It would be a great calamity for this nation to lose all of its mighty riches, and have nothing left but the soil we stand on. But, in seven or eight generations, it would all be restored again; for all the wealth of America has been won in less time. We are not two hundred and fifty years from Jamestown and Plymouth. It would be a great misfortune to lose all the foremost families of the nation. But England lost hers in the War of the Roses; France, in her Revolution. Nature bore great men anew, and fresh families sprung up as noble as the old. But, if this generation in America could believe that there was no law of God for you and me to keep,--say the acts of Congress what they might say,--no law to tame the ambition of men of mountain greatness, and curb the eagle's flight of human tyranny, that would be a calamity which the nation would never recover from. No! then religion would die out; affection fall dead; conscience would perish; intellect give up the ghost, and be no more. No law higher than human will! No watchmaker can make a long pendulum vibrate so quick as a short. In this very body there is that law. I wake and watch and will; my private caprice turns my hand, now here, now there. But who controls my breath? Who bids this heart beat all day long, and all the night, sleep I or wake? Whose subtle law holds together these particles of flesh, of blood, and bone in marvellous vitality? Who gives this eye its power to see, and opens wide the portal of the ear? and who enchants, with most mysterious life, this wondrous commonwealth of dust I call myself? It is the same Hand whose law is "higher than the Blue Ridge," an "eagle's flight above the Alleghanies." Who rules the State, and, out of a few stragglers that fled here to New England for conscience sake, built up this mighty, wealthy State? Was it Carver and Winthrop who did all this; Standish and Saltonstall? Was it the cunning craftiness of mightiest men that consciously, well knowing what they did, laid the foundations of our New England State and our New England Church? Why, the boys at school know better. It was the eternal God whose higher law the Pilgrim and the Puritan essayed to keep, not knowing whereunto the thing would grow. Shall the fool say in his heart there is no God? He cannot make a hair grow on his head but by the eternal law of his Father in heaven. Will the politician say there is no law of God for States? Ask the sorrowing world; let Austria and Hungary make reply. Nay, ask the Southern States of America to show us their rapid increase in riches, in civilization; to show us their schools and their scholars, their literature, their science, and their art! No law of God for States! It is writ on the iron leaf of destiny, "Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a curse to any people." Let the wicked hand of the South join with the Northern wicked hand, iniquity shall not prosper. But the eye of the wicked shall fail; they