But this idea loses its importance as another comes into appreciation, —­namely, that the conflicts of self-love with self-love, suppose mistaken estimates of happiness to be uppermost; and, just in proportion as men rightly estimate life, and truly love themselves, they appreciate those strong, numberless, delicate, indissoluble ties, which bind the members of the social body to suffer, or to rejoice together.

And this idea again lessens in importance, as yet a third gains the ascendancy—­the living conviction, that time is but the portal to eternity; the soul meanwhile tasting “the powers of the world to come;” and knowing the persuasiveness of that strongest call to mutual endearment, “If God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.”

And now the consideration of these three points is commended especially to the attention of those, who, in the execution of their office and ministry, have weekly access to the mind of the people.  We mourn the waning influence of the American pulpit.  Where the power thence emanating in the stirring days of trial to men’s souls,—­when its ministers stood on that commanding point, where they caught the first beams of rising day, and reflected the light in the face of the people?  At our Revolutionary period, ministers, in their earnestness to preach to the times, might have come short in preaching eternity.  So far there was a mistake to be rectified; but they did well to preach to the times.  It is among the reasons, why religious so tempered political zeal; and, accordingly, why, as our Revolution was without a model, so it remains without a rival.  It is well that the struggle came, before the toad-eaters to capital’s feed agents in legislative halls occupied the high seats of moral influence.

The true successors to the fathers are not the preachers of party politics, but they who aim to supply the lack of all parties, in that they fail to make liberty a means, valuable only as affording facilities to improvement.

We are exceedingly contracted in our notions of the Christian preacher’s just province.  If we confine it to administering directly to the soul’s spiritual wants and everlasting interests, we stray wide from the example, which God himself sets, when he writes a revelation for man.  The Bible is full of histories, maxims, laws, just as might be expected in a book, which ignored any other life, than that which now is.  One half of it (within bounds) might remain as it is, on the supposition, that men have neither hopes nor duties, but such as pertain to them as joint tenants of this earthly life.