The idea of unity responds to one of the noblest aspirations of the soul, and wherever it exists free from all compulsion it gives birth to just hopes of true greatness. Would that the cry for unity were heard from the hearts of the inhabitants of the whole earth, and that the inward struggle which reigns in men’s bosoms, and the outward discord which prevails between man and man, between nations and nations, and between races and races, had for ever passed away! “When will the hundred summers die, And thought and time be born again, And newer knowledge, drawing nigh, Bring truth that sways the hearts of men?” Unity is the essence of the Godhead and the animating principle of God’s church; and wherever her spirit penetrates, there the natural desire for unity implanted in the human heart is intensified and universalized, and man seeks to give to it an adequate embodiment in every sphere of his activity. It was this natural instinct for unity guided by the genius of Catholicity that formed the scattered tribes of Europe of former days into nations, uniting them in a grand universal republic which was properly called Christendom. Who knows but, as there reigned, by the action of an overruling Providence, a political unity in the ancient world which paved the way for the introduction of Christianity, that so there may be in preparation a more perfect political unity of peoples and nations in the modern world to open the way for the universal triumph of Christianity? But there is a wide difference between recognizing that political unity is favorable to the strength and greatness of nations and the spread and victory of Christianity, and the acceptance of the errors of a class of its promoters, the approval of their injustice, or a compromise with their crimes. “When devils will their blackest sins put on, They do suggest at first with heavenly shows.”