Excerpt from The Union: An Address by the Hon. Daniel S. Dickinson, Delivered Before the Literary Societies of Amherst College, July 10th, 1861 We are admonished by "the divinity that stirs within us," as well as by all history and experience in human affairs, that there are principles which can never be subverted, truths which never die. The religion of a Saviour, who, at his nativity, was cradled on the straw pallet of destitution, who in declaring and enforcing his divine mission was sustained by obscure fishermen, who was spit upon by the rabble, persecuted by power, and betrayed by treachery to envy, has by its inherent forces subdued, civilized, and conquered a world; not by the tramp of hostile armies, the roar of artillery, or the stirring airs of martial music, but by the swell of the same heavenly harmonies which aroused the drowsy shepherds at the rock-founded city of Bethlehem, proclaiming in their dulcet warblings, peace on earth and good will toward men; not by flashes of contending steel, amidst the bad passions of the battle-field, the shrieks of the dying, and the flames of subjugated cities, but by the glowing light which shot athwart the firmament, and illumined the whole heavens at his advent. Thus was ushered in that memorable epoch in the world's eventful history, the Christian era - an era which closed one volume in the record of man's existence, and opened another - which drew aside the dark curtain of death and degradation, exhibiting to life's worn and weary pilgrim along the wastes of ignorance and barbarism, new domains of hope and happiness for exploration and improvement, new fields for him to subdue and fertilize and reap, and new triumphs for him to achieve in the cause of human regeneration. And let him who fails to estimate the priceless value of this divine reformation in a temporal sense alone, contrast the condition of man wherever Christian civilization has travelled, with a people groping amidst the degrading darkness of idolatry, or bowing beneath some imposture still more heaven-daring and impious. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.