The story of Christianity in America is one of the most astonishing chapters in the annals of the world. The events of Providence in reserving and preparing the country of these United States to be the theatre of its development and triumph, constitute one of the most remarkable passages of modern history.

This is a Christian nation, first in name, and secondly because of the many and mighty elements of a pure Christianity which have given it character and shaped its destiny from the beginning. It is pre-eminently the land of the Bible, of the Christian Church, and of the Christian Sabbath. It is the land of great and extensive and oft-repeated revivals of a spiritual religion, - the land of a free conscience and of free speech, - the land of noble charities and of manifold and earnest efforts for the elevation and welfare of the human race. The chief security and glory of the United States of America has been, is now, and will be forever, the prevalence and domination of the Christian Faith.

The materialist may find in other aspects of our country many grounds of complacency. Compared with other nations, we have had a wonderful career. The marvels of the republic stand thick along the line of our advancement. Whether we consider the colonial period, or that of the Revolution, or those of subsequent times, our growth in numbers, in territory, in wealth and power, has been almost unparalleled. The spirit of our Government and its institutions is singularly adapted to secure the general peace and happiness of human society. Our example has long been an object of jealousy and fear to tho oppressors of man. Our country has thrown open an asylum to the unfortunate from every quarter of the globe. All the kindreds of the earth have been welcome to repose beneath the shadow of our Tree, which in less than a single century has spread its branches across the continent. And if our civil polity has not realized all the possible blessings of a free government, the reason lies less in the genius of the economy than in the acknowledged imperfections of human nature itself. In addition to these things, Providence has signally favored the nation in its geographical position, the fertility of its soil, the plenty of its seasons, and the salubrity of its climate. The vigor of the people has found ample scope in utilizing the physical resources of the country, by all the industries and arts of agriculture, manufacture, and commerce; while in conducting the educational and intellectual interests of society, no modern nation in the same space of time has contributed more to the great elements of that higher civilization towards which the world is everywhere slowly but surely tending. These are sources of just satisfaction to every friend and lover of his country. But they are, meanwhile, considerations which fall far below those great moral and spiritual principles in the absence of which no state on earth can perpetuate its existence.

The true theory of national life and prosperity is clearly unfolded in the revealed word of God. The secret of all stability and enduring greatness in human governments, as with individual men, is to be found alone in the quickening power of the Christian Faith. This only, imbuing and pervading the mind and heart of human society, can organize and preserve to the body politic its highest and most untroubled fortunes. Fallibility and corruption inhere indeed in the materials of every commonwealth, - the result of which is a liability to continual change. Growth succeeded by decay, and decay forcing another growth, is the philosophy of national vicissitude, as it is also the great fact of the physical creation. " One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh," and therefore the permanence of empire must rest in the ideas of a people. If then there be in such ideas no great enduring principle of spiritual life, there can be no perpetuity of national existence. If there be no grand, sublime, and imperishable thought, filling the soul of a people with its fire and fashioning their progress after its pattern, there can be no sense in which they may escape the inevitable mutations of the world, or avoid the fate of so many that have gone before them.

The most powerful empires of the past have perished because they were wanting in a principle strong enough and spiritual enough to resist the self-destructive energies of human nature.

The pagan world could not furnish such a principle. It was in neither their philosophy nor their religion. It is not in the power of man unaided to discover and apply such a principle. Nothing short of divine wisdom and power can actualize among the nations that principle of spiritual life which not only originates but preserves the substance of social and civil welfare. Christianity is the divine method of imparting this principle to men and nations, and the only method revealed from Heaven for regulating our present state, and, after this, conferring upon us the lasting awards of a glorious immortality. The doctrines of Christianity form a system of perfect and saving truth, its duties comprise the sum of all genuine beneficence, while its ascendency over the human soul is effectually secured by the regeneration of no less than the infinite Spirit of God.

The dispensation of this Spirit has been distinctly and constantly affirmed in our country, and the people have been instructed to expect " times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord," not more in the early and latter rains of heaven than in the silent but reformatory processes of our moral and religious condition. The Author of human nature is that same God who must re-supply its wasting energy, and diffuse in human society the life and light of truth, by turning men from the way of transgression unto "the wisdom of the just." According to this belief, there is a direct and immediate connection between the human soul and the Divine Spirit; and wherever the sacred influence falls, there human beings are sure to " walk in newness of life," supporting and stimulating all that is precious and invaluable in the temporal and eternal well-being of mankind. This doctrine, which lies equally removed from the superstition of ignorance and from the levity of unbelief, has been more thoroughly explained and more widely disseminated among the people of America than anywhere else on the face of the earth. And it is due to the influence of evangelical religion among all classes of society, more than to all other considerations together, that our prosperity has been so great and our progress so unexampled. " Ye are the light of the world. Ye are the salt of the earth." This is the description of men whose views and conduct are the result of the inspiration of Jesus Christ. All time attests its truth. " Righteousness exalteth a nation, while sin is a reproach to any people," and must, if persisted in, pave the way to their flnal destruction. This divine maxim has been exemplified in all the old seats of human population, and is borne onward in the spirit of prophetic admonition from age to age. The voice of history is lifted in repeated accents of solemn warning, and rolls in thunder-blasts its own great lesson upon the ear of nations.

But while, without doubt, there has been, and is now, the presence of an evangelical power in this republic, that has left its impress and its influence upon our institutions and our society, and has reared so many sacred monuments for the gratitude and the admiration of mankind, it cannot and ought not to be denied that the nation as it stands to-day is far below that moral and religious condition which constitutes the essential safety, prosperity, and honor of any people. It is sadly true that a very large proportion of the population are strangers to the genuine spirit of the Christian religion, and almost, if not altogether, unacquainted even with the history of its facts and the extent of its influence in the land of our inheritance. The standing complaint of human degeneracy remains against us. Causes have been operating - and of late years with fearful rapidity and strength - to produce a state of moral obliquity and practical atheism among us, appalling in magnitude and of alarming consequence. It has become of late quite customary to sneer at the puritanism of our fathers, and to speak with contempt of the severity of their manners and the bigotry of their faith. This impious treatment, by the present corrupters of society, of a generation of men whose lofty principles and illustrious virtues they seem utterly unable to comprehend, is well adapted not only to arouse the deepest indignation, but also to excite the most lively concern. There are two quarters from which these evil influences chiefly proceed. A class of men without conscience, and reckless of all moral restraint, have gained ascendency in public favor, and assume from their prominent position to mould and direct the public sentiment of the nation. Their general influence upon the public morals has been like the wind of the desert, - poisonous, withering, and destructive. Another and very large class of men moving in the lower walks of life form a significant element of our American population, whose hard and vicious instincts, gratified without compunction and paraded everywhere in the most offensive manner, would seem to render them wellnigh incapable of reformation. Apparently insensible to all the nobler sentiments of public morality and virtue, and ever ready to perform their congenial part in the general demoralization, they demand that all the higher classes shall pander to their depraved appetites, as the price of their patronage and support. In this reciprocal play of the baser passions the common principles of morality are daily sacrificed, and the strong and the weak join hands in carrying down the nation to the very verge of ruin. No man can observe the conditions of society in our country, and the obvious impulses of human conduct, without feeling that the perils against which the fathers warned us, and which have been so faithfully and constantly pointed out by the ministers of religion, have, notwithstanding, increased at a fearful rate, without seeing that the most alarming departures from the standard of individual rectitude and social integrity have occurred among us within the century that is past.

And, while every period has exhibited the signs of public degeneracy, none in our history presents more fearful proofs of the impiety and obduracy of great masses of the people. We have abandoned, in a great measure, the faith and practice of our ancestors, in putting aside from their lawful supremacy the Christian ordinances and doctrines. The natural result is, that we have corrupted our ways in all the circles of society and in all the pursuits of life. We have become as a field rank with the growth of all the vices and heaped with the pollution of mighty crimes. The rigid training of former times through family government, discipline, and instruction has been greatly relaxed, if not in many cases wholly neglected. Indeed, there are multitudes of parents in the land who from physical and moral causes are totally unfit to have the care of the children to whom they have given birth: so that a generation of human beings is growing up in one of the most favored regions of the globe, whose preparation for the responsibilities of their age and mission has been sadly at fault, and whose precocity in levity, mischief, and insubordination already equals the vitiating examples that are set before them. The education of the nation is going forward with rapid strides, but it is in a lamentable degree under the auspices of immorality and irreligion, alike in the high and the low places of the community. The unblushing venality and brazen wickedness of a large portion of the conductors of the public press and of the public men of the country have strongly tended to demoralize the nation, to undermine the foundations and destroy the influence of Christian discipline, and to turn the mind and heart of many to infidelity and licentiousness. The same baleful spirit has moved upon the fountains of human learning and science, and so secularized the philosophy of the times as to have set the high faculty of human reason at variance with the sacred majesty of religion, and to have plunged thousands upon thousands of our young men into a sea of splendid sophistry and subtlety and all the ruinous speculation of a proud but vain imagination. Meanwhile, from the hearts of multitudes the dignity of honest labor and the dictates of a sober and frugal economy have died out, on the one hand increasing pauperism and crime and lending to misfortune the aggravation of human improvidence, and on the other fostering habits of false show, and thus increasing the temptation to deception, fraud, peculation, and all the dishonesties of the most high-pampered extravagance and excess. Moreover, the wanton neglect or abuse of our providential blessings, and the unconscious apostasy from every sentiment of purity and virtue, have served greatly to defile and degrade the mind of a large portion of the community, and fill the centres of population with a low and vulgar herd, who throng the open temples of obscenity and infamy. Thus the materials are prepared for human guilt and wretchedness, whose catalogue of crimes and woes exhausts the power of language to express them. Beyond all this, political controversy and partisan strife for the reins and spoils of power, conducted without principle, and reeking with abuse, have taken so fierce a form as often to have driven the best men from the arena and left the worst upon the field. The selfish and profligate stand forward to control the nominations and elections to office, and afterwards gamble with its duties and obligations without shame and without remorse. Nor is this all. Our wrongs to the Indian and the African, continued from the beginning, have brutalized the temper, darkened the understanding, and perverted the judgment of the nation in regard to the plainest principles of common humanity and justice. The tide of emigration from the Old World has borne to our shores a large element of the foreign-born, who speedily become imbued with our native and inexorable prejudice in this respect. Thus, while we claim to be a free government, we have cherished institutions in our midst which are a mockery of the name of liberty and have become our standing shame and curse in the sight of the whole world. Involved in a criminality so grave, we have not failed to exhibit its usual concomitants, - arrogance and self-conceit. Our vast facilities of production, trade, and transportation have filled us with high notions of our superiority, and at the same time degraded us to dispositions of covetousness and cruelty. And from the long period of our tranquillity we have come at length to a pitch of wickedness that has culminated in one of the most gigantic and desolating civil wars the world has ever seen. Our unparalleled liberty has degenerated into dissolute indulgence ; we have been so long without the burdens of government as to have almost forgotten the price of our birthright and to have cast away the only safeguards of its continuance; we have proved ourselves unworthy of our inheritance, in our contempt of that virtue which alone affords protection to society, in our blind disregard of the Christian foundations on which alone the great interests of a nation can permanently rest. Thus, at last, a majority of the people, have grown wholly unmindful of the authority and prerogative of God, and of the duties we owe to him and to his creatures. The true life and soul of Christianity has been to a great degree emasculated, and the very titles of Jehovah and the tokens of his awful majesty in the earth have become to multitudes among us as idle and unmeaning as the Grecian myths, used, indeed, to furbish a paragraph with classic elegance or round a period with sonorous emphasis, but completely divested of those great, grand, solemn, and glorious thoughts which never can dwell with vulgarity, profanation, and irreverence.

Now, if, under such conditions, Christianity should resume her sway and bring the masses of the nation back to the pure and simple virtues and to the stern and heroic spirit which marked the age of our Revolutionary fathers, it will prove to be a moral miracle equal to her first triumphs in apostolic days. Tet to this object all good men should devote their energies and their prayers. In the firm conviction that virtue must finally be supreme, and that a wise and beneficent Providence has designed this continent to be the theatre of the yet more glorious conquests of Christianity, it is the mission and the duty of all friends of evangelical truth to combine in the attempt to hold and appropriate this country, with its resources, monuments, and institutions, for an empire devoted to the spread of God's kingdom in the earth, and the universal reign of Jesus Christ.

And it is high time that we had begun to see our duty and to feel our obligation. God's great "judgments are already in the land:" shall not its inhabitants begin "to learn righteousness"? The associated moral and spiritual power of a Christian people ought now to be making itself felt in every part of the land and in all that concerns the existence and welfare of the country. It is the settled conviction of many of the most intelligent and purest minds that the time has come when the Christian people of America should take into their own hands the work of reclaiming the government and wielding its power more decisively for the glory of God and the highest good of human nature, and that for this purpose the true and the good should sternly separate themselves from all connection with the openly vicious and corrupt, and from all countenance and support of those whose life and example will not bear the scrutiny of common decency and morality. And if in a representative government like ours there must be political divisions, and a conflict of the suffrages of the people, let there be a Christian party, - a party that will not sustain by their sympathy or their votes men who are known to be in sentiment and life, by precept and example, unchristian and untrue to the great principles of the Christian faith ; for the highest treason of which mankind are capable is treason against the authority and law of the Divine government itself; and the most deadly enemies to human government are they who, with a great pretence of loyalty, are nevertheless daily insulting the majesty of Him who has power to destroy nations at his will.

The fountain of political turbulence and corruption undoubtedly lies in the primary assemblies of the people, as conducted upon the principle of party caucus, which for a long period has amounted to little else than a system of chicanery and venality too humiliating to describe. This kind of imposition upon the free action of American citizenship has been carried to such an extent as wellnigh to neutralize the title of suffrage itself, and make of the boasted ballot-box a mockery of American privilege. For the caucus, then, let the Church be substituted, - not any one sect or denomination of Christians, but the whole Church catholic, - not with a view to exciting mutual jealousies and creating hostile prejudices, but standing on the platform of Christian character supposed to be exemplified in the sincere adherents of every Christian Church. Let the weight of every vote tell what is the conviction, the intelligent, sober, and matured judgment, of the Christian mind of this nation as to the value to our country of personal integrity and upright manhood. If it were well established that such would be the policy of the truly Christian portion of the people in all the Christian churches of the country, the very fact would carry with it a moral influence which even the most brazen and unscrupulous politician could not altogether despise or resist. And in connection with this position it must be seen that our Christian duty requires us also to set our faces as a flint against the current of social and moral degradation which flows in the popular fashions, tastes, customs, and amusements of the day, - in the factitious and dishonest principles of business life, - in the whole circle of immoral and dangerous practices and pursuits which ensnare the multitude and draw them on to ruin. We must be more diligent and faithful with the early years of childhood. Christian parents must resume the discipline and religious training over their sons and daughters which prevailed in the earlier and purer days of the republic. And all the departments of government must be filled with men who will administer their power for the suppression of whatever is deleterious in its influence, and for the encouragement of whatever is of a beneficent and elevating tendency. The Church of Christ must purge itself of worthless members, who now, through the laxity of discipline, continue a scandal and a reproach, cumbering its progress and dragging down its sacred name into the dust. All the educational and eleemosynary institutions and organizations of the times should be pervaded by the ruling spirit of the Christian faith, and quickened and animated by the living principle of evangelical purity and power. In the liberal professions and in all the stations of political prominence from which decidedly Christian men have been pushed aside partly through their own timidity and partly by the audacity of bold and scheming demagogues, there must be made an earnest and persevering effort to establish the tried and faithful representatives of a higher morality and a more stainless character. In all these respects the evils of our delinquency have been multiplying from year to year. Christian men have been unwilling or afraid to unite upon the distinctive principles of a common Christianity, and have shrunk from the sacrifice, scarcely ready to suffer whatever of temporary defeat, expense, or reproach it might cost, and tamely submitting to be overruled by the boldness, the assiduity and energy of the evil-minded who assume to control and dictate the public policy and manners of the nation. In this way we have been swiftly sinking into the grossest perversions of ethical truth and the obligations of duty. We have confounded almost every distinction in morals ; " we have put good for evil, and evil for good ; we have called bitter sweet, and darkness light." In the unrestrained freedom of our experience, with no bonds and no restrictions of government or law that we could feel sensibly resting upon us, and permitted alike under divine and human authority to live in our lusts and to develop in monstrous proportions the sentiment of individual importance, we have come to exhibit little real regard for magistrates of our own choosing, and scarcely less disrespect for the very existence and form of civil government itself. Our very thoughts have been dissolved in the infatuation of personal sovereignty, until oaths and compacts, written charters and constitutions confirmed by the highest sanctions possible to man, are ruthlessly violated, rebellion is inaugurated, and we are brought to the very door of anarchy itself. It could not be otherwise with a people who have in the name of liberty struck at the vital interests of one whole race of men, and through these have aimed an impious blow at the prerogatives of God himself.

And now the day of vindication and of vengeance has burst upon us. The storm which uncovers the social and moral heart of the nation reveals the melancholy fact of a wide- spread demoralization amid the deepest corruption and the grossest profligacy of great multitudes of the people. Rebellion in favor of perpetuating a system of human bondage is held by many to be the crowning glory of men. Sedition, treachery, perjury, violence, and blood are counted as deeds of fame to immortalize their authors and abettors. Meanwhile, there are not wanting those who, utterly unprincipled, in the guise of pretended friendship, are gloating over the scene, and, like the fabled harpies of Tartarus, are plucking their gorge from the miseries of the nation, already reeling in the agonies of a mortal conflict. This is the spectacle which America presents to the world at the present moment. And were it not relieved by some brighter hues of Christian hope, by the spirit of an earnest and patriotic ardor, by the stupendous and heroic sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of men and women who freely lay all they possess on the altar of their country, and, finally, by the consciousness of the rectitude of our cause, our firm reliance on providential direction, and the assurance of the glorious purposes of God to be accomplished through this dreary and dreadful passage of the nation's history, it would be indeed the darkest and the saddest chapter yet recorded in the book of time.

Of what avail, then, is it for the enemies of a spiritual religion to attempt to delude us with the vain pretence that the true progress of mankind implies the rejection of the Bible as the divinely inspired word of God, and the denial of its authority in the affairs of men, and that in the onward march of civilization the dogmas of the Christian Church have become obsolete, - that the human mind has outgrown its restrictions, and can no longer be controlled by its discipline or instructed by its counsels? and of what avail is it, by mocking at the sober habits and simple virtues of a purer age, to prepare society for tho frightful scenes of its own dissolution? Here still are the great and solemn realities of life, here are the giant evils with which men have to grapple, and which, in despite of all the levities and impieties of an epicurean philosophy, cannot be treated as idle, dreams, the vagrant fancies of a distempered mind. And in the effort to ignore both the mischiefs and the remedy of our subverted moral condition by the scoffing infidelity and the specious skepticism of our times, the nation with all its treasure has already been brought to the verge of destruction.

Every intelligent man knows it; every honest man confesses it. And yet the signals of evil omen are not removed. The spirit that humbles a nation before the God of heaven and supplies the conditions of the Divine interposition for our salvation has been strangely wanting to the people; while men are everywhere found among us who leave no means unused to bring the religion of our fathers into contempt, and to cut the nation loose from all her moorings in the ancient faith of martyrs and apostles. The men that do this, whether in the refuse that reeks from the daily press, or in the more pretentious eloquence of the forum, or in the more elaborate and finished chapters of the periodical, or in the more prurient and high-wrought pages of fiction that curse and corrupt the literature of the day, are the deadly enemies of the human soul not only in its relations to the present life, but also in its aspirations for the life to come. They are likewise the malignant and felonious torch-bearers of infidelity, setting the temple of our American greatness on fire, giving our heritage to the flames, and lighting a mighty people into the abyss of self-destruction.

Whoever, therefore, contributes his labor to raise a barrier against so vast and deplorable a calamity to ourselves and the world, whoever lifts his voice like a trumpet in admonition and warning of the danger, and especially whoever can succeed in recalling the mind of the nation to the Christian annals of the republic, in bringing back to the freshly opened fountains of the early inspiration the weary and exhausted body of the people, that they may once more be refreshed and strengthened, once more commune with the great principles, sentiments, achievements, and characters of former times, and be imbued with a sense of the value and importance of their recognition and imitation, will have rendered a noble service, and may justly be regarded as a public benefactor. For the facts of our past history, inspired by the faith of the Christian religion, authenticated and supported as they are by unquestionable proofs, comprise a body of evidence which no well-regulated mind can resist as to the divinity of the Christian religion itself and the reality of a superintending Providence over all the affairs of men. At the same time, they serve to acquaint us with the very purest and loftiest sentiments of the most illustrious men of America in every generation, and with an unbroken chain of testimony in regard to the influence of Christianity upon our national destiny from the beginning until now. And all this appears in connection with the history of most tragic and trying times, and is put forth in terms of thrilling eloquence, of stirring pathos, and of startling energy, kindling the soul to the sublimest fervor of grand and heroic enthusiasm. We shall find in this story of well-attested occurrences and events all the elements that can move the human heart to its profoundest depths, - the wise and steady counsels of the great and good men that adorned the secular professions and pursuits, - the ringing trumpet-voice of the Christian ministry ever calling the host to the march or the conflict, - the beauty and tenderness of woman, roused, amid the sweetness and charms of her gentler nature, as by some supernatural impulse, to all the high and lofty aims of truth and liberty, and imparting everywhere to the breast of manhood a portion of her own unspeakable endurance and devotion, - the sublime unity of the Christian faith, in which were joined Catholic and Protestant, Churchman and Dissenter, clergyman and layman, the members of all parties and the parties of all creeds, as if animated by one spirit and glowing with one thought, - the great idea of civil and religious liberty for all the tribes of men. Surely in these great outlines of essential unity there is enough to gratify and inspirit our generation upon the review of the records of those who have preceded us. It only needs to collect these scattered materials into one volume of available size and proportions to furnish to the American people one of the richest and most useful manuals of political and Christian information ever published in any country. Such an attempt is made in the present volume, so far as is known the only work of the kind ever prepared for popular use and general circulation. The author and compiler, the Rev. B. F. Morris, a Protestant clergyman, for many years a successful pastor and preacher of the gospel in the great Valley of the West, and during the last year a pastor in Washington City, having mingled largely with all classes of the people and become extensively acquainted with many of the leading minds and most prominent and distinguished men of the nation both living and dead, and being peculiarly qualified also by extensive travel and observation throughout our country, and apparently moved to it by a natural aptitude for such a work and an earnest desire to serve the cause of Christianity and civil liberty, some ten years since conceived the idea of collecting from the national archives, and the various other sources of information in the country, the important and deeply interesting materials relating to Christianity in our history which are presented in this volume. In accomplishing this work he has not sought to express at length any opinions or speculations of his own, except so far as to give order, arrangement, and connection to the rich and copious materials thus brought together. Nor has it been his design, as the title of the work might possibly suggest, to give a complete account of the Christian Church in this country, or even a compendium of American ecclesiastical or theological history (which would properly be a distinct work in itself, and is held in reserve for some powerful pen of future times), but rather to show how the spirit of Christianity has entered into the foundations and elements of our national existence, and how it has affected our civil and political history and given shape and structure to our institutions, - to exhibit the relations it has borne to the state and the impulse it has given to the actors in the great drama of American colonization and independence, the support it affords to the civil institutions of the American people, and its general influence upon their fortunes and their destiny. The conspicuity and moral grandeur of these great lessons are most powerfully and abundantly illustrated. No man can ponder them as presented here without discovering that they furnish an effectual antidote to the skeptical tendencies and moral laxities of the age, and without breathing an earnest prayer that all the people may become familiar with these great memorials of the past, these solemn and sublime tributes of a mighty nation to the one inspiring principle of their prosperity and greatness, and may learn to cherish it with increasing vigilance and care as the only solid foundation of their present peace or their future hope.

In undertaking a work of this magnitude years ago, how little could the author have anticipated that the period assigned in Providence for the consummation of his labor should be one in which the errors, follies, and sins of the nation have culminated in the awful storm that now desolates the land, and at a time when it may be hoped that the American people, chastened and sobered through so bitter an experience, will be more disposed to avail themselves of the opportunity to review the sacred monuments of the past, to mark their departures from the ways of wisdom, and to return to the only path of safety and of honor ! Had the author been gifted with a foreknowledge of the events of the past few years, he could scarcely have set himself to perform a task more fitting to the exigency of the time or better adapted to promote the reformation which the present judgments of God must produce as the only alternative of our sure and swift destruction. No analysis of the book is here required. It will speak for itself in thunder-tones. As the common manual of the people, it should be in the hands of every individual in all our borders, and, if diligently perused and faithfully improved, who can tell but, under the blessing of God, it may become the morning star of the mightiest day of national regeneration the world has yet beheld ? B. Sunderland.

Washington, D.C., April 16, 186S.