rn General
Assembly of 1864.

[348:1] For interesting illustrations of this, see Alexander, "The
Methodists, South," pp. 71-75. The history of the religious life of the
northern army is superabundant and everywhere accessible.

CHAPTER XX.

AFTER THE WAR.

When the five years of rending and tearing had passed, in which slavery
was dispossessed of its hold upon the nation, there was much to be done
in reconstructing and readjusting the religious institutions of the
country.

Throughout the seceding States buildings and endowments for religious
uses had suffered in the general waste and destruction of property.
Colleges and seminaries, in many instances, had seen their entire
resources swept away through investment in the hopeless promises of the
defeated government. Churches, boards, and like associations were widely
disorganized through the vicissitudes of military occupation and the
protracted absence or the death of men of experience and capacity.

The effect of the war upon denominational organizations had been
various. There was no sect of all the church the members and ministers
of which had not felt the sweep of the currents of popular opinion all
about them. But the course of events in each denomination was in some
measure illustrative of the character of its polity.

In the Roman Catholic Church the antagonisms of the conflict were as
keenly felt as anywhere. Archbishop Hughes of New York, who, with Henry
Ward Beecher and Bishop McIlvaine of Ohio, accepted a political mission
from President Lincoln, was not more distinctly a Union man than Bishop
Lynch of Charleston was a secessionist. But the firm texture of the
hierarchical organization, held steadily in place by a central authority
outside of the national boundaries, prevented any organic rupture. The
Catholic Church in America was eminently fortunate at one point: the
famous bull _Quanta Cura_, with its appended "Syllabus" of damnable
errors, in which almost all the essential characteristics of the
institutions of the American Republic are anathematized, was fulminated
in 1864, when people in the United States had little time to think of
ecclesiastical events taking place at such a distance. If this
extraordinary document had been first published in a time of peace, and
freely discussed in the newspapers of the time, it could hardly have
failed to inflict the most serious embarrassment on the interests of
Catholicism in America. Even now it