church and the planter's villa, and had the great American Tract Society scattered it broadcast through the dens of poor whites, what millions of money and what hundreds of thousands of lives had been spared! And whensoever Christian principle shall have lost all hold on the citizens of a republic, then let me rather be the subject of one despot than of many of the one whose aims are mostly above my level than of the multitude whose schemes and interests directly and incessantly clash with mine.

Religious principle, calm, thoughtful, and widely prevalent, should secure in due time all proper legislation in restraint of intemperance and other vice and crime; and it is very clear that nothing else will make such laws effective. It can and should secure the elevation of wise and trusty men to office instead of the intriguing demagogue or the wily rogue. It can create that fidelity to trust, the want of which, alas! in the recent greed for money, has sometimes been so startling. It tends directly to the union which gives permanence to institutions; and, as has been seen again and again in New England, it can accept the greatest needful changes without violence or convulsion. It can inspire men to defend with invincible arm the liberties of their families, friends, and country; and, when those liberties are secure, to lay down their arms and retire to be foremost in the virtues of civil life.

Thus, when in India Havelock and his "saints" were objects of general mockery, his commander-in-chief could say: "I can always depend on finding Havelock's

saints ready." And when another commander-in-chief received a whole package of letters protesting against the promotion of that "strait-laced hypocrite and Baptist," "I shall give him the place," said the general, "because I find he has the best soldiers in India." We all remember what England's great crownless monarch, when reorganizing the army, after the Parliamentary check at Edgehill, wrote to Hampden: "How can we be otherwise than beaten? Your troops are most of them old, decayed servingmen, tapsters and such kind ' of fellows, and theirs are gentlemen's sons, younger sons and persons of quality. But I will remedy that; I will raise men who have the fear of God before their eyes and who will bring some conscience to what they do; and I will promise you they shall not be beaten.” And he organized his Ironsides, his "gathered church.” During the intervals of action, as Hume says, "they occupied themselves in sermons, prayers, and exhortations; and when marching to battle the whole field resounded with psalms and spiritual songs." Neither drunkenness, nor gambling, nor profaneness, nor pillage of property, nor insult to woman, was permitted or known there. Clarendon, their enemy, records that they lived like good husbandmen in the country and like good citizens in the city. On the other hand, the "gallant cavaliers," the dissolute followers of Charles, who, by Hume's admission, were by their license and abuse " more formidable to their friends than their enemies," affected to despise these psalm-singing fanatics. But they found their mistake. Upon the battle

field those cavaliers went down before that terrible charge like reeds before the wind. Cromwell's promise "they shall not be beaten," was fulfilled. "From the time when the army was remodeled to the time when it was disbanded," writes Macaulay, "it never found either on the British islands or on the continent an enemy who could stand its onset. In England, Scotland, Ireland, Flanders, the Puritan warriors, often surrounded by difficulties, sometimes contending against threefold odds, not only never failed to conquer, but never failed to destroy and break in pieces whatever force was opposed to them. . . Turenne was startled by the shout of stern exultation with which his English allies advanced to the combat, and expressed the delight of a true soldier when he learned that it was ever the delight of Cromwell's pikemen to rejoice greatly when they beheld the enemy; and the banished cavaliers felt an emotion of pride when they saw a brigade of their countrymen, outnumbered by foes and abandoned by allies, drive before it in headlong rout the finest infantry of Spain, and force a passage into a counterscarp which had just been pronounced impregnable by the ablest of the marshals of France."

The time came for this army to be disbanded. Fifty thousand men accustomed to the profession of arms were to be thrown upon the world. What was the result? Did they fill the country with disorder, violence, and crime? Hear Macaulay once more: "In a few months there remained not a trace indicating that the most formidable army in the world had just been

absorbed into the mass of the community. The royalists themselves confessed that in every department of honest industry the discarded warriors prospered beyond other men, that none was charged with any theft or robbery, that none was heard to ask an alms, and that if a baker, or a mason, or a wagoner, attracted notice by his diligence and sobriety, he was in all probability one of Cromwell's old soldiers."

These were the canting hypocrites against whom Hume launched his invectives. and Walter Scott his caricatures. But what a commentary do they form on the efficacy of religious principle to make genuine freedom! With a nation of such men, what justice and peace would there be in every department of life at home, and what a front of defiance to any foreign foe! Meanwhile, too, under the government of Cromwell, the "arch hypocrite," the candid historian is obliged to assert that "justice was administered between man and man with an exactness and purity not before known in England," and that the country which for half a century "had been of scarcely more weight in European politics than Venice or Saxony at once became the most formidable power in the world."

In truth so thoroughly is the power of Christian principle adapted to meet all the conditions of the best government activity and control, equality of right and subordination to authority, elevation of the wisest and best, fidelity of functionaries, union and patriotism in the populace, protection for the humblest, and, in the admirable words of the Mayflower compact, "equal

Such

laws for the general good" - that the briefest and best. definition of true republicanism would be " Christianity embodied in social usages and institutions." being its inherent influence to fit men for freemen and to adjust the outer state to the men, we are prepared to see that

III. Religious principle alone has historically developed free institutions. The history of human society. has been chiefly a history of oppression. Slavery slavery absolute — is older than history and has penetrated every portion of the globe except Australia. At the entrance of Christianity it held the greater part of the race in degradation, often brutal. But oppression in some form has been still more extensive and thoroughgoing than slavery. Under its heavy burdens the mass of the human race have groaned and “travailed in pain together" until now, the world through. There have been privileged individuals and privileged classes; the rest have been unprivileged. The pyramids of Egypt look down from the ages past and mutely tell a solemn tale of a time when a hundred thousand men toiled twenty years to build the tomb of a king. The Mahmoudean canal of modern Egypt, fifty miles in length, tells also of a time when a hundred and fifty thousand men were toiling for a despot, and twenty thousand of them perished in a twelvemonth. As the eye traverses the dreary waste of the world in the early times, there is little to relieve the sight, save one bright spot on the eastern end of the Mediterranean, where the institutions of true religion carried justice and