The good and evil of any age are commonly bound so closely together, that in plucking up the tares, there is danger lest the wheat also be uprooted, at least trodden down. In America, especially in New England, every thing is intense, with of course a tendency to extravagance, to fanaticism. Look at some of the most obvious signs of that intensity. No conservatism in the world is so bigoted as American conservatism; no democracy so intense. Nowhere else can you find such thorough-going defenders of the existing state of things, social, ecclesiastical, civil; such defenders of drunkenness, ignorance, superstition, slavery, and war; nowhere such radical enemies to the existing state of things; such foes of drunkenness, ignorance, superstition, slavery, and war. No "Revivals of religion" are like the American; none of old were like these. See how the American soldiers fight; how the American men will work. Puritanism was intense enough in England; in the New World it was yet more so. Our fathers were intense Calvinists; more Calvinistic than Calvin--they became Hopkinsian. They hated the Pope; kings and bishops were their aversion. They feared God. Did they love him--love him as much? They had an intense religious activity, but they had another intensity. It is better that we should say it, rather than men who do not honor them. That intensity of action, when turned towards material things, or, as they called them, "carnal things," needed some powerful check. It was found in their bigotry and superstition. In such an age as theirs, when the Reformation broke down all the ordinary restraints of society, and rent asunder the golden ties which bound man to the past; when the Anglican church ended in fire, and the English monarchy in blood; when men full of piety thanked God for the fire and the bloodshed, and felt the wrongs of a thousand years driving them almost to madness--what was there to keep such men within bounds, and restrain them from the wildest license and unbridled anarchy? Nothing but superstition; nothing short of fear of hell. They broke down the monarchy; they trod the church under their feet. She who had once been counted as the queen and mother of society, was now to be regarded only as the Apocalyptical woman in scarlet, the mother of abominations, bride of the devil, and queen of hell. The Old Testament wrought on the minds of these men like a charm, to stimulate and to soothe. "One day," said they, "is made holy by God; in it shall no work be done by man or beast, or thing inanimate. On that day all must attend church as an act of religion." Here, then, was a bar extending across the stream of worldliness, filling one seventh part of its channel, wide and deep, and wonderfully interrupting its whelming tide. I admire the divine skill which compounds the gases in the air; which balances centripetal and centrifugal forces into harmonious proportions,--those fair ellipses in