and they volunteers, of such discipline and efficiency, has confused foreigners. Our military resources surprise them. The strength of the federal power to use the States disappoints them. So in our war we have been a marvel and a confusion to them; and it has been with amazement that they have recently seen eight hundred and fifty thousand men leave the ranks by command, and retire to private pursuits. The consequence is that now to be an American abroad is to be a man who has a country, and government, and nationality. Long known to be progressive in peace, we are now seen to be formidable in war. We have now a reputation for warlike ability that has all the worth, with but a tithe of the cost of a heavy army and navy. We are now able to make as well as interpret international law, and like the other leading powers, to form precedents when we can find none to our liking.

It is to be devoutly desired that this discovery of our warlike ability, and now eminent position among leading powers, may not make us vain and rash and provoking in our international relations. We do not need a foreign war for our honor. We can afford to simply remember some things, while we bend all our energies to remove our debt and develop peacefully the resources of our domain. Changes abroad will invite a settlement of rankling claims, when we can do it more to our liking and credit and advantage.

But sad memories come up from our victorious past. We can not shut out from our retrospect and survey of successes those terrible battle fields, and the yet ungathered dead of many of them. Our hearts go exploring hospitals, where many dear to us oozed their life out at ghastly wounds, or sickened and died of toil and want and disease. Horror, and loathing, and intense indignation, and incensed justice move us to and fro, as we think of rebel prisons, that swallowed up our true men like the insatiable maw of death, regardless alike of the rules of war, the principles of Christianity, and the kinder impulses of a common humanity.

And while the nation was recently holding jubilee, what household was there untouched by sorrowful remembrances of kindred or friend? How many families were under the deep baptism of loss and loneliness and grief? In vain they waited for the step

How

that never had failed them at the family gathering. They gave thanksgiving to God for the deliverance and uplifting of their country, but it was with tremulous utterance when they looked on their own desolation and considered the price.

Nor is it altogether joy when we consider the deliverance of those in bonds. True they are out of Egypt but they are not yet in Canaan. There is yet but little pleasant relation or hopeful feeling between them and their former masters, while the two classes are mutually if not absolutely dependent on each other. They are yet a prey to hate and prejudice, ignorance, unthrift, and cold and famine. We are told officially by the Freedmen's Bureau that without immediate aid thirty thousand will perish in Georgia alone and forty thousand more in Alabama.

Our rejoicing and theirs for their deliverance must be modified somewhat by our anxious anticipations. For the problem of the last thirty years is likely to be the problem of the next thirty in this country. The ignorance, passions, prejudices and traditional antipathies of both races are to be conceded and grappled with as the stern facts of the problem. Doubtless our philanthropy and Christianity, as a nation, are adequate to the imposing labor. What we will most need, and perhaps be least willing to give, will be time. Force has carried the freedmen forward to their nominal liberty. To maintain and enjoy that gift, social and moral forces must now have time to overtake the military and adjust the two parties to their new relations and duties. And not till these are amicably adjusted by the parties themselves will the act of emancipation be practically complete. Our work as Christians and the work of the government will not be done till good civil and neighborly feeling has been developed and established between them. Military edicts, Congressional legislation and prescribed and exacted State laws may somewhat aid this. But duties and relations that are mainly social and moral can not be ordered and legislated into being and force. They must be a growth, and that is a work of time. And the length of time requisite to work. the necessary social, civil and moral changes will try our patience, and perhaps our theories. Two civilizations, two ideas of government, and two grades of society are yet strug

gling for the mastery in the South. Our hands are providentially set to this work, and we must not relax. Though the war is over the work is not; and while we look some to legislation, we must look more to moral forces to finish it. It is both vain and wrong for any to urge that they foresaw this oppressed and perishing condition of the freedman and this hostility of the white man to him when free, and warned against it, and so are exempt from aiding him. We must accept facts and results. A common evil is on us, a common work is demanded and a common good promised. We are to work out the national problem, no matter who so stated it. The events of the times present it, and we must deal with it. Doubtless to work it as a Christian, a social, and a civil problem combined, is to succeed. Thus labored it must be a success. Nor ought the government with any hasty acts to withdraw its hand from this work. Having lifted up and set forward three millions into nominal freedom, it is obligated not only not to withdraw its hand, but to find and use legitimate means to make that freedom a reality. So far as the negro question was an issue in the war by act of the government, it is not yet settled by the government. The hearing is simply adjourned from Bull Run and Richmond to Washington.

While we labor under the thought that the work is great, the elevation of an oppressed race, we may remember that equity, an unfolding Christianity, a progressive civilization, and the spirit of the times are with us as allies. Emancipation, in the form in which it came, was but the beginning of the work. The end of slavery thus, was the opening of the enterprise to elevate a race. Providence has given us a work that will test our philanthropy and call out our Christianity, as no national enterprise ever did before. But to have done such a work and look back on its consummation will be ample reward for all toil and sacrifice.

A glorious and at the same time dangerous future is now before us. Other honors and perils than those connected with the freedmen await us. The resources of the country are beyond all precedent or estimate. They are therefore a vast power for good or ill, according as the moral worth of the people is high or low. We exult in an undivided territory and

of vast extent. Yet its very extent constitutes one of our dangers. The different sections have different and conflicting interests, as the maratime, the agricultural, the mining, the cotton, and the sugar growing. Each of these departments wants a favoring, a protecting legislation, which can be granted only through injury to the others. So have we national and natural tendencies to sectionalism and separation, arising from our vastness of territory. The safety of a government runs very much with lines of latitude, or east and west, because so it is more likely to have a sameness of interest. The dangers of a government run with the lines of longitude, because so it gets a wider range of interests in different climates, and these work a kind of natural disunion.

But as the war brought to the light and service able generals and commodores, who carried us successfully through the conflict of arms, so we doubt not the demands of the hour will bring forward statesmen, as broad and varied in their gifts and abilities for public service, as are our public domain and its interests. We have men, we think, who can take up this nation and turn it in their statesman hands and look at its four sides at once, and then balance it around a common good. We have sectional statesmen. We also have national statesmen, and so we are looking forward to an honorable, prosperous and glorious future. The providence of God in the successes of the past, and our present good condition, make us much more than hopeful.

ARTICLE VII.

ESTHETIC RELIGION.

WHEN the Psalmist exclaimed, "Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary," he struck upon two correlated ideas that are continually meeting us. Thus, applied to literature, they give us those two great departments, the solid and the imaginative ; in the arts, they are represented by the useful and the ornamental; and in nature they come to view again, in the continual

blending of things valuable for the practical purposes of life, with others agrecable to the senses or exalting to the sensibilities. Even in the original constitution of the human family these two thoughts found expression, the man being made from the dust, well knit and strong, while the woman was fashioned from choicer material, and after a more elegant pattern.

This twofold conception applies to religion. Strength and beauty are in the sanctuary. They stand in the walls and look down from the ceiling of every well built house of worship; they appear in the ordering of every well arranged public service; and they are braided together in the doctrines we receive, like the opposite colors in the cords of the tabernacle, or the inwrought purple and gold that curtained the most holy place.

And where things are set in their proper order, "strength" always comes first, and "beauty" afterward. Even in our worldly affairs, it will be admitted that what is useful should take precedence of what is merely entertaining; while in religion, as all must allow, truth should be held at a higher price than the mere drapery it wears, and life, reality and power set above all pageantry and pomp whatsoever. Sometimes, however, this order is practically inverted. Men become so enamoured of beauty as to introduce it into the sanctuary for its own sake; and all else that needs to go with it is either kept out of sight, or else brought in to set that off. Ornament is Ornament is put before use; form takes the ascendency of spirit; and a kind of worship grows up, in which all outward proprieties are well arranged indeed, but in which solid doctrine and serious practice have very small place.

It would not be unsafe perhaps to say that there is some tendency toward such a misarrangement at the present day. It comes out here and there in the style of church architecture that is indulged; it is found in a fashion of church music somewhat cultivated; it sometimes reveals itself in the sermons we hear; and it is particularly manifest in the many things that are said, where once it would have been least expected, of the agreeableness and desirableness of a prepared form of service.

The object of inquiry in this article therefore will be, how these two elements, strength and beauty, are to be adjusted; what their relative position is to be in a public service; and