On the American Continent, what a wonderful amalgamation of races we have witnessed, how wonderfully they have been fused into that one American people!—type and earnest of a larger fusion which Christianity will yet accomplish, when, by its blessed power, all tribes and tongues and races shall become one holy family. The present popularity of beneficences promises well for the missionary cause in the future. Men's hearts are undergoing a process of enlargement. Their sympathies are taking a wider scope. The world is getting closer, smaller, quite a compact affair. The world for Christ will yet be realized.
MORALITY.
Morality rests upon a sense of obligation; and obligation has no meaning except as implying a Divine command, without which it would cease to be.
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning,—an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
All systems of morality are fine. The gospel alone has exhibited a complete assemblage of the principles of morality, divested of all absurdity. It is not composed, like your creed, of a few common-place sentences put into bad verse. Do you wish to see that which is really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer.
To give a man a full knowledge of true morality, I would send him to no other book than the New Testament.
