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The State and the Nation — Sacred to Christian Citizens.

A SEEMON

PREACHED IN ALL SOULS' CHURCH, NEW YORK,

APEIL 21, 1861.

BY

HENRY W. BELLOWS.

NEW YORK: JAMES MILLER,

SUCCESSOR TO

C. S. FRANCIS & CO., 522 BROADWAY, 1861.

SERMON

" And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud, with power and great glory.

" And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh." Luhe xxi. 28.

There is something profoundly instructive in the double title which our Saviour bears in the New Tes- tament Scriptures, — Son of Man, and Son of God. In Him are united the interests and the affections of heav- en and earth. He is equally the representative of God and man, the first-born of Deity and the only perfect child of Humanity. His double name, too, is expres- sive of his double office, which is to bless us in this world, while it saves us for another ; to exalt us in time, while it prepares us for eternity. Christ, by his life and death, his precepts, example, and inspiration, moves and fashions alike the institutions of society, and the immortal character and destiny of men. In the Church he is the Son of God, with tender human sympathy, winning men's souls to contemplations, hopes, and as- pirations above time and sense ; in the world, he is the Son of Man, with divine light and spiritual succor, car- rying the principles of a heavenly society into the im- mediate civilization of mankind. He is thus the light of the world, and the bright and morning-star of im- mortality ; the source of progress, improvement, lib-

erty and happiness here, and of peace and joy and sanctity and blessedness hereafter.

We have a dual nature ourselves, — a double life and consciousness corresponding to our Lord's twofold ministry ; first, a conscience to be set right towards God, a hope full of immortality to be nursed, to which the Son of God makes his great appeal ; and then du- ties and sympathies towards our fellow-men — offices of immediate urgency and opportunity — to which the Son of Man lends inspiration and guidance. These two sides of our nature are represented in the world by the Church and the State, both sacred and divine in- stitutions : the Church, the home and guardian of our purely spiritual and eternal interests ; the State, the home and guardian of our relative, human, and social interests. The Son of God is the head of the Church, the Son of Man the head of the State ; and Church and State are spiritually united in his indivisible character and influence. Nothing can be less real than the im- aginary separation between Church and State in this country. The visible Church is separated from the visible State, as to official and legal functions ; but this exterior divorce was mainly necessary to secure a truer interior union. Civil and spiritual powers, man as a citizen and man as an immortal, were never so inti- mately blended as in the very origin of our govern- ment. Our fathers spurned ecclesiastical control, that they might be more free to worship and serve God ; and the use they made of the religious liberty they acquired, was to render the voluntary support of reli- gious institutions and the Church more generous and efficacious than any enforced support of it ever had been or could be.

We are not content that Christ as the Son of God should rule in the Church alone ; we look for Him as

the Son of Man to come in the State. We know that these interests are one ; that man as a citizen and as a saint has the same vocation ; that Christ is Son of Man and Son of God; and that He must come equally in Church and State before his kingdom is complete. When therefore Christ as "the Son of Man" comes in power and great glory, he sheds light, inspiration, and freshness over society ; he invigorates its. failing pow- ers, pours a new life into its dull veins, reorganizes its old and effete materials, and changes its fashion into a brighter pattern of morality and justice. When Christ as " the Son of God " comes, he kindles up the altars, revives the devotional life, and quickens the spiritual longings and aspirations of his people. And as there are periods of Christian revival in the Church, so there are periods of Christian revival in the State. They are very unlike in their manifestations, though identical in their origin, and inseparable in their purpose and ulti- mate influence. When the sense of humanity, the longing to realize ideal justice, to extend the equality of human privileges, to abolish immoral anomalies, to embody in more perfect laws more perfectly kept the maxims and fundamental doctrines of Christ — when philanthropic instincts and aspirations surge in deep, full waves through the heart of a nation or an era, then the Son of Man is coming, it may be in a cloudy but still luith great power and glory. Christ is working on the State, the kingdoms of this world are becoming the kingdoms of God's Son ; and blessed is the faith that recognizes the source of this glorious and power- ful advent. For, alas, the jealousy of ecclesiastics or Christians of the half-breed, is always misleading those who venerate the Son of God, to deny Him as the Son of Man. They imagine they do Christ honor, by see-

6

ing only half bis work, and recognizing only half his presence ! The great human side of his labors, the regeneration of social and civil and political life which he is steadily producing, they disown as if unworthy of, or even inconsistent with, his purely heavenly and spiritual redemption ! As if the State were not the body of the Church, which ought to be its soul ; its purification and strength and growth, as essentially and vitally connected with the prosperity and life of the Church, as the health of our bodies with the welfare of our spirits. This unhappy alienation of Church and State, of social and religious interests, has usually left the movements of liberty and progress, and the read- justment of society to better social and civil standards, in the hands of the undevout and the unbelieving; as if it v> ere too much to love God and liberty at the same time, or humanity and heaven together ; as if philanthropy were the rival instead of the partner of piety, and the State the antagonist, instead of the ally of the Church. Are we never to learn that Christ is equally Son of Man and Son of God, and that he is as jealous of one name as of the other ? Is the humanity of our Lord less precious and significant than his di- vinity ? Nay, is life itself not the beginning of im- mortality ; this world the predestined scene of Christ's first triumph ; and our ordinary, social, civil, and do- mestic life the very sphere where his glorious kingdom is to be set up?

I speak of our secular, as distinguished from our future interests, as all comprehended under that one word, the State. That is the only grand, venerable, symbolic word that can fitly represent them all. The State — the great common life of a nation, organized in laws, customs, institutions ; its total social being in- carnate in a political unit, having common organs and

functions; a living body, witli ahead and a heart, com- mon pulsations, common interests and feelings, with a common consciousness. The State ! wound it in any part, and pain is felt in all. Warm it any where, and its whole blood is cheered. Feed it at its head, and its whole body is nourished. The State — it is no ab- straction ! but a living, breathing reality, with a mem- ory, a consciousness, a sensibility to praise and blame, a conscience, a power to sicken and die, or to conva- lesce, and grow, and thrive. When Louis XIV. said, " The State — it is I," — if he meant that the State had a personality like his own, he spoke a great and most pregnant truth. For until we learn to affirm con- science, intellect, obligation, shame, honor, unity of the State as of an individual, we are in a grovelling me- chanical humor, which tends all the time to carry us back to the barbarous or savage condition. That old "divinity that doth hedge a king" was the mere re- flection of the sanctity that belongs to the State, and only as its great representative was the veneration paid to royalty, most fitly due. The State is indeed divine, as being the great incarnation of a nation's rights, priv- ileges, honor and life ; that to which every man dying, bequeaths all that he cannot carry with him — the State being the heir of all the precious memories of succes- sive generations, fed on their nobility, strong with their good services, rich with their wealth, impregnated with their spirit, and perpetuating in itself the glorious tradi- tions of all its successive generations of faithful children. Essential to the life and glory of the State, is the sentiment of nationality. The progress of the world has laid in the development of this self-consciousness in peoples. And as great States have become more and more humane. Christian, free ; as their national spirit and temper, their constitutions and laws have partaken

more and more of what we love and admire in great Christian characters, — the Son of Man has come in them, with great power and glory. In the old world, however, nationality — always and under all circum- stances beautiful and glorious — -has been more or less - in rivalry with civil liberty. Governments, which prop- erly represent and externalize the national life and spirit, have yet been commonly made strong at the ex- pense of the rights and independence of the people. For, by a noble instinct, people will consent to a great loss of personal liberty, for the sake of national dignity and power. They gladly merge their private rights and privileges in the majesty of the State, and the loyalty found under despotic governments, which are yet true to themselves, is an affecting tribute to the love and pride of country Avhich sweetens even the wrongs and sufferings of the over-governed and over-taxed. That a proud loyalty should belong to England, where such a steady advance in popular rights is always making, does not surprise us. But it is equally true of France, which perhaps even more than England beats with a national pulse and pride, although her government is a usurpation and her emperor a despot. But he has the skill to make France great, feared, loved, — he is true to her national instincts and aspirations, and her people postpone their private rights and longings, to the glory of France. But how sublimely is nationality exhibiting itself in Italy and in Russia — in Italy, where a common language and blood, common hopes and fears and interests, are forcing one circulation through all its lately manacled and paralytic limbs ; and a cen- tral heart, true to generous ideas and human rights, now sends for the first time for fifteen hundred years, lawful pulsations from the Alps to the Ionian Sea. The icy Nortli is not behind the fervid South in national aspi-

ration. Russia has just achieved undying glory, by an act surpassing even British emancipation in courage and fidelity to conscience. Her splendid enfranchise- ment of the serfs is perhaps the greatest tribute ever paid by a nation to moral convictions; and the "Son of Man came in great power and glory," when that lately-esteemed barbarous people, in the person of her czar, her princes and nobles, laid down the intoxicat- ing but corrupting and damning pride of man-owning^ at the feet of a Christian throne. The glorious author- ity of the State, the worth and dignity of a national character, the possibility of eradicating a moral cancer from the breast of a nation — however near its life — these ideas have been gloriously vindicated for modern times — and for us, especially — in Italy and in Russia, the extremes of Europe.

We have a different equation to solve here, and one on which the attention of the whole world waits with anxiety.

No people can be great, respected, loved, feared, trusted, without nationality ; without patriotic devo- tion and unity, national instincts, and affections; a common government round which they rally, and a common soil, every inch of which is sacred to every citizen. We have in several respects the grandest ele- ments of unity ever possessed by any people ; a com- mon language and a common religion ; a territory in- divisible in natural boundaries; a continent with all the isolation of an island, and with the disadvantageous vastness of its space overcome by the genius of mod- ern locomotive arts. We have the solemn memory of common wars in which one people shed their mingled blood now on Northern and now on Southern soil. Our great names belong to the whole country. There is every reason in the world — one only excepted — why

10

our American people should be a unit ; and tlie trial now upon us, is whether that one reason shall prevail against all the others.

American nationality has doubtless some obstacles in its way altogether peculiar in the history of civiliza- tion. It is an attempt to organize the jealous individ- ualism of democratic freedom — a condition in which personal independence and the private man and local authority claim, and are allowed, the largest liberty — into a consentaneous, harmonious, and powerful nation, able to wield its authority, to symbolize its majesty, to unify its policy through a strong government, — and yet one strong only in the confidence and affectious of the people. You cannot have a great nationality, with- out a strong government. There must be a proper expression and symbolism of the national life in an in- violable national flag, and in trusted and sustained na- tional rulers. But you cannot have a strong govern- ment in our circumstances of democratic liberty with- out the free and full consent of the mass of the people. Can you have that consent in this country ? No ! says the whole European world. No ! says the history of the past. No ! says the Southern Confederacy. No ! say the governors of the Border States. No ! said a week ago some of the leading presses of the North. No! said the fears and misgivings of patriotic souls everywhere. But, thanks be to God, the instincts and affections of the American heart, the latent nationality of the vast majority of its people, have rushed as with the might of a deluge, to drown those fearful Nays, in one sublime affirmation ! Yea ! yea ! say the people, we are a nation. We have a common heart and soul, and are one body. The government (we care not what party has put it there) stands for this nationality — stands for our honor, power, unity, self-respect — stands for

11

our dignity abroad and our peace and prosperity at home — stands for America ! The American flag has our hearts' blood in its ruddy veins ; our national heav en opens in its field of blue ; and our lives shall set sooner than its stars ! And clustering round its stand- ard, flock at once a hundred thousand men — the flower of the land — to maintain in the face of all the world the proud assertion : This American people is not a set of civilized squatters upon a common territory — a school of wriggling fish accidentally caught in one federal net — an aggregation of petty communities, confined in some political kaleidoscope, to which any strong hand at every election may give a shake that alters its whole aspect and identity ; but instead of all this, it is a Na- tion^ like England, France, Russia, with an organic life and destiny — a pride, a character, a soul, which it will vindicate and uphold so long as it has an ounce of sil- ver in its treasury, or a drop of blood in its veins.

We have long known that our nationality was pro- nounced enough to make us safe against all foreign foes. Our doubts have been whether our centrifugal forces at home might not prevail over our centripetal ; our local interests and passions over our national pride and unity. And certainly, for twenty years, the omens have been dark and discouraging. Our patriotism has been all exhausted in efforts to hang together upon eternal compromises and ever-shifting conditions. Our statesmanship has been a perpetual feat of balancing upon the ever-tightening rope of sectional jealousy and exaction. The equiUbrmm, not the nationality, has been our worship ! The States have been stealing away the loyalty due to the nation. Parties have absorbed the pride belonging to the country. National men have been shrinking into petty politicians, and bribery^

12

corruption, peculation, treason have flourished in the capital.

/ did not know — you did not know — the cabinet did not know, a single week ago, whether the country had a heart and soul or not. A horrid nightmare of apathy, hesitation, doubt, sat upon the nation's breast, and it looked as if the country might die in this ster- torous sleep. But the cracking of that splintered flag- staff broke the spell. The nation woke on Monday morning and shook itself, and brushed away the doubts and difiiculties and dissensions which had paralyzed it, as a man clears the sleep from his eyes with the first handful of water he snatches when he wakes ; and now there is no more doubt that we are a nation and a gov- ernment, to be respected at home and abroad, than there is that shameful treason and folly have disgraced a powerful section of the country, and are aiming straight at the national heart.

American nationality is not on trial, — for we may consider it established by the wonderful demonstrations of the past week. But it is important to understand that the contest before us is one in which some long-rooted and deeply-bedded errors fatal to our peace, our na- tional morals, our religion and our power and pros- perity, are to be exterminated — it may be with bloody hands.

It is no longer to be said with bated breath only. Freedom is national. Slavery is sectional ; that is to be thundered with constitutional cannon upon the deaf and deluded ears of those who have refused to listen to the ballot-box. It is no longer to be allowed that secession is, perhaps, the right of disaffected States. That word is to be blotted from our political vocabu- lary with national scorn; and blacker lines drawn about it than ever fenced in the iniquitous entry of

13

some subservient legislature, from polluting the records of the State. It is no longer to be admitted that we have a divided sovereignty to distract and neutralize the loy- alty of our army and navy and people. There is no more pestilent heresy in the world than that of a double sov- ereignty. God and mammon, Christ and Belial, may as soon live together as two sovereignties! And our de- luded brethren are themselves logically proving this, by giving their sole allegiance to the only sovereign they reverence, their separate States. This wretched fallacy lies at the root of our troubles. We have evaded it, covered it over, coaxed it, temporized with it — but now we have to exterminate it. The supreme, sole undivided sovereignty of the United States is to be finally vindicated, and the nation is not to lay down its arms while a single traitor to the flag remains to be dealt with. It is unfortunate that our local govern- ments are called States. It misleads the people by clothing these admirable organizations with a delusive seeming of sovereignty ; but this narrow, selfish, ig- norant provincial pride must be permanently humbled, and the wide and noble American patriotism of the Fathers brought back to its original place and dignity. Nor is it any longer to be admitted, that a consti- tutional majority holds its right to rule by sufferance and dispute. This rebellion is a rebellion against the Ballot-box, the most sacred possession of modern civil- ization. The ballot-box is more vital to our interests as Americans, than mints and forts and bank-vaults and treasuries and armories. We may more innocently and safely submit to assaults on these, than upon that symbol and instrument of our peaceful liberties. Al- low uncertainty, dispute, contempt, armed opposition to hang over its decisions, and our country is lost ! No ! the ballot-box must be now forever lifted above

14

the desecration of sectional or party rage and oppo- sition. Its peaceful rights must be sustained with all the force that its loyal supporters can command. A million cartridge-boxes must see that the ballot-box at the end of this struggle is henceforth safe without one musket to protect it.

We have, then, a holy war on our hands — a war in defence of the fundamental principles of this govern- ment— a war in defence of American Nationality, the Constitution, the Union, the rights of legal majorities, the ballot-box, the law. We must wage it in the name of civilization, morality, and religion, with unflinching earnestness, energy, and self-sacrifice. God knows how we have striven and prayed to avert the awful neces- sity ! But the hour would not be delayed. And no sublimer spectacle has dawned on the world than the sudden dispersion of all partisan feelings, commercial selfishness, and weak irresolution, by the solemn up- rising of the ancient spirit of liberty. It has come unexpectedly, but not a minute too soon to save the nation. Another presidential term, under the auspices of the spirit which has prevailed for five and twenty years past, would have put the nation, bound hand and foot, in the toils of a corrupted, insolent, and domi- neering Slaveocracy. But the nation is aroused ! and it must be kept awake. Our present dangers are the penalties of past stupor. This noble patriotism which now dignifies all hearts, must not be suffered to escape in a temporary ebullition. It must be calmed on the surface and deepened at the bottom. It must learn patience, persistence, and gravity. We are providen- tially called to a conflict more urgent than our first revo- lution— more perilous and awful. We must not de- spise our enemies, nor think slightingly of their saga- city, their means, or their resolution. They are terribly

15

in earnest, they are riclier than we think, they have long-arranged plans, they have a desperate game to play, they have able, ambitious, and unscrupulous leaders, and are under the sway of local delusions, politi- cal fallacies, and military habits and tastes. It is only by the instant rally of the largest force we can muster, and by the immediate exercise of the greatest power we can put forth, by the dropping of every hesitating or half-way policy, by the most direct, aggressive, and overwhelming vindication of all our laws and rights, that we can diminish the effusion of blood, and control within the narrowest limits the horrors and the injuries of Civil War.

This is not a war against the South, or against its institutions, its rights, or its people. It is a war for the South, for the whole people, for the Constitution, and the Union. We see our brethren there under a general madness, ready to fire the Capitol, drawing the sword upon their own and our own country. We see them ready to commit national suicide, and we rush in to prevent a catastrophe as fatal to them as to us ! "We must be cruel, that we may be kind." We must be their enemies for the moment, because we wish to be their permanent friends ; and God knows that their distant posterity will bless us for restraining the mad- ness which, if allowed to have its way, would bury the American name, and its liberties and glories, in an ignominious oblivion.

March on, then, ye noble patriots from the loyal States of our sacred Union ! Your faces are set to- wards the grave of Washington, which must never pass into any keeping less dignified than the nation's own. You go to save the Capitol, where the Father of his Country, and Jefferson and the Adamses and Madison and Jackson presided over a common soil with impar-

16

tial care ; where Marshall and Jay and Story judged the people righteously ; where Gadsden, Pinckney and Livingston, Hamilton and King, and Clay and Web- ster honored the Union with their fervid devotion ; and where patriotism and wisdom and justice still sur- vive, and seek, with honest impartiality, to maintain and allow the rights and claims of the thirty-four States of the nation. What though your blood has already, on the sacred 19th of April, rebaptized our liberties on the soil of Maryland ? The men of '61 are not more precious nor less brave than those of '76, and Baltimore is as good a place as Lexington to die for one's coun- try ! Go, then ! ye noble sons of Massachusetts and New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, Rhode Island and young Minnesota ! offer your bodies as the first ram- part to our invaders. The ranks will rapidly close up behind you — for this is no time for men to hold their lives dear ; no day for cowards, sluggards, or neutrals. The Son of Man bids you "look up and lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh." Your country, mankind, history, and God's holy bar, will bless you for your alacrity, your courage, your fidel- ity, and your sacrifices.

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