and smiles, and clasps his hands, and looks upward, and blesses God for his goodness, and then again turns to his writing, and then again becomes so entranced with a passage of Scripture, the glory of which the Holy Spirit lets in upon his soul, that he is forced, as it were, to lay aside all his labors, and give himself to the sweet work of his closing evening's devotions. The last you see of him for the night, he is alone, kneeling on the floor of his prison; he is alone with God.

THE DIVINE RETRIBUTION AGAINST NATIONS.

Nations have their time and scene of probation as well as individuals. They form character, habits, and fixed principles of conduct, that, in the end, however things may seem to move for a season, come out according to eternal justice. If that be violated by a nation, to secure a present seeming temporal prosperity or power, there will be a divine vengeance and retribution. The course of crime strikes back, and that which was pleasure, luxury, and power, in the forward career, is wretchedness, ruin, and death in the reaction. The time must come; it cannot wait for eternity; and whatever distance there may be between the actors of a present generation, whom the judgment for national crime overtakes, and those who began the crime, or set its causes in the national policy, the stroke of vengeance is not lightened, but falls with a renewed and accumulated, as well as original righteousness and force, the present actors having adopted for themselves the sins of their fathers, woven them in the life of the nation, and made that perpetual which might have been temporary. That upon you may come all the righteous blood, from that of Abel down to the last man murdered for his principles.

There are awful unseen junctures, unseen, because men choose to be blinded; and there are days of unknown visitation, unknown, because men scoff at the thought of being thus under the judgment of a present God. There are seasons of deliberate choice forever, where two ways meet, and nations, as individuals, come to the point, decide, and from that step, go steadily downward or upward, according to that decision. We ourselves, as a nation, have come to such a point. We are to choose for an empire between wrong and righteousness, between injustice and justice, between oppression and benevolence, between slavery and freedom. It is a point, in which all the characters and wills in this country come to a convergency,

one side or other, good or bad. It is a point where the choice will be determined by individual adopted opinions and preferences, under motives and principles which in every case God unerringly traces and judges, as he alone can do.

It is a spectacle, and a national issue, such as there never was before in all the world; a decision affecting at present and in prospect, more millions of men, and greater varieties of interest in this world, and more solemn eternal results, than any movement of any nation's policy ever on record.

MAN CANNOT BE PROPERTY.

The Jewish law strictly forbade any one from ever returning unto his master that servant that had fled from his master to him. If an ox or an ass had strayed from its owner, any one finding the beast was commanded to restore it to its owner, as his property; but if a man's servant had fled away, every one was in like manner forbidden to restore him; demonstrating in the strongest manner that a servant was never regarded as property, and could not be treated as such. A man's ox belonged to him, and must be restored to him as his property; but man's servant did not belong to him, and could not be his property, and if he chose to take himself away, was not considered as taking away anything that belonged to his master, or could be claimed and taken back by him.

It is not possible for an incidental demonstration to be stronger than this. If the possibility of property in man had been admitted, if servants had been regarded as slaves, and masters as owners, then the law of God would no more have permitted any two-legged property to run away from the owner, to steal itself from the master, than a four-legged property; a biped would have no more right of property in himself than a quadruped; and the law would no more have permitted any man to secrete, protect, and keep back from the owner a strayed or runaway biped in the shape of a man, than a strayed or runaway quadruped in the shape of an ox or

an ass.

"If thou meet even thine enemy's ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt surely bring it back to him again." But "thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which has escaped from his master unto thee. He shall dwell with thee, even

Ex. xxiii. 4.

among you, in that place which he shall choose in any one of thy gates where it liketh him best; thou shalt not oppress him." He is a freeman, as any of you, free to choose his residence, free to go and come as he pleases, free to stay unmolested in whatever place he may prefer, and there is no owner to him, no creature that has any power to interfere with his liberty, no law binding him as any man's property, but an explicit, divine law, recognizing, guarding, and establishing. beyond possibility of denial or interference, his sole right of property and ownership in himself.

66 STEP TO THE CAPTAIN'S OFFICE AND SETTLE!"

This old watchword, so often heard by travellers in the early stages of steam navigation, is now and then ringing in our ears with a very pointed and pertinent application. It is a note that belongs to all the responsibilities of this life for eternity. There is a day of reckoning, a day for the settlement of accounts. All unpaid bills will then have to be paid; all unbalanced books will have to be settled. There will be no loose memorandums forgotten; there will be no heedless commissioners for the convenience of careless consciences; there will be no proxies; there will be no bribed auditors.

Neither will there be such a thing as a hesitating conscience; but the inward monitor, so often drugged and silenced on earth, will speak out. There will be no doubt nor question as to the right and the wrong. There will be no vain excuses, nor any attempt to make them. There will be no more sophistry, no more considerations of expediency, no more pleading of the laws of men and the customs of society, no more talk about organic sins being converted into constructive righteousness, or collective and corporate frauds releasing men from individual responsibilities.

When we see a man in any sphere of responsibility, appointed as his Lord's steward, but saying to himself, My Lord delayeth his coming, and beginning to smite his fellow-servants, and to play the heedless prodigal with his Lord's goods, we hear the sound of the call, Step to the Captain's office and settle!

When we see a man, a professed Christian, running a race with the worshippers of wealth and fashion, absorbed in the vanities of the world, or endeavoring to serve both God and

Deut. xxiii. 15, 16.

Mammon, we hear the voice, Step to the Captain's office and settle!

When we see a man spending his whole time and energies in getting ready to live, but never thinking how he shall learn to die, endeavoring even to forget that he must die-poor man, :he must step to the Captain's office and settle!

When we see editors and politicians setting power in the place of goodness, and expediency in the place of justice, and law in the place of equity, and custom in the place of right, putting darkness for light, and evil for good, and tyranny for general benevolence, we think of the day when the issuers of such counterfeit money will be brought to light, and their sophistries and lies exposed; for among the whole tribe of unprincipled politicians there will be great consternation when the call comes to step to the Captain's office and settle.

When we see unjust rulers in their pride of power fastening chains upon the bondmen, oppressing the poor, and playing their pranks of defiant tyranny before high heaven, then also come these words to mind, like a blast from the last trumpet, Step to the Captain's office and settle!

Independent, June 26, 1856.

RICHARD HILDRETH.

RICHARD HILDRETH, the historian of the United States, was born at Deerfield, Massachusetts, on the 28th of June, 1807. When four years old, his father, the Rev. Hosea Hildreth, was called to preside over the English department of Phillips Academy, at Exeter, New Hampshire, and the family removed thither. At the age of ten, Richard entered the academy, to prepare for college, and remained in it till August, 1822, when he entered Cambridge University, where he was distinguished not only for his high class rank, but for his great attainments in general literature. After graduating, in 1826, he kept a school in Concord, Massachusetts, one year, and then studied law at Newburyport and Boston, and was admitted to the Suffolk bar in 1830. In 1832, while engaged in his profession, he was one of a small number who founded the "Boston Atlas," of which he was induced to become the editor. The signal ability with which this paper was conducted while under his control is well known to all familiar with

New England journalism. While editing the "Atlas," he contributed also many papers of interest and value to Buckingham's "New England Magazine."

In consequence of feeble health, induced by over-exertion, Mr. Hildreth went to the South in 1834, and remained there two winters. While there, he wrote that powerful novel, “ Archy Moore," showing a few of the features of slavery in their true light. On his return, it was published anonymously, was republished in England, and received deserved praise from the critics.' He did not now resume the practice of law, but became again connected with the "Boston Atlas," of which, in 1837-8, he was the Washington correspondent. On his return to Boston, in the spring of 1838, he became the chief editor of that paper, and furnished a series of very able articles upon Texas, which were among the first efforts to arouse the North to a true sense of the iniquitous scheme of “Annexation,” as it was called. Being strongly in favor of the enactment by the Legislature of Massachusetts of a prohibitive liquor law, and thus differing from the proprietors of the "Atlas," he left that paper at the end of 1839. In 1840, he published "Despotism in America," a very able work on the moral, political, and social character of slavery, showing conclusively that there is as great a degree of despotism existing in our slave States as in any other country upon the earth, European or Asiatic. In the same year he published a "History of Banks," advocating a system of free banking, with security to bill-holders; and a translation, from the French of Dumont, of "Bentham's Theory of Legislation."

Feeble health making another visit to a warmer climate necessary, Mr. Hildreth went, in 1840, to Demerara (in British Guiana), where he spent three years, employing his time in editing successively two newspapers in Georgetown, the capital, and in writing his "Theory of Morals," which was published in 1844, soon after his return to Boston. In 1849, appeared the first volume of the great work on which his fame will chiefly rest-his "History of the United States," of which five more volumes appeared in the course of the three succeeding years, bringing down the narrative to the close of the first term of Mr. Monroe's administration. In 1853, appeared his "Theory of Politics," one of his ablest and most acute treatises. In 1854, he gave us a new edition of "Despotism in America," with a "continuation," such as the significant events that had occurred since the appearance of the first edition enabled him to make. The latest work of Mr. Hildreth's is "Japan as it Was and as it Is," published in 1855. In that

4

This was republished in 1852, under the title of "The White Slave."