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    and of his Christ . That struggle is like the elemental strife of the material world * It is the storm that clears the heavens * It is the procfess by which Providence conducts mankind to higher and yet higher degrees of knowledge and happiness .

    According to the law of progress , both individual and social , by ¦ which God governs the world , the ti ' ansitioti is made from one gradation of order , harmony , and beauty to a higher gradation , by the intervention of a state of apparent confusion and conflict . In religion , the mind passes from a grosser to a purer form of Christianity through a season of doubt and darkness , of

    inquiry and discussion ; in which opinions ,- feelings * habits , are all for a while tossed in uncertainty , and not only does thought strive with thought , but emotions and convictions battle together , and habits contend with both . The new creation , like the old , rises out of a chaos , itself the monument of a former but

    less glorious creation . And so it is in the religibus history of mankind . The patriarchal world sunk in the night of Egyptian slavery to reappear in the grander shape of Judaism * In the time of Christ , Judaism was no longer a building fitly framed together ; " the human intellect which had been matured by it » wanted something more and better ; and various speculations , some of them anticipating the truth * not yet revealed , of man's

    immortality , shewed that the period was arrived for the advent of the universal teacher . The scepticism of the Sadducees and the dreams of the Pharisees were alike preparatory to the doctrine of the resurrection . Heathenism presented analogous phenomena . Its mythology and its philosophy , in their various interminglings and conflicts , shewed the " fulness of time " for the promulgation of Christianity . And the same process is evident in

    Civil history * The materials of the Roman Empire were loosened and separated that they might serve to construct the order of feudal Europe . Federal America is a re-arrangement of Colonies * effected by discontent ^ discussion * and rebellion * which were the transition From a state of order suited to the intelligence and wants of the settlers of the seventeenth century , to that which the progress they had made demanded towards the close of the eighteenth century *

    With Us , the change which is now effecting would probably have beeti more gradual , quiet , and safe , but for the terror excited by the French Revolution . That event raised a spirit of resistance to all change , however reasonable , however useful , and however inevitable ultimately . The prospect of improvement was ex * - eh&nged for a state of unnatural stagnation * But the spread of

    knowledge , and of the wants and desires which grow out of ittcrelised and increasing knowledge > could not be arrested ; the pfcrwe * which was obstructed continued to accumulate , and thfe Insult is , the apprehension of violence , the existence of excitetnfctit ^ attd the manifest impossibility of the count ry being governed tttft by 1 * Ministry in whom the public can coaiide as irieadL y to 4 .

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    £ State and Prospects of the tlounlry .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1832, page 2, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1804/page/2/