Magnus seclorum nascitur ordo. Such is the impression even upon heathen minds, when society has been unhinged and overturned, when a state of seemingly permanent order has succeeded the years of revolution. Such still more is the conviction of Christian minds when great principles of justice have triumphed in a contest which was forced upon a nation, when the question is finally settled whether flagrant wrong could be met in its proud and grasping course, and be overthrown while yet there is hope, or must sweep onward to utter national ruin. This Christian conviction, or hope-if it be only a hope,—is an authorized one. It is built on a faith in a divine plan, and in a progress dependent, not on inevitable law, but on the counsels which originated the system and sent the Son of God into the world. It has thus a Scriptural foundation; but more than that, the prophetic teaching of the Old Testament, and of the New, present the world to us as a battle field between good and evil, and the leading conflicts of the world as the steps forward, in preparation for the final establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The great events in this land since 1861 have been looked upon by Christian minds as the crisis which was to deter

mine our whole future history, as the crucible in which our national character was undergoing the purifying fires. Why was this view entertained? Not because the war grew into such immense proportions, for great wars lasting longer and costing more blood, have had comparatively small results. The thirty years war of the seventeenth century in Germany, with its ten millions of lives sacrificed, and its multitude of villages desolated, did indeed bring about a compromise of hostile religions and baffled the Emperor's hope that he might again lay the foundation of a truly imperial power; but how little good after all was wrought by it for society, or for relig ion! So the seven years war of the next century destroyed, as it is said, a million of lives, and ended in securing to Frederick the Great a province, of which he was by treaty master when the war began. And vast as were the French wars from the Revolution to the downfall of Napoleon, their effects were rather negative and destructive than positively salutary, and at the last, without solving the problem of society and government in France, they ended in a reaction which Europe still feels to its very core.

Not the magnitude of our late struggle then, nor the principle of self-preservation with which it was waged at first, but the issues into which we were forced by divine providence in spite of ourselves-issues which at the opening of the war only a small part of the North would have accepted-constitute the importance of this war and inaugurate a new era in the history of the United States and of mankind. Most wars, if they do not end in loss or mutual exhaustion, gain but a few of the objects for which they were undertaken, but this, being a strife of principles, has wrought mightier changes in society and government than we dared to hope. It began in self-preservation, it ended in the solution of a problem which no skill of ours could unravel beforehand, and in regard to which a devout mind can only cry "what hath God wrought!"

-

The new era is ushered in by the overthrow of slavery and of secession, the motive and the doctrine of the rebellion. The first, by the admission of all thinking persons had met its fate before the constitutional amendment rendering it an impossible thing wherever the law of the Union is acknowledged, and

before the returning states had accepted its abolition as an inevitable fact. The other may be still sustained by the same. arguments which multitudes at the South, and a few political "incurables" at the North, regarded five years ago as convincing. Possibly few of those who thought they were fighting and suffering for state rights will at once give up this favorite theory, which since the days of nullification in 1832, when in a milder shape nearly all the South condemned it, has been gaining by degrees a fearful power, and has thoroughly controlled the Southern mind. And possibly in the future there may be movements in discontented states on a small scale, which will justify themselves on a similar view of the Federal Union. But after all, secession is extinct and can never be raised to life again. Its animating principle, the motive from which it drew its power, being itself given up, can never again quicken the dead corpse. Never again, it is probable, can a number of contiguous states adopt this doctrine as a pretext for resistance to the general government. The immense love of the Union, which secession first revealed to us, will, as long as the memory of the years of strife shall live, or its history be preserved, prevent similar appeals to such an ultima ratio of disaffected states. The absurdity of secession, as a practical principle, needed only the experience of the Southern Confederacy to place it in the strongest light, for what security was there to this new Union, or at what moment could not any one of the States break away from the covenant. And the right so to do they were obliged to admit, only qualifying it by the important addition that such new secession would be the cause of war. Why then had there not been a good cause of war on the part of the Northern States? Thus secession is stript of its pretext, it has been conquered, it has been denounced, it is shown to be self-destructive, and a mean name adopted to cover up a revolution. And, so, henceforth the old arguments so often urged since the forming of the constitution, to the effect that it secured its own permanence, that no power of a state or a cluster of states could dissolve it, that United States law is supreme everywhere, such arguments as these urged by Jackson, by Webster, and others without number, besides their old cogency, have gained a new and vast power from the

experience through which the country has passed. Separation or secession now not only means wrong but also an inheritance of war through generations, a destruction of our highest hopes, a violation of the highest principle of our institutions.

The new era resting on such foundations,-on the abolition of slavery, on the rejection of the right of secession, which are not temporary, but permanent, which are not superficial but deep seated-must be permanent itself. There is no going backward. There is no evading the force of the new events by any political folly, all powerful as political folly sometimes seems. Even those political moles, the demagogues, must discover, and are beginning to discover, that the old issues and the old compromises are a story of the past, that the precedents of the worst days of the republic can be applied successfuly no longer. Even those men of one idea, the conservatives of form rather than of spirit, must ere long see that the world moves. Even Southern ministers will by and by give up the argument from Noah's curse on Ham, from Hagar and Onesimus; indeed we anticipate that some persons still living may see the time when two or three gray headed men, too old to learn, too isolated to do harm, shall be pointed at as the last advocates of the peculiar doctrines of the "Church South."

There is then a natural exultation in every thinking mind, and a hopeful looking forward, when we take into account that a malady of the body politic that seemed incurable has been cured, that a stormy cape has been doubled without foundering or shipwreck. We have a right to rejoice and to rejoice in hope. We may hope on the same ground on which the Christian may hope, as he reviews his experience,-that he who has begun a good work in us will carry it on, until the kingdom of Christ shall be completely established within our borders and through the world. And this hope may infuse strength into every endeavor to act worthily of the times; it may and must put new power into all Christian movements, and may help us to become alive to a new sense of responsibility.

But danger goes along with hope, and new dangers as well as new possibilities of good attend on the beginning of a new era. The Israelites had a right to exult when they had crossed the Red Sea, because Jehovah had "triumphed glo

riously," and they had a right to hope that he would "bring them in and plant them in the mountain of his inheritance." But as they wandered forty years in the wilderness for their sins, so the speed or the slowness of our course henceforth, before we can become that thoroughly Christian nation which can se cure and retain prosperity, depend on our conduct, on being aware of our dangers, on perceiving what we can and ought to aim at, on having the spirit to go steadily forward in the right path. The great deliverance God has wrought for us gives us possibilities of good only, and furnishes us with encouragement, but no more supersedes our working, or relieves our anxieties, than the providential rescue of a ship from foundering at sea ought to relieve the crew from all apprehensions during the remainder of the voyage. Let us look at the dangers and the risks, at the powers and the duties which the new era brings with it. Let us do this, without entering into political questions any more than is necessary in order to take a full view of the situation as from some Christian watchtower of far looking thought.

The first imagined danger we notice is suggested by the tremendous power exercised by the general government during the continuance of the war. The contrast especially between the imbecility of the former administration and the almost omnipresent efficiency of Mr. Lincoln's government, controlling railroads, telegraphs, newspapers, arresting men for disloyal utterances imputed to them, superseding civil by martial law and stationing its troops and officers in uninvaded districts, such exhibitions of power, together with the impression produced by fleets and by armies so great as no American had ever dreamed of before, were enough to excite alarm lest the States should lose their old political standing, and a consolidated central power should introduce a movement towards an imperial despotism. But if some admired such a power as they admire the Napoleonic state, and if others would wish, for the sake of the conveniences of general intercourse, to entrust the central government with greater control over the avenues of communication and the currency, the danger of the growth of centralism is dispersed by the facts which have occurred since the war came to an end. The States are as strong