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government. It may repudiate the suicidal doctrine in which it had its origin, and may thus become entitled to the good wishes of every conservative mind. But as far as the idea of this last revolution is concerned, France can never have any government without retracing some of her steps. The only acknowledged doctrine now is the inherent right of the stronger part of the population, nearest to the seat of government, to break it down whenever it is disagreeable to them; they being the only judges. For here is the difference between this and all other events that have borne the name of revolution. It is not simply the right to rectify constitutional disorders in one department through the action of other departments of the government. It is not merely the right to resist intolerable physical oppression for this could not be said to be the case in France under the rule of Guizot and Louis Philippe-but it is the assertion of the naked abstract right of revolution, at any time, on the ground that any present government is obnoxious to the masses in its vicinity. It is a principle opposed to all government, republican as well as monarchical. Against its destructive application not even the most extreme flexibility can avail. No provision in respect to constitutional changes, no restrictions, such as we have in all our states, as to time, or place, or numbers, or mode of proceeding, can be any allowed obstacle in the way of those who know they have the physical force, and do not choose to wait for such proceedings, alleging as a reason therefor either fancied inconvenience, or the assumed danger which delay may bring to their rights, or acting from the merest caprice of the moment. Physical force, it is true, may destroy any government; it may destroy the works of God. But in France, this, if we may use the paradox, has been legitimated. The right of revolution, or of unfixing all things, if we may employ the word in so strange a sense, is the only fixed principle of the nation; and even the nation remains the nation, and does not become numberless nations, or parts of other nations, no longer than the aggregate wills of these parts consent to remain together.

Now it is such a revolution, and such a principle as this, which has been extravagantly lauded from one end of our land to the other. How few enquired, or even thought, the enquiries pertinent, whether or not instead of intolerable physical oppression, the government of France, during the past eighteen years, had been so peacefully and well administered, that the physical comfort and outward prosperity of the masses, had been more advanced than during any previous eighteen years of her history; or whether during this period, there had not been a substantial progress, a gradual, yet most sure tendency towards an equalization of property, and a decided advance in all the elements of national wealth. It appears from the very statistics of

the revolutionary government, that the deposits in the saving banks of France had increased, since 1830, from seventy to four hundred millions of francs-four times as much as they had ever been before. What better evidence could the science of political economy furnish of the substantial progress of the laboring classes? But all this must go for nothing. Every Frenchman had not the elective franchise, and therefore nothing was thought of but the glorious and unalienable right to overturn a monarchy, simply because it was a monarchy, and it pleased the masses to exercise their accidentally-developed power in crushing it. How few deemed it pertinent to ask, why a charter monarchy and a representative chamber in France, should, in the language of the day, be driven into the Seine, any more than a president and congress should, by a like summary process, be driven into the Potomac? How few enquired whether this elected king had faithfully observed the charter to which he had sworn? It seemed, on the other hand, to be everywhere taken for granted, that he was bound to violate it in giving to French institutions more of a democratic tendency than was consistent with its spirit. How few thought it at all worth while to enquire, whether or not, in those eighteen years, that charter had received more or less stabs than our own constitution during the same period; or whether the administration of Louis Philippe and Guizot had furnished as many, or even any, examples of men pronounced innocent of all crime by the highest judicial tribunal in the land, and yet retained in chains, as monuments of the feebleness of the law, and the strength of the executive will, or whether, appointments to office in France had actually been attended with any more corruption than had characterized the abominable party system which has so long prevailed among ourselves, or whether, the men thrown out of this revolutionary volcano were likely, on any known probabilities of human history, to be any more honest or capable instruments of good than the illustrious historian and philosopher, and long-tried statesman, whom they had driven into exile. How much thinking and reasoning on the past history of France was exhibited by political men and political parties among us, in that disgraceful strife to see who should be foremost and loudest in the recognition of the first provisional government, and in fustian eulogies of those mock heroics of February, which, when afterwards unsuccessfully repeated by the very same men, were hissed from the stage as the acts of the canaille? That Lamartine, in his history of the Girondist, had just been the apologist of Robespierre, was sufficient ground of suspicion against him, notwithstanding his sentimental eulogies of the new Christianity, a suspicion which should have been increased by his cordial association with such men as Ledru Rollin, Albert, and Louis Blanc; and yet, even the most thoughtful man, we

willingly concede, might be pardoned for not having anticipated that this provisional government would, in a few short months, present that odious spectacle of corruption, intrigue, recklessness, frivolity, ferocity, and imbecility, of which the late disclosures have furnished such irresistible evidence. The great inquiry for politicians and political economists, was simply this,-Is there, in reality, any rational prospect, that the thirty millions of France will be, either physically or morally, more prosperous, more elevated, and, in a word, more happy, during the eighteen years to come, than in those that have just passed? For our more serious and Christian men there were questions of a still higher order; and yet, with all respect we ask it, what proportion of them seemed to think, or cared to ask themselves, whether there could possibly be any sin in thus violently overturning a government in the full exercise of its established action as the heart of political life to so great an empire, or whether Paul's solemn admonition on this head had any meaning, or whether there was any reality in the stern denunciations which the Bible pronounces on those who are given to change, or whether, in short, there could be, in modern times, any state of things, to which those ancient declarations of the Holy Scriptures of never changing truth, could, by any possibility, have the least application, as implying a precept to be broken, or a sin to be committed.

All such questions seemed, in a great measure, to have been unthought of, or, if suggested, to have been repelled as utterly impertinent as having nothing to do with the great idea of the day. It was the right, the imprescriptible, the unalienable right to overturn a monarchy,—a right to be exercised simply because it was a right, whatever might be the intrinsic value of the thing destroyed, or however great the evils consequent upon its destruction.

Right here is found one of the most mischievous moral and political heresies of the day. It is this unnatural separation of the noun right, from the adjective right-this deification of the one at the expense of the other. It is this propensity to substitute a phantom which no one has ever been able to define, for a wise regard to man's truest dignity and happiness; and this grounded not on unmeaning claims of abstract right, terminating in each man regarded as an isolated individual, but on those immutable principles of order which bind together families, and societies, and states, and churches, and worlds, into one harmonious system pervading the universe of God,-making duties before rights, or, in other words, deriving all rights from antecedent social and political relations, and assigning to the individual as his only right, the right discharge of the duties growing out of those Divinely-appointed relations which have for their end the highest

good of society, as the only true mode through which can ever be secured the highest good of the individual member.

When we call to mind the manner in which this French explosion was received among us, there can hardly be imagined a more striking caricature of the claim so proudly set up for this, as being, beyond all others a most remarkably thinking age, an age of independent examination, and of men who can, and who dare, think for themselves. Bnt what proportion, we would respectfully ask, did really think for themselves in these matters? How many were content to have all their thinking done for them by others, who are themselves duped by the echo of their own voices, and merely repeat the public sentiment which comes back to them as the hollow reverberation of their own unreasoning clamor? We would, by no means, say, that there are none, or even few reflecting souls among us, but they are not of those who are most conspicuous in sending forth their public opinion from the press, and the political rostrum, and the halls of our religious anniversaries. Whatever may be its boasting claims, it may be as boldly said, that this is not remarkable for being a thinking age. Facts show that there is not a prevailing independence of thought, in that true sense of the term, which denotes the power of forming opinions independent of the magnifying and distorting influences which come pressing most directly upon us, because they are those with which we are in most immediate contact. If such declarations should seem to betray a want of modesty, let it be remembered that our own times are, beyond all others, boastful and disdainful in respect to all that have preceeded; and, if facts show that there is an egregious fallacy in this extravagant claim of independent thinking, it should be rebuked in a tone as decided as those in which the groundless pretension is put forth.

With the most heartfelt respect and esteem would I speak of the professedly religious men of our land. With all their faults, and however much they may share in some of the moral epidemmics of the day, they are, after all, "the salt of the earth." They truly love Christ's kingdom; and joyfully hail every movement which may tend, even in appearance, to free the church from thraldom, and exalt it to its place "on the tops of the mountains," where "all nations shall flow unto it." It was not unnatural, therefore, that many of the truest Christians should be carried along by that wave of public opinion that has been set in motion by these late events in Europe. With the utmost deference, however, would I dissent from the estimate formed by many in respect to their nature and their results. There is a species of blind optimism on this subject, which prevents all careful examination, by its method of assuming, as clear and certain, the very position on which rests the greatest doubt. Revolutionary movements are assumed to be the direct act of God. The Lord

is solemnly invoked to carry on His glorious work, and "overturn, and overturn, and overturn," until a way is cleared for Christianity, in the utter destruction of all human institutions.

The state in alliance with the church is regarded as so great an evil, that it causes them to look with extravagant hope to an experiment which has as yet been so imperfectly tried, and only among a people where the religious element had previously been diffused through all their civil institutions. Even under these circumstances, it is far from being settled that the state in alliance with the church, bad as such alliance may be, is a greater evil than the one with which God may yet permit the world to be visited-namely the state militant, or warring with the church. It may yet be found, that the idea of neutrality is the most delusive of dreams. Can the individual man be neutral in respect to a power so high and so exacting as Christianity? Can masses, composed of individuals, and, as masses, often manifesting the anti-religious spirit in forms surpassing any exhibitions of the individual enmity-shall masses, we say, be any the more expected to remain neutral towards an imperium in imperio that claims to rule over the highest part of our nature, and, through it, over every sabordinate sphere? Is it, then, so easy to define exactly the limits of the spiritual and the temporal, the moral and the religious, the civil and the ecclesiastical? Is it so very practicable a matter to keep these all in their respective places, and, while thus separate, to maintain the peace among them with a perfect Gallio-like impartiality? The infidel, perhaps, would find no difficulty in this, simply because he would annihilate the one class, and make the other all in all. The Christian, on the other hand, knows that all the true value of the lower and the earthly comes from its connection with the higher and the heavenly. If so, the former cannot be set up as separate, without, at the same time, making them antagonist interests. Church and state cannot be wholly divorced, to use the language of the day, without putting them in opposing attitudes. The very language implies jealousy, suspicion, antagonism. The infidel, also, and the worldling, from their stand-point, perceive intuitively the same truth. They know there can be no true peace between them and serious religion unfolding the claims of a higher government, and of a spiritual retribution. An absolute separation, then, only brings this out in clearer and stronger relief. The more religion is thus divorced, the more and more do they know it as an enemy, the great troubler of their soul's false peace. Hence they cannot be indifferent, either as individuals, or as members of a civil organism. Hence, too, a constant tendency to transfer this vitiosity of the members into the general diathesis of the body politic itself. The state, therefore, cannot be neutral. It must be, and will be, for or against; it

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