f grace and
hope of earthly redemption. And thus a true, unhesitating patriot may be
willing to listen with patience to arguments which he does not need, to
appeals which have no special significance for him, in the hope that some
less clear in mind or less courageous in temper may profit by them.

As we look at the condition in which we find ourselves on this fourth day
of July, 1863, at the beginning of the Eighty-eighth Year of American
Independence, we may well ask ourselves what right we have to indulge in
public rejoicings. If the war in which we are engaged is an accidental
one, which might have been avoided but for our fault; if it is for any
ambitious or unworthy purpose on our part; if it is hopeless, and we are
madly persisting in it; if it is our duty and in our power to make a safe
and honorable peace, and we refuse to do it; if our free institutions are
in danger of becoming subverted, and giving place to an irresponsible
tyranny; if we are moving in the narrow circles which are to ingulf us in
national ruin,--then we had better sing a dirge, and leave this idle
assemblage, and hush the noisy cannon which are reverberating through the
air, and tear down the scaffolds which are soon to blaze with fiery
symbols; for it is mourning and not joy that should cover the land; there
should be silence, and not the echo of noisy gladness, in our streets;
and the emblems with which we tell our nation's story and prefigure its
future should be traced, not in fire, but in ashes.

If, on the other hand, this war is no accident, but an inevitable result
of long incubating causes; inevitable as the cataclysms that swept away
the monstrous births of primeval nature; if it is for no mean, unworthy
end, but for national life, for liberty everywhere, for humanity, for the
kingdom of God on earth; if it is not hopeless, but only growing to such
dimensions that the world shall remember the final triumph of right
throughout all time; if there is no safe and honorable peace for us but a
peace proclaimed from the capital of every revolted province in the name
of the sacred, inviolable Union; if the fear of tyranny is a phantasm,
conjured up by the imagination of the weak, acted on by the craft of the
cunning; if so far from circling inward to the gulf of our perdition, the
movement of past years is reversed, and every revolution carries us
farther and farther from the centre of the vortex, until, by God's
blessing, we shall soon