Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A High Civilization, the Moral Duty of Georgians, a Discourse: Delivered Before the Georgia Historical Society, on the Occasion of Its Fifth Anniversary, on Monday, 12th February, 1844
Each colony had its peculiar spirit - weaved its own web of life - felt an indistinct consciousness that it was moving forward to some vast purpose, but as with prophecy, the event alone could give this consciousness form and feature. And for the consummation of that event, preparing as it had been for ages, men had to wait, until God's ways - with whom a thousand years are as one day - had worked to their result. No wonder that they did not see it; for it is ever God's plan to use nations, as well as individuals, for the perfecting of his purposes, and while pursuing their schemes of ambition and their dreams of gain and their notions of policy - pursuing them, too, with a consciousness of the most unrestrained liberty - to mould their feelings, their thoughts, their movements, in such wise, as to guide them inevitably to the final cause of their creation.
While all this movement of the Old World upon the New was in progress and an unwonted excitement had taken hold of peoples and nations, no one, I say, grasped the important truth that the New World was the theatre which God had kept hidden from mankind, while the elements of a more perfect civilization than any the world had seen were gathering for its blessing. "While they supposed that they were merely transferring to a new soil ancient modes of thought and feeling, they were really, as Arnold expresses it in another connexion, taking "not only a step in advance, but the last step - it bore marks of the fulness of times, as if there would be no future history beyond it. For the last eighteen hundred years, Greece had fed the human intellect; Rome, taught by Greece and improving upon her teacher, had been the source of law and government, and social civilization; and what neither Greece nor Rome could furnish, the perfection of moral and spiritual truth, had been given by Christianity. The changes which had been wrought had arisen out of the reception of these elements by new races, the English, the German, the Saxon; races endowed with such force of character, that what was old in itself, when exhibited in them seemed to become something new.
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