apostle was wrecked,-"a place where two seas met." The speeches before us are significant indications of such a storm on our national horizon. The studied and solemn and deliberate utterances of men, in the highest councils of the Republic, they converge harmoniously in proclaiming the greatness of the crisis and its vast relations to the future history of our people; but how strongly and widely do they diverge in the counsels they suggest, and the demands they would establish. Each speaker, one who has been at some time thought of as a fitting candidate for the curule chair of highest dignity in the nation's gift; some of them versed even from their earliest youth in reading with quick sagacity all the thousandfold shifting prognostics of the popular feeling, and others of them, even down to ripest age, devoting_the profoundest study of massive intellects to the history, Constitution, and destinies of the American Union,-yet the augurs see not alike, and the diviners are confounded, and the ship reels heavily through the storm, whilst the pilots dispute over the soundings which are brought them, and over the chart they are searching. Famed for boundless personal popularity and the gift of masterly negotiation and compromise, as is one, or for the oracular sway they wield over their own districts and constituents, as is another, or known, it may be, in all lands where our mother tongue is spoken, as expounders of our Constitution, as is a third sage among the illustrious Senators,-why see they so differently? In the mutterings of that storm, which is thus filling the public mind from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, there are many who suppose themselves to have heard afar off, but with sad distinctness, the first tollings of the knell of our national Union. Their ear has, they believe, spelled out but too surely, amid the wild turmoil of contending opinions and contrary interests, the dread syllables, "UPHARSIN," (AND THEY ARE DIVIDING,) uttered by the voice of a Divine and overruling Destiny, over what had been, in our fathers' times, and in our own, a common country and a single government, but to remain such no longer. We will not so easily, however, lose faith in our countrymen, rash and earnest indeed, but yet, we hope, prudent and just withal; nor, above all, would we distrust too soon,-even amid our confessed provocations and desertions of Him,-the guardian care of that Patron and Refuge of our fathers, the God who has dissipated so many a boding tempest, and educed ultimate good, where man brooded gloomily over the intermediate, and, as to him it seemed, the irremediable evil. And yet it is not to be

denied that the crisis of the times passing over us is most grave, and the possible exodus of our counsellors from the present straits is yet but dimly seen.

We said, that amid all the wild and fierce controversy as to the proper form and course of it, the common sentiment might be Progress. A war, whose necessity and warrant we have no disposition here to discuss, has brought under our influence and ownership a vast range of territory, and the mines of a new-found Ophir invite the swift ships of each modern Tarshish. The migration that, in the days of our fathers, climbed feebly and slowly the lower sides of the Alleganies, is spilling itself rapidly westward, and in streams each day broader and stronger, through the defiles and over the taller crests of the Rocky Mountains. That generation in our churches, who sent out but a few years since their missionaries to the Sandwich Islands, as if those servants of Jesus were going to the antipodes devoted, beyond recall, to the eternal renouncement of their country and of its civilization, are many of them yet surviving amongst us, to see that country hurling itself, as it were, in giant energy and speed, after these its sacred exiles,-and to behold their own government stretching the belt of its migration and sovereignty up to the Pacific shore, into immediate contiguity and closest neighborhood with these remote scenes of missionary toil. And as we have gone out towards Heathendom, so in its turn Heathendom is coming to meet us. The men of China, to whom but lately we sent our evangelists, in weary voyagings around the Cape of Good Hope, are now hasting in throngs to tenant our own American possessions in California, pitching their tents, and vending their wares, and chattering in their strange dialect upon our own soil: thus, meeting the Home Missionary in the streets of San Francisco, whilst but lately we had no hope of reaching them but by the Foreign Missionaries sent to seek them amid the thronged lanes and the myriad junks of their own Hongkong, and Shanghai, and Ningpo. Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward." Empire and Traffic and Charity seem alike to preach Progress. But where is the rod, and in what prophet hand, that shall point the way, and part the raging seas of popular controversy, and indicate to the ark of our national destiny a safe path and peaceful, amid the raging of the North and the South, and when deep is calling unto deep, and whilst in either section of the Republic Pride and Conscience and Interest are stirred to their profoundest abysses, and seem hurling at each other their mutual and tempestuous

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defiance? The rights of the Northern and Southern States, in the common heritage, are most variously interpreted; and in what shape the common growth of the nation is to proceed, perplexes our truest patriots and our maturest statesmen. Surely, it is at such a time, if ever, that a people should remember, and remember it with prayer, that there is a God of counsel; and if the gospel of our common salvation have its adaptation to all the emergencies of all the centuries, and all the institutions of all the nations, here is a season when its lessons should be invoked and its spirit cherished.

The Jews, when carried into captivity by a heathen and despotic conqueror, were bidden to seek the peace of the land where for the time God had fixed the place of their habitation. If, under an earlier dispensation, of less expansive benevolence than is the present, this was the duty of religious men, even towards the stranger and the oppressor; with much more of emphasis are we, under the gospel, taught, in our intercourse not only with the alien and the heathen, but much more in our relations to our fellow-citizens and our fellow-Christians, to bear in mind that "Blessed are the peace-makers." Far as our Union, in these States, ministers to the peace of our own borders, and to the repose of the nations, the Christian may not lightly disturb it. Short of a revolution, we suppose there could be no legal severance of that Union. It is not a mere league and confederacy of separate sovereignties, like that connecting the partners of a commercial firm, free to withdraw, after certain arrangements, and to pursue thenceforward their several paths and divergent interests. Some such weaker and laxer bond existed indeed before the adoption of the Constitution. But, in the formation of that instrument, the people acted above, as it were, their several governments in the States. Those local authorities still retained their existence, and their distinct fields of power, and their separate officers and legisla tion. But the general government overlaid them, and circumfused, so to speak, its own control and sovereignty through and among the State institutions, binding them into one indissoluble whole; much, we suppose, as the worker in the rich stained glass of our own times prepares the brilliant weight, called the Millefleur, that confines the papers upon so many a library table. The ends of small vitreous tubes, highly colored and beautifully moulded, are shaped into flowers of varied hue and size: these having been first formed apart, and then arranged and bound together, the molten and colorless crystal is, at last, let in upon them, and in its pel

lucid bonds they remain distinct, yet inseparable; variegated in outline and coloring, but hopelessly and indissolubly one. Fixed in bonds of transparent stone, the disruption of a flower from the inclosed garland is the ruin of the whole glassy hemisphere. Even so, in the union of our States, peaceful secession seems impossible. A revolution that should shatter and recast the entire government is the only form of disunion we find ourselves able to conceive. The familiar illustration, of which we have availed ourselves, fails indeed to present the power which our Union has of growth, in the enlargement of its territories, and in the gathering of new States into the bonds of the national unity. Of progress in that shape our annals have already several instances, whose authority as precedents it seems too late to question. It is in the process of such agglomeration, that the existing crisis has begun. The form, the amount, the terms and the bounds of such increase and progress are the themes of our wide-spread and impassioned discussions. All States have not the same domestic institutions, nor the same interests as producers and traders; and difference has become contrast, and contrast has grown into rivalry, and rivalry threatens to harden itself into settled enmity.

If these difficulties be examined in the spirit of that blessed volume where the Christian finds his oracles, and the laws of his better and eternal country, they must be discussed not merely as naked abstractions, but in their practical connections and results. It has been a peculiarity, marked and inveterate, in the legislation and revolutions of the French people, that they have been wont to assume simply some great abstract truths, and thence to reason fearlessly down to a concrete and practical result. Their institutions, so framed, have more of philosophical symmetry, apparently, at the outset; but they have in consequence lacked on the other hand permanency and effective usefulness. The theory may have owed its seeming simplicity and harmony to the very fact of its omitting and ignoring many other principles, subordinate it may be to that first truth, on which the theory based itself, but although subordinate, yet indispensable to its successful working. They have thought that it would mar the symmetry of the chariot wheel to interpolate upon it the simple and trivial linch-pin, or to take any thought as to the brittleness of the axle upon which a wheel of such classical proportions was to revolve. The English race, on the contrary, have in their laws and constitutions been marked by the disposition rather to ascend from the complex facts of the practical or concrete,

to the abstract and theoretical. They have therefore moulded their systems of reform, and rule, and revolution, into such a shape, as to bring into closest harmony all the recognized facts, and to make the theory one of immediate, practical availability. Their Common Law, for instance, has been, like the coral islands of the Pacific, the slow accretion of myriads of concrete facts. It is thence irregular in outline as the nation's growth; but as uniform and immovable in its pervading principles, as the national character. It has been thus the slow outgrowth of that wise principle, (entitled as plausibly to the claim of infallibility, as anything human, and therefore erring, well could be,) the common sense of the many minds of a race, working in the same channels for many ages. Other and rival systems have been the birth of the uncommon sense of some solitary thinker, the work but of a single era, and of, it may be, but a single mind in that era. The author may have been an intellectual Titan, like Saul towering over the heads of all his contemporaries: but his single accumulations could hardly, in amplitude and variety and practical adaptation, have equalled the hived stores, gathered patiently and wisely by an entire generation, or by a nation through its successive generations. The Gaul, a more brilliant and daring builder of theories than the Englishman, seems often ascending to some such supernal height as that where the Athenian satirist put Socrates. There, unimpeded by the difficulties of the every-day world beneath him, of hills to be levelled and streams to be bridged, he draws, in free air, his straight lines, and his angles and curves of strict geometrical accuracy. But unhappily he takes no care to fit the aerial plan to the inequalities of the terrestrial landscape; and the rivers run, and the mountains stand, in most contumacious disregard of the continuity and philosophic beauty of his plans. To give rotundity to his symmetrical outlines, he had ignored the existence of such obstacles, and expects them when thus dismissed to vanish: but so they do not, nor are they like so to do. In her last Revolution France has not found universal suffrage to include either universal enlightenment, or universal emancipation. In her first great Revolution, the Constitutions of Sièyes were admirable-on paper; but miserable failures in practice. The Bible is eminently and sternly a book of great principles, but it is also, beyond all comparison, a system of large practical wisdom, looking at facts and dealing with men, laws, and governments, as they are. There are great principles which, indeed, the Scripture puts above all usages and interests; and thus it bids a Moses turn, at the call of his God, his back on the pyramids and the shrines