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year 1860, and others followed their example in the autumn meeting of 1861. They formed their General Assembly of the Southern Confederacy on the 4th of December of that year. Even before the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln the Protestant Episcopal Convention of several States formally withdrew from the Union, and that fiery soldier-priest Leonidas Polk, Bishop of Louisiana, commanded the clergy to shift their public prayers from the President of the United States to that of the Confederate States, and announced in a pastoral letter that "Our separation from our brethren of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States has been effected because we must follow our nationality. . . . Our relations to each other hereafter will be the relations we now both hold to the men of our mother church in England." Unable to restrain his ardor within the limits of the church militant, he exchanged his crozier for a sword and died by a cannon shot on the Georgia hills.

laid upon the table, nearly every member of the Presbytery voting against it.1

The Methodist Church in the South had separated from their brethren in the North fifteen years before the war on the question of slavery, and a portion of their clergy and laity when the war broke out naturally engaged in it with their accustomed zeal; but they were by no means unanimous, even within the seceding States, and the organization was virtually wrecked by the war.2

As the national authority began to be reëstablished throughout the States in rebellion, not the least embarrassing of the questions which generals in command were called upon to decide was that of the treatment of churches whose pastors were openly or covertly disloyal to the Union. There was no general plan adopted by the Government for such cases; in fact, it was impossible to formulate a policy which should meet so vast a variety of circumstances as presented themselves in the different reAt the session of the first General Council gions of the South. The Board of Missions of of the Protestant Episcopal Church at Augusta the Methodist Church sent down some of their an address was adopted congratulating the ablest ministers, with general authority to take Church in the Confederate States upon the charge of abandoned churches, and to estabunity which existed in its councils, upon its lish in them their interrupted worship. The promise of growth and expansion, and upon mission boards of other denominations took the fact that the leading minds of the new re- similar action, and the Secretary of War3 gave public were of their own communion; they general orders to the officers commanding the called upon the Church to make strenuous ef- different departments to permit ministers of forts in behalf of the slaves of the South, and the gospel bearing the commission of these gently advocated such an arrangement of their mission boards to exercise the functions of peculiar institution as not to violate the right their office and to give them all the aid, counof marriage among the blacks. "Hitherto," tenance, and support which might be practicathey say, "we have been hindered by the press-ble. But before and after these orders there ure of Abolitionists; now that we have thrown was much clashing between the military and off from us that hateful and infidel pestilence, we should prove to the world that we are faithful to our trust, and the Church should lead the hosts of the Lord in this work of justice and mercy." Feeble efforts in this direction were made by churches in other communions in the South, but strong opposition was at once developed. In the Transylvania Presbytery it was argued that "Though the matter presented was one of undoubted grievance, involving a sin which ought to be purged away, yet, to prevent agitation in the Church at such a time of intense political strife, there must be no intermeddling," and a resolution in favor of the solemnization of matrimony among slaves was

1 McPherson," History of the Rebellion," p. 548. 2 At a convention of loyal ministers and laymen of the Methodist Episcopal Church held at Knoxville, August, 1864, it was resolved that the loyal members of the conference have a just claim to all the church property; that they really constitute the Southern Methodist Episcopal Church, within the bounds of the Holston Conference; that they propose, at the earliest day practicable, to transfer the same to the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States; and

the ecclesiastical authorities, which had its rise generally in the individual temperaments of the respective generals and priests. There was an instance in one place where a young officer rose in his pew and requested an Episcopal minister to read the prayer for the President of the United States, which he had omitted. Upon the minister's refusal the soldier advanced to the pulpit and led the preacher, loudly protesting, to the door, and then quietly returning to the altar himself read the prayernot much, it is to be feared, to the edification of the congregation. General Butler arrested a clergyman in Norfolk, and placed him at hard labor on the public works for disloyalty that the ministers be instructed to propose to their congregations to unite en masse with that church. Their report states "that there are in the bounds of the Holston Conference 120 preachers known to be loyal, and 40 others supposed to be true to the Union; and it is thought, therefore, that the work of reconstruction will be easily accomplished." [McPherson, "History of the Rebellion," p. 546.]

3 March 10, 1864. McPherson, "History of the Rebellion," p. 522.

in belief and action; but the President reversed this sentence and changed it to one of exclusion from the Union lines. The Catholic Bishop of Natchez having refused to read the prescribed form of prayer for the President, and having protested in an able and temperate paper against the orders of the commanding general in this regard, the latter ordered him to be expelled from the Union lines, although the order was almost immediately rescinded. General Rosecrans issued an order 2 in Missouri requiring the members of religious convocations to give satisfactory evidence of their loyalty to the Government of the United States as a condition precedent to their assemblage and protection. In answer to the protestations which naturally resulted from this mandate he replied that it was given at the request of many loyal church members, both lay and clerical; that if he should permit all bodies claiming to be religious to meet without question, a convocation of Price's army, under the garb of religion, might assemble with impunity and plot treason. He claimed that there was no hardship in compelling the members of such assemblages to establish their loyalty by oath and certificate, and insisted that his order, while providing against public danger, really protected the purity and the freedom of religion. In the course of these controversies between secessionist ministers and commanding generals an incident occurred which deserves a moment's notice, as it led to a clear and vigorous statement from Mr. Lincoln of his attitude in regard to these matters. During the year 1862 a somewhat bitter discussion arose between the Rev. Dr. McPheeters of the Vine Street Church in St. Louis and some of his congregation in regard to his supposed sympathies with the rebellion. Looking back upon the controversy from this distance of time it seems that rather hard measure was dealt to the parson; for although, from all the circumstances of the case, there appears little doubt that his feelings were strongly enlisted in the cause of the rebellion, he behaved with so much discretion that the principal offenses charged against him by his zealous parishioners were that he once baptized a small rebel by the name of Sterling Price, and that he would not declare himself in favor of the Union. The difference in his church grew continually more flagrant and was entertained by interminable letters and statements on both sides, until at last the provost-marshal intervened, ordering the arrest of Dr. McPheeters, excluding him from his pulpit, and taking the control of his church out of the hands of its trustees. This action gave rise to extended comment, not

1 Report of Judge-Advocate General, April 30, 1864. 2 March 7, 1864. 3 Jan. 2, 1863. 4 Dec. 22, 1863.

only in Missouri, but throughout the Union. The President, being informed of it, wrote3 to General Curtis disapproving the act of the provost-marshal, saying, in a terse and vigorous phrase, which immediately obtained wide currency, "The United States Government must not, as by this order, undertake to run the churches. When an individual in a church, or out of it, becomes dangerous to the public interest he must be checked; but let the churches, as such, take care of themselves." But even this peremptory and unmistakable command did not put an end to the discussion. Taking the hands of the government away from the preacher did not quench the dissensions in the church, nor restore the pastor to the position which he occupied before the war; and almost a year later some of the friends of Dr. McPheeters considered it necessary and proper to ask the intervention of the President to restore to him all his ecclesiastical privileges in addition to the civil rights which they admitted he already enjoyed. This the President, in a letter of equal clearness and vigor, refused to do. "I have never interfered," he said, "nor thought of interfering, as to who shall, or shall not, preach in any church; nor have I knowingly or believingly tolerated any one else to so interfere by my authority"; but he continues, "If, after all, what is now sought is to have me put Dr. McPheeters back over the heads of a majority of his own congregation, that too will be declined. I will not have control of any church on any side." The case finally ended by the exclusion of Dr. McPheeters from his pulpit by the order of the presbytery having ecclesiastical authority in the case.

In this wise and salutary abstention from any interference with the churches, which was dictated by his own convictions as well as enjoined by the Constitution, the President did not always have the support of his subordinates. He had not only, as we have seen, to administer occasional rebukes to his over-zealous generals, but even in his own Cabinet he was sometimes compelled to overrule a disposition to abuse of authority in things spiritual. Several weeks after he had so clearly expressed himself in the McPheeters case, he found, to his amazement, that the Secretary of War had been giving orders virtually placing the army in certain places at the disposition of a Methodist bishop for the enforcement of his ecclesiastical decrees. He addressed to Mr. Stanton a note of measured censure,5 which was followed by an order from the War Department explaining and modifying the more objectionable features of the

5" After having made these declarations in good faith and in writing, you can conceive of my embar

former document. The Secretary explained that his action had no other intention than to furnish "a means of rallying the Methodist people in favor of the Union, in localities where the rebellion had disorganized and scattered them." This explanation was not entirely satisfactory to the President, but he thought best to make no further public reference to the matter. Scarcely was this affair disposed of when a complaint was received from Memphis of some interference by the military with a church edifice there. Mr. Lincoln made upon the paper this peremptory indorsement: "If the military have military need of the church building, let them keep it; otherwise, let them get out of it, and leave it and its owners alone, except for the causes that justify the arrest of any one." 2 Two months later the President, hearing of further complications in the case, made still another order, which even at the risk of wearying the reader we will give, from his own manuscript, as illustrating not only his conscientious desire that justice should be done, but also the exasperating obstacles he was continually compelled to surmount, in those troubled times, to accomplish, with all the vast powers at his disposition, this reasonable desire. I am now told that the military were not in possession of the building; and yet that in pretended execution of the above they, the military, put one set of men out of and another set into the building. This, if true, is most extraordinary. I say again, if there be no military need for the building, leave it alone, neither putting any one in or out of it, except on finding some one preaching or practicing treason, in which case lay hands upon him, just as if he were doing the same thing in any other building, or in the streets or highways.3

He at last made himself understood and his orders respected; yet so widespread was the tendency of generals to meddle with matters beyond their jurisdiction, that it took three years of such vehement injunctions as these to teach them to keep their hands away from the clergy and the churches.

Lincoln had a profound respect for every form of sincere religious belief. He steadily refused to show favor to any particular denomination of Christians; and when General Grant issued an unjust and injurious order against the Jews, expelling them from his department, the President ordered it to be revoked the moment it was brought to his notice.4

He was a man of profound and intense religious feeling. We have no purpose of atrassment at now having brought to me what purported to be a formal order of the War Department, bearing date November 30, 1863, giving Bishop Ames control and possession of all the Methodist churches in certain Southern military departments whose pastors have not been appointed by a loyal bishop or bishops, and ordering the military to aid him against any resistance

tempting to formulate his creed; we question if he himself ever did so. There have been swift witnesses who, judging from expressions uttered in his callow youth, have called him an atheist, and others who, with the most laudable intentions, have remembered improbable conversations which they bring forward to prove at once his orthodoxy and their own intimacy with him. But leaving aside these apocryphal evidences, we have only to look at his authentic public and private utterances to see how deep and strong in all the latter part of his life was the current of his religious thought and emotion. He continually invited. and appreciated, at their highest value, the prayers of good people. The pressure of the tremendous problems by which he was surrounded; the awful moral significance of the conflict in which he was the chief combatant; the overwhelming sense of personal responsibility, which never left him for an hour-all contributed to produce, in a temperament naturally serious and predisposed to a spiritual view of life and conduct, a sense of reverent acceptance of the guidance of a Superior Power. From that morning when, standing amid the falling snowflakes on the railway car at Springfield, he asked the prayers of his neighbors in those touching phrases whose echo rose that night in invocations from thousands of family altars, to that memorable hour when on the steps of the Capitol he humbled himself before his Creator in the sublime words of the second inaugural, there is not an expression known to have come from his lips or his pen but proves that he held himself answerable in every act of his career to a more august tribunal than any on earth. The fact that he was not a communicant of any church, and that he was singularly reserved in regard to his personal religious life, gives only the greater force to these striking proofs of his profound reverence and faith.

In final substantiation of this assertion, we subjoin two papers from the hand of the President, one official and the other private, which bear within themselves the imprint of a sincere devotion and a steadfast reliance upon the power and benignity of an overruling Providence. The first is an order which he issued on the 16th of November, 1864, on the observance of Sunday:

The President, Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, desires and enjoins the orderly observwhich may be made to his taking such possession and control. What is to be done about it?" [Lincoln to Stanton, MS., Feb. 11, 1864. ]

1 Lincoln to Hogan, Feb. 13, 1864.
2 Lincoln MS., March 4, 1864.
3 Lincoln MS., May 13, 1864.

4 War Records, Vol. XVII., pp. 424, 530.

ance of the Sabbath by the officers and men in the military and naval service. The importance for man and beast of the prescribed weekly rest, the sacred rights of Christian soldiers and sailors, a becoming deference to the best sentiment of Christian people, and a due regard for the Divine will, demand that Sunday labor in the Army and Navy be reduced to the measure of strict necessity. The discipline and character of the national forces should not suffer, nor the cause they defend be imperiled, by the profanation of the day or name of the Most High. "At this time of public distress [adopting the words of Washington in 1776] men may find enough to do in the service of their God and their country without abandoning themselves to vice and immorality." The first General Order issued by the Father of his Country after the Declaration of Independence indicated the spirit in which our institutions were founded and should ever be defended. "The General hopes and trusts that every officer and man will endeavor to live and act as becomes a Christian soldier, defending the dearest rights and liberties of his country."1

The date of this remarkable order leaves no possibility for the insinuation that it sprung from any political purpose or intention. Mr. Lincoln had just been reëlected by an overwhelming majority; his party was everywhere triumphant; his own personal popularity was unbounded; there was no temptation to hypocrisy or deceit. There is no explanation of the order except that it was the offspring of sincere conviction. But if it may be said that this was, after all, an exoteric utterance, spring1 General McDowell used to tell a story which illustrates Mr. Lincoln's Sabbatarian feeling. The President had ordered a movement which required dispatch, and in his anxiety rode to McDowell's headquarters to inquire how soon he could start. "On Monday morning," said McDowell; "or, by pushing things, perhaps Sunday afternoon." Lincoln, after a moment's thought, said," McDowell, get a good ready and start Monday." [Herman Haupt, MS. Memoirs.]

ing from those relations of religion and good government which the wisest rulers have always recognized in their intercourse with the people, we will give one other document, of which nothing of the sort can be said. It is a paper which Mr. Lincoln wrote in September, 1862, while his mind was burdened with the weightiest question of his life, the weightiest with which this century has had to grapple. Wearied with all the considerations of law and of expediency with which he had been struggling for two years, he retired within himself and tried to bring some order into his thoughts by rising above the wrangling of men and of parties, and pondering the relations of human government to the Divine. In this frame of mind, absolutely detached from any earthly considerations, he wrote this meditation. It has never been published. It was not written to be seen of men. It was penned in the awful sincerity of a perfectly honest soul trying to bring itself into closer communion with its Maker.

The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of cannot be for and against the same thing at the God. Both may be and one must be wrong. God same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power on the minds of the now contestants, he could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun, he could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

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POET, whose golden songs in silence sung
Thrill from the canvas to the hearts of men,—
Sweet harmonies that speak without a tongue,
Melodious numbers writ without a pen,-
The great gods gifted thee and hold thee dear;
Placed in thy hand the torch which genius lit,
Touched thee with genial sunshine, and good cheer,
And swift heat lightnings of a charming wit
Whose shafts are ever harmless, though so bright;
Gave thee of all life's blessings this, the best,—

The true love of thy kind,- for thy delight.

So be thou happy, poet-painter blest,

Whose gentle eyes look out, all unaware,

Beneath the brow of Keats, soft-crowned with shadowy hair.

Celia Thaxter.

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F

ROM a friend and fellow-craftsman, who was the owner and inventor of a camping-car, a small company of wood-engravers had received invitations to a novel camping-out excursion. Hungering for the woods and fields we hurried away, each by himself, as opportunity offered, to seek the unknown regions of Hockanum, near Northampton, Massachusetts.

Night had come before I reached Northampton, and as no one met me at the station, I went no farther that night. But I took the road again at an early hour the next morning, and rode through a mysterious land where the fog hid all but the gray roadway under the feet of our horse, whose head and ears, almost lost in the fog, stretched outward in the distance in an alarming manner.

For fully two miles we sped on across a level sandy road without seeing a solitary object, animate or inanimate, until we came at last to a clump of trees close to the narrow roadway, and then, with a sudden dip down a sandy bank, I found myself on the shore of the Connecticut River. Before me was a rickety-looking gangplank reaching from the sand to a flat-bottomed and open scow. This was Hockanum ferry. By the roadside and in reach from the carriage was a tin horn, or trumpet, hanging upon a stake, like an extinguisher upon a candle, and a blast upon this instrument is regarded as a peremptory summons by the ferryman.

The ferryman and his assistant soon appeared, and we pushed out upon the mysterious waste. I could see nothing beyond the gray and steamVOL. XXXVIII.—74.

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ing water, and was glad when we grounded upon the sand. From the ferry it was but a short walk up to the tavern.

Standing for a moment hesitatingly upon the piazza, after repeated knocking at the open doorway, which brought no response, and straining my eyes at the fog beyond, I saw coming out of the dimness the outline of a barn and, taking shape gradually, the ponderous and portly form of a man, who was engaged in greasing the axles of a wagon. The fog so narrowed and circumscribed the visible world that what remained was of immense importance to me, and the presence of mine host, whom I found this man to be, was hailed with pleasure. He explained that my friends were in camp upon the mountain right above us, and he pointed over his shoulder up towards the omnipresent screen of the fog, shutting out mountain and the blue heavens beyond. But he said he was going to the camp soon, and we made our way to the house, where I found a surprisingly good breakfast awaiting me.

After our pleasant repast Edwards was ready to go to the camp, and we went to the doorway. Walking out upon the piazza, another and an entirely different world was before me. I could hardly believe my eyes. Such a revelation-light, brilliancy, sweetness, everywhere. Out of a moving, vapory atmosphere rushed swiftly as a swallow's flight bits of blue sky and fragments of mountain.

The cozy old hotel, sitting calmly and peacefully by the highway, with its well-worn drive to the hospitable entrance; the heavy and

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