ms, rules, views, habits, projects; prudence,
foresight, observation, inquiry, invention, resource, resolution,
perseverance, are its characteristics. Justice, benevolence, expedience,
propriety, religion, are its recognized, its motive principles.
Supernatural truth is its sovereign law. Such is it in its true idea,
synonymous with Christianity; and, not only in idea, but in matter of
fact also, is Christianity ever civilization, as far as its influence
prevails; but, unhappily, in matter of fact, civilization is not
necessarily Christianity. If we would view things as they really are, we
must bear in mind that, true as it is, that only a supernatural grace
can raise man towards the perfection of his nature, yet it is
possible,--without the cultivation of its spiritual part, which
contemplates objects subtle, distant, delicate of apprehension, and slow
of operation, nay, even with an actual contempt of faith and devotion,
in comparison of objects tangible and present,--possible it is, I say,
to combine in some sort the other faculties of man into one, and to
progress forward, with the substitution of natural religion for faith,
and a refined expediency or propriety for true morality, just as with
practice a man might manage to run without an arm or without sight, and
as the defect of one organ is sometimes supplied to a certain extent by
the preternatural action of another.

And this is, in fact, what is commonly understood by civilization, and
it is the sense in which the word must be used here; not that perfection
which nature aims at, and requires, and cannot of itself reach; but a
second-rate perfection of nature, being what it is, and remaining what
it is, without any supernatural principle, only with its powers of
ratiocination, judgment, sagacity, and imagination fully exercised, and
the affections and passions under sufficient control. Such was it, in
its higher excellences, in heathen Greece and Rome, where the perception
of moral principles, possessed by the cultivated and accomplished
intellect, by the mind of Plato or Isocrates, of Cleanthes, Seneca,
Epictetus, or Antoninus, rivalled in outward pretensions the inspired
teaching of the Apostle of the Gentiles. Such is it at the present day,
not only in its reception of the elements of religion and morals (when
Christianity is in the midst of it as an inexhaustible storehouse for
natural reason to borrow from), but especially in a province peculiar to
these t