subordinate to the interests of the people, and will form the laws so wise in their objects, so salutary in their application, so immaculate in equity, so benign in justice, yet so strong to enforce obedience at last, that even the wrecked and disordered South shall be beguiled back to her first love for the Union, and co-operate in consummating the highest ends of the enlarged and amended Constitution. Give me these, and the earth and sea shall not outlive your prosperity."

IN

III. THE MICHIGAN PULPIT ON THE CENTENNIAL.

N this chapter the object has been to give the leading thoughts of representative clergymen of the different denominations. There was no

concert of action on the subject among the religious bodies, and the discourses that follow were kindly furnished upon application to the gentlemen by whom they were written. The discourses will be read with interest, and will have an especial value in the years to come, as showing the lines of thought flowing from the pulpit on the Centennial occasion.

AMERICA'S CENTENNIAL MEMORIES.*

HEBREWS, X: 36: For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise.

This scripture has its confirmation in the history of the last one hundred years. It means that they who do their duty receive their reward in good and advancement of some kind. Each year of the last one hundred has proved it a thousand times.

The Congregational State Association, at its late meeting in Pontiac, voted a Centennial sermon to-day from each of its one hundred and seventy-four ministers. This being the first Sabbath of the second century of our nation's existence, it offers the first suitable sacred time for a glancing review of the first hundred years' progress since the declaration of American independence.

I. THE CONDITIONS OF THE PROMISE.

Before considering the gains, we may well consider the conditions of the promised blessings.

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN PATIENCE.

*

*

1. "Ye have need of patience, that ye might receive the promise." Patience is rooted in faith. Christian patience is rooted in the Divine. The allotments and cares of this life demand of us a serene and

* A Centennial Sermon, preached on the day designated for Centennial discourses by the Michigan General Congregational Association, at East Saginaw, Sunday, July 9, 1876, by Wm. De Loss Love, Pastor of East Saginaw Congregational Church.

patient spirit. Not a serenity dwarfed down into coldness and dull placidity; not a patience which has all zeal and fervor wilted out of it; but serenity given by comprehension and true nobility, patience nerved and endowed for all the duties and trials that befall its possessor.

It is a blessing in itself if one has learned to labor and to wait. There are only two classes of persons that can wait. One is composed of philosophers, and the other of Christians. Philosophy, when it sees the causes in operation to produce certain effects, or gets personal promises of fulfillment from the visible, can wait till the event is brought to pass. Even a child on this basis can be a philosopher. Children often are philosophers. But that is waiting at sight. It is required to see the promised good, or the promiser, or the causative laws.

But the Christian believes in a God whom he has never seen, and even an image of whom he is forbidden to make. He trusts that he has felt his God in his soul, he believes he has seen His footsteps in His works. In Him he has faith, religious faith, which is high above natural faith. With Christian faith one can serenely, confidently look forward towards distant results not known, not yet wrought out. With either philosophic or Christian faith, one can trustingly confide in the divine natural laws, and calmly wait the fruit they will produce. Such faith, one kind or the other, has girded many souls with strength during the last one hundred years.

2. "That, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise." Doing the will of God is a condition of the promised blessing. We We may do the will of God in the philosophic realm, heeding and fulfilling the divine natural laws; and we may do it in the Christian, spiritual sphere, which stretches along with the soul's immortality into the world beyond material things, beyond death. Patience is obedience elongated. Putting even partial obedience to God's laws into operation for a whole century produces astounding results. These fruits may be material, intellectual, and spiritual; and the three may be, must be, more or less united.

II. AMERICA'S CENTENNIAL MEMORIES.

GROWTH OF THE COUNTRY.

Having considered the conditions, we now review the blessings:

What a theater our country has had for growth during the last century. The outstretching, new-born states are a marvel. The world has never seen the like before. The original thirteen states, how they all skirt along the Atlantic; and the thirty-eight states, how their grand tread moves sublimely

across the continent. The battle-fields that won the victory demanded by the Declaration of Independence, how narrow the area they dot on the country's chart, compared with the martial fields of the late war that now sprinkle nigh a half hemisphere, and still thrill and reverberate through the hearts of forty millions of people. The woodman's axe in a hundred years, how it has compelled the receding forests into submission; and how Indian hunting-grounds have been converted into a million fields of waving grain and golden orchards.

THE PLOW AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CIVILIZATION.

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The single instrument, the plow, has made signal conquests the last century over countless acres, and more signal victories over itself. The ancient Egyptian plow, even in the age of the pyramids, was only a few pieces of wood, partly matched, partly tied together, with perhaps, as Wilkinson thinks, a metal sock over the sharpened stick-point. The modern Grecian plow, and the East Indian plow, in this nineteenth century, is no improvement over the Egyptian one of four thousand and three thousand years ago. Among ancient Americans, Prescott says the Peruvians were the best plowmen. And their plow was only a sharp-pointed stake, with a cross-piece for the plowman to use in settling the stake into the ground. Six or eight men, with ropes attached to it, drew the plow, while women went behind to break up the sods with their rakes. During the last two thousand years, among the more enlightened, a few rough wrought-iron pieces were attached to the wooden part of the plow that entered the ground, but not until the close of our revolutionary war was the cast-iron plowshare invented; and then in Ipswich, England. Not until the year 1797 was the first cast-iron plow patented in this country, having share and mouldboard in two parts; and not till the year 1800 were there even a few such plows in use, even around New York city and in New Jersey, where they were manufactured. In 1797 Thomas Jefferson wrote an elaborate article concerning the mould-board of a plow; and during the nineteenth century many improvements have been made in this implement of civilization.

The plow, in our present theme, is representative. Even within forty years past have come forward in husbandry the threshing machines, reaping machines, drilling machines, raking machines, and in some parts the steam plow; while in woman's domain have appeared, within a quarter of a century, the sewing machines, knitting machines, and so on.

GREAT DISCOVERIES AND INVENTIONS.

But some may ask, What has all this to do with Sunday and religion? Just this: Dr. Lindley, from South-eastern Africa, recently told us that, whereas,

a native man there, before his conversion to Christianity, slept on the ground, as soon as he became a Christian he made himself a bedstead, and called for the clothing of civilized life; and the woman, when she became a Christian, sat no more on the ground, but in a chair. So Christianity everywhere exalts the very physical life of human beings. It seeks improvement, utility, comfort, happiness. And this we shall see more emphatically, if possible, in the intellectual and spiritual than in the physical progress of our nation. The Baconian philosophy, full of analysis and the investigation of causes, so fruitful in means of advancement and useful inventions in these last days, it is generally agreed has sprung out of the elements and life of Christianity. The really Christian spirit is looking always for the highest good unmixed with evil, and that with the human intellect and life always means advancement.

Some of the more obvious properties of steam were known and treated of two hundred and thirty years before Christ. But that knowledge was stationary until after the era of printing commenced. The little long-known information was then circulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of our Lord. The steam engine is but a trifle over a century old, in its simplest form; and just one hundred years ago this year it received important improvements. Not until three years after the close of the revolutionary war did John Fitch propel a small boat on the Delaware, at very slow speed. And on the morning of August 7th, 1807, Robert Fulton, with a few friends and mechanics, and six passengers, amid an incredulous and jeering crowd, started from New York city in a small steamer for Albany, making that distance, one hundred and fifty miles, at the speed of four and a fraction miles an hour. The great conquests of steam navigation have been made during the century we now review, and chiefly by Americans. The first railway for carrying passengers was not opened till 1825, and the first locomotive was not introduced on a railway until 1826. Roads of every kind have ever been civilizers of mankind. They carry light, intelligence, comforts. Of immense consequence in its time was the old Appian way, leading four hundred miles from Rome to Brundusium. Also the great road of that age from Scotland to Rome, and from Rome to Antioch, making, in all its windings, nearly four thousand miles. So the railways of this country and century have had immense power, in drawing and locating population, in carrying knowledge and happiness among the people, in clearing up forests, tilling fields, and bearing products to market.

That of Prof. Morse,

The electro-telegraph is the creation of this century. generally recognized as superior to all others, was first publicly exhibited in. 1837. And when it is considered that the authors of many of these inven