nd tutelary
divinity,--a mere refinement of fetichism. The world has too often seen
"captive good attending captain ill" to believe in a providence that
sets man-traps and spring-guns for the trespassers on its domain, and
Christianity, perhaps, elevated man in no way so much as in making
every one personally, not gregariously, answerable for his doings or
not-doings, and thus inventing conscience, as we understand its
meaning. But just in proportion as the private citizen is enlightened
does he become capable of an influence on that manifold result of
thought, sentiment, reason, impulse, magnanimity, and meanness which,
as Public Opinion, has now so great a share in shaping the destiny of
nations. And in this sense does he become responsible, and out of the
aggregate of such individual responsibilities we can assume a common
complicity in the guilt of common wrongdoing.

But surely the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth; and though we do not
believe in his so immediate interference in events as would satisfy our
impatience of injustice, yet he achieves his ends and brings about his
compensations by having made Good infinitely and eternally lovely to
the soul of man, while the beauty of Evil is but a brief cheat, which
their own lusts put upon the senses of her victims. And it is surely
fixed as the foundations of the earth that faithfulness to right and
duty, self-sacrifice, loyalty to that service whose visible reward is
often but suffering and baffled hope, draw strength and succor from
exhaustless springs far up in those Delectable Mountains of trial which
the All-knowing has set between us and the achievement of every noble
purpose. History teaches, at least, that wrong can reckon on no
alliance with the diviner part of man, while every high example of
virtue, though it led to the stake or the scaffold, becomes a part of
the reserved force of humanity, and from generation to generation
summons kindred natures to the standard of righteousness as with the
sound of a trumpet. There is no such reinforcement as faith in God, and
that faith is impossible till we have squared our policy and conduct
with our highest instincts. In the loom of time, though the woof be
divinely foreordained, yet man supplies the weft, and the figures of
the endless web are shaped and colored by our own wisdom or folly. Let
no nation think itself safe in being merely right, unless its captains
are inspired and sustained by a sense thereof.

We do