May we not, we say again, rest in an all but certain hope that the
Divine Being will see fit to preserve His own work? For such, though
accomplished through human agency, we feel constrained to believe, have
been this Union and its remarkable constitution.
We have regarded the Union as the culmination of a long series of
endeavors, so to call them, on the part of Providence, to bring men from
a social condition characterized by the multiplicity, diversity,
separation, antagonism, and hostility of independent, warring, petty
states, into that larger, higher form of political and social life, that
shall combine in itself the three conditions of unity--variety in unity,
and of the utmost liberty with order--as the soul and life of the
political body. And that it has also been the aim of Providence, in the
formation of this Union, to accomplish the above object on as large a
scale as possible, in the present moral and intellectual condition of
the race.
Can we be far wrong in such a view? Think of our republic embracing in
its wide extent, one, two, three, or more hundred millions of human
beings, all in political union, enjoying the largest liberty possible in
the present life, as well as the ever-increasing influence and light of
religion, science, and education, giving augmented power to preserve and
rightly use that liberty.
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