nst usage and authority, has a religious character so
far as the ideas vindicate God by being good for man. But a purely
religious war must be one to restore the attributes and prerogatives of
manhood, to confirm primitive rights that are given to finite souls as
fast as they are created, to proclaim the creed of humanity, which is so
far from containing a single article of theology, that it is solely and
distinctively religious without it, because it proclaims one Father in
heaven and one blood upon the earth. Manhood is always worth fighting
for, to resist and put down whatever evil tendency impairs the full
ability to be a man, with a healthy soul conscious of rights and duties,
owning its gifts, and valuing above everything else the liberty to place
its happiness in being noble and good. Every man wages a religious war,
when he attacks his own passions in the interest of his own humanity.
The most truly religious thing that a man can do is to fight his way
through habits and deficiencies back to the pure manlike elements of his
nature, which are the ineffaceable traces of the Divine workmanship, and
alone really worth fighting for. And when a nation imitates this private
warfare, and attacks its own gigantic evils, lighted through past
deficiencies and immediate temptations by its best ideas, as its human
part rallies against its inhuman, and all the kingly attributes of a
freeborn individual rise up in final indignation against its slavish
attributes, then commences the true and only war of a people, and the
only war of which we dare say, though it have the repulsive features
that belong to all wars, that it is religious. But that we do say; for
it is to win and keep the unity of a country for the great purposes of
mankind, a place where souls can have their chances to work, with the
largest freedom and under the fewest disabilities, at the divine image
stamped upon them,--to get here the tools, both temporal and spiritual,
with which to strike poverty and misery out of those glorious traces,
and to chisel deep and fresh the handwriting where God says, This is a
Man!

Here is a sufficient ground for expecting that intellectual as well as
political enlargement will succeed this trial of our country. It is well
to think of all the approaching advantages, even those remote ones which
will wear the forms of knowledge and art. For it is undeniable, that a
war cannot be so just as to bring no evils in its train,--not only