MR. PRESIDENT,

      And Gentlemen, members of the Union Literary Society:--

      An incident occurred on the 10th of November in the year of our Lord 1808, which has occasioned our meeting together this evening. That incident is of some interest both to you and me, else we had not assembled in commemoration of it. It was the day of the nativity of your literary institution--a day in which the founders of your association resolved to prepare themselves more thoroughly for the enjoyment of the social state, by placing themselves in a new relation to one another, and solemnly agreeing to discharge to one another certain social duties and obligations with a special reference to their mutual improvement. They very naturally imagined that they could create a miniature world, in which, on a limited scale, they would have the great world of mankind represented in all those points affecting their literary and moral improvement. They discovered in themselves certain common wants and desires, as well as certain individual aptitudes and powers of supplying those wants and of gratifying those desires; and, in order to this, they agreed to meet on a certain day in every week, and to come with all the available means of improving one another, and of being improved--by comparing their respective views, and calling forth their individual energies in discussing such questions as naturally tended to the development and cultivation of their intellectual and moral powers, and thus fitting themselves for advantageously acting their part on the great theatre of the world.

      You, their successors, approving of these objects of their association, and of the principles and motives which influenced them thus to act, [272] have incorporated yourselves with them as component members of the same institution, and, in pursuance of the very laudable objects of your association, have met this evening to receive an anniversary address from one who cannot but feel himself both honored and happy in being invited to further the wise and benevolent ends of your institution.

      To me, gentlemen, it is frequently no easy task to select a subject pertinent to the occasion. During the last three months--the busiest in my life--the subject of commemorative institutions has occurred to my mind as one of some importance; and presuming it to be as apposite to the present occasion as any I could think of, I decided to offer you a few practical thoughts on THE PHILOSOPHY OF MEMORY AND OF COMMEMORATIVE INSTITUTIONS.

      Preparatory to this, however, it is expedient that we very briefly glance at the faculty of memory itself, as a prerequisite to the comprehension of the philosophy of commemorative institutions. But, gentlemen, what can we say of memory that has not been already said, and better said than we can say it, by some of the great masters of mental philosophy, such as Bacon, Locke, Reid, Watts, Stewart, Brown, or Combe? We shall not attempt to say what they have said, in the way of developing the abstract nature or peculiar attributes of any faculty, instinctive or acquired, denominated Memory. With us, memory is contemplated merely as a monumental tablet, not as an organ nor as an active power. Recollection, indeed, is a faculty, an active power of reading what has been written and inscribed on the tablet of memory. Memory is as passive as the marble tables on which the finger of God inscribed the ten everlasting precepts, while recollection is as active as the pulse of life in reading the inscriptions on those mysterious and incomprehensible tables.

      It is, indeed, agreed by the ancients and the moderns that, of all the faculties or capacities of improvement bestowed on man, either associated with, or supplementary to, reason, memory is first in rank, if not in development. The powers usually styled perception, memory, reflection--or, if any one prefer the new nomenclature to the old, the perceptive and reflective powers--are the eyes, and ears, and hands of the soul; without which its very existence were unknown to itself.

      Instead, then, of descanting upon themes so trite as the usual disquisitions upon this noblest of our intellectual powers, permit me to invite your attention to it as one of the most sensible and incontrovertible demonstrations of the immateriality, if not immortality, of the human soul. [273]

      To locate this power is nowadays regarded as wholly impossible. The new philosophy avers that, though it has a name, it is without a habitation. Gall, Spurzheim, and Combe, the illustrious trio of the new school, can find for it no organ at all; and the metaphysicians of the old school could never find a single cavern for it within all the enclosures of head or heart. In their sublimated and ethereal science, it is a faculty of the soul--an abstract essence, which the most exquisite forceps ever invented by imagination could not seize or hold up to the eye of the mind for the millionth part of a second.

      If material it be, it is matter borrowed from another sphere. It is some of the mould or clay of heaven--of a peculiar unearthy type and temper. It is spiritual matter--a substratum so ethereal and divine as to elude the intellectual grasp and comprehension of a new Aristotle--seventy times more ideal and refined than the celebrated author of the Ten Predicaments.

      Upon its tablet it is, however, agreed there can be written not only all the words of a living or a dead language, but those of many living and dead languages, together with as many volumes of science and images of persons, places, events, facts and documents of individual experience as would busily occupy the oldest antediluvian Sage during his whole life of a thousand years to read or recall. Gentlemen, can any of you deny the fact, or, affirming it, can you explain it? Can you show from any earthly material, analogy or fact, how it is possible to engrave or write over a billion or a quadrillion of times the same substance and still preserve the distinct clear legibility of every letter and point? Take the phrenological sinuosities, folds and convolutions of any organ of the brain, each having its own book-keeper with his celestial patent for short-hand abbreviations, and ask how he can write a million of pages upon them, or upon the ends and points of those intellectual horns, blunted only by the bony case which envelops them. Or take the fine fluids of a Voltaire or an Epicurus, so subtle and imperceptible that the very nerves of sensation along which they roll their gentle current of animal life cannot detect them; and suppose the soul to embark upon these tides of spiritual life all its discoveries: how could such a navy bear within its bosom the immense' accumulation stowed away for years in the warehouses of Memory? Would not the smallest of Memory's craft, so often stranded on the numerous bars of such a river, be likely to fail of performing their regular trips at the call of other powers constantly waiting upon their arrival to put themselves in motion! Ridiculous and preposterous [274] though such visions and hallucinations be, there have not been wanting men of such a peculiar organization as not only to cherish within their own bosoms such idealities, but to seek to propagate them in, the world.

      It has, indeed, also been affirmed that memory is not exclusively an attribute of mind; because creatures destitute of mind possess it, and, in reference to sensible objects, in some cases in a degree superior to man.

      It is admitted that as respects ideas and impressions received through sensation and perception, as well as in matters of instinctive knowledge, some animals, such as the elephant, horse, dog, &c., possess the faculty of memory in a very liberal degree. But what does the fact of animal memory prove? Does it prove that terrestrial matter thinks, remembers, feels, or that irrational animals have that peculiar faculty called mind in man? Or does it only prove a proposition which all nature attests?--viz. that wherever there is organization there is life, either animal or vegetable; and wherever there is animal organization and animation there is a portion, or at least some of the properties, of the great Universal Mind. This is demonstrably a true proposition. Mind is printed on paper, as well as possessed by him that writes: mind is impressed on all the works of the Creator, animate or inanimate; but in some of its modifications it is in, as well as upon, the animated creation of God. There is just such a portion of intelligence communicated to every creature, according to its organization, such a measure of instinctive knowledge, wisdom and memory, as fits it for its exact position in creation, that it may fulfil the benevolent; designs of the Creator. With one of our best-reasoning poets we may say:--

Thus, the memory of man, compared with that of the most gifted of the merely instinctive tribes, is as the solar beam of nature's noonday-sun compared with the feeble ray of evening's glow-worm.

      They are, indeed, essentially different powers--as different as instinct and reason--as the phosphorescent light of rotten wood and the bright glow of the most radiant gem that beams upon a monarch's crown.

      Let us not, however, gentlemen, lose ourselves or our subject in the curious labyrinth of fanciful speculations. The palpable fact is before us. The tablet of human memory is neither a tablet of brass, of stone or of flesh; it has neither length, breadth nor thickness; it has neither solidity nor gravity: yet are inscribed on it not only the words of many languages, but the history of nations, their origin, progress and fall. The actions of their kings and their princes, their heroes and their statesmen, their philosophers and their Sages, their orators and their poets--with all their arts of war and of peace--are recorded not only on the same mysterious and unearthy substratum, but are repeated many quadrillions of times, and yet are clearly legible and unambiguous.

      The art of reading these monuments and inscriptions of the past is as mysterious and inexplicable as the art of writing upon the same substance and upon the same lines, already written over so unspeakably often, the scenes and the transactions, the thoughts and the emotions, of the present. Who of the prosing materialists, so profoundly read in the secret operations of nature, can explain to us, on their own philosophy, that imponderable, intactable, immeasurable, invisible point, or line, or substance, on which can be written, and from which can be read, so many millions of ideas and impressions? With what curious magnifying microscope shall its dimensions or its location be ascertained? If it be a lonely pilgrim, wandering from organ to organ--having neither sympathy, homopathy nor antipathy in common with flesh, blood or bones--who can describe its most peculiar [276] personality, or draw out the lineaments of its singular physiognomy, that we may distinguish and honor it with appropriate regards?

      It is found in the heart, and yet is no part of it. Its presence or its absence affects not in the least its dimensions or its gravity. What a new and sublime chapter in intellectual chemistry will the development of this singular fact afford!--the exposition of the reason why one head in the balance, without a single idea, and destitute of life, will weigh just as much as one of the same dimensions, density and solidity, having within it life, and, in legible characters, imprinted a hundred or a thousand volumes. Who can survey that curious point, or line, or surface on which may be engraven the history of a world and the experiences of an eternity--itself, too, subject to impressions from every sense and from every thing, real and imaginary, commanded by something called attention, and controlled by something called volition?

      Where now the materialist, the skeptic, the atheist? Let them expatiate on matter, solid, fluid, gaseous, aeriform; let them bring their intactable crucibles, their hypothetical laboratories, their imponderable agencies, and distil the quintessence of that substratum on which are legibly inscribed all that is written upon the tomes of an Alexandrian Library; let them demonstrate the peculiar attributes, essential and accidental, that belong to that nameless substance, more durable than marble or brass, and yet of so delicate a texture and so fine a surface as to receive the most gentle touch of the softest pencil in Fancy's pallet when portraying upon it the phantoms of some imaginative scene.

      I presume not to speculate on a subject so incomprehensible. I only affirm the conviction that a more instructive exemplification of the infinite superiority of mind to all earthly matter, and a more soul-subduing demonstration of the fact that there is a spirit in man composed of no earthly elements, cannot, in my humble opinion, be afforded, than are deducible from the philosophy of memory, and the art of recollecting or reading off whatever may have been fairly inscribed upon it.

      But when the whole philosophy of memory and of commemorative institutions becomes the theme of contemplation, we are obliged to inquire after the cui bono? the benevolent designs of the Great Author of all good in those manifestations of his bountifulness to man. And, in the first place, our attention is called to the use of memory itself, before we consider the character and object of her commemorative rites.

      It requires but a slight power of abstraction to perceive that man, [277] though possessing every other attribute and capacity that belongs to his nature, wanting only the single power we call memory, must have continued as lie was born--a perfect infant in knowledge--a speechless, idealess, thoughtless biped, deriving neither intelligence, impulse nor motive from a single incident, sensation or reflection in his whole antecedent existence. The universe, in all its developments of wisdom, power and goodness, in all its demonstrations of riches, beauty and magnificence, as well as the soul within him, would be to him one universal and perpetual carte blanche--an indistinguishable mass of being, without a single manifestation of design indicative of its great and glorious Author. Destitute, as the animal man is, of that measure of instinct belonging to inferior creatures, without memory, we may safely affirm, he could not live at all. Eating and drinking would be to him as great a mystery every hour as it was when first he appeared upon the stage of life. It is, then, an essential attribute of the human soul--of the being designated man--without which, neither the past, the present nor the future would be known, appreciated or enjoyed.

      But to delineate even the outlines of its designs in the development of the human soul and in the formation of human character, it is requisite that we briefly advert to one or two of its primary functions.

      It as certainly causes the soul, or mind, to grow in stature, in all its dimensions, as the atmosphere we inhale and the food we eat contribute to the growth of the body. There is as certainly a spiritual system with which the human soul is homogeneous, as there is a material system with which the body sympathizes. Each element in man seeks its kindred system, and as naturally tends to it as the atoms of material nature seek their kindred and common centres. It is requisite, therefore, that the mind have powers of assimilation and accretion as well as the body. The body is destined to grow, and for this purpose it has its apparatus of separating from external and surrounding elements whatever is congenial with its peculiar organization. It has the power of gradually assimilating such elements, and finally of incorporating them with itself. Just so the inward man, and the spiritual system with which it is kindred. It communes with mind and all its manifestations in sensible nature; and for this purpose it needs and is provided with an appropriate apparatus for secerning from inert matter the indications of reason, adaptation and design of assimilating these and of incorporating them with itself, and thus of increasing its stature, its capacities and its vigor.

      Who does not perceive, when the question is presented to him, that if the body, by its Creator, has been endowed with that marvellous [278] power of abstracting from all the elements around it such particles as it can assimilate to itself and incorporate with the different departments of its own organization, to its great enlargement and corroboration, there can be no reason why the soul should not have the same powers and capacities of assimilating to itself whatever is homogeneous in the mental and moral elements, in the midst of which it has its being, and of so incorporating them with itself as to promote its own growth and vigor. This is the first and main use of reason and recollection. By means of this species of rumination with which the mind is furnished, under the names of memory and reflection, the human soul secerns and detaches from material nature all its earthly feculency and gross ingredients, and attaches to itself the reason, argument and design with which the great unseen and eternal Spirit holds an unobtrusive and perpetual communion with its kindred offspring within us. Memory and reflection are measurably to the soul what the powers of digestion are to the body. That portion of both the corporeal and the mental repast, which does not amalgamate with the system, is, by a wise and benevolent provision of nature, carried out of it. The analogy is more exact than at first thought would have been presumed. The fact is, the soul grows in stature and in vigor, by the provisions which perception, through sensation, acquires, and memory retains; and which reflection, aided by imagination, and those powers of abstracting and generalizing, converts into the very pabulum and stimulus of its healthful and vigorous advancement. By the harmonious and combined action of perception, memory, reason and reflection, the mind acquires, treasures up and separates to its own use so much of every kindred principle as is favorable to its growth and enlargement; and when disencumbered from the imperfect machinery of its terrestrial tenement, its growth will be eternally cumulative and progressive.

      When we see the amateur touch with exquisite sensibility and almost instinctive sagacity the strings of the harp, and "wake to ecstasy the living lyre," when we hear an accomplished reader perform fifteen hundred enunciations in a minute, without the consciousness of an effort, and when we enumerate the ten thousand acts that conspire in the movements of a single habit, what striking demonstrations have we of the avails of memory in the development and growth of the human soul!

      These indications of the influence and power of memory on the acts and habits of the outward man are but a mere exponent of its more mysterious and wonderful power over the whole intellectual and moral man, in the development and perfection of all its powers. They are all [279] as dependent upon it for maturity and perfection as are the members of the human body upon the organs of digestion and accretion.

      But there is another and a still more important function which memory performs to the whole man--body, soul and spirit. By it we not only commune with the present and the past, but by its instrumentality we acquire both impulse and motive for future action. It holds up to our feet the torches of past observation and experience, and throws upon our path the concentrated light of bygone years; thereby furnishing us from its rich and varied treasures those arguments and motives which constitute the very elements of wisdom and prudence. Without the faculty of memory, how barren the incidents of the past to afford either counsel or comfort to man! Without it, the age of a Methuselah were lived in vain, so far as intellectual or moral improvement is concerned. It is a gift which rescues from oblivion the experience of the past, and which converts into the currency of every moment the wealth acquired through years of labor and sorrow.

      It also furnishes us with the experience of others for our still further improvement. The illustrious dead, whose talents and whose virtues afford so much instruction and encouragement to the living--our beloved ancestors and relatives that have left our world--are entombed in memory's sacred urn, over which is inscribed all that endeared them to the living. Though dead, they yet live in our admiration and affection, and often exert a salutary influence upon our conduct. They have, too, a sort of indefinite immortality in the esteem and affections of the living in virtue of that power which memory sways over the desolations of the grave. It is just at this point that the philosophy of commemorative institutions rises above our horizon.

      To aid memory in her pious and benevolent efforts to profit from the example of the great and the good who have honored our nature and blessed our world, man has erected other monuments, and inscribed on other tablets than those of the head or the heart, the names, the deeds and the excellencies of those who deserve an immortality in the recollections of the living. Nowhere heaves the grassy turf or rises the lettered stone, indicative of departed worth, that an appeal is not made to the passing stranger to pause and inquire after the humble tenant that lies beneath. It is an appeal to the living to remember the dead. It is a device and an effort to snatch from oblivion those whose names or whose deeds can contribute any thing to the happiness of the world.

      The great and the noble have had recourse to monuments of costlier construction and of a more enduring architecture. From the family vault up to the proud pyramids of Egyptian kings, through all the [280] intermediate mausoleums of human pride and human folly, we read the same lesson and learn the same moral. All wish to live in the affection and admiration of posterity. True, indeed, is it that often those magnificent tombs owe their origin and their melancholy splendors more to the pride and ambition of the living than to the virtues or the wishes of the dead. Still, it is a petition on the part of the humble tenant within, or of the constructors of the monumental pile, for a place in memory's faithful register--a desire to extort from every visitant a tribute of respect for something supposed to be worthy of the regard, if not of the admiration, of mankind. Some, indeed, of these proud and stately cenotaphs have inscribed upon them, or associate in our recollections, the memory of deeds of tyranny, misrule and cruelty, that awaken in our souls a just contempt for those whose ashes are enshrined within. These, indeed, are not without an advantage to the living. As beacons over the rocks which mariners are taught to shun, these marble biographies in epitome indicate to the living the rocks and shoals on which the lofty sons of earth have shipwrecked their fortunes and engulfed themselves in ruin.

      But, when we stand before the monumental pillar which a nation's gratitude or a people's admiration has erected in commemoration of departed philanthropy and great public worth, and when the mind reverts to those generous and noble deeds which embalm in kindred hearts the memory of the illustrious dead, what deep emotions and melancholy pleasures arise within us and struggle for utterance! Could the sons of science, of poetry and philosophy find the grave of Homer, of Socrates, of Plato or Archimedes, or stand at the tomb of Bacon, of Locke, of Newton, of Shakspeare or of Milton--those "plenipotentiaries of intellect and giants of the soul"--what awe and reverence for intellectual greatness would possess their minds in the remembrance of the mighty triumphs and splendid trophies of their illustrious and wonderful genius!

      Or, could the saint who spends his years in Bible studies find the cave of Machpelah, where repose the ashes of the more illustrious Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or, in traversing the plains of Moab, discover the tomb of Moses, or find along the banks of the Tiber where rests the head of Paul, or, in visiting Jerusalem, ascertain with certainty the sepulchre of David, the tombs of departed prophets, saints and martyrs, what unspeakably solemn and sublime thoughts would spring up within him, and bewail the impotence and imperfection of human language.

      It is when we stand within the precincts of those sacred spots of [281] earth where repose in her fond embrace the mortal remains of those we dearly love or greatly admire, that the philosophy of commemorative institutions arises most clearly to our view and opens its sacred treasures to our consideration.

      But, as the sons of the inductive philosophy always begin, with, history, advance to classification and end with deduction, we are obliged to glance for a moment at the history of commemorative institutions in order to a mere, glimpse of their true philosophy.

      Suffice it, then, to say that nature, religion and society have each their commemorative rites--in the form of eras, anniversaries, or symbolic institutions. To say nothing of the developments of astronomy in the kindred worlds and systems around us, the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms of our own globe present an irrefragable host of witnesses in attestation of the truth that nature herself leads the way in originating both the fact and the meaning of commemorative institutions. Not to appeal to the eras or the facts of the first and second dentition in the infancy and childhood of man, the distinct and well-marked periods of infancy, puberty and old age, with all their peculiar phenomena; not to appeal to the teeth of the horse or the horns of the ox--those intelligible witnesses of the number of their years; not to enumerate the growths of the trees marked in the circles of their wood--we may at once appeal to mother earth herself and her ten thousand hills and mountains, diluvial and volcanic, her deep, alluvial valleys, her mineral and fossil proofs, stereotyped in her innumerable petrifactions, by means of which she teaches us of former generations, and registers the genera and species of animal and vegetable creations, with the various epocha of their past existence. Thus nature perpetuates the memory of her wonderful achievements, and erects the monuments of the great eras, incidents and cycles of her wonderful history. On the tops of her loftiest mountains she records the fact of at least one universal deluge, and in her volcanic excavations develops not only the wondrous power of those hidden and mysterious fires that are continually excavating channels for receding oceans, and thus still more enlarging and enriching the earth for the increasing wants of man, but also affords us specimens of the untold treasures which God has concealed in the bowels of the earth for the comforts and conveniences of generations yet unborn.

      But from the monumental and commemorative rites of dame Nature we turn to those of religion. These naturally classify themselves under three heads--the Patriarchal, Jewish and Christian. As persons and events multiplied in the world, commemorative institutions kept pace [282] with them. But we can only select one or two of these, as a fair specimen of this class of monumental records.

      And to begin with the first:--The oldest commemorative institution in the world is that which records the voluminous fact that nature--that familiar, indefinable and inappreciable something, admired by all and worshipped by a few--is herself an effect, and not a primary cause. It is in this sublime and philosophic way that the man of true science views that primeval solemnization of time called "the Sabbath," the first and one of the most significant and important of all patriarchal institutions. Most modern philosophers, though Baconians in every thing else, are Platonists and Aristoteleians here. They assume, because their philosophic wand is too short to reach up to the first Sabbath--they assume, I say, that nature is an effect; and then gravely ask in their a posteriori arguments, "Can there be an effect without a cause?" Prior to the era of facts and deductions, in the age of hypotheses and speculation, before men had learned the true art of reasoning, this was an astounding question, which brought every deist and theist to his knees.

      That nature is an effect, is not to be gathered from analogy, from abstract reasonings, or from any data in all the premises over which philosophy has legitimate sway. The transcendent fact that nature has a Creator--that matter is the offspring of a spirit--a fact which is yet doubted by multitudes, and denied by many called philosophers(rather philosophists)--is a fact, however, which is the corner-stone of the very temple of reason, of piety and morality--a fact which, to be clearly perceived and realized, seizes the soul with the grasp of Omnipotence, inspires it with the sentiment of the sublime, and causes it to thrill with the elementary emotions of every principle of piety and humanity that elevates, adorns and glorifies man.

      Heaven left not this fact, the basis of a thousand volumes, to be gathered from abstract reasonings, vitiated traditions, ingenious analogies or plausible conjectures, but from a monumental institution, which was as universal as the annals of time, as the birth of nations, and as the languages spoken by mortals. An institution, too, which notwithstanding its demand not only of the seventh part of all time, but of the seventh day in uninterrupted succession, was celebrated from the creation to the deluge, during the deluge, and after the deluge till the giving of the law; and which, when transcribed by the finger of God from the tablets of memory to the tables of marble, begins with the very word "remember," the only word which is legitimately inscribed in every land and language upon every sort of monumental record, [283] natural, religious, moral or political. The humblest pillar that rises in honor of the dead has either "in memory of" inscribed in fact or by circumstances upon its front; and so reads the fourth precept of the everlasting ten--"Remember that in six days God created the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested on the seventh: wherefore, remember the seventh day, to sanctify and hallow it."

      The inductive philosopher, finding the civilized world from time immemorial observing the Sabbath and counting time by sevens, sets himself to inquire into the cause of this mysterious division of time. He first looks to nature, then to art, and finally to history, to find for it a reasonable cause. Nature has divided time into days, months and years, but she proceeds no further. Art has divided it into hours and minutes and moments, but there she stops. Modern history refers him to the ancient. He finds in Homer, in Hesiod, in Callimachus and others, traces of the weekly observance and consecration of time. He hears Josephus say, "There is no city, Grecian or barbarian--there is no nation--which does not rest on the Sabbath." He shuts all the volumes of human history; he presumes not to explain the fact upon hypothesis or by abstract reasonings. He opens the Bible, he turns his ears to the Sabbath and hears a supernal voice from the remotest age proclaiming that nature is not self-existent and eternal--that time began--that there was a first day and a seventh day--that nature is a work, the work of an almighty, supernatural hand--that the awful stillness of eternity was first broken by an almighty fiat that impregnated dark inanity with all the primeval elements of light and life and beauty.

      Here he finds a sufficient reason for the universality and solemnity of the Sabbath, and also for the sacred and mystic import of the number seven, which is found in all antiquity, in all the rudimental nations of the earth. Here first, and here alone, he ascertains the momentous fact that nature is an effect, the work of an almighty hand; and from that moment he improves his style by forever repudiating from his speech the silly, infidel and preposterous phrase, "the works of nature."

      Now, as we are acting the part of the inductive philosopher, we shall select two or three more commemorative institutions, from which to deduce the philosophy of this much-neglected, though most interesting and important, department of divine and human science. We shall take a second from religion and from the highest antiquity.

      Sacrifice is also as old as the Fall, and as universal as the human [284] race. It consists in putting to death an unoffending victim in expiation of the sin of him who offers it to an offended Divinity. What, then, does it commemorate? That man through sin became subject to death. It commemorates this fact in all its ten thousand smoking altars and in all their numberless bleeding victims. Such was its retrospective and prospective character; for, like the Sabbath and all other religious and symbolic institutions, sacrifice had a prospective as well as a retrospective aspect; and therefore intimated the momentous and soul-subduing fact, that if man lives again in another and a better world, he shall live there in virtue of the substituted death of an innocent and unoffending victim.

      But the whole ground of commemorative institutions requires that we have a specimen of a mixed character between the religious and political; and such a one may be found in the phenomena of language itself, oral and written.

      If sacrifice be commemorative of the fall of man, oral language, in its most simple form, may be regarded as commemorative of the fact of a previous state of primeval innocence, when God and man held society together and communed face to face. The existence of human language is as inexplicable as it is inconceivable on any other hypothesis.

      All things begin in miracle and end in nature: in other words, all things are supernatural and divine in their origin; and that which we call nature indicates only their mode of continuous existence. Thus, not only did the Christian religion, the Jewish and the Patriarchal, begin in miracle, but nature and society also began in miracle.

      The first man, in every point of view, was a miracle. He never was an infant. Unlike every other child, compos comporis, he never learned his mother-tongue. Unfortunately, his mother was dumb; she was made without a tongue. Every son of man speaks whatever lingo was first spoken to him; but, mother-earth having no tongue, Adam was compelled to learn his Father's tongue. He had no other language than that of God; and, therefore, as every human being speaks the language first spoken to him, Adam spoke a dialect pronounced by God himself. In this summary, direct and incontrovertible way, we establish the fact that oral language is of divine origin; and thus it is a monumental pledge that God spoke to the first man before he spoke to God or to any kindred being. When any one finds a human being that speaks a language he never heard, then, but not till then, he may set out to prove that human language is of human origin.

      But while the commemorative institution--human language--is in [285] our horizon, we may find inscribed on this monument an argument for the divinity of the Bible and a further illustration of the genius of commemorative institutions.

      That argument is found in the dislocated languages and dialects of earth. These all proclaim to the discriminating ear that some preternatural circumstance or calamity has happened to man that has fallen on no other creature. So far as the language of the passions and the appetites is common to man with the inferior animals, he ought to resemble them in this, that as every species has one uniform language, in whatever clime or latitude it is found, so should he have but one. The horse, the cow, the sheep, the goat, with every thing that moves upon the earth or wings its way in the midst of heaven, has each but one language and but one speech. Assemble them from the remotest islands and continents, and they perfectly understand one another; but man, "the lord of the fowl and the brute," ferried over a river or carried over a mountain, finds not so much communion often with his own species as with the horse on which he rides or with the dog that waits upon his steps. On account of this, and sometimes for no better reason.

      This is a monument of that melancholy fact that mankind, soon after the deluge, again rebelled against God, and, in contravention of his governmental arrangements for the settlement of the whole earth and its equitable distribution, resolved on building a city and a tower as the centre of one great empire.

      The many-tongued nations of the earth, with their three thousand dialects, constitute an awful monument of the fact that our fathers at Babel united in one great rebellious effort against the Divine government; for, until then, " the earth was all of one language and of one speech."

      But for this, gentlemen, your heads had never ached with the gibberish of Greece or Rome; you had never consumed the midnight oil in making sense out of the Barbara celarent, Darii ferioque prioris, or wasted the bloom of youth in learning the interminable idioms and jargons of nations dead and alive. Instead of this rough discipline of the soul, you had found the discoveries of all ages and the experience of all mankind--the genius of poetry, oratory, eloquence, science, and of all arts, useful and ornamental--in your own vernacular, enriched with all the varied improvements and beautiful embellishments of near [286] six thousand years. What a finished medium of converse--what a perfect instrument of thought--what a translucent envelope of the soul--what an exquisitely-refined vehicle of the passions and feelings of the heart--would human speech have been, if all the labors of all the mighty spirits--the Mercuries, the Demosthenes, the Ciceros and the Apollos of Chaldea, Egypt, Arabia, Greece, Rome, Germany, France and England--had been spent on one language and on one universal medium of thought and feeling! But, alas! the bankrupt fortunes of our parents' follies are the inevitable portion of the meagre inheritance of fallen man.

      The Jewish Passover and the anniversary of our national birth are the only two political commemorative institutions which we shall add to the induction of monumental rites. The passover has been annually celebrated by one nation for the long period of three thousand three hundred and thirty-two years, commemorative of a great national deliverance from an oppressive and cruel bondage. It always reminds the Jew that his ancestors were once enslaved by Egyptian masters, and ground down to the dust under a most unrighteous and relentless tyranny, divested of every right dear to the human heart--even of the right of petition. God, however, in due time, heard the voice of their affliction. The cry of their suffering, the groanings of their oppression, entered the ears of the Lord of hosts. The era of his vengeance arrived: he arose in the majesty of his wrath, and poured out the fierce vials of his indignation upon the blood-stained throne and the wicked administration of the Pharaohs. He slew the first-born of man and beast throughout all the land of Egypt.

      The blood of a lamb, sprinkled upon the doors of the Israelites by the commandment of Abraham's God, was the means of redemption; the signal of deliverance, while the angel of destruction was executing vengeance on the doomed people. That messenger of death passed over every house besprinkled with blood; and thus the whole nation was saved without the loss of a man, and emancipated from a long and ruthless despotism. The Jews, by an oracle of God, set apart the fourteenth day of the first month of their new era as the day for eating a lamb, with peculiar rites, indicative of this great national deliverance. Not a single year has passed in the history of that people without a solemn domestic commemoration of that most memorable event.

      We too, residents of this New World, and citizens of these United States, have, as we imagine, been delivered from a very hard colonial bondage to English tax-masters. After years of unavailing remonstrance with and humble petitioning to the mother-country and its then [287] illiberal and churlish Government for a redress of their wrongs, our patriotic and venerable forefathers felt themselves justified before heaven and earth in making a grand appeal to the whole family of man, and in declaring themselves independent of the mother-country and claiming rank as a nation amongst the nations of the earth. This event happened on the ever-memorable fourth day of July, 1776.

      That was the birthday of our nation--the era of our existence as a sovereign and independent people. In conformity to this law of society, or this commemorative principle in our constitution, we have voluntarily set apart this most interesting of all the days of the year to every lover of his country and Government, as sacred to the memory of that event. The annual return of that day does, therefore, necessarily recall to our remembrance the incidents of this memorable epoch, and opens afresh in our hearts those sympathies and antipathies which prompted and animated our fathers to achieve for us so rich an inheritance, and for themselves a fame and a glory commensurate with all the days of our national existence and prosperity.

      May we perceive the true philosophy of commemorative institutions? Are they not designed to recall past events in their most lively forms, for the sake of producing or reproducing those states of mind and modes of feeling homogeneous with the events which they record? They are a device for raising from the dead and for giving an immortality to persons, facts and events which have in them a character and a design intimately and strongly affecting some deep and pleasurable emotion of our nature--some vital interest or affection of the heart.

      They are therefore an irresistible evidence of the truth and supposed importance of the events which they commemorate--a species of historic evidence of the highest character, and as far removed from the imputation of fraud or fiction as is any species of evidence extrinsic of that of the five senses. The history of the world, ancient and modern, as far back as all authentic tradition reaches, furnishes not, I fearlessly assert, one instance of a monumental institution established in commemoration of a fiction. There have ever been, as there now are, certain principles and passions in the human constitution and in human society that peremptorily forbid the accomplishment of such an effort to impose on the faith or credulity of mankind.

      We judge of human nature from the samples which we have seen. We make the present race always represent the past, and sometimes the future. Think you, gentlemen, that ten thousand dollars, or their value in labor, could be now raised in any city, county, state or nation [288] in the civilized world, to build a column, raise a pyramid or erect a triumphal arch in honor of a person who never lived, or of a military or any other triumph which was never achieved? It is impossible: the constitution of human society, the passions and principles of human action, conspire with every man's experience and observation to preclude such an assumption.

      Nay, even of events that have transpired at a given time, not so much as the date of their occurrence can be rushed back or forward a single day or month. As the American people could not now be induced to change the anniversary of their national birth to the 4th of June or the 14th of July, or you, gentlemen, the anniversary of the organization of your literary society from the 10th of November to the 10th of May, so the Jew could not change his passover from the 14th of Nisan to the 14th of Tizri, or his Pentecost from the 5th of the third month to the 5th of the seventh, or the Christian his Anno Domini to the Mohammedan Hegira, or his Lord's day to the Sabbath of the Jew. If, then, the refined ingenuity or the polished fraud of the present day could not change even the time of observance of any commemorative institution, literary, political or religious, I ask, How could they introduce a new observance in pretended confirmation of that which never happened? Such a thing is now, always was and evermore shall be impossible to any man or set of men whatever. Nay, all history gives no instance of the kind. The history of all nations, languages and of all antiquity may be challenged for an instance of any commemorative institution got up at the time or near the time of any alleged sensible fact or event that has been proved or can be proved not to have happened. On the contrary, they are all incontrovertibly certain and demonstrable. Commemorative institutions are, therefore, a species of historical evidence of incorruptible integrity, of the highest certainty and authority, and wholly beyond the imputation of fraud or fiction.

      Now, although the true and proper design of commemorative rites, as has been alleged, is the revival of those ideas and impressions, the reproduction of those feelings and emotions, which were the native offspring of those facts and events at the moment of there occurrence in the minds of those who understandingly witnessed and attended them,--I say, although this be their true philosophy; the reason and cause of their existence, still, as this design is dependent upon the truth and certainty of the events attested in those rites, they must be regarded as affording incontestable evidence of the truth of the facts themselves; and therefore the testimony which they afford in proof of the certainty of [289] great and interesting occurrences is equally important to mankind with the design or philosophy which gave them birth. The resurrection, for example, of the Founder of the Christian faith on the first day of the week, is first made certain by the existence of its commemorative rite, and then a corresponding class of grateful and joyful emotions spontaneously arise in the mind of every one who fully apprehends and believes the fact attested by the consecration of a day to its memory.

      Thus, gentlemen, as the Jews spent forty years in the wilderness while making a three or four days' journey from Egypt to Palestine, I have by a very circuitous route arrived at a point which might have been attained in a very few sentences. But, as we do not in excursions for pleasure always choose the shortest route, nor in making canals for the irrigation of a country or for the transportation of its produce prefer the most direct course, so have I led you in a very circuitous path to a point which might have been approached in a much more direct and immediate way.

      In conclusion, permit me, gentlemen, to express the desire that your society may continue to make the date of its organization still more and more worthy of remembrance; and that by the high and useful attainments of its members, the wide and extended sphere of public usefulness to which they aspire, and to which you shall attain, its anniversaries for many years to come may be celebrated, not only with such honors as these, but with the heartfelt assurance of the many great and enduring advantages your association shall have conferred upon its members, and upon that community in which you design to employ your cultivated powers, in prosecuting the high ends of your existence, and in promoting the intelligence and virtue, the prosperity and happiness, of your country and the human race. [290]

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