Excerpt from Address on the Peculiar Advantages of the United States in Comparison With Other Nations

To England and the United States, then - the one operating through her insular and continental possessions in the east, the other by means of the intimate relations of social and commercial intercourse which she will be enabled to establish in consequence of her broad front on the Pacific ocean -to these powers, it would seem, the task has been assigned of infusing new life-blood into the almost extinct vitality of Asiatic institutions. That this momentous revolution will be slow of accomplishment, at least to hu man perception, and in comparison with the life of man, is most true. So are all the evolutions of the divine policy in terrestrial afi'airs. Six thousand years have elapsed since mankind was created, and yet Vice and ignorance are every where extant upon the earth. Near nineteen centuries have rolled away since the great expiatory sacrifice was made for the sins of the world, yet more than two-thirds of the human race still grovel in the dark ness of paganism and idolatry. Yet are we taught to trust that the time is coming and will come when vice and ignorance, when paganism and idol atry will be expelled the earth; when the animal propensities of man will be put under the control of his moral and intellectual faculties; and when a true and genuine religion will encircle the globe in its all-compre bending embrace. The agencies whose present and prospective operations I have been endeavoring to trace, are, perhaps, some of the many complicat ed means and arrangements of the deity, to effect these mighty changes.

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