nay, when they are animated with a great, all-compelling purpose, they are the myriad-fingered hand of God, fashioning the Earth according to the pattern shown in the mount.

But from this height there is a precipitous descent. The people may be demoralized; then they are not a people, but merely the rabble. Fearfully easy and swift is this recoil sometimes. To-day they sing Hosanna, and spread their garments in the path before the advance of the Highest; to-morrow the same voices sharply cry, Crucify him!

This Vampyre whom they would elect would fasten upon this nation, and suck every free and noble drop out of its heart. The sacred guaranties of Liberty and forms of law would be suspended then, not for the defence of Freedom, but to crush out the soul of Freedom. Slavery would be the tyrant, and dungeons would be filled with those who uttered a word or did aught against Slavery. Those weapons of martial law, far more fearful than any artillery, may each be wheeled around against the champions of Freedom; and there are men not very far from a possible Presidency who would use them all to strangle free thought and free speech in this country.

The Babylon whose captivity we have to fear is not Disunion; if that were the alternative, it would not be so fearful. But there are too many indications that the people of the North so worship the Union, and regard their trade as so involved in it, that, if they cannot win it by fair means, they will by foul. There is no doubt but they will fight and suffer long and gallantly to recover the Union; but when it is decided that they cannot have it with honour, it is to be feared that they can be demoralized enough to pay the price of their honour, to compromise for it.

But this would only be a thorny, crooked way to the same goal, the straight way to which God opens before us to-day. It would not be long before the very men who now think that they would be willing to have the Union with Slavery in it back again, would shriek out Anathema Maranatha upon every man who had a hand in such a result.

XVII

THE DIAL OF GROWTHS

IN the Palais-Royal Gardens at Paris there is a dial, with a small cannon attached. When the sun rises to the meridian height, the cannon is fired, a sun-glass having been so arranged as to concentrate the rays for that purpose.

Not far from this is another dial, arranged on the same principle with the celebrated one made by Linnæus at Upsal: flowers there are which close, and others which unfold, at various periods of the day, and thus the hours are marked.

Thus the same sun which in one spot announces its ascent to the zenith by the cannon's roar, in another noiselessly traces its progress and culmination by the closing up of old and the unfolding of new growths.

Ideas, sun-like, have also their dawn, their ascent, and their culmination. One world lies about us where ideas proclaim their advance through the grim mouth of the cannon. Powers, parties, interests have so set their glasses that fiery Liberty, vivifying Equality, radiant Fraternity, rising, dawn over dawn, upon the world, are responded to by the roar of battle. But softly about us lies another world, in which advancing Truth traces its

steps of light in the closing up of old errors and the unfolding of new truths.

From the noisy thunders of the cannon-dial,- from the din of the voices which cry, Lo here! Lo there! let us turn for a while, and trace so far as we can the hour as it stands in that kingdom which cometh not with outward show.

The leaders and masses enlisted in the Southern rebellion have no more to do with that rebellion than the fantoccini of a puppet-show have to do with their own attitudes and dances.

The present attitude of Slavery is the direct and inevitable result of the attitude of Liberty. The Satanic press throughout the country implores that the antislavery agitators shall be sent to Fort Warren; Parson Brownlow wishes to bury them in a ditch; the allegation being that they have caused the rebellion, and are making a union after the old pattern impossible. Now, this is about as far as the Devil ever sees. He is shrewd enough up to a certain limit; after that he is as blind as a bat. It is as certainly true that anti-slavery agitation caused this rebellion as that Slavery caused that agitation. It were easy to name one hundred brains which have been set a-thinking in this country during this generation, and to say with truth, if God had only seen fit to keep these hundred brains out of the world, or to have consulted Kentucky as to how he should fashion them, there would have been no war now. We should have gone on enjoying our country, our cotton, sugar, and the rest, as happy a nation of maggots as ever swarmed in an old cheese.

In the eyes of those who have a doubt whether that kind of life constitutes the whole duty and chief end of

man, the Abolitionists can desire no fairer laurel for their brows than that through them streamed such fiery rays of Liberty, that Slavery had no choice but to close up like a deadly flower before unfolding Justice, or else respond to these noonday fires with the cannon. The "Rebellion Record" reports that the first gun of this war was fired last year at Charleston: the Muse of History will write that the first gun was fired by William Lloyd Garrison in Baltimore, many years ago; the shell he touched off was a long time on its way, and only lately exploded in the election of President Lincoln, who was sent to Washington as an idea, and who has been, and will be, treated by the South as an idea. That election was an act of war upon Slavery, - all the more formid

able because constitutional.

It is only in crystals that one sees plainly any mingled substance which is inferior. You cannot see a speck of dirt in the heart of a pebble, but you can see it clearly in the heart of a pure crystal. It is so with the evil at the heart of this country. The wrongs which for ages lay unobserved in the stony heart of absolutism, preserved now in the centre of a republic, discolour all the rays shining through it. Our faith and courage in these times will be in proportion to our realization of the fact that our trouble, though it should end in failure, is a sign not of weakness so much as of strength. Were the age meaner, its claim would not be, as it is now, beyond the ordinary satisfaction of circumstances. Had the evils which afflict us a tongue, it would say: "Surely you have grown very sophisticated and fastidious. Read your school histories over again, and see what age was exempt from injustice and violence, war and Slavery. Are you not making in this generation a great deal of noise over evils that your

ancestors sat very quietly under?" Certainly we are. We stand upon our vantage as proudly as did the young Goethe, of whom it is related that, when six years old, he plagued his mother with questions as to whether the stars would perform for him all that, according to some fortuneteller, they had promised at his birth. "Why," said his mother, "must you have the assistance of the stars, when other people get on very well without?" To this the terrible child replied: "But I am not to be satisfied with what does for other people." So the humblest man in Christendom to-day puts his foot upon such a government as Jesus and Paul rested quietly under; so the poorest American is too high to be satisfied with what suits an Austrian. Centuries of rain and sunshine are not wasted on the vineyard of God, where nations of men climb to clusters. Therefore, although the country was never so disturbed before in its immediate interests, it was never higher than now. This sundering of a great Confederacy, -this panic fallen upon all our material interests,this division of the large church bodies, all testify gloriously how large a price a young nation is willing to pay for a principle. Never more fitly could it be called a chosen people of God than now, when it says, "Yes, we are ready to press out even into a forty-years wilderness, following the guiding pillar of Liberty, whether it turn to us its fiery or its clouded side!"

The cannon's roar to-day, then, proclaims Liberty radiant in the heavens. America is assailed only because she has turned from Slavery, and pressed forward to touch the vesture's hem of Freedom. That was her only crime. Then let the prophets be stoned; let those who proclaim that the axe must and shall be laid to the root of the tree be slain, and the head of Radicalism be brought on a