passed upon the state of mankind:—a change so obvious to all, that we can scarcely take up a magazine, or newspaper, or any new publication whatever, without finding it adverted to with admiration!"
"The improvements everywhere springing up, are continually calling forth, from every quarter, exclamations of surprise, and expanding every bosom with the hope, that the opening of a new and happier day than the world has ever before seen, is now dawning on mankind."
"The most unthinking, as well as the most prejudiced," says a well-informed writer, "must be struck with the fact, that the period in which we live is extraordinary and momentous. Amongst the great body of the people an unparallelled revolution is at work; they have awoke from that ignorance in which they had slept for ages, and have sprung up in their new character of thinking beings, qualified to inquire and to discuss; and despising both the despotism and the bigotry that would prohibit or impede their improvement. The intellectual spirit is moving upon the chaos of minds, which ignorance and necessity have thrown into collision and confusion; and the result will be, a new creation. Nature (to use the nervous language of an old writer) 'will be melted down and re-coined;' and all will be bright and beautiful." It is thus that every attentive observer is impressed by the character of the present times.—Consider then, my reflecting readers, whether so great an effect can be without a cause! And to what cause can it, with any degree of reason, be assigned, but to that mighty change in the interior sphere of human minds effected by the performance of the Last Judgment in the spiritual world, and to the pouring thence of new energies from heaven into the awakening faculties of man?"
"Let us here ask, how might such a pouring of energies from heaven, and of light thence, into the minds of men in general, be expected, in the first instance, to operate? What the writer of the above quotation calls "the intellectual spirit moving upon the chaos of minds," is what the Scripture calls "the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters." The ultimate object of the divine movement is, that man may be made in the image and likeness of God; in other words, that man should rise to the full dignity of his nature, as the recipient, without perverting them, of love and wisdom from God; for it is only such a being as this,—a being in whom the spiritual faculties as well as the natural endowments belonging to human nature are properly developed,—that the Word of God emphatically denominates a man.—