side, fell upon its feet, and laid it in ruins. But the stone itself seemed to dash on over the crushed and scattered fragments of gold and silver, iron and clay, swelling out its own mighty proportions, until it filled the whole earth. The prophet assured the king that his own should be succeeded by empires of lesser brilliancy, but of broader power, until, in the days of the last, the God of heaven would set up a new kingdom, which, in the magnitude of its authority, and in the splendor of its institutions, should rise above, and endure beyond all others.

The monarchies typified by that image were, successively, the Chaldean, denoted by the gold; the Persian, by the silver; the Grecian, by the brass; and the Roman, by the iron and clay. And the kingdom symbolized by the stone, is the mediatorial sovereignty of Jesus Christ. The time of the introduction of this new kingdom is pointed out by the admixture of iron and clay, and by the circumstance that the stone, which destroyed the image, fell upon the feet, which were composed of those substances.

The Roman empire arose in its order, and, having triumphed over all that preceded or opposed, it ascended, as we have seen, to an exalted majesty and dominion; a majesty distinguished for its intrinsic lustre, and as having wrought the changes which issued in ultimate dismemberment. It was a moment of the deepest interest to the Roman people, to the predicted kingdom of Christ, and to the world, when Julius Cæsar clothed himself with absolute power, by merging the consular dignity in that of a perpetual dictatorship. Rome, with the forms of government which had prevailed, or been countenanced under her old constitution, was not the Rome whose dominion was sketched as one of the monarchies of the prophetic image. And this bold and bloody soldier became, unwittingly, the instrument of preparing the world for the resistless triumphs of the Prince of Peace, by introducing such changes in the Roman state, as laid the foundations of that imperial greatness, which ranked it among the imperial powers which had preceded. It was upon suspicion of his high ambition to be proclaimed a king, that he was so cruelly assassinated in the Senate-house. But this event brought no new direction into the current of affairs. The power and eminence which he had won, and the dignity to which he aspired, had a real and, to other interests, a necessary existence; and although wrenched from his own grasp, they became at length the possession of his nephew, Cæsar Octavianus, who, with Lepidus and Mark Antony, as Triumvirs, exercised despotic sway over the provinces of the republic, avenged that bloody conspiracy, by the total defeat of Brutus and Cassius, its chief perpetrators, on the plains of Macedon, a few years prior to the time of our Lord; and soon afterwards, having deprived Lepidus of his command, and conquered Mark Antony, he raised himself to the supreme power, ending the existence of the triumvirate and the republic together. Accepting the titles conferred by the Se

nate, he took the name of "Imperator Cæsar Augustus," and henceforth the authority of the Emperor was fully established.

This was the period when the great crisis of Roman affairs had occurred; when the erection of a throne had given them a new and imperial grandeur, constituting them what the prophetic dream had imaged, the fourth great monarchy, and when the first and stateliest of their monarchs had occupied his royal seat for twentyseven years, it was at this period that Christ appeared among men, to execute his own stupendous undertaking, the mediatorial government of the world.

The establishment of the imperial power upon the ruins of both patrician and plebeian factions, imparted to their name its most resplendent majesty, and to their city its most magnificent grandeur. And so also did it, whether by tolerance or persecution, prepare the way for the wide diffusion and the solid perpetuity of the Christian faith. Still it was the great crisis in their political existence, and decay was already commissioned to its work.

During the reign of Augustus Cæsar, under which Christ was born, the empire stood firmly, as on legs of iron; but during that of Tiberius, his successor, under which Christ was crucified, its glory began to wane, and the Roman power stood upon the feet of iron and clay. In the seventeenth year from the birth of Christ the Emperor Augustus died, and the golden gave place to the silver age. From this beginning of decline in its literature, splendor, and power, it came, in a few centuries, in its varying fortunes, to be a monument of earthly instability and the frailty of human greatness. At length it received a mortal blow from the hand of Constantine the Great. Soon after his accession to the throne, in the three hundred and sixth year of the Christian era, he removed the seat of the imperial court from Rome to Byzantium, since called Constantinople. Early in the fifth century, it was divided into two distinct sovereignties, of which the Western, under Honorius, had its seat of government at Ravenna, in the north of Italy, and the Eastern, under Arcadius, at Constantinople. The former subsisted until the year four hundred and seventy-six, when Odoacer, king of the Heruli, took Rome from Augustulus, a feeble and the last representative of the stately Cæsars. And the latter, known also as the Greek empire, was overthrown by the conquests of the Turks, who, under Mahomet the Second, made themselves masters of Constantinople, in the year fourteen hundred and fiftythree. At the present time, and for many centuries past, the kingdoms of Europe and the East occupy the territory over which the Roman Empire once extended its haughty dominion. The God of heaven had set up the new kingdom, and Nebuchadnezzar's dream was realized.

The dignity of the Cæsars, and the lustre of the Roman name, have grown dim by the lapse of time; their crown and their dominion, as of the other monarchies that dream prefigured, having

But that new

long since fallen to the inheritance of other names. kingdom, the sovereignty of Christ, built on deep and strong foundations, has gathered permanency around its own institutions, from prosperous governments and from shattered sceptres, and is filling the world with the splendor of its triumphs; and successive generations will render to it their honor, admiration, and love, until its allegiance shall be acknowledged by all lands, languages, and people.

Now, with two such predictions before us, and with the history of their fulfilment, their most extraordinary fulfilment, in our hands, I ask, can there be a doubt that the accessions of human affairs are controlled by a Divine Providence; controlled agreeably to the arrangements and objects of a great and wise plan of events?

The first was made by Jacob, seventeen hundred years before the time of its accomplishment, and related to the extinction of the political being of a people, his own descendants, who were then few in number, and were dwellers in Egypt, a land of strangers, to which famine had driven them from their own country: assigning that extinction as at once the period and the evidence of the Saviour's advent. The other was uttered in the interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, six hundred years before its completion, and announced the decline of a kingdom, then in the zenith of its magnificence, to make way for its successors, of different names and powers, which were to subsist in their order until the Saviour should appear, and no longer.

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At length one came, who claimed and proved himself to be the Saviour. At the time of his appearing, all the political events pointed out in both prophecies had passed in their succession, or were still in their existence; and no aftertimes have embodied those events, either in whole or in part. Could contingency, could chance thus originate and conduct the affairs of a single nation, and of all the great nations of the world, and through so many ages, concluding them all in that one grand, wondrous, gracious event, the Incarnation of Christ? No event was disjointed from its copartner; no branch of the design failed of its execution; no period in the whole series of ages forgot to render its contribution to the stupendous result. The radii of a circle do not converge with greater certainty at its centre; the dawning of day does not grow up with a stronger assurance to the blaze of noon, than did the accomplishment of these predictions combine, in the Age of Christ, that assemblage of political facts, which so remarkably distinguished it, thereby constituting it what a Divine Providence had ordained that it should become.

That Christ came to be the Teacher and Saviour of men, and that he came at a period marked by such extraordinary intellectual and religious circumstances, must be held to furnish incontrovertible evidence of the definite design and controlling power of Providence.

But when it is added, that the Age of Christ stands attested by the accomplishment of predictions, which covered the rise and splendor, the decline and fall of the Jewish government and the Roman empire, the definite design and the controlling power of the Divine Providence have been demonstrated.

I have thus endeavored to prove and illustrate God's most holy providence, in overruling all human affairs for the accomplishment of his own sublime purposes; and it has been shown that the advent of Christ constituted an august purpose, to which all the great occurrences of foregoing history had been rendered pointedly sub

servient.

To deny the doctrine which I have thus defended, is to affirm that plotting villany, intriguing ambition, insatiable wickedness, and desolating wars, relieved by spare admixtures of moral and political integrity, virtue, and peace, have followed each other, in rapid and angry succession, only to result, without any design, but merely by contingency, in erecting, in the midst of our wretched and guilty world, a system of morals, order, charity, blessing, and salvation, not only beyond the power of the cultivated intellect of the golden, or any other age, to institute, but even to conceive. Now, if we could force our minds to the belief of so monstrous an anomaly, as such an affirmation must involve, still the belief would be utterly useless, being inapplicable to any pleasing or important object. But the doctrine in the illustration of which you have accompanied me, beside being commended to our faith by the clearest evidence, is beneficial in the highest sense and degree. It enables us to trace the legitimate connexion between cause and⚫ effect it reduces to order and harmony much that, without its application, must appear to be a chaos of things: it saves from perverted judgment and painful disappointment, by establishing a higher standard of estimate than the mere expedients of political science, or the insulated interests of common life and its pursuits: it renders a knowledge of the near or remote past tributary, with greater or less directness, to a sound judgment of the nature or probable tendencies and issues of existing events, and of the plans of duty required by the scenes in which we may be engaged, the benefactions which we may enjoy, or the troubles through which we may pass, whether in private or in public relations.

In fine, it will conduct the reasonings which may be instituted upon the authentic facts of history, to the attainment of sterling and practical truth. The doctrine of Divine Providence is the true philosophy of history, of which we should never lose sight, when we look over its general records, or search into its particular details, whether civil or sacred. That doctrine teaches that the power which communicates motion to the complex machinery of mortal affairs, and controls all its actions, is the purpose of the sublime Jehovah, in favor of the church and kingdom of the blessed Jesus, -a mediatorial sovereignty, to which his incarnation and atonement have imparted an imperishable grandeur.

THE GRACE OF RELIGIOUS CONVERSATION. "Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers." EPHESIANS 4: 29.

MEN are social beings in the very depths of their intellectual and spiritual nature. For their use God has established various media of communication, by which they may apprise each other of their condition, their thoughts, their feelings, and their wants. All mental intercourse among human beings is conducted in this indirect way; in this way only is one mind enabled to transmit influence to another. The power of speech holds a distinguished place in this social arrangement. It is more used, and with less difficul ty, than any other instrument of communion among men. The loss of it is an irreparable inconvenience-a vast deduction from the useful or destructive capabilities of the loser. It is probable, that more good and evil have been accomplished in this world by the simple process of talking, than in any other way. Talking is the frequented road of thought-always crowded with ideas, and their dependent influences. The world is alive with activity of speech.

The text, as you perceive, confines its view to this important faculty; and, as such, it respects the use, which is to be made of this power. It is God's institute for the tongue. It is a precept imposed upon the Ephesian Christians, and equally on all; restrictive, in that it forbids men to deal in corrupt communications-corrupt, because they convey unholy influence, whose tendency is not to sanctify, but to do men harm. In distinction from this vice of the tongue, the passage also defines the opposite virtue-" but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers."-The goodness of the communication lies in its adaptation to spiritual edification, or profit. That this was the inspired view is shown by the closing phrase" that it may minister grace unto the hearers."