Page:The History of Liberty.djvu/26

 France made such fearful shipwreck—; and because the certain and terrible consequences of vice, crime and folly both individual and national are just as instructive as the exhibitions of virtue and wisdom. And coming generations having the example of the French revolution to warn them on the left—and the American revolution to guide them on the right, will be doubly fortified and assisted in the cause of Liberty. It was the impulse of vengeance that roused France to revolutionary action, and that being satiated in blood, there was not enough of moral sentiment in the popular mind to check the wild and licentious career of the popular passions; so that their acquired sovereinggn [sic]ty and miscalled liberty was to them a more cruel despotism than the monarch they had overthrown; and thus will it ever be where popular revolutions are not controlled by popular intelligence and virtue. And this great and important truth bas been taught to the world by the French revolution; a revolution which in its way has, and will do as much for the cause of truth and Liberty as that of our own.

If “France got drunk on blood to vomit crime”, she also got sober on the same beverage. And as her oppressors—misnamed rulers—furnished the bane that set a nation raving mad, those same oppressors furnished too the antidote, from their own necks and veins. And thus it is that a wise and just God rules among the nations of men. Nor does he permit any social or national evil—or wickedness to exist, out of which he does not in the end produce a preponderating amount of good; and he has ever made the folly and wickedness, the madness and cruelty of tyrants and oppressors to subserve his own eternal and gracious purposes of love, and mercy to suffering humanity. And so will he ever do it—Oppression whether political or religious always injures itself, and brings to pass results directly the opposite of those it would establish; its direct purposes in every instance are counteracted by its indirect consequences.

Such is the power and wisdom of God who brings good out of evil. Little did the oppressors and tyrants of Europe, political and religious, know, when they would take away the last vestige of liberty from the people; and destroy the least and the last right of conscience and of private judgment, little did they know that their mandates, and edicts to this effect, was the knell of their own power and being. Little did they know that the cries and groans wrung from a thousand hearts by their unfeeling cruelty, would in after ages startle grim tyranny himself in his gloomy abode, with the cries of wrath and vengeance, and be the battle cry to