Thus demonstrative it is that Religion is no weak, idle, evanescent figment of man’s imagination, but a real, substantial, controlling power, shaping his thoughts, it may be unconsciously, and blending itself with the solid structure of society and nations. Greece and Rome, it has been well said, have attracted here and there a visitor, but only the Holy Land has provoked a crusade. Nor is the evidence of its power to be fetched wholly from the records of the past; we think we see in it in our own days a germinating principle more potent than anything else now in operation to work great changes, and rival, at least, if it does not throw into the shade, all that history has yet unfolded. That this power may be based in knowledge, and directed to a righteous end, unlike the character oftentimes it bears on the page of the past, it may deserve some consideration as a means to this end, whether we may not yet read our lesson to greater advantage, and educe from the sacred page a fuller amount of good than in its present state it is calculated to afford. And we have the more confidence in urging our present suit, because we are persuaded that the boon we invoke will not long be unattended with other forms of active beneficence conducing to the same high ends. The church will almost simultaneously rouse herself to new exertion. A yet more effective order of Religious Teaching than we can yet boast of—from the pulpit and the press, will probably be elicited. And thus we shall evoke, not an isolated power waging dubious war against fearful odds, but a CONFEDERATE force, equal, we will hope, to the crisis;—a crisis such as, no one is so obtuse as not to see, demands something vastly in advance of the elements at present available for neutralizing the fearful evils now festering at our core, or looming in the no distant horizon. Such is our argument. The sum is, that the Sacred Books are replete with good, and that a just appreciation of what is due to our own interests, no less than gratitude for the gift itself, demands from us the consecration of whatever further power Providence has, in these latter days, conferred upon us to that end, to render that good in its utmost extent salutary and efficacious. And the time for action presses. Already various undertakings are on foot to supply the desired object: and there may be reason to fear, in the failure of help from higher quarters, that some Society—the Religious Tract Society, for example, as suggested by the “Edinburgh Review,” thus following up its recent excellent publication of the New Paragraph Bible—or some self-constituted body, as is this moment sitting in America for this very purpose—or individual scholars—may appropriate the ground we should rather reserve as the Special Sphere for the operations of the highest Authority in the realm.