Tennyson's Poems, 36-Upham's Life of Madame Guyon, 51-Woolsey's Antigone of Sophocles, 64-Report to Trustees of University Works of Dr. Woods, 377-Wordsworth's Pre- Report, Mr. Kelly's, to Trustees of University Romanism and Protestanism, 162. S. Sophocles, Antigone of, 64; Aias of, 625. Schools, Collegiate and Professional, Utility of, Sumner, Orations and Speeches of, 255. Second Coming, Christ's, 631. of Rochester, 126-Report to Warren Asso- Tennyson's Poems, 36. tion, 581. T. ciation, 139-Systematic Beneficence, 200-Triumph, Ultimate, of the Kingdom of Redemp. Howell's Terms of Sacramental Communion, 210-Curtis's Communion, ib-Dr. Smyth's Unity of the Human Race, 226-Articles on same subject in Christian Examiner, ib W. Cheever's Island World of the Paci6c, 244- Webster, J. W., Report on Case of, 140. ib-Resi- West, Annals of, 142. dence in Sandwich Islands, ib-Missionary's World, Wide, Wide, 148. Daughter, ib-Orations and Speeches of Chas. Willoughby, Lady, 310. Sumner, 255-Mayhew's Popular Education, Waverly, Poetry, 314. 275-Report of Mass. Board of Education, ib- Woods, Works of Dr. Leonard, 377. Beame's Sermon before Am. S. S. Union, ib- Wordsworth, as a Religious Poet, 434, 629. THE nineteenth century of the Christian era commenced on the first day of January, eighteen hundred and one; and the year which has just closed completed the first half of this eventful period of time. The Israelites were instructed in their religious books to celebrate the fiftieth year after an extraordinary manner. "Ye shall hallow the fiftieth year.' "A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be unto you." Without commenting upon those peculiarities in the Jewish polity which demanded a special observance of the seventh sabbatical year, it must be admitted that the passage of half a century presents an occasion suggestive of many and profitable instructions. We propose in the following article to allude to some of the most interesting events which have transpired in the world during the last fifty years. We shall not confine ourselves to that which is strictly religious, in distinction from the secular, when the latter is obviously connected with the progress of Christian truth and human happiness. We often make distinctions between the religious and the secular which are atheistic, and so mislead and entangle the judgment. The word secular is derived from a Latin etymon which means the world, or an age of time, and, in common discourse, is employed to designate things worldly and temporal, in distinction from things sacred and spiritual. Christianity teaches us a better comprehension. This world is Christ's, as well as the world to come. Nothing is to be VOL. XVII.-NO. LXIII. 1 counted common or unclean which bears upon the well-being of man. It was a wise and beautiful conception of the ancients, that the Muse of History was the daughter of Jove. The sober conviction, which religion teaches us to cherish, is, that God presides over all the affairs of the world, the least as well as the greatest; and piety finds ample material for devout admiration in the study of those manifold agencies by which the purposes of the Most High are accomplished. The Son of God rebuked the Pharisees because they would not discern the "signs of the times;" and many an event, political or scientific, a revolution, a discovery, an invention, which some might overlook because it was secular, deserves a most important consideration, because of its relations to the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Man thinks not of God in his schemes of ambition, and pride, and self-aggrandizement; but God overrules even the wrath of man for his own praise. There is an important advantage in taking a survey of a considerable period of time, as a whole or a half of a century. The movement of society is by actions and re-actions. It is not like the current of a rapid river, always running on in the same direction. Rather is it like the swing of the ocean when the tide is rising. A wave comes in, breaks, and rolls back. No one would imagine, from a single glance, that there was progress at all. Fix your eye steadily for half an hour on one point, and you will perceive, with all that flux and reflux of the waves, the progress of the tide is onwards and upwards. Just so is it with history. Examine it in small and detached portions, a year, five years, and it is like a single wave, which disappoints you by its recoil. Take fifty years, the flats and the sea-grass are out of sight, and you are struck with the difference between low ebb and a full tide. Important events require time for their own elucidation. You cannot judge of them by their first appearance; you must wait and see their ultimate effects. Events have roots, branches, and fruit. They do not ripen in a day. Sir James Mackintosh was not a weak and fickle man because of a difference of judgment in his earlier and later writings upon the French Revolution. This change of opinion was the necessary result of advancing time, and so was the proof of serene wisdom. Who can doubt that Edmund Burke, if now alive, would write very differently in this year 1851, on the effects of the French Revolution, from what he did in the year 1790? The progress of half a century gives an entirely new aspect to events which appear disastrous or hopeful in their first occurrence. Concerning the half century which has just been completed, if we should say that it was the most eventful of all that have elapsed, it might be set down to a prevalent self-complacency. "The present enlightened age," is an expression which has already attained to a cant currency; and many, so deftly rebuked by Douglas of Cavers, regard it with as much satisfaction, and the past with as much contempt, as if, like Love in Aristophanes, it had been hatched from the egg of Night, and all of a sudden had spread its radiant wings over the primeval darkness.* Other centuries have been marked by great events. We call events great only from the results to which they lead. Other men have labored, and we have entered into their labors. We and our children gather fruit from the trees which they planted with fear and trembling. The roots of those institutions which distinguish our own times lie back in other centuries. But there is one circumstance which gives to recent years, and the position from which we survey them, a decided pre-eminence. We understand the bearing of events better than in earlier epochs of the world. The older the world is, the more apparent becomes the design of its Maker. The comprehensive study of history is like the ascent up a mountain, the higher you climb the more you see. It is like the progress of a draina,—the farther you advance the more you comprehend of the plot; as events thicken the better do you discern their bearing on the catastrophe. It is in this light that we pronounce the last half century the brightest and the best in the history of the world. Not that it has been the most prolific of great men; not that it has been distinguished by uninterrupted peace and progress; not that it has been without much which we deplore; but because in the advance of time we think we can see more and more of the glorious purpose of God to spread over all the earth the reign of liberty, truth, justice, and love. The close of the last century was marked by the most astounding changes. It was a time of general war and convulsion. It seemed as if God had arisen to shake mightily the earth. Men's hearts were failing them for fear, and for looking for those things which were to come to pass. A great part of the eighteenth century is remarkable for the European wars of succession. Ere the century closes, wars of a very different description, wars of principle, wars of social classes,-compared with which the contests of the house of Hapsburgh were children's squabbles, convulse the world. At the first * Vide Douglas on the Advancement of Society. movement of the popular mind in France, the friends of humanity rejoiced. Great abuses were reformed, and good men were hopeful. But the huge mass set in motion could not be stayed. The detent was wanting, and everything whirled and whizzed to a premature and disastrous stoppage. Commotion, proscription, confiscation, bankruptcy, civil war, foreign war, revolutionary tribunals, guillotinades, blood, chaos, followed each other in rapid succession. A military despotism rises from the confusion and threatens the independence of every State of Europe. In Great Britain affairs were in a most alarming and critical state. The people were disaffected; taxation was enormous; means of subsistence precarious; the army in a state of mutiny; "societies" and "associations" of various names were organized to promote reform; martial law prevailed in Ireland; the act of Habeas Corpus was suspended from 1798 to 1803; the King was openly insulted on his way to Parliament, and the severest measures were adopted to restrict the press, and suppress seditious meetings. The national debt had reached the inconceivable sum of $1,225,000,000. At this very time the expenses of the Court were most extravagant, particularly in connection with the marriage of the Prince of Wales. The stability of the British Empire being mainly dependent on public credit, the measures adopted by William Pitt to sustain that credit necessarily involved a vast amount of human suffering. Suffering of an unparalleled description there must have been to have justified such a man as Robert Hall, when reviewing those times from so late a day as 1822, to use language like the following: "The memory of PITT will be identified in the recollection of posterity with accumulated taxes, augmented debt, extended pauperism, a debasement and prostration of the public mind, and a system of policy not only hostile to the cause of liberty at home, but prompt and eager to detect and tread out every spark of liberty in Europe; in a word, with all those images of terror and destruction which the NAME imports." The Peace of Amiens in 1802, between England, France, Spain, and the Bavarian Republic, secured a momentary lull in the storm. It lasted less than a year. The French army takes possession of Piedmont; England renews the war, and her people are terrified by the expectation of a French invasion. In the last year of the last century, Napoleon crossed the Alps, and conducted his brilliant campaigns in Italy. Though not crowned as Emperor till the year 1804, *Letter to the Christian Guardian. |