Monmouth, from Yorktown, Camden, Bennington, and Sara toga.a Veterans of half a century! when, in your youthfu days, you put every thing at hazard in your country's cause, good as that cause was, and sanguine as youth is, still your fondest hopes did not stretch onward to an hour like this. At a period to which you could not reasonably have expected to arrive; at a moment of national prosperity, such as you could never have foreseen,— you are now met here, to enjoy the fellowship of old soldiers, and to receive the overflowings of a universal gratitude. 9. But your agitated countenances, and your heaving breasts. inform me, that even this is not an unmixed joy. I perceive that a tumult of contending feelings rushes upon you. The images of the dead, as well as the persons of the living, throng to your embraces. The scene overwhelms you, and I turn from it. May the Father of all mercies smile upon your declining years, and bless them! 10. And when you shall here have exchanged your embraces; when you shall once more have pressed the hands which have been so often extended to give succor in adversity, or grasped in the exultation of victory, then, look abroad into this lovely land, which your young valor defended, and mark the happiness with which it is filled; yea, look abroad into the whole earth, and see what a name you have contributed to give to your country, and what a praise you have added to freedom, and then rejoice in the sympathy and gratitude which beam upon your last days, from the impro ed condition of mankind. & Trenton, Monmouth, Yorktown, Camden, Bennington, and Sa atoga, are places where battles were fought during the American Revolution. LESSON XCVI. AMERICA. - PHILLIPS. 1. I appeal to History. Tell me, thou reverend cl:onicler of the grave, can all the illusions of ambition realized, can all the wealth of a universal commerce, can all the achievements of successful heroism, or all the establishments of this world's wisdom, secure to empire the permanency of its possessions? Alas! Troyb thought so once; yet the land of Priam lives only in song! Thebes thought so once; yet her hundred gates have crumbled, and her very tombs are but as the dust they were vainly intended to commemorate! So thought Palmyra; d yet where is she? So thought the countries of Demosthenes and the Spartan; yet the land of Leonidas f is trampled by the timid slave, and Athens insulted by the servile, mindless, and enervate Ottoman.h In his hurried march, Time has but looked at their imagined immortality; and all its vanities, from the palace to the tomb, have, with their ruins, erased the very impression of his footsteps. 2. The days of their glory are as if they had never been; and the island, that was then a speck, rude and neglected, in the barren ocean, now rivals the ubiquity of their commerce, the glory of their arms, the fame of their philosophy, the eloquence of their senate, and the inspiration of their bards. Who shall say, then, contemplating the past, that England, proud and potent as she appears, may nc', one day, be what Athens is, and the young America yet soar to be what Athens was! Who shall say, that, when the European column shall Phillips, a distinguished Irish orator. b Troy, an ancient city in Asia Minor. Priam, & son of Laomedon, and king of Troy. Palmyra, once a magnificent city in Syria, now in ruins. e Demosthenes, see p. 65. Leonidas, a celebrated king of Lacedæmon. Athens, the capital of ancient Greece, and the seat of Grecian liter. ature. Ottoman, a native citizen of the Turkish empire, a Turk have moldered, and the night of barbarism obscured its very ruins, that mighty continent may not emerge from the horizon, to rule, for its time, sovereign of the ascendant! 3. Sir, it matters very little, what immediate spot may have been the birth-place of such a man as Washington. No people can claim, no country can appropriate him. The boon of Providence to the human race, his fame is eternity, and his residence, creation. Though it was the defeat of our arms, and the disgrace of our policy, I almost bless the convulsion in which he had his origin. If the heavens thundered, and the earth rocked, yet, when the storm had passed, how pure was the climate that it cleared! how bright, in the brow of the firmament, was the planet which it revealed to us! In the produc tion of Washington, it does really appear as if nature was endeavoring to improve upon herself, and that all the virtues of the ancient world were but so many studies preparatory to the patriot of the new. 4. Individual instances, no doubt there were, splendid exemplifications of some single qualification. Cæsar was merciful, Scipioa was continent, Hannibalb was patient; but it was reserved for Washington, to blend them all in one, and, like the lovely masterpiece of the Grecian artist, to exhibit, in one glow of associated beauty, the pride of every model, and the perfection of every master. 5. As a general, he marshaled the peasant into a veteran, and supplied, by discipline, the absence of experience; as a statesman, he enlarged the policy of the cabinet into the most comprehensive system of general advantage; and such was the wisdom of his views, and the philosophy of his counsels, that, to the soldier and the statesman, he almost added the character of the sage! A conqueror, he was untainted with the rime of blood; a revolutionist, he was free from any stain of Scipio, (Africanus,) see p. 108. Hannibal, see p. 108. treason; for aggression commenced the contest, and his ecuntry called him to the command. Liberty unsheathed his sword, necessity stained, victory returned it. 6. If he had paused here, history might have doubted what station to assign him; whether at the head of her citizens, or her soldiers, her heroes, or her patriots. But the last glorious act crowns his career, and banishes all hesitation. Who like Washington, after having emancipated a hemisphere, resigned its crown, and preferred the retirement of domestic life to the adoration of a land he might be almost said to have created! Happy, proud America! The lightnings of heaven yielded to your philosophy! The temptations of earth could not seduce your patriotism! LESSON XCVII. CONSEQUENCES OF ATHEISM.-CHANNING. 1. Few men suspect, perhaps no man comprehends the extent of the support given by religion to every virtue. No man, perhaps, is aware how much our moral and social sentiments are fed from this fountain; how powerless conscience would become without the belief of a God; how palsied would be human benevolence, were there not the sense of a higher benevolence to quicken and sustain it; how suddenly the whole social fabric would quake, and with what a fearful crash it would sink into hopeless ruins, were the ideas of a Supreme Being, of accountableness, and of a future life, to be utterly erased from every mind. 2. Once let men thoroughly believe that they are the work and sport of chance; that no Superior Intelligence concerns itself with human affairs; that all their improvements perish forever at death; that the weak have no guardian, and the injured no avenger; that there is no recompense for sacrifices to uprightness and the public good; that an oath is unheard in heaven; that secret crimes have no witness but the perpetrator; that human existence has no purpose, and human virtue no unfailing friend; that this brief life is every thing to us, and death is total, everlasting extinction: once let men thoroughly abandon religion, and who can conceive or describe the extent of the desolation which would follow? 3. We hope, perhaps, that human laws and natural sympathy would hold society together. As reasonably might we believe, that, were the sun quenched in the heavens, our torches could illuminate, and our fires quicken and fertilize, the creation. What is there in human nature to awaken respect and tenderness, if man is the unprotected insect of a day? and what is he more, if atheism be true! Erase all thought and fear of God from a community, and selfishness and sensuality would absorb the whole man. Appetite, knowing no restraint, and poverty and suffering, having no solace or hope, would trample in scorn on the restraints of human laws. Virtue, duty, principle, would be mocked and spurned as unmeaning sounds. A sordid self-interest would supplant every other feeling, and man would become, in fact, what the theory of atheism declares him to be, a companion for brutes. 1. LESSON XCVIII. RELIANCE ON GOD.- CASKET. If thou hast ever felt that all on earth Which man reposes on his brother man |