ue in its special detail;
but that men are placed here to prepare themselves for a future and
higher condition of existence, is not only agreeable to our
consciousness, but is in harmony with revelation. Among the many things
that have been revealed to us, where so many are hid, we are told that
our information is to increase, as we draw nearer to the millennium,
until "The whole earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord,
as the waters cover the sea." We may be far from that blessed day;
probably are; but he has lived in vain, who has dwelt his half century
in the midst of the civilization of this our own age, and does not see
around him the thousand proofs of the tendency of things to the
fulfilment of the decrees, announced to us ages ago by the pens of holy
men. Rome, Greece, Egypt, and all that we know of the past, which comes
purely of man and his passions; empires, dynasties, heresies and
novelties, come and go like the changes of the seasons; while the only
thing that can be termed stable, is the slow but sure progress of
prophecy. The agencies that have been employed to bring about the great
ends foretold so many centuries since, are so very natural, that we
often lose sight of the mighty truth in its seeming simplicity. But, the
signs of the times are not to be mistaken. Let any man of fifty, for
instance, turn his eyes toward the East, the land of Judea, and compare
its condition, its promises of to-day, with those that existed in his
own youth, and ask himself how the change has been produced. That which
the Richards and Sts. Louis of the middle ages could not effect with
their armed hosts, is about to happen as a consequence of causes so
obvious and simple that they are actually overlooked by the multitude.
The Ottoman power and Ottoman prejudices are melting away, as it might
be under the heat of divine truth, which is clearing for itself a path
that will lead to the fulfilment of its own predictions.

Among the agents that are to be employed, in impressing the human race
with a sense of the power and benevolence of the Deity, we think the
science of astronomy, with its mechanical auxiliaries, is to act its
full share. The more deeply we penetrate into the arcana of nature, the
stronger becomes the proofs of design; and a deity thus obviously,
tangibly admitted, the more profound will become the reverence for his
character and power. In Mark Woolston's youth, the great progress which
has since be