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 Professor of Geography 
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 NATIONAL RENOYATION: 
 
 ITS SOURCE, ITS CHANNELS, AND 
 ITS RESULTS. 
 
 WILLIAM R./wn^AMi 
 
 ?^EW YORK: 
 
 ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH, 
 
 No. 683 B RO AD W A T, 
 
 1803. 
 
GIF 
 
MTIOML EEiXOVATION: 
 
 ITS SOURCE, ITS CHANNELS, AND 
 ITS RESULTS. 
 
 WILLIAM E. WILLIAMS, 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH 
 
 No. 683 BROADWAY. 
 
 1863. 
 
%\h '§mnxst 
 
 ON THE FIRST SABBATH MORNING OF THE YEAR, 
 4th JANUARY, 1868, 
 
 IS PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. 
 
 EDWAKD O. JENKINS, 
 
 ^Printer anli iSttrtotfiprr, 
 No. 20 NoBTH William St. 
 
 
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 '^^ ^ -^-^■ 
 
 
 NATIONAL EENOVATION": 
 
 ITS SOOEOE, ITS OHAKirELS, AHD ITS EESULTa 
 
 '• Until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilder- 
 ness BE A fruitful FIELD, AND THE FRUITFUL FIELD BE COUNTED FOR A FOR- 
 EST. Then judgment shall dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness 
 
 REMAIN IN the FRUITFUL FIELD. And THE WORK OF RIGHTEOUSNESS SHALL BE 
 PEACE; AND THE EFFECT OF RIGHTEOUSNESS QUIETNESS AND ASSURANCE FOR 
 EVER." — ISAIAH XXxii. 15-17. 
 
 On the opening Sabbath of a new year it is not only- 
 natural, my friends, but it is almost inevitable that we 
 should look forward — it may be with eager hope or it 
 may be with overmastering solicitude — to the character 
 of the history which that year is to write for ourselves, 
 and our homes, and our native land. Steering, as the 
 ship of State is, amid the howling tempest and boiling 
 surges of war, through most perilous straits, both as re- 
 gards its home and its foreign policy, it would be lack of 
 patriotism and sheer hardness of heart to whistle off, in 
 utter levity, the memory of the tremendous emergencies 
 and responsibilities that envelop, darken, and agitate us. 
 Yet vast as is the State, and dread as is the crisis of the 
 national destiny, the soul of each one of us has a longer 
 lease of being than any empire, merely secular, which 
 the earth has seen or is ever to see. And through the 
 
 Mie8'?970 
 
4 NATIONAL RENOVATION : 
 
 commingling battle of Sin and of Grace, of Temptation 
 whose maelstrom sucks the keel downward, and of Re- 
 demption, which shoots the bark heavenward, each child 
 and each man of us is, whether or not we be conscious 
 of it, struggling for a mightier stake than empires ever 
 contested on the field of battle. Crowns and sceptres 
 are veriest baubles and idle pageantry compared with the 
 intrinsic worth of a human soul. Angels and devils sur- 
 vey with profoundest interest the steps and results of 
 your spiritual career. The realms of Christ and Abad- 
 don sway, so to speak, to and fro over the disputed prize 
 of your soul, lightly as you may regard it ; and habitually 
 as you may forget the fact of that dread arbitrament, 
 which settled once is settled irrevocably and forever. 
 The year of grace, 1863, will, beyond all question, be " a 
 year of the right hand of the Most High." But will that 
 right hand smite us down with its mailed gauntlet of 
 vengeance to depths of inconceivable wretchedness ; or, 
 lift us in its blessed grasp of rescue to the heights of the 
 heavenly glory, and the secure hold of the victor's palm- 
 brancli ? 
 
 Religion and Patriotism should, my beloved hearers, 
 alike make us thoughtful, as we place in uncertainty our 
 feet over the tlireshold of a new year which may bring 
 to us so much of blessing beyond all estimation, or as 
 much of woe, incalculable and irreparable. It was the lot 
 of Isaiah to lift up the voice of his lierald prophesying 
 in a day of rebuke, declension and blaspliemy. The 
 crimes and impiety of Ahaz his king, interrupted indeed 
 by the reign of the godly Hezekiah, but resumed and ag- 
 gravated by tlie next successor Manasseh, — ihe tauntings 
 and cursings of Rabshakeh and the war-trump and im- 
 perial menaces of Sennacherib, must, all in their turn, 
 have beaten heavily on tlie burdened lieart of the pro- 
 
ITS SOURCE, ITS CHANNELS, AND ITS RESULTS. 5 
 
 phet. But witli what an overmastering gladness does 
 bis soul dart through the lower and ominous cloud-rack 
 to reach the upper skies, ever serene and golden. Let us 
 implore the aid of that grace which he so steadily pro- 
 claimed, and so richly and sweetly experienced, in order 
 that we too may no longer be " of doubtful minds f but 
 trust and fear not, with the Eternal God as our stay and 
 as the rock of our salvation. Bring the year what it 
 may, if the Lord, its Sovereign Governor, be the habita- 
 tion of our souls, its worst storms shall but dash us on 
 His faithfulness, and waft us at the last into His rest and 
 beatific vision. 
 
 The Christians of many a remote shore, and using 
 many various dialects of the earth's divided tongues, have 
 agreed to make tliis opening week, as commenced by the 
 present Sabbath, and as rounded by the next succeeding 
 Sabbath, a season of special, unremitted and unanimous 
 intercession for the descent of tlie Spirit of God. This, 
 which is their theme of prayer, is in our text brought 
 forward by Isaiah, as being in his time, and for all after 
 times, the basis of the Church's hope, and the only source 
 of true and lasting renovation for any people and for the 
 entire race. As Ezekiel, from amongst the white and 
 disjointed bones of the Valley of vision, seemingly the 
 spoils of some neglected and unguarded cemetery, and a 
 spectacle that in itself preached only perplexity and des- 
 pondency, was bidden to look up, and to prophesy for the 
 four winds of Heaven — the emblem of the Omnipresent 
 and All-grasping Spirit of God — to come down and shoot 
 life into the rattling fragments ; so Isaiah, before him, 
 bade us raise our eyes heavenwards, amid all scenes of 
 gloom and toil, in our expectation of aid only from God's 
 good Spirit, and in our passionate, importunate entreaties 
 for its quickening descent. 
 
6 NATIONAL RENOVATION : 
 
 With the heart earnestly uplifted, then, to Him who is 
 the heart-searching and the heart-changing Jehovah, let 
 us ponder, in the statements of our text 
 
 I. The SOURCE of national and general renovation — 
 " Until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high ;'' 
 
 II. The CHANNELS of such renewals of good to the age, 
 the land and the race — " And the wilderness be a fruitful 
 field, and the fruitful field be counted for a forest. Then 
 judgment shall dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness 
 remain in the fruitful field f 
 
 III. The RESULTS of such moral and social renovation 
 — " And the work of righteousness shall be peace, and 
 the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance for- 
 
 A Source, supernal and Divine ; Channels, of revolu- 
 tionary change on the earth ; and the Results, peaceful 
 and permanent, are presented by the book of God as 
 affording sufficient grounds of consolation and hope for 
 our race in each darker crisis of history. 
 
 As travellers climb the long staircases of some church 
 spire to scan the avenues and precincts of some great 
 strange city, and thus learn its shape and chief thorough- 
 fares : or, ascend by painful clamberings some steep moun- 
 tain-top to look off from its jagged pinnacles, and judge 
 the better of the country they are traversing — even so is 
 it by the help of ascending in soul on high, that we can 
 aright calculate either the earth's present condition, or 
 its prospects of coming relief. 
 
 When the Temple, in days after those of Isaiah, lay in 
 desecrated ruin, and the walls and homes of Jerusalem 
 
ITS SOURCE, ITS CHANNELS, AND ITS RESULTS. 7 
 
 strewed now with their broken wreck, the desolate heap 
 that had been once a beautiful and sacred metropolis, 
 " the joy of the whole earth,'' the hopes of the pious He- 
 brew, for the restoration of his city and people, lay not 
 so much in any outer and secular alliance, in the rank of 
 Mordecai, or the sweet attractiveness of Esther, or the 
 promotion of a Nehemiah, or the wide sway of a Daniel, 
 as it did in the prophecies of heaven's own sending, and 
 in the prayers of saints as pleading those prophecies, and 
 as besieging, whilst thus sustained by the warrants of 
 God's own word, the throne of His heavenly grace. And 
 so, when Christ, after telling his apostles of the world's 
 hatred, and of the wide range of their own work in all 
 the coasts and through all the tribes of tliat world, would 
 cheer and arm them for the task, he assured them of 
 the presence of this same Spirit, the Comforter, as fur- 
 nishing the pledge of their ultimate and irresistible tri- 
 umph. They were to wait at Jerusalem for that Spirit's 
 coming ; and this Invisible but Invincible Helper would 
 secure the evangelization of the race. Thus was it true 
 in all times, not only in the day of Pentecost, but in the 
 ages before it, as in tlie ages since succeeding and long 
 after it, that the sources of earth's hope were not to be 
 dug out of her own mines, or minted and refined out of 
 her own ores. Its health and recovery was possible, only 
 as it should be in origin, supernal and eternal and Divine. 
 From " on high " did it come j and from " on high" were 
 they to implore its descent. Zion was to look evermore 
 " to the hills whence " — and whence only — " cometh her 
 help." 
 
 That Spirit's outpouring was experienced after all 
 Ahaz's fearful temerity of impiety, in the revival of re- 
 ligion under Hezekiah ; and after Manasseh's more guilty 
 relapse, in his conversion and the early piety of Josiah — 
 
8 NATIONAL renovation: 
 
 yet again, in the days, tasks and achievements of Nehe- 
 miah, Ezra, Zerubbabel and Joshua the son of Josedech, 
 as returning from the Captivity to rebuild Jerusalem — 
 still more largely in the work of preparation under John 
 the Baptist and of evangelization by our Lord and His 
 Apostles — then, anew, in quick sequence after His ascen- 
 sion by the glorious scenes of Pentecost. So, in later 
 ages of the Christian Church, the conversion of the Pa- 
 gan Roman Empire to Christianity, and then of the bar- 
 barian hordes who became the invaders of that Empire 
 — then the Reformation under Luther and Calvin and 
 their compeers — the days, then, of the British Puritans 
 and of the Scottish Covenanters — then, the era of Metho- 
 dism and of Modern Missions, — and all the revivals of 
 religious feeling and activity in our fathers' days and in 
 our own, make up, my hearers, but instalments of this 
 great effusion of celestial energy, — the Spirit's outpour- 
 ing here predicted. 
 
 Surely, that Creator Spirit, who brooded over the 
 emptiness and disorder of the old Chaos, and evoked the 
 order, variety, light, beauty, and permanence of the Cre- 
 ation, is fully adequate to the work of the Second Cre- 
 ation, as the Repairer of our moral ruin in virtue of 
 Christ's treaty of the Atonement. To Nicodemus Christ 
 preached the necessity of this Spirit's influence for that 
 new birth without which Heaven cannot be entered : 
 as He afterwards bade His Apostles tarry at Jerusalem 
 until endowed with fresh power from on high by this 
 Spirit, animating and equipping them for their great trust 
 of itinerating and evangelizing the world. 
 
 And as it is not man's prerogative to wield at his will 
 tliese the resources of tlie skies and the energies of tho 
 Godhead, it is quite as presumptuous for man to propose, 
 in his terrene might, to check, to lock and to bar these 
 
overflowings of the Grace and Sovereignty of Almighty 
 God. " To bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades " 
 might be much more easily effected by man's five fingers, 
 than that his puny hand should bolt the windows of 
 Heaven, stay the vials of Pentecost, and dictate to the 
 Christ, the Heir and Lord of all earth's history, within 
 what secular and human barriers He shall be permitted 
 to spread His truth and rule and mould the hearts of His 
 people. Xerxes assaying to put fetters on the Hellespont, 
 and Canute chiding the tide for its rising, were men 
 soberly and effectively employed, in comparison with the 
 modern schemers and dreamers who arrogate to curb the 
 Law and Spirit of the Omnipotent and Eternal One, in 
 their free career from " on high," over a world created 
 dependent on its Maker, and over a race conscience- 
 bound and death-driven towards the Last Judgment. 
 
 However sadly, therefore, at times, some foreboding 
 hearts here may regard the era of turmoil and political 
 conflict, and martial carnage, and financial embarrassment, 
 which now lowers over us and around us as a people, 
 there is found in God's gracious Spirit the Source of all 
 relief needed, competent to every emergency of the 
 world's darkest era, and adequate to realize and to sur- 
 pass the largest dreams of hope. Are you a parent, 
 whose soul grows heavy at forecasting the possible desti- 
 nies of your children? Do you inquire, passionately, 
 whether Anarchy or Despotism, or the bitter, unrelenting, 
 internecine strifes of two contending Governments, di- 
 viding between them our old territory as a nation, with 
 costly armdments, uncertain boundaries, ruinous imposts, 
 and continuous bickerings, are the appointed lot of your 
 sons and daughters ? Do you ask, at times. Is then the 
 perjured and wily usurper to whom France, craftily flat- 
 tered by him in her love of splendor, bows down the 
 1* 
 
10 NATIONAL RENOVATION . 
 
 pliant neck, and who talks of asserting the rights of 
 the Latin race over the world — to become, by the well- 
 timed intervention growing into invasion, the patron and 
 arbiter of our freedom, religious and political? And 
 this, when so many of us the children of the Pilgrims, 
 and when so many, others of us, as students of the old 
 Puritan theology, have been wont to read in that very 
 name — the Latin, thus brandished over us, the mysterious 
 six hundred threescore and six of the Apocalypse, — an 
 interpretation put upon it so far back as the days of 
 Irenagus, living in the very century next after that of the 
 giving of the Apocalypse — the Latin, thus made the 
 name of tlie Beast that fought against God and that 
 would trample in ashes and gore Christ's truth and 
 Church. Shall imperial and Papal despotism^ wielding 
 a name of such scriptural ominousness, win or daunt into 
 obsequiousness, the children of the men whose fathers 
 fed the fires of Smithfield with their own flesh as fearless 
 martyrs, endured in one land, the Dragonades of the 
 crowned Bourbon, or, in another land, warred on, de- 
 throned and belieaded the crowned Stuarts ; defied in 
 Scotland the Dalziels and the Claverhouses, and in Hol- 
 land the Alvas, and have come out of this varied ances- 
 tral experience with no especial links, binding us either 
 by fear or by love to the Latin name ? 
 
 Against all these needless or warranted alarms there 
 remains one sure and sufficient source of defence, the 
 Spirit of God, that, unexhausted in its powers, and bound- 
 less in its benignity, vaster than our deepest necessities, 
 and richer than our wildest anticipations, is able to shake 
 the nations, and smite with the energy that shattered the 
 old Paganism of imperial Rome all forms of nascent and 
 resurgent Paganism in modern Christendom. 
 
 The Holy Ghost can deluge the globe with light, and 
 
ITS SOURCE, ITS CHANNELS, AND ITS RESULTS. 11 
 
 with life and with love from the plenitude of His re- 
 sources, and the invincibility of His searching and 
 pervasive energies. What social error or evil — what 
 political combination — what power of faction, delusion 
 or obduracy can stand up against the Omnipotent, or 
 outwatch and outwit the Omniscient Spirit of God, if 
 His Sovereignty once move forth ? But this Spirit has 
 placed His influences, so to speak, before us under the 
 condition and requirement of instant, united and con- 
 tinued supplication. He with whom is this all-sufficing 
 and all-commanding " residue of the Spirit," waits " to be 
 enquired of." All His past gifts have not drained the 
 reservoir or trenched on the treasure-heap. He bids us 
 ask assured that we are to receive, and to knock impor- 
 tunately at the door even when seemingly barred, until 
 it be opened. His choicest pledge of favor is the Spirit 
 of grace and supplication. And as a praying Church 
 opened the fetters and prison doors of Peter, whilst all 
 Jerusalem waited for the victim, and Herod's soldiers, 
 chained bodily to the prisoner, seemed to assure his fate, 
 so now the Hearer of Prayer but awaits new and heartier 
 appeals from our globe to call forth new wonders, that 
 as they come gushing downward from His throne shall 
 surprise and disappoint the nations yet, as of old, in their 
 inveterate delusion, banded against His King in Zion. 
 He awakens prayer ; He directs and inspires prayer ; He 
 responds to, crowns and surpasses the requests of prayer : 
 and as of old reiterates His gracious challenge to the 
 Church, " Concerning the work of My hands command 
 ye Me." 
 
 II. But what are the channels selected by this 
 Mighty Worker in shaping the affairs and in controlling 
 the hearts of the nations ? They are not always in the 
 
12 NATIONAL RENOVATION: 
 
 line of established human precedents ; nor do these floods 
 always respect the dykes or follow the channels of secu- 
 lar interests and usages and prejudices. The strangest 
 changes, perplexing and appalling human leaders, are 
 often wrought by His Providence outwardly ; and by His 
 direct, internal influence also in the hearts and moral 
 state of men. These changes can alter unexpectedly the 
 whole face of a land making, in the inspired language of 
 our prophecy, the wilderness into a fruitful field, and 
 causing the fruitful field, in comparison with its new 
 counterpart, to be accounted as a forest. This was illus- 
 trated when out of the imperial household that had ab- 
 sorbed Esther, and out of the banqueting chamber of 
 despotism once promising only riot and violence, and out 
 of the very feast to which had been invited as a honored 
 guest Haman, the sworn enemy of the Jews, there issued 
 the sentence that swung that persecutor from his own 
 gibbet ; soon to be followed by the decree that bade 
 the Jews stand in each city of the empire in their own 
 defence. An earlier edict had sold them to the slaugh- 
 ter. The laws of the Modes and the Persians did not 
 allow the aspect of regal fallibility and mutability, which 
 would be presented if a decree once made should ever be 
 rescinded. But it might be counterpoised. And so the 
 older judgment of general massacre for the Hebrew race, 
 left constitutionally unrepealed, there came as its sup- 
 plement the second decree summoning the race thus 
 sealed for death to assume the sword in general self- 
 defence. The Jew did not wait to debate the question, 
 on general principles, whether of right it were not bet- 
 ter to exscind the old rule of immutability and infallibil- 
 ity. Practically, freedom was set before the Jewish 
 patriot ; and in the name of liis God he accepted and 
 acliieved the boon thus placed within his reach. 
 
ITS SOURCE, ITS CHANNELS, AND ITS RESULTS. 13 
 
 These Avide and sudden changes, which it is the prero- 
 gative of God's Spirit and Providence to effect, were 
 illustrated still more signally when the greater light 
 of the gospel dispensation, as compared with the shadows 
 of the Jewish Levitical economy, made the wilderness 
 of the Gentile world more acquainted with the great 
 truths of religion, and more profusely adorned with the 
 real fruits of holiness than the Jewish people had been ; 
 so that their fruitful field seemed in comparison a forest, 
 and so that, in the principle of the Divine government 
 so peremptorily stated by the Messiah, its Administrator, 
 the last became first and the first were made the last. 
 But was all this spiritual and celestial bestowment, how- 
 ever noiseless its downward lapse, without wars and 
 rumors of wars, as overspreading the earth ? Came 
 there not overthrow and exile, and bereavement, and 
 persecution, and most relentless martyrdoms ? These 
 must be even in the van and in the train of the Prince 
 of Peace. God's plough and harrow went tearing the 
 sod as God's hand rained the harvest-seed of His king- 
 dom. 
 
 In the Church and in the world, the Most High, who 
 is wondrous in working, can yoke the stormiest of instru- 
 mentalities into the service of His own benignant cause. 
 Look at Stephen, the martyr. How was his character, 
 in all the Christian graces that illustrated it, and that 
 made his removal so great a cause of lamentation to 
 devout men, a beautiful realization of the benediction of 
 Isaac on his son : fragrant is holiness, " the smell of a 
 field blessed of the Lord." Yet great as was the fertile 
 promise of that field, even it might be counted a forest 
 compared with the higher spiritual attainments and the 
 wider spiritual achievements of Saul of Tarsus ; whom 
 yet that Almighty Spirit found a very thicket and forest 
 
14 NATIONAL EENOVATION: 
 
 of thorns, briars and poison-weeds, but whom the Spirit 
 uf God converted into a very Eden of the Lord's favor 
 and presence. Such is the Lord's potent " husbandry." 
 
 The Modern Missions of the Christian Church that 
 have carried the Bible into so many tribes on the eastern 
 continent and in the islands of the southern seas, moved 
 in the train of the terrific wars of the great French 
 Revolution. Mirabeau and Robespierre and Danton 
 knew nought of Carey and Martyn ; but the French anar- 
 chists leavened in God's Providence our race for the great 
 social changes which invited and welcomed these mis- 
 sionary outgoings. When the carnival of Terror and 
 Blood trampled over the surface of France till it was a 
 field of mire and gore, the God of the centuries was 
 leading on, by invisible bands, the blessed troops of the 
 Sunday-School Teacher, the Tract Distributor, the Home 
 Evangelist, the Foreign Missionary, and the Bible Trans- 
 lator. And these moral, disturbing forces of the gospel 
 that God sees fit to send forth, in the company or in the 
 train of great secular convulsions, are by the hasty rea- 
 soners of the world most unjustly held responsible for 
 the social convulsions which man's wickedness has really 
 extorted from Divine Justice — convulsions which these 
 moral reformers do beyond all other classes the most to 
 lighten, to terminate and to heal. Sidney Smith, in rude 
 scoffings which it would have been worth the sacrifice of 
 half his literary honors could he have recalled and can- 
 celled, sneered at the early Indian Missions of our 
 churches as the work of " consecrated cobblers ;" and 
 predicted, as the result of their continuance, and of the 
 failure of the British Government to suppress them by 
 the strong hand of power, the murderous overthrow of 
 British dominion in the East — the " cutting," to use his 
 sinewy English, " of every Englishman's throat in the 
 
ITS SOURCE, ITS CHANNELS, AND ITS RESULTS. 15 
 
 fiast." How did God put scorn on the scoffer and honor 
 on his maligned servants, when out of the influence and 
 religious trainings of that very Serampore thus denounced 
 and thus derided, He brought a Havelock, wedded to 
 a daughter of that missionary colony, himself, in the 
 language of Sir Henry Hardinge, " Every inch a soldier 
 and every inch a Christian ;" and sent him, in the hour 
 of sorest peril to the eastern dominion of England, to 
 be in his heroic march to Lucknow, one eminent instru- 
 ment under God of savimi" to the British Crown her vast 
 Indian Empire. 
 
 Repentance it is that sets us in the way of God's tes- 
 timonies, and brings around a people His potent and 
 invincible benediction. And trials and battles and re- 
 volutions often are God's chosen enginery to induce and 
 precipitate repentance. So Manasseh, caught among 
 thorns, remembered his sins, and sought the forgotten 
 God of his fathers. Then and thus "judgment dwells 
 in the wilderness." In out of the way avenues, there is 
 seen starting up some mighty witness for forgotten duty 
 and neglected truth, the echo of an awakening national 
 conscience, or the precursor of an overwhelming national 
 judgment. It is here a John the Baptist, clad in camels' 
 hair, and preaching in the wilderness of Judah to silken 
 citizens and courtiers, the stern realities of Judgment 
 and Eternity. It is there a poor miner's son, Luther, study- 
 ing the Scriptures in his monastery ; or thinking on the 
 true way of salvation as he travels on his knees at Rome 
 up the stairs of Pilate's palace ; or translating the Bible 
 in his Patmos as he called it, the desert refuge of the 
 Castle of Wartburg. So Wesley and Whitfield, poor 
 students in the halls of Oxford ; so a Brainerd, expelled 
 wrongfully from his college in New Haven ; so a Carey 
 fighting poverty, and in a country school pondering sadly 
 
16 NATIONAL RENOVATION : 
 
 the globe's moral destitutions and the Redeemer's world- 
 wide charge ; are they not all but modern specimens of 
 this wonted mode of Heaven's working, by the things 
 obscure, overlooked, or when looked upon by man's eyes, 
 judged pitiably helpless and inadequate, subverting and 
 counter-working those whose power seemed to man's 
 settled judgment unassailable ; — " by the things that are 
 not bringing to nought the things that are." But all 
 this new development of good in unexpected regions and 
 from uncounted allies, does not destroy the existing good 
 in the churches. " Righteousness remains in the fruitful 
 field." Truth and holiness, where already found, are not 
 extinguished, although for the time they may seem 
 eclipsed by these new and unexpected accessions from 
 quarters where the Zion of God had hoped for no helpers. 
 "And the work of righteousness shall be peace." Now 
 here God plainly, and yet how kindly and with what an 
 incisive gentleness, reprehends man's habitual delusions. 
 For man instinctively and universally and persistently 
 yearns after " peace." In his worst riot and excess, 
 when belching out his crude brutalities and blasphemy, 
 man, however revolting against Truth and Heaven, yet 
 sighs for peace. A Dives looks for it in sumptuous liv- 
 ing. The Rich Fool of Christ's parable looked for it in 
 the widened barns and garnered harvests. The drunk- 
 ard hopes to see it at the bottom of his drained bowl ; 
 •and the Sabbath-breaker to sift it out of his sliivered 
 fragments of the dishonored day of God ; and even the 
 poor prodigal dreams of it in a larger dole of the swine's 
 husks. Byron, in his stormy life of passion and self-indul- 
 gence, speaks of his being most deeply touched with the 
 Italian grave-stone, where the deceased bade the traveller 
 " pray for peace " to the buried sleeper. He had fame, 
 and genius, and wealth, and rank, and pleasure ; but 
 
ITS SOURCE, ITS CHANNELS, AND ITS RESULTS. 17 
 
 peace lie had not. Our God has made Righteousness 
 the u-a,y to Peace. Repentance, a return to righteous- 
 ness, is the indispensable prerequisite to the Kingdom 
 of Heaven, to acceptance and to peace with our Maker 
 and Judge. So in the Psalms, Righteousness and Peace 
 are seen to kiss each other. They greet thus each other 
 for an eternal alliance, inseparable as the sunbeam's 
 light and the sunbeam's heat. But man would often, in 
 the arrangements of his mistaken and fatal policy, make 
 the greeting of the two powers like Orpah's kiss of 
 Naomi, a farewell salutation, in which Peace lifts up its 
 voice of wailing at the impending banishment, and takes 
 leave for ever of Righteousness ; as if that Righteous- 
 ness were too costly, too troublesome, too heavy in its 
 taxation, and too laborious in its undertakings, to be re- 
 tained any longer in our vicinity and to be tolerated as of 
 our acquaintance. But God allows no such unnatural dis- 
 junction. He puts the two together, not as exchanging 
 salutations for an eternal parting, like Orpah quitting 
 Naomi to return to her idols ; but as Ruth and Naomi 
 knit in an indissoluble sisterhood ; one life, one grave, 
 and one God, for this world and for all worlds. 
 
 And it is even thus with the nation as well as with 
 the individual. A people must do Right if they expect 
 God's blessing of true and enduring Peace. Hear 
 again the edict of the skies : "The work of righteous- 
 ness shall be peace." Listen to the short-sighted and 
 self-confident schemes of the men of expediency. They 
 say. Give us, in any way and at any cost of principle, 
 and at any surrender of conscience and duty — peace. 
 Let us plaster with the tears and blood of the slave the 
 altar of our national reunion ; and make all slab and 
 smooth. But Heaven denounces the building with such 
 untempered mortar that Justice has not weighed, com- 
 
18 NATIONAL renovation: 
 
 pounded and attempered. It is but to build what Scrip- 
 ture calls " the breach swelling out in a high wall," that 
 bulges and nods to a speedy overthrow. It ts rearing a 
 habitation that, with the stone out of the wall and the 
 beam out of the timber, crying out against the wrong of 
 its architects, invites Revolution to make it the trap and 
 grave of its trusting inmates. 
 
 In the light of these proclaimed principles of the 
 Divine Government, we may look through all our anxie- 
 ties and bitter bereavements, hopefully on the great meas- 
 ure of Emancipation, which as a military act, the Presi- 
 dent may, as we believe under the Constitution, right- 
 fully adopt. The Providence of God has shut him up 
 to it. If we are required by the Judge on high, 
 now and evermore the Arbiter of all national destiny, 
 to do to another as we would have another do unto us, 
 can we with this as the law of righteousness, fail to re- 
 joice even over the terrible trials, which have made such 
 act of righteous dealing, now both constitutionally pos- 
 sible and politically expedient ? Do we anticipate or 
 desire the excesses of servile revolt ? God forbid I 
 But the very presence of two contending armies. North- 
 ern and Southern, will serve as an armed police to re- 
 strain such excesses, were they otherwise probable. They 
 would be far more likely to occur in the desperate out- 
 break of wild uprisings as consequent upon a hollow 
 peace, and upon the disbandment of the existing camps. 
 
 The grand difficulty will be the gradual elevation and 
 education of these enfranchised beings, for the due and 
 safe use of their newly won freedom. But righteousness 
 has God's help and God's especial patronage and protec- 
 tion. And the British West India Islands, whatever may 
 in some have been the diminutions of commercial ex- 
 port, have certainly, as to the social condition of the 
 
ITS SOURCE, ITS CHANNELS, AND ITS RESULTS. 19 
 
 peasantry, disproved the gloomy vaticinations of those 
 opposed to emancipation. And we think that the fullest 
 comparison of the testimonies of those most closely, 
 calmly, and thoroughly observing the field, leaves an un- 
 impeachable and overwhelming result, in favor of the 
 liberated tenantry as to industry, morals, domestic order, 
 and personal happiness and thrift. 
 
 But some may say : In our land at least give us 
 peace — in any mode, at any price. But who shall give 
 us peace ? It would be perilously to reckon without that 
 Divine and Sovereign Host, on whose earth we, and our 
 fathers before us, are and have been but sojourners and 
 tenants on sufferance, if we fail to, consult in planning a 
 sure and strong peace, those conditions of right and 
 equity, on which He stipulates as conditions, that under 
 His government must precede and underlie a national 
 peace of firm structure and texture. And what is peace 
 under the light of God's startling Providences and flash- 
 ing Scriptures ? Peace is not the triumph of faction at 
 the expense and by the sacrifice of principle. It is not 
 submission to the bludgeon as the law for our senators ; 
 and acceptance of secession at will as being henceforth 
 the recognised law of disintegration for the nation, for 
 its several states and for its distinct neighbourhoods. It 
 is not the installation, as the reward of a traitorous and 
 sanguinary revolt, of universal serfdom for the entire 
 land. That treaty brings with it no promise of Heaven's 
 benison for the country that should crawl into so base 
 and cruel a refuge. This is not peace, for it sacrifices 
 both Liberty and Righteousness. Man is too readily 
 inclined to think of gain and luxury and of the silencing 
 of the weak and the many under the violence and selfish- 
 ness of the few, as if, these once attained, peace followed. 
 In the terse phrase of the old Roman, men ma)^ make 
 
20 NATIONAL RENOVATION : 
 
 Desolation and call it Peace. But such silence of Moral 
 Desolation, such repose of Obdi^racy, forgetting Judg- 
 ment, is but the ominous lull that heralds the earthquake. 
 The old invocation of the Psalmist has been voicelessly 
 uplifted and fearfully answered hundreds of times in the 
 history of the race : " It is time for Thee to work, for 
 men have made void Thy law." All human arrange- 
 ments, in a land irradiated with the light of revelation, 
 and all glowing under the monitions of God's judgments — 
 all human arrangements, that in such scenes and times, 
 make promise of relief must make endeavors at righteous- 
 ness. Unrighteousness cannot make peace : for God is 
 at war with it. And when God wars, the Universe will 
 be found ultimately fighting on God's side against the 
 transgressor. The stones of the field are, as said the 
 patriarch, in league with the righteous ; the stars in their 
 courses fought against an unrighteous Sisera. It is not 
 peace with God that is to be bought by flattering ignor- 
 ant prejudices or exasperating intemperate appetites in 
 the people. The unanimity that demanded the Crucifix- 
 ion of the Nazarene, was, unconsciously but most effectu- 
 ally, a vociferous summons for the battering ram of Titus 
 against the gates it proposed to guard, and for the torch 
 of Titus against the fane it assumed to purify by shedding 
 the innocent blood. Not in impenitence and defiance, but 
 in the discernment of error and the reformation of wrong 
 lies God's path toward peace. So John the Baptist, the 
 forerunner of Christ, dealt with the Hebrew people, and 
 Herod their prince. Repentance was the prerequisite to 
 set them in the way of God's favor. And wlien Christ 
 himself, the very Prince of Peace, came down to preach 
 peace and to give peace, it was by proclaiming with His 
 own lips as had His forerunner done, repentance as the 
 preparation for the kingdom of Heaven. The law of 
 
ITi= oOURCE, ITS CHANNEL?, AND ITS RESULTS. 21 
 
 God was to be honored and conserved, that grace might 
 go forth. The light of a recoA'cred paradise shone only 
 over the Gethsemane of unutterable anguish, and the 
 Calvary of ignominy and agony where the Deliverer mag- 
 nified and made honorable the law that He satisfied. 
 Our great cities are in need, for a republic to be pos- 
 sible — in need of a more perfect evangelization. Can 
 drunkenness, ignorance, venality and judicial partisanship 
 give righteousness to the cause they sustain, or freedom 
 to the state which they rule ? Legislators and magis- 
 trates who shall reign mainly by the permission of an 
 incensed Providence, and by the grace of the Five Points 
 politically strong only in the recklessness, error, and 
 riot which they flattered and sheltered and represented, 
 would, by the sure retributions of Heaven, become rulers 
 likely to reverse the Scriptural blessing, and prove, in- 
 stead, " A terror unto them that do well, and a praise 
 and a reward unto them that do evil." For, by the 
 will of the Sovereign of the Universe, righteousness fail- 
 ing, true peace fails ; and the false peace, compounded 
 by the evil doer, persistent in his wrong, evokes the 
 thunderbolt and hurries down the tempest. 
 
 HI. But blessed, and beneficent and permanent are the 
 RESULTS of that acquiescence in God's will, and that ac- 
 ceptance of God's guidance and grace, which follow in 
 the train of the Spirit's renovating work. " Tlie effect 
 of righteousness shall be quietness and assurance for- 
 ever." Come personally to God in true conversion ; and 
 obtain the possession of true holiness from the Spirit's 
 teachings ; and the sequence is for this passing life and 
 for the world beyond this, a quietness and assurance that 
 are forever, for the Unchanging and Holy God bestows 
 them, and the Eternal God guaranties them. And the re- 
 pose, welling from renewed hearts, over reformed nation-^- 
 
22 NATIONAL renovation: 
 
 ind throughout an evangelized planet, as it is fed from the 
 depths of the Infinite Spirit, is a well, as Christ pledged 
 it, " springing up into life everlasting ; " and becomes as 
 the prophet saw it, a great river going out to flood the 
 earth. The peace that has Omnipotence as the ally, and 
 Christ formed in the heart as the hope of endless glory, 
 is a peace not of the world's giving, and also beyond the 
 world's power to destroy. It is so in the concerns of na- 
 tions and the entire race. The Greek asked but a rest, 
 and boasted then that he could, were but a pivot furnished 
 him, lift the world. The Spirit and Son of God, in the 
 Incarnation and Atonement, have provided a support, on 
 which rests and from which plays the great lever of Re- 
 generation and Redemption, upheaving our nature out of 
 the quarry of the Fall to build men into the walls of the 
 New Jerusalem. Heaven has, in its Christ, come down 
 that Earth may, in the person of Christ's Church, be al- 
 lowed to mount on high. The victory that overcometh 
 the world in us, and the victory that is morally to swing 
 the world out of the sides of Tophet is our Faith — a 
 Faith in this the only Christ — a Faith of the operation 
 of this the Spirit of God. 
 
 In vain, then, do men profess to love peace, if they at 
 the same time hate righteousness, which is, in G od's ap- 
 pointment, the only architect of an abiding peace. They 
 seek, as said Augustine, a good they cannot find, because 
 they seek it not in the right quarter and from the only 
 source. For to shuffle off" Duty, and to stop the ears at 
 the cry of Misery, and to secure Luxury and to practice 
 Oppression, are but seeking peace in quarters Avhcre by 
 tlie edict of the Almighty " there is no peace." But in 
 the Spirit of God, the Teacher of righteousness and the 
 Unfolder of duty, giving not only the right precept, but 
 ingrafting the high motive, not merely inscribing the law 
 
ITS SOURCE, ITS CHANNELS, AND ITS RESULTS. 23 
 
 but instilling the love of the law, will the race find the 
 Bringer of Liberty, and the Guardian of Order, and the 
 Sealer of peace. Let the young bring to Him the order- 
 ing of their busy career ; and on Him let 1 he aged cast 
 the weight of their anxious forebodings. Let the patriot, 
 and the reformer, and the parent, teacher, pastor and 
 evangelist, in all their labors for the souls of men, begin 
 by imbathing their own souls in this higher atmosphere of 
 hope, and serene trust, and limitless life. Then the world 
 shall neither fusciiialc nor daunt. The faith in an Invisible 
 but Almighty Helper, that of old marched past scaffolds 
 and dungeons and martyr fires and catacombs, gathering 
 hundreds of its meek witnesses ; nor swerved from its 
 steady advance until it ruled the wide realm of those Cas- 
 sars, who had wielded against that faith all. and vainly 
 wielded all these impediments, — is, in the might and right 
 of its old and unworn Leader to stalk over wider fields of 
 contention, and quell a more thronged and multiform op- 
 position ; for it has the world as its covenanted dominion. 
 Up with the banner of Truth, and in the name of the 
 Lord plant it. Up with the rallying cry of intercession 
 to the Hearer of Prayer, with whom is held in reserve 
 the full aad adequate " residue of the Spirit." Let us im- 
 plore His descent on the camp and the fleet and the cab- 
 inet — on the sorrows of the bereaved and the exiled and 
 the impoverished, on the master and the slave, on the 
 North and the South, on the Church and on the world. 
 Blessed, has this true Spirit of God said, in connexion 
 with the prophecy of our text, are those who send forth 
 to all waters the feet of the ox and the ass. The imag- 
 ery seems to describe the regular and the irregular laborer 
 — the professional and the unprofessional testimony for 
 Christ and His truth, and His cause, as being far more 
 largely diffused than as yet they have been beside all the 
 
24 NATIONAL RENOVATION. 
 
 great channels of intercourse and influence. The prom- 
 ise assures to such wide dispersion as wide a benediction. 
 Battle and Revolution, in all their tremendous severity, 
 are yet in God's unfaltering hand, clearing broad water 
 courses that the more promptly and liberally they be 
 morally tilled, will the sooner roll their floods of healing 
 where at first ran but their currents of submerging deso- 
 lation. Prayer is to feed missions ; and missions are 
 needed to warrant sincerity, constancy and filial confi- 
 dence in the offering of our prayer. And to us, as a 
 nation, the downward rush of the Holy Ghost shall be 
 the era of a genuine righteousness, an abiding concord, 
 and an indestructible freedom. 
 
RECENT PAMPHLETS, 
 
 How a Free People Conduct a Long War. 
 
 A Chapter from English History. By Charles J. Stills. 
 8vo. Paper, 15 cents. 
 
 " We trust that this pamphlet may be very widely read. It is a most timely 
 utterance, and we are sure, that wherever it is read it will infuse new courage 
 and hope into loyal hearts. It shows tliat the scenes through which we are 
 passing, the state of public feeling toward the government, the disputes in 
 reference to public men and public measures, have nothing in them at all strange 
 or unusual, but are in fact the almost universal and inevitable accompaniment 
 of long wars — wars which in the end are entirely successful. The writer illus- 
 trates the whole by an ext('n4ed reference to what took place in the Peninsular 
 "War, under the leadership of Wellington." 
 
 The American AYar. 
 
 A Lecture delivered in London, October, 1SG2. By Rev. 
 Newman Hall, D. D. 15 cents. 
 
 Report of Louis H. Steiner, M. D., 
 
 Inspector of the Sanitary Commission. Containing a Diary 
 kept during the Rebel Occupation of Frederick, Md., during 
 the Campaign in Maryland, September, 1802. 8vo. Paper, 
 15 cents. 
 
 Published by 
 
 ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH, 
 
 ^^J^ The above lu'dl he sent hy Mail prepaid, on the receipt of 
 the price in postarie stamps. 
 
Manufaclured by 
 
 GAYLORD BROS. »ne. 
 
 Syracuse, N. Y. 
 
 Stockton, Calif. 
 
 M287970 
 
 
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