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the song of triumph and praise succeeds, and David's reversed history becomes the lively emblem of Messiah's victory and kingdom.

Was all this an accident, or was it in pursuance of a divine plan of revelation ? The consistent believer in revelation cannot hesitate for an answer. But could not David as well have written this psalm in the quiet seclusion of meditative life, either as a shepherd of Bethlehem, or as a loved and honored member of the royal family? We answer, "With God all things are possible." We cannot deny that it is possible for God to produce upon the human mind, while in a state of actual ease, honor, and safety, such feelings as would give spontaneous utterance to the words of the psalm in question, and through them to have attained glimpses of a suffering Messiah. But this is not in accordance with his well-known plan, as all historic analogy testifies, nor possible without setting aside the ordinary laws of the human intellect and sensibility. From Abraham (in his "Jehovah-jireh ") to Malachi, the prophets rose to supernatural visions through the medium of their historic surroundings. Real objects and events, producing in the mind real feelings and ideas, became the ladder of ascent; and through and above this outwardness the mind reached the sublimest heights of prophetic vision. The "word" or "voice" of God, the angelic ministration, the "dream," the "vision," each had its place and use; but in the dynamics of revelation nothing superseded the historic occasion and ectype, or fully subserved its ends. No method like this could bring home to the realizations of the soul the pathology (so to speak) of Messiah's mysterious work. For this latter and kindred purposes, but this above all, the prophets were put upon a previous course of training, and in preparatory conditions, so that, like all poets, (for poetry is the home of prophecy, and they uttered their oracles in poetic style and measure,) and in conformity with the eternal law of correlation of thought and language, they might

-learn in suffering What they taught in song.

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AT the close of our late civil war grave questions in statesmanship and in social science arose. Some of them were so new that the past furnished no precedents; so difficult, that all the accumulated wisdom of the age could not offer a ready solution. The perplexities were great, while the necessities were urgent. Something must be done, and done quickly. Under the circumstances, experimenting was the only way out of the difficulties, and this involved the possibility of running into still more serious embarrassments. From their limited knowledge and experience the purest and wisest of statesmen are liable to errors in theory and mistakes in practice; while modern politicians are quite as likely to blunder as the best of men. The questions for solution were not only delicate, involving the sensibilities, the prejudices, and the convictions of a great majority of the people, but they were also deep and farreaching, touching upon every element of national prosperity. They took into their grasp more than the political and the economical; they included also the moral, the social, and the religious.

The sword, though it practically settles many great political questions, does not immediately change convictions. Overcome by a superior power, the conquered are not necessarily convinced that the cause for which they were contending is wrong. Their feelings may remain the same, though their condition and circumstances may have greatly changed. This was precisely the condition of the Southern people when the work of reconstruction began. They had been fairly beaten in the field. They had surrendered. Their army was disbanded, and they were at the mercy of their conquerors. Their love for the cause for which they had staked every thing was intense and absorbing when they entered into the struggle. It was the common inspiration which moved and sustained them in the conflict. At the close of the war that love had become more strong and intense by the sacrifices they had made and the privations they had cheerfully endured to secure their favorite object. Contending in this spirit, they

naturally came to hate the Government that was trying to subdue them as intensely and as passionately as they had loved their own political idol. That nature was not concealed, and it was shared by all classes, even by the women and children of the South, who did not hesitate to manifest it in all suitable, and in many unsuitable, ways. With this state of feeling at its height the war closed.

At this point their pride of character and of consistency came in. They not only loved the "lost cause," but they were determined to love it still, and to cling to it with their affections as long as life should last. They not only hated the Government, the power of their conquerors, and every manifestation and symbol of that power, but it was the settled purpose of their heart to continue to hate it in their inmost soul, even if they could successfully offer to it no active resistance. They had not sinned, they had not done wrong, they had simply been unsuccessful. They had no pardon to ask, no confession to make; they were not ashamed of either their cause or their course.* Why should their consciences condemn them when their spiritual guides, the leading ministers of all denominations, were with them, if not leading them, both in spirit and in opinion? In this the prestige of the Southern Churches was with them, so was the high-toned chivalry, as a unit; and last, but not least, the heart and sympathy and cordial support of their women.

These were the people, in 1865, to be reconstructed; to be returned to their allegiance to the Government which they did their best to overthrow; to be brought back into homogeneous relations with the general interests; and into sympathy with the national will as expressed through its constituted authorities.

The above, however, does not express the whole difficulty, nor indicate all the embarrassments of reconstruction. Many other complications entered into the question. Great changes had taken place in the four years of war. Four millions of

*Yet our contributor overlooks the fact that immediately after the surrender of General Lee the mind of the South was for a time humble and conciliatory. Bishop Andrews made deep and solemn confessions, and other Southern Bishops were for Church reunion. The tone of the Southern Methodist press was, for a brief period, right. But the politicians at length commenced their work, aiming at recovering political ascendency over the country, and the spirit of 1860 revived.—ED.

slaves had been emancipated, and all the value at which their masters had rated them was forever lost. Along with these, hundreds of millions of other property had been destroyed. From so great a loss nothing, in their estimation, had been gained. Many of their illustrious men had fallen in the strife, the rich had been made poor, their country was full of widows and orphans, and all the substance of their land was devoured. All these things were mingled in their cup of grief. The newly-emancipated freedmen were to remain, for the most part, in the same section of country with their old masters. The slave had not been educated. It was not politic, it was against the law, to educate him. As a natural consequence the slaves, as a class, were greatly demoralized. The permitted customs of society tended still further to degrade them. They possessed a much larger development of the animal nature than of the moral and intellectual. They had been saved all the trouble and labor of thinking and providing for themselves and their families. Their masters had been more than willing to do this for them. As a general rule the native white population did not feel very kindly and sympathetically toward the freedmen as a class, especially at first. That was natural, almost inevitable. At least it should have been expected. It is a law of our nature that, under the most favorable circumstances, it takes time for excited feelings to subside, and for a great grief to pass away. It is not a wise policy, generally, to keep irritating the minds we wish to soothe, or to unnecessarily cross their feelings or to stir up their prejudices. The sensibilities of the Southern people at the close of the war were, and for a long time had been, unduly excited; they were in an abnormal condition, in a kind of diseased state. They needed wise counsel, considerate treatment, skillful practice. The political doctors who volunteered their services were not generally of this sort, nor at all in the confidence and sympathy of their patients. They often treated the case unskillfully, frequently prescribing irritants when sedatives would have been more appropriate. The result is, up to this time the disease is not cured; it has passed from the acute into the chronic state. The fever, though somewhat abated, more from the lapse of time than the effects of prescriptions, may still be detected by an unnatural pulse and a labored respiration.

They looked upon the freedmen as in some sense the cause of all their troubles. They wanted an independent confederacy, whose corner-stone should be slavery, that their "peculiar institution" might be no longer threatened or annoyed by Northern Abolitionists. Instead of protecting slavery and making it perpetual, as they fondly expected, every slave had been emancipated. The hated Abolitionists were triumphant, and a part of the spite which the South felt toward the emancipationists of the North they were at first disposed to vent upon the emancipated. They loved the freedmen less because the conquerors loved them more. Bleeding at every pore, and crushed by defeat, they saw their former slaves all jubilant with the excitements of a new-born freedom. The contrast was great on either side, and it is not strange that unkind feelings were sometimes manifested in their paroxysms of grief and sorrow. It is not wonderful even that a feeling of revenge, when not restrained by religion, frequently manifested itself in overt acts of violence.

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There was still another excitant. They feared "social equality." That was an awful word among them; a powerful word, not of magic, to calm and soothe over-excitednerves, but a demoniacal word, to arouse and excite to their highest pitch their strongest, their deepest-seated, prejudice. This was a "harp of a thousand strings" on which both parties played, not for the purpose of casting out the evil spirit, but to excite to rage and madness spirits already within. Inconsiderate editors at the North, unwise newspaper correspondents and "carpet bag" orators of the baser sort at the South, for a long time kept the nerves of the South quivering with excitement over that question, until the Southern people could throw themselves at will into paroxysms of bitterness from which they did not seem anxious to be free. This fear, combined with other causes, led many at first to say, "We will not employ the negroes-let them shirk for themselves: let the Abolitionists take care of their pets." They had predicted often that the negro would not work-that he could not take care of himself that in a state of freedom he would become utterly demoralized that he would resort to thieving and robbing for a living, and that thus left to itself the race would gradually diminish, and finally become extinct. They must uncon

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