wealth, and all in connexion with the influence of republican and religious institutions; is it too much to be hoped that God will accept our powerful instrumentality, and make it effectual for the renovation of the world?

The revivals of religion which prevail in our land among christians of all denominations, furnish cheering evidence of the presence of evangelical doctrine, and of the power of that Spirit by which the truth is to be made efficacious in the salvation of mankind. These revivals are distinguished by their continuance through a period of thirty years; by their extent, pervading the nation; by their increasing frequency in the same places; by their rapidity and power, often changing, in a few weeks, the character of towns and cities, and even of large districts of country. An earnest of that glorious time when a nation shall be born in a day, they purify our literary institutions, and multiply pastors and missionaries to cheer our own land, and enlighten distant nations. They are without a parallel in the history of the world and are constituting an era of moral power entirely new. Already the churches look chiefly to them for their members and pastors, and for that power upon public opinion, which retards declension, and gives energy to law and voluntary support to religious institutions.

These revivals then, falling in with all these antecedent indications, seem to declare the purpose of

God to employ this nation in the glorious work of renovating the earth.

If we look at our missionaries abroad, and witness the smiles of heaven upon their efforts, our confidence, that it is the purpose of God to render our nation a blessing to the world, will be increased. In talents, and piety, and learning, and doctrine, and civil policy, they are the legitimate descendants of the Puritans. Every where they command high respect, and have been distinguished by their judicious and successful efforts. In Ceylon, and Hawaii, and among the natives of this country, they are fast supplanting idolatry by christian institutions. Revivals of religion cheer and bless them; and churches, and all the elements of christian civilization are multiplying around them.

Let this nation go on, then, and multiply its millions and its resources, and bring the whole under the influence of our civil and religious institutions, and with the energies of its concentrated benevolence send out evangelical instruction; and who can calculate what our blessed instrumentality shall have accomplished, when He who sitteth upon the throne shall have made all things new.

If Swartz, and Buchanan, and Vanderkemp, and Carey, and Martyn, and Brainerd, could, each alone, accomplish so much; what may not be expected from the energies of such a nation as this? Fifty such men as Paul the Apostle, unaided by the resources of systematic benevolence, might evangelize

the world. What then may not be accomplished by a nation of freemen, destined in little more than half a century to number its fifty millions?

If we consider also our friendly relations with the South American States, and the close imitation they are disposed to make of our civil and literary institutions, who can doubt that the spark which our Forefathers struck will yet enlighten this entire continent? But when the light of such a hemisphere shall go up to heaven, it will throw its beams beyond the waves-it will shine into the darkness there, and be comprehended; it will awaken desire, and hope, and effort, and produce revolutions and overturnings, until the world is free.

From our revolutionary struggle, proceeded the revolution in France, and all which has followed in Naples, Portugal, Spain, and Greece; and though the bolt of every chain has been again driven, they can no more hold the heaving mass, than the chains of Xerxes could hold the Hellespont vexed with storms. Floods have been poured upon the rising flame, but they can no more extinguish it than they can extinguish the fires of Etna. Still it burns, and still the mountain heaves and murmurs; and soon it will explode with voices, and thunderings, and great earthquakes. Then will the trumpet of jubilee sound, and earth's debased millions will leap from the dust, and shake off their chains, and "Hosanna to the Son of David."

cry,

Before we conclude this discourse, let us attend to some of the duties to which we are called by our high providential destiny.

And most evidently we are called upon

1. To cherish with high veneration and grateful recollections the memory of our Fathers. Both the ties of nature, and the dictates of policy demand this. And surely no nation ever had less occasion to be ashamed of its ancestry, or more occasion for gratulation in that respect; for while most nations trace their origin to barbarians, the foundations of our nation were laid by civilized men-by christians. Many of them were men of distinguished families, of powerful talents, of great learning, of pre-eminent. wisdom, of decision of character, and of most inflexible integrity. And yet, not unfrequently, they have been treated as if they had no virtues; while their sins and follies have been sedulously immortalized in satirical anecdote. The influence of such treatment of the Fathers is too manifest. It creates and lets loose upon their invaluable institutions the Vandal spirit of innovation and overthrow; for after the memory of our Fathers shall have been rendered contemptible, who will appreciate and sustain their institutions? THE MEMORY OF OUR FATHERS,' should be the watchword of liberty throughout the land ;-for, imperfect as they were, the world before, had not seen their like, nor will it soon, we fear, behold their like again. Such models of moral excellence, such apostles of civil and religious liberty,

such shades of the illustrious dead, looking down upon their descendants with approbation or reproof, according as they follow or depart from the good way, constitute a censorship inferior only to the eye of God;-and to ridicule them is national suicide.

The doctrines of our Fathers have been represented as gloomy, superstitious, severe, irrational, and of a licentious tendency. But when other systems shall have produced a piety as devoted, a morality as pure, a patriotism as disinterested, and a state of society as happy, as have prevailed where their doctrines have been most prevalent; it may be in season to seek an answer to this objection. The same doctrines have been charged with inspiring a spirit of dogmatism and religious domination. But in all the struggles of man with despotic power for civil liberty, the doctrines of our Fathers have been found, usually, if not always, on the side of liberty, as their opposite have been usually found in the ranks of arbitrary power.

But

The persecutions instituted by our Fathers, have been the occasion of ceaseless obloquy upon their fair fame. And truly it was a fault of no ordinary magnitude that, sometimes, they did persecute. let him, whose ancestors were not ten times more guilty, cast the first stone, and the ashes of our Fathers will no more be disturbed. Theirs was the fault of the age, and it will be easy to show, that no class of men had at that time approximated so nearly