of death, he exclaimed with great emphasis and fervour, La France doit avoir une religion! "France must have religion." Liberty cannot exist without morality, nor morality without the religion of the Bible. It is a nation's love of law, its love of wise and benevolent institutions, its attachment to the public weal, its peaceful and benevolent spirit, its love of virtue, and these alone that can make it free. Take these away and there must be tyrants in their place. I hold no axiom more true or more important than this, that man must be governed by moral truth, or despotic power. As soon as a nation becomes corrupt, her liberties degenerate into faction; and then nothing short of the strong arm of despotism will restrain the passions of men, and controul their pride, their selfishness, their love of gold, their thirst for domination, and their brutal licentiousness. The Bible alone is the source of that high-toned moral principle which is necessary to all classes, in all their intercourse, for the exercise of all their rights, and the enjoyment of all their privileges. Without it, rulers become tyrants, and the people are fitted only for servitude, or anarchy. Without it, there is no such thing as an intelligent, lofty, ardent, honourable and disinterested character. Nothing else is capable of combining a nation into one great brotherhood-annihilating its divisions-quenching its hate-destroying its spirit of party-bringing all parts with all their jarring interests into one great whole, and inscribing on the banner, forever sacred to freedom and virtue, E

pluribus unum. Nothing else will rightly controul its suffrages; send up a salutary influence into its senate chamber; diffuse its power through all ranks of office; direct learning and laws; act on commerce and the arts, and spread that hallowed influence through every department of society that shall render its liberties perpetual. Statesmen may be slow to learn from the Bible; but they will find no surer guide to political skill and foresight. The common people may be slow to learn from the Bible; but they will no where find their interests so watchfully protected, and their liberties defended with such ability and so many counsels of wisdom. The designs of ambitious and intriguing men, the artifices of demagogues, the usurpations of power, the corrupting influence of high places, and the punishment of political delusion, all find their prototype and antidote in the principles, prophecies, biography, and history of the Bible. Where may a people learn a more affecting lesson, than in the succession of weak and wicked princes, from the death of Josiah to the destruction of the city and temple, and the capture of Zedekiah, by Nebuchadnezzar? Read the history of the subtle and traitorous Absalom. Bold, valiant, and revengeful; haughty, eloquent and popular, he "stole the hearts of the people ;" expelled his venerable father from Jerusalem; and having conciliated the affections of a misguided and deceived populace, became after a short period as much the object of their contempt, as he was before the object

of their veneration. Were such a monument as Absolam's pillar of stones erected over the body of every demagogue at the present day, it might be a wholesome comment upon the influence the Bible exerts upon the principles of civil liberty. Read too the history of Jeroboam the son of Nebat; a base idolater, the descendant of a slave, a turbulent, ambitious prince, a fugitive from public justice, corrupt and intriguing, raised to supreme power by an unprincipled majority, corrupting and destroying the people, drying up the sources of national wealth, entailing poverty and abjectness upon the ten tribes to the latest generation, and drawing down upon them the wrath of heaven for twenty successive reigns, and more than two centuries after his death! Contrast also the reign of Solomon with the reign of Jeroboam; the reign of Asa with the reign of Ahab; the reign of Jehoash with the reign of Jehoahaz; and you will form a just estimate of good rulers, and see what a fearful scourge wicked rulers are to their subjects. The God of the Bible is the king of nations. The Lord is with them

while they are with him. Creation and providence are under his controul. With all their influences, all their power, all their glory, they are under him as the Prince of its princes, the Lord of its lords, and all subservient to his designs. A heathen prince was once constrained to say, that "his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom is from generation to generation." His

service is freedom; alienation from his empire is the veriest bondage.

The land we live in is a Christian land. The Bible is here recognized as true; and in our own State, has been solemnly decided as constituting a part of the common law. We shall be a free people, only as we remain a Christian people. If a low and degraded infidelity should ever succeed in its already begun enterprise of sending up from the whole face of this land her poisonous exhalations, and the youth of our country become regardless of the God of their fathers; men in other lands who have been watching for our downfall, will in a few short years enrole us on the catalogue of enslaved nations. You will have a part to act on this great theatre, my young friends, when older heads shall sleep beneath the clods of the valley. Act it like Christian men. Love your country, and for your country's sake. Hold those in detestation who disturb her peace, and tamper with the minds of the young for the purposes of office and gain. It will be in vain that infidel politicians plot the ruin of this fair land, if her young men remain firm to the interests of moral virtue and the Bible. Would that my voice could reach the ear of every young man in the land, and announce to him, how much his country expects from every intelligent friend of the Bible. There is no want of effort to corrupt and demoralize the young men of this nation; and when once this is done, they in their turn will become the corruptérs

and demoralizers of others, until the nation becomes ripened for ruin. The Bible is your protection. There is a natural propensity in the human mind to lawless indulgence, and to hostility to all those systems of human government that are based on the word of God. Beware of being carried down this fatal current. There is nothing that may be so safely trusted in the formation of your political sentiments and influence, as the Bible. I have never known a great political struggle in a Christian land which was not a great moral struggle, and would not have been decided in an hour by the appropriate influence of the Bible. Here is the danger of this Republic. So long as the Bible remains our glory and happi ness, our liberties will remain; but beyond this, there is nothing to forbid the fear, that we shall gradually become an enslaved nation.

But I must close, with a single thought more. "If the Son make you free, ye shall be free indeed." Seriously considered, other liberty is an imaginary theory-an illusion-a name-a sound. You may chant its praises and celebrate its conquests, and yet be slaves. You may deify it, and erect to it monuments, and build its altars, and pour upon them costly libations, and yet be the slaves of sin. But there is a liberty that is worth the name. It is that intellectual and moral condition of the soul which constitutes her highest excellence and glory. It is that spiritual libertythat Christian freedom-that liberty of mind, and