without growing with the growth and strengthening with the strength of the national power that sheltered it, until it became mighty enough to threaten the very Government to which it owed its prosperity. So long as it only threatened, the nation, true to its unhappy vows, did nothing, and could do nothing, to avert the dangers it saw steadily glooming with more and more portentous blackness over its future. It was only when madness matured these threats into overt acts of treason; when State Rights, at the instance and in the defence of slavery, shot down the lonely Flag of the Union in Charleston harbor, that the spell of the nation's suicidal oath was broken, and the Government and the people were placed fairly in position to reconsider the fundamental law, and adjust the Constitution to the Declaration of Independ ence. The war was all contained in the question, Shall the States dissolve the Union in the interest of slavery; or shall the nation exorcise slavery, which drives the States to the attempt to destroy it? The nation had no option. It determined to destroy slavery, root and branch; and it did it at the cost of half a million men, and perhaps five thousand millions of dollars.

The question that remains is this: Has the war, having suppressed the rebellion and destroyed slavery, left the country and the Constitution unchanged? Is the government to be administered henceforth precisely as it was administered before? Is America just what it was, slavery alone being eliminated, so that its Constitution is to be interpreted by the old authorities, and in the light of past legal precedents, which so decisively favored the rights of the States as against the rights of the nation?

We do not care to consider this question with curious legal learning and nice historical reference. It is enough for us to say, that human nature, and the God of human nature, make such a course impossible. The nation is not the same nation it was. It has experienced conversion under the hand of God and the outpouring of the spirit of truth. Not only has the sense of nationality outgrown and overwhelmed the States'-rights doctrine, on which the old Democratic party

traded and triumphed so long, but the very theory of the government, as interpreted by the Supreme Court before the war, has broken down hopelessly in the public judgment, and been supplanted by a new theory, which insists that whatever rights in the States may be inconsistent with the fundamental idea of the national life shall be withdrawn, and the Constitution amended so as to make it conform with the Declaration of Independence. This is the process now going on under the guidance of a public sentiment, which is feeling its way, but never intermitting its intention. All that is done, and all that is not done, indicates the drift of a providential purpose, playing through the political instincts of the American people. With a profound respect for law and order, an almost superstitious reverence for the letter of the Constitution, a jealous feeling for the careful distribution of power, and an alarmed reluctance to deny or weaken the habits of local self-government, the people have a still deeper and more urgent sense of the duty and necessity of not allowing the fruits of the vast struggle they have made to be lost in a juggle of words, or through the strangling influence of old prescriptions. They would throw their Constitution away, and make a new one, sooner than sacrifice the moral and political ground they have won so dearly to the letter of an antiquated and blood-repealed bond. The pound of flesh which political Shylocks would demand on the letter of the bond, they will formally deny on their own reading of that bond; but they will deny the bond itself sooner than pay what is so near their heart. The people feel that they are beginning a new era. They mean to have new bottles for the new wine, if the old bottles refuse to hold it safe and sound. Meanwhile, they will try the old bottles till they threaten to burst.

When the President vetoed the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, he appealed with admirable effect to the instincts of self-government and local independence, so deeply seated in the American mind. All wise and sober minds were disposed to respect a decision which counterbalanced the centralizing tendencies of a war Congress, that, in its noble zeal for national ends,

seemed to have trespassed on the practical independence of the States within their proper spheres of legislation. But when again the President vetoed the Civil Rights' Bill, which embodied in fundamental law the essential results of the war, assuming that the great amendment meant what it seemed to mean, the people compelled Congress, by a tremendous expression of dissent, to re-enact it over the President's head. The President had mistaken their gentle submission to his judgment in the first instance, for an indif ference to the essential ends which the holy war has commanded the legislation of the nation to embody in the organic law.

We may mark the narrow swing of the public pendulum, by measuring the distance between these two points, - the first veto sustained, the second veto set aside. The people steer between Scylla and Charybdis. They do not intend to invade or surrender local independence, much less to sacrifice national ideas and the fruits of their costly and most terrible struggle. How to keep these things both in view, and to harmonize them without compromising either, is the problem of our statesmanship. The instincts of the people are equally strong for both. They will die for either. But it is clear that they are not to be reconciled under the new dispensation of American history, as under the one which passed away in blood with the war. Local independence is to be secured by the absence of any necessity of central interference, not by jealous guardianship of diverse interests. Once establish all necessary organic laws guarding the few great principles of the nation over its whole territory, and the General Government will have as little occasion for interfering with State laws and customs as a good father has to meddle with the private correspondence or personal movements of grown children, who all love and respect him, and obey cheerfully the few conditions under which his many benefactions are bestowed.

Deeply, earnestly should we deplore that kind of centralization in our Government which would make Congress the usurper of the duties of State Legislatures, or State Legisla

tures infringers upon the spheres of town governments, or towns the executors of private duties. It is the mixing up ingeniously the question of local self-government and consolidation, with the question of reform in the organic law, of legislation and government, and interference with local legislation, that so far confuses the public sentiment as to make the progress of events slow and wavering. But we need have no fear that the American people will not see their way through this maze. Every day is clearing it up. The President will see that his logical disinclination to power has ended in a practical absolutism, or a tendency to it, which no monarch in the world could safely exercise. Congress will see that the people mean to stand by the new life and the new liberty and the new nationality; and that it need not fear any want of backing so long as it goes honestly forward in the direction of universal justice, without partisan or personal ambition, or sectional prejudice, or vindictive temper. The people never felt themselves so much the ministers of God, so full of a power greater than themselves, as now. Let statesmen and politicians beware how the political piety of the hour is blasphemed! for the war and the future of America are both too evidently the work and shaping of Infinite Wisdom and Mercy, to make it possible for any human will to balk the gracious purposes of Heaven. The stone that seeks to scotch the wheels of American freedom for all will be ground to powder beneath the advancing chariot; for it moves with the weight of a planet and the momentum of a divine fiat!

And, behind the car in which the genius of American liberty sits, comes a long train, all moving in the same grooves, and each bearing to the same goal the successive nations of the earth. God is showing the world a universal pattern. There is no philosophy and no religion in the view which makes popular liberty an American plant. It is for the healing of the nations. If our system of government were human in the sense of not being divine; if it were man-created, and not God-inspired, it would perish after rendering a temporary service: but, being founded on the laws of human

nature, and in obedience to the principles of eternal justice, it is equally universal in its application and secure in its permanency. It is the realization of a true hierarchy, -a government of God. The nations may rage and the peoples imagine a vain thing; the kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed:-"He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision. Be wise now, therefore, O ye kings! be instructed, ye judges of the earth.” The election and predestination of the nations to universal political equality and freedom are written in the nature of God and man. The writing is interpreted as yet only in America. It is now illuminated in blood, and held up to the eyes of a purblind world. Blessed are those nations that dare to read it! for it will burn itself as a brand into those who refuse light in any form except in that of scorching fire.

The same election and predestination which rule in political ideas and principles, rule also in theological ideas and religious movements. All the superstitions, all the forms of religion in the world, be they true or false, are projections of parts of man's nature. No religion lasts which is not true to what is universal in man; which does not satisfy alike reason, conscience, aspiration, love; which does not adapt itself wholly to the Divine-human.

This is the claim which the gospel of Christ sets up, that it is a universal religion, in that it is true to human wants and human possibilities, true everywhere, and true for all time. But what makes it thus true? Only this, that it is God coming into the world through man; God's divine and eternal Word shaping itself in a human mould, and so incarnating itself first in a man, Christ Jesus, and then in humanity. The mould was made for the Spirit. Man was created to know and welcome, to love and obey God; to live from him, and to show forth his life under human conditions. Christianity, like Christ himself, is therefore supremely divine and supremely human. It cannot be outlearned or outlived. We should have first to outlearn God, and outlive ourselves and himself! What the world is outlearning and