The mere principle of a mechanical Balance of Power to serve as a negative check on overgrown dominion--a system which emanated from England, and was in the eighteenth century universally received--has ceased to be applicable, or to be of service to the existing state of things in Europe; for all the remedies which it can offer, tend only to aggravate the evil when it has once occurred. In religion alone are to be found the remedies and the safeguards, the emancipation and consolidation of the whole civilized world, as well as of every particular state. The most imminent danger to our age, and the possible abuse of religion itself, are the excesses of the absolute. Great is the danger, when in a vindictive spirit of re-action, a revolutionary conduct is adopted by the party of legitimacy; when passion itself is consecrated into a maxim of reason, and held up as the only valid and just mode of proceeding; and when, the sacredness of religion itself is hawked about as some fashionable opinion; as if the world-redeeming power of faith and truth consisted in the mere dead letter, and in the recited formula. True life can spring only from the vivifying spirit of eternal truth. In science the absolute is the abyss which swallows up the living truth, and leaves behind only the hollow idea, and the dead formula. In the political world the absolute in conduct and speculation is that false spirit of time, opposed to all good and to the fulness of divine truth, which in a great measure rules the world, and may entirely rule it, and lead it for ever to its final ruin. As errors would not be dangerous or deceptive, and would have little effect, unless they contained a portion or appearance of truth; this false spirit of time which successively assumes all forms of destruction, since it has abandoned the path of eternal truth, consists in this--it withdraws particular facts from their historical connection, and holds them up as the centre and term of a system, without any limitation, and without any regard to historical circumstances. The true foundation, and the right term of things, in the history of society as in the lives of individuals, cannot be thus severed from their historical connection, and their place in the natural order of events. In any speculation or enterprise conducted by this passionate spirit of exaggeration, the living spirit must evaporate, and only the dead and deadening formula survive. What idols may successively be worshipped by the changing spirit of time which easily bounds from one extreme to another, cannot be determined before-hand. It is even possible that for a while eternal truth itself may be profaned and perverted to such an idol of the day--I mean the counterfeit form of truth;--for the spirit of time, however it may assume the garb, can never attain the inward essence and living energy of truth. Whatever may be the alternate idol, and the reigning object of its worship, or of its passionate