804 ISLES OF SUMMER. 



Columbus, with his little fleet of three vessels, solved the prob- 

 lem of the ages, dispelled the deep and profound mystery, and 

 bridged the dark and unfathomable abyss. Landing upon the 

 Bahamas, he impregnated the newly found Western world with 

 the seminal principles of the old Eastern civilization. This clus- 

 ter of keys and islands constitute the cradle in which Young 

 America, with all his inventions and revolutionary ideas in em- 

 bryo, was first rocked. How murky were the shadows that four 

 centuries ago shrouded equally the Christian church and the most 

 famous institutions of learning! Out of them the tall and com- 

 manding form of Columbus rises, radiant with an effulgence that 

 seems divine, ennobled and glorified by great truths in advance 

 of his age. For eighteen long years he bore with marvelous forti- 

 tude and equanimity the unsupplied and pressing wants which 

 his poverty engendered, the delusive and broken jiromises of 

 kings, the mistaken fears and bigotry of the good, the narrow- 

 mindedness of the learned, and the ridicule and contempt, the 

 scoffs and jeers of the ignorant and doubting world. 



The lesson of Columbus should never be forgotten by the emi- 

 nent theologians and divines who minister at the altars of religion, 

 and guard its j^rofound mysteries in their small but saered arks; 

 nor by the votaries of science, who seem, while they explore the 

 wonderful phenomena of nature, as disclosed uj^on our earth, or 

 travel among the stars, to literally 'Mvalk with God." Let them 

 ever remember that outside of cloistered cells and institutions 

 richly endowed and furnished, in the future as in the past, the 

 most valuable germs of progress will probably be found; that no 

 proposition should be ignored because it is bold and startling; no 

 truth ostracised because it is new. At the same time it may be 

 well for some of the long haired, unshaved, and unkempt seers 

 of our day, who have, as they think, some great revolutionary 

 and reformatory mission to fulfill, to consider that it may not be 



