When the corn and wine and oil, the silver and the gold, have become the main object of worship—that which men or nations do above all things desire—sham work of all kinds, and short cuts, by what we call financing and the like will be the means by which they will attempt to gain them.

When that state comes, men who love their country will welcome Danish invasions, civil wars, potato diseases, cotton famines, Fenian agitations, whatever calamity may be needed to awake the higher life again, and bid the nation arise and live.

That such visitations do come at such times as a matter of fact is as clear as that in certain states of the atmosphere we have thunder-storms. The thunder-storm comes with perfect certainty, and as a part of a natural and fixed order. We are all agreed upon that now. We all believe, I suppose, that there is an order—that there are laws which govern the physical world, asserting[85] themselves as much in storm and earthquake as in the succession of night and day, of seed-time and harvest. We who are Christians believe that order and those laws to proceed from God, to be expressions of His will. Do we not also believe that men are under a divine order as much as natural things? that there is a law of righteousness founded on the will of God, as sure and abiding as the law of gravitation? that this law of righteousness, this divine order, under which human beings are living on this earth, must and does assert and vindicate itself through and by the acts and lives of men, as surely as the divine order in nature asserts itself through the agency of the invisible power in earth and sea and air?

Surely Christianity, whatever else it teaches, at any rate assures us of this. And when we have made this faith our own, when we believe it, and not merely believe that we believe it, we have in our hand the clue to all human history. Mysteries in abundance will always remain. We may not be able to trace the workings of the law of righteousness in the confusions and bewilderments of our own day, or through the darkness and mist which shrouds so much of the life of other times and other races. But we know that it is there, and that it has its ground in a righteous will, which was the same a thousand years ago as it is to-day, which every man and nation can get to know; and just in so far as they know[86] and obey which, will they be founding families, institutions, states, which will abide.

If we want to test this truth in the most practical manner, we have only to take any question which has troubled, or is troubling, statesmen and rulers, and nations, in our own day. The slavery question is among the greatest of these. In the divine order, that institution was not recognized, there was no place at all set apart for it; on the contrary, He on whose will that order rests had said that he came to break every yoke. And so slavery would give our kindred in America no rest, just as it would give England no rest in the first thirty years of the century. The nation, desiring to go on living its life, making money, subduing a continent,
“Pitching new states as old-world men pitch tents,”

tried every plan for getting rid of the “irrepressible negro” question, except the only one recognized in the divine order—t............