the scenes I have
suggested, but could not hold the pen to portray? In your long life many
such have passed under your review. You know that _they_ are not
"_impossible_." Can they be to your taste? Do you believe that in
laboring to bring them about, the abolitionists are doing the will of
God? No! God is not there. It is the work of Satan. The arch-fiend,
under specious guises, has found his way into their souls, and with
false appeals to philanthropy, and foul insinuations to ambition,
instigates them to rush headlong to the accomplishment of his diabolical
designs.

We live in a wonderful age. The events of the last three quarters of a
century appear to have revolutionized the human mind. Enterprise and
ambition are only limited in their purposes by the horizon of the
imagination. It is the transcendental era. In philosophy, religion,
government, science, arts, commerce, nothing that has been is to be
allowed to be. Conservatism, in any form, is scoffed at. The slightest
taint of it is fatal. Where will all this end? If you can tolerate one
ancient maxim, let it be that the best criterion of the future is the
past. That, if any thing, will give a clue. And, looking back only
through your time, what was the earliest feat of this same
transcendentalism? The rays of the new moral Drummond Light were first
concentrated to a focus at Paris, to illuminate the universe. In a
twinkling it consumed the political, religious and social systems of
France. It could not be extinguished there until literally drowned in
blood. And then, from its ashes arose that supernatural man, who, for
twenty years, kept affrighted Europe in convulsions. Since that time,
its scattered beams, refracted by broader surfaces, have, nevertheless,
continued to scathe wherever they have fallen. What political structure,
what religious creed, but has felt the galvanic shock, and even now
trembles to its foundations? Mankind, still horror-stricken by the
catastrophe of France, have shrunk from rash experiments upon social
systems. But they have been practicing in the East, around the
Mediterranean, and through the West India Islands. And growing
confident, a portion of them seem desperately bent on kindling the
all-devouring flame in the bosom of our land. Let it once again blaze up
to heaven, and another cycle of blood and devastation will dawn upon the
world. For our own sake, and for the sake of those infatuated men who
are madly driving on the confl