kingdoms submitting themselves voluntarily to it, throughout a course of ages, and claiming its protection one after another in successive exigencies.  The head of it would be an universal monarch in another sense than any other mortal has yet been, and the eastern style would be literally applicable to him, “that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him.”  Now Bishop Butler supposes this would be the effect, where the individuals of a nation were perfectly virtuous.  But I ask much less for my hypothesis.  I only ask that the ruling members of the cabinet of any great nation (and perhaps these would only amount to three or four) should consist of real Christians, or of such men as would implicitly follow the policy of the Gospel, and I believe the result would be as I have described it.

Nor indeed are we without instances of the kind.  The goodness of the emperor Antoninus Pius was so great, that he was said to have outdone all example.  He had no war in the course of a long reign of twenty-four years, so that he was compared to Numa.  And nothing is more true, than that princes referred their controversies to his decision.

Nor most I forget again to bring to the notice of the reader the instance, though on a smaller scale, of the colonists and descendants of William Penn.  The Quakers have uniformly conducted themselves towards the Indians in such a manner, as to have given them from their earliest intercourse, an exulted idea of their character.  And the consequence is, as I stated in a former section, that the former, in affairs of importance, are consulted by the latter at the present day.  But why, if the cabinet of any one powerful nation were to act upon the noble principle of relinquishing war, should we think the other cabinets so lost to good feelings, as not to respect its virtue?  Let us instantly abandon this thought; for the supposition of a contrary sentiment would make them worse than the savages I have mentioned.

Let us then cherish the fond hope, that human animosities are not to be eternal, and that man is not always to be made a tiger to man.  Let us hope that the government of some one nation (and when we consider the vast power of the British empire, the nature of its constitution and religion, and the general humanity of its inhabitants, none would be better qualified than our own) will set the example of the total dereliction of wars.  And let us, in all our respective situations, precede the anticipated blessing, by holding out the necessity of the subjugation of the passions, and by inculcating the doctrine of universal benevolence to man, so that when we look upon the beautiful islands, which lie scattered as so many ornaments of the ocean, we may wish their several inhabitants no greater injury than the violence of their own waves; or that, when we view continents at a distance from us, we may consider them as inhabited by our brothers; or that when we contemplate the ocean itself, which may separate them from our sight, we may consider it, not as separating our love, but as intended by Providence to be the means of a quicker intercourse for the exchange of reciprocal blessings.