5^ V/^ iTatiouiil i{it t!)t Ut bap of Sunt, 1865. DI THE PASTOR, R. n. NAHAL, n. I). Wasiiinoton, D. C. wm. 11. mooni;, puintkr, 481 elkventii street. 18G5. tl.fcfe8 CORRESPONDENCE. Washington, D. C, June 1st, 18G5. To the Rev. B. H. Nadal, D. D. Pastor of Wesley Chapel. Dear Sir : The undersigned, a committee appointed at the close of the ser- vices this day in your church, politely request a copy of your Sermon for publication and circulation. We have the honor to be. Yours, most respectfully, A. M. SCOTT, J. W. RICKS, A. F. MOULDEN, GEORGE E. H. DAY, W. H. DE MOTTE, BENJ. LIPPINCOTT. To A. M. Scott, J. W, Ricks, A. F. Moulden, George E. H. Day, W. H. De Mott, and Benj. Lippincott, Esqs. Gentlemen : A copy of my Sermon, delivered on the first instant, is here- with transmitted and placed at your disposal. Yours truly, B. II. NADAL. Washington, D. C, June 3d, 1865. DISCOURSE. " Merely ami truth arc met toj^cthcr, riglitcousness and peace have kissed each other." Psalm 85, 10, This psalm is a song of grateful joy upon the return of the Jews from their captivity in Babylon. It begins : " Lord thou hast been favorable to thy land ; thou hast brought back the captivity of Jacob ; thou hast forgiven the iniquity of thy people ; thou hast covered all tlieir sin." In tliis strain the liappy people proceed, mingling with their thanksgiving a prayer that they may be revived and saved ; that the divine wrath may not be drawn out to all generations, but that the land being delivered, his glory may dwell in it. The text is a thankful acceptance of the divine mercy in tlieir deliverance from slavery, and their return to their own country. It recognizes the divine hand, and aflirms the principles of the divine government. It seems to say : " We are here at homo ao-ain ; tliis is the country left us by our fatliors, who received it from the hand of God. Our palaces are in ruins, our temple a heap of rubbish, our national polity an exploded theory, our cap- ital a desolation ; the task of reconstruction with its immense burdens and terrible responsibilities, awaits us. We must re- build the waste places of Jerusalem ; the temple must spring up again under the trowels of our masons; our altar must again rise and smoke, and our government start afresh according to the pattern shown to Moses in the mount. In short, it is the Avork of reconstruction, to which the singers of this psalm feel themselves called, and the text affirms the principles on which they intend to rebuild their institutions, and establish the peace and happiness of the country. " iMercy and truth are met too-ether; righteousness and peace have kissed each other." That is, peace shall rise and spread and consolidate upon the founda- tions of truth and rigbteoiisness. softened and I)eautifie(l by mercy. It' these were the principles with which to rebuild ancient Israel, they are equally appropriate to the present day, and to our own history. We are in the very moment of pause between war and peace. We have demolished the rebellion, and possessed ourselves of the ground on which it was built. These heaps of brick and timber that disfigure the soil must be removed, and we must build again. If our Union is to last, the second temple is to surpass the glory of the first. In the work of reconstruction we must elimi- nate the error and the crime of the former construction. We must rebuild on the rocks of truth and justice, while we garnish the doors, windows, walls and columns of our re-edified temple with the soft and gentle blazonry of mercy. In such a building peace may make her permanent and contented home. In accordance with this view, our theme is expressed in the fol- lowing question, namely : What are the chief elements of national reconstruction; how shall we establish a just, and hence a perma- nent peace? Our text, in general terms, is the answer. Mercy and truth must be wed ; righteousness must underlie peace. Turn we then to these principles of reconstruction, and let us see them applied to the life of the nation. One of these principles is " truth ;" if we are to rebuild rightly, this principle dare not for one moment be ignored. What is it that has necessitated reconstruction I The answer is, what every civilized man knows by heart, namely, that two sections of the nation have been engaged in a deadly conflict for the last four years ; the bonds of national unity have been cut with the sword ; four thousand millions of property has been destroyed, a debt incurred of three thousand millions, and more than five hundred thousand lives have been sacrificed. The charriots of the rebellion are broken ; its President, caught in the disguise of an old woman, is a prisoner in one of the bomb-proofs at Fortress Monroe, and its hired assassins are undergoing a quiet trial for their lives. We are calm. The fever of the war has ceased. Even the grief and indignation in which the nation but recently both bathed and burned, are so far moderated as to leave our judgment free from passion ; at least, what still remains of passion serves only to purge us from party, and from earthly bias, that our decisions may be high- er, nobler, truer. Now, what have been the great principles of the just ended strugsrle ; what liave been the lies which the rebellion erected into a moloch, and bowed down to worship? What were the truths, if, indeed, truth has been witli us, for which the Union has been warring, bleeding, sacrificing? One of the great falsehoods around which the forces of the rebellion gathered, and by which it claimed to justify itself, is the well known doctrine of secession, now handed over to perpetual infamy by the war. The question between the nation and the rebels was, whether or not the United States was one nation or many ; whether our history on this continent had made us a distinct and organic nationality, to which the people had given their solemn sanction in the distinct utterances of the Constitution : or whether the individual States were nations, which in the constitution had entered into a mere treaty, which any one of them could withdraw from at its own sovereign pleasure. It is strange that sucii a dis- pute was possible ; if there had not been a definite end to serve, it never could have arisen. Almost as soon as the colonies had obtained a foothold on the continent, they began to unite for mutual sympathy and defence. Of one language, from one nation, sub- stantially of one religion, with the same enemy to resist, the same usurpations to repel, they were soon drawn closely together. And when the war of the Revolution came, it found the northern and southern colonies already fitted to each other like the blocks of Solomon's temple, which we are told were built together without the sound of a hammer. The American colo- nies were, in all material respects, of one growth ; in tiie war they had common sentiments, a common enemy, and were formally made 07ie bv their Continental Congress. They joined in the same noble declaration of independence ; they fought side by side in the same battles, and as one they conquered their liberties. The mother country regarded them not as separate foes, but as a single enemy, and when she was beaten, she did not acknowledge the independence of the States separately, but the independence of the nation. The triumph was national ; not sectional ; the leaders in the struggle were national. Tliey covered the whole country with their inlluencc, as the y took the wliolc country into their love and into tlieir plans. Wlr.i shall restrict Wnshiiigton, Franklin, Adams, JetVerson, Hancock and Carroll, to a particular American G locality ? Who knows anything of the flag of a separate State ? The national banner covered all the States with its folds, and poured on all tlie glory of its clustered stars. Tiiis natural and national unity awakened in some quarters fear of consolidation, and when the country began to put its life into more regular form there was at first an effort to preserve the spirit of nationality and at the same time to make the individual States sovereign. But the old articles of confederation under which our Union spent the few tirst years of its independent existence, were soon found inadequate. They established a Congress, but the Congress was not a legislature — it had no power of enforcing its own acts. It was only a consulting and advisory body ; sucli a contrivance did not and could not express the true sentiment of national oneness with which the country had come out of the re- volutionary war, and which was embodied in Washington and his companions. To meet this great want, to express the deep, broad sense of nationality which pervaded the soul of the country our present Constitution was formed. In it was uttered, in the strongest possible form, both the unity and supremacy of the whole pleople, considered not as States, but as people. They pronounced it their own work, wrought in their organic and popular capacity, and declared it, and the laws of Congress under it, to be the supreme law of the land, anything in State laws or State Constitutions to the contrary notwithstanding. Thus was felt and expressed and understood the great doctrine of our nationality and unity. The Constitution of the United States formed a supreme national government, which was none the less sacred because its powers were restricted to broad national purposes. It may indeed be said that we cannot claim for the ilodrine of the national unity the character of a great ethical, or even a^reat abstract political truth ; that all States haying a common history, a common language and a common religion are not necessarily under one government. In proof of this, we may be pointed to the many independent states of Germany and to the republics of ancient Greece. True enough ; but when the national unity has come to distinct consciousness, as it did in our early history ; when it has written itself down in the form of an organic supreme laws as it did in our (Constitution ; when it sets up a Supreme Court as the ulliniatc tribunal, when it comes to administer the oath of allegiance, by which presidents, judges, senators and members of Congress, solemnly acknowledge the authority of their States to be inferior to that of the Union ; — when all this takes place, then for the American people national unity becomes a fundamental principle, it underlies the whole national life, and in its oaths of office, and other forms of obligation, it reaches over into the sphere of ethics, so that the advocacy of secession becomes a crime, both against the supreme law of the Country and against the law of God ; it involves treason against the nation, and the prostitution of the conscience by perjury. Men frequently speak of political questions as though they could have no moral bearings, and denounce any allusion to such questions in the pulpit as political preaching. It is difficult to say who are the more silly, those who thus prate or those who arc scared by such talk away from a solemn duty. Politics indeed ! What is the meaning of the 23d Article of our creed which avouches the allegiance of our whole church to the government of the United States ? This is politics, of course, and aught to be handed over to these would-be censors of the pulpit and the re- ligious press, to be expunged. Let these thoughtless people know that every question that touches the practice of human life has its moral aspects. The grocer is confronted by the moral law when he weighs sugar and coffee, the dry goods' dealer when he handles his yard stick ; and both, when they come to write their accounts. They may weigh, measure, reckon falsely. Will the wisdom which talks of political preaching tell us that we must not preach against false weights and measures, against unjust accounts, against sanded sugar and watered molasses, nor against selling calicos of unstable colors with a promise they shall never fade, because in so doing we are getting out of the preacher's into the tradesman's sphere? The absurdity is manifest. Everyone knows that the practice of common life has its moral side, its relations to the law of God, and stands amenable to the christian conscience as utter- ing itself in the pulpit. Thus too is it with political questions ; when tliey are practical they touch the splu-re of morals ; they bccom-j yoked with sin or righteousness, and merit the rebuke or the praise of the christian pulpit. Secession gave the lie to a fundamental truth ; it set itself up for the place of that truth. It armed itself for deadly grapple with that truth to destroy it. It has had its flag and its armies, and dealt its hlows, but the great American, constitutional truth of the Union, has triumphed. Now what we wish to say is, that in reconstructing, in establishing peace for the coming ages of American growth, we must have due regard to the great truth of national unity. If the holy and blessed truth of national unity and supremacy is to meet returning rebels with the kiss of mercy, the salutation must be most discreet. The holy truth must be- ware of dalliance ; it must not lay tbe locks of its strength on the lap of the sorceress. The old idea of State sovereignty must perish with the rebellion by which it was begotten. Let it be un- derstood, once for all, that the States have no rights but such as are consistent with the absolute, indestructible unity of the nation ; and let the silly idea that a citizen's first allegiance is due to his par- ticular State, be hencelorth remembered only as a demon of false- hood, now forever exorcised, who, having slain his hundreds of thousands, has returned to his own place. Let every State in the Union, at the earliest opportunity, follow the example of Mary- land, and insert into its Constitution the great truth of llie suprem- acy and sovereignty of the Union. Let the rebel States now returning from their bloody wild-goose chase after secession be aided in ridding themselves of the very memory of their error; let them be kept in friendly military care, and every proper form and degree of assistance given them in reconstruction, hooping them up if necessary, with military iron, into the Union, until the sun- dered parts grow togetlier again. Another great truth over which this war has been waged is much broader and grander than that of national unity ; it is the higher unity of humanity. The first great truth is national, the second is universal. The first aihrms the United States to be one coun- try, the second declares mankind to be one family. The first truth is the unity of the nation ; the first falsehood is secession. The second and greater truth is the unity of the human family, the second falsehood, including almost every possible wrong, is slavery. I will not insult your intelligence by jiroving the proposition. \ 9 that man is man ; that common human attributes make a common human brothorliood. The simple fact tliat men are men, consti- tutes humanity a unit. Now what part of this human brotherhood shall be owners, and what part shall be owned? Suppose all men now free, and slavery al)out to be reinaugurated ; what tribes would you select as havin