[108] The mountains have not grown in size; but man has broken through their passes. The winds and waves are capricious ever, as when they first beat upon the ancient Silurian rocks; but the steamboatAgainst the wind, against the tide,The distance between two places upon the surface of the globe is the same to-day as when the continents were first heaved from their ocean-bed; but the inhabitants can now, by the art of man, commune together. Much still remains to be done; but the Creator did not speak in vain when he blessed his earliest children, and bade them “to multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.” But there shall be nobler triumphs than any over inanimate nature. Man himself shall be subdued,--subdued to abhorrence of vice, of injustice, of violence; subdued to the sweet charities of life; subdued to all the requirements of duty and religion; subdued, according to the law of human progress, to the recognition of that gospel law by the side of which the first is as the scaffolding upon the sacred temple,--the law of human brotherhood. To labor for this end was man sent forth into the world; not in the listlessness of idle perfections, but endowed
Now steadies on with upright keel.
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B. B. Russell, 1874.
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