Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/260

Rh of man, first, as a portion of the universal empire of God; and, secondly, as a political or national society. The constitutions and laws which concern him under the former aspect, are moral constitutions and laws; those which concern him under the latter aspect, are political constitutions and laws.

“Ask we then the ages what historical report they have to bring in of the progress of those moral arrangements, by which God is inviting and enabling man to work out the moral regeneration of his species, to prepare himself for that spiritual life which is to follow his trial here, for the service, the society, and the felicity, of that glorious inner temple, to which this physical scene, with its thousands of revealed and still hidden mysteries, is but the court and the vestibule.

“They point us, in reply, to the schools of the philosophers, those earth-born laboratories of ethical truth, to the constitutions of the Hebrews, divine in their original, and to the more glorious and efficacious arrangements of the Christian dispensation, remedial in its nature, and adapted with a divine precision to the moral diseases of man. And under this latter dispensation, in further exemplification of the law of progress, they point us to the canons of the Fathers, to the reformations of Germany and England, to the dissent of the Puritans, to the rock of Plymouth, to the thousand clustering institutions and associations of this latter day, subsidiary to the instructions of the pulpit and the labours of the evangelist—all intended, and becoming more and more adapted, to render the prevalence of the Christian faith as universal, as its spirit is intelligent, and rational, and catholic, and benign. They exhibit, in strong contrast, the moral darkness which enveloped our pagan ancestry, with the sunlight which rests on the more favoured portions of the Christian world, enabling the believer with a brightening faith, and with a growing knowledge of his manifold duties