We can go higher than this. Disturbed by anarchy and rebellion we can go to the pages, where we shall read, that there is a King who reigns in righteousness, that to him every knee shall bow and every tongue confess him Lord. When we hear of wars and rumors of wars we can hear him saying: These things must needs be." Above the waves and the storms we can hear him saying: "Peace be still," and we are calmed.

years.

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Finally, we would not overlook the power that literature has to elevate, refine and spiritualize. The tendency of the world's hard business is to dry up the heart. Very often youth loses all its geniality and freshness in advancing The rough encounters all have to meet, the crushing experiences of human selfishness that unexpectedly arise among men, the absorption of their powers in the work of life, make men hard, destroying every feature of the ideals that filled the vision of early days, and withering up all those feelings that now they term romantic. But when these feelings are gone, and the ideals of youth have vanished, the better part of us is gone. Not only are our capacities for pure enjoyment taken away, but our capacity for sympathy with the best of our kind is destroyed, and, as a necessity, our capacity for the highest usefulness is lost. Our very hopes of immortality seem dreams.

One of the great collateral benefits that the word of God confers, is found in this-that it ever renews the fading lustre of that which the world of sight and touch and taste is perpetually effacing. As long as we hear the weekly messages of love we can not quite forget our possibilities of attainment, or fail to see from what height we have fallen, and to what we may re

turn.

All true literature is subservient to the same high purpose. The perfect inspiration of the Bible finds no contradiction in the lower inspirations of human genius, when they are not prompted by motives of vanity, hatred and sensual passion, and when they make their appeal to what is spiritual and not what is earthy in man; for they strike the noblest chords within us; they fill us with the loftiest aspirations; they kindle our emulation for that which is exalted; they purge the mind from that which is gross and sensual; they arouse an ennobling

admiration for what is lovely and of good report; they foster an aversion toward all that looks down and degrades, toward all that crosses, and poisons, and pollutes.

But the mere application of the understanding is not followed by such results. The profoundest chemist may starve in the midst of the abundance which he analyzes; so the shrewdest critic of the letter may die of atrophy, while the spiritual sustenance of ages is on his table. Knowledge puffeth up, but a loving, humble reception, buildeth up. When the imagination and the affections are called into exercise, the spirit feels the expanding and purifying power. As a man thinketh so is he. The clear dream, the solemn vision, "telling of things that no gross ear can hear," this "oft converse with heavenly habitants," so changes the soul's essence, that by the help of God, there is more hope that at length it will "gain the divine property of its first being." Having listened to earth's best teachers, the ear will be more ready to catch diviner accents, and learn of Him who teaches from the cross.

ARTICLE VI.

AFTER THE WAR.

THE preeminent thought, the most profound feeling of the nation is, that our government is preserved in its majesty, and our territory in its integrity, now devoted to universal freedom. From either of these results of the war the national heart recoiled at the first, and always with a most intense earnestness. Let who would suffer, let what would perish, these two points must be maintained. Other issues, more or less important among themselves, coming in earlier or later, and made by few or many, had their place and claims. But these two led: the Constitution and the Union. So for the salvation of these, our emotions of gratitude lead off among the joyful feelings following We are not a broken and shattered Republic, little and greater sovereignties, dashing and grinding against each other, like huge ice islands and icebergs in arctic seas and

the war.

under arctic storms. We are yet one, and anchored at our ancient moorings in the temperate zone. Our constitution, the very centre of attack, much in peril, often under cloud, and sometimes the subject of requiem as if departed, still stands forth in its noble proportions and original strength. So the Granite Hills are stronger than the fierce winter tempests; and the spring covers them, as before, with foliage and flocks and fruitful fields.

Great issues have been involved. In the early times of our government they were made; for the last four or five years they have been bloodily and valiantly contested, and God has defended the right. For long time two civilizations have been struggling in this country for ascendancy. One is of the fourteenth and the other of the nineteenth century. Two theories of government have been in conflict, the one feudal, the other democratic, the one despotic, the other free, the one aristocratic, the other republican.

One civilization, theory and section of the country have been asking that we might go back into a petrification of mediæval Europe; the other, that we might go forward with the current of providence and progress into the America of the twentieth century of Christianity.

The one section ignored the laws of growth, as applicable to national industry and wealth, intellect and morals; and so by painful processes sought to force on the nation the infantile foot of the Chinese and the depressed cranium of the Flat Head Indian. The other section sought to popularize labor, enrich all classes, educate the populace and elevate all into the intelligent morality of the Gospel. So the nation would grow and develop in symmetry and strength and glory. So the progressing ages would not leave us behind. Here and hence the Great Rebellion and our national struggle.

The sections themselves have not been fully conscious of so great a depth, sweep and issue in the contest. Facts nearer

the surface, aims of narrower scope, and ends closer at hand, have interested and controlled and led them on. Populations, like individuals, often do their great life work in dreamy unconsciousness of their destiny and success.

Some on both sides have comprehended the bearings of this

contest, but the contending masses have not.

While we

thought it confined to our own harbors and rivers and gulfs, God has made it a tidal wave for the world, to set all the nations forward. While we made the battle as between North and South, God made it as between the old and the new, the earth over. It is one of those starts, steps onward, impetuses, that the nations get once in a while among the centuries, creating a general progressive movement all round.

We have made a pressure on chattel slavery, on oligarchy as dominating over the masses, on ignorance as cultivated and patronized by local governments, on monopoly of wealth as grinding the poor; and in the pressure we have succeeded in taking a step forward. We have taken it not for our people alone, but for all those peoples who are performing unrequited labor, and obeying laws they did not make, and groping in an ignorance they can feel only to yield to. So have we helped all needy populations to move forward a little, as when in a press and throng one step forward by those at the front is the signal and the opportunity for all to make a gain.

On these grand issues between two conflicting civilizations we have waged a stupendous war. It has been the old form of contract and the old price for civil rights: the shedding and paying of human blood. It is all very well to theorize about peace, and to preach peace, and as much as lieth in us to live peaceably with all men. Blessed are the peace makers. But it must needs be that offenses come. All the upward steps of civil and social right are marked with human blood. Somebody died for the gain. There is no single item in the British Constitution, or our own Bill of Rights, no great civil principle in our statutes, but men fought to secure it. The right of jury trial, of habeas corpus, of making your house your castle against all illegal entrance, of standing on your personal defense to the death, though the humblest man in the realm, and a thousand other rights as common and necessary and unnoticed by us as the air of heaven, each and all, could they tell their origin and growth to maturity and safety, would tell of spearmen, and archers, and mail clad cavalry; of matchlocks and broadswords, cannon and Sharpe's rifles. All our civil rights have had a most uncivil and bloody beginning. And it is a

singular fact that rarely a generation goes through life without seeing its government at war, renewing the bloody seal of its rights. It has been thought that our struggle might have been prevented. With the goodness of angels and the patience of God, perhaps so; but with our thirty millions of flesh and blood men, probably not. Moreover, there are some ideas that nothing but a battle field can clear up, and some others that nothing but a battle field can explode. Very like if a few scores of men had died thirty years ago, the war might have been postponed, perhaps indefinitely. lived, and to see half a million die.

But they

The war itself was on a most stupendous scale. If we include all the men and munitions of war employed, the area of land and water covered, the time consumed, the number and character of the battles and the number of men who fell, we find no parallel to it in history. Europe has hardly room to manœuvre such armies, and can boast of few such battle fields. We shudder to think what a work of devastation and death we followed up for more than four years. Our excitement and intense determination at the time made us in a measure unconscious of what we were doing, and now as we look back we can hardly credit the reality. We fail to concede at first that those bloody fields and sieges that are so to fill history, were really our own. are as something we read of in the days of Herod, and those hospitals, and Christian and Sanitary Commissions belong to the age and literature of romance. But all this, and for so long a time, was ours. We wake up to the assurance that this is no dream. It is all a startling reality. We have had such a war, the like to which in magnitude no nation ever had before. We thank God most devoutly that it is ended.

and forts and marches, Those prisons

When we reflect what vast interests were involved, we shudder to think how near at times we came to making a failure. Our form of government, as democratic, was on trial for the world. The continuance of the Union not only involved the continuance of our present government, but of any harmonious governments on our territory for long and painful years. Our failure would have left the American States a prey and a plundering ground to foreign nations. The civilization of the Western