eneration chosen to accomplish the work that lies ready to
our hands, if we be commissioned to so glorious and so weighty an
enterprise, there is but one spirit befitting our task. The war, if it
is to be successful, must be a religious war: not in the old sense of
that phrase, not a war of violent excitement and passionate enthusiasm,
not a war in which the crimes of cruel bigots are laid to the charge of
divine impulse, bur a war by itself, waged with dignified and solemn
strength, with clean hands and pure hearts,--a war calm and inevitable
in its processes as the judgments of God. When Cromwell's men went out
to win the victory at Winceby Fight, their watchword was "_Religion_."
Can we in our great struggle for liberty and right adopt any other
watchword than this? Do we require another defeat and more suffering to
bring us to a sense of our responsibility to God for the conduct and the
issue of this war?

It is only by taking the highest ground, by raising ourselves to the
full conception of what is involved in this contest, that we shall
secure success, and prevent ourselves from sinking to the level of those
who are fighting against us. The demoralization necessarily attendant
upon all wars is to be met and overcome only by simple and manly
religious conviction and effort. It will be one of the advantages
of defeat to have made it evident that a regiment of bullies and
prize-fighters is not the best stuff to compose an army. "Your men are
not vindictive enough," Mr. Russell is reported to have said, as he
watched the battle. It was the saying of a shrewd observer, but it
expresses only an imperfect apprehension of the truth. Vindictiveness is
not the spirit our men should have, but a resoluteness of determination,
as much more to be relied upon than a vindictive passion as it is
founded upon more stable and more enduring qualities of character.
The worst characters of our great cities may be the fit equals of
Mississippi or Arkansas ruffians, but the mass of our army is not to be
brought down to the standard of rowdies or the level of barbarians. The
men of New England and of the West do not march under banners with
the device of "Booty and Beauty," though General Beauregard has the
effrontery to declare it, and Bishop, now General, Polk the ignorance
to utter similar slanders. The atrocities committed on our wounded and
prisoners by the "chivalry" of the South may excite not only horror, but
a wild fury of reven