heart, he would have been but an ordinary, and perhaps an unsuccessful, executive. Unschooled and unapt in political management, he might have been paralyzed by the abler and more adroit machinations of jealous rivalry, and the logical sequence must have been failure. But a great occasion imposed great duties upon the people and upon their chief ruler. It was for them to count the cost and to pay the appalling tribute. They felt, as their president so forcibly expressed it in his first message"This is essentially a people's contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men;" and only the man of the people could successfully lead them, through fearful tribulation, to their national deliverance.

Had Mr. Lincoln been a citizen of the South, and ardently in sympathy with its cause, he could not have administered the government of the confederacy for a twelve-month. Nor could Mr. Davis, with his confessed administrative ability, have conducted the war as the executive of the Union. Men of the types of these two rulers were not rare in both the North and South during the war, and sincerely devoted to their respective sections; but they were felt or unfelt just as their leading characteristics were in accord or in antagonism with the great purpose of their people. Had the causes of these two civil leaders not been essentially and irreconcilably at variance there would have been no dissevered States and war; and being vitally discordant, their rulers and heroes were created for widely different purposes, and of necessity from the most opposite of elements. Each was the true creation of his own people, and I believe that both filled the possible measure of the duties assigned them. One was successful, and success is the most successful of human rewards. The other failed, and must answer for the errors that failure so eagerly groups and magnifies.

4

The confederacy was reared upon despotism. Its boasted corner-stone was caste. Its theory of government avowed the inequality of human rights before the law. A cold, polished, able and sincere despot only could crystallize such a movement, and accept a conflict that braved the progress of enlightened civilization. He was the offspring, not the parent, of a monstrous wrong. However diversified their views may have been at the beginning, for four years the Southern people waged war for the dissolution of the Union, and proved their devotion on many bravely contested battlefields. Their president was their chosen leader, their faithful exponent, and his failure was but the accomplished failure of the every-day life—of the habits, conviction, and teachings, for more than a generation, of eight millions of our fellow citizens.

Equally marked were the opposite requirements of the Northern and Southern peoples in selecting their great captains from widely opposite characteristics of military genius. Grant and Lee were confessedly the heroes of the sanguinary struggle. In their respective positions none could have been greater-none more successful. But had Grant been a confederate and Lee a federal, both would have been good soldiers-neither a successful general. Both reached supreme command over stars which had glittered and paled, because they respectively filled the measure of their peoples' necessities. The contest was unequal in respect to numbers and resources. The South required the genius to husband, to protract, to give battle only when superior forces were neutralized by position or circumstances. The North demanded swift and crushing blows. Its hunger-cry was battle-victory! One sought its most trusted and skillful defender; the other called for its most persistent and obstinate assailant. The South found its true type of the warrior early in the strife. The North would have revolted at the Wilderness. campaign had it been attempted one year earlier. In the

late fall of 1862 I heard the inquiry made of a gallant officer, who subsequently commanded the Army of the Potomac: "Why do you not advance?" The answer was: We could move directly upon Manassas and Richmond, and capture both, but it would cost ten thousand men to do it," and cavil was silenced. Ten times ten thousand men were killed, wounded and missing in military movements well meant to economize the terrible sacrifice. Then half as many more fell in the campaign of 1864, which was wisely planned in accord with the nation's inevitable need, and executed with marvelous heroism and skill. Grant fought just one defensive battle during the war. He lost it, and lost his command. Lee conducted two offensive campaigns and both were disasters. "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer," was Grant's echo from the Wilderness of the throbbing popular heart in the North. "A renewal of the engagement could not be hazarded," were the sober words with which Lee assured the South that though Gettysburg was lost the army was not sacrificed. These chieftains were the faithful creations of the every-day lives, the purposes, the hopes, and the wants of their peoples; and their achievements were but the patiently and painfully wrought consummation of years of mingled thought and action in the homes of the nation.

The same causes which have created the heroes and sages of the world's history have been the chief agencies in the rapid progress of Christian civilization. Its origin was divine, but the means employed for its diffusion are within the economy of human efforts and influences, and the every-day lives of sincere Christian people are the most impressive and successful of all its teachers. The every-day life of Christ silences the scandal of the scoffer, and it resolves the doubts of thousands whose frailties question the offices of faith. His was the one perfect life among men. He was sorely tempted, and He

knew not sin. He was reviled and persecuted, and He prayed-" Father forgive them." His teachings were pure as the fountain of inspiration whence they came, and His daily walk and actions confounded a sinful world that sought in vain for the blemish on His garment. Even those who reject Him as the Messiah pronounce Him the best of men, and confess the happy influence of His sound precepts and blameless example. At Antioch, the seat of learning and luxury and moral profligacy, His humble followers were classed as Christians. They were distinguished from the ways of mankind about them, and the Christian era was thus named. Trace it thence through the revolutions of nearly two thousand yearsthrough the gradual triumphs of error by the gradual corruption of the people-through the terrible penalties which slowly but surely came as withering vengeance from heaven; and through seasons of moral darkness which appeared as if hope had fled from man. In all these wonderful mutations, not mere rulers or leaders are answerable for results. They were but the creatures of the ebbing and flowing tides of popular degeneracy, or of the struggles of the people for their temporal or spiritual amelioration. The State corrupted the Church; the Church subordinated the State, and the battle-axe smote the altars where the faithful worshiped. The name and ceremonies of the Church were prostituted to the flagrant abuse of external government, until national and religious decay made civilization a reproach. We point to the Reformation as the date of the new Christian era that has so rapidly advanced and ennobled the human But when and what was the Reformation? Luther and Calvin were but the builders of Protestantism. Its foundations had long been laid; its corner-stones had been fashioned by centuries of consistent devotion, and all its materials had been framed and seasoned for the imposing temple. The martyr of Bohemia had gone to

race.

the stake a century before, and Wickliffe had taught still a century earlier. The line of reformers is unbroken from the date of the Son of Man until now. There were periods I when their voices were hushed, and when they would have taught as to the winds had they dared to teach; but there were every-day lives, in every State, whose purity of character and action were like the silver dew-drops of the morning when the earth is parched to desolation. And when the struggle began the world was in travail for two centuries before the Reformation was born. The "reformers before the Reformation" are not unnoticed in history; but before them still were the ever-living currents of Christian life. Like the waters of the western desert, which hide from the weird and burning waste, but rise again where there are life and beauty, Christian excellence and Christian influence coursed onward through ages of degeneracy, until they swelled up as the flood-tide that bore Luther and Calvin to the great work. Luther ignited the latent spark that illumined the world. An unscrupulous Dominican friar made him revolt against the power from which he had accepted Holy Orders. The first step once taken, he earnestly sought the truth, and as he advanced he was followed by many who had long aided to influence, and had long felt the influence of, the Reformation. He little dreamed of the slumbering unrest that was beneath the serene surface of the power of the Church. When he boldly erected the standard of regeneration, the quickened life of the people made his journey to Worms a triumphal ovation, and he entered the city chanting the song of the disenthralled, for the Reformation had its Marseillaise. Nor has the lapse of time, nor the rapid strides of enlightened progress, changed the chief agency of Christian advancement. The Church has great teachers-men whose fame is world-wide, and many stars may be worn in their crowns. And we have books, and journals, and periodicals, and tracts, which