rties; but love of the Union and the Lord was the bedrock of every
confession.

Inevitably an impressionable and imaginative mind opening to such sights
and sounds as it emerged from infancy must have been deeply affected.
Until I was twelve years old the enchantment of religion had complete
possession of my understanding. With the loudest, I could sing all the
hymns. Being early taught in music I began to transpose them into many
sorts of rhythmic movement for the edification of my companions. Their
words, aimed directly at the heart, sank, never to be forgotten, into my
memory. To this day I can repeat the most of them--though not without
a break of voice--while too much dwelling upon them would stir me to a
pitch of feeling which a life of activity in very different walks and
ways and a certain self-control I have been always able to command would
scarcely suffice to restrain.

The truth is that I retain the spiritual essentials I learned then and
there. I never had the young man's period of disbelief. There has never
been a time when if the Angel of Death had appeared upon the scene--no
matter how festal--I would not have knelt with adoration and welcome;
never a time on the battlefield or at sea when if the elements had
opened to swallow me I would not have gone down shouting!

Sectarianism in time yielded to universalism. Theology came to seem
to my mind more and more a weapon in the hands of Satan to embroil and
divide the churches. I found in the Sermon on the Mount leading enough
for my ethical guidance, in the life and death of the Man of Galilee
inspiration enough to fulfill my heart's desire; and though I have read
a great deal of modern inquiry--from Renan and Huxley through Newman
and Doellinger, embracing debates before, during and after the English
upheaval of the late fifties and the Ecumenical Council of 1870,
including the various raids upon the Westminster Confession, especially
the revision of the Bible, down to writers like Frederic Harrison and
Doctor Campbell--I have found nothing to shake my childlike faith in the
simple rescript of Christ and Him crucified.

III

From their admission into the Union, the States of Kentucky and
Tennessee have held a relation to the politics of the country somewhat
disproportioned to their population and wealth. As between the two
parties from the Jacksonian era to the War of Sections, each was closely
and hotly contested. If not the birthplace of what