opportunity allowed to mortal men to work in the eternal scheme of Providence! It is past! Such amplitude of the glory of goodness can never again be put at one moment into the reach of the human will. God’s providence is working out its undoubted design in this magnificent revelation of
That maiden world, twin-sister to the old;—Montgomery.
But they who should have worked with it in the benignity and benevolence of that Saviour whose name they bore, have left to all futurity the awful spectacle of their infamy!
Had the Europeans really at this eventful crisis been instructed in genuine Christianity, and imbued with its spirit, what a signal career of improvement and happiness must have commenced throughout the vast American continent! What a source of pure, guiltless, and enduring wealth must have been opened up to Europe itself! Only let any one imagine the natives of America meeting the Europeans as they did, with the simple faith of children, and the reverence inspired by an idea of something divine in their visitors; let any one imagine them thus meeting them, and finding them, instead of what they actually were, spirits base and desperate as hell could have possibly thrown up from her most malignant regions—finding them men of peace instead of men of blood, men of integrity instead of men of deceit, men of love and generosity instead of men of cruelty and avarice—wise, enlightened, and just! Let any one imagine that, and he has before him such a series of grand and delightful consequences as can only be exhibited when Christianity shall really become the actuating spirit of nations, and they shall as the direct
