decadence and death, which so quietly but effectively, has prostrated its hopes and heaped confusion upon its intentions (despite its boundless wealth, military power, and fierce religious fanaticism) to defend and diffuse its dominating faith! Yet, after all, thus it sinks and thus it dies in its chosen homes.
The instability and the doom that seems ever impending over the institutions and structures raised by the worshipers of Allah, of Vishnu, of Buddha, or the Virgin Mary, come not causeless. They are Heaven's maledictions upon the fearful crime of false religions, which, while they defy God, degrade and dishonor men—cursing their conditions by poverty, miserable homes, and wretched compensation for their toil; wasting their revenues, sinking them in ignorance, destroying their morals, depriving them of liberty, and ruining their souls; till at length, when they have filled up their measure of iniquity, it turns the very centers and cradles of their faiths into the abodes of material or moral ruin, “the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”
Whether the religion be utterly false or only a perversion of the true, its influence is equally pernicious and manifest. He who runs may read this on its very face in India and in Ireland, in Egypt and Burmah, in Delhi and Rome, in Benares and Mexico; in the Sepoy, the Gazee, and the Jesuit; in Tamerlane, Cesare Borgia, and the Nana Sahib; in Cawnpore, Canton, and St. Bartholomew. All equally evince the direful influence of false religions upon the conditions of men and nations.
On the other hand, the holy, living faith of a divine Jesus regenerates the hearts and the communities which yield themselves to its influence—confers freedom, light, education, equal rights, temporal prosperity, moral purity, domestic joy, and every thing lovely, virtuous, and of good report—rears up the temples of a true Christianity, and, without a stain of decadence upon its bright prospects of final universality, presents no ruins or desolations amid its evangelical conquests or their results.
Those once powerful religions and nations that marched so proudly and resolutely to conquest and ascendency under their
