Iniquity, than had ever yet oppressed the earth, was exhibited in the moral and intellectual death of ten successive centuries. The whole circumference of Christendom was veiled in the darkest pall of civil and religious bondage; the human conscience was benighted amidst the terrors of the dungeon, the rack, the gibbet, and the flame; and the persons of men were delivered over a prey to the perpetuity of feudal anarchy and horror,

In the midst of this noon of night, it pleased Divine Providence again to interpose for the benefit of human kind: the Spirit of God again moved upon the moral and intellectual chaos, and in the fulness of his own appointed time, he raised up Luther, and Calvin, and Knox, and an innumerable army of saints and martyrs, at the era of the Reformation, to bring back the children of disobedience from the error of their ways to the wisdom of the just; to teach men the pure doctrines of revelation, to be the means of enlightening the mind, and amending the heart of all the forlorn beings that were slumbering in the confines of darkness, or trembling under the shadow of death. Then, indeed, arose a new order of things; the human heart swelled with the sublimest raptures of spiritual devotion; all the charities of father, husband, son, and brother, were mingled in every life-throb of the bosom: substantial integrity and habitual courtesy at once supported and embellished the whole fabric of society: the mind of man sprang upward like a pyramid of fire, and by its blaze of intellectual light, dissipated the Stygian darkness of the middle ages, and an uninterrupted chain of progressive improvement united together all the intelligent minds of re-illumined Christendom.

But man, weak, frail, unsubstantial man, the changling of an hour, ever prone to pass from one into the other extreme, soon vibrated from the grossest superstition into the most obdurate unbelief. And we, who now live upon the earth, are doomed to witness this last and most dreadful of all the eras of human depravity, that

D d

of general profligate infidelity. The light of religion being quenched, that of moral philosophy is speedily swallowed up in the surrounding darkness; all the duties of moral obligation having no other basis than the will of God revealed to man in his inspired word. All political studies are proscribed, lest they should point out the path to civil and religious liberty. No moral culture is encouraged, and no intellectual improvement permitted, save that which teaches the more speedy accomplishment of the works of blood and desolation, which makes war more frequent, more extensive, more murderous. Whence, a few ages of infidelity would roll back the nations of the earth into all the barbarism of universal ignorance, into all the abominations of universal iniquity. To this most deplorable condition was the European continent verging rapidly, under the infidel dominion of revolutionary France.

Let us pause a moment, and re-survey the threefold progressive augmentation of heavenly light, accompanied with a threefold progressive deterioration of human depravity.

When man had only the lesser light of natural conscience to guide his uncertain steps through the mazes. of moral duty, the Pagan world, although partially illumined in intellect, was immersed in the grossness and profligacy of vice. Yet were the heathens superior, both in doctrine and practice, to the grand corrupters of Christianity, whose superstition polluted the greater light of revelation, and approximated the human animal nearer to the brute beast in understanding, and to the fiend in iniquity. But the total rejection of the greater light of revelation produces a more impenetrable darkness of the understanding, and a more entire depravity of the heart than ever arose from the united efforts of the corruption of Christianity and perversion of the natural conscience. So that the world now presents the spectacie of the greatest light of mind and most unspotted purity of heart in those countries where the unsophisticated Gospel is believed, contrasted with the mid

THE BANEFUL INFLUENCE OF INFIDELITY.

403

night of the intellect and the loathsome iniquity of those regions which have cast off all allegiance to God and to his Christ.

The influence of infidelity, like the baneful Upas, lays the hand of death upon all that it touches; it corrupts the morals, debases the intellect, perverts the resources, tarnishes the character, annihilates the honour of every people whom it enfolds in the harlotry of its embrace; it rolls together as a scroll all the rights and liberties of civilized society; it casts that scroll into the fire of hell, feeding upon the misery of man; it cuts off every retreat from virtue and happiness into human intercourse; it lays for ever low in an untimely tomb all that dignity," tenderness, wisdom, charity, affection, and confidence, can add of lustre and of love to the children of mortality; it has never failed, wheresoever it has rolled its waters of bitterness and of death, to sweep away all the ancient boundaries and landmarks of human improvement; it has rolled its stream of ruin over all the art and pride of Egypt, Greece, and Italy, and every other region, waste or cultivated, wholesome or poisonous, in the earth; it has polluted the shades of learning and science, laid open and desolate the properties of men, levelled the temples, and destroyed the altars of the living God; scattered to the wild fury of the winds every hope and every production of nature that looks upward to the Heavens: and after undermining all the props and buttresses of social order that have been reared and strengthened by the labours of hereditary ages, after washing down into the mire of desolation kingdoms, and nations, and empires, and people, and languages, so that before it the earth was as the Garden of Eden, and behind it a deserted waste, it plunges itself, together with all that it encircles, into the gulph of remediless perdition.

In the present state of the world, infidelity is closely allied with the revolutionary question; and, generally speaking, those who are eager to revolutionize all existing governments, under the ostensible pretence of promoting the liberty and property of mankind, are alike

1

infidels in precept and in practice. But these patriotic politicians widely mistake the matter; for all past experience shows, that civil liberty and national prosperity always flourish most where pure Christianity prevails; and that despotism is the most unrestrained and cruel, and public happiness most completely stifled where unbelief predominates. This was strongly exemplified in the contrasted condition of Britain and France, during the revolutionary conflict. France, during that awful period, was a prey to the worst species of desolation; her whole people, let loose from the salutary restraints of religious and moral obligation, presented the hideous spectacle of one entire mass of systematic and legalized corruption; her agriculture was neglected, her external commerce annihilated, her internal trade stagnant, her manufactures drooping, her science and literature darkened almost to extinction; her whole community groaned under the most sanguinary and remorseless tyranny that ever crushed the heart of man to the earth; her sons were dragged in chains to whiten with their bones and moisten with their blood the soil of far-distant lands, while her own deserted widows and fatherless babes lay mouldering in unburied heaps throughout every nook and corner of her swollen and overgrown empire. During this same period, the British people were protected in their equal rights by the unstained administration of equal justice; the full security of life, liberty, and property, was preserved to all; a continual accumulation of wealth pervaded all the departments of her dominions, which exhibited an improved and improving system of agriculture, an extensive and extending commerce, manufactures thriving and increasing, the arts liberally patronized, science and literature in all their branches promoted; their lands, canals, houses, rivers, presenting the most unequivocal proofs of progressive industry and prosperity; the people advancing in pure religion and sound morals, steady in their habits and manners; whence resulted the enlargement of their territorial possessions by honourable conquest; their inexhaustible stock of talents, the living genius of freedom and intelli

UNITED STATES CALMNESS IN RELIGION.

405

gence, which explored the powers and recesses of na→ ture, to abridge the labours and embellish the productions of art; rendering knowledge tributary to the wants, the comforts, and the enjoyments, not only of their own offspring, but also of the whole human race.

M. Talleyrand observes, that he was particularly struck with the calmness, in relation to religion, evidenced in the United States, so contrary to the zeal and enthusiasm displayed in England; and he attributes it to a variety of causes, some of which it may be well to mention. He supposes that the first and most important consideration in a new country is to increase its riches ; that the proof of such a disposition manifests itself every where in America; and that we find evidence of it in every part of their conduct; and that the customs, with regard to religion itself, are strongly tinctured with this prevailing disposition. In England religion has always exercised a powerful influence over the national mind and character of the people; in that country the greatest philosophers and profoundest sages have cast the sanctity of religion over their most intense and various intellectual pursuits. Since the age in which Luther first peered above the horizon, as the morning star of the Reformation, numerous sects and denominations of Christianity have either sprung up in England, or found their way thither from other countries. And, although in general the great national establishment of the church, together with nearly a full toleration of other persuasions, has maintained a general current of tranquillity and peace within the bosom of the British isles; yet, occasionally, the temporary ascendency and fierce fanaticism of some of the other denominations have wrought sudden and great political changes in that nation.

All these various Christian denominations have been transplanted into America; and several of the separate states actually owe their political origin to the exclusive emigrations of some of these sects. It was, therefore, to be expected that these religious emigrants would, after their transmigration, continue to maintain their original state and character, and frequently convulse