That the miracle is ended is no indication that it cannot be repeated.  For the very reason that the now dead, inarticulate wire, like an infant, lisped and stammered once, it is certain that another will soon be born, which will live to trumpet forth like the angel of civilization, its minister of flaming fire!  No one should abate a jot from the high hope excited then.  No imagination should suffer a cloud on the picture it then painted.  Governments and capitalists have not been idle, and will not be discouraged.  Already Europe and Africa are connected by an electric tunnel under the sea, five hundred miles in length; already Malta and Alexandria speak to each other through a tube lying under thirteen hundred miles of Mediterranean waters; already Britain bound to Holland and Hanover and Denmark by a triple cord of sympathy which all the tempests of the German Ocean cannot sever.  And if we come nearer home, we shall find a project matured which will carry a fiery cordon around the entire coast of our country, linking fortress to fortress, and providing that last, desperate resource of unity, an outer girdle and jointed chain of force, to bind together and save a nation whose inner bonds of peace and love are broken.

Such energy and such success are enough to revive the expectation and to guaranty the coming of the day when we shall behold the electric light playing round the world unquenched by the seas, illuminating the land, revealing nation to nation, and mingling language with language, as if the “cloven tongues like as of fire” had appeared again, and “sat upon each of them.”

It will be a strange period, and yet we shall see it.  The word spoken here under the sun of mid-day, when it speaks at the antipodes, will be heard under the stars of midnight.  Of the world of commerce it may be written, “There shall be no night there!” and of the ancient clock of the sun and stars, “There shall be time no longer!”

When the electric wire shall stretch from Pekin, by successive India stations, to London, and from India, by leaps from island to island, to Australia, and from New York westward to San Francisco, (as has been already accomplished,) and southward to Cape Horn, and across the Atlantic, or over the Strait to St. Petersburg,—­when the endless circle is formed, and the magic net-work binds continent, and city, and village, and the isles of the sea, in one,—­then who will know the world we live in, for the change that shall come upon it?

Time no more!  Space no more!  Mankind brought into one vast neighborhood!

Prophesy the greater union of all hearts in this interblending of all minds.  Prophesy the boundless spread of civilization, when all barriers are swept away.  Prophesy the catholicity of that religion in which as many phases of a common faith shall be endured as there are climes for the common human constitution and countries in a common world!