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der to us will be, that, with all our imperfections and departures from God, the grace of God could raise us to such exalted stations, as sons of God and heirs of eternal life. Passion, prejudice, envy, and hatred, will undoubtedly exclude many from the rest of heaven, for no evil passion ever rankles in the bosom of the redeemed in glory.

"Pure are the joys above the sky,

And all the region peace;
No wanton lip nor envious eye
Can see or taste the bliss."

There are no private or selfish interests in heaven; there should be none in the Church on the earth. Each should strive "to purify himself," as Christ is pure, and to make the Church below a fair type of heaven. And however much we may feel that we have occasion to dislike a brother or to be biased against him, let us bear in mind that some "good can come from Nazareth;" that if we discover much that we can not approve, there will be a wider scope to us for cultivating the spirit of charity and the grace of forbearance. If we can not endure with each other where all need forbearance, what confidence or hope can we have that God will forgive us our trespasses? Instead of allowing a prejudice to affect our minds toward any fellow-being, let us labor to repair over against our own house, to purify ourselves of all those moral blemishes of which we complain in others; and "let him that is without sin cast the first stone," remembering, that as we measure to others it shall be measured to us again.

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Vol. IV.-New Series.] NOVEMBER, 1861. [No. 11.-Whole No. 419.

SERMON XXXI.*

BY REV. ROSWELL D. HITCHCOCK, D.D.,

PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN THE UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY.

OUR NATIONAL SIN.

"THE sin which doth so easily beset us."-HEBREWS 12: 1.

THE particular sin here referred to is apostasy, of which the Hebrew converts to Christianity were especially in danger, and against which the writer of this epistle especially warns them. But to-day I shall detach the few words chosen for our text from the connection in which they stand, and apply them, without further preface, to the solemn occasion which has now called us together.

Sin, in its essence, is self-assertion; the finite setting up for it

Preached on the day of the National Fast, September 26th, 1861, in the South Reformed Dutch Church, New-York.

self against the Infinite, the creature against the Creator. Its forms are various: such as sensuality, or the lust of pleasure; avarice, or the lust of gain; and ambition, or the lust of power. But its essence is always one and the same. Underneath these and all other possible forms, there lurks a single malignant principle, which may be best described as self-assertion.

Of sin, in this its essential character of finite rebellion against the Infinite, we may say it belongs to man as man. It is no mere fortuity, which may or may not occur. "To err is human." By nature, there is none loyal to his Maker; no, not one. Contempt for the divine authority may therefore be pronounced to be the easily besetting sin of our race, as such. In one form or another, we are rebels, all of us.

But for each individual, besides this generic depravity, which is in him like poisoned blood, there is also some specific infirmity peculiarly his own; some one form of spiritual disloyalty, toward which he gravitates with a special momentum; some one sin out of all the catalogue of human offenses, which he commits with the most fatal facility and frequency. It may not be known to the world. It may not be known even to himself, by reason of moral blindness. It may be known only to God. But, in either case, it is his easily besetting sin, stamping its burning seal upon his inmost character, even though it may set no mark of shame upon his brow.

As thus of individuals, so likewise of nations. Nations are not mere masses and aggregates of population; they are organisms. Each is endowed with a sort of moral personality, and has a determinate character of its own. Individuals may be born and die, generations may come and go; but the national pulse beats on without arrest, and the millions of the present find their destiny arbitrated by the millions of the past. The whole, in this case, is something more, and other, than simply the sum total of all its parts. It is an indivisible, organic whole, planting itself astride the generations and the centuries, and standing face to face with a wakeful Providence, whose retributions are none the less righteous, and often all the more impressive and salutary, because they do not come at once. So France is suffering to-day for having exiled her industrious Huguenots nearly two hundred years ago.

Thus may each nation be disfigured and crippled by its easily besetting sin; its history disclosing to every sagacious observer some one type or aspect of the manifold depravity of our common nature, which dominates over all the rest, setting its seal upon the national character, and suggesting the sort of retribution the most fitting, and therefore the most likely, to be launched, in God's own time, upon its guilty head; as Greece sinned in her idolatry of art, and sank, emasculated and nervous, first beneath the Macedonian phalanx, and finally beneath the iron legions of Rome;

as Rome herself sinned in her inordinate lust of dominion, multiplying her slaves as she squandered the lives of her citizens in incessant war, till the Teutonic barbarians came down and crushed her like an avalanche.

The circumstances of our assembling to-day require no extended recital, being as well known to all as they are or can be to any of us. So grave an occasion has never before befallen us in the whole course of our national existence. We are in the midst of what all history declares to be the bitterest of public calamities. A gigantic armed rebellion is on foot, bent upon accomplishing a permanent dismemberment of the Republic. Should we consent to this dismemberment, it would settle nothing. Two clusters of States, such as the proposed dismemberment would give us, can not possibly divide our territory amicably between them. The very structure of the continent forbids it. All the antecedents of our history forbid it. All the passions of our nature forbid it. The ink upon a treaty of peace so utterly preposterous would hardly be dry before the hot embers of this civil strife, now so flagrant, would be flaming afresh. The only way out of this frightful war is straight on through it, with gleaming steel and bellowing cannon, till the rebellion against the Government is crushed, and so crushed as never to be repeated. Such is the well nigh unanimous conviction of the twenty millions of people still loyal to the Union; a conviction shared also by multitudes, by other millions, perhaps, in the disloyal States, whose voices are now stifled by a reign of terror almost unparalleled in history. Such is our present distress. We are inexorably shut up to the horrors of civil war as the only possible condition of a righteous and lasting peace. It does no good now to inquire whose immediate fault this is; whether it has come about, as some would have us believe, through the culpable intermeddling of our Northern abolitionists, or is the work of disappointed Southern politicians, as the Vice-President of the seceding Confederacy himself declared not many months ago. It does no good now to inquire whether the present catastrophe might or might not have been averted. Here it is upon us, in all its stupendous proportions; and there is no deliverance for us but by the sword.

It is a huge calamity, from whose stunning, staggering stroke it will take us long to recover. Thousands of brave hearts must cease to beat, while the voices of other thousands, widowed and orphaned, send up their piteous wail; miles upon miles of fertile territory must be ravaged; and millions upon millions of precious treasure sacrificed, before this war is ended. In the midst of such troubles, thoughtful men recognize instinctively the presence of a Higher Power, presiding over the fortunes, and about to determine the issues, of this gigantic struggle. It is well that the voice of our President, echoing the voice of both Houses of Con

gress, is to-day calling the whole nation to its knees in humble fasting and prayer. The hand of God is very heavy upon us. His hottest judgments are abroad in the land. We have no inspired prophet among us, infallibly to interpret these judgments. Whether leveled against our sins in the past, or sent as a paternal chastening, to insure us a nobler future, or charged with the double office of punishment and discipline, who will presume to say? Nations, we know, are sometimes simply punished, even to their extinction, for their crimes. Sometimes they appear to be hardly more than gently chastened for their obvious and immediate good. But oftener, by far, they suffer a deserved punishment, which it lies with themselves to accept, if they will, as a timely and wholesome discipline. How it may be with us, we shall know full soon. In our case, as in every other, it will be found that

"God is his own interpreter,

And he will make it plain."

But whatever may be the divine purpose concerning us, our own duty in this sharp and painful crisis of our national life is clear. The trumpet of God's providence, now breaking on us out of the lurid war-cloud, is a startling challenge to thoughtfulness and prayer. The whole nation finds itself suddenly confronting the awful Arbiter of nations. There is no escaping the grand arraignment. The nation must now review its career, as under the eye of an eternal and inflexible justice. While no man, not inspired, may dare to say against what particular offense any particular judgment is hurled, there is no offense which any man may venture to shield or palliate. Any one of our offenses, for which conscience reproaches us, may justly enough evoke against us the divine displeasure. Now, then, is the time for us to bend our heads, in penitential shame, over each and every offense which has marked our national career. Nor is this all. The nation must now reckon with itself in respect to its inmost life, and come to a right understanding of its moral state. If the ideas which have inspired the national life, and the purposes which have guided the national career, and the enterprises which have molded the national character, are beneath the nobleness of our origin and the dignity of our errand in history, now is the time for us to discover it. If, by reason of glaring faults or se rious defects of character, we are misimproving our unexampled opportunities; if, by bringing liberal institutions to needless reproach, we are embarrassing the friends of such institutions in other lands, and so are impeding the general progress of the race; now is the time for a thorough self-knowledge, for repentance and amendment. Brayed as we are in this terrible mortar of Providence, it is of the last moment that we so confess and renounce our folly as to have it depart from us.

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