lated in the following lines, taken from his fifteenth book : — "0 you whom horrors of cold death affright, Why fear you Styx ? vain name ! and endless night, The dreams of poets, and feign'd miseries Of forged hell, whether last flames surprise Or age devour your bodies : they ne'er grieve. Nor suffer pain. Our souls forever live, Yet evermore their ancient houses leave To live in new, which them as guests receive." But need we ask, How can human souls enjoy or suffer any thing 104 IS MORAL PHILOSOPHY with a reference to the past, having first lost every feeling of persona, identity? This school, then, was as ineffectual a guide of life — as whimsical a standard of virtue — as fallacious a way of happiness, as the Eleatic. There yet remains another school — the Ionic school, more ancient, and therefore more orthodox, than either of the former two. Thales, its founder, was followed by Anaximander and Anaximenes : these were followed by Anaxagoras, the instructor of Pericles, and Archelaus, the alleged master of Socrates. These all, down to Socrates, devoted themselves to physics and not to morals ; therefore they are out of our premises. Not so Socrates : of him Cicero has said, He was the first to call philosophy from the heavens, to place it in cities, and to intro- duce it into private houses : that is, to teach public and private morals." He was, indeed, the first and the last of all the Grecian philosophers that wholly devoted himself to morals. Plato and Xenophon were his immediate pupils; Aristotle and Xenocrates theirs. The Ionic school, in its theological and moral departments, was now merged in the Socratic ; but that soon branched off into several sects — the Platonic, or old Academic; the Aristotelian, or Peripatetic ; the Stoic, founded by Zeno ; the middle Academy, by Arcesilaus; and the new Academy, by Carneades. Between these two last Academies there was no real nor permanent difference. If not in all their conclusions, they were, in all their modes of reasoning, skeptical. Their discriminating principles were, that nothing could be known," and that every thing was to he disputed/' consequently, nothing was to be assented to, said the absolute skeptic. ''No," said the Academics, " the probable, wherever you find it, must be assented to, but, till it be found, you are to doubt." And the misfortune was, they rarely or never found the probable ; and in effect the Academics and followers of Pyrrho, the absolute skeptic, were equally atheists all their lives. Meanwhile, as said the learned Bishop of Gloucester, " they talked perpetually of their verisimile and of their probabile, amidst a situation of absolute doubt, darkness and skepticism — like Sancho Panza of his island on the terra firmaT' Pyrrho dogmatically affirmed that ''no one opinion was more probable than another," and that there were no moral qualities or distinctions. Beauty and de- formity, virtue and vice, happiness and misery, had no real cause, but depended on comparison — in one word, that "all was relative." The lights of all Pagan philosophy are now reduced to the three sects of the Socratic school — the Platonic, the Peripatetic and the Stoic. If we find no surer, no clearer moral lights in these three, all AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? 105 Grecian, all Eoman philosophy is a varied and extended system of skepticism, so far as the origin, moral obligations and destiny of man are invplved. The Stoic, (for we shall take the last first,) so called, not from Zeno, their founder, nor from his city ; but from the painted porch in Athens, from which he promulged his doctrines, by another route arrived at the same goal with Epicurus. In their abstractions they discovered, I had almost said, that pain was pleasure ; at least, that pain was no evil. Epicurus taught that pleasure was the only good — Zeno, that virtue alone was bliss — Epicuras, that virtue was only valuable as the means of pleasure. Both agreed in demanding from their disciples an abso- lute command over their passions, and both supposed it practicable. They both boldly asserted that the philosophy which they taught was the only way to happiness ; and yet both agreed that there was no future state of happiness or misery, and equally justified self-murder. Could any evidence dissipate the delusion of the competency of philosophy to be either the standard of virtue or the guide of life, methinks it might be found in this best of Pagan schools. Amongst its brightest ornaments were Chrysippus, Cato of Utica, Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Antoninus the Pious. Plausible in many of their dogmata, prepossessing in their displays of certain virtues, fascinating in some of their theories, most ingenious in all their speculations, they breathed contempt both of pleasure and pain, commanded the extin- guishment of passion and appetite, eulogized temperance and self- government, and extolled the dignity of virtue and the rules of modesty and piety ; while themselves were addicted to vicious indul- gences, sensual pleasures, and even to gross intemperance itself. Zeno drank to excess, and killed himself rather than endure the pain of a broken finger; Chrysippus died of a surfeit of sacrificial wine; Cleanthus followed his example ; while Cato of Utica thrust the dagger into his own heart ; Epictetus gave to the human will a power almighty, above that of the gods themselves, and advised suicide in certain cases ; Seneca taught that no man ought to fear God — that a virtuous man equalled him in happiness; he justified the drunkenness of Cato, and plead for self-murder ; while many of them indulged in the grosser and more nameless vices of the Paoran world. Of none of the Stoics could as much in truth be said as Cowley says of Epicurus : — *' His life he to his doctrine brought. And in a garden's shade that sovereign pleasure sought ; Whoever a true Epicure would be Maj there find cheap and virtuous luxury." 106 IS MORAL PHILOSOPHY The Peripatetic school, so denominated from the peripaton, or walk of the Lyceum in which Aristotle taught his philosophy, next claims our attention. With the moral part of his theory our demonstration lies. Aristotle, then, with all his prodigious parts, great erudition and various and profound studies, was a polytheist. He asserted the eternity of the world both in matter and form. He, indeed, held a supreme abstract Intelligence, which he called the Supreme God — pretty much the anima mundi of Pythagoras. This Supreme God was the life and soul of all the gods inferior ; for all the stars were, with him, true and eternal gods. He denied that Providence ever stooped beneath the moon, and, consequently, superintended not human affairs. His moral sentiments and theories, as a matter of course, corresponded with his theological views. He not only approved but prescribed the exposing and destroying of weak and sickly children. He encouraged revenge. Vacillating in all his theories of the soul, he doubted at one time its future existence, and finally concludes the ninth chapter of his third book of Ethics with these words : Death is the most dreadful of all things ; for that is the end of our existence : for to him that is dead there seems nothing further to remain, whether good or evil." Dic^earchus, one of his most learned followers, whom Cicero extols, wrote books to prove that souls are mortal ; and many of his followers compared the soul to the harmony of a musical instru- ment, which has no existsnce when the instrument is destroyed. The Platonic school, or the old Academic, is not much better than the Peripatetic. Plato is designedly obscure in aU his speculations on divinity. He affirms one Supreme God, but he had no concern in the creation or government of the world, and recommended the people to worship a plurality of inferior deities. He extols the oracles, and advises the consultation of them in all matters of religion and worship. He prescribed great licentiousness of manners ; allows, and sometimes commands, the exposing and destroying of children. He declares that OD proper occasions lying is not only profitable, but lawful. He argues the immortality of the soul, and speaks of the rewards and punish- ments of a future Ufe. He sometimes, however, equivocates on this subject, and seems to believe in the transmigration of souls ; while again he will have the soul immortal from a necessity of nature, oi from an antecedent immortality. He taught the Greeks to love them- selves and hate the barbarians as enemies ; by which term he denoted all other nations. But yet there remains Socrates himself, the father of the Greek moral philosoplv. Though not followed in the best part of his specu- AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? 107 lations by even his own Plato, who, nevertheless, with the exception of Xenophon in some points, followed him more closely than any other disciple of the Socratic school, he clearly asserted and boldly taught one God, the immortality of the soul and future retributions. Paradoxical, however, though it be, he did not fully believe the doc- trine which he taught. Sometimes he believed it; at other, times, his reasonings not fully proving it, he seems to doubt it. He appears, indeed, to have died a skeptic. He both taught and practised poly- theism, and amongst his last words ordered a sacrifice to the god of physic. As Plato represents him in his Phcedon, the more nearly he ap- proached death, the more he doubted his own doctrine. To his sur- rounding friends he says, " I hope that I shall go to good men after death; but this I will not absolutely affirm." But as to his going to - the gods he is positive. ''If," says he, ''I could affirm any thing concerning matters of such a nature, I would affirm this." Again, "That these things are so, as I have represented them, it does not become any man of understanding to affirm ; though, if it appear that the soul is immortal, it seems reasonable to think that either such things, or something like them, are true with regard to our souls and their habitations after death ; and that it is worth making a trial, for the trial is noble." To his judges he says, " There is much ground to hope that death is good ; for it must necessarily be one of the two : either the dead man is nothing, and hath not a sense of any thing, or it is only a change or migration of the soul hence to another place — according to what we are told " — Kara ro Xeyo/ieva. Finally, he says, "Those who live there are both in other respects * happier than we, and also in this, that ever after they are immortal." If the things which are told us are true, Eenep ra Xeyofieva aXede tartv. Such are the triumphs of philosophy. Such is its power to guide the life, the piety, the morality, the destiny of man. But we are about still further to despoil it of the little light that it has, and divest it of all its glory, even in the points in which the throe mightiest of Grecian philosophers — Socrates, Plato and Aristotle — most deserve and have most enjoyed the admiration of the world. Eemember the last words of Socrates — ^^If, indeed, the things that have been told us are true'' Who, then, will have the temerity to affirm that moral philosophy is a true science ; that it builds upon its own foundation and uses only its own materials ; while its father and 108 IS MORAL PHILOSOPHY founder at last shifts it off the basis of reason and its own researches, and seeks for a foundation in the traditions of former times ? Tradition, then, and not induction, originated in the minds of the Socratic school all the light of the origin, moral obligations and destiny of man, which this school and the Grecian and the Roman world from it enjoyed. The history of the whole matter is this : — The Romans borrowed from the Greeks, the Greeks stole from the Egyptians and Phenicians, while they borrowed from the Chaldeans and Assyrians, who stole from the Abrahamic family all their notions of the spirituality, eternity and unity of God, the primitive state of man, his fall, sacrifice, priests, altars, immortality of the soul, a future state, eternal judgment and the ultimate retribution of all men according to their works. We might, indeed, pursue the same course in reference to the Per- sians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the ancient Gauls, and trace all the light in them to the same common origin. The Indians, Egyptians, Phenicians, Greeks, Romans, made very great advances in geometry, astronomy, natural history, philosophy, language, politics, oratory, and the fine arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry and music. But in the points before us they degene- rated into superstition, mythology, licentiousness and barbarity. As we examine and compare all the systems of moral philosophy and theology, ascending the streams of antiquity we find the Druids among the Gauls, the Magi among the Persians, the Brahmins among the Indians, the philosophers among the Greeks and Romans, all borrow- ing from one original and universal tradition. The writings of Con- fucius and Zoroaster, of Borosus and Sanchoniathon, and every ancient monument which has escaped the wreck of time, bear inscribed upon them the same unequivocal testimony. Thus the lawgivers, philosophers and sages of Greece travelled into Egypt and the East in quest of knowledge. Amongst the Grecian lawgivers and sages who visited this ancient and celebrated country in search of new ideas, were Orpheus, Rhadamanthus, Minos, Lycaon, Triptolemus, Solon, Pythagoras, Plato, &c. ; by whom the Greeks, as generally acknowledged by themselves, imported from Egypt their theology, philosophy and learning. Philosophy, or human reason, as may appear in the sequel, is very inadequate to the discovery of ideas on any of the great points involved in _ the origin, obligations and destiny of man. Hence, sensible and learned men of former times and of the present day assign to traditwn or revelation, har-^ed down orally, and neither to natural religion" AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? 109 nor moral philosophy, all knowledge upon these subjects. Great and learned names may be found in abundance, to sanction the conclusion to which we are forced to come, from the facts now standing in our horizon. These will say, with the distinguished Puffendorf, in his Law of Nations,* ''It is very probable that God himself taught the first men the chief heads of natural laws, which were preserved and spread abroad by means of education and custom." ''Nature," says Plutarch, in his treatise on Education, " nature without learning or instruction is a blind thing." ''Vice can have access to the soul by many parts of the body; but virtue can lay hold of a young man only by his ears." And "Man," says Plato, "if not properly educated, is the wildest and most untractable of all earthly animals." And, declare a host of close observers, " No man has ever been found possessed of a spiritual con- ception by the mere exercise of his own powers." But, to complete our premises, two things are yet wanting — a just view of tradition, and of the comparative claims of reason and faith as faculties or powers of acquiring knowledge of the highest and most important character. On these we have time for but a few remarks. And, first, of tradition as the first and chief source of knowledge to man. Before an efi'ort to sketch the history of ancient tradition, we must define the term. According to Milton — a name of high renown — "tra- dition is any thing delivered orally from age to age." But, in its more enlarged signification, it denotes any thing — fact, event, opinion — handed down to us, whether by word or writing. Still, the ancient traditions being accounts of things delivered from mouth to mouth, without written memorials, while speaking of them I shall use the term as defined by Milton — Things delivered orally from age to age. Few of us have paid much attention either to the nature or the amount of that knowledge possessed in the remotest ages of the world, or to the safe and direct manner by which it was communicated from one generation to another. It was a true and practical knowledge of those five elements which was essential to the science of happiness. On no one of these points did mun, could man, begin to speculate or philosophize till tradition was corrupted by fable, and men began to doubt. Hence the era of philosophy, mental and moral, was the era of skepticism. For, in the name of reason, why should a man institute a demonstration a priori or a posteriori to ascertain a fact for whic}i he had direct, positive and unequivocal evidence ? * Vol. ii. chap. iii. sect. 20 110 IS MORAL PHILOSOPHY That the first man never was an infant, reason and philosophy are compelled to admit; and that he was spoken to before he spoke, and that by a superior Being, are postulates which will be no sooner de- manded than conceded by every man having any pretensions to science or reason. Of course, then, the adult Adam received knowledge orally from its fountain — ^knowledge of his origin, nature, relations, obliga- tions and destiny. If he did not fully comprehend each or all of these, he could not possibly be ignorant of any one of them. He lived for nine hundred and thirty years, an adult life all the time ; and cer- tainly was the oracle of the world for the first thousand years of its history. But there were two witnesses from the beginning; and two wit- nesses most credible, becaiise every feeling of human nature compelled Adam and Eve to give a true history of their experience to their own children. Methuselah, who lived to the age of nine hundred and sixty-nine — the very year of the deluge — conversed with Adam for two hundred and forty- three years ; and with Shem, the son of Noah, for almost one hundred years. Thus, not only all the experience, all the acquisitions, of these two great and learned sages, (for great and learned they truly were,) but all the science of the antediluvian world was carried down to Shem by the lips of one man. Now, as Shem lived five hundred years after the flood, he must have been the greatest of moral oracles that ever lived. All antiquity, from Adam to himself, came to his ears by one man, corroborated too by the concurrent testi- mony of many others. The amount and variety of knowledge which Methuselah possessed and communicated would, without much reflection, be almost incredible to any one who has not closely looked into the fragments of sacred history which are extant at this hour. Besides, their knowledge of geology, astronomy, natural history, chronology and general physics was much more extensive than we imagine. Enoch, the father of Methuselah — the most enlightened and perfect man that lived during the first two thousand years of human history- was a most gifted teacher of the science of morals. He taught a future judgment, the co7ning of the Lord, with ten thousand of his saints, to punish the wicked ; and, in his translation to heaven — body, soul and spirit — forty-four years before Seth, the immediate son of Adam, died, gave an exemplification of the immortality of the saints to all his con- temporaries and to posterity through all generations. At the time of his translation, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Methuselah and Lamech were all of mature age and reason; so that all the generations AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? Ill between Adam and Noah had the advantage oi the doctrine, manner of life and translation of Enoch. The origin of the universe and of man — his nature, relations, obligations and destiny — were, therefore, matters of fact or direct testimony amongst the antediluvians, and faithfully communicated from the mouth of one individual, corrobo- rated by many concurrent witnesses, into the ears of Shem. Shem, too, became an oracle of the postdiluvians for five hundred years; spending one hundred and fifty years of his life with Abraham, and fifty with Isaac, his son. Thus the entire experience of Adam came to Shem through one individual, and passed through him to Isaac; so that from the tongue of Methuselah the words of Adam fell upon the ears of Shem, and from the tongue of Shem may have fallen upon the ears of Abraham and Isaac. The vast knowledge of ten antediluvian generations, with the sub- sequent details of four hundred years — a period of two thousand one hundred and fifty-six years — is transferred to Isaac through two persons. But, while I thus speak of two persons, I would not be understood as making them the sole depositaries of all the learning and knowledge of twenty generations of men. In keeping the chronicles of the world, Adam was aided eight hundred years by his son Seth ; almost seven hundred by his grandson Enos ; six hundred by Cainan ; five hundred by Mahalaleel; four hundred by Jared; three hundred by Enoch; two hundred by Methuselah; and sixty-four by Lamech, the father of Noah and grandfather of Shem. Shem, also, after the deluge, was aided by ten generations of men with whom he conversed ; for, of the twenty generations of our Lord's ancestors whose history he could give, he had seen with his own eyes twelve. How vast and varied, then, were the stores of tradition and of personal experience pos- sessed by this most learned of all the sages of mankind ! A fit person, indeed, in the character of the King of Salem and priest of the Most High God, to bless the patriarch Abraham, the holder of the promises. But, to trace the history of tradition down to Moses : Isaac, it will be remembered, lived long enough with Shem to have learned it all from him. He also conversed not only with Jacob, but for more than fifty years with Levi. Levi told the story to his son Kohath ; Kohath told it to his son Amram ; and Amram to his son Moses. So that aU ancient knowledge reached Moses from Adam down to his. own times — a period of two thousand four hundred and thirty-three years — by only six persons. 112 IS MORAL PHILOSOPHY Meanwhile, the knowledge of the true and only God and of these cardinal points was in Egypt, from other sources of tradition, when Abraham first reached it. Other branches of the human family beside? that of Shem took notes of facts and events. And we know that all the knowledge of Shem, communicated to Jacob, Joseph and Levi, went down into Egypt with these persons as early as the year of the world 2298. Now, we learn from profane history that Cadmus, with his Pheni- cian colony, founded Thebes, and Cecrops and Danaus, with their Egyptian relations, founded Athens and Argos, about the time of Moses. Carrying with them the science and learning of Egypt into these new states, we can easily discover how the knowledge of the East came into Europe, and how the traditionary revelation in Abra- ham's family bf^i^^Lrne a common fountain of knowledge to the whole human race. With regard to the correctness and authority of these traditions, moderns generally entertain very erroneous conceptions. We suppose them to be of no higher authority than many of the legendary tales of more modern times. But this is owing to our want of a little philo- sophy, and to our confounding the character of the traditions after the confusion of speech and the dispersion of mankind with those which existed while the world was all of one language and of one speech. Could we place ourselves among the antediluvians while all mankind spoke one language, and then among the postdiluvians after the con- fusion of speech, the contraction of human life and the wide dispersion of mankind over the earth, we should find some data by which to appreciate the all-important difference between the ancient and the most ancient traditions. Can any one, the least acquainted with human nature, possessing a little of the philosophy of himself, imagine that Adam and Eve would not freely communicate to every son and daughter, to the tenth gene- ration, who visited them, all they had orally learned from their Creator, or by subsequent revelation, on the three great questions which human reason and haman philosophy frankly confess they cannot answer, viz. What am I? Whence came I? and Whither do I go? Would not the venerable pair most cheerfully and faithfully narrate their experience to their own offspring — give a clear and full record of the past — and intimate all their anticipations of the future? With what thrilling iu^erest would they detail the incidents of the patriarchal state, and the sad series of events accompanying and subsequent to their eventful catastrophe ! AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? 113 Or can any one suppose that during the latter centuries of this chief patriarch, when his progeny had grown up into nations, multitudes of the most virtuous of them, even from the remotest settlements, would not continually visit him as an oracle, and learn from his own lips the whole history of time, the origin of the race, and the antiquities of nature herself? "Who of us moderns would not make a pilgrimage half round the globe to see the first man ; to look in the face and to hear the voice of the great prototype of humanity; and to listen to his narration, not only of what he had seen and heard of the Creator himself, or learned in latter days of his works and will; but to hear him relate his con- ceptions and ecstasies when first the breath of life swelled the purple current in his veins — when wonder, love and praise struggled within him for utterance, while he gazed upon the Father of his spirit, and the new-born glories of a universe smiling upon him with brighter beams of joy and bliss than ever the rapt vision of the most inspired of human bards has yet conceived ! I say, who of us would not have curiosity enough to encounter toils and dangers of the first magnitude, to have it to tell to our children that we had seen and heard the unborn man — the father of a world — the origin of mankind — and his divinely formed wife, an after-creation from himself — the mother of all the loveliness and beauty, of all the grace and excellency, of all the intelligence and taste, of all the deli- cacy and sensibility which have adorned the untold millions of her de- ceased and living daughters ! We have only to bring the matter home to ourselves to be assured that the whole history of the first nine centuries, which had in it the elements not only of society, but of religion, morality and all natural science, so far as Adam was concerned, (and no man's experience ever equalled his,) would have been told by him ten thousand times, and as often repeated by his faithful sons and daughters. This would also be true of Shem and of his wife, who stood in a similar relation to the postdiluvian world. They had to tell not only what they had heard from Methuselah, Lamech, and a thousand others of the eld world, but had the marvellous record of the deluge, by which a world was lost, and a new order of things begun. Now, can there be any thing more obvious than that narrations so often delivered by the same persons, should be engraved upon their memories with the clearness and fidelity of words deep cut in marble, or engraved on plates of brass ? No translations or spurious readings could vitiate o' corrupt that text, written on the tablets of hale and 8 114 IS MOBAL PHILOSOPHY undegenerate memories, and kept as within the ark of the covenant, in the sanctum sanctorum of their hearts. We need no oracle to declare or to decide, that men walked by faith before philosophy, or that there was no place for speculation or hypo- thesis during the first two thousand years of time ; for who could have been so crazy as to state a hypothesis about the origin or nature, the relations or obligations of man, or about the origin of the universe, while Adam lived ! or about the deluge or antediluvian state of our planet, while Noah, Shem or Japheth yet lived ! Such a speculator would have been laughed out of society, and excommunicated from the habitations of the sane and rational of mankind. Some of the events of the first age of the world were, moreover, of such a nature as to attract extraordinary attention ; to occasion more reflection and elicit more light than we can now fully appreciate. The martyrdom of Abel, the death of Adam and the translation of Enoch were of this class. Hence many conversations on the questions. Whither went Enoch? What came of Abel? Why was he slain? Where now is Adam ? Of what use is an altar, a priest, a victim ? Why count time by weeks ? What means the promised seed ? What means the threatened bruising of the serpent's head ? &c. &c. Among the faithful line of the ancestry of our Lord these were topics familiar and often discussed. Hitherto we have spoken of but one line of tradition — that which has given all true light, civilization and refinement to human nature. But there was, and still is, another line, whence came hypothetical philosophy, ignorance and barbarity. Cain was the head of this line. Of him it is said, that after he had slain his brother Abel he went out from the presence of the Lord, or from the dwellings of the righteous, and east of Eden settled in the land of Nod. His line is heard through his descendants, Enoch, Jared, Mehujael, Methusael, Lamech, and his sons Jabal, and Jubal, and Tubal-Cain, seven generations. Cain founded the first city on earth, called after his son, the city of Enoch. Having gone away from the presence of the Lord, and busied himself in worldly employments to drown reflection, and his descendants all following his example, it is not likely that he would often visit the paternal dwelling. The blood of Abel still haunted him, and rendered him in fact a fugitive and vagabond on the earth. His descendants also gave themselves up to animal and temporal pursuits, and became distinguished for their inventions in tent-building, musical instruments, m brazen and iron implements and weapons, and for introducing polygamy and war. AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? 115 The destiny of man is never a pleasant theme to such spirits ; and as guilt is the natural parent of fear and the immediate progenitor of a refuge of lies and hatred of the light, such persons would be at more pains to vitiate the ancient traditions than to preserve them pure and incorrupt. Intermarrying with these on the part of the other line, superinduced the deluge. ' After that catastrophe, either through the wives of Ham and Japheth, or from the inherited depravity and corruption of the old world, they again apostatized from G-od. Ham immediately dishonored himself, and brought upon his family a paternal and prophetic malediction. Japheth, too, removed from the residence of his father; and in their wanderings, and subsequently in the confusion and wide dispersion of their offspring, they lost their veneration for the paternal customs and traditions concerning their relations, moral obligations and destiny. Among them the truth began to be mixed up with fable, and so meta- morphosed that it lost all its redeeming influence upon these two branches of the family of Noah. The posterity of Japheth, called by the Greeks Japetus, comprehended the ancient Cimbrians, Phrygians, Scythians, Medes, Persians, Mace- donians, Iberians, Greeks, Romans — indeed, all the ancient European and northern tribes of Asia, and probably some of the American tribes ; while the posterity of Ham peopled some- portions of Arabia, all Egypt and Canaan, Seba, Shebah, Shinar, much of Africa, and some parts of Asia. Among these, fable, mythology and hypothesis began. Oral tradition, much corrupted indeed, continued amongst them till the time of Hesiod, Homer, and, I might say, to the time of Pherecydes of Scyros, the preceptor of Pythagoras — himself the pupil of Pittacus and the oldest of the G-reek prose writers. But as the history of the Greeks . consisted of oral and incoherent traditions, kept for thirteen centuries I before they had a written history of themselves, little or nothing I certain can be known of them, except their original extraction and I their plagiarisms on Egypt and the posterity of Shem; for, of all ; people that ever lived, the Greeks were the greatest literary thieves, and had the best art of concealing the theft. The word philosophy, and the profession of philosopher, began with Pythagoras, when tradition was involved in doubt owing to the causes already mentioned — the contraction of human life to seventy or eighty years, the confusion of human speech, the multiplications and wide dispersion of nations, and especially the gigantic iniquity, violence I and crime which almost universally prevailed. Polytheism, mythology, I 116 IS MORAL PHILOSOPHY liypothesis, skepticism and licentious manners, were the legitimate fruits of departing from the sacred traditions truly and faithfully kept in the line of Seth, Enoch, Noah and Shem, down to Moses, the divine historian and lawgiver of the Jews. Thus far the history of the most ancient traditions is placed in con- trast with the pretensions of hypothetical philosophy. It remains for us to cast a glance upon two or three points in the human constitution, to ascertain whether man was made to be led by philosophy or tradition in matters pertaining to the science of happiness : for certain it is, if man was not made to be led by philosophy, in vain she pretends to be his guide. The question now before us is, How is man constituted as respects the faculty of acquiring knowledge? or with what powers of knowing the universe is he endowed ? for, as before observed, the universe must be known before it can be enjoyed. I ask not what are his powers of retaining knowledge, nor what are his powers of applying or of enjoying knowledge; but what are his powers of acquiring it? With the most liberal philosophers they are four — Instinct, Sense, Reason, Faith. Some philosophers, indeed, are not so generous; none, how- ever, give him more ; and we are willing that he should appear with all his armor on — with all his intellectual apparatus in full requisition, that we may demonstrate that he was made to be led, pre-eminently and supremely, by a power that despoils speculative philosophy of all its proud assumptions, and gives to tradition, in its broadest and fullest sense, a very elevated standing amongst the sources of intelligence accessible to man. Let us then briefly survey these powers. Instinct has never been definitely and satisfactorily explained by any man. The theories on the subject are innumerable, but speculation and inquiry are as rife as ever. Nothing is decided except that it is a law or rule of life con- ferred by the Creator on every animated existence, animal or vegetable, by which such acts are performed as are essential to its existence and well-being. But it is of a much higher order in the animal than in the vegetable kingdom, and in some animals it appears to be so nearly assimilated a^nd related to intelligence as to be with difficulty dis- tinguished from it. It is, however, very different from sensation and reason ; for it is found to exist where there is neither of them. In reference to my object, it is enough to say, that by instinct we mean that innate or natural rule of life, which God has written upon and incorporated with the nature of every animal; by which it is enabled to govern itself, in order to the full enjoyment of all its powers AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? 117 and susceptibilities, and so much of the universe as is suited to its nature. So far it is a perfect and infallible rule of life to it, in all that respects its nature and the end of its existence. It may be impaired by physical disease ; it may also be deteriorated, but it cannot be im- proved by education. It is as perfect the first as the last hour of animal or vegetable existence. It gains nothing by experience or obser- vation : hence the swallow builds her nest, the beaver his dam, the bee its cell, and the ant her cities and storehouses, as they were wont to do six thousand years ago. Now, man has little or no instinct; and, in this point, is more neglected by his Creator than any other creature ; and would, indeed, perish from the earth the first day of his existence, if left to the guidance of all his instinctive powers — an evident proof that he was not made to be led by it, as the law of his animal, intellectual or moral existence. By sense we mean those external organs, usually denominated the five senses, through which we become acquainted with the sensible pro- perties of all the objects around us. In this endowment man is not singular. All terrestrial beings of much importance to man have as many senses as he has. And if, in some of his senses, he is superior to some of them, in others, some of them are greatly superior to him. But he has intellect — he has reason ; and this greatly compensates for those inferiorities ; and yet there are many creatures that seem to possess it in some good degree : still it is man's great perfection, by which he rises far above the beasts that perish. Some philosophers have almost deified reason, and given to it a creative and originating power. They have so eulogized the light of reason and the light of nature, that one would imagine reason to be a sun, rather than an eye ; a revelation, rather than the power of apprehending and enjoying it. But when accurately defined, it is only a power bestowed on man, of comparing things, and propositions concerning things, and of deducing propositions from them. It is the faculty of discriminating one name, or thing, or attribute from another, and of forming just conceptions of it. It is not, then, a creative power. It cannot make something out of nothing. It is to the soul what the eye is to the body. It is not light, but the power of perceiving and using it. And as the eye with- out light, so reason without tradition or revelation would be useless to man in all the great points which the inductive and true philosophy of nature and of fact humbly acknowledges she cannot teach. She modestly avows her inability to unfold, or even to ascertain the origin, nature or end of any thing. Her verdict in the case before us is, that 118 IS MORAL PHILOSOPHY he who presumes to walk by the light of reason in these great matters is not more eminently insane, than he who assumes to walk by his eyes in the midst of utter darkness. But the ennobling faculty of man is faith. This puts him in posses- sion of the experience of all other men by believing their testimony. Instinct, sense and reason, however enlarged in their operations, are confined to a single individual of the race, and that within a very narrow circle, a mere atom of creation, and but for a moment of time ; while faith encompasses the area of universal experience, and appro- priates to its possession the acquisitions of all men in all ages of time. Human knowledge, properly so called, consists of but two chapters. Our own individual experience furnishes the one, and faith the other. Faith, therefore, is to instinct, sense and reason, as the experience of all mankind is to that of a single individual — the experience of a thousand millions to one. And were we to add to the experience of all living men that of all who have lived and died, or that of all who shall hereafter live, and superadd to this the experience of all angtls, and all other orders of intelligences hereafter to be made, accessible to faith, how inconceivably immense the disproportion between reason and faith, as the means of enlarging the capacity and of storing the mind of man with true knowledge ! In one word, then, from an invincible necessity of nature, we are indebted to faith for millions of ideas, for one obtained by oui' own personal sensations, observations or reflections. How preposterous, then, was it for the learned and ingenious author of the ''Treatise on Human Nature," to elaborate an essay to prove that no man could rationally believe the testimony of any number of persons affirming a supernatural fact; because, as he imagined, their testimony was contrary to universal experience ! The eloquent author of the History of England seems not to have perceived the delusion he was imposing on himself, in making his own individual experience, or that of a few others, equal to that of aU mankind in all ages of the world, a ten-thousand-millionth part of which he, nor no other person, ever heard or knew ! No man ever had universal experience, con- sequently no man could believe it. On such a splendid sophism, on buch a magnificent assumption, however, is founded the capacious temple of French, English, German and American infidelity. "While we have our definitions of instinct, sense, reason and faith Defore us, and this ingenious class of doubting philosophers in our eye, we must enter another demur to the sanity of their intellects, or of their logic. We have seen that instinct is a divine and infallible rule AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? 119 of life given to the mere animal creation — and, indeed, to the vegetable also, (as might be demonstrated were this the proper place,) for the purpose of guiding the actions of those creatures in benevolent sub- ordination to the end of their being. Now, of this endowment man is of all creatures the most destitute : therefore, if he have not an infallible rule somewhere else, he is more slighted than any other creature ; nay, he is the only creature wholly neglected by his Creator, in the most important, too, of all communicated endowments. But he has not this infallible rule in his five senses — he has it not in his powers of reasoning; and unless he have it in his faith in divine testimony, in a revelation internal and external, he is an anomaly in creation — the solitary exception to a law which, but for him, would be universal. But what makes this hypothesis still more extravagantly absurd is the fact, that, of all sublunary creatures, man is the favorite of his Maker — the head and "lord of the fowl and the brute." Now, to have granted the meanest insect a perfect rule of life ; to have remembered every other creature and forgotten only man, in a point the most vital to his enjoyment of himself and of the universe, is an assumption, a result more incredible and marvellous than any other assumption on the pages of universal history. This is, indeed, to swallow a camel while straining out a gnat. Another assumption of this speculative philosophy, another point deeply affecting the pretensions of revelation, and the most ancient and veritable traditions of the infancy of time and of nations, is equally at fault with the instances now given, and demands a special notice. It objects to a system of religion and morals founded upon faith rather than upon philosophy, as not in harmony with human nature, on account of its liabilities to deception in all matters depending upon human testimony. It dogmatically affirms that man is more liable to be deceived hj faith than by reason. This is a direct assault upon nature, and consequently upon the Author of it. For what can be more evident than that every human being is by an insuperable necessity compelled to make the very first step in life, intellectual and moral, if not physical, by faith? Must an infant wait the impulses of instinct or the decisions of reason for instruction in what to choose, or what to refuse, in the nursery or infant school ? Or must it depend on its own observation, experience and reason, or upon oral tradition, for light upon food, and medicine, and poison ? Must it experiment with the asp, the adder, the basilisk, the fire, the flood, the innumerable physical dangers around it, or implicitly believe its nurse, and walk by faith in her traditions ? When 120 IS MORAL PHILOSOPHY it enters the infant school, must it prove by reason, or receive upon testimony, the names and figures of all the vowels and consonants of the alphabet? Can it by reason or instinct learn any grammar, speak any language, or make one step in human science or literature ? It is just as true in nature as in religion, that he that belie veth not shall be destroyed. There is no salvation to the infant man from natural evils — from ignorance, vice and misery — any more than to the adult sinner, from guilt and ruin, but by faith in tradition, oral or written. The voice of nature and that of the gospel speak the same language — he that believeth not shall perish. Man, then, is so constituted that he must walk by faith if he walk at all. He must do this long before reason has commenced its career of examination. Now, to affirm that reason is a better guide than faith, is to charge our Creator with folly in subjecting man to an inferior guide, even in the incipient and moulding period of his being, while his mind is assuming a character, and being fashioned for future life. To do this on a model, too, that forever gives to his ears an ascendency over sense and reason, as the channel of light and knowledge, unless he intended that faith should always have the superiority in guiding the actions of man, is, in fact, to interpose an insuperable obstacle to his own designs, and to defeat himself in any after-measure to restore him to reason, from aberrations supposed to be attendant on the exercise of faith as an incompetent rule of moral action. Man, however, reason as we may, is by an insuperable necessity compelled to make the first step in physical, intellectual and moral life by faith in tradition ; and well would it have been for immense multitudes had they continued to walk by faith in the oral traditions of those moral instructors to whom God in the first ages of the world, confided the temporal and eternal destiny of mankind. Lest, however, it should seem as if faith and reason were rival claimants for the absolute government of man, and, like other aspi- rants, were seeking to rise, each upon the ruin of his competitor, to this high office, the province of reason should be distinctly noted and understood. Permit me, then, to say in behalf of reason, that she assumes to be only a minister to faith, as she is to religion and morality. She examines the testimony, and decides upon its pre- tensions. In this sense, intellect and reason are as necessary to faith as they are to moral excellence ; for a creature destitute of reason is alike incapable of faith, morality and religion. Reason, then, in one word, examines the tradition and the testimony, whether it be that of our five senses our memory, our consciousness, or that of AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? 121 other persons; faith receives that testimony, and common sense walks by it. From the definitions, facts and inferences now before us, may we not, gentlemen, conclude that if the physical sciences — natural philo- sophy in all its branches — be true sciences, because all founded on their own facts, observations and inductions, that science usually called moral philosophy is not a true science, because not founded on its own facts, observations and inductions, but on assumptions and plagiarisms from tradition and divine revelation; borrowing, instead of originating and demonstrating, all its fundamental principles ? If our mode of examining its pretensions be fair and logical, as we humbly conceive it is, does it not appear, by a liberal induction of witnesses from the best Pagan schools, that it has never taught, with the clearness and fulness of persuasion, nor with the authority of law or demonstration, the true doctrine of man's origin, nature, relations, obligations and destiny ? And from a careful consideration of all our powers of acquiring knowledge, is it not equally evident that he is not furnished with the power of ascertaining any one of these essential points, without the aid of a light above that of reason and nature ? And may I not further appeal to your good sense, whether we could have instituted and pursued a fairer or more honorable course than to state the pretensions and claims of moral philosophy in her own terms, as used by her greatest and most approved masters — Grecian, Roman and English ; and then inquire singly of all her schools and renowned teachers, whether in their own experience, and in their candid con- cessions and acknowledgments, philosophy, in life and in death, has redeemed her pledges, fulfilled her promises and sustained the ex- pectations of her friends and admirers ? When hard pressed on these points, observing that she herself relied more on tradition than on her own resources, fastening her hopes more on the basis of what was handed down to her by the ancients, than upon all her own discoveries and reasonings, became it not expedient that we also should turn our thoughts to tradition, examine its history and canvass its pretensions, so far at least as to institute a comparison between it and philosophy on the points in discussion ? Having thus placed these two great sources of intelligence in con- trast and comparison, and finding on the side of tradition, as defined by us, incontestable and decided advantages, incomparably superior claims and pretensions, what more natural and conclusive than to 122 IS MORAL PHILOSOPHY examine the human constitution, with special reference to these two, and, if possible, to ascertain whether the Creator intended man to walk by hypothetical philosophy or authentic tradition ? Such, then, has been our method ; and what now, on summing up the whole, are the legitimate results and conclusions ? Does it not appear that moral philosophy never removed any doubts except those which she had created ? Like the spear of Achilles, she healed only the wounds which herself had inflicted. That it cast not a single ray of light upon a single cardinal point in the whole science of happiness ! That it failed in all the three great lines of the Ionic, Italic and Eleatic orders ; and most essentially failed, even in the best branches of the Ionic school, even in the hands of the great masters — Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno and Epicurus. Nay, does it not appear that the age of doubting was the era of philosophy ? — that men never began to start hypotheses till they had lost their way ? — that mankind walked safely by the light of tradition from a divine origin for many years before philosophy was born ? — that those ancient traditions were kept pure for thousands of yeai.-j in one great line of the human race, but were finally corrupted by priests, and disguised by poets, and thus became the basis of the Chaldean, Indian, Phenician, Egyptian, Persian, Grecian and Roman philosophy ? And is it not most of all evident, that man is not constituted by his Creator to be led by instinct, sense or reason ; but by faith in infallible tradition, in all these points of vital importance in the philosophy of bliss; and that such arrangement is in good keeping with the pre- eminent superiority of the most ennobling of all the endowments of man, whether we consider the immense compass, the infinite variety of its acquisitions, or that high certainty and assurance to which it ofteji rises, and to which we may attain, on all essential points, when accompanied with that candor and inquisitiveness indispensable to the detection of truth, in all matters of vital interest to man ? My object now is gained, even although I may not have carried conviction to every heart. The science of human happiness is now before us ; and if I have not shown where it may be learned, I have certainly shown where it never has been and where it never can be learned. And may I now be permitted to add, that the study of these five points opens to the human mind the purest, sweetest and most copious fountains of delight ? They connect themselves with the whole universe of God, end place it all under tribute to our happiness. AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? 123 With the telescope of faith to our eye, looking back to our origin, beyond the solar system, beyond all the systems of the heavens, we descry the archetype of our being in the remote and unfathomable depths of the bosom and mysterious nature of that divine and tran- scendent Being whose temple is the Universe, and whose days are all the ages of Eternity. While man stands upon this earth and breathes this material breath of life, and sees and feels in his outward frame much in common with the beasts that perish, he feels within himself an unearthly principle — an inward man — a heaven-descended mind — a nature more than ethe- real— a spirit ever panting, thirsting, longing after the affinity of his Father's spirit, whence, as a spark of intelligence, it was stricken off^ and made to illumine its little mansion in the vast temple of creation. The intellectual nature vouchsafed to man communes with the Supreme Intelligence in all his various and boundless works ; and such is its love of new ideas, of new conceptions of the almighty source of its being and bliss, that if it could only imagine any fixed summit of its attainments, even in the heavens, beyond which it could add no new discoveries, that summit would be the boundary of its career of glory and of bliss; and, repining, as did the Grecian chief, that no new worlds were yet to be conquered, heaven itself would cease to be the place of infinite delight, the ultimate and eternal home of man. The relations of man are, as a necessary consequence, equally sub- lime and comprehensive with his origin and nature. He touches every point in the universe, whether material or immaterial, animal, intel- lectual or moral — temporal, spiritual or eternal. He not only derives pleasure from all these sources, but feels that he is related to God, angels and all natures, by ties, and sympathies, and nice dependencies, from which arise innumerable pleasures, duties and obligations ; each of which becomes a new source of delight to him who, reconciled to the government of the rightful Sovereign, seeks the enjoyment of all things in subordination to His will. The destiny of man is in harmony with his nature, relations and origin. True, indeed, there is a dark, cheerless and gloomy mansion, to which his mortality is for a season confined. But should he learn in this life the science of happiness, and regulate his actions according to the philosophy of bliss ; beyond that land of darkness and of night, that dreary bourn of his follies, misfortunes and sins, ''there is a land of pure delight," a more blivssful paradise than that of ancient Eden, in wh^ch man will freely eat of the fruit of a more delicious tre<^ 124 IS MORAL PHILOSOPHY AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE? of life, breathe a purer air, see a brighter sun, and enjoy, without the intervention of a cloud, the light of that divine and glorious counte- nance which illumines all the suns of all the systems of universal nature. There, in the midst of kindred spirits of a celestial mould, of -a divine temper — the mighty intellects, the refined and cultivated genii of the skies — the true nobility of creation — he will converse, and in the seraphic pleasures of a taste and an imagination of which all terrestrial objects are inadequate types, he will view the bright and more perfect displays of creative power, wisdom and goodness in the palace of the universe ; in that holiest of all, where beauty and loveli- ness in their most divine forms, unseen by mortal eye, shall be dis- played in the superlative of glory, amidst the enraptured gratula- tions of innumerable multitudes of holy spirits, assembled not only from all earthly nations and all mundane ages, but from all the celes- tial dominions, states and communities of the empire of God. To contemplate an eternity past — to anticipate an eternity yet to come — with full-developed minds of celestial stature, dwelling in spiritual and incorruptible bodies of unfading beauty and immortal youth, to survey the past creations of Grod — to witness the new — to commune with one another, and with all intelligences, on all the mani- festations of the divinity — and above all, to trace all the acts of the great drama of man's redemption as developed by the Divine Author and Perfecter of a remedial economy — to- read the library of heaven, the volumes of creation, of providence and redemption — to intercom- municate the sentiments and emotions arising from such themes, in- terrupted only by heavenly anthems, and fresh glories breaking on our -enraptured vision — will constitute a proper employment for a being of such endowments, capacities and aspirations as man. Need I add, to disclose such secrets — to reveal such mysteries — and to guide man in a path that leads to such a destiny, is not the province of philosophy — of the mere light of nature or of reason; but the peculiar and worthy object of a communication supernatural and divine ? and such a volume we have in that much neglected, but in- <5omparablyj sublime and awful volume — the Bible. ADDRESS. LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND ART DELIVERED AT NEW ATHENS COLLEGE, TO THE STUDENTS OF THAT INSTITUTION, 1838. Young Gentlemen : — Were I asked what element or attribute of mind confers the great- est lustre on human character, I would not select it from those most conspicuous in the poet, the orator, the philosopher, or the elegant artist ; I would not name any of those endowments which are usually regarded as superlative in adorning the reputation of the man of genius or of distinguished talent ; I would not call it memory, reason, taste, imagination ; but I would call it energy. I am sorry that it has not a more expressive and a more captivating name ; but, gentlemen, that something which we call energy, is the true primum mobile — the real mainspring of all greatness and eminence among men. Without it, all the rarer and higher powers of our nature are useless, or worse than useless. The genius of a Milton, a Newton, a Locke or a Franklin, would have languished and expired, without achieving any thing for them, their country, or the human race, but for this peculiar vis a tergo — this active, operative and impulsive ingredient in the human constitution. Sustained and impelled by this impetus or power, endowments very moderate may accomplish — nay, have accomplished — more for human kind, than the brightest parts have ever done without it. That power, or element of our constitution, which makes humble talents respectable; respectable talents, commanding; commanding talents, transcendent; and without which the most splendid powers can effect nothing — may, we presume, be regarded as chief of the ele- ments of human nature. Were I again asked what power, or art, or habit, most of all accele- rates and facilitates the acquisition of knowledge, which most of widens, deepens and enlarges the capacity of the human mind ; feeling myself sustained by the oracles of reason and the decisions of ex- perience, with equal promptitude I would allege that it is that un- 125 126 LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND ART. defined and undefinable something, which no one comprehends, but which every one understands, usiaally called the faculty or art of attention — a power, indeed, not often appreciated, not easily cultivated, and never enough commended, even by the most devoted sons of lite- rature and science. But a small remnant, an elect few of our race, have ever known how to use their eyes, their ears or their hands in the pursuit and acquisition of useful knowledge, much less how to direct and govern the operations of their own minds in the application of it. Of a great majority it may truly be said, though not in the identical sense of the Great Teacher, Eyes they have, but they see not ; ears they have, but they hear not ; and powers of understanding, but they perceive not." They know not, indeed, how to use their senses, or their reason, on material nature ; and therefore perform the whole journey of life with a few vague, indistinct, incomplete and mis- shapen conceptions ; and finally embark for eternity without a clear, definite or correct idea of their relations to the universe, or of their responsibilities to Creator or creature. Some might consider this use of our perceptive powers as what is usually called observation. But what is observation ? Another name for the attentive application of our minds, through the senses, to what- ever passes before us in the operations of nature and society And this again depends upon what the new school of mental ists have agreed to denominate concentrativeness. They have discovered, or think they have discovered, that there is a native, original and distinct power of the mind by which the other powers are concentrated, commanded or continued on the objects around us. This they have very aptly de- nominated our concentrativeness. Be this true or false in theory, one thing is evident — that without attention nothing is perceived, and con- sequently nothing learned ; while by it, all nature and society, as they pass before us, find a way into the chambers of the human mind and are safely lodged in the spacious apartments of our intellectual nature, whence they diffuse themselves through all the avenues of human life and human action. And were I still further interrogated what other habit, art or power completes the measure of the comparative superiority of individual greatness, I would as decidedly and, I think, as rationally answer that it is the faculty or habit of classifying our acquisitions and conceptions under proper heads. It is the power of properly labelling every new thought, and of marshalling all our ideas under their proper captains on every emergency. It is the power of generalizing and of abstract- ing whatever is foreign to some grand idea, or some particular system LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND ART. 127 or law or principle of nature. Every man will be eminent amongst his compeers in the ratio of his readiness and power to classify the objects of nature, society, art and religion ; or, what is the same thing, his views of them according to any given attribute or property which they may possess, or according to any end or object he may have in view. To a person well disciplined and practised in classification, all nature, society, literature, science, art, ever stand in rank and file before him, according to his intimacies with them. In the philosophy and skill of the greatest military chieftain that ever lived, he can assemble the greatest force to a given point in the shortest time. He, too, super- latively enjoys his own knowledge, just as the prudent mistress of a household, who has a place for every thing and every thing in its place, enjoys all her resources. He also sees order, harmony, variety, fitness, beauty, from a thousand points inaccessible to one destitute of this sovereign art. He that looks at the universe with a generalizing eye, looks at it with a discriminating perspicacity more individuating than his who rarely ascends from an individual to a species, or from a species to a genus; for, however paradoxical it may appear, the habit of gene- ralizing is the habit of individuating; and he who classifies most ex- pertly individuates most readily ; and, therefore, he who best under- stands the species most clearly discerns the individual ; and he most clearly perceives the species who best comprehends the genus under which it stands ; just as he whose vision commands the largest horizon most distinctly discriminates the objects which it contains. To illustrate and enforce this important point is, gentlemen, a primary object of this address ; and, to make it as useful as possible, I shall select three generic words as a proper theme for such a develop- ment. These are. Literature, Science, Art. A definition of these terms — their comprehension, mutual dependence, and the connection of all true science with religion — shall constitute the outlines of my practical remarks at present. And how shall we define the generic term literature ? You antici- pate me, and, with one accord, reply, " The knowledge of letter s'' It is, gentlemen, neither more nor less than the knowledge of letters; but it is generic, and comprehends all sorts of letters — words, signs, lan- guages. Contradistinguished from science and art, it simply means language and its laws. These principles or laws may, however, be classified and arranged into the form of a science — such as grammar, • logic, rhetoric ; and, according to our mode of considering or using 128 LITEEATURE, SCIEXCE AND ART. them, they become to us either sciences or arts. As subjects of study or contemplation, they are sciences; but, as precepts and rules of thought or of speech, they are arts. Hence they are called sciences or arts just as we approach them and use them. We must, however, keep to our definitions; and, having agreed that literature is the knowledge of letters and that a literary man is only a man of letters, we must hasten to our second definition. What is science f You answer, "The knowledge of things.'' You mean the constitution, attributes, operations and states of all the indi- vidual subjects on which we think, reason or discourse. True, very true, gentlemen ; hence we may have sciences based on things them- selves, or on their attributes — their operations and relations. Of these we presume not to fix the limits. You can convert any part of speech into a noun by making it the subject of a verb : so you can convert literature, art, or any thing on which you think, contemplate, reason, discourse, into a science. Still, however, science, properly so called denotes that knowledge of things — their properties, operations, laws, relations — founded upon demonstration or certain and indubitable evidence. Informer and less enlightened ages, we had but "seven sciences/' "four elements" and "ten categories." Those ages have, however, been added to the years beyond the flood ; and elements and categories and sciences have multiplied exceedingly, and replenished the earth with many valuable and splendid improvements. In this age of simplification and true science, a science means the accurate and certain knowledge of some particular subject. Thus, astronomy is the knowledge of the heavenly bodies and their laws. But, as we cannot be said to have the knowledge of any thing without knowing its laws or the changes to which it is subject, we may simplify still further, and say that astronomy is the knowledge of stars ; geo- logy, the knowledge of the earth ; mineralogy, the knowledge of mine- rals ; botany, the knowledge of - trees and plants ; zoology, the know- ledge of animated beings, &c. And what is art f Art is the application of science, or it is the rules of some particular practice or calling, or it is the practice itself. Every science has its own peculiar and corresponding art ; and, indeed, the use and end of all the sciences are the useful and liberal arts to which they give rise and for the sake of which they are acquired and cultivated. Thus, we naturally associate science and art, theory and practice, faith and obedience, as correlate terms — as mutually imply- ing each other — especially the latter as presupposing the former ; for LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND ART. 129 art without s-cience, practice without theory, and obedience without faith, would be as anomalous and unnatural as an effect without a cause, fruit without blossoms, or a child without a parent. Our terms are now defined. Literature is the knowledge of the signs of thought ; science, the knowledge of the things of thought ; and art, the application of these signs and things to the numerous and varied ends of individual and social life. Each of these terms, as already observed, is generic, and represents a class — one grand ab- stract idea — from which all that is common to other ideas, and not individual, is separated. Literature, therefore, includes all that per- tains to language or signs of ideas, ancient or modern, natural or arti- ficial, from the alphabet of Cadmus down to the belles-lettres productions of the present day. The arts of reading, writing, speaking, grammar, logic, rhetoric, are but the practice of the theory of literature ; for, like every thing else, literature has both its theory and practice. A mere literary person, however, is conversant only with letters or signs of thought, without regard to science or the useful and liberal arts. Could you accurately and elegantly speak and write all the lan- guages of the world, living and dead, ancient and modern, from the hieroglyphics of Egypt to the apocalyptic symbols of unaccomplished prophecy, you would be only literary men — skilled in the names of things, the symbols of thought, the signs of ideas. It is freely ad- mitted that in so much intercourse with books, so much attention to the signs of thought, much useful knowledge of men and things may be acquired, and that a literary man of high attainments will neces- sarily possess much valuable information in the study of ancient and modern dialects of thought ; still, we must plead that such a person iS' greatly inferior to the man of science in point of really useful and practical knowledge, as he who can only name a horse in ten languages is greatly inferior in the knowledge of that useful and noble animal to the keeper of a livery-stable, who can only name the animal in his ver- nacular. Believe me, young gentlemen, a man with one language and many sciences, or even useful arts, is much more likely (for he is better prepared) to be a valuable and useful member of society, than he who has many languages and only one or two sciences. Except it may be in the departments of a translator or an interpreter, or in preparing others for those services,' such persons are greatly overrated in society. But, as science, rather than literature or art, is the burden of our address, and as we have more in view than simple definition — com- bining, as far as we can, the definitions of important terms with the 9 130 LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND ART. laws of classification, and thus illustrating and commending its value— we shall hasten to the classification of science, properly so called. The great end to be gained in classification is the proper distribution of all knowledge under proper heads, with a single reference to the easy acquisition and communication of it. A good and rational classi- fication, then, is that which collects all that appertains to any one sub- ject under a suitable designation, and clearly separates it from all that belongs to another category or subject. There are two great diffi- ■culties in perfecting such a classification of science : one, radical and as yet insuperable, is that no one science is so insular in its position, so separate and distinct from all others, as to be perfectly independent of them — so as never to borrow or lend a single idea. Such a science would be as singular as Robinson Crusoe, or Alexander Selkirk, in the island of Juan Fernandez : yet even he had his man Friday. A science perfectly isolated is not yet known ; therefore our classifications are not bounded by insuperable barriers or mountain landmarks : they rather resemble the charters given by the kings and queens of England to the principal America.n colonists, setting forth the eastern, the northern and southern boundaries, but ending in the vague terms, " thence west to the Pacific Ocean," the Lake of the Woods," or some unknown terminus in the midst of Indian tribes. Hence, as our western limits are yet undetermined, so one side of all our sciences is yet unsurveyed. The best classifications hitherto made are therefore imperfect. The other difficulty is found in the unfortunate fact that we have not yet acquired a perfect scientific language. All our vocabularies and nomenclatures are defective, and unfit for close and accurate definition or reasoning. Still, the best classification of science, in the absence of a perfect one, is that which collects all our knowledge of one subject under the best title and distinguishes it from every other. Mr. Locke, the great mental philosopher, was duly sensible of this, and sought to divide the whole world of ideas into provinces separate and distinct from each other. He so generalized ideas as to place them all under three distinct heads. These three genera generalissima, or grand generic ideas, are, — things, actions, signs; that is, things, as they are in themselves knowable ; actions, as depending on us, in refer- ence to our happiness ; and signs, as they may be used in reference to our knowledge as regards both clearness and accuracy. According to this eminent Christian philosopher, all science pertains to these three, or these three engross all the science in the world : — For," says he, ^'a man can employ his thoughts about nothing but either the contern LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND ART. 131 plation of things themselves for the discovery of truth ; or about the things in his own power, which are his own actions, for the attainment of his own ends ; or the signs he would make use of both in the one and the other, and the right ordering of them for his clearer inform- ation." The modern schools of Britain have sought to improve upon this view of the matter by reducing all science to two chapters. The head of the one is, " What is the head of the other is, What OUGHT TO BE." The what is and the what ought to he, say they, are the sum total of all our knowledge. This is within one step of the ontological abstraction, which makes the word being the genus general- issimum, the highest and most comprehensive term in universal language. This is, however, too sublimated for practical purposes. The ontology and the deontology, or the what is and the what ought to be, of the most approved schools, would, I think, make five chief heads of science, or five chapters of sciences of sciences ; for we are now seeking not for a particular science, but for a science of sciences. Following both Locke and the moderns, so far as they both can be followed by one person, or rather putting them together and forming a tertium quid, a new com- pound, we would have five sciences of sciences, or five general sciences, which would include the whole area of human knowledge ; and if we must continue the old nomenclature, we should call them physics, metaphysics, mechanics, ethics and symbolics. By physics I mean natural truth, or truth in the concrete, as it is found in material nature ; by metaphysics I mean artificial or abstract truth, or truths not found in nature, but inferred or generalized from nature; by mechanics we would denote truths that are simply useful ; by ethics we intend truths moral and good in their operation ; and by symbolics we I mean the signs which are employed in acquiring and communicating i these truths. We would thus represent truth as the matter of all I science, and name the science from the nature or character of the truth I of which it treats. Thus we would have truth in the concrete, truth in the abstract, truth as connected with simple utility, truth as con- nected with human happiness, and lastly, the signs of truth ; or par- ticular truths, general truths, useful truths, happifying truths, and the signs of truth. But, gentlemen, I will be told that this is too multiform an abstract I of science reduced to five chapters, and that the inductive sciences are already well divided into natural, mental, moral; or, to speak more learnedly, into physical, psychological and ethical. With all due defer- I ence to the men of enlarged and liberal science, I object to this division 132 LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND ART. as quite indistinct, confused and defective. We have had jical and metaphysical sciences, natural and moral, speculative and practical, material and mental, and I know not how many other classifications, all, in my judgment, either too indefinite, too defective or too confused. The best of these, perhaps, is the natural, mental and moral ; but do not these most wantonly run into each others' territories ? The specific idea which is as essential to a science of sciences as to a particular science, is lost, — as, for instance, do we not find the specific idea of the mental in the natural, and the specific idea of the natural both in the mental and the moral ? and does not this division leave out the science of signs altogether ? If not, wherein does it excel the ontological and the deontological division already defined? In the classification of science, as in the arts and business of life, we seek some generic idea; and having found it, we arrange all things that have that idea in them, under the term or name which represents that idea. For example, if we contemplate sciences with regard to the subjects on which they treat, we prefix to them the name of that idea. That science which treats of simple being for the sake of discovering general or abstract truth, is properly called ontology, because that Greek compound represents the law, or reason, or nature of being in general. We call this science sometimes a speculative science, because it is a mere exercise of our intellectual powers — itself, too, the result of speculative reasoning and discussion upon simple existence, rather as a matter of intellectual or moral gratification, than of practical utility. It is, therefore, purely metaphysical. But those sciences which treat of the masses of matter that compose the universe, the structures and relations of all those parts that compose the immense whole, we properly call the physical sciences, contrasted with the former, which is properly metaphysical. Again, those sciences which treat of actions with a reference to utility — as the construction of all the necessaries and conveniences of life — are properly called mecha- nical by the mechanicians of the world. Those, however, that contem- plate actions in reference to right, or to human happiness, are called moral, or ethical, from the earliest ages of philosophy. Thus, accord- ing to the division now contemplated, we would have two chapters of science on things, two chapters on actions, and one on signs; and this, after all, is but the perfection of Locke's views. These five chapters of science, namely, physics, metaphysics, me-* chanics, ethics and symbolics, cover the whole ground of English and American sciences, and are the completion of all the improvements from Locke to the present day. The two first concern being and truth. LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND ART. 133 07 things particular and general ; the next two contemplate actions as u efnl and good ; and the last one treats of the signs of all our ideas u : every department of our knowledge. They are, indeed, dependent c n one another as much as the intellectual powers of man are depend- ' nt on his active or effective powers, and his active powers upon his ntellectual. We shall now briefly notice the principal sciences that are found ander these general heads or classes : — ] . In the science of sciences called Physics, or physical sciences, we make seven primary sciences, viz. astronomy, geology, geometry, mineralogy, botany, zoology, chemistry. Gentlemen, neither approve nor disapprove this division till we have examined it. Our process of thinkmg and reasoning in making out this distribution is, we think, very natural. It is as follows : — In physics the generic idea is material nature. We then proceed to the specific sciences, which are the integral parts of it. This we do in the following manner : — 1st. We look at the whole universe as composed of innumerable masses of matter spread out over infinite space, moved and moving by certain powers or laws, and tending to some grand result. The science that treats of all these masses and their laws we call astronomy. Of these systematic masses we select one, called the solar system ; and of that system we again select one planet, our earth. Then comes, in the second place, the science of the composition and organization of our earth, called geology. But we cannot proceed any further in the study of the universe without some scaffolding; for the ideas of quantity, extension, magnitude, number, rush upon us, and so completely over- whelm us, that we set about measuring our earth that we may measure the universe; and hence arises, just at this point, the science of geometry, a word indicating the measurement of the earth; for we soon discover, with the ancients, that God has made the universe geo- metrically, by line, scales, weight and measure. Geometry, then, although an abstract science, is indispensable to the study of astronomy, geology, or even the geography of the earth. After the geology of the earth come its minerals, vegetables, animals. Each of these become separate and distinct subjects of science. Its minerals occupy the pre- cincts of mineralogy; its trees, shrubs, plants, flowers, fruits, con- stitute the science of botany ; and all animated beings become the sub- ject of its zoology. Finally, the elements and simple substances, which form all its creations, and of which the terraqueous sphere is com- posed, and all its inhabitants, form the substratum of the immense and sublrfne science of chemistry. Chemistry, indeed, is a system of LITEEATUEE, SCIENCE AN'D ART. science in itself, and extends its jui'isdiction, as a sort of supreme court, over all the physical sciences, geometry alone excepted. Whatever is not explained or understood in geology, mineralogy, botany, zoology, whatever caput mortuum, whatever residuum these sciences leave, is within the jurisdiction of chemistry, which har for its rich and extensive domains the elements, the simple substances, the com- binations and uses of all the bodies in or upon this terraqueous ball. Like the Germanic Empire, a cluster of principalities, of little kingdoms, it is a subgeneric which might coimt almost seven times seven individual sciences, such as the science of light, caloric, oxygen, azote, hydrogen, carbon, &c. &c. ; nay, it disputes the ground with what was formerly called natural philosophy,"'and claims the old sciences of optics, dioptrics, catoptrics, pneumatics, hydrostatics; it takes the fossils, the minerals, the metals, the earths, the salts, the atmosphere itself, the solids, the liquids, the gases of our earth, under its care and keeping. Plants and animals are not wholly beyond its assumptions. Such is the seventh of the first series, or the last verse of the first chapter of the science of sciences. Such, my young friends, is the process of reasoning fi^om which sprang the division of physics into astronomy, geology, geometry, mineralogy, botany, zoology, and chemistry. I wish you to bear in mind that man, in his physical constitution, belongs to the science of zoology ; and, under this head, we may, perhaps, contemplate him at some other time. 2. Metaphysics are not confined to any kingdom of nature, not even to the material universe ; but in their daring and presumptuous flight speculate on time, space and eternity; on being, truth and goodness; on God, angels, and demons; on moral good and evil; on free agency and necessity ; on mind and matter ; on thought and language. We have the metaphysics of every science, such as speculative theology, specu- lative morality, speculative language, speculative philosophy, &c. &c. 3. Mechanics. — Trigonometry, mensui^ation, surveying, navigation, gauging, dialling, architecture, sculpture, painting, &c. are chief among the sciences called mechanical. These sciences are often re- garded as arts ; but they are sciences first and arts afterwards. 4. Ethics call for the whole science of man, and send us back to zoology for his animal existence. He is chief of the science of zoology. Of animated nature he is the consummation, as well as the head. But he is not all found in any one department of nature. There is a spiritual system as well as a material system. The science cf Pneumatology, or of spiritual existence, is as comprehensive as the science of a^tro- LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND ART. 135 nomy. But as in physics, so in pneumatology. After speaking of astronomy, we take our earth, on which, and from which, to reason astronomically ; so, after speaking of pneumatology, we take man, on whom, and from whom, to reason pneumatologically. For in man alone, of all physical beings, is there a distinct and an unequivocal portion of a spiritual system. But this view exhibits man as the sub- ject of many sciences. Of all the physical sciences he is a part and portion, and he is himself the engrossing theme of a respectable number. His animal and human nature, in the hands of the physician, make him the subject of several sciences — such as anatomy, physiology, osteology, neurology, nosology, pathology and pharmacology. Besides these, in the hands of the jurisconsult he becomes the sub- ject of the sciences of politics, of jurisprudence, of municipal, civil and criminal law. In the hands of the theologian he is also the subject of the canon law, the ecclesiastical law, the moral law and the Christian law. His perceptive, reflective, affective, communicative and mechanical powers make him the subject of the sciences of phrenology, grammar, logic, rhetoric, mechanics, ethics and religion. From these premises we may easily survey the sciences that properly range under the general head of Ethics. According to our best schools, they are — Natural Theology, as it is called, or the being and perfec- tions of the Deity, as manifested in all the designs of material nature; Moral Science, properly so called ; Political Science, properly so called ; the Theory of a Future Life — Human Eights, Wrongs, Obligations and Responsibilities, &c. But, as Christians, we would abandon the doctrine of the schools, and substitute the Bible, the Law, the Gospel, the Adamic, Abrahamic and Christian institutions, as furnishing not merely a perfect code, but the proper motives and incentives to good morals. 5. Symbolics. — This is our fifth and last head, and, as might have been inferred from our previous remarks on literature, we would enum orate seven distinct sciences as comprehended under this head These are orthography, orthoepy, grammar, prosody, logic, rhetoric and every species of engraving or chirography. This is usually the first branch of science taught, but it ought also to be the last. The acquisition and the communication of knowledge being the chief end of education, that part which most subserves this high end ought to be first, midst and last. G-entlemen, after having made the tour of so many sciences, and ranged at large over a field so extensive, we have no time to descant upon the arts. I will only say that they are both the useful and thr> 136 LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND ART. fine or liberal arts. On the useful or mechanical arts there is no need that I detain you ; and I will only say that the fine arts are not con- trasted with the useful, as in opposition to them; but to distinguish them from such as are necessary or useful only. They are generally regarded as six ; but I will add one to them. They are poetry, music, painting, sculpture, engraving, architecture of the different orders — to which I will add good manners. There remains but one point to consummate our plan — the connection of science, all true science, with religion. One might as rationally seek to comprehend an effect without any knowledge of its cause, as to comprehend any part of the science of the universe without some knowledge of its Author. G-od and his works are the basis of all the science in the world. But as the universe is not without God, nor God now without his universe, so no science, physical or ethical, can be thoroughly learned without the revealed knowledge of God. We study man in his works and in his word, and we contemplate our Creator through the medium of what he has done and said. The works of God are his first and most ancient revelation of himself; and had not man, by his apostasy, lost the art of reading and studying the works of God, he would not have stood in need of any other medium of knowing him, or of communicating with him, than this wonderful and greatly diversified volume of nature. And, even as it is, the in- telligent Christian makes the greatest proficiency in studying nature and the Bible by making them subservient to each other — sometimes interpreting the Bible by nature, and at other times expounding nature by the Bible. They are two voices speaking for God — two witnesses of his being and perfections ; but neither of them is wholly adequate to meet all the variety of human circumstance without the other. But we need no more striking evidence of the intimate connection between science and the Bible than the well-established fact, that all the great masters of science were believers in the Bible and cherished the hopes which it inspires. Bacon, the founder of the inductive phi- losophy; Locke, the great mental and moral philosopher; and Newton, the interpreter and revealer of nature's secrets, are known to the religious as well as to the scientific world as believers in the Bible and expounders of its doctrine, its precepts, types and promises. They are as eminent for their homage to the Biblo as for their devotion to the studies of nature. Philosophy, with them, and Christianity were not at variance. They saw the immutable and inimitable traces and characters of one and the same Supreme Intelligence clearly and boldly written on every LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND ART. 137 page of the volumes of Creation, Providence and Redemption. They were persuaded that the still small voice which whispers in every star and in every flower speaks aloud in the language of authority and of love in all the precepts and promises of the law and of the gospel. Such were the great founders of the reigning philosophy and sciences of the present day. But I speak not of the first class only ; for it seems as if the Father of Lights had vouchsafed all useful sciences, discoveries and arts to those who acknowledged his being and per- fections, and to none else. So general, if not universal, is this feature of his providence, that I know not the name of the founder of any science, or the inventor of any useful art, or the discoverer of any great master-truth in any department of human thought, who did not acknowledge the God of the Bible and cherish the hope of a future life. I have permitted my mind to take a long retrospect into the annals of the great inventors and discoverers, the authors and founders of those sciences and arts that have since the dark ages new-modelled society and the world, to see if there was any one of them who had divorced nature and religion, or who had rejected the being, perfections and providence of God, or denied the authenticity and inspiration of his word. By the examination I have been greatly confirmed in my theory, that " the secrets of the Lord are with them that fear him," even the great secrets of nature, as well as of his purposes and will in reference to the future. Beginning with the invention of the mariner's compass, in the early part of the fourteenth century, by Flavio Gioia, born A.D. 1300, and descending in a direct line down to Sir Humphry Davy, who but a few years since passed the Jordan of time, I observe that all the sciences and arts that have been introduced or perfected during the last five hundred years — which have made this century so unlike the year 1300 — have been given to us by men who looked through nature, society and art up to nature's God. Of this sort were Dr. Fust, or Faust, a goldsmith of Mentz, who invented the art of printing on wooden blocks, and gave it to the world in 1430 ; Schaefi'er, his son-in-law, who, in 1442, invented the casting of metallic types ; Christopher Columbus, born- at Genoa, 1442, who dis- covered a new world in 1492; Copernicus, born at Thorn, in Prussia, 1472, who proved the errors of the Ptolemaic system of the universe, and suggested the elements of the present demonstrative system ; Tycho Brahe, of Sweden, born in 1546, and Kepler, of Weil, of WUrtemberg, born 1571, who, though of somewhat conflicting opinions in some branches of the Copernican system, greatly advanced it by their dis- coveries; Galileo, born at Florence, 1564, who first discovered the gravity 138 LITEEATURE, SCIENCE AND ABT. of tlie air and sundry new astronomical truths, ip.Yor.'i/'/ o^ cLe pen- dulum and of the cycloid, and an able defender of the Copernican system ; Descartes, too, a native of Touraine, borr. 1596, though erro- neous in his docrine of the vortices and in some fj.ctaphysical specula- tions, nevertheless in mathematics, algebra and in bis Analytics greatly advanced the cause of science, and became the founder of the Cartesian philosophy, now reviving in some of its branches in Europe ; Boyle, inventor of the air-pump,* born in 1626 — one of the most retiring and devout of philosophers ; Isaac Barrow, the light of the age in mathe- matics, philosophy and theology— the instructor of Newton — born in England, 1630. Passing over the famous epocha of Sir Francis Bacon, born 1561, Locke, born 1632, and Newton, born ten years after, 1642, we will only name Franklin, the American sage and distinguished philosopher, born 1706 ; Euler, born 1707 ; Ferguson, born 1710 ; Sir William Herschel, born 1738; James Watt, LL.D., born 1730, im- prover of the steam-engine first invented by the Marquis of Worcester, 1660, and author of various useful inventions ; Robert Fulton, the in- ventor and constructor of the steamboat, born in Pennsylvania, 1765; and Sir Humphry Davy, born 1778, the enlarger and perfecter of the science of chemistry — all mighty men in science, or in the useful arts and discoveries w^hich have really new-modelled the world. These, however, are not all the men of renown that should be mentioned in a catalogue of public benefactors in science and art. Some, indeed, might plausibly think that we ought to have begun with Poger Bacon, almost a century before the age of Gioia, and have given him and Schwartz a conspicuity in this class of renowned and noble spirits — Bacon, for his many new discoveries ; and Schwartz, for his invention of gunpowder; but we have been rather too particular, our object being only to name the mighty chiefs in each department, and to ad- duce them in proof of this important point — that true science and religion are intimately associated both in theory and practice : other- ,wise we should have embellished our cloud of witnesses with the names of such men as Harvey, Gall, Spurzheim, &c. &c. There is but the name of La Place concerning whom infidelity itself could have the hardihood to complain. It might be said that the atheist La Place is worthy of a rank amongst the greatest of philo- sophers; but I ask. What new truth or science, or new art, did discover or teach ? Newton opened the door and led the way for him into the study of nature. * Generally conceded to Otto Guericke. LITERATUKE, SCIENCE AND AET. ''But Franklin," says the skeptic, "belonged to us." Strange arro- gance, indeed ! Eead tlie epitaph on his tombstone, sketched by his own hand ; and see his hope of a future life and his acknowledgment of his Creator and Benefactor unequivocally expressed therein. It was observed that one of the principal difficulties in the proper classification of science and of human knowledge is found in the fact that all the sciences run into each other, and are separated rather by gra- dations than by clear and prominent lines of demarcation. Now, if this be true in physics or ethics, it is most certainly and evidently true of their connection and intimacy with religion. In the natural sciences we cannot advance a single step without the perception of adaptation and design. The cosmical adaptations are so numerous, obvious and striking, that we are compelled to notice them, and to see that, like the leaves that envelop the rose-bud, from the inmost petal that enfolds the germ to the outermost covering, they are all shaped and fitted, not only to one another, but to the central stamina, for whose protection they seem to have been made. Thus the whole solar system seems to exist for our earth ; our earth for its vegetable and animal productions ; and these, again, for man. Our earth, however, appears to be adapted to the universe as the universe is to it ; and after it has subserved human existence as its ultimate end, it again repays to the system of nature the aids and advantages furnished it by its neighbor- ing planets. Thus the whole universe, both in its general laws and in its particular arrangements, is one immense system of means and ends, suggesting to the true philosopher one great First Cause and one grand Last End, between which all things exist. It is as impossible, then, to understand any portion of such a system with a clear comprehension, viewed apart from this great First Cause and Last End of all things, as it would be to understand a human finger without a human hand, a hand without an arm, an arm without a body, a human body without a mind, a mind without the Supreme Intelligence. If it be folly, plain, palpable folly, to pronounce an opinion upon a part, when ignorant of the whole to which that part belongs, what shall we say of his philosophy who dogmatically pronounces upon science in general, who has not studied any one fully ; or of him who has studied but a single chapter in the volume of nature, and yet presumes to judge the whole library of the universe ! And is not this, gentlemen, his character who would presume to divorce the study of nature from the knowledge of its First Cause, or from the science of the Bible, on the 140 LITERATURE, SCIEXCE AND ART. pretence that it is unnecessary, or, which is the same thing, that any one science may be as fully comprehended without, as with, the know- ledge of Him who is himself, his being, perfections and will, the sum and substance, the Alpha and Omega of them all ? But who, of unperverted reason and of uncorrupted affections, could wish to study science without tracing its connection and its intimacies with the most magnificent, sublime and interesting of all sciences — the knowledge of God, of our own origin, destiny and duty ? If there be beauty, grandeur, sublimity, immensity, infinity in this stupendous temple of the universe, how infinitely beautiful, lovely, grand and glorious must be that august and adorable One who had from all eternity the archetypes of every system, and of every creature, existing in his own mind, unexpressed; awaiting the moment which infinite wisdom, power and benevolence had fixed upon as the most fitting to speak them forth into being! To make the universe and all its science the way, the means to know him, appears to us the true wisdom and the true happiness of man. He clothes himself with light as with a garment ; nay, he has clothed himself with his own creations, insomuch that the clear intelligence of them is the clear intelligence of himself. To me it has ever been a paradox, a mystery, how any one can feast on nature, or luxuriate in the high enjoyment of the arcana which science reveals — how any one can in ecstasy and rapture contemplate the celestial and the terrestrial wonders of creation, and yet be indif- ferent either to the character or will of Him who is himself infinitely more wonderful and glorious than they — how any one can admire the developments of the Creator, and forbear himself to adore. Assuredly there is something wrong, some superlative inconsistency or mistake in this matter ; else it would be impossible to delight in the works and neglect or despise the workman. When education shall be adapted to the human constitution and conducted in full reference to the rank and dignity of man, then will the connection of science and religion, of nature and God, be made not merely the subject of an occasional lecture, but a constant study ; the universe will then be but a comment on the Supreme Intelligence ; the being, perfections, providence and will of the Almighty Father will always be the text; and every science but a practical view of Him in whom we live and are moved and have our being, and of our respon- sibilities and obligations to Him who has endowed us with these noble faculties and powers, on account of which we rejoice and triumph in existence. LITERATUEE, SCIENCE AND ART. 141 Meanwhile, young gentlemen, I would remind you that there is one science, and one art springing from it, which is the chief of all the sciences and of all the arts taught in all the schools under these broad heavens. That science, as defined by the Great Teacher, is the know- ledge of God and of Jesus Christ whom he has commissioned. This, he says, is eternal life. And that art which springs from it is the noblest and the finest in the universe : it is the art of doing j ustly, of loving mercy, and of walking humbly with our God. SUPERNATURAL FACTS. AN ADDRESS TO THE MAYSVILLE LYCEUM, 1839. Oentlemen : — In testimony not merely of my sense of the honor you have done me in unanimously electing me an honorary member of your institution, nor of the high regard which I entertain for such of your association as I have the pleasure personally to know, but rather in proof of the high estimate I have formed of the great and useful objects of your lyceum, do I at this time appear before you. On every other account, I should certainly at this time have declined a task for which I am so ill qualified. Fatigued as I am with the labors of a six months' tour, only closed this forenoon in this city, and not having had an hour to arrange my thoughts on any subject since I received from your com- mittee an invitation to address you, I should, in justice to myself, as well as to the expectations expressed by the large assemblage before me, have deferred this address to a more convenient and propitious season. But, as in the routine of the reigning manners and customs of society we sometimes make visits of friendship as well as fashion- able visits, I prefer to appear before you in the guise of the former rather than in the disguise of the latter. In the one case, dress and display are supreme ; in the other, the frank and unadorned congratu- lations and communications of friendshi;: and of the social feelings have the ascendency. Without the corsets and trappings of a set speech and a fashionable address, I propose, then, gentlemen, to offer you a few practical remarks connected with the great object of your association — viz. ^'Mental and Moral Improvementy Among the useful institutions of this age of improvement, I think the village and city lyceums occupy a very prominent and a very large space. When well conducted and in reference to the object you propose, they offer, in my judgment, at least half the advantages of a collegiate course of instruction. Aided by a good library and 142 SUPERNATURAL FACTS. 143 governed by the decorum of a polite and rational administration, young men especially may derive from them many and great advantages, not only in compensation of the want of a liberal education, but even in superaddition to all the benefits usually derived from it. Well, then, gentlemen, as you have very wisely organized with a true regard to your mental and moral advancement, permit me to invite your attention to a subject of transcendent importance, involving in it the genuine radices of all intellectual and moral superiority. That subject is the nature and use of supernatural facts. This, as you have no doubt frequently observed, is an age of facts against hypotheses, and of the inductive process of inferring the laws of things from facts observed and classified ; and, therefore, all that is now dignified with the name of science is the knowledge of facts and of the inferences logically drawn from them. As there is but one great truth in the universe, and all truths are but fractional parts of that sublime and incomprehensible truth ; so there is, indeed, but one science, of which all the varieties of human knowledge are but so many component parts. There is neither an isolated fact nor science in this great universe. They run into each other, and mutually lend or borrow light, illustra- tion or proof from one another. The classification of science most convenient and philosophical is that which arranges human knowledge according to the facts of which it treats. Thus, as we have physical, intellectual and moral facts, gene- rically speaking, we can only have physical, mental and moral sciences. The knowledge of things physical, mental and moral is, therefore, the measure and boundary of all our scientific attainments. But, besides these facts, which are the basis of all human science, there is another class of facts, mysterious and sublime beyond com- parison, which, for the want of a more distinctive name, we have called supernatural facts. These, as have been stated, constitute the theme of our present address. How, then, shall we define this word supernatural? You say, gentlemen, ''It literally means above nature.'' But still the wonder grows, and we are asked, "What is nature f The answer commonly given is, The usual course,'' or, The established order of things." Supernatural, then, would indicate something above the reach or power of the established connection of things. The establivshed order of things is not to be trenched upon, nor violated, nor even sus- pended, by any one who is himself a subject of those laws. Hence, none but the Author of nature, or a being not a subject of the laws ol nature, can either suspend or control any of her laws or arrangements. 144 SUPERNATUflAL FACTS. Supernatural facts are, then, facts superior to the powers of nature — facts above the established order of things, and which can only be performed by a hand that can control, suspend or annihilate the laws of nature. All facts, therefore, that are clearly not the effect of any law of nature, but contrary or superior to those laws, we call super- natural ; such as a person's walking in the midst of a burning fiery furnace without the slightest injury, or upon the tops of the waves of a tempestuous sea as upon a rock, or curing natural diseases or raising to life a dead person by speaking a word. I need not tell yau, gentlemen, that the reality of such facts is denied, and that, too, by some of our shrewd and speculative philosophers ; nay, further, there are some who teach that if such facts did happen, no sort of evidence could sustain them, because it is more probable and more credible that the witnesses are mistaken than that the event or fact reported should have occurred. With a few there is no power above nature — nature is omnipotent, self-existent and eternal. These are not to be reasoned with ; and, therefore, they are not at present within our jurisdiction. We now reason with those who contemplate nature not as a first cause — " a cause uncaused" — but as an effect of one intel- ligent and almighty agent. Next to Newton, La Place ranks in the philosophy of nature. He is decidedly skeptical. He denies supernatural facts altogether. So dons David Hume. These are the two greatest names on the list of skeptics. Their philosophy is standard and canonical in all the high schools of infidelity. If, then, we can show their philosophy to be at fault, false and chimerical, foolish and absurd, on this subject, we shall, I trust, be excused from wrestling with inferior spirits — mere fresh- men in their school. On this occasion, then, we shall contend with none but these two great masters of the hosts of skepticism. I have to prove the existence of supernatural facts ; and my first task shall be to show that the skeptical philosophy is based on a false hypothesis, and, consequently, a gross and even a palpable delusion. We shall first hear La Place state his own argument against revela- tion : — " The probability of the continuance of the laws of nature is, in our estimation, superior to every other evidence, and to that of his- torical facts the best established. One may judge, therefore, the weight of testimony necessary to prove a suspension of those laws, and how fallacious it is in such cases to apply the common rules of evidence.' Now, the strength and point of this philosophy is, that the proba- bility that the laws of nature have always continued and shall continue SUPEENATUEAL FACTS. 145 as they are, is superior to the evidence of sense, the evidence of testi- mony, and every other evidence by which we prove any fact whatever. If, then, we had walked through the jhannel of the Eed Sea after Moses, or had seen the rock Horeb turned into a fountain of water at the bidding of the prophet ; if we had seen the three sons of the captivity walking in the midst of the fiery furnace, breathing in flame ; or Laza- rus rising out of his grave, on the fottrth day, at the command of the Christian Lawgiver ; we should rather believe that our eyes and ears and senses had deceived us, than doubt the probability that the laws of nature continued in these cases to operate as they had always done. Is there not, then, but one short step between the assumption of La Place and absolute and universal skepticism of even the laws of nature themselves ? For, let me ask even the sons of skepticism. On what sort of evidence does our assent to this "probability" rest? or, rather, By what sort of evidence do we learn the laws of nature ? Is it not by the testimony of our senses ? If, then, I believe my senses while they at one time attest the regularity of the laws of nature, why should I disbelieve them when, in a particular case or in a number of cases, they depose that the laws of nature are suspended, violated or changed ? Why should the senses in this arbitrary way be metamorphosed into true or false witnesses to suit the emergency of a philosopher? Now, we — who believe in supernatural facts, or facts above the regular con- tinuance of the laws of nature, and which those laws can by no possi- bility achieve — admit the testimony of our senses as true and faithful in both cases. Judge, then, gentlemen, which of the two schemes is most rational and consistent — that which uniformly credits the senses as faithful witnesses, or that which, according to the emergency of the ease, whimsically and arbitrarily makes them true or false witnesses at the demand of a favorite theory. And is it not evident that he who discredits the testimony of the senses in any case, in which they unequivocally and concurrently depose a fact, natural or supernatural, aims a fatal blow at the foundation of all certainty, natural and mora' — at the foundation of all science, material and mental ? But, to come to still closer quarters with this great sage of nature's laws, let me ask, Whence the evidence of the probability of the con- tinuance of these laws of nature ? Is not the skepticism of the philo- sopher in supernatural facts clearly based upon a most fallacious hypothesis? Who has proved the uninterrupted continuance or the much boasted uniformity of the laws of the universe ? It is a base- less assumption, and obviously contrary to the evidence of both sense and reason, especially when they are permitted to extend 10 146 SUPERNATURAL FACTS. their researches through all the fields of human science, limited though they be. If nature's laws are uniform and permanent without the intervention of a supernatural agency; if all things continue as they were from eternity — all science is hypothetical — astronomy and geology, with all the physical sciences, are without facts and without reason. But they are not ; therefore we have all the physical facts against the hypothesis of the skeptic, and in proof of facts supernatural. Let us,^ then, hear what the sciences already named depose against the skeptical hypo- thesis. What saith Geology? Does she prove that all things continue a^. they were ? Does she testify to the uninterrupted continuance of the laws of nature ? We shall first hear the testimony of Mr. Lyell, the President of the British Geological Society, in his anniversary address to the society for 1837 :— * ''All geologists will agree with Dr. Buckland, that the most perfect unity of plan can be traced in the fossil world, the modifications which it has undergone, and that we can carry back our researches distinctly to times antecedent to the existence of man. We can prove that man had a beginning, and that all the species now contemporary with man, and many others which preceded, had also a beginning ; consequently, the present state of the organic world has not gone on from all eternity, as some philosophers have maintained." To this I may add the testimony of Dr. Buckland himself, author of the Bridgewater Treatise on this most interesting science. His words are, ''AH observers" of the mechanism of the earth "admit that the strata" of which it is composed "were formed beneath the waters, and have been subsequently converted into dry land." (p. 44.) To these two dislinguished witnesses we shall add the testimony of a still more deservedly renowned name — one of the three greatest men of the present century that have flourished in the French me- tropolis, and near the court of that great nation. I allude to Cuvier, and his distinguished friends MM. Cousin and Guizot. These three deserve the admiration and the gratitude of that nation and all lovers of religion and science. Gentlemen, let me recommend to you the late work of M. Guizot on the Progress of European Civilization. I have read it with pleasure and profit. It traces, with the hand of a master, the agencies and elements that have conspired in the present civil- * Not having the works herein quoted with me, the substance was onlj given troni -my recollections in the extemporaneous address. SUPERNATURAL FACTS. 147 ization of the world. While I would not endorse every sentiment in the works of these great masters in philosophy and science, I cannot but regard them and their works as a blessing to that volatile, vivacious but great and distinguished nation. They have greatly contributed to redeem France from the theoretic atheism of the Voltaire and Volney school, and to convert its seminaries to a theism not only tending to good morals and good government, but to emancipate the people from the superstition and follies of the Papacy, and to propitiate their ears to the religion of the Bible. And, ladies, permit me to say for your con- solation and encouragement that all the piety of these great authors, and the good tendency of their numerous and elegant productions, are to be traced to the religious affections and pious trainings of the mother of one of them, Madame Cuvier, at whose house the other two, when lads, were accustomed to visit in the days of their juvenile amusements. She was accustomed to take every occasion to imbue their minds with a deep and abiding sense of the being and perfections of God as displayed in all his works and in his word — and to lead them to look through nature up to nature's God." From this digression let us turn to the testimony of Cuvier in his most splendid System of Geology: — ''The lowest and most level parts of the earth exhibit nothing, even when penetrated to a very great depth, but horizontal strata or layers composed of substances more or less varied, and containing almost all of them innumerable marine productions. Similar strata, with the same kind of productions, compose the lesser hills to a considerable height. Sometimes the shells are so numerous as to constitute of themselves the entire mass of the rock ; they rise to elevations superior to every part of the ocean, and are found in places where no sea could nave carried them at the present day, under any circumstances ; they are not only enveloped in loose sand, but are often enclosed in the hardest rocks. Every part of the earth, every hemisphere, every con- tinent, every island of any extent, exhibits the same phenomenon. It is the sea which has left them in the places where they are now found. But this sea has remained for a certain period in those places ; it has covered them long enough and with sufficient tranquillity to form those deposits, so regular, so thick, so extensive, and partly so solid, which contain those remains of aquatic animals. The basin of the sea has therefore undergone one change at least, either in extent or in situa- tion : such is the result of the very first search and of the most super- Rcial examination y ''The traces of revolutions become still more apparent and decisive 148 SUPERNATURAL FACTS. when we ascend a little higher, and approach nearer to the foot of tho great chains. There are still found many beds of shells; some of these are even thicker and more solid ; the shells are quite as numerous and as well preserved, but they are no longer of the same species. The strata which contain them are not so generally horizontal ; they assume an oblique position, and are sometimes almost vertical. While in the plains and low hills it was necessary to dig deep in order to discover the succession of the beds, we here discovered it at once by their exposed edges, as we followed the valleys that have been produced by their disjunction." ''These inclined strata, which form the ridges of the secondary mountains, do not rest upon the horizontal strata of the hills which are situate at their base, and which form the first steps in approaching them ; but, on the contrary, dip under them, while the hills in question rest upon their declivities. When we dig through the horizontal strata in the vicinity of mountains whose strata are inclined, we find these inclined strata reappearing below ; and even, sometimes, when the inclined strata are not too elevated, their summit is crowned by hori- zontal ones. The inclined strata are therefore older than the horizontal strata ; and as they must necessarily, at least the greatest number of them, have been formed in a horizontal position, it is evident that they have been raised, and that this change in their direction has been efiected before the others were superimposed upon them." ''Thus the sea, previous to the disposition of the horizontal strata, had formed others, which, by the operation of problematical causes, were broken, raised and overturned in a thousand ways; and as several of these inclined strata which it had formed at more remote periods rise higher than the horizontal strata which have succeeded them and which surround them, the causes by which the inclination of these beds was effected had also made them project above the level of the sea, and formed islands of them, or at least shoals and inequalities; and this must have happened whether they had been raised by one ex- tremity or whether the depression of the opposite extremity had made the waters subside. Thus is the second result not less clear nor less satisfactorily demonstrated than the first, to every one who will take the trouble of examining the monuments on which it is established." — Cuviers Theory of the Earth, vol. v. pp. 8-10. May we not now ask, How can these plain, sensible and incon- trovertible facts of geology, stereotyped in rocks and mountains, clearly legible to the eye of science, be reconciled with the hypothesis of the skeptic — that "the probability of the continuance of the laws of nature SUPERNATUEAL FACTS. 119 is superior to every other evidence" — when, in fact, we find no evidence of the continuance of the said laws of nature for any great length of time ; but rather the tokens of a series of supernatural facts, answer- ing to the series of creative acts recorded by Moses? He says, "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep ; and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God separated the waters, and the dry land appeared." Peter says, when speaking of our present scoffers, that this wilfully escapes those who say that "all things continue as they were from the begin- ning of the creation:" — "This wilfully escapes them, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water; by which water the old earth perished," &c. Geology is proving this by tables of rock, by stratas of earths, by the indurated remains of progressive creations, showing that at least six grand generic fiats originated and ordered the dominions of nature so far as pertains to our terraqueous inheritance. There is no bribing of these fossil witnesses — no counterfeiting of these imprinted rocks — these tables engraven by the finger of God ; a portion of which, exclu- sively a petrifaction of sea-shells, I picked up the other day in this county of. Mason ; and if I were permitted to conclude from the pave- ments of your streets and the excavations from the bottoms of your wells, I would say that you, gentlemen and ladies, live and move and have your being on an immense bed of sea-shells deposited ages since by the movements of a shoreless ocean, now converted into limestone ;* whose upper surface, by the action of atmospheric agents, has mould- ered down to dust ; and from which, mingled with vegetable deposits, the beautiful frames around me have, by another marvellous process, been reared and animated by the omnipotent hand of the Creator. Yes, gentlemen, I read on the deeply imprinted volumes of God's earth, in your own city and county, the refutation of the theory of La Place, and all of that school, who affirm that all things have continued in one uniform system of nature from some dateless eternity, alike unknown to reason and record. From the geological premises now before us, and I believe they are the most scientifically orthodox, though as nothing compared with the masses of documents and stratas of evidence within our reach ; still, from these premises the following conclusions are inevitable : — 1. The present earth was formed under water. Geology, and the Bible, Moses and Peter agree in this testimony. This truth is most * The primitive name of Maysville. 150 SUPERNATURAL FACTS. prolific of facts subversive of the skeptical philosophy. For, in the second place, the vegetable and animal structures and creations, requiring atmosphere, did not, could not possibly, exist from the beginning. Therefore a new class of supernatural facts, or a new series of supernatural operations, must have succeeded the first system of nature, before the fiat which separated the waters above and under the firmament, and which caused the dry land and the pure air to appear. 2d. The creation, then, of all the vegetable genera and species, each of which is a special operation, a new suspension, violation or devia- tion of the then laws of nature, next ensued, and became a distinct category of supernatural facts — a new system of nature. 3d. Then, when the vegetable dominions were finished, the earth clothed and filled with provisions for animal creations, a new series of supernatural interpositions was required to fill the air, the sea and the earth with inhabitants, requiring vegetable productions mediately or im- mediately for their subsistence. This occasioned more supernatural facts. 4th. And even yet the work was not complete; for there was no oeing of earthly creation that could read, or understand, or enjoy either the Creator or his creation ; and this called forth those divine energies that brought man into existence. Without further details, you will perceive, gentlemen, how baseless the hypothesis that nature's laws, operations and powers have continued always as they now are. Nothing can be more absurd. Consequently, nothing can be plainer to the candid, unsophisticated mind, than that there is a class of facts as properly styled supernatural, or miraculous, as that there are physical facts for the foundation of physical science. What more evident than that there was one man who was never born — a person that spoke who had never been spoken to by man — an oak that never sprang from an acorn — and trees innumerable that never sprang from seeds ? Or, will the skeptic prefer to say that there was a child without a father — speech before persons — eggs before birds — and seeds before trees ? On either hypothesis, miracles or supernatural facts are conceded as true and undeniable ; and therefore La Place's hypothesis of the uniformity and continuance of the laws of nature falls prostrate to the dust. Dare any philosopher affirm that nature continues to operate as she began ? Why, then, does she not annually cast up new genera and species, and begin new races of plants, animals and men ? May we not then conclude that the probability of the long continuance of the present system of nature is fairly shown to be a fond hypothesis rather than an ascertained fact ? SUPERNATURAL FACTS. 151 But the facts of geology are sustained and illustrated by astronomical observations ; so far, indeed, as the conglomeration of our planet, and, I might add, so far as the Mosaic account of the creative processes are implicated. The two Herschels, Sir William and Sir John, have greatly enriched astronomical science by their many splendid discoveries and specula- tions on the construction and architecture of the heavens. By the aid of their immense telescopes, of from ten to forty feet in length, they have ascertained that stars are still forming, and the remote fields of space are filling up with new systems of suns and their satellites. ''A shining fluid," rare and cloud-like, or nebulous, in immense masses, sometimes of a pale milky appearance, diffused over millions of miles, and of immense depth, like a curdling liquid, thickens, and, from being " without form and void," gradually assumes a globular appearance, thickens down into less dimensions, and finally shines as a star occu- pying but a speck, a shining point in a region which it once filled with its cloud-like appearance. Stars are counted up to thousands, in dif- ferent states of perfection, from shapeless masses of nebulae to spark- ling orbs of various magnitudes. They are said to resemble one another in their approaches to perfection, as an infant in its annual progress to manhood resembles a perfect man. In the first and rudest state," Nichol in his Architecture of the Heavens has said, " the nebulous matter is characterized by great diffusion ; the milky light is spread over a large space so equally that scarcely any peculiarity of construc- tion or arrangement can be perceived." The perfectly chaotic modifi- cation of this matter on its first appearance, or original form, resembles vapor thinly spread, some spots thicker and more luminous than others. So Moses describes our planet : — "And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the mass ; and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."* We cannot now detail what astronomers have said on the gradual condensation of these amorphous nebulosities into globular masses, or of the increased brilliancy which follows a change of structure. Suffice it to say, their matter seems gradually to fall under the same laws of gravitation and motion which govern our system ; but in the first instance one of their diurnal revolutions may occupy thousands * Keith, after quoting from Nichol as above, says, "Nebulae or nebulous matter, cloud or cloudy, may be said to be identified with waters, designated as without form and void. Water in a void or diffused state is vapor or cloud ; hereby denoting a harmony of expression between Moses and the astronomers for a state of matter for which human language, as they confess, has no name." 152 SUPERNATUEAL FACTS. of years, while as they condense into more solid masses, their motion increases, until their days, like those of our planet, from thousands of years are reduced to a few hours. Hundreds of instances given by our greatest astronomers confirm the truth of this statement, and show that the matter of these stars, by this rotatory motion, is separated and gradually solidified into a globe. If any one should doubt the power of glasses to bring such objects under our vision, to him we should say that the largest telescopes do penetrate into distances perfectly beyond the limits of even our ima- ginations. The diameter of the orbit of our earth is about one hundred and ninety millions of miles ; and, making it a sort of measuring-rod, it is calculated that our most powerful glasses can descry luminous objects almost four hundred times more remote than Sirius, which is distant from our earth about thirty-six billions of miles. It would be foreign to our object to institute a comparison between the discoveries of modern astronomers and the record of Moses con- cerning the first state of the heavens and the earth, and the gathering together of our globe. I will only say that, as in geology, so in as- tronomy, the nearer we approach the truth, the more complete is the evidence that no person in the times of Moses could have given such a description of the heavens and the earth, unless guided by the un- erring hand of omniscient wisdom. "We have made this reference to the diff'used nebulosities, those chaotic vaporous masses which contain within them the seeds and elements of new suns and systems, and which in process of time are rolled up, condensed and solidified into globes like ours, and fitted up for the production and residence of numerous and greatly- diversified in- habitants, to show that when Moses says the old earth was without form and void, and enveloped in darkness, and that God separated the waters above and below the firmament, and darkness and light, and finally made the dry land appear, he only speaks in accordance with the modern discoveries of the great masters of astronomical science; and for another purpose of greater interest with many — with a reference to the length of the six days, or the much higher antiquity that some geologists assign to our earth, comprred with what is understood to be the Mosaic account of this matter. It is alleged that the fossil remains, deposits and formations discovered in this earth argue an antiquity many thousand years beyond the period which Moses assigns to its origin, not yet full six thousand years. But to say that the time from darkness to darkness, or from light to light, called " evening and morn- ing," is necessarily of one length, is as unwarranted from the Bible as SUPERNATURAL FACTS. 253 It is from analogy, or from the changes which must have happened to the vaporous mass, formless and void, of which this globe was formed. Is there any ball in motion — any wheel in the universe, that performs its first rotatory motion in the same time in which it performs even its second, to say nothing of its motion when under the full influence of all the agencies and impulses which are then in co-operation upon it ? This would be a supernatural fact indeed ! The earth now revolves upon its axis in twenty-four hours ; but that it must have occupied no more time when it was an immense volume of vapor spread over a thousand millions of times its present occupancy of space, and unin- fluenced by the same laws that now govern it, would be a preposterous conclusion, a supernatural fact of marvellous import. While, then, the last days of the creation-week may have been no more than twenty- four hours, the first two or three may have been twenty-four thousand years, for any thing which science or the Bible avers on the subject. But all this is a free-will ofi'ering, uncalled for by the oracles of faith or of reason — by the word of God or the scientific researches in either of the departments of geology or astronomy. When any one argues from the length of time necessary to the formation of all the strata of earths and rocks with which the earth abounds, against its being created in six common days, he resembles a brother skeptic who argues against the fact of the first man's being an adult the first moment he saw the sun, because the formation of the bones and sinews, the muscles, arteries and nerves of an adult requires some twenty-five or thirty years to develop and confirm. To such drivelling philosophers we say, if God by one word could raise up in perfection one man, could he not by one word raise up this earth in all its developments — though now, as in the case of man, many years might be necessary, by the operations of the common laws of nature, to such a wonderful consum- mation ? We conclude, then, that there is nothing in true philosophy or in true science against supernatural facts, on the ground assumed by La Place, in his false hypothesis concerning the continuance of the laws of nature ; but, on the contrary, that both geology and astronomy, when fairly and impartially considered, compel the conclusion that various systems of nature must have preceded the present; and that to the commencement of each a divine or supernatural interposition was ab- solutely necessary. As an astronomer. La Place deposes against himself; for, according to him, "the primitive fluidity of the planets is clearly indicated by the compression of their figure conformably to the laws of the mutual ittraction of their molecules; it is moreover demonstrated by the 154 SUFEENATUKAL FACTS, regular diminution of gravity as we proceed -from the equator to the poles. The state of primitive fluidity to which we are conducted by astronomical phenomena is also apparent fi'om those which naturax history points out."* As La Place endorsed for David Hume, alleging that he was the first writer who had fairly and correctly propounded the connection between the evidence drawn from universal experience and the evidence of testimony — who had, in one word, declared that miracles are incredible because the laws of nature are inviolable — we need not assign much place to the consideration of his objections to supernatural facts, they being identical with those of the great materialist already examined. Still, as Hume is the real author of that philosophy which makes it equally impossible for God to work a miracle as for man to believe it, he deserves a more formal notice at our hand than we have yet given him. La Place's immutable and eternal contintiance of the laws of nature, and Hume's inviolability of those laws, are identical proposi- tions. If, then, the Creator of man desired to communicate with him, either by word or sign, on the assumption of these two mighty infidel chiefs, whose dogmas are the boast of all the French and English skeptics of the present day, he could not do it : for that would be to violate the inviolable laws— that would be to break up their eternal continuance. Eevelation is, therefore, impossible to Grod himself ; and the glorious constimmation of the philosophy of this school is, that man has more power to reveal himself to man, or even to the animals around him, than God himself. Man, then, is condemned to eternal ignorance of his origin and destiny, and of the will of his Creator, if nature's laws are inviolable, and God cannot suspend them. This, we think, would be absurd enough for even the skeptical philosophers themselves. But Mr. Hume could not believe any testimony that is contrary to universal experience," because it is infinitely more probable that the witnesses are mistaken, than that the laws of natv.re have been violated. This is the marrow and strength of his essay against miracles, or super- natural facts. This sophistry has been so ably exploded by the justly celebrated Dr. George Campbell, that it would seem a work of superero- gation again to notice it. But as many still rest in the delusion, who do not love truth so well as to listen to the other side of any question, for their sakes I would briefly ask Mr. Hume, if he were present, or any of his friends, How do you come into the possession of that which * La Place's System of the World, vol. ii. p. 365. SUPERNATURAL FACTS. 155 you call universal experience ? By wliat evidence do you acquire the assurance that the laws of nature are inviolable? Your own observa- tion ? Your own senses ? A narrow horizon, truly, from whicli to infer the uniformity and the inviolability of the laws of nature ! And is this your boasted philosophy, to infer fi'om the e\^dence of your own senses, for some half-century exercised on an atom of the universe — not a hand's-breadth of creation — the inviolable character of its laws through infinite space and eternal duration ? A mole, a gnat, an insect, may, then, from the image of this great world painted on the retina of its eye, philosophically depose that the universe is self-existent and eternal ! But, stranger still, do you call your own observations universal experience ? Is not universal experience the experience of all men in all places and at all times? And have your five senses given you the assurance of the experience of all persons in all places and at all times ? It is absurd. You can know only the experience of one man in one place and at one time. The rest is all memory, or all faith. You believe the experience of all men, and know only your own. Your own experience is knowledge, other men's experience is with you faith. Yes, gentlemen, your own personal experience is all that you know of this great universe; all the rest is mere belief of the testimony of others. And so it comes to pass that Mr. Hume could not believe the testimony of some men, because their testimony was contrary to the testimony of all men ! I But had he heard and examined the testimony of all men before he concluded himself in actual possession of uni- versal experience? No, not a millionth part of the testimony of all men : yet on this veriest fraction of universal experience he presumes to erect a house of refuge for all the outlaws of the universe, and calls it the Castle of Universal Experience! Mr. Hume's "splendid, un- answerable and most philosophic argument," as his disciples call it, against supernatural facts, when analyzed, is simply this: — "I cannot believe the testimony of some men, because it is contrary to my own experience and to that of a millionth part of all men, whose expe- rience is, in my judgment, universal experience!" And so deposes the Emperor of Siam : — I cannot believe one word that an Englishman utters, because he says that in England men and cattle walk upon water congealed into ice, which certainly is a glaring falsehood, because contiaiy to my experience and to that of all the good people of the torrid zone, which is the universal experience of all mankind in all ^ges and in all places !" But if it were allowable farther to expose this shameless sophistry^ 156 SUPERNATURAL FACTS. I would yet ask, Why does Mr. Hume believe the testimony of any man on any subject? Because his own experience and that man's exactly tally with one another ? Then his own individual experience is the standard of all truth ! Who can believe that ? Mr. Hume, in his elegant but insidious History of England, shows that he believed ten thousand facts without, or contrary to, his own experience. This, then, was mere credulity, his own philosophy being in the chair. But his vouchers were honest men, veracious and competent witnesses. And have we not as honest men — as veracious and competent witnesses of supernatural facts, as they ? And if we rely upon the eyes and ears of one class of witnesses, why not upon the eyes and ears of another class, who are even more disinterested and capable than they? men who sealed their testimony of supernatural facts by laying down their lives calmly and deliberately in proof of what they alleged ? We admit that it requires good, strong and unimpeachable testi- mony to establish a suspension or violation of the laws of nature. And we admit that the uniformity of the laws of nature must be well esta- blished in order to the credibility of a supernatural fact : for were the laws of nature frequently suspended, or were not their uniformity, except by the interposition of the Creator, fully sustained, then the proof of a supernatural fact would be impossible. The Christian philosopher contends strongly for the uniformity and inviolability of the laws of nature, unless the Author of nature interpose, and that on an occasion worthy of such an interference; for with Horace he will say — Xec Deus intersit, Nisi dignus vindice nodus. (Let not a god appear in the piece, unless upon an occasion that calls for his presence.) But we are persuaded, from the sciences already named, that occa- sions have occurred in which the Divinity has interposed ; for the tables of nature, as well as the oracles of prophets, have mado it most evident ; and if it were expedient for the Creator to interpose on any occasion in reference to the creation of man, reason says, with her ten thousand tongues, more necessary it is that he interpose to save man from ruin, that this creation, this mundane system, might not issue in a perfect abortion ! We Christians thank all the philosophers, and amongst them the two master-spirits now before us, for their efforts to establish the uniformity and inviolability of the laws of nature; for we need their arguments to establish ours ; but with one of their own school, the eloquent though visionary Eousseau, we will say, "Can God work miracles ? that is to say. Can he derogate from the laws which SUPERNATURAL FACTS. 157 he has established ? The question, treated seriously, would be impious^ if it were not absurd." Having seen that philosophy, from all her treasures and with all her talents, not only inefficiently assails, but even corroborates and illustrates the certainty of supernatural facts ; we shall define a miracle with a reference to its utility in religion and morals ; for with us miracles or supernatural facts are as necessary to true morals as to true religion. Evidence and authority are demanded alike by conscience and by reason, before we make a perfect surrender of ourselves to the dictates of piety and humanity A MIRACLE, in the Jewish and Christian sense, is a display of supernatural power in attestation of the truth of a message from God. To seal a message, or to attest a messenger, is essential to the credit and acceptance of them. Now, miracles are the seal of a message. '^Witness my hand and seal" is the philosophy of the whole matter. "God the Father sealed Jesus;" Moses and Jesus were sealed messen- gers of God. The former was the minister of law; the latter the minister of grace : "for the law was given by Moses ; but the grace and the substance came by Jesus Christ." Now, as there are two sorts of supernatural power, there are two sorts of supernatural facts — physical and mental. Miracles, then, may be displays of the one or the other, or of both conjointly, as the nature of the case may demand. The person who controls, violates or sus- pends any of the laws of physical nature, — curing disease by a word, healing the sick, restoring the maimed, raising the dead, or dispossess- ing demons, gives evidence that he is sustained by the hand of Omnipo- tence. He performs physical miracles; he overpowers physical nature. This is what we mean by a display of supernatural physical power. He who foretells a future event, depending on no known or ascertain- able cause, such as the fortune of a man, a family, a nation, at any given future period, displays a mental power equally supernatural and miraculous. This is a display of supernatural mental power. Physical miracles are, then, primarily addressed to the reason and senses of living witnesses ; intellectual miracles to the reason and senses of those who shall hereafter live. One class, it may be said, are primarily designed for contemporaries ; the other for posterity. Thus we who now live are made equal to those who lived in the times of the apostles in point of assurance of the truth of the Christian re- ligion. They saw some miracles, and believed others; we see some miracles, and believe others. The miracles which they saw, we believe ; the miracles that we see, they believed. One half of our supernatural SUPERNATURAL FACTS. evidences grows weaker, the other half grows stronger, by time. This, with me, is a point of great moment ; permit me therefore, gentlemen, to make myself fully understood. The power that infallibly foretells a future event, depending on no laws known to mortals, but upon a thousand contingencies beyond human calculation, is as clearly super- natural as that power which reanimates at a bidding the dust of a dead man. Not, however, the uttering of a prediction, but the accomplish- ment of it, constitutes the proof of omniscience. Now, the longer the interval between the prediction and the event foretold, the clearer the evidence of supernatural knowledge : whereas the longer the interval between a reported miracle, and the more numerous the hands through which it has been transmitted to us, the fainter or more obscure the evidence. Thus, while for the sake of argument it might be admitted that the evidence of the miracles of Moses and of Christ, at the distance of two or four thousand years, is weaker than it was a single century after they occurred; surely it will be conceded that their clear predictions of events two or four thou- sand years future, is a stronger proof of their inspiration, or divine mission, than the foretelling of events only fifty or a hundred years distant. Thus, while the evidence of physical miracles daily grows lighter, the evidence of mental miracles or prophecy daily grows heavier. And he that lives to see a prediction fully and clearly accom- plished as certainly sees a miracle as he that by his natural eyes saw Lazarus revive and leave the sepulchre at the command of Jesus of Nazareth. To illustrate : — Suppose any one should arise amongst us in the cha- racter of a divine messenger, having some communication from Heaven of transcendent importance to the human race : it would not be suffi- cient that he solemnly affirm his mission : he must prove it ; he must show the hand and seal of Heaven attached to it. Nothing like omni- potence or divine power so naturally addresses itself to the human understanding through the senses in evidence of inspiration. He per- forms physical miracles : this satisfies contemporaries, and they report it to posterity. But posterity would like to see as well as to believe a miracle. Well, he is willing that posterity as well as his contempo- raries should be blessed. He, therefore, in the presence of many wit- nesses, at diverse times and places, foretells some future events which shall in the different ages of the world sensibly and intelligibly occur: for example, among other predictions, he foretells that the inhabitants of a certain Spanish island shall, in fifty years from this time, possess this whole continent ; that their language, laws, customs and religion SUPERNATURAL FACTS. 159 shall be everywhere predominant; and that our children, excepting such as migrate to some distant region, shall be extirpated by them. Now, suppose this prediction be made a matter of state record, placed among the archives of the nation and copied and translated into different languages ; and, finally, should this event, with all its circumstances, so strange, so unexpected, so contrary to all human probability, actually occur : I ask, would not those who then lived see as great a miracle, having the prediction in their eye, as we who saw the same prophet raise the dead ? While, then, we his contemporaries see some miracles and believe others, our posterity believe the miracles that we see, and see the miracles that we believe ; and thus the more impro- bable the events foretold, and the longer the interval, the stronger the assurance of the mission of him that uttered them. Such, gentlemen, are the supernatural facts recorded in the Bible, and such their use. And, when the subject is examined with the candor and the care which its infinite importance demands, it will un- doubtedly appear to all that we who live in the year of grace 1839 have prophecies accomplishing, miracles occurring before our eyes, which were registered in the records of nations and translated into difi*erent languages thousands of years before we were born ; and there- fore we have as good reason to believe that Jesus is the Saviour of the v/orld as they who witnessed his miracles in Judea. Indeed, the Bible is the only book in the world that ever did pre- sume to foretell the fortune of the whole human race. It has, so to speak, one great prophetic meridian-line which surrounds the destinies of our globe ; and, when we intelligently bring up any particular place or epoch to that line, upon it we read its fortunes at that hour. But this requires some intelligence in that book and in the history of the world: it requires that both be read and understood — just as it re- quired the Jews to walk with Jesus to 'the tomb of Lazarus, and to look and listen, to see and believe that miracle. It therefore behooves us to go with the prophets, geographically and chronologically, and to listen and look that we may see and understand the miracles submitted to us. The same candor and attention that could have seen and believed a miracle then, can see and believe a miracle now. I can illustrate by only an instance or two these remarks on the Becond class of miracles — those displays of supernatural intellectual power in attestation of the great proposition. I will select a single specification from each Testament. That from the Old will be found in the writings of Moses — the most ancient of historians — delivered at a time when his own people were standing around him on their way 160 SUPERNATURAL FACTS. from Egypt to Canaan. In anticipation of their breaking covenant with God, the prophet Moses states (Deut. xxviii. 46-68) certain curses which should be upon them for a miracle and perpetual won- der." These are among the specifications : — 1. A far foreign nation, swift as eagles fly, should come from the ends of the earth — a nation of a foreign and to them a barbarous speech, of warlike character, fierce and unrelenting to old or young — and should devour their good land with all its products, and then besiege them in all their cities. 2. The details of the sieges are then given with a minuteness that ends with the account of a delicate lady eating her own infant secretly in the distress and straitness which should come upon them. 3. They should afterwards be reduced in number, from immense multitudes to comparatively a very few, and driven from their own land. 4. Then they were to be scattered among all people from one end of the earth to the other, and should serve them and their gods of wood and stone. 5. And, while among these nations, they should have no ease, no ■-est for the sole of their feet, but should be seized with a trembling heart, failing of eyes and sorrow of mind. 6. Yet they should not be absorbed by those nations ; for, as saith the Lord by Jeremiah, " they should never, while sun, moon and stars existed, cease from being a nation before him." Jer. xxxi. 35, 36. These are but a few — not a hundredth part — of the clear, literal, unfigurative predictions of that miraculous people : a standing miracle, indeed, they have ever been, from the supernatural birth of Isaac to the present hour ; which go to prove that Moses and their prophets spoke by a divine and supernatural wisdom and intelligence. Now, as they who lived in the times of the siege of Jerusalem saw the verifica- tion of so much of the prediction as pertained to that epoch, so we who now live see another portion of it literally accomplishing : we see the Jews in our own land preserved a separate and distinct people — not yet amalgamated and absorbed by any nation on earth, though disperse/; through Asia, Africa and Europe, as among us, without a home, a resting-place, or national institutions — yet still a people; while the Assyrians, Medo-Persians, Greeks and Komans, who, ages after the prediction was delivered, tyrannized over them, and rose to the govern- ment of the world, have long since been absorbed, amalgamated and ost in the ocean of humanity. Now, that Moses wrote in Hebrew nore than three thousand three hundred years ago, and was publicly SUPERXATUEAL FACTS. 161 and by national authority translated into Greek more than two thou- sand years ago, are facts as veritable and certain as that there were once Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Greeks, Komans ; and that is all that is necessary to perfect this miracle. For, let me ask, was it within the power of human reason or intellect to foretell, with such minuteness, with a singularity of incident unparalleled in the history of the world, the presept fortunes of any people some two, three or four thousand years ago ? If this be not a display of supernatural intellectual power — a real miracle — a palpable supernatural fact — we confess ourselves incompetent judges of the attributes of any fact, ordinary or extra- ordinary. Take another example. Paul (in the second chapter of Second Thessalonians) foretells a man of sin, with such a variety of circum- stances as wholly transcends all human prescience, as much as the removal of a mountain exceeds all human volition. Within thirty years of the crucifixion of the Messiah, he describes one who should sit in the Christian church, assuming a power over all political magis- trates and rulers ; that this personage could not appear till an apostasy from the apostles' doctrine should occur, and until the Roman Pagan magistracy was taken out of the way, as a hindrance to his full revela- tion. He also foretells the consumption of this son of perdition, his final ruin, &c. And have we not this fact now before our eye ? That apostasy came : Christian emperors mounted the throne of the Caesars ; Christian priests made for themselves a Pontifex Maximus — a great High-Priest — a Pope, who now sits in what he claims to be the temple of God, and who has oft assumed all the powers before described over all princes and rulers. And lias not the consumption of his power commenced ? and do we not see, ever since the Protestant Reforma- tion, the waning and gradual diminution of his authority ? Surely, we have this fact before our eyes at this moment. Now, that the pre- diction is eighteen hundred years old, is proved from the ancient Syriac and Latin versions, and all authentic records concerning the commence- ment and progress of Christianity, Jewish, Pagan and Christian. And need I say that nothing was or could be more unlikely to happen than that the alleged vicar of one then so recently crucified should rise to a transcendency of power eclipsing the glory of all Roman, of all Pagan magistracy — not for a moment, but for a series of ages, amounting to almost thirteen centuries ? In the extemporaneous address of an hour, gentlemen, it is not pos- sible to set this matter forcibly and clearly before you. We rather dubmit to you these facts and observations as a subject of your own 11 162 SUPERNATUKAL FACTS. examination and development. To give to one of these supernatural facts the demonstration of which it is susceptible would require more time than we have now occupied on the whole premises before us. ^ith me, I assure you, this is an important subject. True religion and true morals are, like all true science, founded on homogeneous facts. Christianity is a supernatural institution for man in a preter- natural condition, and it is itself — both its proposition and its proof— a superhuman system. That God should have permitted his Son to die for his rebellious creatures, in open war engaged, is itself a moral miracle, and demands supernatural attestations. It is unique. The proposition, the proof, and the issue, are alike supernatural and tran- scendent. In bringing this subject before you, gentlemen, I had another object : I desired to contribute my mite to the proof of another proposition not fully stated in this address — that all the discoveries in science are favorable to Christianity. The voice of nature will never contradict the voice of revelation. Nature and the Bible are both witnesses for God — they are consistent witnesses, and mutually corroborate each other. But they must be understood. Some novices in religion are alarmed at every new discovery in science, lest it should militate against the Bible. Astronomy, geology, phrenology, have all been proscribed, like Galileo, by some untaught and unteachable ecclesiastics. We fear nothing from true science. Phrenology herself, when she takes her seat in the temple of true science, will lift up her voice for the necessity of the Bible and of reli- gion. She does it already by showing that man is made to worship and adore, to be both righteous and religious, just and generous ; that in order to be happy, he must know and reverence and delight in the true God. She proves man, as he now is, to be a religious animal, and in need of a revelation from God ; and leaves to reason and con- science to prefer truth to error — Christianity to idolatry — reality to fable. That you, gentlemen, individually and collectively, may not only attain to the true science of God, but to the true enjoyment of a reli- gion based on supernatural facts ; that you may be prepared for the enjoyment of an immortal life in a new creation; is the unfeigned desire of your friend and fellow-citizen, long devoted with you to the great work of mental and moral improvement. ADDRESS THE DESTINY OF OUR COUNTRY: DELIVERED BEPORE THE PHILO-LITERARY SOCIETY OF CANONSBURG COLLEGE, PENNSYLVANIA, AUGUST 3, 1852, BEING IT3 FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY. Gentlemen : — No one can really understand any thing, who does not kno^w something of every thing. Circles, cycles and centres compose the machinery of the universe. Suns, moons and stars have their re- spective centres, their orbits and their cycles. But there is one centre that regulates and that governs all other centres ; for every centre is both attractive and radiating. It communicates and it receives. It supports and is supported. There must, then, be one self-sustaining centre, and that centre must be forever at rest. It is both the centre of gravity and the centre of motion. And that centre is not God himself, for he is everywhere. He is himself a circle, whose centre is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere. There is a reason for every thing, if there be any reason in any thing. Of what use light, if there be not an eye ? And of what use an eye, if there be not light? Creator and creature are correlates. The one implies the other. There is, therefore, in the human mind, a necessity for the being and perfections of God. His existence is essen- tial to ours ; but our existence is not essential to his. We are, because he wds. Had he not been, we never could have been. We are not Belt-existent. He must, then, be self-existent; consequently, infinite, eternal and immutable. But there is in God something passive, as well as something active. A human muscle is passive without a nerve of motion. A nerve of motion is passive without a will ; and, therefore, wiU, and will only, is 163 164 THE DESTINY OF OUR COUNTRY. the primum mobile — the first cause and the last end of this universe. For God's pleasure, or will, we are and were created. How much philosophy find we, then, in that beautiful word universe ! It is a versus in unum. It is every thing in motion around one thing , which is immovably fixed. The true centre of gravity is, then, the true centre of motion. But there is not much gravity in a volition. olitions are very ethereal entities. Oh for Ithuriel's spear, to dissect one of them! Oh that we could place ourselves yonder, ''where fields of light and liquid ether flow" ! But here we must place ourselves upon an assumption. "We do not like that word assumption. We shall, therefore, call it a, postulatum. But its very assertion is its proof. It is this: the universe is founded upon a moral idea. God did not create the universe because he had wisdom to design it. He did not create the universe because he had power to create it. For both wisdom and power are passive instruments. Goodness alone is necessarily, eternally, im- mutably active. It is essentially and perpetually communicative. It is communicative when it radiates and when it attracts. It is the cause of all motion. But for it, nothing would ever have been. The universe is, therefore, a necessary existence. It must be, because God was. It must be, because Jehovah was God — the absolute Good One. It is but a temple, in which goodness lives, moves and has its being — its local habitation and its home. For its glory all things are and were created. This, and this only, is physical, intellectual, moral and religious ortho- doxy. It is orthodoxy in essence, in form, in substance. It is the phi- losophy of philosophy, and the religion of religion. It is the immo- vable centre of all the centres of the universe. And here we place our foot upon the Eock of Ages. Our only postulatum is the "Hock of Ages." Man having been created in the image of God, and cradled in a universe in perpetual motion, his mind is necessarily active. As soon as man begins to think, he begins to construct circles of thought around some perception or idea ; and these, according to their specific nature, are formed into what are properly called systems, or sciences. He has an ideal ontology and a deontology, before he knows the meaning of a single word. His primordial conceptions are, first, being, then relation^ then dependence, then duty, then pleasure, then pain. These are all arranged before he understands a word or a thing. "These are the centres of his thoughts, his volitions and his actions. But he is sur- rounded by bad teachers, and has a fallen and, consequently, a shattered constitution. He is passive, and easily led astray. His mind is perverted by bad teachers and bad associations. He soon finds THE DESTINY OF OUR COUNTRY. 165 liimself in error, and sets about correcting it. He again finds an error in his mode of correcting it; and so the conflict between truth and error, good and evil, begins long before he knows any one thing. This is an inherent calamity, consequent upon an ancestral catastrophe. He is necessarily obliged to classify perceptions, reflections, volitions, actions and their consequences. He is born with a pope in his stomach, and that is a very indigestible substance. Hence the dogmatism of children, simpletons and charlatans. Of these big children we have yet a sample in every family of science. I say family of science, for these families have grown and multiplied, and replenished the whole earth. Our great-great-grandfathers had but seven sciences — the num- ber of perfection. But we have seventy sciences ; and yet we want another. With the great Hooker, we will say, that ''no science doth make known the first principles on which it buildeth." But in this age of progress, any art, or species of knowledge, is called a science. Any one specific idea may become the centre of a science. Indeed, we have, without knowing it, been moving forward to a new nomenclature on the grand subject of sciences, sects and schisms, in all the know- ledges of earth, of time, of the universe. The time may come, if it be not already come, when every generic and specific idea shall become the foundation of a science, a sect, a party and a school. Take the following words — Papist, Protestant, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Con- gregationalist, Methodist, Baptist, Monarchist, Aristocrat, Democrat,