The Tempest.

Yes, it is over; and the great Armada is vanquished.  It is lulled for awhile, the everlasting war which is in heaven, the battle of Iran and Turan, of the children of light and of darkness, of Michael and his angels against Satan and his fiends; the battle which slowly and seldom, once in the course of many centuries, culminates and ripens into a day of judgment, and becomes palpable and incarnate; no longer a mere spiritual fight, but one of flesh and blood, wherein simple men may choose their sides without mistake, and help God’s cause not merely with prayer and pen, but with sharp shot and cold steel.  A day of judgment has come, which has divided the light from the darkness, and the sheep from the goats, and tried each man’s work by the fire; and, behold, the devil’s work, like its maker, is proved to have been, as always, a lie and a sham, and a windy boast, a bladder which collapses at the merest pinprick.  Byzantine empires, Spanish Armadas, triple-crowned papacies, Russian despotisms, this is the way of them, and will be to the end of the world.  One brave blow at the big bullying phantom, and it vanishes in sulphur-stench; while the children of Israel, as of old, see the Egyptians dead on the sea-shore,—­they scarce know how, save that God has done it, and sing the song of Moses and of the Lamb.

And now, from England and the Netherlands, from Germany and Geneva, and those poor Vaudois shepherd-saints, whose bones for generations past

     “Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;”

to be, indeed, the seed of the Church, and a germ of new life, liberty, and civilization, even in these very days returning good for evil to that Piedmont which has hunted them down like the partridges on the mountains;—­from all of Europe, from all of mankind, I had almost said, in which lay the seed of future virtue and greatness, of the destinies of the new-discovered world, and the triumphs of the coming age of science, arose a shout of holy joy, such as the world had not heard for many a weary and bloody century; a shout which was the prophetic birth-paean of North America, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, of free commerce and free colonization over the whole earth.

“There was in England, by the commandment of her majesty,” says Van Meteran, “and likewise in the United Provinces, by the direction of the States, a solemn festival day publicly appointed, wherein all persons were solemnly enjoined to resort unto ye Church, and there to render thanks and praises unto God, and ye preachers were commanded to exhort ye people thereunto.  The aforesaid solemnity was observed upon the 29th of November:  which day was wholly spent in fasting, prayer, and giving of thanks.