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Show 10~ TIIIKI> DAV-,\ F'I'ERNOOX SESSJOX. questions, settled in the early ages of tile world, anJ th~usands of ti1~1es since· but thev now seem to come forward as fresh questions, demandmg a deci!:iion wili1 all the eagerness of zeal, with all that gives weight to high pretension, and with an impatience that.forbids delay, from the magnitude of the interests involved; so that our mmds are compelled to become moral scales, to re-weigh and re-mark the mi~hty interests o~ humanity .. But these questions have been we1ghed and cons1dered by 1-lLm who cannot err, who is the author of right, the enemy of wrong. His weights and measures are the enduring revelations of perfect wisdom. The deliveretl opinions of the Eterna~ came ~own l? ~~~is world, _whi.le men \~~re conten~ing in the forum of phllos~ph1cal ~cfi~lltiOi~S, g_rop_mg tn the twll1ght ?f the_ir understandings, and wastmg thc1r lives 111 hndmg a stanJard of nght 111 uninstructed conscience. The pity of Ilim whose home is immensity, who is from everlusting to everlasting, who placed the shining worlds on their great path-ways, and gave them a momentum which flying ages do not weaken, who knows each rood and inch between all the self-balanced globes as they rush round the skies in . their u_ntired r:.lcc of ag;-es, - of that God, who permit~ each one to travel liS subl11ne aut! annual JOUrney around the sun, was manifested in giving man a rule of action for time, eternity, forever," LovE THY NEIGHBOR AS TIIYSEJ.F.11 The law of gravitation of the moral universe! Every departure from this eternal landmark of duty, however small, has been the parent of criwe and human ag~ny. . The first issue ever made between nght and wrong, the holy liberty of conscience, and the brutal violence of oppression, was between the t~vo first of woman born. \Vhile the younger employed moral weapons to ViliUicate his sentiments, such as prayer and petition, and ",,.ent to God for strength, wisdom, and direction; the elder used the modern club-logic; he preferred the bludgeon to manly debate; to silence investigation was bett:r than to convince; to murder his opponent, was easier than to answer Ins arguments. Cain was the founder of the brute-force system of logic, being the only method then, or evtr since known by its admirers, of auswering tmmuwerable arguments. . This mode of reasoning, like the extreme unction for the dying man, IS not to be resorted to except in the distressing emergency of having no other mode by which to protect Folly from contempt, Obstinacy from rebuke, Ignorance from pity, and Crime from punishment. If Cain could h~ve proved Abel in an error, then Abel might have died in his bed, at nme hundred years of age, or more. ~ut because he could ~ot, therefo~e he slew him. So we see the first witness called to cstab!Lsh truth died a martyr; and the morning of the new world was hung in black by the depravity of mau. The next great issue made up for everlasting remembrance, was betw.eeu Noah and his family of eight souls, against the world,-of right agamst wrong. What, could eight persons be the only ones right, and the wh~\e world wrong beside'{ It seems so. Truth is not always found keepmg company with the rnol titudc, leading armies, or seeking the shout of numbers. But the last mountain top of the ante-diluvian world was covered will1 water, tmth then being on board the floating ark, in the eight witnesses, on that ocean without shore or island. These eight human beings were the connecting }inks between two worlds; and lest their narrati\'e :should _be denied in the coming profane ages of philosophic scepticism, the mass1ve Hoors on which the ocean roll ed, were torn up, and piled away on the tops :'il'EEL:H OF AJ, \'AN ST KWART. 103 of. mighty mountains, in mom1mentnl strr~ta, on whose pages are written the history of a drowned world,-a record of God's JUdgment lithographed on the primal formations of the enduring rock ! Dut the most sublime and grand issue ever framed between guilty mnn and his Maker, on the trial of which such amazing consequences depended WaS, WIIE'l'UtR l't1AN SUOULD IH: 'l'lli~ l'ROJ>JmTV 01-" l'IIAN, OR Tilt: Si::RVANT OF Goo ?-whether man should lose his charter in himself and become incorporated in another's self ?-whether a man should cease to have use for his mind anti his body, so that another might take that mind and body and approp1iate it to himself and cxting11ish all claim of the individual in and to himself r This coulJ not be pcrmittell without deny ing God's interest anU claim in each being whom he had created for I-I is own will and pleasure. Therefore, as GoJ had made man, be l1ml a right to his own workmanship; and having conferred on man certain high powers, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which happiness consists in obeying his Creator's l::.ws, this being could not abandon or surrender these rights to another human being, nor could another hu111an being assume them,rights, which in th eir nature could neither be surrendered hy one, or assumed by another, because of God's interest in man as his Mnker.-Gotl had a claim on those uusurrenderable and unassumable rights-a mortgage on them which can never be extingu ished in time or cancelled in Eternity. Egypt was the theatre of this momentous issue, in the event of which every question afl"'ecting human liberty was iJn•ol\'ed, considered and deter· mined. \Vho were the parties? Haughty Egypt in the plenitude of her power, with a population of twenty millions, the schoolmaster of the world, the granary of mankind, the home of eivilization; whose proud cities opened and shut their hundred gates; whose imperishable structures of monumental marble must have equalled in expenditure the united energies of the gene· rations of the nineteenth century; whose mountains for miles inward were penetrated and excavated with the silent palaces of the dead; whose power brought from the cataracts of the Nile to the Delta, the :Monolith temple of solid rock,-Egypt, with her acre-covering temples-with her artificial Jakes, her giant sph inxes, her twenty pyramids, those piles of wonder where art seems to rival nature in her boldest work. And on the other hand two and a half millions of lfcbrew :slaves; a nation of tasked bondmen, brick makers under their task-masters and drivers. Egypt was the oppressor; two and a half millions of Hebrews were the oppressed slaves, and God the judge, a\•enger and deliverer. Never was there such a display of Almighty power, ne\•er since, the creation of this world, has the Arm of Omnipotence been more s ignally revealed than in this manife:station of His utter abhorrence of slavery, and His love of human liberty. lie caused the mighty river of Egypt to run wi;.h blood from its upper cataracts to its seven mouths, and as the Mediterranean received the tribute of the Nile, il blushed at Pharaoh·s insult to .Jehovah , in presuming to lwld man as a slave. The hail and lightning, the ice and fire leaped from their chambers in the clouds to the s la\'e-insulted soil, to avenge the quarrel of the abused. The locusts forsook their sullen solitudes of whirling sands and in dark armies came riUing on the winds to consume the products of the spoiler's fields. The murrain smote the cattle of the t<tsk-ma$tCr; and on that last dreadful night uprose the death-wail aloug the reeJy margin of the Nile, and from the heart of the mighty cities, as the Angel of Death pas:sed silently and unseen from house to house and struck down two and a half millions of the first-born of Egypt. Pharaoh, in the pride of human glory, said to himself," I will become the defender of Egypt's power r~gainst these slaves, my brickmakers, by whose unpaid |