Puslapio vaizdai
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a nobler and higher civilization. Let us look for our prosperity in the paths of tranquility, and strive to establish our liberties in exalted justice and love and good will to man.

CHAPTER XV.

Or the establishment of permanent peace among civilized nations. The means by which this object can be attained. The necessity which will justify a nation in resorting to arms. Prospect of the triumph of peace.

THE ancient heathen poets, chroniclers of the earliest periods of the past, record the wonders of a golden age in times anterior to

their own; when man, clothed with the majesty

of the celestial, gazed with undrooping eye upon the radiant forms of the immortals, and listened in free intercourse to the divine oracles that fell from their lips. But toward the void of coming ages their imagination seems never to have directed its flight.

The Roman sang of that age when Saturn in his divinity walked on earth, and cast over their land a verdure, and over their sky a brilliancy which yet bloomed in its fertile plains, and lingered in its balmy air and in its deep

blue heavens, faint tokens of the former glorious presence of Deity.

The Grecian loved to sing of the earth as it was when Orpheus tamed ferocity by the strange enchantment of his lyre; when through glade, by waterfall, "beneath the glassy noontide and under the silver stars," beings of celestial form and beauty were seen to walk, and every grove and every fountain was rendered lovely by the guardiancy of the Naiad and the Fawn.

The Persian in the rich coloring of oriental fancy, describes a scene lovely as Paradise— when Ormuzd held dominion over earth and ocean, when the Houri fanned a balmy air with lulling plumes, trod with tinkling feet on emerald turf, and reposed in quiet beauty beneath a rose-colored sky, and the Peri sent up strange, ravishing melodies from the coral depths of its ocean home.

But the harp of the christian poet in that distant age was struck to a nobler song.

The past had indeed themes for him far above all that heathen imagination could frame. For him God had created the heavens and the earth, had said "let there be light, and

there was light," had fixed to the sea its bound. For him, man had dwelt in the beauty of innocence in a garden planted by the hand, and made glorious by the presence of the Lord. For him the bow of promise had been set in the clouds by the same Almighty One who in awful displeasure had brought a flood of waters upon the earth, and beneath whose judgment of fire the smoke of the cities of the plain "went up as the smoke of a furnace."

For him his fathers had been made to pass on dry land through the midst, while "the flood stood upright as an heap, and the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea." For him Jehovah had descended to earth, and with thunderings and lightnings and thick darkness and the voice of a trumpet had declared his law to man, while Sinai quaked at the presence of its God.

But nothing of all the past did he sing. His was a yet grander theme. In inspired vision the veil of the future had been lifted before him. He had heard from immortal lips the glad tidings of peace on earth and good will to men. He had beheld the exalted destiny of his race. He had witnessed the glorious spread

of that spiritual kingdom which shall extend "from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth."

Forgetting at once the present and the past, his rapt spirit passes into the deep bosom of the future, and beyond the shores of time, and in language most sublime breaks forth into rejoicing song.

The Hebrew prophets point forward to a distant time when man should attain his highest earthly development and happiness, and this they always represent as an age of peace. They employ the highest language of poetry, and the grandest imagery, to describe that reign of the Prince of Peace, when we are told that "the Lord will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the earth, and will make them to lie down in safety;" "men shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more;" "violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders;" "the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf, the young lion and the

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