it exists; and from the nature of its principles,
we can predict its future history. The confidence of bad men and the
despair of good men proceed equally from a too fixed attention to the
facts and events before their eyes, to the exclusion of the principles
which underlie and animate them; for no insight of principles, and of
the moral laws which govern human events, could ever cause tyrants to
exult or philanthropists to despond.

If we go farther into this question, we shall commonly find that the
facts and events to which we give the name of Providence are the acts
of human wills divinely overruled. There is iniquity and wrong in these
facts and events, because they are the work of free human wills. But
when these free human wills organize falsehood, institute injustice, and
establish oppression, they have passed into that mental state where
will has been perverted into wilfulness, and self-direction has been
exaggerated into self-worship. It is the essence of wilfulness that it
exalts the impulses of its pride above the intuitions of conscience
and intelligence, and puts force in the place of reason and right. The
person has thus emancipated himself from all restraints of a law higher
than his personality, and acts _from_ self, _for_ self, and in sole
obedience _to_ self. But this is personality in its Satanic form; yet it
is just here that some of our theologians have discovered in a person's
actions the purposes of Providence, and discerned the Divine intention
in the fact of guilt instead of in the certainty of retribution.
The tyrant element in man is found in this Satanic form of his
individuality. His will, self-released from restraint, preys upon and
crushes other wills. He asserts himself by enslaving others, and mimics
Divinity on the stilts of diabolism. Like the barbarian who thought
himself enriched by the powers and gifts of the enemy he slew, he
aggrandizes his own personality, and heightens his own sense of freedom,
through the subjection of feebler natures. Ruthless, rapacious, greedy
of power, greedy of gain, it is in Slavery that he wantons in all
the luxury of injustice, for it is here that he tastes the exquisite
pleasure of depriving others of that which he most values in himself.

Thus, whether we examine this system in the light of conscience and
intelligence, or in the light of history and experience, we come to but
one result,--that it has its source and sustenance in Satanic energy, in
S