But who shall estimate her influence on private happiness? Who shall say how many thousands have been made wiser, happier, and better, by those pursuits in which she has taught mankind to engage; to how many the studies which took their rise from her have been wealth in poverty; liberty in bondage; health in sickness; society in solitude. Her power is indeed manifested at the bar, in the senate; in the field of battle, in the schools of philosophy.
But these are not her glory. Surely it is no exaggeration to say, that no external advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual eye, which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world; all the hoarded treasures of the primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of the yet unexplored mines.
This is the gift of Athens to man. Her freedom and her power have for more than twenty centuries been annihilated. Her people have degenerated into timid slaves; her language, into a barbarous jargon. Her temples have been given up to the successive depredations of Romans, Turks, and Scotchmen; but her intellectual empire is imperishable.
And, when those who have rivaled her greatness, shall have shared her fate; when civilization and knowledge shall have fixed their abode in distant continents; when the sceptre shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps, travelers from distant regions shall in vain labor to decipher on some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts; her influence and her glory will still survive, fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin, and over which they exercise their control.
THE IRISH CHURCH.
BY WILLIAM E. GLADSTONE.
No man in England, or in fact in the whole world, has gained so high a distinction in modern times for statesmanship and eloquence as Mr. Gladstone. Possessed of vast resources of brain and culture, a remarkable command of language, an iron will and an enthusiasm in behalf of every cause he espoused that was checked by no opposition, the “Grand Old Man,” as he was called, was the most majestic and commanding figure in English politics and literature for a generation. His oration on the Irish Church is a good specimen of his impassioned oratory.
If we are prudent men, I hope we shall endeavor as far as in us lies to make some provision for a contingent, a doubtful, and probably a dangerous future. If we be chivalrous men, I trust we shall endeavor to wipe away all those stains which the civilized world has for ages seen, or seemed to see, on the shield of England in her treatment of Ireland. If we be compassionate men, I hope we shall now, once for all, listen to the tale of woe which comes from her, and the reality of which, if not its justice, is testified by the continuous emigration of her people—that we shall endeavor to—