heaven and a new earth, are questions
with which we have no concern. It is indeed right that we should look
for, and hasten, so far as in us lies, the coming of the Day of God; but
not that we should check any human efforts by anticipations of its
approach. We shall hasten it best by endeavoring to work out the tasks
that are appointed for us here; and, therefore, reasoning as if the
world were to continue under its existing dispensation, and the powers
which have just been granted to us were to be continued through myriads
of future ages.

Sec. III. It seems to me, then, that the whole human race, so far as their
own reason can be trusted, may at present be regarded as just emergent
from childhood; and beginning for the first time to feel their strength,
to stretch their limbs, and explore the creation around them. If we
consider that, till within the last fifty years, the nature of the
ground we tread on, of the air we breathe, and of the light by which we
see, were not so much as conjecturally conceived by us; that the
duration of the globe, and the races of animal life by which it was
inhabited, are just beginning to be apprehended; and that the scope of
the magnificent science which has revealed them, is as yet so little
received by the public mind, that presumption and ignorance are still
permitted to raise their voices against it unrebuked; that perfect
veracity in the representation of general nature by art has never been
attempted until the present day, and has in the present day been
resisted with all the energy of the popular voice;[46] that the simplest
problems of social science are yet so little understood, as that
doctrines of liberty and equality can be openly preached, and so
successfully as to affect the whole body of the civilized world with
apparently incurable disease; that the first principles of commerce were
acknowledged by the English Parliament only a few months ago, in its
free trade measures, and are still so little understood by the million,
that no nation dares to abolish its custom-houses;[47] that the simplest
principles of policy are still not so much as stated, far less received,
and that civilized nations persist in the belief that the subtlety and
dishonesty which they know to be ruinous in dealings between man and
man, are serviceable in dealings between multitude and multitude;
finally, that the scope of the Christian religion, which we have been
taught for two thousand years, is st