ip truly catholic in the one work of Christ, once tasted,
was not easily foregone. Already the current, perplexed with eddies, had
begun to set in the direction of Christian unity. How much the common
labors of Christian men and women and Christian ministers of every
different name, through the five years of bloody strife, contributed to
swell and speed the current, no one can measure.

According to a well-known law of the kingdom of heaven, the intense
experiences of the war, both in the army and out of it, left no man just
as he was before. To "them that were exercised thereby" they brought
great promotion in the service of the King. The cases are not few nor
inconspicuous of men coming forth from the temptations and the
discipline of the military service every way stronger and better
Christians than they entered it. The whole church gained higher
conceptions of the joy and glory of self-sacrifice, and deeper and more
vivid insight into the significance of vicarious suffering and death.
The war was a rude school of theology, but it taught some things well.
The church had need of all that it could learn, in preparation for the
tasks and trials that were before it.

There were those, on the other hand, who emerged from the military
service depraved and brutalized; and those who, in the rush of business
incidental to the war, were not trained to self-sacrifice and duty, but
habituated to the seeking of selfish interests in the midst of the
public peril and affliction. We delight in the evidences that these
cases were a small proportion of the whole. But even a small percentage
of so many hundreds of thousands mounts up to a formidable total. The
early years of the peace were so marked by crimes of violence that a
frequent heading in the daily newspapers was "The Carnival of Crime."
Prosperity, or the semblance of it, came in like a sudden flood.
Immigration of an improved character poured into the country in greater
volume than ever. Multitudes made haste to be rich, and fell into
temptations and snares. The perilous era of enormous fortunes began.

FOOTNOTES:

[340:1] E. B. Andrews, "History of the United States," vol. ii., p. 66.

[342:1] Read "The Kansas Crusade," by Eli Thayer, Harpers, New York,
1889. It is lively reading, and indispensable to a full understanding of
this part of the national history.

[346:1] Thompson, "The Presbyterians," p. 135.

[346:2] "Narrative of the State of Religion" of the Southe