came in their appointed hour, but no one knew who sent them. Night comes after the day, but only because the day is ended. The most cunning soothsayer can make no mystery out of that. It is all in the order of nature. Why inquire further? Darius saw no sign of a Divine judgment in the resistless might of Alexander, and Porus still less. Both found a complete explanation of their own prodigious misadventures in the solidity of the Macedonian phalanx. Why should they seek for it elsewhere? Why suspect a supernatural cause of events for which a natural one seemed to them so manifestly adequate? Baltassar would have been astonished to hear that Cyrus was the "servant" of the Most High, though there was one in his court who could have told him so, and did vainly warn him of his coming fate. When Greece fell, in spite of her temples, her poets, and her heroes, the human majesty of imperial Rome was perhaps enlarged, but nothing else. Neither Greek nor Roman gave a thought to the tremendous majesty of God. When Rome, the conqueror of all, fell in her turn, it was only because the Danube was too weak a barrier to stay the rush of hordes from without, and a degenerate soldiery too impotent to provide a defence from within. If more than one of the triumphant barbarians who trampled her under foot called himself "the scourge of God," perhaps he did not know what he was saying. What was true of the Pagan nations, who knew not God, was true also-alas! that it should be said-of His own people. Persians, Assyrians, and Egyptians understood His judgments as well as they did, and interpreted them as wisely. The Chaldean king, whose profane banquet was adorned with "the golden and silver vessels brought away out of the temple that was in Jerusalem," and who the same night expiated his sacrilege by death, was not more heedless of his approaching doom than the elect people to whom the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been, for long ages, a tender Father and a gracious King. He had smitten them for their good, less in anger than in love, and they knew not that His judgments in the past were only a rehearsal of that final catastrophe which was reserved for the future. If the captive children of Israel refused to sing the songs of Zion in a strange land," they did not sing them to much purpose when they were restored to their own. As soon as their sufferings were over they forgot them. When at last their King came, not to lead them to an unprofitable victory over Rome or Egypt, but as the "Prince of Peace," of whom Moses, David, and Isaias were the heralds, surpassing all imaginable guilt they cried: "His blood be upon us and upon our children." The malediction which they invoked has overwhelmed them. Yet the people of Tyre and Sidon were not more unconscious in the day of wrath by whose sentence they were crushed than they who had once been the people of God. Centuries of union with Him had taught them nothing. If their unexampled fate is a proverb in all the world, it is none to themselves. Are they scattered among all the nations, bearing the brand of Cain on their brow, without a home, without a head, of all nationalities yet of none; it is probably an accident. Why should people point the finger at them in all lands, and say, "Behold the judgment of God"? Not so do they read their own doom. Why should they? Are they not prosperous, according to their own measure of prosperity? Do they not lend money to Christians? Do they not even, in most of the capitals of Europe, supply instruction to them, by means of the foul literature of newspapers, most of which treat the Christian Church and religion as if they were inspired by Jews, and had nothing so much at heart as to justify Herod, absolve Pilate, and build a monument to Caiaphas? What sign is there here of the curse of God? The Jews see none. To hold their own, and exert at the same time no fugitive or ephemeral influence over the fortune of others, contents their ambition. They could do no more if they still ruled in Zion, and controlled the stock-market from the city of David. If in the judgment of Christians they lie under the anathema of God, in their own nothing seems more unlikely. No doubt this is the most astonishing example of insensibility to a Divine judgment which the world has ever seen, or ever will see; but if it can never be reproduced in all its features, there are not wanting contemporary instances in which some of them may be easily recognized. Men can never repeat the unapproachable crime of the Jews, but they can imitate it. If it is impossible to represent a second time the awful scene of Calvary, it is quite possible, an Apostle tells us, "to crucify the Son of God afresh." Multitudes do it every day. It is done many times, between the rising and the setting of the sun, in all lands. Even in this nineteenth century, in which revolt is permanent and lawlessness a virtue, no man can rival the Jew; but there are many who would if they could. They do what they can, and they are as stupidly indifferent as he is to the calamities which chastise their guilt. There is not at this hour a nation, either of the Old or New World, in which God is not ignored or defied by at least a fraction of its population. The Mede and the Babylonian were not more unconscious of His presence, nor more in different to His love, than thousands who live under our own eyes, as if there were no God, in Germany, France, and Italy. In some countries it is not only a fraction, but a majority, of whom this is true. In England, we have been lately informed by an Anglican newspaper, as if the fact were beyond dispute," the rapid descent of the great mass of the people to a state of practical irreligiousness not greatly differing from open Atheism" proves that "the danger of a national apostasy is even now imminent."* Yet the paganized English, like the Moabites, the Tyrians, and the Jews, are as unconscious of their own deplorable state as this Anglican writer is of its true cause. That cause, as we hope to show in what follows, is everywhere the same. It is not to be found in peculiarities of national temper, for it is identical in all nations; nor in defective political or social institutions, for it is independent of them all; nor even in eccentric or ill-adjusted forms of government, for its action is equally visible in monarchical and democratic communities, in an empire, an oligarchy, or a republic. The miseries which afflict human society, now as in all former ages, have the same root in all lands. They spring from revolt against God, and contempt for the authority by which, in the plenitude of His royal supremacy, He has decreed to rule the world, and to test to the end of time the obedience of His creatures. Whether He speaks by Prophet, Apostle, or Pontiff, man's only wisdom is to hear and obey. It is hard to fight against God. When the senseless king of Juda shut up Jeremias in prison, because he prophesied, "Thou shalt be delivered into the hands of the king of Babylon," he did not avert his own ruin, though, as the sacred narrative adds, "Jeremias remained in prison until the day that Jerusalem was taken." Modern kings have learned, and others will yet learn, the same lesson. If the first Napoleon, dazzled by his own transient glory, laid sacrilegious hands on Pius VII., his puny Piedmontese rival imagines in our day that God will not do for Pius IX. what He did for his predecessor. The spirit of revolt, whether in kings or people, shrouds the soul in a preternatural darkness; and the only thing in which the creature imitates the unchangeableness of the Creator is in renewing in every age the stupid and unprofitable impiety which in every age provokes the same sure and irresistible judgment. The world is sick, with a mortal sickness, not because the voice of the prophet is silent in its streets, nor its appointed teacher dumb, but because, in spite of all the "The Church Review," March 18. + Jeremias xxxvii. 16. unheeded lessons of the past, it lives in brutish forgetfulness of God, and voluntary alienation from His Church. If we propose to illustrate this thesis chiefly by the example of the youngest of nations, we hasten to admit that the oldest would serve our purpose equally well. No doubt the "spirit of the age," with all its shams and delusions, works in the vast American continent like other disruptive forces, including waterspouts and hurricanes, on a colossal scale, and with the more impetuosity because there are no lingering traditions from past ages to create a counter current, and check the force of the storm; but the American people possess, by the favour of God, certain qualities and dispositions which encourage the hope that they may, by a happy exception, detect the danger, common to them and to us, which menaces their peace, as it has already destroyed that of older communities. Considering the part which, by the force of circumstances, they are evidently destined to bear in the later history of our race, the choice which they may ultimately make in their submission to God and His Church on the one hand, and their attitude towards the anarchic principles of "modern thought" on the other, will inevitably affect the issue of the strife between good and evil in other lands besides their own. We cherish the earnest hope that they may choose wisely, and comprehend, with a deeper sagacity than Assyrians, Jews, or apostate Christians, that there is no strength nor joy but in union with God, and with the Church which He created in the munificence of paternal love, not to lead men astray, but to keep them for ever from bondage to a lie, and assure to them the glorious liberty of soul and mind of which every substitute which the world or the devil can offer is only a spurious counterfeit. That is the question for them as for us. whole future depends, like ours, upon the answer which they give to it. God with us, or God against us, is the sole fact which determines the life or death of every community as of every individual. It has the same tremendous gravity on one side of the ocean as on the other. Is there any reason to believe that Americans will consider it with the wistful attention which it deserves? We think there is, for reasons which we shall find an opportunity of stating; but this at least is certain, that to contribute to that result, by counsel or admonition, is the truest service which love can offer them, and of more priceless and enduring efficacy than any of the delusive chimeras which Washington called, in his farewell address to the nation which ho founded, "the impostures of pretended patriotism."* Their *Washington's "Monuments of Patriotism," p. 288. Philadelphia, 1850. It is pleasant to us to share the responsibility of what we are going to say, as the author of the French work named at the head of our essay does, with that eminent man, and to shelter it under his authority. However vague his dogmatic perceptions may have been, as indeed he frankly avowed, his recognition of the supreme authority of God as the Lord and Governor of human States is clear and emphatic. Washington did not scruple to tell the House of Representatives in 1796 that, in the government of their country, they were all "the instruments of Divine Providence"; which is not exactly the view which most of them take of their functions in the present day. He thought it a sacred duty to impress this truth on his contemporaries, and used the more frankness in reiterating it, because he knew the respectful attention with which his words would be received. "Of all the dispositions and habits," he told them, "which lead to political prosperity"-by which he seems to have meant national and material well-being," Religion and Morality are indispensable supports." If this upright and distinguished man did not so much as suspect that revealed dogma is the only substantial basis of either, as the experience of all nations, including his own, has too copiously demonstrated, that was a calamity which he shared with all the men of his age and sect. He may have been in advance of his generation in political sagacity, but as a moral and religious lawgiver he had no more light than others, because he had no authorized teacher, and never knew the need of one. He felt, with reason, as all his co-religionists feel at this day, that he was at least as capable of teaching his so-called Church as it was of teaching him. But he was far from tolerating in civil the chaos which he cheerfully approved in spiritual government. He wisely claimed the right to control the citizen, though he left the Christian to follow without restraint his own caprice. There was nothing in this inconsistency to give a shock to his mental tranquillity. He did not even notice it. It was quite enough, he thought, to have order in the things of man, without making any provision for it in the things of God. And because he took no account of the latter, he left only a precarious basis of the former. He did not know that the one will never exist long without the other. He did not consider that if men may rebel without sin against the Church, which is the work of God, much more may they rebel against the State, which is only the work of man. If he had lived in our day, the fatal logic of the so-called Refor |