.

Comment upon this is unnecessary. Let no loyal man forget these
expressions; they reveal the egg from whence, after fifty years'
incubation, this rebellion has been hatched.

But our theme, 'The Value of the Union,' continually expands before us;
nevertheless we must bring our article to a close. We do so with the
following remarks:

An individual is truly free, not in the degree only in which he governs
himself, but in the degree that he governs himself according to the
central truth and right of things, or according to the loftiness of the
standard by which he regulates his conduct.

It is by the possession of truth, and by obedience to what that truth
teaches, that a man rises out of evil and error, and out of bondage
thereto.

The possession of truth constitutes intelligence.

But intelligence is worse than useless without obedience to its highest
requirements, which is virtue.

Virtue, or morality, in its turn (or decent exterior conduct), is
nothing without that which constitutes the soul's topmost and central
faculty, viz., the religious sentiment, or that which links the soul to
God, the centre of all things. As the parts of any organism, as we have
seen, fall into confusion and discord when the central bond is wanting;
so do the powers of the soul, when it closes itself by evil doing
against the entrance of the beams of life and light that unceasingly
flow upon it from God, the spiritual sun and centre of the universe.

Now, as individuals make up the nation, this will be free, and the Union
valued and preserved, in the degree that each individual is intelligent,
virtuous, and religious.

Upon those, then, who educate the individual, those to whom the infant,
the child, the youth, is entrusted, to mould and imbue at the most
pliant and receptive period of life--on those, whose office it is to
form the young mind into the love and practice of all things good and
true, and an abhorrence of their opposites; upon these, the parents, the
teachers, and the pastors of the land; upon these, when this hurricane
of civil war shall have passed away, do the preservation of this Union
and the hopes of mankind more than ever depend. Upon home education and
influence; on the schools and on the churches on these three forces
centred upon, interwoven, and vitalized by true Christian doctrine, as
revealed in the Sacred Scriptures or inspired Word of God, rest the
destinies of the American republic. May those who wi