church and the world-ridiculed by the latter, as visionary enthusiasts hoping against hope, and neglected or "damned with faint praise" by the former, as well-meaning but weakminded, these men are now beginning to reap their reward. They had faith that in due time it would be so, if they did not faint. That faith is now beginning to be sight. While they were saying it is yet four months to harvest, they looked up and beheld the fields already white unto the harvest. In a word, the signs of progress are so many and so manifest, that the accomplishment of the great project is to be no longer accounted a matter of hope, but of reasonable certainty; the beginning of the end" has come. The friends of man, who have so long sustained each other by the promise that some future age shall behold what their eyes should not see, may now congratulate one another, and praise God, and take fresh courage. Certainly we cannot observe what is now brought to our view, without congratulatory words to them and to our

race.

If any are disposed to say, that these congratulations are too early, we ought to wait, we speak prematurely; we reply, by asking them to look at the symptoms to which we refer; have they turned their eyes in this direction? have they taken any note of the premonitory signs? Let not those, who stand obstinately with their back upon the East, think themselves qualified to deny that the first rosy streaks of the dawn are on the misty horizon. Let them not insist that there is no life or sound abroad, because in their deep slumbers they have not themselves heard the early cock crowing. Let them believe those who have been awake and watching through the night, whose senses have been quickened by their vigilance, whose straining eyes and anxious ears have become so sensitive, that they catch certainty from amid the dimness which is still impenetrable by other senses, and who are now ready to shout over Christendom the tidings of the approaching morn. They are sure the day is about to break, and would fain awaken the world to rejoice.

And why should not men be ready to receive the tidings? It is nothing new, that a cause makes a long progress in profound silence; that its principles lie working in the minds of men, unobserved and unsuspected, shaping, moulding, changing their ideas, and then bursts forth at once in sudden activity and universal change. So the principles of the Reformation

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long moved secretly about, and became at last thoroughly inwrought into the public mind; but the outer order of society gave no signs of change till Luther arose, and then it was simultaneous and universal. So in the French Revolutions the first and the second; the antecedent preparation was silent and long; the catastrophe was sudden and overwhelming. So in the Temperance Reformation of the last fifteen years, which offers an illustration perfectly parallel to the case before us. The friends of that reform began hopefully more than thirty years ago; they made an impression; they spread the alarm, awakened attention to facts, infused the elementary principles; but there was only a slight advance, and then a pause indifference apathy; the friends of the undertaking were in a fair way to become altogether discouraged. But, meantime, the thing was working in the depths of men's minds, thoughts were maturing in the bosom of society, and by and bye, at the right time, they came forth in action, and a great revolution was rapidly accomplished. The field, on which so much labor seemed to have been unprofitably wasted, became green in one night; the seeds so long despaired of shot up everywhere, they grew steadily, rapidly, till the early planters were lost in amazement at the almost incredible harvest. It requires no extraordinary faith, no unreasonable stretch of credulity, to think that this may be the process by which the prevalence of Peace principles shall be secured, and the reign of War demolished. Why improbable, that beneath the indifference which has so long mocked the entreaties and prayers of disinterested philanthropy, there has been going on a process of preparation, which is, ere long, to surprise the inattentive world with sudden manifestations of a wide-spread change of opinion, and a resolute agreement among the nations to banish war from the world?

In order to see how far the present position of affairs gives hope, we must recollect what has been the history of the past. It must first of all be remembered, that the time has never been when some far-sighted and benevolent men have not we do not say deplored and declaimed against the follies and wickedness of war, but have seen the possibility of abolishing it, and have entertained the hope that it would be done. Three centuries ago Erasmus published his Complaint of Peace, a treatise that may well compare with any that have been written in the present century. But it seems to have produced no

effect on the opinion or action of the age; and all, who afterward from time to time echoed his voice, received no response but the hollow echo of their own words, like the empty reverberation of a trumpet among the hills, that dies away in the air and leaves no mark. Christendom still remained thoroughly unpurged of its pagan mind. Even the eloquent and soul-stirring orations of the two great preachers of their day in Britain, Chalmers and Robert Hall, seem to have made no impression beyond that of admiration for their eloquence. And Neckar, in France, by his urgent arguments and glowing expostulations, instinct with wisdom and eloquent with truth and feeling, effected nothing. All other individual efforts in like manner failed; they cast a momentary light which attracted the attention of a few, who looked and wondered for the instant, then turned away, and the darkness closed in as before.

Is there not an impressive lesson to be extracted from this fruitlessness of such powerful efforts? Do we not discover in the discouraging fact, the wisdom and divinity of the modern system of associated action? Do we not find in it a refutation of all the theoretic arguments that are sometimes broached for the superior efficiency of individual effort? No efforts more true and powerful than those of the eminent men just referred to. How happened it then that they came to nought? How happened it that Erasmus made no impression, and that for three hundred years the world went on sinning and suffering in spite of his appeal, which seemed as if it might waken and change the universe? He was alone, that is the answer. It was the mind of an individual that reasoned; it was the voice of an individual that spoke. If Erasmus had known the force which lies in combination, and had gathered into a society the good men who felt as he did, and if that society had given itself to the work of changing the sentiment of men and bringing about the pacification of the world, with the resolute and onward spirit which characterizes all true Christian action on a great scale, the result would have been how different! What an alleviation of the horrors of the subsequent three hundred years! What a different condition of the world at the present time! The ultimate object might, ere this, have been very nearly, if not quite accomplished ;-and the long enjoyment of universal peace would have already produced effects on the character, condition, civilization of society, whose magnitude it is difficult to conjecture. What

might not have resulted from the steady propagation of peace principles for three hundred years! But because it was the solitary voice of one man and not the acclamation of a multitude, it was overpowered by the dissonances of the world. After a brief hour nobody remembered that he had spoken. For the same reason all who lifted up the cry from time to time afterward, spoke to the winds. It was in every instance the shout of a single voice; - one voice! to balance the noise of all the captains and their shouting, the acclamations of victory, and the Te Deums of the church! And when Noah Worcester, in 1815, uttered his grieved and indignant cry, it must in the same way have died upon the air, and before this have been forgotten, if he had not taken care to give it the power of increase and perpetuity, by banding together a company whose office should be to repeat it with perpetual iteration, and take care that it should not fade from the audience of mankind. His book was perishable; like the "Complaint of Peace," it was the natural, and probable destiny of the "Solemn Review" to be read and praised in its day by a few, then be shoved aside by other more practical topics, and at length be known only to the scholars and antiquarians, who should find it on the mouldy upper shelf of the public libraries; while the spirit of the world and the practices of society should remain just what they would have been if the tract had never been written. But happily, the times had changed. It had become known that united action is strength; that a great thought, born of one mind in solitude, is to be nursed and matured by the union of many in society. Therefore the principles and faith of this one man, who alone could do nothing and must soon die, were embodied in an association of brethren which could do much, and need not die; which might descend with an unquenchable and ever more vigorous action from generation to generation, might extend itself from land to land, and by degrees enlist in its ranks the great majority of Christian men; until these principles, thus enthroned in the mind of the majority, should sway the action of society and determine the condition of the world. Happily there were good men and brave, who were ready to attempt this magnanimous design. They could not be daunted, as long as they remembered that eleven humble men, banded together in an upper room, once formed an association which has overturned the world. They organized the Massachusetts Peace Society in

the month of December, 1815; by auspicious coincidence, on a day of the very week, in which the treaty of Peace was signed at Ghent. Thus the solitary voice of the "Solemn Review " became the outcry of many, and insisted on being heard. As the procession passed on, another and another joined the band, till the earnest cutcry swelled louder and louder on the breeze, and rolled on from state to state, across the wide seas, and over the Eastern continent, penetrating the palaces of kings, alarming the garrisons of war, and everywhere, from every class of men, calling out to join the philanthropic anthem; till statesmen in their robes of office gave assent, and warriors laid down their trappings and their armor to join this new crusade of the Prince of Peace.

The great hope of success, then, rests, under God, upon the principle of association; and in proportion as we witness the activity of the Peace Society, we behold the approach of the predicted and longed-for day of universal peace. The action of the Massachusetts Peace Society was never intermitted, though sometimes it evidently felt the benumbing influence of the general apathy. The unconcern, with which even the most Christian portion of the community regarded its movements, could not be other than disheartening. Yet it manfully kept on its way. It held its anniversary on the evening of the 25th of December, and then, to small audiences, were addressed Orations that were fit to move the world, and yet could make small apparent impression on the skeptical mass. Even the Reports of the active Committee of Inquiry-the result of great labor, and the depositories of astounding facts and equally astounding calculations, seemed to be heard by the multitude with a sort of self-complacent incredulity, which seemed to say, "such things cannot be in so good a world as this; or if they are, it is no concern of ours; none but fanatics would meddle with them." The society, however, persevered. Dr. Worcester, gentle, serene, undoubting, sat in his sick man's chair, and pondered, and prayed, and hoped, and sent out from his retirement the quarterly Friend of Peace; - not wholly in vain;-it arrested the attention of many, and gave conviction to some, and excited an active zeal in a few. We cannot name that publication without a passing expression of our admiration, that for so long a period one man should have carried it on, almost unaided, with so perpetual a variety of argument and illustration, with a spirit never extravagant, and a zeal that never flagged, undismayed and undisheartened to the end.