Fortunately the tide of improvement has already rolled onward so far, and with such increased might, that Oxford is just as impotent to stay the ameliorating progress of mankind as was the Vatican, and both must advance with a diviner momentum, or be outstripped by a younger competitor in the heavenly course. Without an intelligent faith in the divine purpose to incite and control perpetual progress toward the perfection of mankind, history is an insoluble enigma, a huge pile of detached fragments, and the great drama of humanity must forever remain devoid of all proper results. But even Aristotle expressed a worthier view, in saying that every end is great; it is so, because it forms the beginning of something greater. In nature, nothing actually perishes. Death is birth, and the dissolution of every organization is but the development and visible advancement of a fresher type of being. Naturally every substance is conservative of all the vitality it can possibly sustain, and when any given form apparently perishes, it is but to reveal a still higher life that lay concealed behind it, awaiting the moment of its appointed succession to power. Thus decay and renewal constitute a perpetual struggle, identical life rising through multifarious death toward the supreme in freedom and power. In proportion to the graduated scale of existence, lesser or greater, lower or higher, this law applies with more palpable justness, and is best exemplified in the unpausing progress which humanity makes in its predetermined career. In tracing the evolution of those laws which rule in the various realms of simultaneous growth, we see that, while all are connected, and always act upon each other, some one of them, for the time being, must be preponderant, in order to impart an impulse to the rest, though, in its appointed time, another may be called to succeed, and receive superior expansion. It is that which develops the most advanced nation of a given era, and constitutes the moving centre of progressive civilization. It is the connecting bond and quickening impulse of those heroes who can marshal motives as well as armies, and make the grandeur of their own nationality the introduction and nutriment of a grander nation to come. The vanguard of the human race, invested with and impelled by this indomitable energy, moves in the appointed orbit, losing neither momentum nor effulgence as it advances, but rather increasing both. If we inquire as to the area and agency of the chief progression in the domain of human history, it will be found that Japhet has been the constant leader, Europe the intermediate track, and America the manifest goal. From all the premises furnished by experience, and the fullest assurance of faith, we must infer that this continent, ruled by the Republic upon its centre, is destined to garner the selected seed from antecedent harvests, that it may sow world-wide the germs of ultimate and universal worth.