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other historians of the free states of antiquity? what the political speeches of Cicero, and the orations of Demosthenes, those models of eloquence and wisdom, but volumes of evidence, attesting that an opposition founded in faction, and unrestrained by moderation, and a regard for the public welfare, is the most dangerous of political evils?

Nor does antiquity alone testify. The history of modern times is crowded with examples. What, I would ask, has become of the free states of modern Italy, which once flourished in wealth and power Florence, Genoa, Venice, and many others? Gone! perished under the deadly feuds of opposition. Even England has not been free from its pernicious effects. What arrested the war of Marlborough, when France was so humbled, that, had it gone on, Europe might have been freed from the danger which she has since experienced from that nation? What stayed the conquering hand of Chatham, when before his genius and power the throne of the Bourbons trembled to its centre? The spirit of factious opposition, that common cause of calamity, that without which liberty might

be eternal, and free states irresistible.

Guard, then, I entreat you, against the pernicious effects of a factious opposition to the government. Universal experience and the history of all ages furnish ample testimony of its dangerous consequences. Could any certain remedy be applied to restrain it within the bounds of moderation, then indeed might our liberty be immortal.

SUBLIMITY OF THE BIBLE.

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97. SUBLIMITY OF THE BIBLE.

THE Bible is not only the revealer of the unknown God to man, but His grand interpreter as the God of nature. In revealing God, it has given us the key that unlocks the profoundest mysteries of creation, the clew by which to thread the labyrinth of the universe, the glass through which to look "from Nature up to Nature's God."

It is only when we stand and gaze upon Nature, with the Bible in our hands, and its idea of God in our understandings, that Nature is capable of rising to her highest majesty, and kindling in our souls the highest emotions of moral beauty and sublimity. Without the all-pervading spiritual God of the Bible in our thoughts, Nature's sweetest music would lose its charm, the universe its highest significance and glory.

Go, and stand, with your open Bible upon the Areopagus of Athens, where Paul stood so long ago. In thoughtful silence, look around upon the site of all that ancient greatness; look upward to those still glorious skies of Greece, and what conceptions of wisdom and power will all those memorable scenes of nature and art convey to your mind, now, more than they did to an ancient worshipper of Jupiter or Apollo? They will tell of Him who made the worlds, "by whom, and through whom, and for whom, are all things." To you, that landscape of exceeding beauty, so rich in the monuments of departed genius, with its distant classic mountains, its deep blue sea, and its bright bending skies, will be telling a tale of glory

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the Grecian never learned; for it will speak to you no more of its thirty thousand petty contending deities, but of the one living and everlasting God. Go, stand with David and Isaiah under the starspangled canopy of the night; and, as you look away to the " range of planets, suus, and adamantine spheres wheeling unshaken through the void immense," take up the mighty questionings of inspiration.

Stand upon the heights at Niagara, and listen in awe-struck silence to that boldest, most earnest, and eloquent of all Nature's orators. And what is Niagara, with its plunging waters and its mighty roar, but the oracle of God, the whisper of His voice who is revealed in the Bible as sitting above the waterfloods forever?

Go, once more, and stand with Coleridge, at sunrise, in the Alpine Valley of Chamouni; join with him in that magnificent invocation to the hoary mount, "sole sovereign of the vale," to rise,

"and tell the silent sky,

And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,

Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God."

Who can stand amid scenes like these, with the Bible in his hand, and not feel that if there is moral sublimity to be found on earth, it is in the Book of God, it is in the thought of God? For what are all these outward, visible forms of grandeur but the expression and the utterance of that conception of Deity which the Bible has created in our minds, and which has now become the leading and largest thought of all civilized nations?

MASTERS OF THE SITUATION.

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98. MASTERS OF THE SITUATION.

GREAT mastery, like that of Washington or Bismarck, is not so common in the world as to excite no surprise when it occurs. It is not, and never can be, an every-day matter. You will often see Dulness striving to revenge itself upon Genius; but you will never see the former rising to be victor of the situation.

True mastery is a compact of supreme qualities. It is heroism; it is culture; it is enthusiasm; it is faith; it is intelligence; it is unconquerable will. No man ever became master of the situation by accident or indolence. It was an admirable saying of the Duke of Wellington, that "no general ever blundered into a great victory." "He happened to succeed" is a foolish, unmeaning phrase; no man happens to succeed. "What do you mix your colors with?" asked a visitor of Opie, the painter. "With brains, sir," was the artist's reply. Indolence never sent a man to the front. Promptness is a grand leader, while Procrastination limps behind. To-day is master of the situation; to-morrow is an impostor.

Masters of the situation accomplish what they undertake; but there are minds that seem always to be in a state of disintegration, slowly working to no end whatever. There are jumping men who always hit the top bar with their heels, and never quite clear it. There are poets who never get beyond their first verse; orators who forget the next sentence, and sit down; gold-diggers who buy a pickaxe, and stop there; and if sluggards ever took good advice, what

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long processions we should constantly meet, slowly travelling on their way to the ant!

Modern luxury is an almost insurmountable barrier to modern mastery. "A too rich diet," says an old master, "hinders the gallantry of the soul." Let us not forget that luxury and ease have never been conducive to liberty. It was the same Augustus who boasted that he found Rome of brick, and left it of marble, who also found Rome free, and left her a slave. Stretched on the rack of a too-easy chair, one man will let a great occasion go by, and lose in sleep the very birthright of his soul; while another, encompassed round with want and woe, will leap from his pallet of straw, and go forth like Peter the Hermit to. fire the age with enthusiasm.

But there are successes which are worse than failures; and there are victories which are irremediable ruin. Two of the fastest equipages in France and America were driven for a short time by Louis Napoleon and James Fisk. We have seen these men followed and applauded by thousands on the Champs Elysées and the Central Park their flashing liveries dazzling the world of stupid gazers. One of these

poor creatures fell by the hand of an assassin; the other died, gnawing his own heart, in bitter exile. And yet how recently both these men seemed to be masters of a great situation!

A short time ago, their names, every morning, vulgarized the columns of newspapers; and their doings, each day, were chronicled as those of good men never are. But that inexorable Hand which, sooner or later, arrests the robber and the coward, smote them from their high places. The old, old motto, "Principles not men," is imperishable.