Page:The crater; or, Vulcan's peak.djvu/148

14 J THE CRATER; placed here to prepare themselves for a future and higher condition of existence, is not only agreeable to our con sciousness, but is in harmony with revelation. Among the many things that have been revealed to us, where so many are hid, we are told that our information is to increase, as we draw nearer to the millennium, until " The whole earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea." We may be far from that blessed day; probably are; but he has lived in vain, who has dwelt his half century in the midst of the civilization of this our own age, and does not see around him the thousand proofs of the .tendency of things to the fulfilment of the decrees, announced to us ages ago by the pens of holy men. Rome, Greece, Egypt, and all that we know of the past, which comes purely of man and his passions; empires, dynasties, heresies and novelties, come and go like the changes of the seasons ; while the only thing that can be termed stable, is the slow but sure progress of prophecy. The agencies that have been employed to bring about the great ends foretold so many centuries since, are so very natural, that we often lose sight of the mighty truth in its seeming sim plicity. But, the signs of the times are not to be mistaken. Let any man of fifty, for instance, turn his eyes toward the East, the land of Judea, and compare its condition, its promises of to-day, with those that existed in his own youth, and ask himself how the change has been produced. That which the Richards and Sts. Louis of the middle ages could not effect with their armed hosts, is about to happen as a consequence of causes so obvious and simple that they are actually overlooked by the multitude. The Ottoman power and Ottoman prejudices are melting away, as it might be under the heat of divine truth, which is clearing for itself a path that will lead to the fulfilment of its own predictions. Among the agents that are to be employed, in impress ing the human race with a sense of the power and benevo lence of the Deity, we think the science of astronomy, with its mechanical auxiliaries, is to act its full share. The more deeply we penetrate into the arcana of nature, the stronger becomes the proofs of design ; and a deity thus obviously, tangibly admitted, the more profound will