ce, the timid compromisers who are always trying to curve the
straight lines and round the sharp angles of eternal law, the continual
debate of these living questions is the one offered means of 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