Page:Calvinism, an address delivered at St. Andrew's, March 17, 1871.djvu/26

 repeated itself many times in human history, and, unless the old opinion that we are more than animated clay, and that our nature has nobler affinities, dies away into a dream, will repeat itself at recurring intervals, so long as our race survives upon the planet.

I have told you generally what I conceive to be our real position, and the administration under which we live; and I have indicated how naturally the conviction of the truth would tend to express itself in the moral formulas of Calvinism. I will now run briefly over the most remarkable of the great historical movements to which I have alluded; and you will see, in the striking recurrence of the same peculiar mode of thought and action, an evidence that, if not completely accurate, it must possess some near and close affinity with the real fact. I will take first the example with which we are all most familiar—that of the chosen people. I must again remind you that I am not talking of theology. I say nothing of what is called technically revelation. I am treating these matters as phenomena of human experience, the lessons of which would be identically the same if no revelation existed.

The discovery of the key to the hieroglyphics, the excavations in the tombs, the investigations carried on by a series of careful enquirers, from Belzoni to Lepsius, into the antiquities of the Valley of Nile, interpreting and in turn interpreted by Manetho and Herodotus, have thrown a light in many respects singularly clear upon the condition of the first country which, so far as history can tell, succeeded