We conceive
that this mighty truth furnishes unanswerable proof of the unceasing
agency of a Providence, and when we once admit this, we concede that
our own powers are insufficient for our own wants.
That the world, as a whole, is advancing toward a better state of
things, we as firmly believe as we do that it is by ways that have
not been foreseen by man; and that, whenever the last has been made
the agent of producing portions of this improvement, it has oftener
been without design, or calculation, than with it. Who, for
instance, supposes that the institutions of this country, of which
we boast so much, could have stood as long as they have, without the
conservative principles that are to be found in the Union; and who
is there so vain as to ascribe the overshadowing influence of this
last great power to any wisdom in man? We all know that perfectly
fortuitous circumstances, or what appear to us to be such, produced
the Federal Government, and that its strongest and least
exceptionable features are precisely those which could not be
withstood, much less invented, as parts of the theory of a polity.
A great and spasmodic political movement is, at this moment,
convulsing Christendom.
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