rms, it
becomes conscious of its relation to objects outside of self; it seeks
new outlets of sympathy in love of parents and kindred--then of
political communities, nations, and races; ever expanding the grand
circle of its sympathies as it grows more and more into a perfect image
of the divine spirit of the universe.

This tendency of the soul to the universal is a sure index of its
highest moral and intellectual culture; it is one of the divine
instincts of our nature, and shines out as God's autograph upon the
great representative minds of all ages. In Marcus Curtius, William Tell,
Garibaldi, and our own loved Washington, it makes the cream of history
and the highest poetry of nations. Its perfect manifestation is seen in
that grandest of all epics, 'Christ on the Cross,' wherein we behold a
most complete absorption of the self of the individual in the universal
self of the race.

There are men with little, narrow souls, that never radiate beyond the
centre of self; they have no conception of pure, fixed, absolute
principles, but are wholly governed by their local surroundings,
provincial prejudices, and the lower instincts of their nature. The
large, liberal mind of the true patriot, however, can never be dwarfed
down to mere sectional standards, but, true to the law of its
attraction, will ever point to the Pole-star of national unity and
national brotherhood.

Universality of soul, in the sense above adverted to, distinguishes the
Anglo-Saxon race as the best government-builders of the world. England,
by her subordination of the sectional to the national, by her reverence
for organic law and national unity, has survived the fiercest shocks of
her civil convulsions, and built upon their ruins a more perfect and
enduring fabric of government. In Southern latitudes, where the
temperament grows mercurial, and the emotional nature predominates, as
in France and the Italian States, governments seem founded on _volcanic
strata_, liable to frequent and radical eruptions. In the hot Huguenot
blood of South Carolina was kindled the first fatal spark that now
threatens to set our entire Union in a blaze of ruin.

The Christian draws nearer to the angels as he forgets self in the love
of God and his kind; and that nation is the most prosperous, happy, and
powerful that subordinates all selfish local interests, all sectional
antagonisms, to the higher law of national unity and brotherhood, that
holds 'the hallowed hopes