e. The
tower, when finished, will present an elevation of 200 feet, with a
portico of twelve Corinthian columns, six in front and three on either
side, on the model of the Tower of the Wind at Athens. The entire
building will be Grecian in all its parts. One-fourth of the population
of Cincinnati are Roman Catholics. They have lately discontinued the
use of public government-schools for their children, and have
established some of their own, I am not so much alarmed at the progress
of Popery in America as I was before I visited that country. Its
proselytes are exceedingly few. Its supporters consist chiefly of the
thousands of Europeans, already Roman Catholic, who flock to the New
World. The real _progress_ of Popery is greater in Britain than in
America.

In the evening I preached for Mr. Boynton in the "Sixth-street Church,"
Mr. Boynton and his Church, heretofore Presbyterians, have recently
become Congregationalists. This has given great umbrage to the
Presbyterians. Congregationalism is rapidly gaining ground in the
Western World, and seems destined there, as in England since Cromwell's
time, to swallow up Presbyterianism. I make no invidious comparison
between the two systems: I merely look at facts. And it does appear to
me that Congregationalism--so simple, so free, so unsectarian, and so
catholic--is nevertheless a powerful absorbent. It _has_ absorbed all
that was orthodox in the old Presbyterian Churches of England; and it
_is_ absorbing the Calvinistic Methodists and the churches named after
the Countess of Huntingdon. It has all along exerted a powerful
influence on the Presbyterianism of America. The Congregational element
diffused among those churches occasioned the division of the
Presbyterian Church into Old School and New School.

Mr. Boynton is what a friend of mine called "intensely American." He
has lately published, under the title of "Our Country the Herald of a
New Era," a lecture delivered before the "Young Men's Mercantile
Library Association." To show the magnificent ideas the Americans
entertain of themselves and their country, I will transcribe a few
passages.

"This nation is an enigma, whose import no man as yet may fully know.
She is a germ of boundless things. The unfolded bud excites the hope of
one-half the human race, while it stirs the remainder with both anger
and alarm. Who shall now paint the beauty and attraction of the
expanded flower? Our Eagle is scarcely fledged; but one