has been for several years back, charged with thunder?
Despots are plotting, ships are building, man's ingenuity is bent, as it
never was bent before, on the invention and improvement of instruments of
death; Europe is bristling with five millions of bayonets: and this is
the condition of a world for which the Son of God died eighteen hundred
and sixty-two years ago! There is no mystery of Providence so
inscrutable as this; and yet, is not the very sense of its mournfulness a
proof that the spirit of Christianity is living in the minds of men?
For, of a verity, military glory is becoming in our best thoughts a
bloody rag, and conquest the first in the catalogue of mighty crimes, and
a throned tyrant, with armies, and treasures, and the cheers of millions
rising up like a cloud of incense around him, but a mark for the
thunderbolt of Almighty God--in reality poorer than Lazarus stretched at
the gate of Dives. Besides, all these things are getting themselves to
some extent mitigated. Florence Nightingale--for the first time in the
history of the world--walks through the Scutari hospitals, and "poor,
noble, wounded and sick men," to use her Majesty's tender phrases, kiss
her shadow as it falls on them. The Emperor Napoleon does not make war
to employ his armies, or to consolidate his power; he does so for the
sake of an "idea," more or less generous and disinterested. The soul of
mankind would revolt at the blunt, naked truth; and the taciturn emperor
knows this, as he knows most things. This imperial hypocrisy, like every
other hypocrisy, is a homage which vice pays to virtue. There cannot be
a doubt that when the political crimes of kings and governments, the
sores that fester in the heart of society, and all "the burden of the
unintelligible world," weigh heaviest on the mind, we have to thank
Christianity for it. That pure light makes visible the darkness. The
Sermon on the Mount makes the morality of the nations ghastly. The
Divine love makes human hate stand out in dark relief. This sadness, in
the essence of it nobler than any joy, is the heritage of the Christian.
An ancient Roman could not have felt so. Everything runs on smoothly
enough so long as Jove wields the thunder. But Venus, Mars, and Minerva
are far behind us now; the Cross is before us; and self-denial and sorrow
for sin, and the remembrance of the poor, and the cleansing of our own
hearts, are duties incumbent upon every one of us. If the Ch