to the part that has been played; to turn the eyes from the strong light of orbs which now touch to the meridian, to the milder glow of those which have passed beneath the horizon.

NATIONS ARE REPRESENTED IN HISTORY.

On this great stage of the world nations have been substituted for persons, and masses of men for individuals. Hence the philosopher has deduced laws from history, which were true of all mankind under the same conditions, instead of those partial laws. which are true only in extreme cases, and are seldom applicable to real life. Take, for example, the influence of specific institutions in perpetuating conditions, as exhibited in the castes of Hindostan, in which learning is confined to the Brahmins, while labor is imposed on other trades, and where ages on ages have rolled away without ever changing or improving the condition of the people; or, as in the English feudal system, where an overshadowing aristocracy has been built up and perpetuated by the laws of primogeniture and entailment; or the influence. of laws on morals, in the destruction of the known domestic ties by the terrible laxity and yet cruelty of its institutions, and finally the reaction of those poisoned morals in the destruction of the state; for we find that the Emperor Augustus had a whole code of laws enacted to encourage marriage, in which great rewards were offered to those who married and great penalties to those who did not, and yet the Roman

knights were so corrupt that they insisted upon its abolition; hence it was well said, that the Roman empire was destroyed before it was invaded by the barbarians.

In furnishing examples of these general laws of human nature of which history is the development, the statistics of modern times afford powerful aid and instruction. Mankind are now in the crucible of analysis, and the laws of social action will as certainly be systematized and demonstrated, as that the violation of them has produced half the miseries of the race. Take, for example, the law in respect to the formation of opinions; ignorance of that law, a recent writer has remarked, has to answer for the atrocities of religious wars, the horrors of the inquisition, and the too great severities of the penal code. Creeds and confessions have been handed to men at the point of the bayonet; and if there was no virtue in kind words, there was supposed to be much in the sword. Yet whose opinion has force ever changed? Whom did persecution ever convince? On the contrary, has it not become a maxim, that persecution assists the persecuted? and that even a fool or a villain, or a most fallacious creed, may be raised into consequence by uncharitable and violent attacks? Here the principle deduced from history is the same with that laid down in the gospel, that the true mode of persuasion is by kindness and charity.

Again, we have an example of another principle illustrated in the history of the penal law of England,

that when a punishment is disproportioned to the offence, however grievous and calamitous that offence may be to the community, society will not enforce the law. In a commercial community the crime of forgery is one of the highest which can be committed, because it attacks that commercial confidence which is fundamental to a commercial community. Accordingly in England they punish it with death, and no one fairly convicted has been known to be pardoned. Yet society, believing this disproportioned to the offence, very seldom convict: witnesses disappear, and juries find loopholes of escape. And when we attach death to a still smaller crime, theft, the government itself steps in to commute the punishment, and not one of a thousand criminals receives the punishment awarded by the law. Law, then, to be successful, must conform to the equity of society.

Again, we may refer to the established historical principle, that wherever mind and commerce are least restricted, there the social progress is the most rapid, and the mind most active; whether we cite positive examples in Athens and the United States, or negative ones in China and Spain.

Further, we might deduce the utility of knowledge from the statistics of modern society, in the fact, that crime and vice have diminished as education has increased in those countries where accurate returns could be had.

The illustrations we have now given, whether from the dramatic scenery or the aggregate facts of society,

all tend to show that in history, aided by its great adjunct, statistics, we must seek the true science of human nature. She has taken the gauge and dimensions of humanity; she has descended into the caverns of the earth to describe the half-fed savage, and has ascended the heavens to "unsphere the spirit of Plato;" she has left no extreme of the race unvisited, and no principle of its nature without illustration.

In respect to this view of human nature, we may cite an extract from a recent article on statistics:

"To know human nature is to know the general laws of human action; to ascertain the general course of man's physical and moral faculties. Previously to all observation, it might seem that human actions would, if registered, present as vast a variety as the caprices of the will, and that to discover any thing like a law in their production would be more absurd than to investigate the rules of the wind, or the regulations of the whirlwind; yet when we pass from individuals to masses, we find even in those actions which seem most fortuitous, a regularity of production, an order of succession, that can arise only from fixity of cause. Thus were a man always to examine only individual drops of water, he could never conceive the beautiful phenomenon of the rainbow; it is only when the drops are aggregated in masses and placed in a position favorable for observation, that he can contemplate that glorious arch spanning the horizon and seeming to connect earth with heaven."

HISTORY IS THE RECORD OF GOD'S PROVIDENCE IN HE GOVERNMENT OF MAN.

The next use of history is derived from its being the record of that providence by which God administers the moral government of mankind.

That there is a system of compensations by which crime is made to produce its own punishment, at some time and in some form, enters into every scheme of religious belief, whether of savage or civilized, Jew or Gentile, disciple or skeptic. It was a fact legibly written in the constitution of men, and upon the works of nature. The true philosophy of the human mind taught it from the days of Socrates to the present time; the Bible teaches it both in the prophecy and the fulfilment of those tremendous desolations, which visited the iniquities of men and nations through their distant posterity; and it may be expected that history will teach the same lesson as she calls up, in long succession, the awful shades of departed nations. She will call them up from ancient graves, from ruins long unvisited, from monuments just discovered by the traveller, from pools where the bittern dwells, from mighty rivers and from desert plains; she will call the spirits of once glorious, long punished nations,

To vindicate the ways of God to man.

In illustration of this truth, we shall take but two or three remarkable examples. As a principle, Provi