Psalms 115: 1, 2, 3.

Not unto us, Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory,
                    for thy mercy and for thy truth's sake.
Wherefore should the heathen say, Where is now their God?
But our God is in the Heavens: he hath done whatsoever he pleased.

The devout Proclamation of our President invites us to give, to-day, a public manifestation of our gratitude for the clear proofs of the Divine blessing hitherto extended to the people of the Confederate States in their efforts to maintain and perpetuate public liberty, individual rights and national independence.  At the same time it calls upon us to humble ourselves before God in this our time of peril and difficulty, to recognize His righteous government, to acknowledge His goodness in times past, and to supplicate His merciful protection for the future.  It is a day to be devoted to mingled gratitude and humiliation—to thanksgiving for great mercies and to a confession of our unworthiness of them—to acknowledgment that unto Him alone belongs the glory of our present condition, and to supplication that he will continue to be our shield and strong tower of defence.  This direction which the Proclamation of our Chief Magistrate has given to the devotions of the day will require a review of our civil affairs from the commencement of our constitutional struggle, in order to point out to you the overruling and directing hand of God in all our movements.  May His Holy Spirit rest upon me and preserve my pen from bitterness and my tongue from evil speaking, and may that same Spirit enlighten your minds to perceive His presence in all that is past, and sanctify your hearts to keep it there through all that is before us. 

For many years past, God has permitted us, as a people, to be deeply humiliated.  While we have enjoyed great material prosperity and have, in a certain sense, maintained our position under the forms of the Constitution, we have been systematically slandered and traduced, in public and in private, at home and abroad, in a way such as no free and independent people has ever before so quietly submitted to.  Because of the maintenance of an institution inherited from our fathers, which the rest of the world was pleased to consider as incompatible with civilization and with Christianity, we have been made, thro’ every form of literature, a by-word among the nations of the earth.  The lecture room, the forum, the senate chamber, the pulpit, have all been used as the instruments of our denunciation.  The newspapers of the Northern States and of Europe have vied to express their abhorrence of our social life and their contempt for ourselves.  The grave statesman, the flippant poet, the sentimental novelist, the critical reviewer, the witty satirist, has each, in turn, singled out our homes as the targets of his falsehood, and our mothers, and wives, and daughters, as the objects of his insult.  In many of the religious bodies of the United States, their communicants from the slaveholding States were excluded from the participation of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, and the Southern ministers from brotherly interchange of services.  We had committed an unpardonable sin in doing what Abraham, the friend of God, had done, what Philemon, the clearly beloved fellow laborer of Paul the aged, had not been ashamed to do.  All this abuse and misrepresentation was borne according to the temper of men, by some with the patience of Christians, leaving their justification in the hands of God, by others with contempt for an hypocrisy which could see the mote in a brother's eye, but not the beam in its own eye; by not a few with arrogant defiance and words of bitter scorn.  So far it had been a war of ideas, but leaving, nevertheless, rankling wounds behind.  Gradually it passed from literature to politics, and we were soon made aware that a deep laid scheme, resting upon the double basis of fanaticism and interest, was closing in upon us, which was to reduce to overt acts the ideas which had been so assiduously impressed not only upon the minds but upon the feelings of a whole generation.  We were to be humbled, not simply by being held up to the scorn of the noble and generous all the world over, but by being virtually disfranchised, even while retaining the forms of constitutional liberty, and being permitted to keep up the appearances of equality.  This scheme was devised by a far-seeing statesman, now occupying a position of commanding influence, who laid his plans with consummate skill and has pursued them, lor twenty years, with undeviating firmness, thro’ good report and thro’ evil report.  He advanced from point to point with the steady pace of inevitable destiny, drawing his lines closer and closer around his fluttering yet unresisting victim.  He educated through the Press and through the Pulpit, a whole generation, and the two ideas which he has made the ideas of the times, are the irrepressible conflict, under democratic institutions, between freedom and slavery, and the utter inability of slavery to maintain itself in the face of freedom.  The one idea combined into a great party the fanatic, the laborer, the foreigner, the farmer, the manufacturer—the other idea gave confidence and fearlessness to his followers.  When this powerful and ever growing host was thoroughly prepared for its work, he decided, after a calm survey of all the chances of the conflict which he was about to inaugurate, that success was inevitable.  He perceived that there was but one movement that could defeat his plans— a dissolution of the Union—and he maintained that to be an impossibility.  He believed that party divisions could keep the South so distracted—could separate her statesmen by such lines of bitterness—that no combined resistance to his sure but stealthy advances, could ever be brought about.  Had all his followers been as prudent as himself, and had not God been on our side, nothing could have saved us from slow but inevitable destruction, for it was not his purpose to strike any blow that might alarm or arouse the south, but to achieve all his purposes thro’ seemingly constitutional movements.  He well knew that the rapid growth of free territory, filling up with a foreign population of the most radical description, would surely give him what he aimed at, and that gradual changes in the Constitution or plausible interpretations of it would cover all his advances with the forms of law, and render any opposition difficult which proceeded beyond the limits of legislative or judicial resistance, of which he had no fear.  And then he looked upon the section he was devoting to ruin and perceived that she was engaged in a fierce Presidential strife even while he was closing his toils around her, well might he have supposed that his game was a sure one and that time only was needed to make his triumph complete.  At this moment, in the confidence of his heart, he might well have asked “Where is now their God?” and our answer could only have been “Our God is in the Heavens; he hath done whatsoever he pleased.”  But just at that moment, when he considered us deserted and doomed, commenced a series of events which has brought us this day to the altar of the living God to ascribe the glory of our deliverance not to ourselves but to Him, to confess our unworthiness of all this unmerited goodness and to pray him to continue to bless the work which he has thus far so graciously favored—"Not unto us, Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy and for thy truth's sake.”

By that mercy of God our greatest difficulties have been successfully passed through, I do not say our greatest privations or our keenest sufferings.  We may yet have before us years of self-denial and of self-discipline—we may be called to suffer in our fortunes and in our homes—our chambers may be clothed in mourning and our hearts may be lacerated with sorrow, and yet, with all this it may be true that our greatest difficulties as a nation have been already met and overcome.  The severest trials through which a movement, such as ours, is forced to wade, are those which arise in its inception and in its organization.  The work which we had undertaken to accomplish was in many respects a novel one.  It was not a revolution against intolerable ills—it was not the casting off of a foreign tyranny which had ground us to the dust—it was not even rebellion against the forms of the government under which we had lived, that we might substitute for them other forms, but it was the withdrawal from an Union, which had given us, in spite of its abuse and corrupt administration, a large share of material prosperity and social happiness, and which was associated with all our anticipations of national greatness.  The love of the Union was deeply ingrained into the hearts of the nation, and into no part of it more deeply than our own Southern section.  We were proud of it as that which gave us dignity abroad and advancement at home.  The people considered its freedom to be the envy of the world, its constitution the “ne plus ultra” of political wisdom.  Our most prominent statesmen had held it up before the nation as the bond of our greatness and as the hope of the human race.  Webster had consecrated it, in the Northern mind, by that master piece of eloquence which, as a rhetorical effort, has not been surpassed in ancient or modern times.  Clay had surrounded it with all the charms of his fascinating personal popularity, and had identified it, all through the West, with his wide-spread political opinions.  Jackson had added to the influence of this idol of the West, the idea that the Union had been once preserved by him and that, he had left its continued preservation as a sacred legacy to his followers.  Even Calhoun, while advocating the doctrines of State sovereignty, had pressed them most earnestly as the means whereby alone the Union could be maintained.  But above all, Washington-—the personification of American constitutional liberty—had committed it, in his dying words, to the people, as the central idea around which the future should forever revolve.  It seemed impossible ever to overcome this idea, and yet the question had become one, in the minds of many, no one knew how many, between the Union and a passive subjection to the yoke which had been so skillfully preparing for our necks.  Again and again had disunion been attempted and had failed, in some cases, with ignominy, with hopelessness in others.  The Union was fast absorbing everything in the popular mind and becoming the devouring idol of the nation.  Before it the constitution had changed its whole scope and meaning—before it liberty was fast becoming a mere word—under its sanction an irresponsible majority was transferring power, prosperity and wealth from one section of the country to the other.  The cry of Union had become a sanction for every irresponsible decree, a war-cry against all opposition that promised to be effectual.  The greatest danger of the South was, lest her people should permit this idea to overlay every other consideration and to rise superior to every constitutional infraction.  There was no overt act of tyranny to arouse the people to madness—no action on the part of the government to render resistance immediately necessary—nay, the government had, in a certain way, been in the hands of those who were willing to concede to the South her constitutional rights.  It was necessary to meet the deeply laid and far-reaching scheme of which we spoke just now, by an equally far-seeing and prospective opposition, and the difficulty was lest the people should not see, with any degree of unanimity, the necessity for immediate action.  All saw that the time was coming—all looked shudderingly at the prospect of civil convulsion which seemed drawing nearer and nearer—but Hope was strong in many of our most devoted Southern hearts—men who are now standing with their swords in their hands and their shields clasped over the bosom of their mother in the very front rank of battle—that God might yet avert the evil and postpone if not defer forever the stern necessity.  Secession was urged more upon what was before us in the future, than upon what had actually taken place.  Coming events had, to be sure, cast their ominous shadows before, but as yet there was no act which had come directly home to the cottage and fireside.  The raid into Virginia in 1859, had, at the time, produced a deep sensation, but as that Mother of States had treated it lightly herself, having been satisfied with the punishment of the wrong-doers, it had died away.  Under these circumstances, the most sanguine feared the issue of the question between Secession and the Union.  They believed that a majority in certain States would sanction an act of separation, but they dreaded such an opposition in each State as might neutralize the action and impair its whole moral effect.  Anything like a nearly equal vote in the States would have created a nucleus of opposition which would have rendered the whole proceeding inefficient.  But, thanks be to God he gave us among ourselves a more remarkable unanimity than anyone had dared to hope for, and what was lacking in ourselves, was supplied by the blunders of our adversaries.  Instead of supporting those who were not prepared for separation, by granting their moderate demands of constitutional amendment, they struck blow after blow upon an already over excited country, with a folly that was inconceivable.  Every plank upon which the Union men of the South desired to stand, was successively struck from under them, and the unanimity which the merits of the question failed to produce, their stubborn obstinacy rendered inevitable.  Instead of meeting the advances of the Union men of the South with a lofty magnanimity—a magnanimity which a victorious party can always afford to exhibit—they met them with a.  defiant arrogance.  They showed evidently by all their actions that they considered the struggle as at an end, and that they were commissioned to walk as conquerors over a subjugated territory.  One by one, all their friends were driven from them, and thus has been produced an Union of the South which was scarcely hoped for when the struggle first began.  And thanks be to God their folly still continues, and if, with humble hearts, we bow ourselves before God, and ascribe this important result not to ourselves but to His overruling and protecting Providence, we shall see still greater wonders worked for us, and new stars rising to take their place in our constellation, and nations coming to our aid who were supposed to be bound to the North by strong bonds of sympathy and fanaticism.  “Not unto us, Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy and for thy truth’s sake.”

Another danger which threatened us and which is the “experimentum crucis” of all new nationalities, was the adoption of the permanent constitution under which we were to live.  It is always a moment of critical peril.  It was the rock upon which Cromwell's successful usurpation crumbled to the dust.  So long as he lived, his genius sustained the civil arrangements which he had substituted for the English constitution, but with his death things flowed back into their ancient channel and the nation returned joyfully to the monarchical government even of the Stuarts.  It was the rock upon which the European revolutions of 1848 all split.  Theorists took up the question of government and inexperienced professors and fantastic poets were deputed to arrange constitutions and to mould the necessities of a practical world.  It ended just as any man of common sense might have foreseen that it would end, in the usurpation of a clear-headed man of practical experience.  In the formation of the constitution of 1789, that which we have just amended, there was large diversity of opinion, and much time was consumed ere it could be made satisfactory to the thirteen States.  The leading men of the country were forced to exert all their influence to secure its adoption.  Washington talked for it— Madison and Hamilton and Jay wrote for it—the heroes who had illustrated the war of the Revolution, prayed for it as the seal to their bloody triumph.  And yet, with all this array of influence, it was very reluctantly adopted by several of the States, and one distinguished gentleman of South Carolina said, during the debates upon its adoption in the Convention of that State, “I desire no other epitaph to be written upon my tomb than this: ‘Here lies the man who voted against the adoption of the Federal Constitution.’” How wonderful then, that in a few weeks a Congress of gentlemen, who had differed all their lives upon questions of national policy, who were just warm from heated discussions of principles as well as men, who were yet reeking with the sweat of one of the bitterest Presidential elections which had ever distracted the country, should have submitted to the people of the Confederate States a constitution of the most conservative character in which many grave errors of the old constitution had been amended and new features introduced of the highest moral and religious import.  They entered that Congress with several questions ominous of evil pressing upon them—questions upon which, if they had erred, their cause must have been shaken to its centre.  Among these were the re-opening of the African slave trade, the change in the value of slave representation, and that question which had once before disturbed the Union, the proper scale of duties upon imports and exports.  A false step upon any one of these three questions would have been, in our then condition, almost irretrievable.  The reopening of the African slave trade would have disgusted Europe and produced great dissatisfaction at home.  A change in the value of slave representation would have disaffected that large population of our mountains and pine barrens who own no slaves, and would have thrown them at once into the hands of demagogues.  Too high a tariff would have checked the sympathy of England and France, and too low a tariff would have forced us to resort to direct taxation, which a people must be educated to bear.  Marvelous then was it in our eyes that these gentlemen should have laid upon the altar of their country all their private views and all their public differences, and should have adjusted every point with such nice discrimination, with such wise and Christian moderation, with such a happy conception of the necessities which surrounded their States, that an almost unanimous shout of applause should have arisen from a delighted constituency.  And afterwards, that seven conventions, composed in a like manner of men of every shade of opinion and of every party in politics, should have so quietly and so unanimously accepted their work, can be attributed to nothing else but the overruling spirit of God.  All these bodies entered upon their duties with fasting and prayer—they all acknowledged God every day in prayer—they placed him in the forefront of their constitution, and they recognized him as the supreme ruler of the universe, and we therefore can truly say again “Not unto us, Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy and for thy truth’s sake.”

The next trial, through which the Confederate States were called upon to pass, arose out of the regulation of its financial affairs.  Napoleon is reported to have said, blasphemously enough, that battles were decided by the heaviest artillery, and the world is fast coming to the conclusion that the longest purse is the arbiter of war.  Granting this to be in some measure true, we yet acknowledge most humbly the presence of God with our Government in this most important matter.  The most arrogant boast of the North was of its own abounding wealth and of our exceeding poverty, and so long had this assertion been made and so persistently had it been adhered to, that both sides were fast becoming to believe it.  The North and the South were both losing sight of the unalterable principles of political economy and had become confused amid the complications of commerce and trade and exchange.  In a conflict like this, wealth must be looked at from a different stand point from that in which it is viewed in a time of peace.  At its commencement, the North has most accumulated money, because its great cities have been the converging centres from all parts of this widely extended country, but accumulated money is very soon expended in a war like this, and the ability to continue it will depend far more upon the available income of each section than upon its money capital at the outset.  The wealth of the North depends upon manufactures, upon trade, upon commerce, and the North West furnishes a very abundant supply of food.  Analyze this wealth and you will perceive that its results depend upon the ability to find consumers and to furnish an exchangeable value upon which to trade.  Unless manufactures find a market, they remain a drug upon the hands of the manufacturers and are a loss instead of a gain.  Unless trade finds purchasers as well as sellers, it very soon becomes bankrupt in the face of rents and living and the taxation of a war such as this will be, if it goes on.  Unless commerce has something to export as well as to import, it must necessarily come to an end, for one cannot buy, as the world goes on now, unless he has something to sell.  The North has no great export of its own which is a necessity to the world.  Now and then the failure of a grain crop in England or upon the Continent, creates a demand for corn, and then, for a season, the West can furnish a value that is exchangeable.  But this is an exceptional case, and the commercial men of the North have never placed any permanent dependence upon it.  It has rested its exchanges upon the cotton and tobacco of the South, and it has obtained possession of these by flooding our States with its manufactures and nicnacs of every description, and by acting as the commercial broker of the South.  And besides selling our valuable staple for trifles like these, which we could as well make for ourselves, we have annually distributed much that remained of these staples upon hotels and watering places, in steamboats and railroads, in shops of luxury and temples of fashion and upon what is facetiously called education and accomplishments.  And by the time that the cotton and the tobacco were made, it no more belonged to us than did the manufactures of England, and we were compelled in common honesty to let it go where it was really owned.  At a very moderate calculation, the exchangeable value thus furnished the North in return for its manufactures and its climate and its fashion, amounted annually to between one and two hundred millions of dollars.  But all this is now changed; we have seen the last of it, at least during the war, and a year or two will soon show that the subtraction of this amount from the one side, and the addition of it to the other, will make a marvelous difference in the aggregate of wealth.  And while the withholding of this immense sum of money from the North will cripple its resources, it will be put in circulation among ourselves and add to the income and resources of our own citizens.  For there is no truer principle in political economy than this, that the distribution of money has as much to do with the wealth of a country as its production.  God seems to have endowed our financial officers with the wisdom to seize the strong point of our economical position and our people with the patriotism to receive and adopt it.  They have made our great staple to supply for them the place which gold and silver supply for the Banks.  As they issue paper money upon the coin which they possess, so will the Confederate States issue paper upon the cotton which it will accumulate by the exchange for it of Confederate bonds, and thus, instead of a currency depreciating continually like the old continental money, we shall have a currency always at par, because the cotton which is its basis, is always wanted and receives no injury of any material consequence from being piled up during a blockade.  If a currency keeps at par, and it will always keep at par when it is known to represent an actual value, nobody will care to have it redeemed, especially so long as he may be hemmed in from intercourse with any except those whose currency it is.  And besides furnishing a Bank capital for the Confederate States, it becomes in the hands of the government an instrument of great power for the regulation and control of foreign alliances.  Refusing to permit its export except through our own seaports, it will soon bring all the nations who use our cotton, face to face, with the question between us and our enemies.  It is not that cotton is King, but that God has given our statesmen wisdom to use a great advantage aright, and the people self-denial to acquiesce in the arrangement, and to stand manfully by it.  “Not unto us, Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy and for thy truth's sake.”

And in this very matter our God does seem to have smitten our enemies with judicial blindness.  Just when they most needed sound wisdom, they have inaugurated a financial system which must cripple their resources.  A prohibitory tariff, and one which they will find it difficult to repeal, because it was given as a sop to particular States, just when a nation needs both friends and money, is the very height of folly, and a system of borrowing, at a heavy discount, is a poor beginning for a people boasting of its wealth and arrogant about its resources.  The commercial men of the North perceive this weakness and therefore it is that they cry out for quick measures and a short war.  They know that they cannot bear a long one, and very soon will they begin to murmur at any Commander-in-chief who desires to move slowly and surely, and will either hurry him into measures which will ensure his defeat or force him to yield his marshal's baton into bolder because more ignorant hands.  Truly does God seem to have ordered everything for us and to have made everything work for the security of our cause.  How can anyone distrust him or be faithless enough to ask with our enemies, “Where is now their God?”

If we turn from the financial to the military affairs of the Confederate States, we perceive the same visible presence of God in our concerns.  In the beginning of this movement we appeared to have no resources wherewith to meet the immense preponderance of power that was against us.  They had armies, navies, armories, manufactories, everything that could conduce to their strength—fortresses bristled in our midst and aimed their guns against the people they had been builded to protect—a large, well ordered army, stood upon our Texan frontier quite in a condition to have invaded and embarrassed us—a large armament was fitted out to strike at the heart of South Carolina, which was considered the soul of the rebellion—a navy yard of immense resources, filled with arms and ammunition and ordnance, supported by the strongest fortress in the Union and defended by men of war armed with guns of the heaviest calibre, lay upon our North eastern frontier.  A hastily raised militia was all we had to depend upon in the conflict.  But in a moment everything seemed changed in a way more than natural.  Skillful officers sprang from every direction into the arena.  Armed men arose as if from the dragons teeth which the abolitionists had been sowing for years.  And fear seemed to fall upon our enemies—unaccountable fear.  Officers who had never quailed before any living man—soldiers who had borne the old flag to victory wherever it had waved over them—navies which had moved defiant over the world, all, all seemed paralyzed.  That large border army surrendered to militia without a blow—that gallant armament, made up of the same fleet which had run in the revolution into the Thames, which had defied the Algerine batteries, which had brought Austria to terms in the Levant, which had spit its fire into the face of the almost impregnable fortress of St. Juan d'Ulloa stood inert and saw a gallant soldier, who was upholding their own flag, beaten out of his fortress by sand batteries and volunteers.  That immense navy yard, with its vast resources, with its great power of resistance, with its huge fortress at its back? with its magnificent men-of-war all armed and shotted, was deserted in an unaccountable panic because of the threats of a few almost unarmed citizens and the rolling during the night of well managed locomotives.  And nowhere could this panic have occurred more seasonably for us, because it gave us just what we most needed, arms and ammunition and heavy ordnance in great abundance.  All this is unaccountable upon any ordinary grounds.  But two days before a naval officer of very high rank had reported to headquarters at Washington that this navy yard was impregnable.  Is not this very like the noise of chariots and the noise of horses, even the noise of a great host which the Syrians were made to hear when the Lord would deliver Israel?  “And they said one to another, Lo, the King of Israel hath hired against us the King of the Hittites and the Kings of the Egyptians, to come upon us.  Wherefore they arose and fled in the twilight and left their tents and their horses and their asses, even the camp as it was, and fled for their life.”   “Not unto us, Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy and for thy truth's sake.”

And now, my beloved people, after such tokens of God’s presence with us in all the departments of our civil affairs, need we be afraid of man’s revilings, and man's threats?  If God be with us, who can be against us? Shimei’s cursings did not hurt David; they only returned upon his own head.  And if any be presumptuous enough, in the arrogance of their wealth and in the pride of their numbers, and in the presumption of their Pharisaism to ask “Where is now their God?” we can humbly answer “Our God is in the Heavens: he hath done whatsoever he pleased.”  Nay, more, we can tremblingly rejoice and point to His presence with us upon earth.  He is too manifestly with our people, giving them unanimity and patriotism—with our rulers, giving them wisdom and moderation and a proper sense of their dependance upon him—with our armies, shielding them in the hour of conflict, for us not to acknowledge it.  We should be as brute beasts before him if we did not perceive his presence and humble ourselves before him.  God loves to be honored in the assemblies of the Saints, and he delights in the praises and thanksgivings of his people.  There is no surer mode of driving Him from us than by refusing to acknowledge His presence among us.  It is not humility to be blind to the tokens of God's goodness towards us, it is faithlessness—it is not vain boasting to enumerate his glorious acts in our behalf, it is giving Him the honor due unto His holy name.  Read the Psalms of David and note how frequently he enumerates in long and elaborate verse the wondrous acts of the Lord, closing each stanza with the triumphant refrain, “For ins mercy endureth forever.”  And surely he knew how God loved to be praised.  Let us not be afraid or ashamed to see the hand of the Lord in everything, to believe firmly that He does manifest himself for the right, and to be a praying and a thanksgiving people, as well as a fighting people.  “Some trust in horses and chariots, but we will trust in the Lord our God.” 

But while we render thanks unto the Lord for all His benefits towards us, how deeply should their reception humble us!  For we have been utterly undeserving of them.  They are the tokens of unmerited mercy.  If God was only strict to mark iniquity, which of us could stand?  As a people, how little have we done for his cause!  how poorly have we fulfilled the great mission entrusted to our hands!  What wretched stewards have we been of the treasures committed to our keeping!  How polluted our land has been with profaneness, with blasphemy, with Sabbath breaking, with the shedding of blood.  What violence and recklessness, what extravagance and waste have manifested themselves as the normal condition of our people! what an idolatry to fashion has disfigured the ancient simplicity of our people!  What a high value has been put among us upon all those qualities which are the very opposites of the graces of the gospel, upon pride, upon self-reliance, upon animal courage!  How inordinately has wealth been sought after and valued!  How honor, falsely so called, has been exalted and almost deified!  And if with all these hateful sins cleaving to our national skirts, God can yet manifest His presence with us, what might we not hope for, if we would lay down those iniquities at the foot of Jesus’ Cross and cry for mercy?  Let us begin to-day and with deep humility of spirit, confess our unworthiness and pray the Lord that He will not turn His face from us, but will still enable us to say, “Our Lord is in the heavens.”

We are engaged, my people, in one of the grandest struggles which ever nerved the hearts or strengthened the hands of a heroic race.  We are fighting for great principles, for sacred objects—principles which must not be compromised; objects which must not be abandoned.  We are fighting to prevent ourselves from being transferred from American republicanism to French democracy.  We are fighting to rescue the fair name of our social life from the dishonor which has been cast upon it.  We are fighting to protect and preserve a race who form a part of our household, and stand with us next to our children.  We are fighting to drive away from our sanctuaries the infidel and rationalistic principles which are sweeping over the land and substituting a gospel of the stars and stripes for the gospel of Jesus Christ.  These objects are far more important even than liberty, for they concern the inner life, the soul and eternity.  Let us be strong and quit ourselves as men—strong in the strength of Jesus, strong in the presence of the Lord of Hosts.  Let us, in all our efforts, in all our successes, say unceasingly “Not unto us, not unto us, Lord, be the glory.”  Let us in all our reverses still praise the Lord and in all humility reply “Our God is in the Heavens: He hath done whatsoever he pleased.”