of Christian charity and Christian unity, and just as its hearthstone and healthy rays become more and more diffused throughout religion, the more will the creeds and dogmas of men be discarded, and the more will the religion of Christ enlarge its worshipers. Who ever loved religion more because the doctrines of election, perseverance, particular form of baptism, fasts, penance, etc., were tangled up with the thunders of the law, and Sunday and worship made horrible as Sunday clothes? Christ did not thus teach; He had no dogmas, no creeds; but He con. demned the creeds and dogmas of men in His day, as they are now condemned by those who understand that religion is rational, simple, beautiful. Take the sunny side of religion; it will make all men better here, and make it well with them hereafter.

THE SUNNY SIDE OF DEATH.

Take the sunny side of death. Sooner or later it must come to all, and at the latest it is only a few swiftly passing days distant. Kings and potentates have no refuge from the summons of the dreaded messenger. Death is the great leveler of man, and dust to dust the heritage of all. Why, then, should we shrink from its contemplation? Why banish it from our thoughts with a shudder? It is not rational to permit death to shadow our lives: nor is it rational to turn in terror from what must as surely come as to-morrow's sun. Those who are suddenly chilled day after day by the thought of death either shadow their lives by misdeeds, or reject the philosophy that should make every well-ordered life wait serenely for its end. The rational apprehension of the upright man is, not that he may fall too soon in the race, but that he may linger too long and outlive everything but hope. The green old age is one of the most beautiful lessons taught around us. When the brief cirole is completed and the weary toiler becomes a child again, with heart fresh to

quicken the halting limbs, life is sunny until the lengthened shadows settle into night; but when helplessness and despair come with age, or when reason totters in the crumbling temple, the work is done and the grave is the only promise of rest. It is true that most men cling to life even after useful life is ended, but why? They clutch a few weary days against the endless and what should be the better existence at whose threshold they are trembling, and when the brittle chord is not unloosed until the cup of pain is filled, the end is no more welcome. It is not so with the sunny life. With much to live for; with all the generous offices of affection, and with the repose that faithfully performed duty to God and man ever assures, the end is peace, and sunshine dispels the shadow even from the tomb. Such lives may be noted everywhere, and they are the excellent of the earth. They take the sunny side of country, of home, of toil, of faith, of religion, of death, and when their days are numbered they are lamented as they were beloved. Like ripe fruit, they drop into their mother's lap, and the sunshine of life is not clouded in the hour of their departure. The song of Bryant, when he, basking in all the sunny dreams of youth, thus eloquently taught the sunny side of death:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan that moves

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent Halls of death,

Thou go, not like the quarry-slave, at night,

Scourged to thy dungeon; but sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave

Like one that wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

ΙΟ

The Lesson of Our Civil War.*

GENTLEMEN OF THE LITERARY SOCIETIES:

I do not

Do not shudder at the theme I have chosen. come to criticise the past, or to speak to those of the past. There are deep wounds not yet wholly healed; there are fierce passions which, though enfeebled, have not perished; there are bereavements whose shadows linger in countless homes; and there are sorrows which are tempered by time, but not effaced. I come to speak to a new generation, to which we, who witnessed out great civil conflict, must soon give place. I do so because I address young men, most of whom were not born when Appomatox became historic, and young men who, by reason of their better opportunities and attainments, are to be teachers and leaders when the memorable names of the war shall be known only in the exceptionally grand and thrilling history whose annals they have made illustrious.

There is no history or tradition of man that does not tell of civil war. Even the chosen people of God, led by His own appointed lawgiver-fed, guided, and rescued by miracle-were made wanderers in the wilderness by secession and fraternal dispute; and, when in possession of the promised land, the tribes of Judah and Israel plunged into bloody conflict. Thus, through all the strange mutations of ancient and modern national structures, every civilization has carved out its destiny with the battle-axe and sword, and chiefly by internecine war. It was the natural employment of the barbarian. As a better civilization dawned, wars often multiplied until they blotted

*An Address delivered before the Literary Societies of Washington and Lee University, at Lexington, Virginia, June 16, 1886.

out the grandest monuments they had erected; and the history of every great nation of to-day has for its foundation the arbitrament of sanguinary battle. Our own Republic was deeply crimsoned with the blood of its founders, and it was through the deadly struggle of mother and son of proud Britain that the noblest government of earth was created.

But the civil wars of other countries and civilizations bear no analogy to the two great internecine conflicts which the American people have made memorable. The wars of the ancients were wars of ambition, of conquest, of robbery. All that is immortal in Roman or Grecian or Carthaginian history, where we read of popular ruleall the wonderful temples, triumphal arches, and other monuments of antiquity, and even the later achievements commemorated by the imposing columns of modern art, as a rule, proclaim how history has repeated itself in all ages, by wars of ambition. Every great nationality of the past was rocked in the tempest of civil conflict; every civilization of the present has bloody pages of fraternal strife, and there is no more thrilling record of sanguinary internal struggle than that of England, the accepted fountain of the best civilization the world has known. The right of might is the sole title to every monarch's sceptre in the Old World, and that tells the whole story.

But history is among your collegiate studies; and, with the strange conflicts and mutations of living, languishing, and perished nationalities, you are familiar. Let us deal with what is least taught in the colleges, and what is most needed to be learned by students-our country and ourselves.

You are told by many inconsiderate political writers and orators, that our late civil war was the creation of extremists in both sections of Northern abolitionists and Southern fire-eaters; that they inflamed the people

:

beyond the bounds of reason; that they precipitated North and South into causeless war. It is not so. They aided and hastened the conflict, just as the driftwood of the resistless current adds to its momentum. They were only the white-caps of the often angry surface-waves which betokened the restless unfathomable deep. They were seen and heard by all, while the profound unrest that flung them up to play fantastic parts was unnoted and unappreciated.

It is a reproach to American intelligence and heroism to assume that mere sectional agitators could lead the most peace-loving, the most cultivated, and the most prosperous people of the earth into the bloodiest war of modern history. No: there were rational causes arising from sincerest conviction, which became too great for adjustment by statesmanship, and war came because of irreconcilable dispute on problems which defied solution by the methods of peace. It is easy to present many plausible theories by which the conflict between the North and the South could have been averted; but those who thus theorize do not understand the best attributes of American citizenship. There were statesmen and soldiers who welcomed war, but they were rare exceptions. There was not a great soldier, of either North or South, who did not draw his sword with painful reluctance: there was not a great statesman, in either section, who did not profoundly deplore the resort to arms. I saw tears jewel the eyes of Winfield Scott, the morning after the surrender of Fort Sumter, as he stood in the President's room and looked across the Potomac to his mother commonwealth. "I fear Virginia-I fear Virginia," was the sad and tremulous exclamation of the hero of two wars, and the great Captain of the Age. I then, for the first time, understood how deep and implacable were the opposing convictions of allegiance, when State and Nation gave opposing commands.