ch so crowd upon us
that we have hardly time to grasp them; if we are fully aware of the
infinite possibilities of what has been so well called this 'fearfully
glorious present'? I think not, and I do not know that it is possible
for us to do so. Only when we look back upon it from the hight of the
far-off future, shall we see the country through which we are journeying
in all its grand, sweeping outlines, its majestic proportions, and its
imperial tints of coloring. The days of peace and tranquillity in a
nation as in a life are robed in colors sweet and grateful to the
eye--softened hues of green and gold--but the days of war and
tribulation are days of scarlet and crimson, and all that can be seen in
heaven and earth is black and flame; but the days when Right achieves
great triumphs, even through bloodshed and desolation, are days of
imperial purple, hues royal in their magnificence. Thank Heaven that,
through the days of blood and black, we have at last reached the purple
days of life as a nation. A little more than a year of war, and now the
skies are brightening. Thank God! for they have been black, black, black
with horror and suffering and crime. And yet such a year as this, I am
almost persuaded, is worth a score of years of peace. It certainly has
achieved more for truth and humanity and God than the score of years
which preceded it. As a nation, we had become almost despicable. Such
supple, yielding slaves of 'Democratic' demagogues; such cringing,
fawning, knee-bending, hand-kissing agents of the diabolical, traitorous
Slave-Power; such apologists and supporters of Wrong; such
pusillanimous, weak-hearted advocates of the unpopular Right; such
slaves to Cotton and its threats, that we had almost lost the God-given
independence of American freemen, and seemed--thank God! events have
proved only _seemed_--to be entirely given up to money and mechanics,
to have become, indeed, a nation of peddlers. So much so, indeed, that
our prophets were stoned in their own lands, our apostles stricken down
in the national councils, and the few voices that were raised for God
and humanity, from out the miry slough of a trafficking age, were almost
unheard in the general din which went up from all the nations, and the
burden of whose song seemed to be: 'There is no God but Cotton, and we
are all his prophets.' But the moment the first gun was fired, how all
this changed! How regally the whole nation rose up! How magnificently