ce. He has ordered
nature and life and circumstance for this one great end.

Therefore the Nation is not a joint-stock company. It is not a
paper association. It is not a mutual assurance society for life
and property. That is the shallow, surface notion that makes
such miserable babble in political speeches. The Nation is Divine and
not Human. It is of GOD's making and not of man's. It is a moral
school, a spiritual training institute for educating and graduating men.
For that purpose it is _alive_. Men can make associations, companies,
compacts. God only makes _living bodies_, divine, perpetual
institutions, with life in themselves, which exist because man exists,
which can never end till man ends. The Family is one of these. The Church
is another, in any shape it comes. The Nation is another, holding Family
and Church both in its arms.

True, from the fact that the power, the administration and the
arrangements of details are in men's hands in the nation mistake is
common, and people are tempted to think the Nation purely human. All
thought below the surface will show the fallacy and stamp the Nation as
the handiwork of God.

We believe true thought on this matter is, at this day and in this land,
of first importance. The Lord of Hosts rules, and not the master of a
thousand regiments with smoking cannon. God builds the Nation for a
purpose. While it fulfils that purpose it shall stand. The banded folly
and scoundrelhood within and the gathered force of all enemies without
shall never overthrow one pillar in its strong foundations or topple
down one stone from its battlements while it works honestly toward its
true end. Not till it turn traitor to its place and purposes, not till
it madly plant itself in the way of the great wheels that roll the world
back to light and justice, will He who built it hurl it to the earth
again in crashing ruin, to build another order in its place. The man who
has let that great truth, written out in flame across the dusky forehead
of the Past, slip from his foolish atheist's heart and his shallow
atheist's brain, is blind, not only to our own land's short history, but
to the lessons of the long ages and the broad world.

We have been driven back to the loftiest ground on this question. We
have found that only on that could we stand. When the very foundations
of what we held most awful and reverential have been assailed by mad
traitorous hands, as though they were vulgar things, whe