* * * * * RELIGION. J. HUNT, JR. Religion, pure and undefiled, Before the Father’s sight in bliss— Who will the same in Heaven reward, Consists in holy deeds, like this: To heed, when cold Affliction’s shaft Is at the helpless Orphan hurled— The Widow visit, _and_ to keep Himself unspotted from the world. * * * * * TITUS QUINCTIUS FLAMININUS.[2] Of all the truths at which we arrive through a calm and dispassionate study of history, none appears to me more certain than this, that, as regards the career and course of empires, the rise and fall of states, there neither is, nor has been, any such thing as Fortune; that from the beginning of time, to the events born of the present day, every minute particular, every seemingly unimportant incident—or, as men are fond to call it, accident—in the affairs of nations, is part and parcel of one grand, universal, all-pervading scheme of divine world-government, projected before the patriarch kings led forth their flocks to feed on pastures yet moist with the waters of the deluge, but not to be fulfilled until time itself shall have an end. It can hardly, I think, fail to strike the least observant of readers, that unless the civilized world had been for a long period chained together under the stagnant, and in the main, peaceful despotism of the successors of the twelve Cæsars, it never would have been prepared to receive that tincture of letters, of humanity, and above all, of Christian faith, with which it became in the end so thoroughly imbued; that in every case, without one exception, it brought over to its own milder cultivation, milder religion, the fiercest and most barbarous of its heathen conquerors. Not a province of the Western Roman empire but was overrun, devastated, conquered, permanently occupied by hordes of the wildest, crudest, most violent, most ignorant of mankind—Goths, Vandals, Huns, Vikings, and Norsemen, Jutes and Danes, tribes whose very names to this day stand as the types of unlettered force and unsparing outrage. Not a province of that empire, though of its present population not one hundredth part can trace an approximate descent from the original Roman colonists, so vast the influx of the Pagan invaders, but in the lapse of time conquered its conquerors by the arts of peace, and so became the germ of that Christian civilization, that Christian Liberty, which—though either, or both, may be temporarily obscured for the moment—we see, in the main, steadily and consistently pervading the Europe end America of the nineteenth century.