we know what we are fighting for now, and what we
are fighting against.

We are fighting for our existence. We say to those who would take back
their several contributions to that undivided unity which we call the
Nation; the bronze is cast; the statue is on its pedestal; you cannot
reclaim the brass you flung into the crucible! There are rights,
possessions, privileges, policies, relations, duties, acquired, retained,
called into existence in virtue of the principle of absolute
solidarity,--belonging to the United States as an organic whole, which
cannot be divided, which none of its constituent parties can claim as its
own, which perish out of its living frame when the wild forces of
rebellion tear it limb from limb, and which it must defend, or confess
self-government itself a failure.

We are fighting for that Constitution upon which our national existence
reposes, now subjected by those who fired the scroll on which it was
written from the cannon at Fort Sumter, to all those chances which the
necessities of war entail upon every human arrangement, but still the
venerable charter of our wide Republic.

We cannot fight for these objects without attacking the one mother cause
of all the progeny of lesser antagonisms. Whether we know it or not,
whether we mean it or not, we cannot help fighting against the system
that has proved the source of all those miseries which the author of the
Declaration of Independence trembled to anticipate. And this ought to
make us willing to do and to suffer cheerfully. There were Holy Wars of
old, in which it was glory enough to die, wars in which the one aim was
to rescue the sepulchre of Christ from the hands of infidels. The
sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine! He rose from that burial-place
more than eighteen hundred years ago. He is crucified wherever his
brothers are slain without cause; he lies buried wherever man, made in
his Maker's image, is entombed in ignorance lest he should learn the
rights which his Divine Master gave him! This is our Holy War, and we
must fight it against that great General who will bring to it all the
powers with which he fought against the Almighty before he was cast down
from heaven. He has retained many a cunning advocate to recruit for him;
he has bribed many a smooth-tongued preacher to be his chaplain; he has
engaged the sordid by their avarice, the timid by their fears, the
profligate by their love of adventure, and thousands of noble