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190 her beautiful islands laved by the crystal waters of the Ægean Sea. There is Athens, with her exquisite arts, her literature, and her science, with her constellations of genius just ready to burst upon the world. There was Sparta, less cultivated, but the bulwark of Grecian independence. There was Leonidas, with his three hundred. There, in a little peninsula, lay the intellectual hope of the world, the sole germ of free government forever and ever. Is this brave and gallant people to be crushed at a blow? Shall the Persian banners float on the hills of subjugated Greece? Is it to be announced at Susa that order reigns in Attica? Is Asiatic despotism to overwhelm, in one long night of oppression, the very dawn of human greatness? In that contest literature had her stake. The very existence of those men depended on the issue of this vast enterprise, whose works have been the study and delight of all succeeding time — that whole galaxy of genius, whose clustering radiance has since encircled the earth. The religion of our fathers had much at stake. Standing now and gazing back upon this epoch of history we are made to tremble, for all these were nations given to idolatry. Everywhere are ceremonies, temples, priests; but both priest and people, the noble and the base, the learned and the simple, all alike grope in Cimmerian darkness as to the knowledge of the true God. There is but one exception to this in all the earth — the temple at Jerusalem. We turn our eyes eastward to Palestine, and there we see the temple of the true God just rising from