NOTE B.

Referred to in Page 68.

FROM ALLISON'S SERMONS.

"We live in times when the judgments of the Lord are in the earth, when nations are falling around us, when scarcely a year passes without being marked by the dethronement of monarchs. Do we look for the causes of these awful events? We shall find them in their national sins; in the corruption of their private manners; in the injustice or oppression of their internal governments; or in the ambition or avarice of their national policy. The period of the devices of man's heart has arrived, and the counsel of the Lord arises to stand; the foot of guilt has long trod upon the earth, and legions of armed men are sprung up to avenge and to purify it.

"These also, with all their pride and all their atrocity, will pass. The storm which now rages over a suffering world, will renovate but not destroy. The empires that perish, will perish only to be renewed in nobler forms, and under more auspicious rule.

"The power itself, which the Almighty hath made the instrument of his justice, will last but for the time appointed; and when the devices of ambition

have passed like the storms of winter, over a suffering world, the counsel of the Lord will stand and awaken a noble spring. *

*

*

"You see the occasional visitation of war and of calamity, operating upon the moral world, like the occasional visitations of the storm and the tempest, upon the material world, and ending in purifying the moral atmosphere, and invigorating the powers of moral vegetation."

Wraxall, in his Age of Henry the IVth, written about the time of the French revolution, has the following reflection.

"It is apparent, that however lamentable and destructive were the immediate effects of the civil and religious wars in France in the sixteenth century, their remote consequences were in many points of view beneficial. It will be the province of future historians to determine, whether the present sanguinary race of republicans, who have effected the entire change of landed, and almost of monied property; who have spilt more blood than all the tyrants of antiquity; and who seem to emulate only the crimes of Greece and Rome, may not, like tempests and hurricanes, purge the moral and civil atmosphere of France: and whether, from the bosom of anarchy, infidelity and carnage, a new and more beautiful order of events may not arise, as did precisely two centuries ago, under Henry

the IVth, in that distracted and depopulated country."

That much real good has resulted from the horrors of the revolution, will not be doubted for a moment, when the situation of France is considered previous thereto. Desolating, indeed, has been the carnage, but glorious has been the triumph.

A despotic monarchy has been broken down, that supported 80,000 spies and informers; an aristocratic nobility, that constituted one hundredth part of the population, with immense revenues, and who were still exempt from taxation, has been dissolved; and finally a church hierarchy overthrown, more profligate and corrupt than most that the world has seen.

NOTE C.

Referred to in Page 77.

Sensible minds have sometimes been struck with, and perhaps ready to doubt the truth of the account, of Abraham being commanded to offer his son as a sacrifice. The state of mankind was then so different from the present, that it is impossible for it to be realized by any present estimate of things. The people a round him, were con

stantly in the habit of sacrificing their children; but it would probably never have been required, if he had really sacrificed him in his own heart. But waving this question, it has been satisfactorily asserted, that the substitution of a vacarious victim, had been so striking a circumstance to the Egyptians, as to cause them, from that time, to abolish the sacrifice of children,* Manetho, who wrote several centuries before the christian era, asserts, that by a law made by Amoses, it was enacted, that waxen sacrifices should be substituted in their place. This was done in the 25th year of the age of Isaac, corresponding with the time when Abraham prepared for his immolation. Children had previously been sacrificed three in a day, in the same manner as calves.

* See Encyclopedia, Brittanica and dessertations on Josephus.