Page:The Relation of the Sunday-school System to our Christian Patriotism.pdf/15

Rh to us worse than foreigners; let but the word of God be within every dwelling, every child know how to read it, the Sabbath bell call every heart to prayer, and we shall be all one in mind, feeling and principle, though our nation cover the continent.

The relations we sustain to other countries are of vast importance both to them and ourselves. With the establishment of our unprecedented government and Union, a new era dawned upon the world. The scoffing prophecies of our speedy downfall, as a certain consequence of our popular system, which then curled the lips of despotic and aristocratic power, have been silenced by ill-dissembled terrors, lest its example should overturn and out-live the strongest thrones. On the old continent, revolution has followed revolution, dynasty dynasty, reform reform, while we have become firmer, more united, less liable to decay, notwithstanding the rapid multiplication of our numbers. At least, the blessings of social peace, plentiful food, free exercise of conscience, are ours to a degree that mankind have never before known. The eyes of the poor and the oppressed are turned as longingly to our shores as those of Israel in Egypt towards Canaan. Each ship that has borne a crowd of emigrants, glad to leave the soil of their birth, and the graves of their ancestors, that they may find happy homes for their children and children’s children, bears back tidings of a land flowing with milk and honey, to the mud-walled cabins where famine broods, and the gaunt infant dies upon the exhausted bosom of its starving mother. The early adventurers, who sought the New World of the west, were men of pride, covetous of gold and conquest; those