BY THE AUTHOR OF CHIVALRY AND THE CRUSADE.' CIVILIZATION is to Society, or to masses of men, what Education is to the individual. The History of Civilization is no other than the history of God's providence over our race. A brief consideration of some of the processes and instruments ordained by that Providence for developing the various capacities of the human soul, may be perhaps both useful and interesting. And, in pursuance of our theme, we may note first, the singular fact, that the original impulse to the Civilization of any given Čommunity comes ever from abroad. History furnishes, to our knowledge, no authenticated instance of a Society within whose own bosom sprung up the incentive and the system of means, whereby it was borne onward to the triumphs and blessings of a fully civilized state. This point is illustrated by the most familiar passages of History. Our earliest knowledge of Greece, the primal source of illumination to the Modern World, shows it peopled by roving savages, without culture, refinement, or art. With the inmigration of Egyptian and Phoenician colonists, bearing with them letters and other appliances of cultivation, broke the morning of that splendid day, than which no brighter has hitherto shone on the world." Rome, too, for centuries after she had sitten unchallenged on her seven hills, remained in a condition hardly beyond barbarism. Military Glory was the engrossing passion, and the almost sole occupations. were War, and Agriculture in its rudest form. With the conquest of Carthage and Greece, and of Syria and lesser Asia, colonies of Greece, Navigation and Commerce, as also the Science, Literature, and General Culture of the Greeks, were introduced to the knowledge, and engaged the interest, of the Romans, and hence zation of the Mistress of the World. Note again Europe in the fifth century. Celts and Goths, Scythians, Sarmatians, and Britons, who shall conjecture how many ages these barbarous races had lived on, without making a single advance toward the melioration of their rude Estate? But, with the overthrow of the Roman Empire in the West, by their undisciplined yet resistless vigor, some light was, of VOL. XVI. 1 sprang the august Civili |