CLAIMS ON THE CHRISTIAN.
With the Christian community California has higher claims than those which glitter in her mines. The moral elements which now drift over her streams and treasured rocks will ere long settle down into abiding forms. The impalpable will become the real, and the unsubstantial assume a local habitation and a name. Shall these permanent shapes, into which society is to be cast, take their plastic features from the impress of blind accident and skeptical apathy, or the moulding hand of religion? These primal forms must remain and wear for ages the traces of their deformity or beauty, their guilty insignificance or moral grandeur. Through them circulates your own life-blood; in them is bound up the hopes of an empire. Not only the destiny of California is suspended on the issue, but the fate of all the republics which cheer the shores of the Pacific. The same treason to religion which wrecks the institutions of this country, will sap the foundations of a thousand other glorified shrines. It is for you, Christian brethren, to prevent such a disaster; it is for you to pour into California an unremitted tide of holy light. The Bible must throw its sacred radiance around every hearth, over every stream, through every mountain glen. The voice of the heralds of heavenly love must be echoed from every cliff and chasm and forest sanctuary. On you devolves this mission of Christian fidelity. It is for your faith and philanthropy to say what California shall be when her swelling population shall burst the bounds of her domain. You can write her hopes in ashes, or stars that shall never set. Every school-book and Bible you throw among her hills will be a source of penetrating and pervading light, when the torch of the caverned miner has gone out. The images which you impress on her gold age will efface; but the insignia of truth, stamped into her ardent heart, will survive the touch of time, and gleam bright in the night of the grave.