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favor of their system of government. Instead of aiding the emancipation of the oppressed of other lands, we have given their masters new reasons for withholding from them those franchises we so highly esteem, and have double riveted the chains of the slave. The Christian world may well exclaim, in view of our example for the last twenty years, "God save the king! for if licentious and despotic kings are bad, licentious and aggressive democracies are worse."

We are for ourselves neither monarchists nor aristocrats, but according to the best of our knowledge and ability a loyal American citizen; yet we cannot shut our eyes to the dangerous and utterly immoral and dishonorable career upon which the American people to a fearful extent have entered. It is difficult, it may be too late, to arrest them; but as one of the people, as one who yields to no man in his love of his country, and attachment to her government, we assure them that they will never secure true freedom and prosperity in the way they have thus far sought them. If they value national honor, if they love liberty, they must return to the recognition of law, the obligations of morality, and the duty of religious faith and worship. No nation can recede from law without falling into anarchy, or depart from God without precipitating itself into hell. All is not gold that glitters. All change is not improvement. All motion is not progress, and every novelty is not a conquest from the domain of truth. Let our citizens meditate these commonplaces, and form a more just estimate of themselves. They have territory enough, - quite too much; they have room for all the virtuous expansion of which they are capable; let them learn to be content with what they have, and that it is as base to steal a province from a neighbouring state, as it is to pick a neighbour's pocket, or to steal his sheep.

We have taken no notice of what is said about the tyranny with which Spain governs Cuba, for we have no authority to supervise her internal administration, and are bound to treat her as an independent and a Christian nation. We must annul our treaty with her before we can put her out of the pale of civilized nations, and we must put her out of that pale before we can have any right to supervise or interfere with her treatment of her own subjects. But what is said about Spanish tyranny and oppression in her colonies is all unfounded. Spain does not oppress and never has oppressed her colonial subjects, and Cuba would have far less real freedom as a democracy, than she enjoys as a province of the Spanish monarchy. So it was said

that the other American colonies of Spain were oppressed, and as far back as Jefferson's residence in Paris as the minister of the American confederacy, intrigues were begun with us to convert them into independent republics. We need only to compare what they are now with what they were under Spain, to comprehend the value of assertions as to Spanish tyranny and oppression. Let us leave Red Republican cant, learn to be just and honorable, and labor to secure liberty at home. So shall we best promote freedom abroad.

ART. V. Conversations of an Old Man with his Young Friends. No. IV.

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C. NOTWITHSTANDING all you say, your doctrine is distasteful, humiliating, and repugnant to the natural instincts and aspirations of the human heart.

B. No doubt of it. But is that to its reproach, or to yours? C. How can you expect us to embrace a doctrine repugnant to our feelings and tastes, that contradicts our natural tendencies and aspirations ?

B. I do not expect you to embrace it by a natural predilection, and it is certain that you cannot embrace it without the grace of God moving and assisting you to do so.

Z. But is it not a sufficient condemnation of a religion, that it is contrary to our nature, above our natural strength, and can be embraced only by violence to our nature?

B. If our nature were sufficient of itself to attain the end for which its Maker has intended it, and if it had not fallen and become corrupt and enfeebled, perhaps so.

W. Surely our nature is all that God has made it, and it would be unjust on his part to demand of it what it is not able to do.

B. That all may be, and yet God may justly appoint us to a destiny above our natural reach, because he may provide us with graces and helps above our natural powers adequate to its attainment. And in this he would show himself, not only just, but superabounding in goodness. In our nature he has promised us only the good to which that nature by its own powers is adequate. But in the order of grace he provides something better, a far higher good for us, and furnishes us with sufficient

means to obtain it. Instead of murmuring at this, we should be grateful for it, and see in it an additional motive for love and gratitude to him.

Z. But why need this supernatural destiny be attainable only by violence to our nature? I see no reason why we might not have been so made that nature and grace should aspire to the same end, so that we might have followed our nature and grace at the same time.

B. Such, in a certain sense, was the case with us prior to sin. Prior to sin, our nature was turned towards God, was held by grace in subjection to his law, and it required no interior struggle to fulfil it, and attain our supernatural destiny. But by sin that grace was lost, and our nature became turned away from God, and inclined to evil. In consequence of this, our nature, that is, the flesh, is now opposed to God, and we can obey his law and live for our supernatural destiny only by doing violence to it. Hence you see that a religion may be very true, very holy, and indispensable to our salvation, and yet be very distasteful to the natural man, and altogether repugnant to the instincts and aspirations of the natural heart.

Z. But one cannot believe what he finds repugnant to his natural feelings.

B. That were some comfort, if it were true; but in the various vicissitudes of life, I find myself obliged to believe many things exceedingly repugnant to my feelings. There are a great many disagreeable truths even in the order of nature, which all of us are compelled to believe.

Z. I am in the habit of relying on my feelings, and when I find I cannot feel with you in what you say, I say at once I do not and cannot believe with you. I do not like your doctrine, for it sacrifices the pure feelings, the noble emotions, and the gentle affections of the human heart, to the cold propositions and rigid deductions of a dry and inexorable logic.

B. Such may be your habit, but the question for you to determine is, whether it be commendable or the reverse. If the propositions and deductions of logic are true, if they conform to reality, your feelings, emotions, and affections, which are opposed to them, are false, and are neither pure nor noble, and if followed lead into falsehood and sin. They are repugnant to truth, and therefore they, not the propositions and deductions, are in fault.

Z. But I am tired of dry and rigid logic, of the cold forms of the intellect. I want the heart, the warm and loving heart,

and the heart is a better guide to the truth than the understanding.

B. That is to say, you are a bit of a sentimentalist, too indolent to think, and simply disposed to lie at your length under a wide-spreading beech, and indulge the luxury of feeling.

"Lentus in umbra

Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.”

This is no uncommon case with young men, especially when smitten by the sweet face and laughing eyes of Amaryllis. But the state of mind you describe is not one to boast of, or to parade before the world. It is a state in which one is expected to say and do a thousand foolish things, but no one ever thinks of taking them as a proof of his good sense, or piety and orthodoxy. Man is not a block of marble, nor is he required to be a mere logic-grinder. The heart has its place and its office; but, when used in a good sense, it means the will, not mere sentiment, and the will, as a blind faculty, never does or can act, save in reference to objects presented to it by the intellect, or that are intellectually apprehended. The heart, distinguished from the understanding, is no guide to truth, for it cannot apprehend truth, and it can be safely trusted only when it is enlightened or informed by intellectual apprehension.

Z. What I mean is, not that we are to follow blind feeling, but our intuitions, that is, the truth as intuitively beheld, rather than as drawn out into logical statements and formal propo

sitions.

B. So that you can disport yourself in the vague, and never be called to an account for any thing you say, however false or absurd. Intuition, on the part of the subject, is an intellectual act, but in the intelligible order it is never a clear, distinct, conscious apprehension of the object, and one knows not that he knows what he intuitively apprehends, till he makes it an object of reflection, and logic is simply the instrument or form of the reflective understanding as distinguished from the intuitive. The intuitions are never practically available as intuitions. They must be embodied in language, and presented through it to the mind, before we can distinctly know what they are, or make any use of them. And the moment you begin to use language you are in the domain of reflection, and answerable at the bar of logic.

C. That is too metaphysical for my understanding. is the reason you cannot talk in the plain language of common sense, so that simple men even can understand you?

B. My young friends are too hard with me. They bring out doctrines which can neither be confirmed nor refuted without resort to metaphysical principles and distinctions, and the moment I attempt to subject them to these principles and distinctions, they cry out, That is too metaphysical, — give us common sense, and speak so that we can understand you. I am accused of making too much of logic, and overlooking the feelings and affections. You tell me these are trustworthy, and our surest guides to truth. I reply, the value of these is in the fact that they are informed by truth, and conform to it, and that they can be so only as we intellectually apprehend the truth; for truth is apprehended only by the intellect. The feelings can no more apprehend it than the eye can apprehend sounds, or the ear colors. Then you shift your ground, and tell me that they are our intuitions, not properly our feelings and affections, you mean. I acknowledge the fact of intuition, and that all our knowledge in the natural order, in the order of the intelligible as distinguished from the superintelligible, rests mediately or immediately on intuition for its evidence. But intuition of the intelligible, as distinguished from the sensible object, is, though apprehension, an unconscious apprehension, that is, in intuition we apprehend the object indeed, but do not take note of the fact that it is we who apprehend it. not consciously connect the apprehending subject with the apprehended object, and therefore the intuition is what Leibnitz calls simple perception, wanting the character of apperception, in which we apprehend both the object and ourselves as apprehending it. How, without adverting to this fact, am I to test the value of what you allege? And how, without understanding this, are you to be disabused of your error?

The truth, and the whole truth, of the intelligible order, is undoubtedly in our primitive intuitions, in which are all the principles or data of the speculative reason in the order of nature. But in the state of pure intuition this truth is not available, is never practical knowledge. It must become apperception first, and this it cannot become without reflection. Reflection is a turning back upon or rethinking the objects revealed in the intuitions. But as the intuitions in themselves, save when intuitions of sensible objects, are simple apprehensions, and not apprehensions which we are conscious of having, the reflective intellect cannot seize this object in them and make it the object of its own action. It must be presented in language, and therefore, as it must have been already embodied

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