1^ / u^ / 
 
GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL 
 CHANGES IN THE INTERESTS 
 E 649 OF HIS CHRIST. 
 
 .V1645 
 Copy 1 
 
 A discourse before the American Baptist Home Mission Society, at 
 its annual meeting in the City of Providence, R. I., 
 
 ON THURSDAY EVENING, MAY 29th, 1862. 
 
 William R. Williams. 
 
 NEW-YORK : 
 
 SHELDON & COMPANY, 335 Broadway, 
 
 Boston: GOULD & LINCOLN. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA : 
 
 American Baptist Publication Society. 
 1862. 
 
L_ io4-^? 
 
 X t4-. 
 
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 Jeremiah xxvii. 7. 
 
 " UNTIL THE VERY TIME OF HIS LAND COME." 
 
 The Chaldean and the Egyptian monarchies were 
 contending for dominion, each maddened with the vain 
 phantasm of an universal empire. The one on the 
 Euphrates, and the other on the Nile ; the Jewish 
 people lay between these fierce rivals, in the very path- 
 way of their mutual raids. It was a position of dan- 
 ger, much as if, in the exposed infancy of their great 
 ancestor, Moses, the bulrush ark where the child floated 
 in his defencelessness had been rocked and splashed by 
 the rushing of two huge monsters of the river, disputing 
 the control of the mud and reeds of its banks ; and 
 when the conflict paused, the red jaws of either com- 
 batant might craunch in a moment the poor, hapless 
 waif. That Hebrew people had been, in better days, 
 sheltered as in the pavilion of the Divine presence ; but 
 now they had deserted the God of their fathers, and 
 were in turn abandoned of Him whom they had for- 
 saken. In the path of the caravan travelling East, and 
 in view of the swift ships of Tarshish gliding West, 
 that people had once been like an eagle's nest on the 
 face of an inaccessible precipice — the eye-mark of all 
 observers, but securely guarded from the hand and 
 clambering foot of each invader. When, however, they 
 came down to court the alliance and to borrow the idols 
 of the nations, the eagle's nest was flung down as upon 
 the crown of the highway, at the mercy of the foot of 
 
4 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 each passenger. So deserted of God, and so surren- 
 dered to man, the poor relics of the kingdom of Judah, 
 shorn of their ten kindred tribes, had been compelled 
 to submit to the Chaldean. But, at this time, they 
 seem to have been plotting against their Chaldean mas- 
 ter, and with their neighbors in the pastures of Moab, 
 and the rock-hewn passes of Edom, and the sea-marts 
 of Tyre, consulting to secure the protection of the great 
 rival power, Egypt. And the messengers of these sev- 
 eral people of Palestine are met at Jerusalem. A pea- 
 sant priest from Anathoth, a suburban village some 
 three miles off from the Jewish capital, startles the 
 ambassadors with a message for their masters, and with 
 the significant present which they are bidden to bear 
 to those masters, of a yoke for each potentate. We 
 may think of the grim smile with which the gift was 
 met. And did this simple priest think that the grazier 
 chieftains of Moab, and the dwellers in Selah, the rock- 
 built city of Edom, and the merchant princes of Tyre 
 and of Sid on, whose galleys skirted every shore, and 
 whose warehouses gathered the treasures of all climes, 
 would submit to wear the collars which he has the pre- 
 sumption thus to tender them ? And what name is 
 embroidered on the collar ? Must they be tributary 
 to the Chaldean ? Would Jeremiah ever venture — 
 audacious as he has thus shown himself — to say as much 
 to " that bitter and hasty nation," the Chaldeans them- 
 selves, and to their king, the proud conqueror Nebu- 
 chadnezzar ? He will venture it. It is just this that 
 he adds. Predicting the rise in the tide of their power, 
 he foretells as calmly its ebb. Chaldean pride and 
 Chaldean towers shall not secure them. The maker of 
 yokes for the necks of others is soon to be, in turn, the 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 5 
 
 wearer of a yoke himself. He has but a limited term 
 of immunity, and dominion and conquest. So our text 
 asserts : " until the very time of his land come." 
 The conqueror shall be the conquered, the ruler one 
 day overruled, and the spoiler in his turn despoiled, 
 when comes the revolving wheel of destiny over his 
 country also, at the hour fixed of Jehovah. 
 
 God has notched in the calendar of centuries, as He 
 guards and holds that dread register, the eras of na- 
 tional ease, and concord and growth, and the days, also, 
 of weakness, discord, defeat, and bondage. Jeremiah 
 of Anathoth is but announcing, in frankest loyalty, 
 the oracle which the King of Eternity has entrusted to 
 him. It was not the first time that such a decree had 
 been intimated. A similar message had long since been 
 sent, by the same Almighty Kuler, to all earth's poten- 
 tates. In the Second Psalm, more than four centuries 
 before Jeremiah's time, had David cried : " Be wise 
 now, therefore, ye kings : be instructed, ye judges of 
 the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with 
 trembling. Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and ye 
 perish from the way when His wrath is kindled but a 
 little." 
 
 And this, too, was only the echo of a yet earlier de- 
 cree hurled from the loftiest heights of Paradise over a 
 wider sphere than our narrow world even. The Father, 
 "when brino-ino; in the First Born Son into the World, 
 had proclaimed : " Let all the Angels of God worship 
 Him." The manifestation and enthronement of the 
 Christ was the errand of Creation, and is the burden 
 of all History. All dynasties, commonwealths and 
 centuries — all continents and all worlds — were to wear 
 the yoke of His just sway, and to accept the collar that 
 1* 
 
g GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 His regal, bleeding hand presents to them. Slain, in 
 the purpose of the Father, before the foundation of the 
 ■world, and covenanted to be made, in the end of the 
 world. King of all its kinglings, and Lord of all its 
 lords, the story of His pledged and irreversible domin- 
 ion is the thread on which are strung all the fates of 
 all the nations — all the philosophies of all the schools — 
 and all the doctrines, facts, types, and ordinances of 
 either book, and of every dispensation recounted in this 
 blessed Bible. Jeremiah, His prophet, and we, all of 
 us, His people, are summoned, in the old jDast, and in 
 the rushing present, and in the dim future, to hail the 
 march of this One Sovereign, Jesus, ordering all times ; 
 having, as He asserted after His resurrection, all power 
 in Heaven and in earth committed into His hands ; and 
 moving all the varied changes of the land and the cen- 
 tury in His own serene, foreseen and foretold dominion. 
 Times of wide-spread, exhausting, and sanguinary 
 conflict are upon our beloved land. But they come not 
 unsent : and they must not pass unheeded or misread. 
 The Home Mission Society, in which our Churches 
 have been wont to seek the evangelization of our conn- 
 try, has fallen, it might at first seem, on days and 
 scenes where it had little to hope, and where little was 
 left it to do. The land bristling with arms, what ears 
 care to listen to the gospel ; whilst all hearts yearn to 
 learn of the last or of the next battle-field ? But all~ 
 this were a false reckoning. The Christ who yoked — 
 though they knew Him not — Assyrian, Egyptian, Chal- 
 dean, Greek and Koman — all these old, blind. Pagan 
 powers, for the accomplishment of His own majestic 
 schemes, and who brought about these designs punc- 
 tually in His own exact and predestined hour, is pre- 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 7 
 
 siding yet, unworn, unresting, and invincible, never 
 hurried and never tardy, over these very times, that 
 perplex your wisest counsellors, and that task the best 
 powers of your boldest and wariest chieftains. " Is 
 there evil in the city ; and the Lord hath not done it ? 
 Hear ye the rod and Who hath appointed it." 
 
 To His feet, then, let us gather in the prayerful con- 
 sultation of His own scriptures. Our country is part 
 of Christ's heritage by the bloody right of Gethsemane 
 and Grolgotha. He has earned, and must have, as the 
 Shiloh, the gathering of this as of all others of the na- 
 tions. All people and kindreds shall serve Him. Let 
 us, therefore, see in the very solemnities of the national 
 crisis now passing over us — 
 
 I. The times, ordered for our land by our God, and 
 ordered in the interests of His own Christ ; 
 
 II. The special lessons of those times ; and 
 
 III. The signal opportunities and hopes of the times, 
 in their bearing on the Home Mission work of the 
 Churches of Christ. 
 
 I. The times are arranged by our Kind and Wise 
 Father ; and they are ordered evermore for the inter- 
 ests of His own Christ. 
 
 Human freedom and human responsibility, in bring- 
 ing about evil, and in working out good, are not to be 
 shoved aside. Providence is not Fatalism. But, on 
 the other hand, man's free activities do not prove the 
 despotism of a blind Chance, shifting as man's caprices 
 may dictate. Our gospel, said Paul, is not a May-be 
 and a May-be-not gospel — to-day Yea and to-morrow 
 Nay — fluttering and quivering to the vibrations in th-e 
 tastes of the age, and vacillating with all the changeful 
 shades of man's thick-coming and many-hued fancies. 
 
3 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 But it is a gospel of certainties ; sure as the Divine ex- 
 istence, and sacred as the Divine holiness : — a Yea and 
 Amen gospel, not built up of perad ventures and con- 
 jectures. And the great truths of a foreseeing — all- 
 governing — minute — omnipresent, and unerring Provi- 
 dence, and of its constant reference to the forgotten 
 Past, and to the yet untracked Future, make up an in- 
 separable part of that Yea and Amen gospel. Not 
 only in Christ's day, but in Adam's as well, and in our 
 own times also, every lily that has ever grown has been 
 clad of our Heavenly Father. Each sparrow, that may 
 have built its nest in the eaves of any hut, has been 
 guided and guarded by that same Sovereign Parent ; 
 alike whether that hut were tenanted by one of the 
 fishermen apostles, or by one of the world's old, 
 grey, antediluvian fathers, or on your own shores by 
 one of your contemporary backwoodsmen. And does 
 God take thought for the flower, and bird, and beast ; 
 and leave man to drift untended ? " Are ye not much 
 better than they ?" was Christ's significant question. 
 He who put forth that argument, holds yet to the 
 pledge that the argument implies. As He made the 
 world, so will He also guide, and so certainly will He 
 also judge the world : and may well be trusted to un- 
 derstand the polity and philosophy of all that world's 
 history . 
 
 Though the Tyrian ambassador to whom, in his 
 amazement, and perchance in his derision, Jeremiah 
 handed the yoke, little dreamed of the fact, yet Jere- 
 miah's God knew that city and its wide commerce far 
 better than did the Tyrian himself There was not a 
 web of purple in all the looms or the warehouses of 
 that queenly metropolis, of which the Christ knew not 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 9 
 
 the history, in its growing, in its weaving, in the hues 
 that steeped and dyed it, and in all its wearing, from 
 the time that as a prince's robe it swept the pavements 
 of marble, to the day when as the dishonored, tarnished 
 rag, it fluttered from some beggar's shoulders. Not a 
 keel of their ships of Tarshish scraped any shore, how- 
 ever remote or strano;e, but this God had counted all the 
 sands of that sea-beach. Not a sail of all their vast 
 commerce flapped to the gale, but this Jehovah had 
 meted to the breeze its precise strength, and fixed the 
 bounds " whence it cometh and whither it goeth." Not 
 an arrow was stored in Chaldean quiver ; not a steed 
 backed by Chaldean ranger ; but this, the same God 
 who read their Nebuchadnezzar's dream, and who 
 watched their Belshazzar's riotous banquetings, saw 
 the shaping and the shooting of the bolt, and counted 
 all the paces of the war-horse, and knew all the inci- 
 dents of the campaigns in which steed and shaft were 
 to be brought into requisition. The vastnesses and the 
 pettinesses of earth all drop harmoniously into the wide 
 scheme of an unsleeping Providence. The wrath of 
 man and the rage of Hell are overruled where they 
 may be permitted ; and are curbed, where they could 
 not be permitted, by Him, who is yet, all the while, 
 too Holy to sympathise with one sin, and all the while 
 too Mighty to need one helper. For his own interest 
 and education, man is enlisted, though he is not needed ; 
 and remains, when most reckless, self-reliant, or defiant 
 even, dependent upon and accountable to God. There 
 are influences which man can wield and should control 
 aright. There are others which God originates or 
 shapes. Some of these are as far beyond man's con- 
 trol as is the amount of the week's sunshine ; as is tlie 
 
10 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 shape or speed of yonder j)assing cloud ; as is the mea- 
 sure of the rain, dew and frost for the year. In the af- 
 fecting language, that shuts up one of the books of the 
 Old Testament,"''' the times " go over" us, as really as 
 they went over David and over Israel, and "over all 
 the kingdoms of the countries" in David's century. 
 " The times go over us." They are, while partly of 
 the earth, yet also, and in very much of their bearing, 
 above the earth. They affect the race ; but the race 
 cannot manage them more than can that race brew 
 the whirlwind, order the seasons, or yoke and unyoke 
 the sweet influences of the Pleiades. 
 
 There are, again, influences which are under human 
 management, but which become mighty for good or for 
 ill only by their timing ; and this timing of them is 
 often a visible interposition of God's overruling care. 
 On the sea and on the land, where some great battle 
 impends, the delay or the arrival of a reserve may de- 
 cide the fate of an empire, and give its fixed indelible 
 hue to the history of a century ; but that delay or ar- 
 rival may be all made up of what man calls fortuitous 
 occurrences, or unforeseen coincidences. Grouchy does 
 not come up and Blucher does come up : and Waterloo 
 is what it is ; and flings Europe into its own mould. 
 The powers that, mighty as each is, would yet apart, 
 miss their end, are, in the nick of time — in an ad- 
 justment exact and momentous as the fitting of the 
 nick of the archer's arrow to the string of the archer's 
 bow — mated together, and so mated, become irresisti- 
 ble. The hours that yoked the arrival of the tiny Moni- 
 tor with the heyday of the career of the Merrimac were, 
 
 * I. Chronicles, xxix, 30. 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 11 
 
 probably the pivot of influences that in their far 
 sweep may traverse centuries. In starting, speeding, 
 retarding and matching such coincident or coUiding in- 
 fluences, how often has the drapery of invisibility 
 seemed to drop away from the arm of Omnipotence. 
 God's arm is lifted up and " made bare." The like- 
 ness as of a man's hand, that wrote the doom of Bel- 
 shazzar, gleams out again to the eye of Faith, arbi- 
 trating in the destinies of the dwellers on God's 
 earth. 
 
 And God's power is illustrated in arraying, massing, 
 and brandishing whole hosts of earthly workers, igno- 
 rant or heedless of the ends to which He guides them. 
 Jehovah's title, the " Lord of Hosts," describes Him 
 not merely as ordering His heavenly legions, and ar- 
 ranging stars and systems : but it includes, also. His 
 control of all the mailed warriors of mankind ; of that 
 palmer worm and caterpillar also which he calls "His 
 great army ;" of the flies that plagued Egypt, and the 
 quails that fed Israel ; of the huge caravans of the 
 wild pigeon that often break down the boughs of your 
 Western forests ; and of the ruinous maraudings of 
 the tiny wheat midge ; as of the foul vultures that He 
 is to summon to the field of carnage of Armageddon. 
 The God of Revelation claims an universal and per- 
 vasive sovereignty, from the heights to the depths — 
 binding into one service, conscious or unconscious, de- 
 fiant or devout, as may be, the most discordant, and 
 seemingly, the most reckless, ungovernable and dis- 
 proportionate elements. 
 
 Treasons, seditions, battles, and revolutions, far as 
 they are made up of evil, are of man. But in the 
 evil development is to be recognized, nevertheless, the 
 
12 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 controlling purpose and overruling goodness of God. 
 Judas was the son of perdition, and Satan had entered 
 into him. But yet his intended deicide sped on the 
 "world's redemption. The fall of Jerusalem seemed 
 like a geyser of Hell, springing up to meet an over- 
 turned vial of the hottest wrath of Heaven. But into 
 the heart of that glowing ruin, as into molten wax, 
 was stamped down a new seal of attestation to Christ's 
 Messiahship : and out of that furnace-mouth of Ven- 
 geance went as from new Pentecostal fires, a fresh 
 evangelization of the Gentiles. The wars that tracked 
 the Protestant Keformation on the soil of Germany, 
 Holland, France, England and Scotland, and the later 
 struggles of the English Commonwealth, spread around 
 much of woe and of wrong even ; but who could 
 well spare from European and American history the 
 seeds of truth and life then sown ? The good far out- 
 weighed the precedent and attendant ills. Could 
 Literature — could Freedom — could Eeligion forego 
 the heroes, sages, confessors and martyrs, that emerged 
 in those trials ; grew wiser and holier in the furnace ; 
 . and bequeathed to us their inspiriting testimony, and 
 their enduring trophies ? For that Freedom has 
 looked out benignly upon us, through the gratings of 
 their dungeons ; and that Religion, with the smile of 
 Heaven's own peace on her lips, has blessed us out of 
 the thick smoke of their martyr-pyres. 
 
 We are, throughout our land, once so fertile and 
 peaceful, and teeming with richest promise, feeling 
 the terrible ills of warfare. But are we because of its 
 drafts of men, and its heavy burdens of consumption 
 and taxation, because of the harvest fields that it 
 tramples down, and the hospital beds that it litters 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 1^ 
 
 with, heroic agonies, and the households that it dark- 
 ens and shivers, and the graves that it fills — to say, 
 that it has abrogated Faith, or Prayer, or Sabbaths ? 
 Has it repealed the gospel, or banned the further de- 
 scent of the regenerating and sanctifying Spirit of 
 God ? None of all these. God is in the struggle. We, 
 in our temerity, clay as we are, are but too prone to 
 forget this, and to question and to instruct the Divine 
 Worker who is tempering and moulding the ductile 
 mass. He, as his word expressively designates Him, is 
 " The Potter." But, as said an old Puritan worthy, in 
 regard to man's rashness and despondency when mis- 
 reading the mysteries of the Divine judgments, " what 
 is it but to exalt clay to the pottership .^"* When man 
 undertakes to mend God's sovereign behests, he would, 
 by his success, mar, far as in him lies, the whole uni- 
 verse ; and the critic sjooils himself into a misshapen 
 vessel of dishonor. God is in the struggle. And for 
 His church shall good emerge from all these dark and 
 stormy scenes. 
 
 II. For amidst the very depth of the gloom, we may 
 well recognize in broader and more legible characters, 
 the LESSONS of such times Is there not a voice bid- 
 ding alike those who contrived and those who resist this 
 rebellion to consider ? 
 
 There is a lesson of remembrance. We have, as 
 a people, enjoyed much. The past is secure. Let us 
 recal its high privileges with thanks to the God whose 
 goodness bestowed that glorious past. Come what 
 may, the page that records our Washington, and Hamil- 
 
 * Tho. Crane " Prospect cf Divine Providence," Lond. 1672. 
 
24 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 ton, our Adams and our Henry, our Jefferson and Frank- 
 lin, our John Jay and John Marshall, our Oliver Ells- 
 worth and Henry Laurens, our Nathaniel Macofi, and 
 our Madisons, and Jacksons, and Wehsters, and Clays, 
 cannot be torn from the world's annals. Freedom, 
 Education, growing Territory, Commerce, Invention, 
 Art and Wealth ; how largely were they bestowed 
 upon us. It was from the signal mercies of our God : 
 and far as we claimed, in self reliance, the honor, we 
 have sinned ; and our troubles are, in part, the memo- 
 rial and penalty of this our vainglory and ingratitude. 
 
 There is a lesson as to the relative worth of 
 wealth. Other nations have imputed to us, as a peo- 
 ple, an absorbing pursuit of gain. Kiches were widely 
 spread, by many rapidly won, and as lavishly dis- 
 pensed. But gain is not a nation's truest measure of 
 prosperity ; and ill fares the land where it is made 
 the chief object of pursuit. Our terrible conflict has 
 at least this signal blessing — that it has shown to 
 multitudes the worth of higher objects than gain. 
 Myriads have flung ease and riches and household 
 comforts to the winds, in their zeal for freedom, 
 national unity and national life. They have perilled 
 their own lives. Their blood has run like water. 
 Lucre has no more, blessed be God, that accredited 
 and paramount place of authority which we had our- 
 selves feared that it occupied, and which others had 
 augured of us. Mammon, the bent and grovelling god 
 of the muck-rake, has lost immensely. And the very 
 burdens of taxation manfully confronted by patriotism, 
 may become blessings and medals of honor, enhancing 
 our estimate of the freedom so secured, and attesting, 
 at least, the temporary dethronement of the " Filthy 
 Lucre " that once tyrannized so ruthlessly. 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. ][5 
 
 And is there no lesson, again, for tlie hearts of 
 the whole people, as to the foundation- truths of our 
 national system ? Christ, by ordinances, schools His 
 Church, in recurring and regular admonitions, to the 
 remembrance of Ihe fundamental, elemental facts of His 
 own history ; and which, at the same time, are the first 
 and deepest truths of her life. So Christ's Providence 
 may school nations into the reviewal of their own po- 
 litical foundations. When the storm rocks the walls, 
 and the rain falls in sheets on the roof, the man who 
 never before cared as to underpinning and subsoil ma- 
 sonry, begins to inquire into both, as the freshet goes 
 roaring past his door. Multitudes, who never else 
 would have pondered the question, are beginning to 
 consider the nature and constituent principles, and first 
 conditions of Liberty. The saying of a revolutionary 
 patriot — a Christian jurist and statesman — "I think 
 that, apt in the earthly Court of Chancery, so in the 
 Court of Heaven it will be found, that if we ask 
 equity we must do equity," has begun, not in words, 
 perchance, but in the substance of the thought, and 
 the unspoken feeling, to pervade myriads of minds. 
 The foundations of government and justice are becom- 
 ing, by the very stress of the necessities of the era, the 
 themes of meditation. The torrents of the time are 
 laying those foundations bare to the eye. 
 
 But beyond all these, the lesson of events is our 
 absolute dependence on God. We have much and 
 grateful confidence in the leaders and counsellors, and 
 captains whom Grod has given us. But even the more 
 heedless must see that a Higher than any earthly Power 
 rules. A Providence which waits not for man, which 
 may dispense with man, may thwart the mightiest, and 
 
25 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 may surprise tlie wisest of men ; this is tlie Potentate 
 that is supreme in the events which go hurtling over 
 us, and which carry in their train the destinies of our 
 children. We need, in the prayers of the home and 
 of the national senate, of camps and of fleets, as of 
 closets and sanctuaries, yet more and more to ac- 
 knowledge and vitalize this sense of dependence. 
 
 We need repentance for our sins. It was the 
 Baj^tist's trumpet cry when he heralded the approach- 
 ing Saviour. It had been every prophet's burden — it 
 is each evangelist's theme. Another Hebrew prophet 
 beside Jeremiah — it was Daniel — preached it to Nebu- 
 chadnezzar, the Chaldean conqueror ; as still another, 
 Jonah, had done it to the Assyrian King at Nineveh. 
 Whatever forms sin assume against any line of the 
 Decalogue, the God of the nations, the Judge of all 
 the earth, remains yet the Jealous Avenger of that 
 law of Sinai, A reckless, godless people, fling away 
 both helmet and shield, by their impiety, profligacy, 
 and injustice. And the struggles, privations and 
 slaughters that make life to many so bitter, and bring 
 death so suddenly, may yet prove — if they but divorce 
 from the old idol and drive the penitent to a forsaken, 
 forgotten Father — a thrice-blessed discipline, restoring 
 the prodigal to his home and his parent not only, but 
 recovering him to himself. A nation, bowed in heart 
 before God, in true contrition, and in honest reformation 
 taking hold on God's rule and word, is a nation taking 
 hold on the very strength of Jehovah, and making peace 
 with Him ; and with His alliance won, is assured of 
 all help against all odds. Some talk of " organizing 
 victory," but the Almighty alone can do that. And 
 He has organized it for the kingdom of His Christ ; 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. |7 
 
 and the people who braid their hopes and lives into 
 the law and grace and life of that predestined Heir and 
 Conqueror, are assured of sharing in a triumph organ- 
 ized indestructibly and enjoyed forevermore. 
 
 III. Now, far as these lessons of the times are 
 heeded — far as the national heart and conscience take 
 in the grateful remembrance of earlier mercies — rate 
 Wealth less extravagantly — ponder the foundation 
 truths of their own national life — accept the fact of 
 their utter dependance on God — and by repentance for 
 past sins, deprecate the wrath with which they cannot 
 cope, and implore the help that no foeman can with- 
 stand — the character of the nation, so permeated and 
 renovated is, itself, a rich earnest of all benediction. 
 
 The times in which God's presence becomes espe- 
 cially traceable and sensible are, in the language of 
 Holy Writ, variously styled times of visitation and 
 search — again, times of refreshing — again, times of re- 
 formation — and again, times of vengeance. The same 
 crisis, in a nation's life, may develop more than one, 
 or even unite all of these traits. Jehovah may search 
 into sin, and make domiciliary inquisition for blood ; 
 He may take vengeance on the froward and obdurate ; 
 while, under the same cloud. He drops refreshing on 
 the devout and vigilant ; and in the contrite, works 
 reformation and restoration. Like the training of the 
 tribes in the wilderness — where Dathan and Abiram 
 besomed the pathway for Joshua — the discipline that 
 begins in storms may burst the way for a recovery, 
 general as it is genial, widespread as the spring, gentle 
 as the dew, and welcome as the morning light. 
 
 The object of Christians in their Home Missions, is 
 2* 
 
23 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 to bring truth into the dwellings and hearts of tne 
 whole people of the land. They would see all souls 
 by Christ's truth and Spirit educated, renewed, and 
 sanctified. Of such an education patriotism would be, 
 by a moral necessity, one of the vigorous offshoots. 
 Liberty would be the inevitable and imperishable out- 
 growth of that Kighteousness and Love — learned best, 
 or rather learned only, at Christ's feet. A land so 
 evangelized — your own hereditary home land so evan- 
 gelized — this is the great purpose of your organization. 
 Does the crisis at all help you towards the end so 
 eyed ? 
 
 The times manifestly help you by giving what 
 Paul besought in his prayers — ■ the opening of the 
 door of access. Your prayers take a wider scope, and 
 with more than their wonted fervor pursue brothers, 
 Irssbands and sons, through weary marchings, to dis- 
 tant encampments and perilous fields, or along the 
 stormy shore, and up the fort-girt bay. Your efforts 
 for religious usefulness take on new forms and find out 
 new avenues. The Tract, the Bible, and the Christian 
 visitor, the letter of Christian friendship, and the talk 
 of the Christian chaplain reach now, in our camps 
 and fleets, many thousands who in seasons of preced- 
 ing peace missed such influences, or would persist- 
 ently have shunned and finally have evaded them. 
 Here a new field for a new phase of Christian Missions 
 is opened. If some are hardened into sots, gamblers, 
 or profligates, yet multitudes are sobered by the stern 
 realities of impending, imminent death. Eternity 
 comes nearer. And as the stalwart Ironsides of Crom- 
 well prayed and preached as well as fought, God may 
 make our valiant and generous soldiery, many of them, 
 
m THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. ^9 
 
 more thoroughly than most armies as yet have been, 
 evangelized and evangelizing laborers, for Christ. 
 
 We needed as a people more of interpenetration — 
 a more entire assimilation and unity. God has 
 often used the terrible enginery of war apparently for 
 this express end. The various races that are com- 
 pounded into national unity in the British Isles were 
 triturated together, from the days of the Heptarchy 
 down, by the conflicts and agonies of centuries ; as the 
 painter rubs together the colors on his palette, as the 
 apothecary in the mortar bruises together his simples, 
 as the Jewish priest of old prepared the choice and 
 sacred incense, that was to smoke only in the Holy 
 Place, before the Ark of the Covenant and the Sheki- 
 nah of the Divine glory. How terrible was the process 
 of the Greek wars of Alexander in their wide devasta- 
 tion — how deadly and far the flight of the Eoman 
 eagle wherever a tempting quarry caught the eye and 
 invited the keen beak and dire talons of the imperial 
 bird. Yet it is easy now to see — what they knew not — 
 how Alexander and C^sar were, like Cyrus, preparing 
 that God's temple should be built. The Greek con- 
 quests furnished the compacting influence that provided 
 readers through the civilized world for the Greek gos- 
 pels and epistles of the New Testament, and for the 
 Greek Septuagint version once so widely diffused of the 
 Old Testament. The Persian dreamed nought of it as he 
 rushed westward on Marathon and Salamis. The Mace- 
 donian phalanx dreamed not of it as it rushed eastward 
 to Arbela. They knew not their own mission. But He 
 who gives to the crane and the stork their appointed 
 seasons of travel in the sky, wings also on an uncon^ 
 scious errand the rapacious vultures of conquest and 
 
20 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 desolation. So the Roman invasions and annexations 
 laid open the provinces of their world for the Home 
 and Foreign Missions of the early Christian Churches. 
 And thus had Chaldean and Greek and Latin warriors 
 all been, in fact unconsciously, what Israel in the 
 Egyptian captivity was consciously, busied in treading 
 mortar in the alien brickfield. The Master who sum- 
 moned them described one such. His unconscious servi- 
 tor, as " coming upon princes as upon mortar and as 
 the potter treadeth clay."* The nations trampled down 
 beneath their soldier heels became the material, com- 
 pacted under the unity of Greek literature and civiliza- 
 tion, and the unity of Eoman law and polity, for 
 readier incorporation into the rising walls of that edi- 
 fice, the Christian Church, which a Mightier and 
 Holier Captain was eyeing through all the turmoil and 
 carnage of these Pagan battle fields. Come in what 
 form, and come at what date, and come at what terrible 
 cost it may, it seems almost inevitable that the ulti- 
 mate result of our fearful national conflicts will be the 
 production of a more thorough and manifest national 
 unity. The stern assertion of the national life, needed to 
 its preservation, involves for the nation its being inev- 
 itably compacted into a more homogeneous mass. Not 
 in the way of brute subjugation — in any just applica- 
 tion of that term — but in the exercise of that resolved 
 and princij^led firmness, which can be stern as Duty 
 and yet, withal, kindly as Grace, the nation must be 
 defended and avenged into the full integrity of its 
 rights. That agency compresses and condenses into 
 closer oneness. 
 
 • laaiab xu, 25. 
 
7iV THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 21 
 
 Our struggle lias already afforded wondrous and 
 reinforcing evidence of momentous truths that were 
 ignored or openly denied. Because our government 
 was self-chosen, some drew the facile inference, but as 
 unjust as it was facile, that the choice of a neighbor- 
 hood, a metropolis, a clique, or a State might without 
 further ceremony abrogate it. Government is on one 
 side, in our American theory of it, a human compact. 
 But, on its other side, that human arrangement has 
 been backed by a Divine sanction. Marriage is the 
 free choice of affection : but human consent cannot at 
 will rend what human consent first knit. An authority 
 more than earthly interposes the shield of its sanction 
 against the rude clipping and the bright glitter of the 
 mortal shears, that would put asunder what God, as 
 well as man, brought together. The powers that be are 
 ordained of God. Juster and more reverent feelings of 
 the high rights of the State are already saturating the 
 national mind. The Republic is becoming more solid, 
 not as a reckless, ruthless Absolutism, but as an au- 
 gust, self-ruling, self-asserting Sovereignty. Do we 
 forget and impugn our own Revolution, as against 
 Britain ? No. That was really, in its essential 
 principles conservative — an assertion of old national, 
 hereditary, and Anglo-Saxon liberties, which a trans- 
 atlantic Crown and Parliament were plundering. Do 
 we impeach the fathers when they cried, " Resistance 
 to tyrants is duty to God ?" Our conflict reasserts 
 that cry, for the causeless anarchist is, in fact, but a 
 tyrant of baser metal ; and prompt, firm resistance of 
 his acts is a bulwark against the Despotism that 
 Anarchy always brings in on its shoulders. Such 
 truths come home to the national soul in its agonies of 
 
22 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 trial. The furnace fires of the time fuse and vitrify 
 our homebred and our immigrant soldiery into a more 
 resolute, intelligent and harmonious nationality. The 
 men of the Ehine and of the Shannon are on the 
 shores of the Potomac and the Cumberland, and the 
 Mississippi, learning aright what their duty is to a 
 common country, which has been God's gift to them 
 and their children, to be defended in His strength and 
 in His fear. And they learn, in the common lessons, 
 also the better to appreciate, emulate, resemble and 
 complete each other. 
 
 The sanctity of an oath is another great truth now 
 receiving significant illustrations. The Old World has 
 had potentates, who, pledged by solemn and repeated 
 oaths to freer institutions, have trampled peremptorily 
 on the bond given to Liberty, when the toys of Des- 
 potism tempted them : and they have snatched at abso- 
 lute power through sheer perjury. At the bar of man 
 they found, and it may be that they feared, no punish- 
 ment. " There be Higher than they" — " The Higher 
 than the highest reg-ardeth."* In our own land this 
 recklessness has been shown respecting the oath of alle- 
 giance to the nation. Men — who sneered at the North, 
 as teaching a higher law to God which should be para- 
 mount to all terrene statutes — have been themselves 
 among the first to hold the supreme law of the land, 
 and their own oaths of fealty and loyalty to that laud, 
 abrogated by the lower law of iState claims and State 
 interests. It could not be sin, in the man of the 
 North, if God and his country ever clashed, to say 
 that well as he loved his country he loved his God yet 
 
 ♦Eccles. V, 8. 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 9^ 
 
 more. But what plea shall shield the sin, which claims 
 to love one's own petty State, better than either coun- 
 try or God ? They have virtually tunnelled and honey- 
 combed into ruin the fundamental obligations of the 
 citizen. Jesuitism had made itself ^ name of reproach 
 by the doctrine of mental reservation, under which the 
 Jesuit held himself absolved from oaths of true wit- 
 ness-bearing, which he at any time had taken to the na- 
 tion and God ; if the truth to be told harmed the inter- 
 ests of his own order, whose interests he must shield by 
 a silent mental reservation. The lesser caste, the eccle- 
 siastical clique, thus was held paramount to the entire 
 nation ; and oaths of fideHty to the rehgious order, a 
 mere handful of God's creatures, rode over the rights of 
 the God whose name had been invoked to witness truth 
 telling, and over the rights of God's whole race of 
 mankind, to have the truth told in their courts, by those 
 who had solemnly proclaimed and deliberately sworn 
 that they would tell and were telling it. The State 
 loyalty as being a mental reservation, evermore to ab- 
 rogate the oath of National loyalty : — what is it but a 
 modern reproduction of the old Jesuit portent ? But 
 perjury, however palliated, and whether in Old World 
 despots or in New World anarchists, involves, in the 
 dread language of Scripture, the being " clothed with 
 cursing as with a garment." ■'••" That terrible plirase of 
 inspiration describes, we suppose, not merely profuse 
 profanity, but the earthly deception which attracts the 
 heavenly malediction ; the reply of a mocked God to a 
 defiant transgressor ; vengeance invoked, and the in- 
 vocation answered. '' So help me God !" is a phrase 
 
 'P.-^alm cix. 18. 
 
24 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 SO often heard in jury-boxes and custom-houses, be- 
 side the ballot-box, and in the assumption of each 
 civil office, that we do not at all times guage its dread 
 depth of meaning. It is not a mere prayer of help to 
 tell the truth : but,like the kindred Hebrew words, " So 
 do Grod to me and more also !" it is an invocation of 
 His vengeance, and an abjuration of all His further 
 favor if we palter with the truth. It means : " If I 
 speak not truly, and mean not sincerely, so do I for- 
 swear and renounce, henceforth, all help from Grod. I 
 hope not His help in the cares of life — I hope not His 
 help for the pardon of sin — I ask not His grace — not 
 hope from His smile in death — not help at His hand 
 into His eternal, holy Heavens. All the aid man 
 needs to ask — all the aid which God has to the ask- 
 ing heretofore lent, I distinctly surrender, if He, the 
 Truth-seeing sees me now Truth-wresting." Now 
 the risk of trifling with such a thunderbolt is not 
 small. The many noble, excellent and Christian men 
 who may have been heedlessly involved in this rebel- 
 lion, in spite of past oaths to the nation, it is not our 
 task to judge. But the act itself, of disregarding such 
 sworn loyalty to their whole country, — the act in its 
 general principles, apart from all personal partakers in 
 it, — we may and we must ponder. Now, in this re- 
 spect, if these views of our national oaths be just, 
 our present Kebellion has been not merely trea- 
 sonable, but its cradle-wrappings, its very swaddling- 
 bands have been manifold layers of perjury — its in- 
 fancy has been clad with cursing as with a garment. 
 The oath will come out of this era a more august 
 solemnity, and better understood, than it went in. 
 Our age has, again, seen Rationalism hewing, with a 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 25 
 
 ruthless heartiness, at the old truth of the inspiration 
 of the Scriptures. In this attack on the character of 
 the Bible, it has been contended that all inspired Pro- 
 phecy was but devout and patriotic enthusiasm of seer 
 and apostle, agitated by the passions of the time, spec- 
 ulating poetically upon contemporary history, and 
 flinging over the Future the gorgeous hues of the hopes 
 or the fears of the Present. If Prophecy, nine or nine- 
 teen centuries before Christ were this, and only this ; 
 then, certainly, there may be, nineteen centuries after 
 Christ, as wise, as good, and as sure prophecy. If 
 Jacob, Moses, Isaiah and Daniel, and Paul did only 
 this, and no more ; we news-writers, and news-readers 
 of this time can, with our quick intelligence and ready 
 interchange of thought, do as well. Let us then ask, 
 how the sages, and journalists, and parliamentary ora- 
 tors, and cabinet ministers of our own and European 
 shores have succeeded in their prophesying, as to the 
 course, duration, and results of this present struggle ? 
 The moderns had greatly the advantage of nearness to 
 the times of which they uttered predictions. They 
 told of what must be ere the coming summer, or of 
 what even the next fortnight must bring. The hardier 
 seers of God's anointing flung the bold pontoons of 
 their unhesitating prophecies over the wide chasms of 
 centuries. Surely, we moderns, with the easier task, 
 must make the better work. Compile the oracles, 
 American, British and Galilean : and ask, if such seers 
 — no better — no wiser — no nearer Heaven's heart — 
 were the men who foretold of Israel's cai^tivities, and 
 of Messiah's sorrows and conquests, and of the desti- 
 nies of the Church of the Living God ? The journals 
 and protocols of the day explode that dream of Ration- 
 3 
 
25 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 alism. Scripture prophecy is of other texture. And 
 we exultingly repeat what the littered wrecks of the 
 political prophesying, rife around us, have so reinforced : 
 " The prophecy came not in old time by the will of 
 man : but holy men of God spake as they were moved 
 by the Holy Ghost/^* 
 
 But we weary you. Easy were it, in like manner, 
 to refer to the fresh lights cast on others of the old 
 and discredited truths by the conflagration socially 
 blazing around us. It might be seen how the merely 
 humanitarian views of government, that made all in- 
 dignation against sin, itself sinful ; and held all ven- 
 geance to be sheer malignity ; and regarded the reform 
 of the offender as the last or sole end of all punish- 
 ment, have been practically flung down by the rush of 
 events : and the old truths of God's right as the 
 Avenger to hate sin, and eternally to visit it with His 
 condign displeasure, come out from the clouds of our 
 conflict with new lustre. 
 
 But with these renewed sanctions given to Truths 
 that were in danger of being forgotten, shall we retain 
 that grand modern truth and fact — the truth of our 
 own liberty as a nation ? Shall we emerge from a 
 war, wide, and as fierce as it is wide, summary in its 
 movements and temper, all ablaze with military 
 trophies and military ambitions, — shall we emerge still 
 a Free People ? Perchance — we answer — with God 
 sought by us, and God blessing us, a people more 
 free even than before. God is, we believe, setting be- 
 fore the nation in the necessities of the crisis, and the 
 lessons of the hour, the open door to a solution more 
 
 • 2 Peter i. 21. 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 27 
 
 speedy than we liad lioped, less sanguinary tlian we 
 had feared, of the great problem of our statesmanship. 
 Bondage — African bondage, has been the enigma and 
 scandal alike of our home and foreign polity — of our 
 diplomacy and of our ethics. Our fathers regarded it 
 as a thing to be regretted : but supposed it excep- 
 tional, and trusted that it would prove ephemeral. 
 By studied circumlocution they avoided the explicit 
 recognition of it in our Constitution : yet it had there, 
 by implication, its designed constitutional safeguards ; 
 shelved and curtained there, for, as it was hoped, a 
 slow and quiet, but a sure, decay. It was felt to be a 
 scrofulous taint of the body politic, which it was 
 hoped, however, that the nation would, with the ad- 
 vance of years, noiselessly and painlessly outgrow. So 
 in a document, which to all religious men was of 
 higher authority than any jurisprudence of earth, — in 
 God's Scriptures, — the relations of slavery were matter 
 of doubt and debate to many honest and disinterested 
 readers. They took the Bible as the truth in its fullest 
 statement : and they held Christ and Christianity as He 
 exemplified it — and as His apostles and Himself taught 
 it — as being the crown and sumx of all moral excellence. 
 They found slavery recognized as existing in the patri- 
 archal and in the Mosaic economies. In the Apostolic 
 Church they saw slaveholder and slave, side by side, in 
 the Christian Church. But they saw, in the same 
 book, Paul declaring to Timothy, that "t\ien-steal- 
 ERS" were among the most hardened of sinners, to be 
 classed with murderers of fathers and murderers of 
 mothers. The Bible defies Logic, in our narrow, and 
 Western sense of that word. Of a perfect Logic, 
 where the relations of all truths are seen fully and 
 
28 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 stated liarmoniously, a finite race is probably in- 
 capable. The Bible itself does not teach all existing 
 truths ; or disclose all the relations of the truths that 
 it does teach. It is for its purposes and man's needs, 
 perfect : but it is a fragmentary statement, and many 
 of the relations of the truths that it reveals are left 
 unrevealed, running off into the eternities, and rooting 
 themselves in the infinite depths and recesses of the 
 Divine Mind. Occidental students sometimes forget 
 this character of Revelation. We, Western thinkers, 
 accept our definitions, often too narrow, and our 
 premises, often but very imperfectly seen, as if the 
 definition were full, and the premises completely and 
 clearly grasped ; and then from such definitions and 
 premises, radically defective, but by assumption com- 
 plete, we reason ruthlessly to the last results which they 
 seem to involve. But the Bible, a more practical book, 
 ignores such mechanical logic, and leaves our arguments 
 bootless. A Western mind would argue : If man- 
 stealing, the ordinary commencement of slavery be thus 
 sin, all the results of that first crime are smitten with 
 the same utter sinfulness ; and neither Commonwealth 
 nor Church may, for one moment, tolerate their con- 
 tinuance. But another reasoner of the same school, 
 starting from the opposite end, and finding master 
 and slave sitting in the same primitive Christian 
 Church, and partaking of the same ordinances of 
 brotherhood in Christ Jesus, with the relation, servile 
 on the one hand, and dominant on the other, recognized 
 as still enduring, would reach the conclusion, that the 
 first creation of the bond, whether by stealing, by war, 
 by trade, or by inheritance, could not be faulty. But, 
 in fact, the Word of God is full of such practical bar- 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 29 
 
 monies of what our self-confident zeal would pro- 
 nounce theoretical contrarieties. Thus, for instance, 
 the Bible makes perfection the standard of all duty, 
 and yet declares that no man is perfect, and that 
 righteousness, by the deeds of the law, is now impos- 
 sible. It represents sin as occurring while God as a 
 sovereign permitted it ; and yet that it is without 
 God's complicity. It shows human malignity, and 
 Divine decrees, harmoniously interlocked in that 
 Divine Atonement which was at once Earth's crown- 
 ing sin and Heaven's peerless boon : — the grace, all 
 stainless goodness ; the sin, all shameless, inexcusable 
 and accursed wickedness. So does a Book, — issuing 
 from a Divine Mind, a Mind which takes into its sur- 
 vey of all events the issues and remotest relations that 
 stretch beyond the ken of any finite intellect, — so does 
 such Book of such authorship puzzle while it yet over- 
 tops the mere unaided mind of man. For man's mind 
 with its puny logic, accepts its partial views, and its de- 
 fective definitions as the full premises, and then educes 
 conclusions to sweep the w^hole field. The gospel did 
 not recognize Absolutism in the state, or Slavery in 
 the community as the best, the original, or the per- 
 manent condition of Human Government. But dis- 
 couraging the immediate and violent overthrow of 
 either ; fixing the convert's mind on Eternity, and 
 Heaven, and Hell, and Sin and Duty and Grace, as 
 the main elements of man's interest and thought ; it 
 tolerated for the time what it was leisurely and 
 peacefully, but ultimately and universally, to subvert. 
 It branded by Paul's letter to Timothy man-steal- 
 ing as dire sin. That word, by the bye, no less a 
 scholar than Bishop Horsley, in his place in the 
 3* 
 
30 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 British House of Lords, declared to mean more 
 j3roperly " slave-trader.'' ■•■■ How terrible the power 
 of that single word we may infer from the fact as 
 ascertained by Scott, the Commentator, that in an 
 Arabic Testament which the British Christians had 
 been circulating on the slave-trading shores of Western 
 Africa, the word had been quietly withdrawn, lest it 
 should shock the Mahommedan readers. But that 
 same gospel, while it thus denounced the origin of the 
 relation and the agent in the transfer of the slaves 
 from hand to hand, bade the converted slave not to 
 desj)ise his believing master. But it also taught, that 
 if he might be made free, he, the bondman, was to 
 " USE IT EATHER." Compared, indeed, with the free- 
 dom from Sin and Hell wherewith Christ enfranchises, 
 all earthly rights were poor and perishable ; but they 
 were not all equally worthless. Personal liberty was, 
 where accessible, to be prized and secured. And de- 
 fended, also, it was to be — for Paul nobly and reso- 
 lutely vindicated, from Philippian outrage, the rights 
 of his own Roman freedmanship and citizenship. 
 
 Our Christian patriots found themselves, in defer- 
 ence to the Constitution and its implied pledges, held 
 back, in our preceding history, from any national in- 
 terposition to change the local laws of States respect- 
 ing slavery. But yet they felt, keenly and constantly, 
 the tendency of the jjolitical champions of slavery to 
 encroach ujjon the foundation stones of Northern free- 
 dom. Slavery was itself an anomaly, and known to be 
 regarded as a solecism by the patriots who, as advo- 
 cates for the rights of man, drafted the claim of our 
 
 * See note A. 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 
 
 31 
 
 own Independence. Our Constitution forbids attainder 
 for the citizen, however guilty, understanding, by it, 
 the blood of a guilty parent working the summary for- 
 feiture of estate and honor for his innocent children. 
 Slavery seemed the harshest of attainders, making the 
 haplessness of an innocent parent — not guilty but only 
 wretched — to attaint down the long tract of generations 
 the blood of his innocent progeny. Our institutions for- 
 bid hereditary rank ; it seemed a hard inequality that 
 they should tolerate and be even wrested to foster a 
 despised Pariah caste, a hereditary rank of menials 
 who might never aspire, and of vassals Avho were never 
 to wrestle into freedom. Our institutions cherished 
 equality, and honored mere simple manhood ; it seem- 
 ed cruelly inequitable that to growing myriads this 
 manhood should mean only chatteldom. Our State in- 
 stitutions, generally, discourage feudal entails binding 
 property to one lineage and family ; it seemed all the 
 more contradictory that they, who would not have the 
 master entail his acres, would yet permit him, through 
 long generations to entail upon his fellow-men, the til- 
 lers of those acres, the lot of the collar, the branding- 
 iron, the slave-pen, the driver's whip, and the slave- 
 coffle. 
 
 The Constitution, as gently and as consistently as 
 was in any way possible, spread its Japheth mantle, 
 in regretful silence, over the Noah infirmities of our na- 
 tional condition. But meanwhile the South, by a new 
 school of jurists and statesmen, would interpret this 
 silence into a full surrender, on the part of the North : 
 and would hold up the unseemly sleep of Noah as the 
 law of perfection, and as the one condition, for all supe- 
 rior races, in all times, of the highest freedom. Long 
 
32 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 controlling the government, choosing the nation's Presi- 
 dents, crowding its judiciary benches, shaping the na- 
 tional policy, purchasing new territory, and dictating 
 wars in its own sectional interest, the South seemed bent 
 on making the ephemeral into the permanent, and con- 
 verting the exceptional into the normal, and heating 
 out the local institution, until it should plate over the 
 national domain in its every acre. It was thus become, 
 on their part, an attempt to inoculate with their own 
 scofulous taint the entire national constitution. They 
 would proclaim bondage for the African the grand 
 prophylactic of the Caucasian nations for Freedom, 
 for Virtue, and for Order. Against an election in 
 which they had shared, and which had been held under 
 all the forms and principles of a Constitution to which 
 they had sworn, they rebelled. But they rebelled, 
 having first provided for it, by disarming the North 
 and by arming their own South, with treachery that 
 seating itself in our national Cabinet, emulated there, 
 and there surpassed the guilt of the shameless Cabal 
 who disgraced the latter days of the last and worst of 
 the British Stuarts. 
 
 Their new Confederacy was to be based on slavery 
 as its corner stone, as the ablest and frankest of their 
 statesmen presented their case to our land and to all 
 nations. Their act has, happily, swung the whole 
 question out of its old moorings. Before our country 
 and our churches — before the other nations of the earth, 
 and before the Judge of all the earth, the question now 
 assumes a new shape. They remodel and recast the 
 Constitution ; and they recast the gospel. And they 
 virtually challenge us to an acquiescence in their new 
 gods ; or demand the quiet surrender of our national 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHTIST. 33 
 
 unity, and their own peaceful dismission with insult 
 unpunished and plunder uncompensated. The men, 
 whose hold on the conservatism of Northern States and 
 Northern Churches lay in their own fidelity to the Con- 
 stitution, its oaths and its balances, have toppled over 
 the balance, and spurned the oath, and assayed to re- 
 model the Constitution. In assuming the aggressive 
 and the anarchical, they have thrown off, in mass, the 
 alliance of the conservative classes, whose moderation 
 they had misconstrued as spiritless, mercenary, and pli- 
 able. Themselves, the propagandists of anarchy, they 
 must retrace their steps, or revolutionize and subjugate 
 the North, the entire and united North. Can they ? 
 
 Or can they enforce the division, which is their later 
 demand ? Our mountain ranges and our streams, our 
 ocean coast and its ports, tapping by river and canal, 
 and railway — that iron river — the entire bulk of the 
 country, our history, our interests, and, as we believe, 
 our destiny, make us one nation. North and South. As 
 by anticipation, God's own hand had defied the new 
 political surgery which would rashly seek|to sever the 
 national back-bone of the AUeghanies, and that would 
 assay to tie up, for the separate uses of two distinct 
 nationalities, a Northern half and a Southern half — our 
 great arteries of the Mississij)pi and the Missouri. His 
 edict wrote confusion on the dreams of such statesman- 
 ship. Our Southern friends saw this at the outset, if 
 they refuse to see it now. They had, at first, hoped to 
 have made the West their own as well as the South ; and 
 to have subjugated by interest or force the Northeast 
 into subserviency. The question now before the Christ- 
 ians of the North is, the Acceptance or the Kejection of 
 slavery, as a constituent element of their own Northern 
 
34 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 communities. Shall bondage become, or not, tolerated 
 and permanent among tliemselves at tlie base of tbeir 
 own mountains, and in their own Atlantic seaports ? 
 As the entering wedge of the Ship Money decision, in 
 Hampden's days, would, undisputed, have torn from 
 Parliament the national purse, and so have made the 
 Crown independent of the people for revenues : even 
 thus does the enterino- wedsre of the Dred Scott deci- 
 sion lead, if accepted, to the tearing from the North of 
 all her old anti-slavery safeguards, and it would give 
 tlie slave-pen the hedge of law, over every acre once 
 fenced by Northern toil and blood, as a home for free- 
 dom ever, and for freedom only. To such new adjust- 
 ment of the question, the answer should be prompt and 
 clear. And the old precept of the gospel, giving the 
 preference to freedom, where the choice is ours to make, 
 and bidding us to " use it rather,"* becomes now the 
 law of the situation and the God-given summons of 
 the hour. 
 
 Kather than, by new compromises, and by unworthy 
 submission to such judge-made law, when it is usurp .- 
 ing on the old safeguards of freedom — rather than le- 
 gitimize, under any pretext, and for any bribe, slavery 
 over our whole territory to the Canadian line, beside 
 our lakes, and over the passes of the Kocky Mountains 
 to the Golden Gate — ^let the'South, if it must, and if it 
 can, with the red right hand overrun our coasts, and lay 
 village and sea-port in ashes. We would resist to the ut- 
 termost, and if overpowered and sacrificed, bequeath to 
 our children the charge to flee, like the old Christians 
 of Spain, to the mountains, and wage a war of centu- 
 ries in the hope of returning at last to claim, not 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 35 
 
 only our North ibus devastated in the propagand- 
 ism of bondage, but by just reprisals to occui)y the 
 entire borders of the propagandists also, from the 
 Gulf to the Canadas, and from the Atlantic to the 
 Pacific, as a home for unconditional and uncompro- 
 mised Freedom. But peace, on the new terms of the 
 South, and with fresh compromises for her serfdom, 
 never — never. To accept the unhealthy parasite of our 
 institutions as the vital trunk — to proclaim normal and 
 admirable what the fathers judged to be both excej)- 
 tional and lamentable — to make bondaire for the Afri- 
 can the corner stone of freedom for the Caucasian, is, 
 in our solemn judgment, not merely treason against 
 the memories of our Revolutionary fathers, but it is 
 rebellion against the edict of God. For such views of 
 the African race lead to, and they will propagate, as 
 they are even now propagating, denials of the Ethiop's 
 humanity.* But God made of one blood every nation. 
 As said our prophet, Jeremiah, of that God, in the 
 days of Israel's deep degradation and woe : " To turn 
 aside the right of a man before the face of the Most 
 High ; to subvert a man in his cause the Lord appro v- 
 eth not."f When the seer of Anathoth handed yokes 
 to Tyrian ambassadors, as the type of Chaldean rule ; 
 when for himself, in the low, miry dungeon, he put be- 
 neath his arm-pits the cords of Ebcdm<'lech, the Ethio- 
 pian, the prophet held, as his solace and creed, this 
 great truth of God's justice to man : and of God's in- 
 effaceable, unappeasable protest against the subversion, 
 by any man, of another man's cause, whether it were 
 as invading emperor from the Euphrates, or as a raging 
 
 * See note C. t Lament, iii., 35, 36. 
 
36 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 mob and a jDroiid aristocracy, in the streets of his own 
 Jerusalem. It is grievously " to turn aside a man's 
 right," and it is fearfully " to subvert a man in his 
 cause," when you impeach his right to himself, and to 
 the wife of his youth, and to their own children — when 
 you hide from his eyes the letters of God's book lest 
 they become incendiary — and, most of all, when you 
 jeer at his community of interest in the first Adam, 
 the ancestor of us all. Shut a man in " his cause," 
 and in the question of his manhood, from the first Adam, 
 as no kin of his : dispute his right in the blood 
 of the first tenants of Eden, and you "subvert also 
 his cause," and impeach also his right in the Second 
 Adam, who, as the Lamb of God, taketh away the 
 sin of the world. Blot his pedigree, if you can, with- 
 out blotting also his passport to a better country, in 
 that title which a Redeemer's blood sealed. That Elder 
 BrQther — was He, exclusively, and by right of Cau- 
 casian caste yours only ? We know from the Evan- 
 gelist that He accepted aid in bearing His cross to the 
 pit-hole where they planted it, from a man of African 
 home — Simon, the Cyrenian, Whether that helper's 
 hue, as well as his home, were African, it matters not. 
 If Ethiopia, " stretching out her hand unto God," 
 had, in the veins of that hand, not the same human 
 blood, of which the Incarnate Eansomer took in His 
 humanity : then she stretches, far as salvation is con- 
 cerned, that hand in vain to a barred Eden and an in- 
 accessible, inexorable judge. Subvert the Ethiopian's, 
 the African's, the Negro's — word the name as you 
 will — the black man's claim to a common blood and a 
 common humanity with yourselves ; and write with a 
 grin, before the skies, Sambo, cousin to the ape : and 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 37 
 
 you have " turned away liis right" in the Atonement, 
 and "subverted his cause" in the Last Judgment, and 
 his citizenship in the New Jerusalem. Easily said is 
 the scoff, when you consider its victim's disabilities, 
 and his accuser's advantages. It is an unequal com- 
 bat. But if the taunt chance to call out a Higher 
 arbiter — what then ? And Solomon warned us cen- 
 turies ago : " Whoso mocketh the poor reproacheth 
 his Maker,"* If Sambo's mocker finds himself con- 
 fronted by Sambo's Maker, the inequality shifts to 
 another side. The mortal scoffer is startled to find 
 the puny lance of his jest hurtling upon the thick 
 bosses of Jehovah's buckler. And Sambo's Maker 
 will ansAver your taunt, be assured. Will the Sufferer 
 on that Cross, and the Occupant of that Judgment 
 Seat, and the King of that Paradise, calmly and mutely 
 "approve" your exclusiveness, and endorse your relega- 
 tion of His ransomed ones to brutalism and perdition ? 
 Paul, speaking by authority of his Master, told the 
 Athenians, one of the superior castes, as they held 
 themselves, of the 2)roud Greek blood, that God had 
 " made of one blood all nations of men ••■" * on all 
 the face of the earth.""]' Christianity repudiates this 
 disparagement and subversion of the African's cause 
 and right. He is your kinsman, for he is Christ's kin. 
 " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of 
 these, my brethren, ye have done it unto Me :" know 
 we not that soon we are to hear these words ; and 
 from Whom ; and where ? 
 
 • And now what shall Christian, conservative men of 
 the North, do in regard to slavery in this strife ? It 
 
 " Prov. xvii., 5. t Acts xvii., 26. 
 
38 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 was not a war of their seeking. They see their gov- 
 ernment in a struggle for its own preservation. Back 
 of all statutes and counsellors lies, for man and for na- 
 tions, the right of self defence. To all his civil 
 powers, our nation's first magistrate has now super- 
 added the vast military powers with which he is con- 
 stitutionally clad, in defending the nation's unity and 
 life. How far he shall put forth that reserved fund 
 of magisterial and military power, the South are, in 
 one sense, themselves to be the judges. Far as the 
 South resist a constitutional, national authority, by 
 treason and armed rebellion, the longer their struggle, 
 and the wider the range of our trampling hosts, the 
 larger the number, by the mere inevitable force of 
 events, of their bondmen released from bondage. Once 
 thus enfranchised, it would be national infamy to re- 
 tore them to the lash and manacle, and slave cofHe. 
 Shall we deport them ? Did Spain profit by her expul- 
 sion of the tawny Moor and the hunted Hebrew ? Has 
 France, yet febrile and convulsed, recovered from the 
 bigot quackery which drew out of the veins of her art, 
 trade and literature, the old Huguenot life-blood ? Has 
 modern Scotland i)rofited by the changes which ex- 
 pelled Highland clans from old ancestral regions to 
 convert these into sheep-walks ? In an age when 
 British Christians and American Christians have just 
 been fighting the good fight of the abolition of caste 
 in the churches, which their missions planted in India, 
 is it policy or piety to exasperate the law of caste on 
 these shores, and convert our dusky tillers and toilers ' 
 into the coolies of a cruel, enforced expatriation ? 
 
 Our government illustrates, in its present attitude 
 toward the slaveholding States, not merely the intent 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 39 
 
 and polity of the first framers of our Constitution, who 
 would give, to freedom only, the honor of a name in 
 their instrument, and as respects bondage, preserved a 
 studied, regretful, significant silence ; but that gov- 
 ernment is also carrying forward the principle of the 
 Grospel, in its least offensive form, the principle that 
 Freedom, where attainable, is to be preferred to Bond- 
 age. The President and both houses of Congress 
 have virtually said again what the Apostle, rating 
 Freedom as more desirable, said centuries since, " Use 
 IT RATHER." They have proffered a large share out 
 of the national treasure towards a compensated enfran- 
 chisement that should wipe out the fearful anomaly in • 
 our institutions, which, cancerous in its growth, was 
 becoming preponderant in its influence, and if wrong 
 to the enslaved, was certainly not harmless to the dom- 
 inant race. Neither at the South, nor at the North, 
 can it seem Christ-like, when a peaceful and compen- 
 sated escape from the burdens of slavery is tendered, 
 that men should undertake to reverse the decision of 
 the Holy Grhost, and to apply to Bondage the other 
 alternative in the comparison, the language which the 
 Holy Ghost applies to Freedom. If we say, in face of 
 Paul and of Paul's Master, of the Bondage, " Use it 
 RATHER," Messiah's polity is not likely to swerve at our 
 will. "He is in one mind, and who can turn Him ?" 
 And if with the Freedom made feasible, by God's 
 Providence in our national changes, and commended 
 as the more desirable by God's word, whensoever it is 
 feasible ; we dispute the desireableness, and spurn the 
 feasibleness, it may be found that the God of Sinai, 
 who of old commanded the love of our brother, has 
 not fallen asleep upon His own rusted thunderbolts, and 
 
40 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 that Paul's Grlorified Master, king over all earth's po- 
 tentates, is not ready to accord to any of His people 
 the privilege of reversing His edicts, and will scarcely 
 let His blessing be read backwards into a witch's 
 curse. As to the plea that Slavery is now found to be 
 the guardian princij^le of Liberty, in the Christianity 
 of the nineteenth century ; — it is, as if the old Hebrew, 
 instead of the paschal blood besprinkled on the door- 
 posts, had expected to find the required security in 
 rubbing into the wood the scurf of the hereditary lep- 
 rosy of some hapless G-ehazi. The wing of the Des- 
 troying Angel of Misrule is not likely to be banned 
 from the gates of the Kepublic, merely by showing 
 there the nail-j)rints where the bondman's ear had 
 been duly fastened to the sideposts. 
 
 In our choice of the principles by which we stand, 
 and of the part which we take in the great controversy 
 now pending and in litigation, we act not only for the 
 coming ages and our posterity — we are stewards before 
 the world of the interests of rej^resentative democratic 
 institutions. We must, in the grace and word and 
 Providence of God, strive to neutralize each omen of 
 ill ; and to justify and overpass each kind wish and 
 cheering word of those, on other shores, who see in us 
 the descendants of their blood, and the inheritors of 
 their ancestral rights, and the vanguard, to some of 
 them, of their own maligned, bafiled, and betrayed as- 
 pirations. For the sake of those who love us, and of 
 those who hate us, on Eastern shores, we must be 
 prayerfully just and firm. The nations of the Old 
 World have looked, with perhaps no special disinter- 
 estedness, on our struggle. They have presaged, in 
 their journals, and parliaments, and state-cabinets. 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 
 
 41 
 
 that our rent was irremediable ; and that the times 
 now moving over our land were the very times of 
 *' Upharsin," such as the Hand wrote for the Chal- 
 dean empire on Belshazzar's wall. With a confidence 
 that was both promj3t and peremptory, old world 
 statesmen have exclaimed, " Upharsin — they are di- 
 vided." With something of wistful envy, perchance, 
 some of these rulers had gazed on the rich sisterhood 
 of States, once united in golden bands of concord ; and 
 which now they adjudged sundered forevermore. In- 
 tently scanning each new omen, and listening for the 
 last echo of the strife, these observers stood on Eastern 
 shores, and, like Siseia's mother gazing through the 
 lattices, exclaimed, " Why are the chariot wheels of 
 Anarchy and Disruption so long in coming ?" And 
 they have thought, as the goodly booty of provinces 
 and colonial dependencies, and possible principalities, 
 that might be secured from the wreck of the Transat- 
 lantic Kepublic, swept before the fancy — " To every 
 man" — to Gaul, and to Britain, and why not to old 
 Spain ? — " to every man a damsel or two," from the 
 disbanded States, the sisters forever disunited. But, 
 my brethren, the stars in their courses did not, of old, 
 fight, as they moved over the earth, for Sisera. The 
 conqueror for whom his mother, as she hearkened, was, 
 perchance, already preparing timbrel, anthem and gar- 
 land, lay even then stark and cold beneath the tent 
 curtains of Jael. And our vigilant watchers in the 
 monarchies and empires of the East may find that 
 modern auguries sometimes speed as those of Sisera's 
 household once sped. God has not delivered us to 
 the eagerness of their foreboding welcome. Our cap- 
 tivity is not yet led captive. And men, called to con- 
 4« 
 
42 GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 tend for the right on the shores of our New World 
 streams, may yet, if the God of all might shall bless 
 them with victory, as they shall remember the strong 
 rebellion they withstood at home, and the strong sym- 
 pathies they nullified abroad, take up the strain once 
 used beside the ancient Kishon : -'0 my soul, thou 
 hast trodden down strength !" 
 
 But if the God of battles give us to see success, 
 where is the freedom of the nation ? Where is its 
 refuge from standing armies ; from the Praetorian camps 
 that breed Emperors, and that mint so rapidly an out- 
 worn Eepublic into a golden Despotism ? England had 
 her Monk ; France has had her brace of Napoleons ; and 
 what these warriors received as commonwealths, were 
 transmuted, in their hands, into kingdoms and em- 
 ]3ires. Shall we escape the like ? And here, again, 
 we have hope — only because our hope is in God. His 
 past mercies are our plea, before His throne ; and our 
 basis before our fellow men for blessed auguries as to 
 the future. Men in Euroj^e said of us : " With but a 
 nominal army, garrisoning a few outposts, and that 
 feebly, how can they war ? If mustered numerously, 
 who shall train their republican insubordination ?" 
 These prophets were appalled at seeing the numbers, 
 the unity, the rapid discipline, and the energy of our 
 recruits. The citizens of a Republic have a special 
 stake in its welfare. Its banners and camps are wound 
 around with the heartstrings of a nation's homes : its 
 hosts move forth with the memories and restraining 
 prayers, and tearful sympathies of a nation's mp-iads 
 of closets and sanctuaries. The trader, merchant, 
 lawyer, ploughman, artisan, have become our volun- 
 teer soldiery. This is the glory of our democratic in- 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 
 
 43 
 
 stitutions. It is still more the gioiy of our Chris- 
 tianity. Cromwell, to cope with England's old chiv- 
 alry, called forth Christian men, with the Bible in 
 their knapsacks, and the fear of God in their hearts, 
 and a conscience behind their bayonets. And the same 
 religion which made the pious tiller and artisan into 
 the material of his invincible Ironsides, made those 
 soldiers when disbanded to return innocently and in- 
 dustriously to the trades and fields they had forsaken. 
 Docs money facilitate exchange ? The gold of Scrip- 
 ture principle, made generally current in the intellect 
 and conscience of a nation, makes social change easy 
 and harmless. The gospel enables the man of wealth, 
 smitten with disaster, to become unrepiningly poor ; 
 and teaches the poor man, suddenly affluent, the unin- 
 flated and unhardened use of his wealth. His reli- 
 gion taught Job to exchange his affluence, his health, 
 and his household, without a murmur, for the ash-heap 
 of the childless lazar : — as his religion qualified David 
 to pass gracefully from the sheep-cote and the sheep- 
 walk, to enfranchise, to unite, and to rule the whole 
 people of Israel. It is this gospel, which now fits the 
 missionary, refined and aspiring, to sit down, un- 
 shrinking, amid the squalid barbarism of the lowest 
 Heathen : and in turn incites the Heathen to aspire 
 out of filth, child-murder, and cannibalism, to all the 
 decencies, conscientiousness, and hopes of Christian 
 civilization. It renders the citizen a principled warrior, 
 true to his country because first true to his God. And 
 it relegates that warrior, flushed with his triumph, to 
 the peaceful scenes of a country, which, in God's name, 
 he defended from the invader ; and which, in that 
 same name, he now defends from exactions at the 
 
44 ^OZ; TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 hands of its defenders, himself and his brethren. It is 
 a Eepublic, and a Christian Republic, that can accom- 
 plish this. It is in other forms of government, that 
 the soldier most naturally crystallizes into a standing 
 army ; and that War becomes the chronic malady of 
 the nation. Its sudden jDOwer, in a Christian, repub- 
 lican people, and the disappearance, as sudden, of 
 that power, when no longer needed, may be illustrated 
 in Nature. Look at the atmosphere. How light and 
 unburdensome does it seem. To an unpractised eye, 
 how little does it suggest the huge avalanches of 
 wintry snow that it can yet evolve. But send over 
 that clear sky and translucent air the storm ; and soon, 
 the gale which now stirs gently the peach-blossom, 
 and kisses so lovingly the cheek of the cradled infant, 
 has become horrid with Arctic sleet, and carries in its 
 heavy folds the death frosts that strip every forest, 
 and sheet hundreds of leagues with an icy pall. But 
 when Spring returns, the ice leaves the pool, the river 
 is unlocked, and the air is again balm and music. 
 Where is now the wintry snow ? It has become Sum- 
 mer's crystal brook and translucent sky. It is now in 
 the air that you breathe, and the harvests that it is 
 nurturing to feed you, and the flowers and the fruits 
 that gladden the eye and recruit the strength of the 
 tiller. So, in a Christian republic, the armies that 
 have suddenly emerged may as innocuously vanish ; 
 and leave but the blessed memoiy of the rights that 
 they vindicated, and the honorable scars of the wrongs 
 which they effectually redressed. 
 
 The great force of Christianity in a State, as seen 
 producing these vast, practical results, is spiritual. The 
 king-dom of Christ is not of this world. Yet the sub- 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 45 
 
 jects of that kingdom are in this world, and are planted 
 there in their relations to it to make it better. What 
 secular power is like that of the Scriptures, in direct, 
 palpable, practical and enduring results upon Free- 
 dom, uj)on Social Order, upon material well-being, and 
 Science and Law ? God's Sabbaths and Sanctuaries, the 
 examples, sacrifices, prayers and sympathies of Chris- 
 tian men and women are the great sheet-anchor of the 
 nation, preparing them for the tempest and stress of 
 the age, in all its wildest violence. This Christian 
 power is not a visible so much as an invisible force ; 
 it is not counted in the decennial census ; not entered 
 in the yearly tax-roll ; not registered in army-lists, or 
 voting-books, or Congressional catalogues. But yet 
 these spiritual influences constitute a power, behind all 
 these, and towering above all these, to the throne and 
 bosom of God. Without the conscience which this 
 Christianity enlightens and educates ; without the 
 hopes that it ministers ; without the restraints that it 
 imposes, where were your Constitutions, and what 
 would be the uj)shot of your victories and your revolu- 
 tions ? Their strength is of the unseen, but is also of 
 the Almighty and Omnipresent and Eternal ; for all 
 these it derives from the God whom it trusts, and who 
 guards all that thus seek His favor and lean on His 
 fatherly heart and his Omnipotent arm. " Not by might, 
 
 NOR BY POWER, BUT BY My SpIRIT,"SAITH THE LORD 
 
 OF Hosts." As with the renewal, in letters of fire, of 
 that inscription, Pentecost sealed the Churches of 
 Jesus, in their day of weakness, and when Paganism 
 spread itself over the mightiest and broadest empire 
 the world had yet known. So Pentecost sealed them 
 for the conversion of those Gentiles, and the evangeliza- 
 
46 ^OD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 tion of our race and globe. In that name of the Lord, 
 let us now set up afresh our banners. The times that 
 sweep by, march, be assured, men and brethren, to the 
 ultimate triumph of the Right, and the slow but uni- 
 versal diffusion of the Truth. Find, in God's strength, 
 thy niche, and fulfil thy task : and thy land shall yet 
 be Emmanuel's land. The Babe of Bethlehem, and 
 the Sufferer of Calvary — Weakness victorious under 
 long Wrong, and emerging over all Wrong into full 
 supremacy and manifested Omnipotence : the Saviour's 
 earthly career is the image, compend and pledge of 
 the career of His Church ; weak, contemned, and 
 wronged, but enduring, overcoming, and invincible. 
 He notches the centuries ; musters all earth's gather- 
 ings ; and flings forth the banner of His covenant, as 
 the crown and last result of all earth's strifes. Not 
 wont is He to undertake more than He can achieve. 
 The Winner of Pardon, the Render of the Grave, and 
 the Opener of Paradise ; all earth's nations and kin- 
 dreds must yet be made to see that the work already 
 done by this Christ, in the heights and in the depths — 
 on the Cross, in the vacated Tomb, in the re-occupied 
 Throne — above us and beneath us, — are pledges, full 
 and sufficient, for His doing the work that remains 
 unfinished upon our earth — and around us and with- 
 in us. 
 
 The din and turmoil of national conflict shall not 
 prevent the Christian from tracing, reverently, the in- 
 audible footprints of this, the King of Zion. It is one 
 and the same Ruler who governs, though upon distinct 
 principles, the Kingdom of Providence and the King- 
 dom of Grace. With what a deft quietness He inter- 
 weaves the influences of these two kinaxloms — with 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 47 
 
 what nice adjustment He sums the more glaring and 
 more boisterous movements of the secular, into noise- 
 less preparations for the spiritual, — was illustrated just 
 one century since in the history of Britain and India. 
 In the year 1761 the British Parliament voted to 
 Kobert Clive an Irish peerage as Baron Plassey.* It 
 was but a cheap recognition of the audacity, craft and 
 valor by which but a few years before, in the Battle of 
 Plassey, that merchant's clerk, having become diplo- 
 matist and general, won Bengal for the British crown 
 and converted a corporation of shop-keepers into a 
 board of sovereigns. For this had he done in behalf 
 of the British East India Company. But other 
 results are in train. In that same year 1761, 
 which gave Clive his peerage, there was born in 
 a j)oor village of Northamptonshire to the })arish-clerk a 
 son, whom they called William. The ajjparent lot of 
 that infant, penury, obscurity, and comparative igno- 
 rance, what recked Clive and his brother Nabobs of 
 the peasant child ? And how were Clive's victories, or 
 crimes, matter of any special concernment in the parish- 
 clerk's nursery of Paulerspury ? Some thirteen years 
 after, the bold, bad man, the East Indian general, 
 amidst honors and huge wealth and large influence, com- 
 mits suicide, turning loathingly from earth's rewards 
 and treasures to the knife as his refuge. But he leaves 
 behind him, yet unrecognized, another mighty fellow- 
 worker in Indian fields. It is that peasant boy, 
 the parish-clerk's son, who, as an ailing lad must, 
 about the period of Clive's suicide, resign the plough 
 and be apprenticed because of feeble health to the lap- 
 
 * See note D. 
 
4g GOD TIMING ALL NATIONAL CHANGES 
 
 stone and the awl. But through that shoemaker's stall 
 lies that lad's pathway to the evangelization of India. 
 It is William Carey of whom we sj^eak. Clive planted 
 over Bengal England's meteor flag, the red cross of 
 St, Greorge ; but it was Carey's to call her teeming 
 and swarthy myriads to the Cross of Redempiton. 
 Born in the year of Clive's peerage, to something far 
 higher than the peer's coronet or the general's baton — 
 born to confer upon the Bengal that Clive won, Ben- 
 gal's first Bible ; he is to give to modern Missions 
 their yet unspent impulse ; and to lead into the 
 waters of the Ganges, that Bengalee convert, Krishna 
 Pal, who shall become in turn a Bengalee Evangelist. 
 This Carey founds, with his brethren, that Mission at 
 Serampore, which, as Heber acknowledged, was to do 
 so much in opening the gates of the ancient languages 
 of the East to European scholarship ; and which was 
 also to unlock to so many Oriental tribes, in their own 
 tongues, the fountains of Insj^ired Scripture. 
 
 If in the Waste-Book of worldly empire Jehovah, 
 as the God of Battles, wi'ote Plassey, memorable as an 
 opening victory in the long train of Britain's Indian 
 conquests ; have we not the evidence that in the 
 Ledger which keeps register of His Covenant to evan- 
 gelise the earth for the kingdom of His own Christ, He 
 wrote, in a corresponding column, Serampore ? When 
 secular annalists and statesmen hailed the conqueror, 
 counted his rupees and his jewels, and voted him rib- 
 bands and titles ; the Invisible Ruler laid, in a poor 
 man's cradle, the infant who was to do a more difficult, 
 a more enduring, and a more angelic work. Another 
 bound the province to the British throne : it was Ca- 
 rey's vocation to summon the swarthy millions tenant- 
 
IN THE INTERESTS OF HIS CHRIST. 
 
 49 
 
 ing it to the hopes, pardons and Heaven of Christ's 
 gospel. And while the Ganges runs to the sea, and 
 whilst the Himalayas stand, shall not the memory of 
 Carey abide, blessed of India, and blessed of Britain ? 
 Is it not sure of a yet higher record, with those who 
 turning many to righteousness shall shine as the stars 
 for ever and ever ? 
 
 The Providence that ordered a Clive's career, and 
 timed a Carey's birth, watches our century, and rules our 
 land, with the like silent, serene and unfaltering steadi- 
 ness. All earth's tribes, in their longings and strug- 
 glings, have been but like the blind man in the hands 
 of the oj^erator, when he rolls his sightless eye-balls 
 towards his deliverer. They have been unconsciously, 
 dimly, turning towards that Christ, who is " the 
 Desire of all nations." Thus of old, Pharsaliaand 
 Actium, the battles of the coming Caesars, turned 
 their film-clad eyes towards Bethlehem where was 
 soon, more quietly, to come a greater than Cassar. 
 And even so is it now. Christ coming — Christ already 
 come — Christ to come again : these make up the three 
 great stages of the world's history. He, the Christ, 
 it is who dates and journalizes all our passing strifes, 
 and reckons up their final results. We read the 
 Waste-Book : our children shall turn the pages of the 
 Ledger. Disparage not the interests of this Christ in 
 thy way and thy work : withhold not from His blessed 
 and remunerative service thy soul and the consecra- 
 tion of thy life. There is need, in His ranks, for 
 thee ; there is room, in His heart, for thee. It is 
 His prerogative and His wont to catch, amid the 
 crash of contending nations, and of falling dynasties — 
 with equal nicety of ear, the sighing of the lone, for- 
 5 
 
50 CHANGES TIMED FOR CHRIST. 
 
 gotten prisoner. He can, without flurry — amid the 
 taxes and expenditures that by their huge weight stag- 
 ger your statesmen — note and rate the widow's two 
 mites, cast out of her deep penury into His treasury. 
 While wielding, all undisturbed, Earth's most stub- 
 born and oldest despotisms, and all Earth's fiercest de- 
 mocracies, for his own sovereign ends, he yet remem- 
 bers, Christian mother, the prayer your child lisped 
 or murmured at your knee this very evening. With 
 all the reins of Power gathered into His hand, and 
 with all people fated to serve Him ; yet no burdened 
 heart is hid from His pitying glance, no cares cast by 
 His suflering servants upon His fraternal breast are 
 denied His j)rompt sympathies. The Intercessor for 
 your devotions, the Propitiation for your sins, the Bro- 
 ther born for your adversity, the Companion, Guard- 
 ian and Rewarder of your toils, may He not well ask 
 your trust ; and does He not deserve the consecration 
 of your life to His service ? The yoke easy, and the 
 burden light ; may not nations, whether rent by war, 
 or lapped in j)eace, heed the Psalmist's charge, to pour 
 out their hearts before Him ? And ought not, and 
 needs not, each soul here, at all times, and at this time, 
 to leap forth to His gracious invitation : " Give Me 
 thine heart ?" Is this blessed Master yours ? Are 
 you Christ's ? If not — why not ? And if not noio, 
 " in the very times of your land" ; if not now, 
 which is '' His accepted time," lohen will you relin- 
 quish the long and causeless, and inexcusable rebellion 
 of impenitence and unbelief against Him ? Why not, 
 now and here, sue for the assurance of His gracious 
 sway — the burden of His unspeakable peace — the yoke 
 of His blessed guardianship — and the heritage of the 
 Paradise which He has opened to all believers ? 
 
51 
 
 Note A, p. 30. Bp. Horslej/'s criticism on I Timo. i. 10. 
 
 " The revei'end prelate near me has cited the paesage in which St. Paul mentions 
 men-stealers among the gi'eateet miscreants. • Men-stealers, ' so we read in our 
 English Bible ; but the word in the original * * is literally ' a slave-trader ' ; and no 
 other word in the English language but ' slave-trader' precisely i-enders it. It was in- 
 deed the technical name for a slave-trader in the Attic law ; and although the Athe- 
 nians scrupled not to possess themselves of sbives, yet the trader in slaves among them 
 was infamous." Speeches in Parliament of Samuel Horsley, Lite Ld. Bi.^hop of St. 
 Asaph, Dundee, 1S13, p. 539. (Speech in House of Lords on the Slave-Trade, June 24, 
 1S06.) Conybeai-e and Howeon, (Life and Epistles of St. Paul. Lond. 185'2, Vol. II. p. 
 464) insert " slave-dealers" in their version ; appending, at the foot of the page, the 
 note ; "This is the literal translation of the word," And Alford, in his Greek Testa- 
 ment (Vol. Ill, Lond., 1S56, p. 200, n.) also gives " slave-dealers " as the rendering of 
 the word, but adds the sweeping comment, " of this crime (man-stealing) all are guilty 
 who, whether directly or indirectly, are engaged in, or uphold, from whatever pretence, 
 the making or Iceeping of slaves." By the construction which this very accomplished 
 critic puts upon Paul's language, in 1 Cor., vii. 21, might he not be charged with 
 making the Apostle, one of those « ho " ujjholds," of course " indirectly," the " keep- 
 ing of slaven" ? If so, does not the above definition make Paul, also, a "man- 
 Btealer" ? 
 
 Like the authors of our own excellent Received Version, the Reformers in Germany, 
 France, Switzerland and Holland, seem generally, acquiescing perhaps in the prece- 
 dent of the Vulgate, to have adopted the more limited sense of the Greek word, the 
 stealing of a man ; and apparently interpreted it after the definition of the Greek 
 scholiast on Aristophanes, of the m.an, who, either by deceit gets a freeman into bond- 
 age, or steals those already slaves from their masters, to sell them for his own advan- 
 tage elsewhere. To this sense Valpy (New Testament, Fifth Edition, Vol. Ill, Lond., 
 1847, p. 124) seems to adhere. From this same rendering the "man-thieves," or 
 " man-stealers " in Luther, some of the later German versions, as De Wette, Allioli, 
 Kistemaker, and Gossner departed, to the use of a word, implying violence rather than 
 fraud, in the deprivation of freedom, and which would be represented in English by 
 "men-robbers," had we such a term in our language. And Stier & Thiele, in their 
 German Polyglott Bible (Vol. IV, p. 839, Bielefeld, 1849,) when quoting these, and 
 when adding to them the version of Van Ess, " Men-sellers " (or Slave-traders) append to 
 Van Ess's rendering, an exclamation mark, as if to express amazement and dissent. 
 But Van Ess does not stand alone. Heydenreich, in his excellent Commentary on the 
 Pastoral Epistles (Hnchunar ls26, Vol. I, p. 70) has the same term. And Wiesinger, 
 in his scholarly continuation of Olshausen (Konigsberg, 1S50, p. 394), employs this 
 Bame -word iMenschenverkauf em). 
 
 The phrase of the Vulgate is the root of our word. plagiary, now in English employed 
 only in its metaphorical sense of him who steals not the man himself, but his thoughts. 
 It was in Roman Law, the Man-stealer, and by it not only the Vulgate, but Er.asmU3 
 and Grotius and Beza and Calvin render the Greek word in I. Timothy. On it, the 
 excellent John Gerhard, the eminent theologian, in his Notes on Timothy, posthumously 
 edited by his son, comments as being, in the use of the writers on law, inclusive of 
 " those who carry off, keep and sell men, whether bond or free, and those also who buy 
 as slaves those whom tliey know to be free ' (Adnotationes ad I Timoth. Jence, 1643, p. 
 19.) Bengel, the acute and exact, one of the devoutest and most conscientious of inteT>- 
 prefers, (Gnomon, Vol. II, Tubingen 1850, p. 345), explains the Greek word as describ- 
 ing "those who by violence make freemen into slaves." And then adds as the com- 
 ment : " Not far removed from this class are those, who instead of enlisting soldiers, 
 by enticements, deceptions, and violence drag them in." Wesley, in his Notes on 
 the New Testament, founded as he states on Bengel, of whom he Had justly the 
 warmest admiration, expands the application yet more widely, by reference to the modea 
 of procuring a class of colonists to our own country, the Redemptioners, lamiliai-ly 
 known during Wesley's American experiences, but now comparatively obsolete. J • A*- 
 Michaelis, in his Remarks for the Unlearned, on the New Testament, {Gottmg. 1791), 
 also alludes in strong terms, to the German Red.mptioners, as cheated by the shippers 
 into a temporary slavery. -'Min-stealers. (We quote Wesley.) The wor.t ot all 
 thieves, in comparison of whom highwaymen and house-breakers are innocent ! vv nai 
 then are most traders in negroes, procurers of servants for America, and a'l wUo lui 
 soldiers by lies, tricks, or iuticements ? " Wesley, therefore, did not hold the worn 
 itself to mean slave trader, for he declares only that "men-stealing attaches to 
 " most " not to all such traders. Macknight held the m.an-stealing to refer to preda- 
 tory wars made to obtain prisoners for slaves, as on the African coast. _ 
 Bretschneider in his Lexicon of the New Testament, Second Edition, Leipsto, 
 
52 
 
 1829, in his German renderings of the Greek word, puts " man-seller " (slave-trader) 
 first, and " man-robber '' next. In the great Greek Lexicon of Passow, as edited by 
 Rost (fc Palra, (Fifth Edition, Leipsic. 1841), the definition given is " one reducing men 
 to slavery ; one selling men ; one stealing the slaves of another to sell them again.' ' And 
 of the verb, from which the noun of our text U derived, it is said, that, in the Middle 
 voice, it is found in Herodotus, Xenophon, Plato, and the later Attic writers, of frequent 
 occuiTence, in the sense of " practising raan-rol5bery, or man-selling." Th adjective, 
 formed on our noun, and found in Plato, is defined as " man-selling." 
 
 The exact sense of the term, in the ordinary Greek of the Roman Empire, at the 
 time of Paul's using the word, is a nice question. The current of opinion seems stead- 
 ily set, in England and in Germany, from tlie narrower interpretation of fraud or vio- 
 lence in the reducing of men to bondage, or the fraudulent transfer of a slave from his 
 legal claimant, towards the larger signification, which, as we have seen, Bishop Horsley 
 attaches to it, and which makes it describe all slave-trading. Sacred and classical 
 scholarship seem both tending to the same conclusion. 
 
 Note B, p. 34, " Use it rather." 1 Cor. vii. 21. 
 
 There is an acknowledged ellipsis in the Apostle's phrase here. In our version, that 
 void is i-epresented by the word " i<." Was this a reference to Freedom or Servitude ? 
 Did Paul enjoin it upon the converted slave, "Cling rather to thy bondage:'' or, 
 " Grasp rather at thy freedom ?" The collocation of words in onr English Received 
 Version, suggests that the " being free" is the boon to be prefei-red. And the Greek 
 original seems more naturally to take that same reference. For there is great force in 
 the remark of Neander, that, slavery being a privation, " use'' would hardly be Paul's 
 phrase in commending it ; had such been his intent, Paul might be expected to say, 
 " ABIDE IN IT," as a state rather to be endured than enjoyed. And the Protestant Re- 
 formers, as far back as Wycliffe, with his '■'■ Ttiore use thou" (Pickering's Ed., 1S48), 
 or "^/le rather use thou.," (Engl. Hexapla, 18-11,) have run almost, we believe, with- 
 •out a dissenting voice, into this current of interpretation. Luther, Calvin, Bcza, 
 Brentius, Tremellius and Marlorat are in it. Tyndale's " use it rather" passed over, 
 in English, unquestioned, not only into Cranmer's Bible and the Geneva English 
 Bible, and our own King James's Version, but also into the Rhemish Version of the 
 Roman Catholic Church. So the Hollander version provided by the Synod of Dort, the 
 Italian version of Diodati, and the French versions of Ostervald and Martin are on the 
 same side. The renderings under Pi'otestant influence, have continued mainly in the 
 same channel : the Modern Greek version of the New Testament, published by the 
 American Bible Society (V. Y., 1S35), and the Hebrew New Testament of the British 
 and Foreign Bible Society {Land., 183(5,) taking sti'ongly the same interpretation. 
 Nor has it been confined to Protestants. Erasmus also held it ; and so Cornelius a 
 Lapide. Although Quesnel, the pious Jansenist, learned in the Fathers, names in his 
 New Testament the other interpretation, soon to be noticed, as if it were the only one ; 
 his brother Jansenist, De Saci, gives both the interpretations, and puts the Protestant, 
 as we shall call it, last, as if, (we might conjecture) that, with which he himself most 
 sympathized. And another learned Catholic, Calmet, giving both the rival inteiTjreta- 
 tions, and whilst pronouncing the Patristic one, that most generally (in his church, we 
 presume,)— approved, yet calls the other "the most simple." We quote from Mansi's 
 Latin translation of Calmet. It was the view of Grotius, of Bp. Hall, of Hammond, and 
 of Whitby, of Doddridge and of Macknight, of Bloomfield and Valpy. G. F. Seller, 
 an evangelical scholar of Germany, to whom Pye Smith, in his " Scripture Testimony 
 to the Messiah," alludes most respectfully, has, in his Commentary on the New Testa- 
 ment, the same explanation. Pool's English Annotations and our own Gill present 
 both interpretations ; but incline to what we would call the Protestant, as the more 
 obvious and simple one. Wesley adopts it, although to do so, he has to desert hia 
 cherished guide Bengel: and gives as Paul's thought the phrase, ^'■Embrace the oppor- 
 tunity." It was substantially what Calvin had presented as Paul's principle : " 1/ the 
 option be granted. Freedom is the more desirable state." The Father of Methodism, 
 and the Genevese Reformer, dissenting in much, are agreed here. 
 
 But the Greek Fathers, as far back as Chrysostom, though that Father refers to both 
 interpretations, held an opposite sense of this passage. To them it taught the slave, 
 even if freedom came within his reach, to content himself rather with bondage. It 
 may be found, too, in the Syi'iac Version ; and the learned Protestant, De Dieu, 
 was, perhaps, from his fondness for the Syriac, led to adopt it as Paul's teaching. 
 Earlier than Chrysostom, it seems favored by Ignatius, in his Letter to Polycarp, 
 an Epistle of his, which the researches of Cureton have left still in unshaken 
 authority, (Bunsen's "Ignatius," Hamb., 184T, pp. 5, 2(5): and where Christian 
 slaves are discouraged from expecting their ransom out of the common Church 
 funds. Some Protestant critics of latter times have adopted Chrysostom's view, as Wol- 
 
53 
 
 fius and the excellent Bengel. Some i-ecent German Commentator.^, of the Rationalistic 
 school, a3 De Wette, H. A. "W. Meyer, and very lately Ewald, in liia Pauline Epistles, 
 are enlisted on the same side. And others, not Rationalistic, as Oslander and Harless, 
 have joined them. Some of the recent English scholars, as Couybeare and Howson, 
 and Alford, give in their accession ; the latter with much earnestness. There had 
 been found earlier English scholars, now, however less known, who held it before them. 
 Dr. John Heylyn, a man of ability, the friend of the great Bp. Butler, whose consecra- 
 tion sermon, at his induction into his first See, that of Bristol, Heylyn preached, de- 
 livered to the King's Scholars, at Westminster School, a Paraphrase of the N. T., in 
 the form of Lectures, which he afterwards published. Among the lads then and there 
 his hearers, were WaiTen Hastings, and Cowper, the poet, and Elijah Impey, after- 
 wards the tool of Hastings in India. He translates our text : " If you can obtain your 
 freedom, choose rather to continue in servitude." (Heylyn. Interpr. of N. T. Land. 17(51, 
 vol. n., p. 106.) It was a sentiment seemingly better fitted to train Impeys than Cowpers. 
 So the very acute but captious John Walker, of Dublin, proposed, in ISBl, to translate 
 the clause, " rather lend thy service." (Works, Land., 1S3S, vol. ii, p. 110.) Walker, 
 by the bye, shows that the Syriac Version is really against the slave's taking freedom, 
 though Tremellius has translated it, as if for his accepting freedom. Meyer, in haste, 
 has adopted, without noticing it, the blunder which a British scholar had pointed out 
 nearly twenty years before. Meyer, above named, whose verbal criticism is often 
 valuable, imputes, on this text, with some sharpness, wilfulness to all who interpret 
 otherwise than does he. Meyer and Alford present the ablest and fullest argumeuta- 
 tiou that we have met, in favor of this return to the Patristic interpretation of the pas- 
 sage. But some of the later German Commentators failed to accept that view ; as the 
 elder RosenmiiUer, Riickert, Olshauseu, Billroth, (whoso work on Corinthians, was 
 translated in the Edinb. Bibl. Cabinet) ; and above all the excellent Neander, certainly 
 not unacquainted with the Fathers, and not disinclined to give them their just infiu- 
 ence. But Neander imputes to them here, and we think, with manifest justice, that 
 asceticism which was covertly preparing so much of evil and of error in the early 
 Christian Church. An English Scholar, Davidson, generally regarded as not want- 
 ing in strong regard for the German Biblical critics, takes in his Introd. to the 
 N. T. (vol. II., Lond. 1S49, p. 24S), the position from our text, that "Paul exhorts 
 every slave to avail himself of a legitimate opportunity to obtain his emaucip.a- 
 tion. He prefers freedom to slavery, when it could be procured without doing violence 
 to the principles of ju.stice, or the established relations of social life. " And so a French 
 Protestant, — abundantly familiar with German literature, in his Prize Essay, pronounced 
 such by the French .\cademy of Science, an Essay on Civil Society in the old Roman 
 Empire, and the influence of Christianity in its renovation, (we quote from Richards 
 German Transl. of it. Leipsic, 1S61. p. 1.51,)— Prof. Schmidt, of Strasburg, declares 
 Paul here to teach that when a Christian slave may be set free, he should avail himself 
 of the advantage. So another French scholar, whose work on slavery (Histoire de 
 1' Eiclavage, Pjiris, 1847,) has received the highest honors, M. Wallon, takes (t. it., pp. 
 5, 6, note,) ground distinctly : "These words ' use it rather' have been taken as refer- 
 ring to slavery : they refer to Freedom. Profit by it to become serviceable, doubt- 
 less, but not to continue a slave ; to be serviceable in that more lofty service indicated 
 in the next verse : * * ' the servant of Christ.' " Authorities cannot settle such a ques- 
 tion ; but these are cited to show some, whom the names of Meyer and Alford might 
 else dazzle, that the stream of modern scholarship has by no means settled in that re- 
 turn t5 the old Greek Patristic channel which this German and this British critic favor ; 
 and that in Britain, France and Germany it is intelligently resisted by men of at 
 least equal scholarship. 
 
 But the fullest, and to the present writer's mind, the ablest discussion of the Apos- 
 tle's meaning that he has met, is that of Neander. He had in the earlier edition of his 
 " Planting of the Church by the Apostles," taken the older Protestant view of Paul's 
 meaning in the text before us. In later editions of that vTork he replies to, and con- 
 tmues unmoved by, the criticisms of De Wetts and others. But in his Expository 
 Lectures on the two Epistles to the Corinthians, a work that appeared posthumously, 
 and was edited by B^yschlag, at Berlin, in 1S5?, he returns, most comprehensively, to 
 the topic (pp. 12S-131). Beyschlag founds his volume on three separate courses of 
 Lectures which the devout and scholarly Neander had delivered in 1820, in 1843, and 
 again in 1843-9. The results are thus the fruit of Neander's studies and ripest reflec- 
 tions, as continued through a tract of nigh thirty years, surrounded by all the con- 
 temporary literature of his own Germany, and not unobservant of that which 
 appeared in France and England. The verbal arguments of Meyer and AUVird seem 
 all, in substance, anticipated and answen-d ; and the argument from the general 
 context, and still more from the general character of the Apostle's principles seems 
 to us invincible, and entirely overweighing aught that has been adduced on the 
 opposite side. 
 
54 
 
 The Greek words that introduce the clause in question are indeed in the Greek idiom 
 differently arranged ; but the three simple English words : ^^ And, yet if — " fully con- 
 vey their sense. That word, "^nrf," seern^ the hinge of Meyer's and Alford's difficul- 
 ties. But, to us, it appears only the introduction of one of those digressions, some- 
 times brief, sometimes protracted, — the parentheses with which the style of Paul so 
 notoriously abounds. He has talked of Slavery and of freedom, as comparatively 
 of little moment, because of men's moral cq\iality before God. " And yt if," adds 
 he, the Providence of God present thee with political enfranchisement, despise it 
 not ; but value it, as preferable to bondage, in itself. The rapid side-movements of 
 Paul's mind remind one of an Arab guide, mounted on his swift courser and escorting 
 a caravan of travellers on foot. He dashes aside suddenly, and as suddenly returns ; 
 gathering up again, after one of these excursions, the regular train of thought along 
 which he is conducting his readers; now darting up some nook, or exploring some 
 side valley, and then resuming his post ia the highway. From Bruder's Ed. of 
 Schmid's Greek Concordance, it appears that Paul uses the same Greek words which 
 here so perplex the German critics, also, in his 2d Epistle to the same Corinthian 
 Church (2d Cor., Iv. 16) ; and in that to the Philippians (Philipp., ii. 17) ; and that 
 they are employed by his brother apostle, Peter (1 Peter, iii. 14), who is there intro- 
 ducing a digression as Paul is here. 
 
 The advocates of a change seem to us to embarass themselves with some grave in- 
 consistencies. Even the excellent Bengel finds, after he has made Paul recommend a 
 Christian slave to forego the offer of liberty in this clause, that this seems somewhat 
 irreconcilable with his view of v. 23 — " bought with a price, be not ye the servants of 
 men:" which Bengel understands to be a recommendation to a Christian freeman, not 
 to get himself into slavery. If one who has, in a life of bondage, known its sorrows 
 must incur the added self-denial of foregoing freedom when withiu reach : why forbid 
 a freeman, ^^ ho has had the blessings of freedom, to exercise himself in the self-denial 
 of voluntarily foregoing his freedom ; and so placing himself, like his Blessed Master, 
 on the level of his slave brethren's sorrows? The Moravians once, on the We^t Indian 
 Mission, proposed, when no other access to the slaves seemed left to them, — that they 
 would sell themselves as slaves. Though Bengel would, hold v. 23, to forbid such self- 
 disfranchisement by a freeman, we think that the heroism of that missionary proposal 
 was not only wh it Paul would have permitted, but what Paul would have extolled. 
 
 So Meyer assumes that Paul thought relatively little of the difference between free- 
 dom and bondage, because of his expecting Christ so soon to come — an imputed, 
 erroneous expectation, which, as Diisterdieck and others have shown, is expressly 
 repudiated by Paul's explicit language ; but yet an imputation in which many Ger- 
 man interpreters largely Indulge themselves, thus discoloring their whole exegesis of 
 inspired statements. Of Ewald's genius and erudition it were unjust ever to speak 
 lightly ; but when he would, adopting the Patristic view that Paul encouraged a 
 Christian bondman to adhere to his bonds, append the remark (Sendschreiben d. Apost. 
 Paul. Ootting, 1S57, pp. 1G3, 164), that this was " good advice for young Christianity 
 shunning thus tumultuous insurrections,'' but that it would be unfair to apply It to 
 the general question of the national advantages of slavery ; we regret the Ratioualism 
 which leads this illustrious scholar thus to make " young Christianity" shortsighted as 
 to her destinies, or timorous as to her utterances. The " Ancient of Days " knew the 
 scope of His own oracles ; and the horizon of His plans took in the Pyramids of Egypt 
 and the Coliseum of Rome, as mere perishable heaps aloug the magnificent highway 
 predestined for the march of His truth and His kingdom. 
 
 Paul means that, in comparison of the vast preponderance of eternal interests, as 
 measured against "the light afflictions " and "the beggarly elements " of this pres- 
 ent world. Christians should bring themselves upon a nearer level of sympathies, 
 interests and prospects, amidst all their diversities of wordly position and nationality. 
 But he did not make the earthly, on that account, all of equal degrees of worthleesness. 
 Liberty, as measured against slavery, was not to be levelled down. Paul himself 
 interceded for it in the behalf of Onesimus ; and contended for it in his own case as 
 against the wrongdoers of Philippi. As Neander remarks : would it have been con- 
 sistent in Paul to say, to a man poor at his conversion, that if afterwards wealth, in 
 honest ways, were tendered him, the poverty of his condition at his " vocation " to 
 Christ required him to refuse that wealth ? Still less, could he forbid the man, a slave 
 when Christ found him, to refuse henceforth freedom. It was more than wealth. 
 
 Would not the strict views of the impassable bounds, which a mans civil state, as 
 freeman or as bondman, Mhen Christ called him, is thus made to set against all further 
 change, lead, by parity of reasoning, to extend that same law of "vocation" to all 
 the trades and ranks of society ? Would not Luke, on that account, have been found 
 faulty in quitting the work of physician ? Must not Peter always fish ; and Cornelius 
 always drill ? If the grace of God found Luther inside a monastery, and his Catharine 
 a Bora within the walls of a nunnery ; would not the rule thus brought in have for- 
 
'.n/ 
 
 55 
 
 bidden the converts ever to break through the conventual precinct.-^, and to leave the 
 unmarried for the married life ? Would it not virtually transplant the burdensome 
 law of caste, from Egypt and Hindostan, where it so trammelled and crippled human 
 nature, into the Church of Christ Jesus — the brotherly home of Christ's freednien? 
 And was the Patristic age consistent in its own application of its own exposition 
 in regard to slavery, as an impassable barrier and an ineflfaceable badge ? That age 
 held that to take the Christian ministry, a man must be, or become free. Was a 
 Christian slave, then, whilst aspiring to the ministry which Paul declares to be 
 "desiring a good work," in reality, cherishing a forbidden and unlawful desire: 
 for the Church said that the slave, as such, could not be minister ; and the Scrip- 
 ture, according to that Church's traditionary exposition of it, said, that he must not 
 leave his slavery ? By what right did the Ancient Church, in her enfranchisement 
 and ordination of slaves, undertake to cancel Scripture : even though the master re- 
 leased his bondman, and the Church advised the master's so doing? Were not 
 release and advice both disrespectful to Paul, if their exegesis of Paul were just? 
 How, on their principle, is it explicable that Onesimus became a pastor ? 
 
 The authority of the Greek Fathers, as says Neander, is not to be contemned. But 
 there are hoary errors, as he remarks ; and such have easily grown up in exegesis, 
 where prejudices, whether growing out of matters of doctrine or of practice, have 
 darlcened the mind and hindered its just pei'ceptions. The a-'cetic tendencies of the 
 earlier Church, — leading to morbid and false views of health, of the body, of property, 
 and of freedom, — were early and widely working. We can see how they darkened 
 the mind even of a Pascal, when he spoke of sickness as a Christian's normal condi- 
 tion. It is as unjust, as un-Pauline, and as unchristian, to make slavery a convert's 
 normal and unrepealable lot, merely because as a slave the gospel found him. The 
 highest development of the Pagan civilization had been the culture of the feel- 
 ing of nationality. Judaism, under the influences of Pharisaism, had but cultivated a 
 lianghty sense of Hebrew national dignity, with a growing isolation from or scorn of 
 the Gentile races. Christianity, in the Messiah's Incarnation, Atonement, and pre- 
 dicted Universal Dominion, iirst made intelligible the true honor and worth of hu- 
 manity, as such. In Paul's as in Peter's doctrine, the great precept, " Honor all 
 MEN," (1 Pet. ii., 17) gave ethics a new shape. The slave, taught his common brother- 
 hood by the new faith, might be tempted to snatch violently at the restoration of his 
 equal right. Paul guarded against thi.=', by shewing the relative littleness of these 
 temporal and terrestrial distinctions and disadvantages. But in the parenthetical com- 
 mendation of Liberty as the more desirable, when it was peacefully attainable, he 
 guards against the possible misconception, that he would stereotype Bondage, or dis- 
 parage Freedom. 
 
 A French jurist, M. Troplong, the same scholar, we believe, who now occupies one of 
 the highest places in the judiciary of the French Empn-e, has, in his valuable Essay on 
 the Influence of Christianity on the Roman Civil Law, (Louvain, 1S44) expressed 
 strongly the sense of the power, which the new Christian truth of man's inherent dig- 
 nity exercised on the Roman intellect, even before the gospel became dominant. He 
 finds in Seneca on this subject utterances new to Paganism ; and which make to him 
 probable the old tradition that Seneca knew Paul. 
 
 That expansive but healing — that disenthralling and yet cementing energy of the 
 Gospel, in its operation on society, affected the relation of Master and Servant, in a 
 mode w-ell described by Jacobi, a pupil of Neander's, and since, one of the Pro- 
 fessors of Theology in the University of Berlin, in his Manual of Ch. History 
 {Berlin, 1S5(), pp. 05-00). " The slaves especially felt the enfranchising spirit of the 
 Gospel {Ep. to Philemon) and were, in relatively the larger proportion as to numbers, 
 won to it. Yet Slavery was to be overcome, not suddenly and with the violation of the 
 existing social order ; but by the triumph of Christian love working from men's pri- 
 vate relations its outward way (1 Cor. vii. 20, c&c.)" 
 
 Note C, p. 35. Denial of Common Origin to the Negro Race. 
 
 A German scholar, of the highest rank as an ethnologist and linguist, now settled in 
 England, Max Miiller, in his Lectures on the Science of Language (Vcro York, ISO'2, 
 p. 22,) has made but recently the following remarks on this manifest tendency : "In 
 America comparative philologists have been encouraged to prove the impossibility of a 
 common origin of languages and races, in order to justify, by scientific arguments, the 
 unhallowed thsory of slavery. Never do I remember to have seen science more de- 
 graded than on the title-page of an American publication, in which, among the profiles 
 of the different races of man, the profile of the ape was made to look more human than 
 that of the negro." 
 
^6 illillilliil 
 
 013 764 580 4 
 
 Note D, p. 47. Date of CHve's i^eeragc. 
 
 Kippii?, in his Biographia Biitannica ; Aikiu, in his Bio^'aphical Dictionary; and 
 Cunningham, in his " Illustrious Englishmen," (Vol. V., p. ii44,) give 1T61 as the date 
 of Clive's peerage. Burke, in his "Peerage," (Sth Ed., 1815, p. 809,) however, gives 
 the IStli March, 1762, as the time. The earlier year might be the date of the recom- 
 mendation to Parliament ; and the date given by Burke, that of the patent as made 
 out. Gleig's Life, and Macaulays article on Clive, leave the date uncertain ; and to 
 Malcolm's Life the writer had not access. William Carey was born on the ITtli of 
 Auguft, 1761. " During his childhood, it was remarked that whatever he began he 
 completed. * * At the age of twelve (1773) he obtained a copy of ' Pyche's Latin 
 Vocabulary,' and committed nearly the whole of it to memory. * * But his parents 
 were indigent, and unable to afford him any assistance in the pursuit of knowledge : 
 and a scorbutic di.-order, which his constitution eventually ovt rcame, unfitted him at 
 the time for any labor out of doors. He was, therefore, bound apprentice, at the age 
 of fourteen, to Charles Nichols, a shoemaker at Hackleton." J. C. Marsliman. Life 
 and Times of Carey, Marshman <fe Ward; Lond., 1859, Vol. I., pp. 1, 2. Clives 
 suicide occurred on the 22d of November, 1774. Carey's apprenticeship must have 
 commenced in 1775. 
 
 Clive's measures in acquiring the Indian territory of Britain were, some of them, of 
 a character for which Burke, who denounced, with such splendor and energy, similar 
 and perhaps more venial abuses in Hastings, was compelled to make the apology, that 
 as coming from a man of the genius and virtues of Edmund Burke, is to be regretted. 
 " There is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all governments. Ours, in 
 India, had an origin like those which time has sanctified by obscurity. Time, in the 
 origin of most governments, has thrown this mysterious veil over them ; pmdence and 
 discretion make it necessary to throw something of the same drapery over more recent 
 foundations, in wliich otherwise the fortune, the genius, the talents and military virtue 
 of this nation never shone more conspicuously. But whatever necessity might hide, 
 or excuse, or palliate in tlie acquisition of power, a wise nation, when it has once made 
 a revolution upon its own principles and for its own ends, rest^ there." (Burke's 
 Speech in the Impeachment of Wan-en Hastings, 16th Feb., 1788.) Does this mean, 
 that " a wise nation" makes revolutions, without regard to laws, human or divine, 
 " upon its own principles, and for its own ends : " but that it stops there, and always 
 afterwards cultivates honesty and parades justice ? Kobs, for the foundations ; buys, 
 in open market, for the superstructure ? With the admiration of the elder William 
 Pitt, who styled him "the heaven-born general," an epithet which, years after, the 
 eulogists of Pitt's own son, wei'e accustomed to apply to the latter, as a statesman, de- 
 lighting to extol him as " the heaven-born minister ;" with the confidence and sup- 
 port of his sovereign, George III., then young ; and with hia wondrous energy and 
 his stores of Indian military and civil experience, it has been suggested by one of 
 Clive's biographers, that had he lived but a little longer, he would have been sent by 
 the British Crown as their general to suppress the rising Revolution in our own country. 
 He would certainly have been to our fathers a much more formidable antagonist than 
 either Howe or Cornwallis showed himself; and would not probably have made any 
 failure so disgraceful as that of Burgoyne, who in the British Parliament, had been 
 one of Clive's accusers and tormentors. But neither wouldClive have found here Indian 
 venality or Indian feebleness. 
 
 Had five years been added to Clive's life, it might have altered greatly the story of 
 the American Revolution. If man may indulge in such speculations, a similar ad- 
 dition to the lives of Edward VI., of Gustavus Adolphus, and of Oliver Cromwell, 
 would, supposing tliem to retain their positions and their mental powers, have very re- 
 markably modified the whole history of Europe. The " time" of an individual's mor- 
 tal pilgrimage may greatly affect the contemporary and subsequent " times" of his 
 nation, not only, but of his race. It is, perhaps, not an extravagant supposition, which 
 his biographer thus intimates, that Clive's suicide may have facilitated our Inde- 
 pendence. 
 
LIBRARY OF 
 
 CONGRESS 
 
 013 764 580 4 •