world, cowered beneath the scourge of Goth and Vandal and Hun, and the earth was eclipsed in the night of the ages. Still the Pyramids towered toward heaven, the Sphynx gazed on with calm, earnest eyes, Memnon made music of welcome to the sun, and our token sealed the shrivelled silent lips of the Egyptian. The world emerged from its night. Dante and Aquinas, Copernicus and Galileo, Luther and Melanchthon, Gutenberg and Faust, Kant and Schlegel, Bacon, Leibnitz and Newton, Watt and Morse, tore away the seals before our token saw the light. It came forth into a new world by the hand of a missionary, preaching a religion founded three hundred years after it closed the lips of the Egyptian. The heathen god was upon its field, but the Christian religion had set aside the old mythology of which it was a representative. I turn from this relic of the past to the coin of the present, and upon the latter I find the acknowledgment of that religion, and of dependence upon its immutable Author: 'In God we trust;' and from this legend I augur deliverance from the troubles that beset us, the vindication of outraged laws, the Union of dissevered fragments, the return of peace to our distracted land, the integrity of the Republic. MIRACLES. People refuse to believe in miracles because they esteem, them incredible: how, then, do they believe in existence--in the being of anything? Is it credible--to human reason, I mean--that anything should be without a cause? Nothing, so far as we can judge, _ever comes to_ be without an efficient cause--something that goes before, with power to bring that which comes after. But existence is an indisputable fact: we must believe it, whether we can or not. Oh yes, one may say, but there is an infinite Being from all eternity, and He has produced all other forms of existence. Very well; but if that be so, do not let us trouble ourselves about what are called miracles. They come very easily after the creation of light--the creation of sun and moon and stars; or even of nebulous matter, so constituted that by its revolution in space it may generate these wondrous orbs. But there is a difficulty, it seems, about laws--natural laws: we are not to suppose that they will ever he violated. But there is another law above all these; all at least of the inanimate world, _i.e._, that the forces of brute matter are subject to the will, or whatever is analogous to will, in any living creatures. The law of gravitation is one of the most universally operative; but every bird rising upon its wings, every dog in its leaps, yea, the grasshopper springing from the earth, sets this law at defiance. Almost every common law of matter is set aside by the ingenuity of man, as put forth by that most truly spiritual faculty, the will.