necessity, flung abroad into the circumambient darkness. At first, indeed, the darkness comprehended it not,' but with the lapse of time gradually came understanding and appreciation. So that, in truth, from this chance-dropped and unpromising germ, issued the stately and far-spreading growth of Modern European Civilization.

So stands, then, the testimony of Ancient History, concerning the point in discussion. We behold Civilization issuing from the far-off, unknown Orient, introduced by Egyptian and Phoenician immigrants into Greece, and there coming to perfection; from Greece glancing upon and brightening through Rome; from Rome received into the bosom of a wide extended barbarism, and there drawing effectual furtherance from a new Power, a Religion from the Jordan's banks, and finally resulting in that manifold and affluent Civilization, wherein our lot is cast.

The

The same conclusion is enforced by contemporary History. North American Savages have been known to Europeans for more than two centuries. And yet the tribes left to themselves, have not, in two hundred years, advanced one step in improvement beyond the contemporaries of Raleigh and the Pilgrims. Not one scientific or literary production; not a single invention or discovery in even the practical appliances of life; not an iota of mitigation in the ferocity of their principles and customs, have appeared among them during those two centuries, which have witnessed, in close proximity to them, a little one become a thousand, and a small one a strong nation,' and innumerable square miles of wilderness transformed into a fruitful garden, by the intelligent industry of the European race. How and why is this? Planted amid natural scenery, which in sublimity and loveliness Earth elsewhere can hardly match; with stupendous mountains, Arcadian vallies, and boundless prairies encircling them; with rivers like flowing lakes, and lakes like inland oceans spread out before them; with primeval forests, whose giant growths shame the pigmy products of Europe, wooing them from their deep-voiced shades, and the azure of Italian skies unrolled above them, studded with stars no whit less bright than those which gem the brow of Oriental night; how have men, with all man's faculties and feelings, acted upon by all these extraordinary outward incentives, still continued, from generation to generation, enveloped in the gloom of primitive ignorance and barbarism? Simply from the action of the law under consideration, that the original impulse to a people's civilization must come from abroad. The fierce and irreconcilable antipathy of the red man to the white, has precluded the former from the operation of this law in his favor, and hence, according to our theory, the melancholy result we have described.

Finally, the Bedouin Arabs go to illustrate the same point. It was predicted of them, before the birth of Ishmael their progenitor, that they should be wild men, their hand against every man, and every man's hand against them.' The prophecy has been verified to the letter. Four thousand years have rolled away; nations have been born, have filled out their date, and been reft of their national existence; empires and dynasties have risen and flourished, and declined and passed away; and still the sons of Ishmael have survived and do survive, a distinct, peculiar, unconquered race, perpetu

ally attacking and attacked by all people else; the very same uncultivated, barbarous, robber tribe, that they were twenty centuries before the advent of Christ. The explanation of their state, upon our theory, is easy enough. At odds with all the world, they, of course, shut out all humanizing influences from abroad; and so long as they persist in repelling all foreign impulses to improvement, they must needs continue, even as now, uncivilized and barbarian.

If any should now, as is natural, propound the question, 'whence came the first civilized Society, and by what methods was it trained to a fitness for communicating to others an impulse to Civilization, according to the Law we have been considering, we can only reply our total ignorance. We might, indeed, conjecture, and so may others with equal probability of correctness. In truth, the same conjecture would naturally occur to all. Suffice it for us to have produced the testimony of History, so far back as its authentic records go, as to the ordinary course of Providence in the matter under discussion.

The final cause, too, of this Law of Providence were well worth our dilating on at length, did our limits permit. It resolves itself, in brief, into a call on men to help one another; to put in practice the second of the two great commandments, 'to love our neighbor as ourselves; since it makes it depend on us whether our fellow men shall reach the elevation whereof they are capable, and leaves it at our option whether or not to confer on them the most inestimable of all earthly boons, the boon of Civilization.

But we proceed to specify other instruments and means exerting an agency in the process of human development. Among these, a prominent place is held by the wants and desires of our common nature. These all crave satisfaction, and, to obtain it, put in motion the intellect through all its departments, and so work out the development of its whole various capacities.

For example, we hunger, and lo! the fruitful and marvellous results! Agriculture springs into being, with many an auxiliary Science, and practical processes without number. Commerce soon follows, and, attended by a host of Sciences and Mechanic Arts, by itself called into life, traverses every ocean, floats over every inland lake, and threads every winding river, in quest of appliances to the primitive or the factitious demands of the appetite of hunger.

We are naked, and lo! another series of marvels! Manufactures are created, and, in their turn, require and originate for their use a thousand sciences and practical operations. The blue expanse of the air; the green abysses of the sea; the dark depths of the earth; the fervors of the tropics, the rigors of the poles, and the variable clime of the temperate zones; all are compelled to become tributary to covering the nakedness of the human body.

We lack shelter from the inclement elements, and note the results. Architecture is born, with the many knowledges and skills involved in it; and the forest lays down its antique, giant growths; the mountain opens wide its stony bosom; the earth surrenders the treasures of her secret repositories; and every kingdom of Nature brings its contributions, to furnish a shelter for man's corporeal frame.

We are social and sympathetic beings, and behold the consequences.

The mighty organization of Civil Government; the infinite multiplicity of social institutions; the conjugal, parental, and filial relations; these, and a thousand results beside, are the fruit of the one simple principle of sympathy in man.

We have imagination and taste, a love for the beautiful and sublime; and, at their bidding, a glittering and wondrous creation rises on the world. The stately and picturesque Edifice; the richlycarved and shapely Column; the Statue, seeming with its spotless white, like a spiritual body, out from which the high angelic nature gleams, even as a light shines through its enclosing vase; the Painting, which images life, but life in glorious transfiguration; Poetry, with its thoughts that breathe and words that burn,' and its numbers rolling and reverberating through the soul's depths, like the organ's tones through a minster's ailes; Music, with its mystical enchantments, prisoning the soul and lapping it in Elysium ;' Romance, with its dear witcheries and irresistible fascinations; all this manifold and magnificent world is the product of the simple elements we have indicated above.

We have an instinct bidding us aspire to somewhat beyond the Present and Visible, and yearning for alliance and intercommunion with a Power less mutable and feeble, and more enduring and perfect than ourselves, and the result is Religion, with its injunctions and interdicts, its exalting hopes and its overcoming dreads, its symbols and ceremonials, and its worship of vast variety and manifold accompaniment.

Once more: we are liable to casualty and disease. And the result is Medicine, which, for its uses, explores every kingdom of Nature, searching through sea, air, and land; analyzing all substances and revealing their most occult properties; and Surgery, which unfolds the cunning mechanism of the human frame, running the blind round of the life-current through even its scarce visible channels, and threading, one by one, those inconceivably delicate fibres, which spread their tracery through and around every portion of this fabric so fearfully and wonderfully made;' both, meanwhile, in the quest of remedial agencies, originating a thousand inventions and discoveries.

So it is, then, that our natural wants and desires, acting on the means furnished by the Creator in the worlds of matter and of thought, tend to develope man's capacities, and accomplish the work of human Civilization. And how marvellous the spectacle! Out of a few simple elements mingled in man's physical and mental structure, a result is compounded not less various and vast than Nature itself; awful in grandeur and resplendent in beauty, bearing the crown and sceptre of authentic majesty and power, even the World of Civilization! Does not Man show herein, that he was indeed, 'made in the image of God,' and that, in some humbler degree, he is like his Divine Original, a creator? Compare this earth in its primeval condition, and Man in the savage state, with the same earth when it has passed under cultivation, and the same Man in a state of high civilization, and say if a process has not here been wrought in some sort akin to that of old, which inspired 'the morning Stars to sing together, and all the Sons of God to shout for joy!'

It remains now to enumerate sundry causes, which so modify the action of those already considered, as to impart to the Civilization of different Communities diversities of form, aspect, and spirit. Among these causes, is the Geography of a country, including its soil, climate, and physical outlines. These must, as matter of course, communicate some direction, as well as fix some limitation, to man's activity, since it belongs to him not to create, but to apply means and materials furnished to his hand. That the inhabitants of the Tropics should differ from those of the Polar regions, and the dwellers in the Temperate zones from both, in manners, ways of life, and general character, and again, that the inhabitants of inland and those of maritime regions should exhibit similar diversities, we should naturally anticipate, and our anticipation is fully justified by experience.

For example, the Oriental and the European worlds, peopled by the same original stock, exhibit forms of society, features of character, and habits of life, very distinctly and widely at variance. Of the East, fixedness, immobility, is a characteristic so strongly marked, as to strike the most superficial observer. Thousands of years have wrought scarce the slightest change either in its political and religious systems and social institutions, or even in the minor usages of daily life.

The European World, on the contrary, is characterized quite as strongly by change, revolution, progress. The East has, indeed, had its convulsions and its changes of dynasty. But its changes were but the substitution of one race for another to mount the same throne and wield the self-same sceptre, and its convulsions were like ocean's storms, which, after all their fury and uproar, subside, leaving each bound and barrier as before. But the convulsions of Europe have often changed the character of entire communities, and re-cast the whole structure of their social life; and its History, through alternate advance and retrogression, has been, on the whole, the History of Progress. The political governments of the East are Despotisms, subordinating the citizen's substance, liberty, and even life, to the arbitrary will of an individual inheriting the sceptre by right divine. The governments of Europe, even the least liberal, are very far removed from pure absolutism. In public sentiment there exists an incalculable force for the subject's protection against despotic caprice, a protection scarce known in name beyond the Mediterranean and Euxine. At the same time, European society is stirring with a universal and irrepressible movement toward a higher than the existing degree of liberty.

The Religion of the East is a tremendous Polytheism, which counts Man as nothing, and the Divinity as every thing; demanding for worship, the entirest prostration of soul before the throne of the Supreme, and demanding little beside. The abjectness of spirit lineally begotten of a Theism so terrible, may perhaps aid in solving a problem, which every where meets one in the East, that is, the trivial value put upon human life. To this peculiar religion may be traced also the characteristic features of Oriental Art; its Architectural piles so vast and colossal, as to move wonder even in this, the very age of Mechanism; its gigantic and monstrous Sculpture, so enigmatic to the cursory beholder. Man, it would seem, was counted too insignificant for representation by canvass or marble, and the

But the task of

Divinity alone worthy of visible presentment. shaping a semblance of a Being so mysterious and awful; a Being regarded by them less as a Person than as an omnipotent Force, a mere Existence, impersonal and absolute; was one under which the mind quailed and sank helpless. And therefore in the grotesque and colossal Sculptures, and the mountainous Architectural Piles of the East, we seem to behold the products of an Imagination struggling with conceptions too vast for its compass, and hence endeavoring to make some approximation to the reality, by heaping up the irregular and huge invisible forms.

The Religion of Europe, on the contrary, is milder and less mystical in its character. Its Divinity is an actual Person, invested with definite personal attributes; in a word, the Infinite and the Perfect of Humanity. His worship is not an abject prostration of soul, but rather a lofty humility, a spirit which is at once modest and upwardlooking; and an inseparable part of such worship is love and active kindness to all living creatures. Man, in its estimate, instead of being insignificant even to nothingness, is a creature of unutterable dignity and worth, and regarded by the Divinity with perpetual and tenderest solicitude. Accordingly, European institutions, even where most imperfect, all bear witness to the importance of the individual Man, and Government, where least liberal, points to the citizen's welfare as its principal object. The Arts, too, recognize the same idea of the worth of Humanity. Sculpture and Painting find their chief occupation in representing the human form, and depicting the 'human face divine; and Architecture, instead of issuing from an imagination overborne and crushed by conceptions of the vast and indefinable, is the fruit rather of an imagination buoyant and free to realize a simple and clearly defined Beauty.

Now, though we say not that these striking differences between the Oriental and European worlds are attributable to a single cause, yet we do hold that, among the several causes of such differences, the Physical Geography occupies a prominent place. Cast your eye on the map of Asia. You see a vast continent encircled by an immense ocean, which, itself seeming the bounding wall of the habitable world, offers no inducement to attempt passing beyond it. From the centre this continent stretches away thousands of miles toward every point of the compass; possessing no inland sea and but few lakes and rivers; here intersected by vast burning deserts, and there by lengthened chains of lofty mountains; and the whole bathed in the fierce rays of a torrid sun. Shows not this spectacle like the very home of fixedness and immutability? What is there in Nature's aspect here to instigate change, or so much as suggest the thought of it? What to give birth to movement in any kind? What, least of all, to fuel an unquenchable ardor of enterprise in all departments of human activity Vast spaces must be slowly traversed by land journeys; or sandy deserts must be faintingly crossed beneath scorching suns, amid lethal winds, and in jeopardy to perish of thirst; or enormous and difficult mountain-ridges must be wearily clambered over; before the several communities of this continent can meet for interchange. Hence Commerce, by necessity tardy in its reciprocations, as well as liable to frequent casualty and interrup