This theory is now surrendered,--or its advocates, if any such there be, are few in number. We, of the present age, regard it as a wild and brilliant error, poetically beautiful, but in practice incorrect,--as a rich and elegant production of a distant age,--as a flower that sprung up, bloomed and faded in the spring-time of the world. There is a second theory, which numbers among its supporters a large part of the philosophers of modern time. We would call it without reproach the Atheistic scheme, for it seems to shut out a governing Providence from the successive evolutions of our race. It attributes the same principles of stability to the natural and moral world, considering them as both liable to the same law of physical necessity, which causes them to “alternate, between fixed and narrow limits of progress and decay.” States and Empires it regards as rising only like the waves of the ocean, to give way to those that follow them--an endless succession of events, without one indication of plan or aim, to remind us of a governing Intelligence! Laying aside these theories, as equally unworthy of man and of Him who made him,--with history for our guide, the monument at once of the rise and fall of nations,--what theory shall _we_ form? What shall we affirm of history itself? Is it nothing but the chronicle of unconnected facts--the assemblage of by-gone events, that have passed without an object? What too is the lesson that we read in the revolutions of the world? Are they mere isolated exhibitions of a vast and mighty energy expended for no purpose,--monuments reared along the track of ages as mementos of unmeaning greatness,--meteors that burst from the midst of clouds and darkness to reveal the wreck of nations, and then go out for ever? In the eloquent language of another: “Is the change in its generations the only change in society? Are the actors alone renewed, and the same drama of life for ever repeated? Or rather does each succeeding generation, standing on the graves of their forefathers, rise to a higher vantage ground, as the oaks of the wilderness in succession strike deeper roots, and grow more flourishing over the dust of their predecessors?” The theory implied in these remarks, if properly stated and understood, is the true theory of the progress of society. It is a _real_ progress. One after another of its empires may have risen, flourished for a time, and then crumbled into ruins. Some may have remained apparently unaltered, balanced by the action of opposing causes,--but the grand, the mighty WHOLE, has been progressive. The current that sustained and bore it onward, has increased in energy,--it has never lingered,--its apparent rest or retrocession, was but the reflux of the wave that is rising higher along the shore.