But on the contrary, it is in history that the lessons of morality are delivered with most effect. The priest may provoke our suspicion--the moralist may fail to work in us any practical conviction; but the lessons of history are not such as vanish in the fumes of unprofitable speculation, or which it is possible for us to mistrust, or to deride. Obscure as the dispensations of Providence often are, it sometimes, to use Lord Bacon's language--"pleases God, for the confutation of such as are without God in the world, to write them in such text and capital letters that he who runneth by may read it--that is, mere sensual persons which hasten by God's judgments, and never tend or fix their cogitations upon them, are nevertheless in their passage and race urged to discern it." In all historical writers, philosophical or trivial, sacred or profane, from the meagre accounts of the monkish chronicler, no less than from the pages stamped with all the indignant energy of Tacitus, gleams forth the light which, amid surrounding gloom and injustice, amid the apparent triumph of evil, discovers the influence of that power which the heathens personified as Nemesis. Her tread, indeed, is often noiseless--her form may be long invisible--but the moment at length arrives when the measure of forbearance is complete; the echoes of her step vibrate upon the ear, her form bursts upon the eye, and her victim--be it a savage tyrant, or a selfish oligarchy, or a hypocritical church, or a corrupt nation--perishes. "Come quei che va di notte, Che porta il lume dietro, _e a se non giova, Ma dopo se fa le persone dotte_." And as in daily life we rejoice to trace means directed to an end, and proofs of sagacity and instinct even among the lower tribes of animated nature, with how much greater delight do we seize the proofs vouchsafed to us in history of that eternal law, by which the affairs of the universe are governed? How much more do we rejoice to find that the order to which physical nature owes its existence and perpetuity, does not stop at the threshold of national life--that the moral world is not _fatherless_, and that man, formed to look before and after, is not abandoned to confusion and insecurity?