they turned towards God and began to pray. On a route of three thousand
miles, wherever one might stop, he found a meeting, a simple,
spontaneous meeting, at which the pastors did not take the initiative,
where they were present instead of presiding. Ere long, public attention
became fixed on this movement, the greatness of which could not be
contested; the most hostile journals ended by rendering it homage. And
it lasted, it still subsists, it has produced something else than
meetings and prayers, it has induced extensive moral reforms, it has
closed places of debauchery and taverns by hundreds. The military and
commercial marine of the United States has been especially subjected to
its influence; captains, officers, and sailors in great numbers, have
shown by their lives that their habits of piety are more than a vain
form; American vessels are perhaps the only ones at the present day in
which groups of sailors assemble to converse on the interests of their
soul, and to make the praises of God resound over the ocean.

In strengthening the religious element, in exciting the Puritan fibre of
America, the awakening certainly contributed a great share to the
success of the party opposed to slavery. South Carolina acknowledged
this herself lately, when she inserted the following phrase in her
declaration of independence: "The public opinion of the North has given
to a great political error the sanction of a still more erroneous
religious sentiment." Is this religious sentiment, assailed by the
slaveholders, that of free thinkers, or of Christians? The South is not
mistaken; it knows that the truly difficult acts of emancipation are
accomplished on earth only by the power of the Gospel; it saw the great
abolition impulse rise in England, and spread over the United States;
journals, committees, correspondence, all indicated that the English had
become the American movement, and was continued under the same banner.
Under this banner, and this alone, it has conquered. A colossal work in