punishment upon their leaders, we can afford to be magnanimous toward the ignorant masses of the South, because we are strong and free. Kindness will open new avenues for the truth. Simultaneously with this enlargement of the field, the war has developed and cultivated in the nation a spirit of philanthropy and of liberality, which will prepare it for this new work of evangelism at home, and for a wider range of evangelistic efforts abroad. Before the war, the passion of the nation was for material aggrandizement, and the passion of the people for acquisition with a view to luxurious expenditure. We were never a niggardly people. Yankee thrift and economy were not niggardly, for these qualities had reference to substantial comfort and enjoyment in the future upon the savings of present industry. With all our passion for accumulating, we were not a nation of hoarders. We spent freely, and had a growing tendency toward fast-living. Nor were we wanting in public spirit or in philanthropy, as the times went, for we built schools and colleges, and hospitals and almshouses; we had our associations for the poor, our homes for orphans, our religious charities of every name. We were really a nation of spendthrifts, and our countrymen abroad had a reputation for indifference to money, and for a certain dashism, that made our wealth seem fabulous. But the whole tendency of national life was toward materialism and luxury. We had not learned the difference between "big" and "great.' We measured our greatness by the census. We fed our pride with statistics of population, of corn, of railroads, of mines, and manufactures. And worshiping material success as a people, we carried into our household life and into our social intercourse a prominent regard for material interests, until "the Almighty Dollar" became the symbol of our national spirit and aims. We had yet to learn the truth of Carlyle's biting satire, that to be worthy of the respect of mankind and the title of a model nation, we must cease to brag of cotton, corn, and bacon, and must bring forth great human souls, great thoughts, great and noble things that men could loyally admire. Already has the war begun to work this needed change in our national habits and aims. Though in some quarters the spendthrift tendency has been accelerated, yet even "shoddyism" has its mission as a reformer of social extravagance, by caricaturing it through an association with whatever is coarse, and ignorant, and vulgar. Material show is no longer the standard of social position. But setting aside the vulgar style of some who have been made suddenly rich by the war, there is apparent a marked change in our national estimate of money and its uses. The war has opened to us moral and philanthropic objects for the expenditure of money, upon a scale so vast, that all personal, social, and national vanities are belittled in the comparison. We are taxing ourselves upon everything that we possess, as a tribute to a grand moral idea-that of nationality, and of a unified government as its representative. We are giving without cessation or stint to all patriotic and philanthropic interests and necessities created by the war. And these demands, so immense, so constant, so imperative, have revolutionized our habits in the use of money, and elevated our tone and scale of giving. In 1863, it was computed that the State and personal contributions for bounties to soldiers, and relief to their families, had reached the enormous sum of two hundred millions of dollars; while the contributions to the soldiers through the Sanitary and Christian Commissions and the various religious societies, reached twenty-five millions of dollars. These sums have been largely advanced upon during the year 1864. And the constant drain has not exhausted the supply. What a marvelous outpouring of popular sympathy and generosity was the Thanksgiving Dinner for the soldiers! "It was not so much our getting it as your thinking of it," said a brave fellow who failed to receive his portion. The "thinking" of such things, the application of our inventive genius to new methods of philanthropy, is a result of that great and terrible stimulus which the war has brought to all our powers. And while the direct demands of the war have drawn thus largely upon the purse of the nation, the spirit of liberality thus evoked by patriotism and by sympathy has extended itself to all objects of public utility and of Christian beneficence. Mil lions have been given to pay off church debts; and millions more to endow colleges and theological seminaries. How vast a gain is this to the cause of Christ in the future of this nation! The war has taught us how to entrench and fortify the institutions of peace. And the marvel is that these immense home charities have not trenched upon the work of evangelization abroad. The American Board was never more highly prospered. The American Bible Society, while giving Bibles and Testaments to the army by tens of thousands, is yet able to provide for stereotyping the scriptures for the millions that speak the Arabic language. This new zeal of benevolent action will survive the war. The principles that have stirred it will remain. The satisfaction it has brought will abide. The sympathies it has developed will outlive the occasion. And its fruits will be garnered by the next generation. For it is a marked feature of this national philanthropy, that children have been trained by it to feel that the worth of money is to be measured by what it accomplishes for the relief of suffering and the diffusion of · good. The moral effect of the war for the furtherance of Christianity is no less significant than are its philanthropic results. The overthrow of slavery which the war has now accomplished takes from our foreign missionaries a reproach that had hindered their evangelical labor, and takes from the nation a reproach that had crippled its moral influence. The passing of the Fugitive Slave Law and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise-both measures that defied the moral sentiment of Christendom, by adopting and endorsing as a national concern the odious system which before had crouched under the shadow of State laws-those two atrocious violations of honor, faith, justice, and humanity, were felt by every American missionary as a stigma upon his good name, as a blight upon his work among the pagans. Why seek to civilize Af rica, when we were brutalizing ourselves by imbruting her sons upon our soil? Why seek to convert the Turk from a system of domestic servitude and of concubinage that were decency and mercy in comparison with American slavery? Missionaries in Turkey, in India, in the islands of the Pacific, sent home their earnest and pathetic remonstrances against the wrong we were doing them by our apologies for slavery through the pulpit and the press, and by our political legislation on its behalf. The saintly and now sainted Stoddard wrote from Oroomiah: "We dare not tell these Nestorians that such an institution exists in free, happy America. If we should, they would not fail to charge us, as Mar Yohannan did, when visiting America, with the grossest inconsistency. You come here,' I seem to hear them say, 'to labor for our social and moral elevation. It is well. We thank you for your labors of love. May God reward you for all your self-denials! But, while feeling compassion for us, why do you harden your hearts against whole millions, who languish in your own land in unrighteous bondage} You give us the Bible. Why do you deny it to the slave? You multiply schools among us; why do you forbid the African to learn to read? You feel indignation at our Moslem oppressors; why are you unwilling to disturb even with a whisper, the American slaveholder? You tell us of the sanctity of marriage; why do you endure a system which, hardly less than Mohammedanism, tends to concubinage? You hold up before us the family relation as of the most sacred and delightful character; how then can you sanction the violent sundering of these ties, and the scattering of father, mother, brother, sister, son, and daughter, to the winds of heaven? You assure us that man is not a brute, that he is made in the image of God, that he is to live forever; why then do you, in America, buy and sell men, and reduce them nearly to the level of the horse or the ox? Is this consistency? Is this Christianity? Is this the land of freedom; this the land of philanthropy, of pure and devoted piety, of which you boast ?'"* And again he wrote: "The circumstances and views of every missionary must make him an antislavery man, and I do not believe that there is one of the missionaries of our Board but feels as I do on this general subject. Many of them I know are astonished at the apathy of American Christians, and especially American ministers, in regard to it, and have not words to express their sorrow when such an institution is apologized for and stoutly defended in Northern pulpits. For my own part, I fear that we shall not see the cause of missions making rapid progress until the American churches are ready to take a higher stand on this and every other subject, and become far more bold, enterprising, humble, self-denying." Now, all this is changed. The American missionary has no more cause to blush for his country or to extenuate her sins. At every missionary station it is known that we are fighting not for conquest, nor for territory, nor for military fame, but Memoir, p. 360. * Memoir, pp. 372-373. for great principles of social and political justice, affecting the welfare of all mankind. It is known that we have declared freedom for the slave, and have resolved to incorporate a perpetual prohibition of slavery in the fundamental charter of the nation. Converts in Syria and in India have sent us their gifts of sympathy and of aid for our soldiers, and their assurance of prayer for our cause. How will the moral influence of America for the well-being of mankind be augmented by the triumph of the national arms in the extinction of slavery! Heretofore, when our free institutions have been vaunted by the friends of liberty abroad, the bare mention of slavery has provoked the sneer of contempt at our inconsistency and hypocrisy. But the destruction of slavery makes us a power for unqualified and immeasurable good. In striking the shackles from the slave we have struck them from the nation. Far sooner than he dreamed has Whittier's prophecy of emancipation been fulfilled: "In the sun A free flag floats from yonder dome, And at the nation's hearth and home, 1 The enlightened friends of freedom and humanity abroad hail this result as a victory for their cause. Cobden, and Bright, and Goldwin Smith, and Gasparin, and Laboulaye, and their peers in the nobility of freedom rejoice and give thanks that this nation has now rectified itself in the great interest of humanity. Henceforth we are a power for good, wherever thought can penetrate, wherever history is read. There is a still higher range in which the war contributes to the furtherance of Christ's kingdom. Since the kingdom of God is founded in spiritual ideas, this war, by bringing the nation to the consciousness of God's supremacy, and to the conviction of his truth and justice, has established that kingdom in the souls of multitudes who had not before regarded it. With the masses of men, the most evidential proof of the existence of God is the felt conviction of a moral government over the world-of a power above man, above nature, above physical laws, that cares for the Right, |