how the domestic relations were to be created and sustained; so also, when nations "had begun to multiply on the earth," he revealed his will respecting the origin and tenure of authority in a State, showing how the relations between rulers and ruled should be formed and regulated. When he "brought the Hebrews out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage," his first care was to give them laws and ordinances by which he made known his redeeming grace for lost man. But he did not forget their temporal welfare as a Nation, while he guided their faith as his Church. He formed them into a Commonwealth under civil enactments, which embrace all the essential features of national freedom, or of a well-ordered Republic.

This religious aspect of the subject enhances its claim upon our careful consideration. And is it not fitting and seasonable that civil liberty should be more fully rescued from the profanity with which it has been too often treated? Notwithstanding what we view as an improved state of opinion in some quarters, there is still much public impiety with regard to this inestimable blessing; impiety which pollutes our seats of learning, and profanes our high places of authority. Our educated youth are still taught to believe, and the people are still told by many of our public men, that liberty was

cradled in the states of Greece; and that the Solons and Lycurguses of former days were the great fathers of freedom to our world. We believe in a different doctrine. We believe that we must look further back than either Athens or Sparta for the origin of a blessing most deeply interwoven with the welfare of man; and that it was not the wisdom of Greece in the halls of the Acropolis, but the wisdom of God speaking from heaven through his servant Moses, which first taught how the rights of a people should be asserted and sustained.

While impiety is rebuked, unbelief may at the same time be put to shame. There are Cassandras, croaking prophets in our own country, who are always predicting the speedy overthrow of our free institutions; and there are Catalines and Hotspurs who would love to have it so, as it would open to them the fields of treachery and blood in which they delight. But there are men also of sober and reflecting minds, who look on the future both abroad and at home with much anxiety. "Upon the earth there is distress of nations, with perplexity, men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things that are coming upon the earth." Far and near we see a tumult of kingdoms, in which deep calleth unto deep ;" and the responses are loud and portentous. Great as the changes may be which

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we have seen taking place, they are pregnant with others still greater which must soon follow. They are only "the beginning of the end," and there may be many fluctuations between good and evil before that end can be reached. The fates of empires seem to be governed by new laws which baffle the wisdom of the wise, and turn "the counsels of Ahithophels into foolishness." Every institution that has sprung from the ambition or the policy of man, seems tending toward a general wreck; and the efforts of statesmen to prevent the catastrophe, seem only to accelerate it. The gigantic strength of the popular will is, Samson-like, heaving at the pillars of a tyranny that has long doomed men to blindness as well as to bondage; but it too often threatens, in its maddened violence, to bring ruin both on the oppressed and the oppressors; while the "Lords of the Philistines" infatuated with the love of power, and bewildered by the dread of losing it, are running into measures that must render their overthrow the more fearful when the day of retribution comes. Nor are the commotions and changes of our day confined to the political world. The fountains of every great deep, whether in church or state, are fast being broken up, as if to issue in another deluge that shall overthrow every thing that has been heretofore viewed as high and stable. The corrupting alliances with worldly

pomp and power, which have long burdened Christianity, are beginning to give way; but we fear they must be wrenched by many a rude, if not bloody hand, before they can be finally severed. Gross superstitions, which have degraded Christianity down to the verge of Paganism, and the blind idolatries of Paganism itself, are sinking into decrepitude and discredit. Mahomedanism can no longer claim the Crescent as its emblem. Its moon is also on the wane. But, although the forms of irreligion and error are losing their sway, we must not believe that they can be finally overthrown without further struggle; and in the mean time the spirit of change which at first may have been an ambition for healthful reform, too often degenerates into a blasphemous impiety; and instead of a meretricious faith, embraces a licentious infidelity, that mocks at truth and at the God of truth.

Nor should we in this brief review pass by in silence disquieting indications which we find at home. We have here "the largest liberty for the largest number;" but it is too often perverted and abused by men who display a lawless and rabid hostility against many of our best institutions, both civil and religious. "Deceiving and being deceived, despising dominion, and speaking evil of dignities," they carry with them a hardened and unblushing

ambition to pull down every thing which is built up, to unsettle every thing that has been settled either by the authority of God or the matured wisdom of man; and under the guise of a benevolence that promises to render all men free and equal, they would subvert every obligation of justice which binds society together, and every sense of truth and duty that should bind us all in reverence to our Creator.

It should not be denied that these "signs of the times," which are so widely spread, are the ominous mutterings of a coming tempest. They are notes of preparation for a war which, as we are told in the Sriptures, is to convulse our world previous to the millenial reign of Him who is Prince of Peace and Saviour of our fallen race. In the language of prophecy, "the angel" seems to be "pouring out his vial into the air," and it is followed by "voices, and thunders, and lightnings." Opposing hosts are fast becoming marshalled for what may well be called "the battle of the great day," great in reference both to the magnitude of the interests involved and the forces engaged; and when infidelity may perhaps be found in strange alliance with superstition and tyranny against Christianity and freedom. It will not be a strife for some portion of territory or some conventional point of national honor; but