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covered forever from the darkness of ignorance and despotism; while he will naturally ask himself when and where will the progress of Liberty cease? Here all conjecture is at fault—, here all calculations founded upon past circumstances of social and national progressions are quite irrevelant to the present case: and here in contemplating her future advancement and conquests the imagination recoils from its own legitimate conclusions. Oh how feeble and incompetent the sagacity of the statesman, and the wisdom of the politician to measure and estimate the future and ultimate results of Liberty, which is now just beginning to alarm the nations and “shake terribly the earth” And who does not feel the conviction growing stronger and deeper, that God has chosen the American nation as his agent to confer the last and greatest of blessings upon the world? God has ever pursued this course, of employing men and nations to execute his purposes of mercy and love and the contrary, and why not do so still? And if to the Anglo-Saxon race the world is much indebted for what is good, what moral or political arithmetician can count or estimate that infinite indebtedness which the same world shall owe to the Anglo-American race in all time to come?
We must fill our mighty destiny and calling; a destiny whose high origin started in the age immediately succeeding the flood, ere the sun had yet dried the surface of as drowned world. What time Ham, by his transgressions, entailed a burning and withering curse upon his offspring, when the father of the third part of the human family at that time, fell by sin and like the first father of mankind hurled his posterity into misery and wo, adding thus a second curse to a part of the human race—a curse that may be destined to run out parallel in duration with the one originally entailed. Who can tell? and will any one call in question the justice and goodness of God in the one case, and acquiesce in his justice and goodness in the other, which embraces a greater number? this is not wisdom nor submission to the Divine will.
The judge of all the earth shall always do right, but to comprehend what is right just and good in his administration is often as far beyond our understanding as the remotest star in the milky way is beyond our solar system.
But look at that momentous prophecy of the patriarch Noah, its blessings and its curses, one of the most stupendous prophecies of ancient times—a prophecy which has ever been fulfilling, is now rapidly fulfilling—and will continue its fulfilment, until time’s hoary and faded curtains drop upon a burning world. In that prophecy the three sons of Noah
