o 
 
 ( "CrlOh^' 
 
 ^^0)i> 
 
 13 
 
 I Je relations of % §ible to % ODitrili^atiort of % Juto. J< 
 
 SERMON 
 
 DKI.IVKHEII BEFOBE 
 
 HIS EXCELLENCY NATHANIEL P. BANKS, 
 
 GOVERNOR, 
 
 Ills EONOR ELIPHALET TEASK, 
 
 LIEUT. GOVERNOR, 
 
 lije jjonorabh Council, 
 
 AMD 
 
 THE LEGISLATURE OF MASSACHUSETTS. 
 
 AT THE 
 
 ANNUAL ELECTION, 
 WEDNESDAY, January 2, 18G1. 
 
 A r S T I N P II E LPS, 
 
 BARTLBT PROFBSSOB [N INDOVBR rHEOLOGIOAl SKMi.viEV . 
 
 BOS T N : 
 WILLIAM WHITE, PRINTER TO THE STATE. 
 
 18 61. 
 
 s 
 
 £1 -'-'kg^-
 
 - 
 
 %\t relations of ilie §iWe to the ftil^atiott of the Jfttta. 
 
 SERMON 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE 
 
 HIS EXCELLENCY NATHANIEL P. BANKS. 
 
 G V E B N B , 
 
 I ITS HONOR ELIPHALET TRASK, 
 
 LIEUT. GOVERNOR, 
 
 %\t lononoU (imuuil, 
 
 AND 
 
 THE LEGISLATURE OF MASSACHUSETTS. 
 
 AT THE 
 
 ANNUAL ELECTION, 
 
 WEDNESDAY, January 2, 18C1. 
 
 BY 
 
 AUSTIN PHELPS, 
 
 /) 
 
 BARTLET PROFESSOR IN ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMIXART. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 WILLIAM WHITE, PRINTER TO THE STATE. 
 1861.
 
 totinotttwalt!] of Itassacdwsetts. 
 
 In Senate, January 5, 18G1. 
 
 Ordered, That a Committee be appointed to present the thanks of the Senate to 
 the Rev. Dr. Phelps of Andover, for his very able and appropriate Sermon preached 
 before the Government of the Commonwealth on "Wednesday last, and to request a 
 copy thereof for the press, 
 
 And Messrs. Underwood, Walker, and Hardy, are appointed said Committee. 
 
 S. N. GIFFORD, Clerk.
 
 CfliWMtttolijr of Stacjprtts. 
 
 State House, Senate Chamber, Boston, / 
 January 7, 18G1. J 
 
 Rev. Sir, — By an Order unanimously passed on the 5th instant, the undersigned 
 were instructed to present to you the thanks of the Senate for the able Sermon 
 preached by you before the Government of the Commonwealth on the 2d inst., and 
 to request a copy of the same for the press. 
 
 Be assured, Sir, it affords us sincere pleasui - e to communicate to you a tribute so 
 well deserved, and we trust it will be both agreeable .and convenient for you to 
 furnish to the Senate a copy of the Sermon for the press as solicited, at an early day. 
 
 M. S. UNDERWOOD, 
 FREEMAN WALKER, 
 ALPHEUS HARDY, 
 
 Committee of the Senate. 
 Rev. Dr. Austin Phelps, Andover, Mass. 
 
 Andover, Mass., January, 8, 1861. 
 
 Gentlemen, — I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of yes- 
 terday, communicating to me the wishes of the Senate that a copy of the Sermon, 
 which it was my privilege recently to deliver before the Government of the Common- 
 wealth, be given to the press. 
 
 It will give me pleasure to comply with the request, as soon as the manuscript can 
 be made legible to the printer. 
 
 Please to accept my cordial acknowledgment of the courtesy with which you 
 have expressed to me the vote of your honorable body, and believe me to be, 
 
 With sentiments of high regard, 
 
 Your ob't serv't, 
 
 AUSTIN PHELPS. 
 
 To the Hon. M. S. Underwood, Hon. Freeman Walker, Hon. Alvheus 
 Hardy, Committee of the Senate of Massachusetts.
 
 Commoomtowlti of PassadjMtiis. 
 
 In Senate, January 15, 1861. 
 
 The Committee to which was committed the Order of the 5th inst. have attended 
 to the duties prescribed in the Order, and have received from the Rev. Dr. Phelps a 
 manuscript copy of his Sermon preached before the Government of the Common- 
 wealth on the 2d inst., which together with the correspondence is herewith laid before 
 the Senate, and your Committee report the accompanying Order. 
 
 For the Committee, 
 
 M. S. UNDERWOOD, Chairman. 
 Accepted. S. N. GIFFORD, Clerk. 
 
 In Senate, January 15, 18G1. 
 
 Ordered, That eight thousand copies of the Election Sermon preached by the 
 Rev. Dr. Austin Phelps, before the Government of the Commonwealth on the 2d 
 inst., be printed for the use of the Legislature. 
 
 S. N. GIFFORD, Clerk.
 
 SERMON. 
 
 Psalms cxix. 99, 100. 
 
 I HAVE MORE UNDERSTANDING THAN ALL MY TEACHERS: FOR THY TESTIMONIES 
 ARE MY MEDITATION. I UNDERSTAND MORE THAN THE ANCIENTS, BECAUSE I 
 KEEP THY PRECEPTS. 
 
 The custom which we honor in the services of this 
 day, has come clown to us from an ancestry, whom 
 history has learned to recognize among the civilizing 
 powers of the world. Their power is, for the most 
 part, latent, like the forces of nature. Like those, 
 also, it is constructive. It has been working now for 
 two centuries and more ; yet, to-day, it is going on 
 with its creations, giving birth to States, fashioning 
 institutions, breathing free life into nations, with 
 the same unconsciousness of its own majesty which 
 belongs to gravitation. 
 
 Like all such unconscious forces in the moral world, 
 however, it is not the power of the men who repre- 
 sented it, but of certain principles which were in the 
 men. Those principles, as related to the progress of 
 civilization, may be reduced to two, of a very simple 
 character. The one is, their faith in the Word of 
 God ; the other, their faitli in the world's future. 
 2
 
 10 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 Our Fathers had faith in the Bible. They believed 
 it as no abstraction, concerned rather with other worlds 
 than with this. They embraced it as the most intense 
 reality they knew of; as necessary to their daily wel- 
 fare as the daily sunrise. They grounded their domes- 
 tic, and literary and civil institutions upon it, no less 
 heartily than their churches, and creeds, and pulpits. 
 They would have put a man in the pillory who should 
 have so insulted their consciences, and expressed the 
 degradation of his own, as to deny the obligation of a 
 State to conform to the same standard of right with 
 that which should govern the individual. They con- 
 sulted the ministers of religion in the framing of their 
 statutes, at the very time when their care against 
 priestly domination was so vigilant, that they forbade 
 the clergy to solemnize the right of marriage. They 
 fought the battles of the State, with Bibles in their 
 knapsacks. They expounded the institutes of Moses, 
 and sung the Psalms of David, on the eve of their 
 victories. It was their faith in the Word of God 
 which moved that Act of the American Congress, by 
 which, at the height of the Eevolution, side by side 
 with appropriations for the purchase of gunpowder, 
 there stood an Order for the importation of twenty 
 thousand copies of the Scriptures. 
 
 From such a faith as this, it was an inevitable corol- 
 lary that our fathers should have faith also in the 
 future destiny of this world. Such men could not 
 believe that God would abandon the nations. They
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 11 
 
 were stern predestinarians ; but theirs was faith in the 
 predestined triumph of right over wrong, of truth over 
 falsehood, of liberty over slavery, and of a Christian 
 civilization, therefore, over barbarism, however rooted 
 in history. If ever men deserved the title, they were 
 Men of the Future. Their ideas penetrated into 
 coming times farther than they themselves saw. They 
 were the builders of structures, of which they were not 
 consciously the architects. It has been well said of 
 them, that they had a " high constructive instinct, rais- 
 ing them above their age, and above themselves." 
 Men who are raised above their age, and above them- 
 selves, by whatever power, have great visions of truth, 
 which suggest, when they do not reveal, a great future. 
 It was a spiritual inheritance from such men which 
 moved John Adams, in the Congress of 1775, to say, 
 " No assembly ever had a greater number of great 
 objects before them. Provinces, nations, empires, are 
 small things before us." * 
 
 Tracing our institutions to their origin in such an 
 ancestry, we may not unfitly regard it as our birth- 
 right to consider, on an occasion like this : 
 
 Some of the Relations of the Bible to the Civilization 
 of the Future. 
 
 The discussion of this theme here must necessarily 
 
 be fragmentary. It will be my object to direct your 
 
 thoughts to a few only, of the facts in which lie the 
 
 * Life and Works of John Adams, vol. i., p. 170.
 
 12 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 germs of the control which the Scriptures must exert 
 over the progress of mankind. 
 
 I. Of these, we may observe in the first place, that the 
 Scriptures contain the most ancient forms of truth now 
 known to men. In any enlarged view of the forces 
 which civilize communities, a place must be found for 
 the instinctive reverence of the human mind for anti- 
 quity. A thing is presumptively true if it is old ; 
 and an old truth men ivill revere. Such is human 
 nature. We all have historic feelers, which reach out 
 into the past, for something to lay hold of, and to hold 
 on by, in the rush of things around us. He is not a 
 bold man, but a weak one, rather, who can tear him- 
 self absolutely loose from those roots which run into 
 the under-ground of other ages. It would be an 
 irreparable loss to the civilizing forces of Christendom, 
 if the faith of the Christian world could be destroyed 
 in the descent of the race from one pair ; so ennobling 
 and so stimulating to culture is this instinct of rever- 
 ence for a long-lived unity. Especially is its power felt 
 in the fashioning and perpetuating of civil and social 
 institutions. An institution becomes to a nation like 
 an heirloom to a family ; the longer it has been, the 
 more worthy to be it appears to the nation's heart. 
 England, within a century, has borne shocks of her 
 social framework which no other nation in Europe 
 could have survived, in part because she has a thou- 
 sand years of history.
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 13 
 
 With all the abuses to which this susceptibility of 
 our nature is liable, it is in our nature, and for wise 
 purposes. Within its normal limits, and kept in 
 balance by the opposite spirit of inquiry, its operation 
 is healthful. No grand elevation of society is ever 
 attained without its aid. The Bible invites a large 
 and free indulgence of it, by the fact that, in this 
 volume are contained the earliest truthful thoughts of 
 our race, in written forms. 
 
 To give defmiteness to this view, let. several specifi- 
 cations be observed in its illustration. It is, for in- 
 stance, a fact, the significance of which Infidelity 
 appreciates, if we do not, that the only authentic his- 
 tory of the world before the Flood, is found in the 
 sacred books of Christianity. The world of the future 
 never can know any thing of the Antediluvians, except 
 from the Jewish historian. It would be worth centu- 
 ries of toil to the socialism of Europe, if the infidel 
 science on which it is founded could blot out this one 
 fact in the relations of the world to the Pentateuch. 
 We have also, in the books of Moses, — what no other 
 literature can show — one or two stanzas of poetry, 
 which were actually composed in the antediluvian 
 infancy of the race. Does it not help us to some con- 
 ception of the venerableness of these volumes, to recall 
 that they were written eleven hundred years before 
 Herodotus, whom all other literature denominates the 
 father of history X The Hebrew jurisprudence is seven 
 hundred years older than that of Lycurgus, and two.
 
 14 THE EELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 thousand years older than that of Justinian. You 
 have heard that Thomas Jefferson was indebted for 
 his conception of our American Government, to the 
 polity of an obscure Calvinistic church in Virginia. 
 But Republicanism was foreshadowed in the Hebrew 
 Commonwealth, three thousand years before the settle- 
 ment of Jamestown. 
 
 Dr. Johnson once read a manuscript copy of the 
 book of Ruth, to a fashionable circle in London. 
 They begged to know of him, where he obtained such 
 an inimitable pastoral. What would have been their 
 amazement, if he had concealed the fact of the in- 
 spired origin of the story, and had told them that it 
 was an ancient treasure, written twenty-five hundred 
 years before the discovery of America] The lyric 
 poetry of the Hebrews was in its golden age, nearly 
 a thousand years before the birth of Horace. The 
 author of Ecclesiastes discussed the problem of evil, 
 six hundred years before Socrates in the dialogues of 
 Plato ; and the epithalamium of the Canticles is a 
 thousand years older than Ovid. The book of Esther 
 was a venerable fragment of biography, stranger than 
 fiction, at least fifteen hundred years old at the dawn 
 of the romance-literature of Europe. The Proverbs 
 of Solomon are, by nine hundred years, more ancient 
 than the treatises of Seneca. The entire bulk of the 
 prophetic literature of the Hebrews, a literature ex- 
 traordinary, one which has laws of its own, to which 
 there is and can be no parallel, in any uninspired
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 15 
 
 workings of the human mind — this mysterious, often 
 unfathomable compendium of the world's future, which 
 the wisdom of twenty centuries has not exhausted, was 
 the whole of it anterior to the Augustan age of Rome ; 
 and even the writers of the New Testament are, all of 
 them, of more venerable antiquity than Tacitus, and 
 Plutarch, and Pliny the younger. 
 
 And what shall be said of the book of Job \ Bib- 
 lical scholars can only conjecture its age ; but if that 
 conjecture be true, this is the oldest volume now 
 existing, at least a thousand years older than Homer. 
 It was already an ancient poem when Cecrops founded 
 Athens. When Britain was invaded by the Romans, 
 it was more time-worn than the name of Julius Ca?sar 
 to-day, is to us. Natural philosophers now turn to 
 its allusions as the only recorded evidence we have, 
 of the state of the arts and sciences four thousand 
 years ago. A living commentator on the book has 
 collated from it passages illustrative of the then 
 existing state of knowledge, respecting astronomy, 
 geography, cosmology, meteorology, mining operations, 
 precious stones, coining, writing, engraving, medicine, 
 music, hunting, husbandry, modes of travel, the mili- 
 tary art and zoology. Any other work, surely, which 
 should be so fortunate as to be of uninspired author- 
 ity, and should give to the world the obscurest au- 
 thentic hints of the state of these sciences and arts 
 forty centuries back, would be hailed as a treasure 
 worthy of a nation's purchase.
 
 16 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 But these vestiges of antiquity are of little moment, 
 considered merely as curiosities of literature. The 
 thing which gives them claim to notice at the present 
 is, that through them there runs a chain of truth, rep- 
 resenting a work of God for this world's welfare, and 
 that this is the only thing in the world's history which 
 goes back, in authentic record, to the beginning of 
 time. Such a volume must be, sooner or later, a 
 power in the world's enlightenment, if for no other 
 reason, for the strength of its appeal to man's rever- 
 ence for long-lived truth. Nations cannot forever 
 throw off its authority if they would. Governments 
 cannot permanently seal it up, nor political science 
 treat it with the contempt of silence. Armies cannot 
 trample it out of life in the souls of men. Manly 
 souls will not let it go from them. It must be felt 
 as one of the powers of control on earth, if this 
 clinging of our nature to ancient forms of truth is 
 designed, in God's purposes, to hold the world fast to 
 any thing in the evolution of its destiny. 
 
 II.* The Sovereignty of the Scriptures in the pro- 
 gress of mankind is further suggested by the fact, that 
 they contain the only development of Oriental mind, 
 which can be an authority in the civilization of the 
 
 * In consequence of the lateness of the hour at 'which the services 
 commenced, this division of the Discourse, and several other paragraphs, 
 were omitted in the delivery.
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 17 
 
 future. In an estimate, on any large scale, of the proba- 
 ble advancement of our race, it is impossible to leave 
 out of account the immense masses of being which are 
 congregated in the East. If the most recent reckonings 
 of the population of the globe are true, considerably 
 more than the half of mankind are east of the Med- 
 iterranean. Oriental scholars tell us that they find 
 there a civilization as complicated, and in its kind as 
 perfect, as that of the West. Recent history indi- 
 cates a probable design of Providence, to bring the 
 two types of humanity into contact, it may be for 
 a time into conflict, with each other. The western 
 mind is reaching out from Europe overland, and from 
 this continent across the Pacific, and from both it is 
 peering around the Capes, to find out the resources of 
 that Asiatic world, and if possible, to use them. 
 Every thing betokens an approach of these ends of 
 the earth to greet each other. But for what purpose 
 is the greeting, as it regards that oriental half of man- 
 kind! What type of the Asiatic mind, other than 
 that found in the Scriptures, has any prospect of 
 impressing itself on the world's future I What other 
 can possibly become a vitalizing agency, in the pro- 
 gress of any thing that enters into our ideal of an 
 elevated and refined humanity! 
 
 It is a fact of which we are apt to be oblivious, in 
 responding to questions of this kind, that all the 
 ascendant forces working in modern civilization are 
 occidental. They are the offspring, immediately, of the
 
 18 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 western races, of western ideals of taste, of manners, 
 of learning, of arts, of commerce, of government, 
 and of religion. The national temperaments which 
 they represent, the histories which lie back of them, 
 and the languages which express them, are all the 
 growth of western climes. The old fancy that empire 
 follows the sun, is sober truth in the annals of civil- 
 ization. Oriental life has no perceptible power in 
 them as an authority, in any other development than 
 that found in the Scriptures. With the exception, of a 
 small group of scholars given to Asiatic researches, 
 the circle even of scholarly thought, in our day, does 
 not go back of the Greek literature chronologically, 
 nor eastward of it geographically. The ancient seats 
 of power have no lines of telegraph connecting them, 
 in the conceptions of modern scholarship, with the 
 empires of the West. The connection exists histori- 
 cally, but it is handed over to antiquarians. Who 
 thinks of it, often, in observing the growth of man- 
 hood on this side of the Atlantic % To whom is our 
 derivation from Asiatic progenitors any thing more 
 than a curiosity in ethnologic history 1 What is there 
 existing in the oriental forms of life to remind us of 
 it I Where are the powers of eastern thought, which 
 are now creating any thing that seems worthy of the 
 regard of an American scholar or statesman % What 
 have we learned from the Japanese embassy, that has 
 seemed worthy to be engrafted upon American life 
 and manners \ Where are the great libraries of the
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 19 
 
 East \ where are the universities ? where are the men 
 of literary renown, to attract literary travel beyond 
 the Bosphorus I Where are the advanced forms of 
 government, the improved ideas of liberty, the supe- 
 rior systems of jurisprudence, the more perfect bal- 
 ancing of the social forces, which should lead an 
 American senator to seek out the wise men of the 
 East? Where is there any thing eastern, which is 
 now projecting itself, by the energy of its own merits, 
 upon western civilization \ The truth is, that a new 
 world has sprung up westward of the Euphrates and 
 the Ural mountains, which is more than newly dis- 
 covered continents. Occidental mind is a novelty, as 
 related to the earlier developments of the race. It is 
 almost as much isolated from its oriental progenitors, 
 at all those points of sympathy which form inlets 
 of influence, as if it were the mind of another planet. 
 The only volume, the only thing of elemental energy, 
 which forms an isthmus between the two, on any large 
 scale, is the Christian Scriptures. These have affini- 
 ties for both. Through these they can come together 
 in brotherhood. 
 
 Suspending now, for a few moments, the observa- 
 tion of this fact, let it be remarked, on the other 
 hand, that the oriental development of man, as a 
 whole, is giving no signs of having finished its work 
 in the Divine plans respecting the world's progress. 
 The oriental races are not only the grandest in respect 
 of numbers, but they are the most various in respect
 
 20 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 of character, which this planet has yet borne. It is 
 not probable that they are to be a blank in the 
 civilization of the future. Is it not to the last degree 
 improbable, that imbecility is to settle henceforth 
 upon that immense oriental brain 1 He must have 
 a singular theory of the ascendency of races, who 
 can persuade himself that our culture, so exlusively 
 occidental as it is, has received all that it can re- 
 ceive from that ancient stock. Nothing in the Divine 
 methods of working gives countenance to such pre- 
 sumption. 
 
 What is the law of Providence, respecting nations 
 and races, which have finished their' work as Powers 
 in the world's destiny? It is the law of dissolution. 
 When a nation has ended its mission, in the evo- 
 lutions of the drama which Providence is enacting, 
 that nation dies. When a race of men has reached 
 the point at which God has no farther use for 
 them, in the future moulding of nations, that race 
 goes out of being as a visibly distinct stock of man- 
 hood. It decays and falls off, or by revolution it 
 is pruned off from the trunk, and the sap of the 
 root flows elsewhere. When a type of civilization 
 has grown obsolete in its relations to God's plans 
 for the future, that civilization caves in, and is 
 swallowed up, and covered over by something younger 
 and better. God lives — we may say it reverently — 
 God lives, in his government of this world, for the 
 future, never for the past. Paces, nations states,
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OP THE FUTURE. 21 
 
 churches, civil institutions, even families — any thing, 
 in short, that would live — must move abreast with 
 Providence. 
 
 Christianity, which, as wrought into organic social 
 forms, is but the flower and the fruitage of Provi- 
 dence, has always been prophetic in its instincts. 
 It has always been animated with the soul of a 
 seer. It has looked to coming generations, and 
 lived for them. It has never bound itself to the 
 soil, anywhere. It has refused to be hemmed in by 
 geographical lines. It calls no land holy, merely 
 because it was born there. It has no such romance 
 in its make. The law of its being is, that it shall 
 pass away from superannuated to youthful races; 
 from decaying to germinant nations; from expiring 
 to nascent languages. By the decree of God, it is 
 fore-ordained to take possession always of the lands 
 of promise. Its affinities are such as always to draw 
 to itself those elements in families, in churches, in 
 civil institutions, in states, in nations, in tongues, 
 in races of men, which are elastic and eager and 
 foreseeing. Any stock of humanity which is so far 
 worn out, as to have lost, beyond recovery, this 
 capacity for future use, Christianity parts with, leaps 
 away from, and leaves to die. It goes where it finds 
 the most healthy, exuberant energy of production. 
 Mere susceptibility of being acted upon, is not 
 sufficient to preserve a nation, under this law of 
 Providence. It must have power to do, either
 
 22 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 latent or developed, as well as to be; otherwise its 
 permission to be is revoked. Nothing in God's plan 
 of things is purely receptive. Every thing must help 
 another thing. Any thing dies when it ceases to be 
 helpful. 
 
 Under this law, the entire oriental stock of mind, 
 if it has finished its work in God's plan, ought now 
 to be evincing signs of dissolution. The oriental 
 type of civilization ought, as a whole, to be approach- 
 ing its extinction. Yet this is by no means the case 
 with it. The nations which represent it, as a whole 
 are not dying out. They are not visibly approaching 
 their end. More than one of the Asiatic races seem 
 to be yet as full-blooded and as virile in their 
 physical make, and as likely to endure for thirty 
 generations to come, as they did a thousand years 
 ago. That ancient development of manhood, 
 which began on the plains of Shinar, bids fair to 
 live, by the side of its occidental rival, even if it 
 does not outlive this, by reason of its calmer flow 
 of life. If it does thus live, all analogy should lead 
 us to believe that there is something in it which 
 deserves to live. There is something in it which 
 Providence has a use for in the future. It has 
 energy ; it has resources ; it has manly tastes and 
 proclivities ; it has something or other, which, under 
 divine regeneration, would be, will be, a cause of 
 growth, if infused into the life-blood of the western 
 races. The circle of occidental development may
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 23 
 
 be enlarged by it. The channel in which our 
 civilization is moving, may be thus widened and 
 deepened. 
 
 Resuming now, the connection of this train of 
 thought with the theme more immediately before us, 
 let it be repeated, that the only method by which 
 the oriental mind can ever thus again affect the 
 civilization of the West, is through the forces of the 
 Bible. There is nothing at present in oriental ideas 
 of art, or of commerce, or of government, which can 
 ever be a power, by the side of the laws, the com- 
 merce, the arts of western life. These things, for 
 the most part, we have to give, not to receive. The 
 oriental power in the future, must be the production 
 of the religion of the Bible, re-established in its 
 ancient seats, and transfused through the forms of 
 national life there. If new systems of thought are 
 to grow up among the Asiatics, with any function 
 of control in the world, they must be the creations 
 of the Bible. Nothing else represents the oriental 
 mind, in any form which can ever rouse it to its utmost 
 of capacity. Nothing else, therefore, can ever enable 
 it to become a power in the future civilization. None 
 but a visionary can look for a rejuvenescence of Asia 
 in the coming ages, from any internal forces now 
 acting there, independently of the Scriptures. The 
 history of the East contains nothing which can ever 
 be to the world, what the revived civilizations of
 
 24 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 Greece and Eome were to the middle ages of Europe. 
 Whatever that immense territory has to contribute 
 to the civilization of the future, must come as the 
 illustration of scriptural modes of thought, and as 
 the fruit of scriptural ideas of truth. 
 
 Is it visionary to look for this, as one of the results 
 of the infusion of European mind, now going on, 
 in western and central Asia] What, indeed, may 
 not be hoped for from the contact of western with 
 eastern thought, pioneered as the western mind is 
 by Christian missionaries, and pervaded as it is 
 so largely by Christian ideas of life \ What a differ- 
 ence would have been created in the destinies of 
 Europe, what centuries of barbarism and conflict, 
 to human view would have been saved, if all that 
 was good in the civilizations of Greece and Home 
 could have dawned upon the European mind, in 
 Christian, rather than in pagan forms ! Yet this, to 
 a very large extent, appears likely to be the process 
 of intellectual and moral and social awakening, to 
 which the vast resources of the Asiatic mind are to 
 be subjected. 
 
 Napoleon used to say that the only theatre fit for 
 great exploits was the East. Europe, he said, was 
 contracted. It was provincial. The great races were 
 beyond the Mediterranean. They were in the ancient 
 seats of empire, because the numbers were there. 
 There may be more of truth in this than he
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OP THE FUTURE. 25 
 
 meant to utter. The grandest intellectual and moral 
 conquests of the world may yet follow the track of 
 Alexander. 
 
 « 
 
 III. Passing now from the oriental world, we may 
 observe a further source of the ascendancy of the 
 Bible in the institutions of the future, in the fact that 
 it is already wrought into all the dominant forces 
 of the civilization of the West. Not that it is in 
 them all with equal efficiency, but in all of them in 
 such degree as to make itself obvious. When we 
 speak of the sway of European and American mind, 
 we speak the conquests of the Scriptures. The ele- 
 mental ideas of the Bible lie at the foundation of the 
 whole of it. Christianity has wrought such revolu- 
 tions of opinion ; it has thrown into the world so 
 much of original thought ; it has organized so many 
 institutions, customs, unwritten laws of life; it has 
 leavened society with such a powerful antiseptic to 
 the putrescent elements of depravity ; and it has, 
 therefore, positively created so much of the best 
 material of humanity, that now the noblest type of 
 civilization cannot be conceived of otherwise than 
 as a debtor to the Christian Scriptures. 
 
 This obligation becomes most obvious in our mod- 
 ern literature ; because there the ideas which are 
 creative in our civilization take on forms of speech. 
 The debt of literature to the Bible is like the debt of 
 vegetation to Light. No other volume has contributed
 
 26 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 so much to the great organic forms of thought. No 
 other is fusing itself so widely into the standards of 
 libraries. Homer, and Plato, and Aristotle long since 
 gave place to it as an intellectual power. This 
 volume has never yet, at any one time, numbered 
 among its believers a fourth part of the human race ; 
 yet it has swayed a greater amount of mind, than any 
 other volume the world has known. It has the 
 singular faculty of attracting to itself the thinkers 
 of the world, either as friends or as opponents, 
 always, everywhere. The works of comment upon it, 
 of themselves, form a literature of which any nation 
 might be proud. It is more voluminous than all that 
 remains to us of the Greek and Roman literatures 
 combined. An English antiquarian, who has had the 
 curiosity to number the existing commentaries upon 
 the Scriptures, or upon portions of them, found the 
 number to exceed sixty thousand. Where is another 
 empire of mind to be found like this ? Here is a 
 power which, say what we may of its results, has 
 set the Christian world to thinking, and kept it think- 
 ing for nearly two thousand years. The unpublished 
 literature of the Christian pulpit surpasses in volume 
 all the libraries of all the nations. "If the sermons 
 preached in our land, during a single year, were all 
 printed," says a living scholar, "they would fill a 
 hundred and twenty million octavo pages. Many of 
 these sermons are, indeed, specimens of human weak- 
 ness; but the frailest vase may hold roots that will
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 27 
 
 far outgrow its own dimensions."* The Bible is read 
 to-day by a larger number of educated minds than any 
 other book. Innumerable multitudes are poring over 
 its pages, and are feeling its elevating, refining influ- 
 ence, who never think of it otherwise than as the 
 authority of their religious faith. f Harvard College, 
 at a time when the material civilization of Massachu- 
 setts was so meagre, that a pewter flagon and a bushel 
 of corn were received gratefully as a contribution to 
 the collegiate funds, was founded by men, some of 
 whom could regale themselves in their hours of lei- 
 sure, by conversing in the original language of the 
 Old Testament. Our own language owes, in part, the 
 very structure it has received to influences exerted 
 upon it by our English Bible. No Englishman or 
 American knows well his mother tongue, till he has 
 learned it in the vocabulary and the idioms of " King 
 James's Translation." In English form, the Bible 
 stands at the head of the streams of English con- 
 quests; and of English and American colonization 
 and commerce. It must control, in large degree, the 
 
 * Prof. E. A. Park's Election Sermon, 1851, page 12. 
 
 J "The number of English Bibles and New Testaments, separately, 
 which have passed through the press, within the recollection of many now 
 living, has exceeded the number of souls in Britain. In the space of 
 twelve months, the press has sent forth more than a million of copies, or, 
 say above nineteen thousand every week, above three thousand every 
 day, three hundred every hour, or five every minute of working time." — 
 Anderson's Aunals of the English Bible, vol. i., Preface, page 8.
 
 28 THE EELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 institutions which are to spring up on the banks of 
 those streams, the world over. 
 
 It is interesting to observe how the influence of the 
 Bible trickles down into crevices in all other litera- 
 ture, and shows itself at length in golden veins, and 
 precious gems of thought, which are the admiration of 
 all observers, but for which He who made them 
 often receives no thanksgiving.* Shakspeare's con- 
 ception of woman has been applauded as an ab- 
 solute original, the creation of no other genius 
 than his. This is not so ; it is only a portraiture, 
 in poetic forms, of the Christian ideal of woman, 
 which suffuses with refinement so much of our 
 modern life, and which we owe ultimately to the 
 scriptural doctrine of the atonement. The psalmody 
 of the Scriptures has wrought mightily in the birth- 
 night of more than one revolution for the sake of 
 liberty. The old English and Scottish ballads never 
 exerted on the national mind a tithe of the influence 
 of the Hebrew Psalm. The Commonwealth of Eng- 
 land owed its existence, in part, to the psalm-singing 
 
 * The late Prof. B. B. Edwards, in his admirable Essay on the Hebrew 
 Poetry, observes : " It supplies the seeds of thought, the suggestive hints, 
 the little germs, the dim conceptions, the outlines of some of the sublimest 
 poems, or passages of poems, to be found in modern literature. It is easy 
 to perceive the influence of the Scriptures on the imagination of Spenser. 
 The Messiah of Pope is only a paraphrase of some passages in Isaiah. 
 The highest strains of Cowper, in his Task, are but an expansion of a 
 chapter of the same prophet. In the Thanatopsis of Bryant, [certain] 
 lines remind us at once of the words of Job. Lord Byron's celebrated 
 Poem on Darkness was evidently founded on a passage in Jeremiah." — 
 Writings, vol. ii., pages 389, 390.
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 29 
 
 of Cromwell's armies. On the continent of Europe, 
 also, the whole bulk of the despotism of the middle 
 ages went down, for a time, before the rude imitations 
 of the Hebrew psalmody, which were sung in thou- 
 sands by the people of Germany. The battle-song of 
 Gustavus Adolphus was originally published with 
 this title : " A heart-cheering song of comfort, on the 
 watchword of the Evangelical Army in the battle of 
 Leipsic, September 7, 1631, ' God with us.'" 
 
 "Who shall worthily portray the obligations of 
 American freedom to the Word of God 1 Sir James 
 Mackintosh says that the " Independent divines " — 
 (and it was from them that the clergy of New Eng- 
 land were culled) — first taught to John Locke " those 
 principles of religious liberty which they were the 
 first to disclose to the world." * But why should the 
 Independent divines have been the pioneers of such 
 discovery 1 " Democracy is Christ's Government," was 
 the theme of a pamphlet by an humble pastor of 
 Massachusetts, in 1687, which nearly a hundred years 
 later, on the eve of our Revolution, was re-published 
 as a political document becoming to the times.f 
 
 * Mackintosh's Miscellaneous Works, Second Edition. London. Page 
 152. In a note upon Orme's Memoirs of Dr. Owen, he adds : " In this 
 very able volume it is clearly proved that the Independents were the first 
 teachers of religious liberty. . . . It is an important fact in the his- 
 tory of toleration, that Dr. Owen, the Independent, was Dean of Christ 
 church in 1G31, when Locke was admitted a member of that College, 
 ' under a fanatical tutor,' as Antony W^ood says." 
 
 t Thornton's " Pulpit of the American Revolution." Introduction, 
 page 29.
 
 30 THE RELATIONS OP THE BIBLE 
 
 On a Sabbatli morning, the 8th of June, 1766, 
 when the old Charter of Massachusetts was in peril, 
 Jonathan Mayhew, pastor of the West Church, in 
 Boston, hallowed his last day of health in this city, by 
 writing to James Otis : " You have heard of the com- 
 munion of churches "While I was 
 
 thinking of this in my bed, the great use and impor- 
 tance of a communion of colonies appeared to me 
 in a strong light, which led me immediately to set 
 down these hints to transmit to you."* That was 
 the germ from which sprung the Union of these 
 States. But where did Jonathan Mayhew find the 
 idea of the communion of churches'? He found it 
 where he found the other great thoughts which 
 inspired his love of liberty. In a sermon preached 
 to his people on the occasion of the repeal of the 
 Stamp Act, he said : " Having learned from the Holy 
 Scriptures that wise, and brave, and virtuous men 
 
 are always friends to liberty, and 
 
 that where the spirit of the Lord is, there is lib- 
 erty ; this made me conclude that freedom is a great 
 blessing." -f* 
 
 Eloquent defenders of liberty in parliament and 
 senate have echoed the voice of this patriotic pastor, 
 by their own indebtedness to the same fountain of 
 freedom and free speech. The Earl of Chatham 
 
 * Bradford's Life of Mayhew. Pages 428, 429. 
 
 f " The Snare Broken." — A Thanksgiving Discourse, by Dr. Mayhew, 
 preached May 23, 1766. Page 43.
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 31 
 
 acknowledged that he owed much of his power in 
 parliamentary debate to the Apostle Paul. Patrick 
 Henry and James Otis were often likened in their 
 day to the Hebrew prophets. Lord Brougham and 
 Daniel "Webster have both expressed their sense of 
 obligation to the same models. Webster was for 
 years the concordance of the Senate of the United 
 States. It is said, that some of his ablest opponents 
 have been known to seek the aid of his memory, to 
 furnish them with biblical references, with which to 
 condense and point their own speeches against him. 
 Yet, such was his affluence in command of the same 
 resources, that he could afford to give them liberally, 
 and without upbraiding. 
 
 To all departments of modern thought, the Scrip- 
 tures have been what they have been to modern art. 
 It has been said, that the single conception of the 
 Virgin and her Child has achieved more for the eleva- 
 tion of art than all the exhumed models of Greece and 
 Rome. It is a well known fact, that nothing in art 
 itself succeeded in crushing out the moral abomina- 
 tions which many of those models expressed, until the 
 Christian religion flooded the realm of beauty with 
 more intense ideas of life ; so that to the purest taste, 
 the Greek Venus has become imbecile by the side of 
 the Christian Madonna. So- is the Bible dropping 
 everywhere its germs of refinement in modern civ- 
 ilization, beyond the depth of Greek and Roman 
 thought in its choicest and most durable forms.
 
 32 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 I would not weary you with an enumeration of 
 examples of a truth so obvious, but it is illustrated 
 with singular vividness in one phenomenon of our age, 
 which you will permit me to notice. I allude to the 
 unconscious debt of infidelity to biblical resources. The 
 energy of a moral power is often seen most impres- 
 sively in the disasters which attend its perversions. 
 So the power with which the Scriptures are working 
 in modern mind, is disclosed in the vigor of our infidel 
 literature. That literature owes nearly all the vitality 
 it has, to its pilferings of Christian nutriment. Its 
 very life-blood comes by unconscious suction from 
 Christian fountains. The Pilgrim's Progress and the 
 Paradise Lost, are not more palpably indebted to the 
 Bible, than are many of the most thrilling conceptions 
 in anti-christian productions of our times. The most 
 popular and effective of them no man could have 
 written, whose genius had not beeen developed by 
 Christianity. No man would have written them, whose 
 infidelity had not been fired by collision with the 
 epistle to the Romans. Atheism, as is well known, 
 is now working disastrously among the artisan classes 
 of Great Britain. But it owes the chief sources of its 
 power over the popular mind, to the fact that it holds 
 on to so much of scriptural thought, though strug- 
 gling to enforce it without a scriptural God. Its 
 capital ideas are biblical ideas. Strip it of these, and 
 it would have no more chance of a hearing in the
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 33 
 
 workshops of Birmingham and Manchester, than the 
 vagaries of Buddhism* 
 
 Similar to this is the chief lesson, which, in my 
 view, we have to learn from the life of that misguided 
 mind, which, for the last twenty years, has been the 
 prophet of infidelity in this city. I use the term 
 " infidelity" here, not opprobriously, but as expressing 
 by common consent the system of opinions which he 
 held honestly, and which he was too manly to conceal. 
 He brought to that solitary altar at which he minis- 
 tered, a scholarship more generous, and a genius more 
 mercurial, a power of thought more versatile, and a 
 command of speech more fascinating, — taking him all 
 in all, a character more earnest, and a life more pure, 
 than any other of our countrymen has ever arrayed 
 against those views of truth which he was wont to 
 designate as the " popular theology." For one, I 
 must concede the vigor of his influence. With all 
 the evidences which were apparent, that its acme had 
 
 * On this topic the learned author of " The Natural History of Enthu- 
 siasm," remarks as follows : " The disbelief of these last days, so far as it 
 is a scheme of doctrine, may be shown to be a birth of Christian doctrine. 
 The Atheism partly, and the Theism entirely, of the present time is a 
 heresy full of Christian sap. By calling it Christian, I mean that it has no 
 meaning at all, except that which it has wrung from elements of Christian 
 belief, brought into collision one with another. Atheism, in these days, is 
 not as of old, a metaphysic abstraction, or a cold paradox; but it is a 
 living creature, speaking with a loud voice, and showing a ruddy cheek, 
 because it has drawn life-blood from that which can spare much and yet 
 live. If the Gospel, the destruction of which is so eagerly desired by 
 some among us, were actually to breathe its last, not one of the schemes of 
 doctrine which is now offered to us in its ^tead would thenceforward draw 
 another breath." — The Restoration of Belief, page 215. 
 5
 
 34 THE RELATIONS OP THE BIBLE 
 
 been reached, and its decline had commenced, during 
 the last years of his life, I am compelled to believe 
 that no candid man among his opponents, who knows 
 the classes of mind which have been addressed, and 
 the energy with which they have been moved, in 
 yonder Music Hall, will feel that, as a friend of truth, 
 he can afford to ignore that influence, or to underrate 
 it. We have not yet seen the end of it. The man 
 has gone; but he represented, and his name still 
 represents, opinions which are a power in the conflict 
 of ideas among us. Yet his power was not the power 
 of his infidelity. It was the power of his unconscious 
 obligations to the very truth which he discarded. His 
 great ideas, those by which he roused the popular con- 
 science, and often swayed the popular heart, were 
 Christian ideas. He owed them to the Bible, which, 
 as an authority, he disowned. He derived them from 
 all the living literatures which he mastered, and from 
 which he could not help imbibing streams of Christian 
 thought. He absorbed them from the very atmos- 
 phere, which is electric with our biblical civilization. 
 The workings of his mind were in part like respira- 
 tion, in which a man inhales the pure air which God 
 made for his sustenance, and exhales mephitic vapors. 
 Many of us, I may say with no invidious intent the 
 majority of us, have been compelled to feel that he 
 maligned our religion ; he ridiculed our sacred oracles ; 
 he denounced our hope of heaven ; he scoffed at our 
 Redeemer; he uttered language, which, from our lips,
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF T II E FUTURE. 35 
 
 would be blasphemy against our God. Yet, the inter- 
 nal forces which bore up, as on a ground swell, this 
 nameless craft so revolting to our view, and propelled 
 it often at the top of the wave in the popular vision, 
 were forces, every one of which sprung from that 
 ocean of inspired thought, whose great deeps were 
 broken up in the civilization and the literature around 
 him. His idea of the dignity of manhood, of the 
 singleness of individual being, of the brotherhood of 
 the race, of the intensity of life under the shadow of 
 immortality, of the paternity and the love of God, of 
 the right of free inquiry, of the despicablcness of 
 cant in every form, and the ideas of social and of 
 political, and of moral reform, which grew out of these 
 as corollaries — such were the elements of his strength. 
 For the right to wield them, he stood up as a free 
 man, with a free tongue, and for this we honor him. 
 Yet, for every one of these ideas we hold him as 
 a debtor to the old Scriptural Theology of New 
 England. 
 
 Thus it is with every development of infidelity, 
 which has force enough of character to render it 
 respectable. It feeds on Christianity itself, and grows 
 lusty therefore. Christian thought comes into this 
 world, and goes through it, like an immense projec- 
 tile. It creates, in the surrounding atmosphere on 
 either side, currents which are no part of it. Yet 
 they imitate its magnitude ; they border on its track ; 
 they catch the rate of its momentum, and so keep
 
 36 THE RELATIONS OP THE BIBLE 
 
 pace with it in speed, like the wind of a cannon ball. 
 Hence it is that infidelity appears often to grow in the 
 intensity of its spirit. Hence it seems often to accu- 
 mulate resources of destructiveness. Each new phase 
 of it seems more formidable than the last. It is 
 because the scriptural standards of thought are work- 
 ing their way deeper into the convictions of men, and 
 are spreading wide their influence, and are hastening 
 to their results in perfected forms of civilization. 
 The whole being of a Christian nation is thus in- 
 tensified. The Bible, like the sun, thus shines on the 
 evil and on the good. It fertilizes the soil of infidel 
 opinions ; and these, in turn, fling up in defiance of it 
 a portion of the fruits of its own vitality. 
 
 IV. Some of the views thus far presented involve 
 another fact, indicative of the ascendancy of the Bible 
 in the future progress of the race. It is, that the 
 Bible discloses the only groundwork and process of 
 a perfect civilization, as a practicable result. 
 
 A scheme of social advancement, as such, the Bible 
 does not delineate. The word ' civilization ' does not 
 once occur in it. The things in which an elevated 
 social economy reveals itself to political wisdom, are 
 not at all obtrusive upon the foreground of scriptural 
 thought. Wealth, arts, literature, science, urbanity 
 of manners, domestic comfort, institutions of charity, 
 free governments, — these are not the salient themes 
 here, either of argument or of promise. A reformer
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 37 
 
 might study pages of this volume, covering a thousand 
 years of history, and not discover that inspired minds 
 ever thought of any such sort of thing; yet a wise 
 man, instructed in God's wisdom, may traverse the 
 same ground and so discern the gravitating of princi- 
 ples towards social results, as almost to imagine that 
 inspired minds thought of nothing else. 
 
 The idea, out of which the future civilization must 
 grow, is here, there, everywhere in this Book of Life. 
 You anticipate me in affirming that that idea is, the 
 moral regeneration of the individual. In this one aim 
 lies the rudiment of all that is practicable for the 
 amelioration of the race. This is the germ of the 
 whole tree. The wisdom of God is to begin at the 
 beginning. The wise master-builder starts at the 
 foundation, and builds up. The pulpit, especially in 
 its friction against more flimsy engines of reform, has 
 made this idea familiar to us all. Let us therefore 
 more summarily than would be otherwise desirable, 
 observe the method by which Christianity works as 
 an organ of political and social movement. 
 
 In the first place, it exalts spiritual over material 
 forces. It aims at souls, rather than bodies. " Mine 
 is a kingdom," it says, " which is not of this world." 
 Steam, railways, telegraphs, ships, cotton gins, spin- 
 ning-jennies, printing presses, and the like, are not in 
 the Christian theory the elemental civilizing powers. 
 They are effects and incidents. The powers which lie 
 back of them are ideas. They lay hold of the only
 
 38 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 thing on this earth which is immortal. The stir of 
 physical forces is only the fermentation incident to the 
 working of ideas in a world of sense. The material 
 creation groans and travails, because it is put to great 
 uses in expressing the throes of the spirit which is its 
 lord. In such a system of things, cotton is not king, 
 and corn is not king, and gold is not king ; thought 
 is king, mind is king, character is king. 
 
 Working thus with spiritual forces, Christianity 
 intensifies individual being. It deals not with human- 
 ity but with men, and takes them as they are. It sets 
 the individual man to searching after God. It stimu- 
 lates the sense of individual responsibility to a personal 
 Deity. It evokes the consciousness of individual sin. 
 It makes a man feel the infinite solitude of guilt, as if 
 there were no other beings in the universe but himself 
 and God. To that only Friend it directs his cry for 
 help, as to One who is not shocked nor disgusted by 
 his vileness, but who can be touched with the feeling 
 of his infirmities, and who is ever saying to him, 
 " Come unto me, my child." It reveals the practica- 
 bility of individual regeneration by God only, through 
 individual faith in Christ, expanding and blooming 
 into the graces of a Christlike character. 
 
 Intensifying thus the individuality of the soul, 
 Christianity presumes the whole process to be, as in 
 experience it proves itself to be, a process of symmet- 
 rical elevation. An uplifting of the entire being is 
 the result. Affinities spring into life with all that is
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 39 
 
 lovely and of good report. Aspirations after growth 
 in every thing that may dignify a man, come by a law 
 as sure as that by which respiration comes to the 
 newly born. Advance becomes a necessity. Heavenly 
 voices speak, saying, " Come up hither ; forget the 
 things which are behind thee ; thine is a high calling." 
 
 Lifting thus the individual mind, Christianity sets 
 to working a power which is diffusive. The man is a part 
 of humanity : he begins to move it, as he himself is 
 moved. The individual is an elevating force to the 
 family, and through the family to the community, and 
 through the community to the state, and through the 
 state to the age, and the race. Christianity presup- 
 poses what history proves, that individual consciences, 
 thus illumined, intensified, redeemed from the domin- 
 ion of guilt, will sway the world. Dotting the globe 
 over with points of light, they radiate towards each 
 other; each reduplicates the illuminating power of 
 another. They run together, sometimes by imper- 
 ceptible advances, like the movement of the fixed 
 stars ; yet in golden moments of history, times of re- 
 freshing to an expectant and weary world, they are 
 like material light, the swiftest of the elements. 
 
 Diffusing itself thus, as a power of moral illumina- 
 tion, Christianity is affluent in the production of certain 
 auxiliary ideas. These like itself, are spiritual, and 
 they take on social, and civil, and political forms. 
 They are constructive ideas. They work in building 
 institutions, customs, forms and reforms of govern-
 
 40 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 ment, much as the instinct in a bee-hive works. From 
 the intensity which the Christian theory of manhood 
 gives to individual being, start forth as collaterals, 
 such ideas as the equality of the race, the brotherhood 
 of man with man, the nobility of woman, the inhu- 
 manity of war, the odiousness of slavery, the dignity 
 of labor, the worth of education, and the blessedness 
 of charity. Institutions which are the consolidation 
 of such ideas, Christianity drops from her open hand, 
 in and around the homes of men, for the healing 
 of the nations. And the point of significance is 
 that the nations never get them from any other 
 source. 
 
 I have said, that civilization as a scheme of social 
 progress is not expressed in the Bible. Yet, once 
 more, be it observed, that while throwing out into the 
 world these ideas which are auxiliary to its direct aim, 
 the Bible does exhibit, if I may so speak, a certain 
 divine consciousness, that they mast and will, and a 
 purpose that they shall, become constructive elements in 
 society. This is exhibited, for instance, in that most 
 luminous fact in scriptural history, that God educates 
 nations as the representatives of principles. No 
 thinking man can review the four thousand years 
 of history, covered by the Old Testament, without 
 discerning that nations are servitors of God's pur- 
 poses, arranged along a line of advance in the devel- 
 opment of a plan. They are like a cordon of military 
 posts along a king's highway.
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OP THE FUTURE. 41 
 
 Equally obvious is this breadth of providential 
 design, in the scriptural fact that God destroys 
 some nations to make way for the establishment of 
 truth in others. The biblical interpretation of the 
 history of such empires as those of Babylon and 
 Egypt, is simply this ; that when a nation plants 
 itself in the way of a plan of God for the progress of 
 the race, Divine Providence waits with long-suffering, 
 while the pride and pomp and circumstance of na- 
 tional impiety accumulate, but at the same time gathers 
 alongside of these the materials of retribution, 
 and at last, with an awful composure, a composure 
 like to nothing else but the stillness of eternity, God 
 sacrifices that nation to a principle. To any people 
 who are identified with a principle in God's purposes, 
 though they be but a handful of slaves under the 
 task-masters of the Pharaohs, the language of Provi- 
 dence is, " Fear not ; since thou wast precious in my 
 sight, thou hast been honorable, and I have loved 
 thee ; therefore will I give men for thee, and people 
 for thy life." 
 
 The same reach of truth beyond the destiny of the 
 individual, is shadowed forth in certain intimations of 
 biblical writers themselves, that their teachings must 
 become disturbing forces in society. A celebrated 
 English scholar says that the idea of the unnatural 
 structure of the social life of England, in certain 
 respects, first dawned upon his mind in reading the 
 Epistle of James and the prophets of the Old Testa-
 
 42 THE RELATIONS OP THE BIBLE 
 
 ment. The commission of our Lord himself to his 
 disciples, affirms as distinctly as language can, that the 
 Gospel they were to preach was to become the occasion 
 of social disquietudes and collisions ; and more, that 
 it was to advance amidst the shock of battle, by 
 the agency of suffering, and at the cost of life. 
 " Think not that I am come to send peace on earth," 
 is his language, "I come not to send peace, but a 
 sword." 
 
 But we are not left to intimations alone, of the in- 
 spired insight into the working of religious ideas in 
 social institutions. The design of such ideas to work 
 thus, is seen in some of the actual uses made of them 
 by inspiration itself. It is an inexplicable anomaly, 
 that honest minds can read certain portions of the 
 Scriptures like some of the teachings of the prophets, 
 and of the apostle James, and yet hold the scriptural 
 policy in the applications of the Gospel to social 
 and political abuses, to be the policy of silence or of 
 reserve. The late Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, who perhaps 
 more than any other man of our times, made the Scrip- 
 tures his study with reference to this thing, alludes to a 
 recommendation which had been made in a time of 
 national commotion in England, that the clergy should 
 preach only subordination and obedience. " I seri- 
 ously say," he writes, " God forbid they should ; for 
 if any earthly thing could ruin Christianity in Eng- 
 land, it would be this. If they read Isaiah and Jere- 
 miah, and Amos and Habbakuk, they will find that
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 43 
 
 the prophets, in a similar state of society in Judea, 
 did not preach subordination only or chiefly ; but they 
 denounced oppression, and amassing overgrown prop- 
 erties, and grinding the laborers to the smallest pos- 
 sible pittance : and they denounced the Jewish high 
 church party for countenancing these iniquities, and 
 prophesying smooth things? " * 
 
 The scriptural principle in the application of Chris- 
 tianity to social wrong, may be summed up in this — 
 the temporary toleration of evil, followed by timely 
 efforts for its extinction. It is the wisdom of the Bible, 
 as of Providence, to be merciful to the evil and the 
 unthankful. The sufferance of wrong, the toleration 
 of sin even, it endures, so long as the national con- 
 science is not educated to distinct cognizance of the 
 sin. " I have many things to say unto you," is often 
 its sad burden, "but ye cannot bear them now.' 
 But, on the other hand, the wisdom of the Bible, as 
 of Providence, is to endure no hiding of wrong, and 
 no compromise with wrong, seen and felt to be wrong, 
 by the national mind. "When Christian truth has so 
 trained a people, that they begin to rise above the cor- 
 ruption of ages, and to grow into capacity to catch 
 some glimmering of light upon a national distortion, 
 then the prophets and apostles of Christianity are on 
 the alert, quick to point out that distortion as a sin ; 
 to denounce it without stint, as a wrong against hu- 
 
 * Arnold's Life and Correspondence, American Edition, page 170.
 
 44 THE RELATIONS OP THE BIBLE 
 
 manity, and a crime against God. Then truth becomes 
 a fire and a hammer. It verifies, by its working, the 
 saying of one of our wise men ; that " when God 
 prepares a hammer it will not be made of silk." This 
 is the genius of biblical reform. Large portions of 
 the Bible are alive with it. Suspense of judgment 
 upon wrong, I repeat, is in the Scriptures, as it is in 
 Providence, only so far as it is mercy to the weakness 
 and the blindness of men. It exists always for the 
 sake of the extinction of the wrong; never for its 
 increase, never for its perpetuity, never for the con- 
 venience of letting it alone. Inspiration does indeed 
 practice as it preaches the wisdom of the serpent, 
 but always in conjunction with the innocence of the 
 dove. 
 
 Perhaps more convincingly than in any other form, 
 the diffusion of the effects of Christianity into the 
 social economy, is seen in the predictions of the final 
 triumph of the gospel by the conversion of the world 
 to Christ. It is impossible to look attentively Upon 
 the scriptural picture of this world as it is to be in its 
 latter days, without catching from inspiration an as- 
 surance that those are to be days of great intellectual, 
 and social, and civil, and political, as well as of moral 
 elevation. They are to be days of peace among the 
 nations : swords shall become ploughshares, and spears 
 pruning hooks. They shall be clays of the supremacy 
 of right over wrong in the government of states. " I 
 will make thy officers peace, and thine exactors right-
 
 TO TUE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 45 
 
 eousness: " "nations shall say, 'come, let ns go np to 
 the mountain of the Lord, and he will teach us of his 
 ways, and wc will walk in his paths.' " They shall 
 be days in which the great powers of the world shall 
 acknowledge the dominion of Christ. " All kings 
 shall fall down before him." It shall be an era of 
 intellectual advancement. " Wisdom and knowledge 
 shall be the stability of thy times." * They shall be 
 times marked by revolutions of false public opinion. 
 " In that day shall the deaf hear the words of the 
 book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of ob- 
 scurity : they also that erred in spirit shall come to 
 understanding." Those days shall witness signal ad- 
 vances upon preceding states of society. " For brass 
 I will bring gold, and for iron silver, and for wood 
 brass, and for stones iron." The natural obstacles to 
 progress shall be removed. " Every valley shall be 
 exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made 
 low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the 
 rough places plain." Changes so marvellous shall 
 occur in the relations of conflicting races, that they 
 shall seem like a reversal of the laws of nature. " The 
 wolf and the lamb shall feed together; the leopard 
 
 *Thc elder President Edwards, in lii.s History of Redemption, speaking 
 of the ultimate prevalence of knowledge in the earth, observes: " It may 
 be hoped that then many of the Negroes and Indians will he divines ; 
 and that excellent books will be published in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Tar- 
 tary, and other now the most barbarous countries ; and not only learned 
 men, but others of more ordinary education, shall then be very knowing 
 in religion. Knowledge shall then be very universal among all sorts of 
 persons." — Works in four Volumes, vol. i., page 481.
 
 46 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 shall lie down with the kid ; the calf and the young 
 lion and the fattling together." Is it possible not to 
 believe that slavery will cease in those days 1 " They 
 shall sit, every man under his vine and under his fig- 
 tree, and none shall make them afraid." " The lofti- 
 ness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughti- 
 ness of men shall be made low." " Sorrow and sighing 
 shall flee away." " The voice of weeping shall no 
 more be heard, nor the voice of crying." " My people 
 shall dwell in a peaceable habitation, and in sure 
 dwellings, and in quiet resting-places." " Neither shall 
 they defile themselves any more with their detestable 
 things, nor with any of their transgressions." 
 
 In no deformed, degraded, brutalized types of 
 humanity then, but in the noblest and most pure, are 
 the nations to be given to Christ for His inheritance. 
 He shall see, — He whose ideal is his own pure con- 
 sciousness of what manhood can be, — He shall see of 
 the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied. 
 
 Starting thus with the idea of the moral regenera- 
 tion of the individual, the word of God conducts us, 
 by easy and inevitable advances, to that truth which 
 becomes its own witness to a Christian believer, that 
 the civilization of the future, and the triumph 
 of Christianity, are identical. 
 
 This faith was the wisdom of our fathers, in laying 
 the foundations of New England. Theirs was a hidden 
 wisdom, which none of the princes of this world knew.
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 47 
 
 Their ideal of a perfect body politic, was simply that 
 of a Christian State. Just two hundred years ago, in 
 the Election Sermon of the year preached, by Rev. 
 John Norton, the preacher declared, " That our polity 
 may be compleat according to the Scriptures — this is 
 the very work we engaged for into this wilderness. 
 This is the scope and end of it, that which is written 
 upon the forehead of New England." * " God be 
 thanked," said the fervid pastor of the West Church 
 of Boston, " one may speak freely . . . both of 
 government and religion, and even give some broad 
 hints that he is engaged on the side of liberty, the 
 Bible, and common sense . . . without danger 
 of the Bastile or the Inquisition." j* " Liberty, the 
 Bible, and Common Sense ! " Thus our wise fathers 
 uttered " broad hints " of the alliance of the great 
 ideas on which their institutions should be built. 
 
 And we are here to-day, for what purpose more 
 becoming, than to read anew that writing on the fore- 
 head of New England, and interpret it to our children X 
 Surely, never in our history has it been more timely. 
 I should be unworthy to stand in this presence, 
 within these walls from which echo so many voices 
 of the past, beneath the cloud of witnesses who have 
 hallowed this anniversary by their faithfulness, and at 
 
 * Thornton's " Pulpit of the American Revolution," page 18. 
 
 fPatre 2 of Preface to Mayhcw's Sermon on the Anniversary of the 
 Death of Charles I., " preached the Lord's Day after the 30th of Janu- 
 ary, 1749-50."
 
 48 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 such' an hour as this in the evolution of our country's 
 destiny, if I should refuse to accept the application of 
 the suhject we have considered, to the rights and the 
 duties of the hour. 
 
 The details of the crisis which is upon us, need not 
 be rehearsed here. They have been borne through 
 the land as by the winds. Have they not seemed at 
 times to press down the atmosphere to an unnatural 
 stillness, as if the breath of a nation were stifled by 
 them % Yet who knows whether or not it has been 
 the hush which precedes the earthquake'? This is 
 one of those epochs, not infrequent in the history of 
 great nations, at which God summons them to fall 
 back upon the principles on which their greatness is 
 built, and from that point look the future in the eye. 
 We need to lift up the questions of the hour, above 
 the strifes of parties, above the frivolities of politics, 
 above the interests of trade, above the temptations of 
 ease, and listen for the responses of God's word, with 
 faith in them as oracles of the future. We need to 
 weigh events and their probable results, in the spirit 
 which subdued many of the founders of this republic 
 to prayer. Said John Adams in 1776 : " When I con- 
 sider the great events which are passed, and those 
 greater which are rapidly advancing, and that I may 
 have been instrumental in touching some springs, and 
 turning some small wheels which have had and will 
 have such effects, I feel an awe upon my mind which 
 is not easily described." " In such great changes and
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 49 
 
 commotions, individuals arc but atoms. It is scarcely 
 worth while to consider what the consequences will 
 be to us. What will be the effects upon present and 
 future millions, and millions of millions is [the] 
 question." * The clear head and the great heart of 
 a Christian statesman spoke in those words. 
 
 Approaching the duties of our time in such a spirit, 
 we shall ensure the prime virtues of Christian citi- 
 zenship and Christian legislation. We shall, in the 
 first place, act in the spirit of obedience to constitu- 
 tional law. We have been told, by men whom it has 
 been an honor to us to respect as our judicial counsel- 
 lors, that we have enactments on our statute-book, 
 inconsistent with the compact which binds us to the 
 sister States of the Confederacy. If this be so, those 
 enactments will be repealed. It will be seen that 
 Massachusetts knows how to do her duty, as well as 
 to claim her rights. She will indeed judge leniently 
 of the passage of such laws, for the genius of Chris- 
 tianity, and the judgment of the Christian world have 
 taught her in the language of Burke, to "pardon 
 much to the spirit of liberty." But she will repeal 
 those laws, in the faith that liberty can always afford 
 to be just: and its doom is inevitable if it is built on 
 a wrong. It is never pusillanimous to do right. As 
 there is always a spot of soft cowardice in the heart 
 
 * Life and Works of John Adams, vol. i., pages 219, 199. 
 7
 
 50 THE EELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 of a duellist, so is there in the heart of a great people, 
 who dare not retract an error, through fear of seeming 
 to fear a threat. But why do I speak thus I A Mas- 
 sachusetts Legislature never yet betrayed the childish- 
 ness of refusing to hear reason. They are wont, 
 indeed, to be convinced before they act, but once 
 convinced, they need no exhortation from the pulpit 
 or the bench on such a theme as this, to do their 
 duty. 
 
 Acting thus in the spirit of Christian statesman- 
 ship, we shall cherish, also, magnanimity towards our 
 misguided brethren. This is no time to taunt them 
 with their misfortunes ; it is no time to upbraid them 
 with their misdeeds. In so grave a crisis, the triumph 
 of a party is unseemly. If the dying prayer of Christ 
 could ever be offered for states deluded to the brink 
 of their own destruction, it is becoming now for our 
 brethren of the South. They surely know not what 
 they do. They misinterpret the word and the Provi- 
 dence of God. They do not hear aright the voices of 
 the future. They are deceived respecting our position 
 in controversy with them. Their press is teeming 
 with falsehoods from northern pens. Up to the 
 limit of national safety, then, we have reason for 
 forbearance. Let the tone of our legislation, and our 
 press, and our pulpits, be generous, until so gentle a 
 virtue is silenced by events. If we can yet be heard in 
 debate, let it be in words of temperance and soberness.
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 51 
 
 Let us speak at the height of great argum < j 
 becoming to Christian states in the discussion of great 
 principles. If we need a less exalted motive, let us 
 remember that we can afford to be magnanimous. 
 For, though, if our brethren suffer, we must suffer 
 with them, yet what thoughtful man is not appalled 
 at the imagination of the contrast between their lot 
 and ours in the last extremity \ If there is any truth 
 in history, if the faith of our fathers has not been 
 mocking us these two hundred years, if 'liberty' is not 
 
 " A hollow word, 
 As if a dead man spake it," 
 
 then surely the Future is ours. No, I will not say 
 1 ours,' except as, through our Christian faith, " all 
 things are ours, whether things present or things to 
 come." 
 
 Yet not this virtue of forbearance, as I con- 
 ceive, is the chief of ' the graces ' demanded of us in 
 the present exigency. Regarding the requirements 
 of the time in the light of a Christian civilization, we 
 have need to gird up our fidelity to the principles of 
 Freedom. Here lies our chief duty, and our chief 
 peril. It is useless to blink the fact of the radical 
 antagonism of elements under the cover of our 
 national constitution. Two opposing types of civili- 
 zation are in conflict here, and have been from the 
 infancy of our Union. The conflict is not one of 
 physical resources, but of ideas. The strifes of polit-
 
 52 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 ical parties have been, as they often are in the history 
 of great nations, ripples on the surface of affairs. 
 Underneath, a drifting of the social forces has been 
 going on, under laws of Providence, as inevitable in 
 their operations as oceanic currents. It has been 
 bearing the whole body politic on towards the solu- 
 tion of the African problem in the civilization of this 
 continent. Not chiefly is it for the sake of the 
 African race ; it is for the sake of the principles 
 of civilization which that problem involves. The 
 statesmen of England now very clearly see that the 
 American Revolution was the salvation of the lib- 
 erties of Great Britain, and if of her liberties, then 
 of all else that is valuable in her institutions. So 
 the freedom, and if the freedom, the happiness, and 
 the culture, and the character of every man, woman, 
 child, of the future generations of America, swing 
 on the pivot of the African question of to-day. This 
 is no chimera. It is an illustration of one of the 
 methods of Providence in the probation of nations. 
 God tries nations by the conflict of ideas, brought 
 into conflict in the exigencies of national life. Ideas 
 of truth and ideas of error are set afloat, and so 
 long as they float in theories only, they move peace- 
 ably, because they move asunder. Outside of books, 
 the world hears very little about them. But 
 by and by there comes a great practical exigency, 
 involving the right and wrong of those ideas, and
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 53 
 
 the nation drifts into it like a ship drifting in a gale 
 into an icefloe, in which her safety depends, under 
 God, on the strength of her timbers, the discipline 
 of her crew, and the nerve of her pilot. Who cares 
 for the icefloe, as a thing of dispute between the 
 North Pole and the Equator, provided the freight 
 of human life can get safely into port? So it is 
 with these national exigencies. As involving the 
 questions of sectional rivalry, they are petty. An 
 earnest man will not look at them. But as tests 
 of conflicting ideas of civilization, an earnest man 
 cannot help looking at them. The nation's future 
 dates from them. A nation's capacity for every thing 
 that a great people should aspire to, is cither 
 expanded or contracted by them. Not a thing, not 
 a thought, which a wise, free people ever fought for, 
 or a Christian people ever prayed for, is outside 
 of the bearings of such crises. The trial by jury, 
 the freedom of the press, the rights of commerce, 
 the sacredness of constitutions, the interests of learn- 
 ing, the integrity of the pulpit, a free Bible, free 
 worship, free homes — every thing, in short, around 
 which the battles of Christian liberty have surged 
 in the past, is put to the hazard in such emergen- 
 cies ; and the privilege of a people to have these 
 blessings is made to hinge upon their will to keep 
 them, by contending for the ideas which gave them 
 birth.
 
 51 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 National progress and national decline go on visibly 
 from exigence to exigence ; not by quiet and easy 
 gradations, in which there is no trial of a people's 
 faith in truth and in God. The immediate occasion 
 of such conflicts of ideas may be insignificant. The 
 abduction of a Jew boy may seem to convulse a 
 continent ; so may a tax of three pence on a pound 
 of tea. Be the occasion what it may, when such 
 a conflict comes, it is neither statesmanship nor 
 manliness to evade it by the sacrifice of a principle, 
 or the surrender of a right. Compromise of things 
 not vital may, and may not, be expedient, but beyond 
 that, ' compromise ' is a perilous word with which to 
 familiarize the lips of a free people. It should be met 
 as the wary citizens of Boston met the insidious 
 propositions of Bernard, by which he attempted to 
 beguile them into an acceptance of the Stamp Act. 
 " There is a snake in the grass," said they ; " we 
 choose Samuel Adams to speak our minds." 
 
 Just this, then, I must believe, is the mission 
 of New England at the present juncture of our 
 affairs ; it is to stand with temperate, but firm resolve, 
 by the hereditary ideas of liberty, which have become 
 historic among us, and which, under the good Provi- 
 dence of God, have made New England what she 
 is. "We owe this to the future of the South, no less 
 than to our own. When such perils to freedom 
 are darkening the air, we can see no points of com- 
 pass. The blackness falls on the whole land.
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 From the origin of our government, the influence 
 of New England has been pre-eminently the influence 
 of her moral ideas. These have given the purchase 
 to the lever, with which she has borne her share 
 of the lift in national affairs. "We have been accus- 
 tomed to ground our own liberties on principles 
 of right — never on devices of expediency. We have 
 claimed those liberties ; never, at any human tribu- 
 nal, have we asked for them. On the same principle, 
 we have advocated the liberties of other men. Our 
 pulpits, our bar, our press, our platforms, our halls 
 of legislation, our seminaries of learning, have spoken 
 our love of liberty everywhere for all men, as a 
 right founded on the laws of God. Our notions of 
 freedom and of conscience have thus been welded 
 together in our history. " Is it right," inquired James 
 Otis, " to enslave a man because his color is black, or 
 his hair short and curled like wool, instead of 
 Christian hair 1 " And that has been the blunt 
 question of New England from that clay to this. We 
 have no novel ideas of liberty. We have no imprac- 
 ticable theories. We stand, on this subject, where ice 
 were born. We have proved the practicability of 
 our theory by the working of our own institutions. 
 The world knows this. The world knows, too, 
 that, as a people, we have not been accustomed 
 to compromise our views of right for the sake 
 of our material interests. God forbid that Ave 
 should do it now ! Two hundred and forty years
 
 56 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 ago, our fathers buried the thought of such com- 
 promise as that; and generations have tramped over 
 its grave. It is not for us to call the dead thing to 
 life again. 
 
 But, in giving an irrevocable negative to such 
 dishonor, it becomes us to count the heaviest cost. 
 No man can foresee the immediate issue of our 
 affairs. We are advancing in the dark. "We are all 
 sensible of this. It would be folly to predict the 
 intelligence of to-morrow's telegraph. But it is not 
 the usual way of Divine Providence, in the treatment 
 of gigantic evils, which block up the course of 
 Christian ideas, and are organized in social insti- 
 tutions, to bring them to an end by bloodless revolu- 
 tions alone. They do not commonly die of sheer 
 old age, and go out of sight tranquilly. The decisive 
 conflict of a Christian civilization with them may be 
 deferred, but, sooner or later, it must come ; and 
 whenever it comes, they are apt to die as they have 
 lived, — by violence. If this should be the result of the 
 conflict with slavery in this country, we or our 
 children must suffer from the shock. Be it so. Every 
 man of us should be prepared for this. Possibly God 
 will avert it from us, but what wise man can expect 
 such a result, or teach his children to expect it? 
 
 There are men, indeed, who tell us that the brunt 
 of the shock will fall first and last, and heaviest, on 
 New England. We have too much faith in gravita- 
 tion to believe that ; but be it even so. It will not
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 57 
 
 be the first time that Right has seemed to be worsted 
 in the battle. We must be prepared to stand in our 
 lot, whenever and however, the trial of our free insti- 
 tutions shall come upon us. For these we must be 
 content to go back to the times of " plain living and 
 high thinking." The WQrld should know that these 
 institutions are, at all hazards, to be protected. It 
 shall be done without bravado, but it shall be done 
 without compromise, and without restriction. 
 
 They are to be defended by the majesty of law, by 
 the culture of the schools, by the instructions of the 
 pulpit, by the persuasions of the press, by the wisdom 
 of the bench, by the eloquence of the platform, 
 and the bar, and the senate, by free thought and free 
 speech in our streets, and in our homes, and if need 
 be, by the sacrifice of fortunes, and by the best blood 
 we have inherited from men who reckoned not their 
 blood too dear a price of the institutions which they 
 would give to their children. 
 
 Prepared thus to do and to suffer, we may trustfully 
 commit the future of this nation to God in prayer. 
 Prayer will save this country, when it has gone 
 beyond the reach of legislation. We may cast it 
 into the infinity of the plans of God, with repose. 
 
 " As a child drops some pebble small 
 Down a deep well, and hears it fall, 
 Smilinjr,"
 
 58 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 so we may entrust the destiny of this people to the 
 depths of His Will. " If thou seest," is His language 
 to us, "if thou seeest the oppression of the poor, 
 and violent perverting of judgment and justice, in a 
 province, marvel not at the matter: for He that is 
 higher than the highest regardeth." 
 
 The events of the last month have forced back our 
 thoughts to the great men who have left us. We 
 have said, " Would that they were with us now ! " I 
 have been reminded of Wordsworth's apostrophe to 
 Milton, in one of England's dark hours during the 
 French Revolution : — 
 
 " Milton I Thou shouldst be living at this hour. 
 England hath need of thee." 
 
 So have we said of this one, and of that one, of the 
 men whom we venerate in our country's history. 
 Eternity only can disclose the volume of prayer 
 which, in these few weeks, has gone up from this 
 land to the God of nations, in the petition of the 
 Hebrew lawgiver, " Let the Lord, the God of the 
 spirits of all flesh, set a man over [this people] that 
 [they] be not as sheep, which have no shepherd." 
 
 Yet, we have taken courage, when we have looked 
 around us, and numbered the men whom the God of 
 our fathers has given us, in whom the manhood of 
 the fathers still lives. Do I not speak the minds of 
 the citizens of Massachusetts, in recognizing as emi-
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OF THE FUTURE. 59 
 
 nent among such men the retiring chief magistrate of 
 the Commonwealth \ 
 
 I am sure, Sir, that I do not exaggerate the feelings 
 of the good and true men among us, in expressing 
 their gratitude to the good Providence of God, for 
 raising you to offices of trust in the midst of them. 
 He has permitted us to honor you as one of the crea- 
 tions of the ancient institutions of New England. 
 When those institutions have been reviled, He has 
 made it our privilege to respond silently, pointing to 
 the life and character and administration of the Ex- 
 ecutive at our State Capitol. Our young men have 
 been stimulated to achievement by your history ; our 
 old men have been cheered by it, as being in some sort 
 a proof of the fidelity of their generation. 
 
 We count it as a blessing of God upon us, that He 
 has put it into your heart to appreciate our semina- 
 ries of learning of every rank. We bear you witness 
 that your care for them has been large-hearted and 
 impartial. There are youth now in a course of train- 
 ing in them who will speak to their children, of the 
 first awakening of high aims in their souls by words 
 which have fallen from your lips. 
 
 The churches and the clergy of the State have 
 numbered it among the mercies of Providence to this 
 Commonwealth, that you -have been a friend of good 
 order, of liberty, and of sound morals, and that they 
 have never feared to see you sitting in the seat of the
 
 60 THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 scomer. You do not need our praise for these things, 
 but we thank God, on your behalf and ours. 
 
 New England has long been accustomed to give up 
 the choicest of her sons to more youthful States. Of 
 such sacrifices Massachusetts has borne her full share. 
 Now that she adds another to the number, may I 
 venture to tell you that she feels a joy for your sake, 
 that you go, as we have been told, to discharge a duty 
 to those who are dependent on your private fortunes. 
 We rejoice in it, as a proof to the world of that which 
 we all knew before — which would once have indicated 
 too common a virtue to be spoken of, but a virtue 
 which, in these latter days is beginning to reflect 
 signal honor on a public man — that the Governors of 
 Massachusetts do not understand the meaning of the 
 " spoils of office." 
 
 We give you, Sir, to the State of your adoption — 
 not unwillingly ; for we know where the destinies of 
 this nation are to be decided, and there, we believe, 
 you are needed. But I am assured that I speak the 
 voice of this people when I say, that the heart of 
 Massachusetts goes with you. She trusts you to 
 represent her honorably there, as you have done here. 
 
 To His Honor, the Lieutenant Governor, and to 
 the Honorable Council, and to you all, Gentlemen of 
 the Legislature, permit me to extend the salutations 
 of the hour — salutations subdued by awe at the gran- 
 deur of public duty in times like these. We are
 
 TO THE CIVILIZATION OP THE FUTURE. 61 
 
 approaching a great epoch, if true men are found 
 with wisdom and grace to make it great. In you, 
 Massachusetts expects to find such men. She trusts 
 you as the guardians of her honor. She makes you, 
 for the time, the representatives of her conscience. 
 She believes that you will come up to the level of 
 Christian legislation ; and that whatever else you part 
 with, you will cling to her ancestral fame, as a State 
 fearing God, obeying Law, "daring to feel the majesty 
 of Right," and loving the liberties of mankind.
 
 
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