398 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the respiration, too, of such an atmosphere as that of our earth, we 

 perceive that our highest endowments are thus connected with things 

 at first sight apparently having no connection with them. And 

 though it is thus the arch-chemist, the Sun, who transmutes a poison- 

 ous gas in the air into fruits, and seeds, and flowers; who prepares the 

 vital medium that we breathe, and enables us, therefore, to think and 

 move, shall we not look with veneration, through his more obvious 

 agency, to a silent influence that is beyond ? For these products of 

 his action are so many witnesses to us of a provident foresight for our 

 physical and moral wants. There is an authority who has taught us 

 not to disregard such natural emblems. Who is it that has set his 

 rainbow in the cloud, as the pledge of a plighted word? "We are 

 surrounded on all sides with similar indications, and are constantly 

 invited to see in each material event a token of intellectual benefit ; 

 and if, as we have seen, from a poisonous atmosphere, there has thus 

 gradually been developed, under the agency of that great celestial 

 body, a medium suited to the well-being and conducive to the happi- 

 ness of man, may we not hope that what has taken place as resi^ects 

 his physical is a type of w^hat will occur as respects his social condi- 

 tion. Who that looks on the events which this year has brought forth^ 

 — the overturning of thrones and time-cemented institutions, the 

 bloodshed and atrocities of civil wars — who does not recognize that 

 we are entering on an era ? The material atmosphere once had a poi- 

 sonous constitution, the social atmosphere has its poisons too. There 

 is a cry, almost of despair, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, from 

 the Black to the Atlantic Seas. It is no imaginary nightmare tliat is 

 oppressing men, but so greatly has the human mind been developed 

 by the advance of knowledge, that it has outgrown the existing order 

 of things. The pressure of that invisible social atmosphere has become 

 too intolerable to be borne ; it must be cleared of its impurities and 

 poisons ; there must be freedom for thought and freedom of action. 

 The natural change which we have been considering was only brought 

 about after many a convulsion ; the moral change must have its catas- 

 trophes. But are we not taught, from this evening's reflections, to 

 trust that there is in this too the influence of One far greater than the 

 sun, but of whom the sun is the most noble and appropriate type, who, 

 unafiected by the tempests of the times and the suflerings of men, is 

 steadily shaping the course of events, to bring things at last into a 

 condition suitable for the intellectual as well as the physical well- 

 being of our race ? 



1 This was said in 1848, a year of many political revolutions. 



