The Historic Significance of the Southern Revolution: a Lecture Delivered by Invitation in Petersburg, Va, March 14th, and April 29th, 1864. and in Richmond, Va., April 7th and April 21st, 1864.

What also is the great historic design of this Revolution? And what historic results will ensue from its successful issue? All of which we may now anticipate, though we may not be able to calculate the measure of their fulness. I would conduct this inquiry upon the idea that the meaning of any periodic or national life is to be ascertained by consulting the nature and the bearings of the philosophy, the inmost ideas, which make up and control that life. For human history, considered as to its matter, is a manifestation of the human mind; as to its outward, written form, it is a record of the action of that mind in all the directions in which it has wrought. Withal there is the double truth that God and man are the two great factors of history; both co-operating to accomplish the heavenly purpose; the One working with the independent free-agency proper to a self existent, independent Being; the other working with the dependent free-agency proper to a created and therefore dependent being; yet God all in all, working in and through and over man. History is therefore, in a higher sense, the manifestation of God in his providence; it is also a record of that divine providence. Prophecy is history yet to come, the God of providence yetunrevealed, untraced, ever adding to the canon of the providential scripture Without accepting the entire development theory of the German school, I believe that all historic ideas do beget and influence and modify each other; and control, through a sort of genetic development, the periodic and national lifes of history; so that each succeeding period of history is, so to speak, a development out of the preceding. Each gathers up the historic forces of the preceding, and adding new and modifying elements of its own passes on to the accomplishment of its appointed mission--the working out of the great principles which each embodies within itself.