TO THE ELECTORS OF LIVERPOOL.

81

it is next to impossible for victory not to crown your exertions. The extent of your resources, under God, is equal to the justice of your cause. But, should Providence determine otherwise,— should you fall in this struggle, should the nation fall, — you will have the satisfaction (the purest allotted to man) of having performed your part; your names will be enrolled with the most illustrious dead, while posterity, to the end of time, as often as they revolve the events of this period (and they will incessantly revolve them), will turn to you a reverential eye, while they mourn over the freedom which is entombed in your sepulcher.

I can not but imagine the virtuous heroes, legislators, and patriots, of every age and country, are bending from their elevated seats to witness this contest, as if they were incapable, till it be brought to a favorable issue, of enjoying their eternal repose. Enjoy that repose, illustrious immortals! Your mantle fell when you ascended; and thousands, inflamed with your spirit, and impatient to tread in your steps, are ready to swear, by Him that sitteth on the throne, and liveth for ever and ever, that they will protect freedom in her last asylum, and never desert her cause, which you sustained by your labors, and cemented with your blood!

REV. ROBERT HALL.

L. TO THE ELECTORS OF LIVERPOOL.

Do not, gentlemen, listen to those who tell you the cause of freedom is desperate- they are the enemies of the cause and of you; but listen to me, for you know me, and I am one who has never yet deceived you. I say, then, that it will be desperate if you make no exertions to retrieve it. I tell you that your languor alone can betray it; that it can only be made desperate through your despair. I am not a man to be cast down by temporary reverses, let them come upon me as thick, and as swift, and as sudden, as they may. I am not he who is daunted by majorities in the outset of a struggle for worthy objects; else I should not now stand here before you to boast of triumphs won in your cause.

If your champions had yielded to the force of numbers, of gold, of power,-if defeat could have dismayed them, then would the African slave-trade never have been abolished; then would the cause of reform, which now bids fair to prevail over its enemies, have been long ago sunk amidst the desertions of its friends; then would those prospects of peace have been utterly benighted which I still devoutly cherish, and which even now brighten in

your eyes; then would the orders in council, which I overthrew by your support, have remained a disgrace to the British name, and an eternal obstacle to our best interests. I no more despond now than I have in the course of those sacred and glorious contentions; but it is for you to say whether to-morrow shall not make it my duty to despair. To-morrow is your last day; your last efforts must then be made. If you put forth your strength, the day is our own; if you desert me, it is lost. To win it, I shall be the first to lead you on, and the last to forsake you.

Gentlemen, I stand up in this contest against the friends and followers of Mr. Pitt; or, as they partially designate him, the "immortal" statesman, now no more. Immortal in the miseries of his devoted country! Immortal in the wounds of her bleeding liberties! Immortal in the cruel wars which sprang from his cold, miscalculating ambition! Immortal in the intolerable taxes, the countless loads of debt, which these wars have flung upon us, which the youngest man amongst us will not live to see the end of! Immortal in the triumphs of our enemies, and the ruin of our allies, the costly purchase of so much blood and treasure! Immortal in the afflictions of England, and the humiliation of her friends, through the whole results of his twenty years' reign, from the first rays of favor with which a delighted court gilded his early apostasy, to the deadly glare which is at this instant cast upon his name by the burning metropolis of our last al-ly'! But may no such immortality ever fall to my lot! Let me rather live innocent and inglorious; and when, at last, I cease to serve you, and to feel for your wrongs, may I have an humble monument in some nameless stone, to tell that beneath it there rests from his labors in your service "an enemy of the immortal statesman, a friend of peace and of the people!"

*

LORD BROUGHAM.

LI. MORAL EFFECTS OF INTEMPERANCE.

THE sufferings of an animal nature, occasioned by intemperance, my friends, are not to be compared with the moral agonies which convulse the soul. It is an immortal being who sins and suffers; and as his earthly house dissolves, he is approaching the judgment-seat in anticipation of a miserable eternity. He feels his captivity, and in anguish of spirit clanks his chains and cries for help. Conscience thunders, remorse goads; and as the gulf

The news of the burning of Moscow had arrived by that day's mail, Oct. 8th, 1812.

HORRORS AND HONORS OF WAR.

83

opens before him, he recoils, and trembles, and weeps, and prays, and resolves, and promises, and reforms, and "seeks it yet again,”—again resolves, and weeps, and prays, and "seeks it yet again!" Wretched man, he has placed himself in the hands of a giant, who never pities, and never relaxes his iron gripe. He may struggle; but he is in chains. He may cry for release; but it comes not, and lost! lost! may be inscribed upon the doorposts of his dwelling.

In the mean time these paroxysms of his dying moral nature decline, and a fearful apathy, the harbinger of spiritual death, comes on. His resolution fails, his mental energy, and his vigorous enterprise, and nervous irritation and depression ensue. The social affections lose their fullness and tenderness, and conscience loses its power, and the heart its sensibility, until all that was once lovely and of good report retires, and leaves the wretch abandoned to the appetites of a ruined animal. In this deplorable condition, reputation expires, business falters and becomes perplexed, and temptations to drink multiply as inclination to do so increases and the power of resistance declines. And now the vortex roars, and the struggling victim buffets the fiery wave with feebler stroke and waning supplication, until despair flashes upon his soul, and, with an outcry that pierces the heavens, he ceases to strive, and disappears!

LYMAN BEECHER.

LII. - HORRORS AND HONORS OF WAR.

THE miseries of war are miseries inflicted by man on man. They bear the impress of cruelty, of hardness of heart. The distorted features, writhing frames, and shrieks of the wounded and dying, these are not the chief horrors of war; they sink into unimportance compared with the infernal passions which work this woe. Death is a light evil, when not joined with crime. That man, born of woman, bound by ties of brotherhood to man, and commanded, by an inward law and the voice of God, to love and do good, should, through selfishness, pride, or revenge, inflict these agonies, and shed these torrents of human blood, here is an evil which combines with exquisite suffering fiendish guilt. All other evils fade before it.

The idea of honor is associated with war. But to whom does the honor belong? If to any, certainly not to the mass of the people, but to those who are particularly engaged in it. The mass of a people, who stay at home and hire others to fight; who sleep in their warm beds and hire others to sleep on the cold

and damp earth; who sit at their well-spread board, and hire others to take the chance of starving; who nurse the slightest hurt in their own bodies, and hire others to expose themselves to mortal wounds and to linger in comfortless hospitals; certainly this mass reap little honor from war. The honor belongs to those immediately engaged in it.

Let me ask, then, what is the chief business of war? It is to destroy human life, to mangle the limbs, to gash and hew the body, to plunge the sword into the heart of a fellow-creature, to strew the earth with bleeding frames, and to trample them under foot with horses' hoofs. It is to batter down and burn cities, to turn fruitful fields into deserts, to level the cottage of the peasant and the magnificent abode of opulence, to scourge nations with famine; to multiply widows and orphans.

Are these honorable deeds? Were you called to name ex-ploits' worthy of demons, would you not naturally select such as these? Grant that a necessity for them may exist; it is a dreadful necessity, such as a good man must recoil from with instinctive horror; and though it may exempt them from guilt, it cannot turn them into glory. We have thought that it was honorable to heal, to save, to mitigate pain, to snatch the sick and sinking from the jaws of death. We have placed among the revered benefactors of the human race the discoverers of arts which alleviate human sufferings; which prolong, comfort, adorn and cheer human life; and if these arts be honorable, where is the glory of multiplying and aggravating tortures and death?

DR. CHANNING.

LIII. -SKEPTICISM OF THE AGE.

Ir seems to me you lay your finger here on the heart of the world's maladies, when you call it a skeptical world. An insincere world; a godless untruth of a world! It is out of this, as I consider, that the whole tribe of social pestilences, French revolutions, chartisms, and what not, have derived their being,their chief necessity to be. This must alter. Till this alter, nothing can beneficially alter. My one hope of the world, my inexpugnable consolation, in looking at the miseries of the world, is, that this is altering. Here and there, one does now find a man who knows, as of old, that this world is a truth, and no plausibility and falsity; that he himself is alive, not dead or paralytic, and the world is alive, instinct with Godhood, beautiful and awful, even as in the beginning of days! One man once knowing this, many men, all men, must, by and by, come to know

THE SPIRIT OF PERSECUTION STILL EXTANT. 85

it. It lies there clear, for whosoever will take the spectacles off his eyes, and honestly look to know.

For such a man the unbelieving century, with its unblessed products, is already past; a new century is already come. The old unblessed products and performances, as solid as they look, are phantasms, preparing speedily to vanish. To this and the other noisy, very great looking simula'crum, with the whole. world huzzaing at its heels, he can say, composedly stepping aside, Thou art not true; thou art not extant, only semblant; go thy way! Yes, hollow formalism, gross Benthamism, and other unheroic atheistic insincerity, is visibly and even rapidly declining. An unbelieving eighteenth century is but an exception, such as now and then occurs. I prophesy that the world will once more become sincere; a believing world; with many heroes in it, a heroic world! It will then be a victorious world,―never till then.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

It is very difficult to make the mass of mankind believe that the state of things is ever to be otherwise than they have been accustomed to see it. I have very often heard old persons describe the impossibility of making any one believe that the American Colonies could ever be separated from this country. It was always considered as an idle dream of discontented politicians, good enough to fill up the periods of a speech, but which no practical man, devoid of the spirit of party, considered to be within the limits of possibility. There was a period when the slightest concession would have satisfied the Americans; but all the world was in heroics. One set of gentlemen met at the Lamb, and another at the Lion blood-and-treasure men, breathing war, vengeance, and contempt; and in eight years afterwards, an awkward-looking gentleman in plain clothes walked up to the drawing-room of St. James's, in the midst of the gentlemen of the Lion and the Lamb, and was introduced as the ambassador from the United States of America.

Mild and genteel people do not like the idea of persecution, and are advocates for toleration; but, then, they think it no act of intolerance to deprive Catholics of political power. The history of all this is, that all men secretly like to punish others for not being of the same opinion with themselves, and that this sort of privation is the only species of persecution of which the improved feeling and advanced cultivation of the age will admit.