the African’s devil-rites.  These are, to a large extent, principalities and powers of darkness with which our religion has never been brought into collision, save at trivial and far separated points, and in these cases the attack has never been made in strength.  But what of our own Europe—­the home of philosophy, of poetry, and painting?  Europe, which has produced Greece, and Rome, and England’s centuries of glory; which has been illumined by the fires of martyrdom; which has heard a Luther preach; which has listened to Dante’s “mystic unfathomable song”; to which Milton has opened the door of heaven—­what of it?  And what, too, of that younger America, starting in its career with all our good things, and enfranchised of many of our evils?  Did not the December sun now shining look down on thousands slaughtered at Fredericksburg, in a most mad, most incomprehensible quarrel?  And is not the public air which European nations breathe at this moment, as it has been for several years back, charged with thunder?  Despots are plotting, ships are building, man’s ingenuity is bent, as it never was bent before, on the invention and improvement of instruments of death; Europe is bristling with five millions of bayonets:  and this is the condition of a world for which the Son of God died eighteen hundred and sixty-two years ago!  There is no mystery of Providence so inscrutable as this; and yet, is not the very sense of its mournfulness a proof that the spirit of Christianity is living in the minds of men?  For, of a verity, military glory is becoming in our best thoughts a bloody rag, and conquest the first in the catalogue of mighty crimes, and a throned tyrant, with armies, and treasures, and the cheers of millions rising up like a cloud of incense around him, but a mark for the thunderbolt of Almighty God—­in reality poorer than Lazarus stretched at the gate of Dives.  Besides, all these things are getting themselves to some extent mitigated.  Florence Nightingale—­for the first time in the history of the world—­walks through the Scutari hospitals, and “poor, noble, wounded and sick men,” to use her Majesty’s tender phrases, kiss her shadow as it falls on them.  The Emperor Napoleon does not make war to employ his armies, or to consolidate his power; he does so for the sake of an “idea,” more or less generous and disinterested.  The soul of mankind would revolt at the blunt, naked truth; and the taciturn emperor knows this, as he knows most things.  This imperial hypocrisy, like every other hypocrisy, is a homage which vice pays to virtue.  There cannot be a doubt that when the political crimes of kings and governments, the sores that fester in the heart of society, and all “the burden of the unintelligible world,” weigh heaviest on the mind, we have to thank Christianity for it.  That pure light makes visible the darkness.  The Sermon on the Mount makes the morality of the nations ghastly.  The Divine love makes human hate stand out in dark relief.  This sadness, in the essence