constituent of civil and religious freedom, all will admit; that it is the _only_ requisite, the _sole_ constituent, may be questioned. "Knowledge," in the celebrated language of Francis Bacon, "is power;" ay! POWER; an engine of tremendous, incalculable energy, but blind in its operations. Applied to the cause of wisdom and virtue, the richest of blessings; to that of infidelity and vice, the greatest of curses. A lever to move the world, its influence cannot be over-estimated; as the bulwark of liberty and human happiness, its effect has been fearfully miscalculated. Were man inclined as fully to good as to evil, then might knowledge become the sovereign panacea of every civil and moral ill; as man by nature unhappily _is_, "the fruit of the tree" is oftener the stimulant to evil than to good. Unfold the sacred record of the past. Why did not intelligence save Greece? Greece! the land of intellect and of thought; the birthspot of eloquence, philosophy, and song! whose very populace were critics and bards! Greece, in her early day of pastoral ignorance, was free; but from the loftiest pinnacle of intellectual glory she fell; and science, genius, intelligence, all could not save her. The buoyant bark bounded beautifully over the blue-breasted billows; but the helm, the helm of {184} _moral_ culture was not there, and her broad-spread pinions hurried her away only to a speedier and more terrible destruction. Ancient Rome: in the day of her rough simplicity, _she_ was free; but from her proudest point of _intellectual_ development--the era of Augustus--we date her decline.