ng.

PEACE: HER GIFTS AND DEMANDS."

"THEY ARE DEAD THAT SOUGHT THE YOUNG CHild's life. Matthew ii. 20.

"THE LORD GAVE THEM REST ROUND ABOUT, ACCORDING TO ALL THAT HE SWARE UNTO THEIR FATHERS; AND THere stood not a man of ALL THEIR ENEMIES BEFORE THEM; THE LORD DELIVERED ALL THEIR ENEMIES INTO THEIR HAND. THERE FAILED NOT AUGHT OF ANY GOOD THING WHICH THE LORD HAD SPOKEN UNTO THE HOUSE OF ISRAEL; ALL CAME TO PASS." Joshua xxi. 43-45.

B

UT one Fourth of July has ever occurred that equals the one which has just been celebrated with tumult and joy unspeakable. That was the first that came after peace was made, and our independence was acknowledged by the parent government. After eight years of wasting war; after thousands of their youth and men of years had fallen in death; after their prosperity had given way to long and fearful poverty, and the national sovereigns, crowns, shillings, and even pennies, that had been the stable and general reward of industry and basis of wealth, had given place for years to a miserable

* A sermon preached in Boston, Sunday, July 9, 1865.

paper, many dollars of which could not buy a British shilling, and whose fluctuations, even on its almost worthless base, paralyzed trade and defrauded labor of its due; after anarchy and hatred of brother against brother, such as only our Southern section has lately reproduced, had raged through all the land, as violently in Boston as in South Carolina, then came the gray flush of the approaching day. Exhausted England rested long and longer between her attacks, until at Yorktown, hemmed in by allianced France and America, she surrendered her hold and hopes, and acknowledged our independence. The following Fourth of July was a day of widest and wildest delight.

Such has been the past anniversary. We have heard the joy and praise that with bell, and martial march, and music, and roar of multitudinous cannon, have shaken the skies; that with the voice of praise, and prayer, and discourse of reason, and passion of oratory, have lifted the souls of the people to Him whose right hand and whose mighty arm hath gotten Him the victory. We, too, have just emerged from a wide and wasting war. Our finances have plunged into an abyss, which, but for the unexampled confidence and strength of the people, would have proved as fatal to our wealth as was the continental currency to that of our fathers. Our foes have been they. of our own household. Brother has wrestled with brother in dying agonies. Half a million of our sons sleep in their own blood. The cloud of sorrow has wrapped millions of hearts in the pall of the grave. For four years has the terrific struggle gone on, until at last the sulphurous cloud moves off, and the light of returning day gladdens every eye.

It is well to come together in the house of God, and lift humble and grateful hearts to Him. It is well in the awakening day, to consider the blessings and the duties with which He is now crowning us. Let us then turn our eyes

inward and heavenward, discerning the will of God and the willingness of man.

I. The first great blessing which peace brings us is Peace. She herself is a treasure worthy our warmest love. War is ever horrible. Whatever grand disguises it puts on, in pomp of dress, array, and melody; in the excitement of the strife, when men put on the action, and put within them the heart of the tiger; in the bloody feast of telegrams and pictures of the battle, on which the public appetite feeds with a greediness of delight that reveals our kindred to our cannibal ancestors, and shows that we are one with those who yet find their most exhilarating beverage to be the blood of their victims, and his flesh to be their sweetest viand. Notwithstanding all these terrific uplifts of soul which it creates, it is still a volcano of death and horror. You may admire the armless, legless heroes that feebly move through your streets. You would hardly wish to exchange your soundness of body for their wounds and weakness. You may seek to cheer the weeping father, mother, wife, and child with your cheap phrases of duty, patriotism, and glory. But you would not exchange your embodied love for theirs, disembodied and unapparent. You would not empty your house of its head or its heart, in order that you might fill your desolate soul with memories of goodness or greatness. Human hearts crave visible, embraceable beings, on which to lavish their love. Heaven to the heartsore is desirable, because it will disclose the evanished faces of the loved, and restore to our arms their long-lost forms.

Those who, therefore, prate flippantly of the glories of martyrdom for the right, are not those who bleed inwardly and constantly in consuming sorrow. You never hear the parents, whose son will brighten their aged eyes no more, parade this theme in wordy eulogy. You never hear the widow, cast into an outer and inner mourning, that only

death can cure, by the dreadful disasters of battle, who is ever crying out in the darkness of her home and heart,

"O that it were possible,

After long years of pain,

To feel the arms of my true love

Round me once again!"

You never hear such wounded souls discoursing on the beauties and grandeur of war. That is well enough for orators, and editors, and parlor knights, and dames; it is not the speech of these who humbly say, with firm-set lips, and tumultuous, agonized heart, "I was dumb, and opened not my mouth, because Thou didst it." Thy will, not mine, be done.'

Nay, war is a horror of horrors. Thank God it has finished its direful course. Thank God that the marches of our mighty legions have ceased; that we no more sup on such horrors as were served up to us on the dreadful night of Bull Run, and by Ball's Bluff, and Chickamauga, and Murfreesboro', and Fredericksburg, and the Wilderness, and Spottsylvania, and Fort Pillow, and a hundred other like fearful names. These telegrams, dripping, nay, deluged in blood, are not served up as our daily food. And those more horrible accompaniments of the bloody feast, Libby and Belle Isle, Andersonville and Salisbury, they too are gone, and gone forever.

Talk not of the glories of war. As well talk of the glowing pageant of the Judgment, when the great day of God's wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand. Some may fancy that they will gaze with artistic eye on that terrific spectacle. They have so dwelt upon it in earthly imagination; they have set their highest genius to depict the scene. Rubens, Cornelius, Fra Angelico, and greatest of all, Michael Angelo, have set forth its fearful splendors

with sublimest pencil. Yet what are they by the side of the unspeakable reality?-the blazing earth, the dissolving heavens, the arising dead, the assembled multitudes, the great white throne, from whose presence earth, and heaven flee away, and there is no place found for them; the Judge severe, the wonderful Son of God, the enraptured saints, the shuddering, flying, falling sinners. Ah, why fancy that a Michael Angelo, by covering a narrow wall of a little chapel with pigment, can body forth that spectacle of spectacles!

So dream not that your talk of war, or pictures of war, embodies its realities. No tongue, no heart can. Its riven frames, its ghastly dead, its unutterable groanings, its shock of demons leaping at each other, all this is over, may it be, forever. That blessing peace bestows.

But peace also gives us the blessing of ordinary law. War not only destroys the happiness, it weakens the stability of society. We have lived for four years in fear of losing our liberties as well as our lives. Those liberties have been suspended. The ancient and essential landmarks of human progress and protection have been submerged in the deluge of blood. Our prime minister not only said that he could, by touching a little bell, consign any one to prison he did it. : Had he so chosen, he might have consigned them to death also. Hundreds were thus, without warrant or accusation, cast into jail; others were banished from the land, and all held their liberties at the tenure of the government. The Constitution as well as the laws was suspended, and military despotism swayed the land. The government professed to maintain some of its forms, yet it claimed the power to disregard them all, and did often disregard most. The President appointed generals, who held commissions as members of Congress, contrary to its direct letter. He refused to execute laws which