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 nothing else, therefore, can prepare a nation for freedom. A nation, it is to be remembered, is composed of individuals, and the general outward state of a nation is, in fact, only a manifestation of the aggregate inward state of the individuals that compose it. If a nation have not private virtue, it will have no public virtue. If the individuals that compose a people, are generally in a vicious state, the slaves of their own passions, they will soon find themselves in a disordered national condition,—they will soon be slaves politically. Men who are not capable of private self-government, are not fit for public self-government: that truth is very evident. Now, what is it that enables an individual to govern himself and master his own passions? There is but one thing that can do it—and that is the knowledge and practice of truth,—truth spiritual and Divine,—or, what is the same, the truth of God's Word. That is powerful—that is the weapon, and the only one by which a man can master himself! as the Saviour said, "The truth shall make you free." Wherever, then, within the limits of the Christian world, there is found a people, in general unpossessed of, or unbelieving in, the Word of God, it may be set down as certain, that that people will be in political bondage: they cannot be publicly free, because they are not privately free: they are under the mental tyranny of their own passions,—and those tyrants of the mind will presently be seen embodying themselves, as it were, in one or a few individuals, who will exercise a correspondent tyranny over their bodies and estates. Look at the condition of France. There is a people, which, in the last half century or a little longer, has been passing through many different forms of