Excerpt from A High Civilization, the Moral Duty of Georgians, a Discourse: Delivered Before the Georgia Historical Society, on the Occasion of Its Fifth Anniversary, on Monday, 12th February, 1844

While all this movement of the Old World upon the New was in progress and an unwonted excitement had taken hold of peo ples and nations. No one, I say, grasped the important trutfz, that the New \vorld was the theatre which God had kept hidden from mankind. While the elements of a more perfect civilization than any the world had seen were gathering for its blessing, While they supposed that they were merely transferring to a new soil ancient modes of thought and feeling, they were really, as Arnold expresses it in another connexion, taking not only a step in advance, but the last step it bore marks of the fulness of times, as if there would be no future history beyond it. For the last eighteen hundred years, Greece had fed the human in tellect Rome, taught by Greece and improving upon her teach er, had been the source of law and government, and social civi lization and what neither Greece nor Rome could furnish, the perfection of moral and spiritual truth, had been given by Christ ianity. The changes which had been wrought had arisen out of the reception of these elements by new races, the English, the German, the Saxon races endowed with such force of character, that what was old in itself, when exhibited in them seemed to become something new. Now looking anxiously around the world for any new races which may receive the seed (so to speak) of our present history into a kindly yet a vigorous soil, and mayreproduce it, theisame and yet new, for a future period, we know not where such are to be found. We may not find new races, but we inhabit that New World, where God designed to work out, through the combination of these elements of civilization, the highest purposes of human nature. These colonies sprang into existence in possession of every thing which would inevitably give them. So soon as natural difficulties were overcome, immense moral weight in the scale of nations. What Europe had been gradually moulding herself into for centuries - a series of con stitutional governments - formed the basis of their civil state. What Rome had expended all her power and wisdom to attain a higher social life, a life of law and equity at once came over to them with the legal institutions of their father-land. What Greece had worked out as the result of a most happy intellec tual freedom and activity -the era xahov in letters, in arts, in taste flowed in as their heritage from the schools and universi ties in which they had been bred, and to crown the whole, what God had been consummating for the nations - the revelation ofhis will - the manifestation of himself in the face of Christ Jesus became the moving cause of much of the emigration which made the wilderness a peopled city. And the desert a place of habitations. As these colonies grew into life, the\ were hortor ed ih religion, literature, laws, life, which the World had been perfecting in its long and varied course; nurtured, too, under circumstances in which many of the evils which had grown up along with them could be shaken off, and their inherent blessings find room to develope themselves, in any direction and toward any perfection the will of man might suggest.

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