Still the conflict of principles endures in the world at large--the
Aristocratic Principle, represented by autocracy, absolutism, prelacy,
and slaveholding authority, on the one hand, and the Democratic
Principle, represented by republicanism, Protestantism, dead-levelism,
with free and destructive competition, on the other. As Slavery and
Freedom have been preparing for their local conflict in America during
the thirty years past; so, for the whole century gone by, the
threatening cloud of the final conflict between the two great governing
ideas in the world has been gathering. Occasional sharp and some
terrific encounters have been had. Is this conflict of opinion to become
more and more consolidated and defined, and finally embodied in two
great hostile camps, covering the whole earth with an actual war,
replete with desolation and carnage--not a war of distinct
nationalities, but of the partisans of the two great antagonistic drifts
of human development? Is there to be literally the great battle of
Armageddon in the world before the incoming of a better age? or has the
ignorant wrath of man sufficiently prevailed, and are we in truth
prepared to investigate with sobriety, accept with simple honesty, and
faithfully to practise the lessons of wisdom which the experience of the
past or the new discoveries of the present or the future may bring? The
religious world is becoming deeply penetrated with the conviction that
we are, in the world at large, upon the verge of great events--that we
are nearing the termination of an Old Dispensation and the commencement
of a New; without, perhaps, defining very clearly, or attempting even to
define distinctly to the imagination the nature of the change.
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