rather than men, that caused Europe to rock to its centre. In the train of this religious reformation civil liberty followed, but became settled and valuable only as religious liberty was perfected. It was every where on the ground of conscience towards God that the first stand was taken, and in those countries where the struggle for religious liberty commenced but did not succeed, as in Spain and Italy, civil liberty has found no resting place for the sole of her foot to this day. It is conceded even by Hume that England owes her civil liberty to the Puritans, and the history of the settlement and progress of this country as a splendid exemplification of the principle in question, needs but to be mentioned here.

In speaking thus of the resistance of christian subjects to the government, perhaps I should guard against being misunderstood. In no case can it be a factious resistance. It cannot be stimulated by any of the ordinary motives to such resistance—by discontent, or passion, or ambition, or a love of gain. In no case can it show itself in the disorganizing, the aggressive, and in a free government, the suicidal spirit of mobs. Christians have in their eye a grand and a holy object, and all they wish is to go forward, without violating the rights of others, to its attainment. In so doing they set themselves in opposition to nobody, but merely exercise an inalienable right, and if others oppose them, they must still go forward and obey God, be the consequences what they may.

We will now consider, as was proposed, the effect of an adherence to the principle of the text on the part of rulers. This becomes appropriate from the peculiar form of our government, and the relation which the rulers hold to the people. Rulers have indeed, in all countries, need to be exhorted to obey God, but when their will is supreme, and their power is independent of the people, there can be no propriety in exhorting them to obey God rather than men. In this country, however, this principle needs to be enforced upon legislators and rulers quite as much as upon the people, perhaps even more. It is at this point, if I mistake not, that we are to look for the danger peculiar to our institutions through those in authority. In other countries the danger is from the accumulation and tyrannical use of power. With us, limited as is the tenure of office, there is little danger of direct oppression. The danger is that those who are in office, and those who wish for it, will, for the sake of immediate popularity, lend the sanction of their names to doctrines and practices, which, if carried into effect, must destroy all government. How is it else that mobs should often escape with so little rebuke? How is it else that we hear such extravagant and disorganizing doctrines maintained in regard to the rights of a majority respecting property, and their power to set aside any guaranties of former Legislatures? Certainly the people are the fountain of power. They establish the government, they have a right to alter it; but when it is established, the state becomes personified through it, and its acts are to be consistent. When it is established, it is a government, it has authority, it becomes God's institution, and those who administer it are to obey God rather than men. Wo to this country, when the people shall become to those in place, the object of adulation and of an affected idolatry. Wo to this country, when the people shall cease to reverence the government as the institution of God because it is established through them; when they shall suppose that it is in such a sense theirs, that they can supersede its acts in any way except by constitutional forms.

There is also another reason why the principle of the text ought to be especially regarded by the rulers of this country. So far as a nation can be considered and treated as a moral person, its character must be indicated by the acts of its rulers. Accordingly, we find that under every form of government, God has made nations responsible, as in the natural course of things they evidently must be, for what is done by their rulers. But if this is so in monarchical governments, where the agency of the people is so little connected with public acts, much more must it be so in one like ours. Here the rulers represent the people more immediately. They indicate in the eyes of the world, the moral condition of the people, and hence the peculiar responsibility of those who act under the oath of God in making and administering the laws of a representative government. If it can ever be required of God to vindicate his administration by the treatment of any people, it must be of one whose government is thus administered.

I observe then that the principle of the text should be adopted by rulers, because it furnishes the only broad and safe basis of political action. The adoption of this principle I consider the first requisite of a wise, in opposition to a cunning and temporizing statesman. Statesmanship, as distinguished from that skilful combination of measures which has for its object personal advancement, consists very much in a perception of the connexion there is between the prosperity of states, and the accordance of their laws and social institutions with the laws of justice, and benevolence, and temperance, which are the laws of God. The laws of God are uniform. The general tendencies which he has inwrought into the system will take effect, and nothing, not shaped in accordance with these can stand. Now it is an attempt to evade the effect of these tendencies by expedients in particular instances and for the sake of particular ends, that has been called statesmanship; while he only is the true statesman who sees what these tendencies are, and shapes his laws and institutions in accordance with them. The mere politician, if I may so designate him, perceives the movements which take place in the different parts of society relatively to each other, and is complacently skilful in adjusting them to his purposes, but he fails to see that general movement by which the whole is drifted on together, and which is bearing society to a point where elements that he had not dreamed of will be called into action, and where his petty expedients will become in a moment, but as the barriers of sand which the child raises upon the beach, when the tide begins to rise.

"I tremble for my country," said an American statesman, in a sentence, which, though awfully ominous in the connexion in which it was uttered, does equal honor to his head and his heart, "I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just." In that sentence are involved the principles of that higher statesmanship before which the expedients of merely expert men dwindle into nothing. He knew not how, or where, or when, the blow might fall; but he knew that there was always a joint in the harness of injustice, where the arrow of retribution, though it might seem to be speeding at a venture, would surely find its way. The higher movements of Divine Providence include the lower. Sooner or later all particular, and for a time apparently anomalous cases are brought under its general rules, and he has read the history of the past with little benefit, who has failed to see how the giant machinery of that Providence, in the intermediate spaces of which there is ample room for the free play of human agency, takes up the results of that agency as they are wrought out, and applies them to the execution of its own uniform laws, and the accomplishment of its own predicted purposes. These purposes, as declared by those divine records whose prophecies have now become history, were often such as no human sagacity, looking merely at second causes, could have anticipated, such as no