continent of Asia, must proceed from our western shores. We may also learn that when we, as a people, shall have proved false to our vocation or fulfilled it, the principles we represent will not die, even should we cease to exist as a nation. Stout hearts and strong arms will then be found to rescue our palladium from the ruins of our greatness, and bear it in safety to other shores, where its sacred influence will still guard the dearest interests of humanity. Thus shall civilization revisit the birth-place of our race, and on a higher level, and under brighter auspices, begin the cycle of history anew.

Let us pause a while, if we can, amid the bewildering whirl of events, the clash of arms, and the mighty tread of armies that shakes the very continent, and calmly endeavor to trace the successive steps in this westward march of civilization, and see if, by the light of nature and the guidance of philosophy, we discover our true position in history, and learn what our mission as a nation is, what God means for us to do in this crisis, and what he means to do with us and for us as a people. History, some one has said, is but the biography of eminent individuals. This is true, inasmuch as the prominent men of any age or nation always embody the most striking characteristics of the individual life of the masses; they are the representative men, and stand for the people. History, then, is but the experience of the individual projected on a grander scale, and extending through centuries. The one contains no more elements than the other. The development of the race in history has no more stages than the gradual normal unfolding of each individual character in the short period of a human life. We may take man, then, as the microcosm, as the archetype, of society; as containing in himself the germ of all human history.

The human mind, in its ultimate analysis, contains three great, original, innate ideas, and but three. All others are but modifications or developments of these three. They are first, the idea of the infinite; second, the idea of the finite; and third, the idea of the relation of the infinite to the finite.* The first, the idea of the infinite, gives us by intuition our first conception of God as infinite power and goodness. It may be said to be the original image of God in the soul of man. The second,

* Cousin.

the idea of the finite, gives to us our consciousness of ourselves and of the world about us; or, as the Germans say, the "me" and the "not me." The third and last, the idea of the relation of the infinite to the finite, teaches us the dependence of all finite existence on an infinite, overarching power, and shows us God manifest in his works and in the dealings of his providence.

Though these three ideas always coexist in the mind, for the one always suggests the others, yet, in their development, the successive predominance of each over the others, marks three distinct periods in the history of the individual, as well as in that of the nation and of the race. These may be

called, first, the religious or credulous period, corresponding to infancy and childhood; second, that of skepticism or inquiry, which marks the period of youth; third, the philosophical, or that of reason and faith combined, which belongs to the period of mature manhood. The child, in his uncorrupted innocence, is truly devout. His first dawning consciousness is that of a power above and beyond him, to which he instinctively bows in humble submission, and taught at his mother's knee, his first lisping accents go up in simple, but earnest prayer to God. His faith is unbounded. He worships and questions not. Truly the poet has said, "Heaven lies about us in our infancy;" but as truly, "Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy." His first inevitable step forward brings the longing for freedom and knowledge. He would be "as gods, knowing good and evil." He plucks the forbidden fruit. He questions, doubts, disbelieves. Driven from the Eden of his innocence, he goes forth rejoicing in his liberty, with the world before him to conquer. Enraptured with the growing consciousness of his own intellectual powers, he forgets God. Exulting in his mastery over the powers of nature, he impiously banishes God from his own creation, and deifies reason and law in his stead, vainly fancying himself, the while, a philosopher! He is only a skeptic. But when this phase of his development, that of the idea of the finite, has run its course, and given him the knowledge of the true measure of his own powers and of the world about him— when error and suffering have accomplished their true ministry, and done their perfect work, and the dry husks of skep

ticism no longer satisfy his hunger-the original voice of God in his soul, like a new revelation, begins again to make itself heard, and calls him, like a prodigal from his wanderings, to the good and the true. A new life of the Spirit begins to develop within him. It is then that he begins to attain to the highest knowledge of himself and of his duty; to a true, a divine philosophy. He is then prepared to see the manifestations of God everywhere. All nature becomes vocal with his praises. He acknowledges him in the dealings of his providence. He hears his voice through all history. "He has sounded the key-note of nature and spirit, the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat, which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood and the sap of the trees."

Corresponding to these three well-marked periods in the life of the individual, are the three grand epochs of history, each marked by its distinctive characteristics, and requiring a separate period of time, a peculiar race, and a fitting theater for its manifestation.

In the infancy of the race the idea of the infinite had its development, and predominated over the others. Its proper theater was the East. Its home was amid the lofty mountain ranges of Central Asia and on the vast plains of India. The face of nature here is marked by vastness, sublimity, and unity of structure. The continent lacks the variety and diversity of feature necessary to give freedom of intercourse and stimulate activity among the nations that people it. Life here is, consequently, characterized by immobility: civilization is stationary and progress is impossible, for man is yet in his infancy, and instead of being the master of nature, he is its slave. The forces of nature and the hosts of heaven, at whose mercy and in whose power he feels himself to be, become the object of his servile worship. Everywhere the civilization of the East bears the impress of this bondage to nature. Philosophy here is but a blind fatalism; government a theocracy, for the most part, hence an inexorable despotism. This is the religious or credulous period of history, the period of inspiration, when the voice of Jehovah was heard speaking in and through man, the golden age of the poets, the paradise of the Bible.

But the period of infancy, with its discipline, passes, and

youth, with its activity, begins. Man breaks loose from the fetters of nature and enters on his career of liberty. The first great epoch of history is ended. The nations of the Orient have fulfilled their mission and personated their ideas. The ever-advancing spirit of civilization leaves them but lifeless forms; and there they stand through all succeeding history, the petrified monuments of the infancy and imbecility of the

race.

The continent of Europe is the school where the youth is to grow to manhood, and learn his liberty and moral responsibility. Variety and diversity of form are, therefore, its characteristics. Its inland seas and rivers, its clustering islands and peninsulas, affording ample facilities for commerce, for movement, and change, present a fitting stage for the busy elements of this epoch to play their stirring part in this grand world-drama. Greece, situated close to the western limit of Asia, yet separated from it, and embracing in a narrow compass all the characteristic features of the whole European continent, marks the transition from the old to the new. On it is rehearsed, on a small scale, the important part that Europe is to represent in the scheme of Providence. Greek civilization, embracing, as it does, the commingling elements of the past and the future, both through its art and its poetry, celebrates the passage of the race from bondage to freedom. Philosophy here, leaving the abstract and the mystical, now deals with man and his relations, becoming an intellectual and moral philosophy. Even the religion of the Greek is but a deification of human faculties and passions. Instead of contemplating the absolute, remorseless God of the Asiatic, his worship goes no higher than Olympus, peopled with the gods he has himself created after his own image, and sharing his own feelings and frailties. Instead of worshiping blindly the forces of nature, he gives to each one its appropriate divinity to preside over its functions, thus peopling the woods and streams with a motley crowd of nymphs and dryads, fauns and satyrs, endowed with the forms and affections of humanity-another expression only of the idea of man's superiority

to nature.

As in Greece, so throughout this whole European epoch, civilization is characterized by the development of individu

ality, personality, and by immense material, intellectual and moral progress. As the continent lacks grandeur and unity of form, so society lacks unity of organization. Being intended only to represent the idea of the finite-of individuality and diversity-it has no principle of association, no grand central idea, to combine the nations into one powerful commonwealth, possessing one common life, and animated by one lofty common purpose. Hence Europe has ever been but an aggregation, not a union, of individual, active, struggling sovereignties, with no tie but selfishness and no higher aim than interest.

One nation after another has tried to organize these diverse elements into one form, controlled by one power, and perished in the attempt. Greece, first, with all her philosophy, her literature and her art, whose refining influence has been felt through all the centuries, had not even the power to control the warring elements within her own borders; and, losing her liberty in the fratricidal strife of her own contending factions, passed the scepter on to Rome. She next attempted, by the might of her conquering arms, to subject the world to the one idea of the sovereignty of the empire. She, too, failed, and the proud empire, unable to assimilate the conquered nations, fell to pieces under the crushing blows of the barbarians of the North. But amid the ruins of Roman greatness Christianity grew and strengthened, until the Church became a power in the world. Through her instrumentality, Germany next gained the supremacy of Europe, and for a while controlled the destiny of the nations. But Christianity, whose kingdom is not of this world, was so overloaded with heathenish superstitions, and so corrupted by the pomp and pride of power, that instead of a bond of union, it became an element of disintegration; and, by its mighty struggles to save its own vitality, it shivered into fragments the vast empire whose power had been built upon its prostitution. And there Germany stands to-day, in her imbecility, as if in very mockery of her former grandeur, without even power enough to unite her petty principalities on the basis of a common nationality. This was the last great effort to unite the fragmentary elements of European civilization under one power and upon one principle; unless we except the frightful attempt of Napoleon to wipe out all Europe's bound-lines with blood,