and good.  Every man wages a religious war, when he attacks his own passions in the interest of his own humanity.  The most truly religious thing that a man can do is to fight his way through habits and deficiencies back to the pure manlike elements of his nature, which are the ineffaceable traces of the Divine workmanship, and alone really worth fighting for.  And when a nation imitates this private warfare, and attacks its own gigantic evils, lighted through past deficiencies and immediate temptations by its best ideas, as its human part rallies against its inhuman, and all the kingly attributes of a freeborn individual rise up in final indignation against its slavish attributes, then commences the true and only war of a people, and the only war of which we dare say, though it have the repulsive features that belong to all wars, that it is religious.  But that we do say; for it is to win and keep the unity of a country for the great purposes of mankind, a place where souls can have their chances to work, with the largest freedom and under the fewest disabilities, at the divine image stamped upon them,—­to get here the tools, both temporal and spiritual, with which to strike poverty and misery out of those glorious traces, and to chisel deep and fresh the handwriting where God says, This is a Man!

Here is a sufficient ground for expecting that intellectual as well as political enlargement will succeed this trial of our country.  It is well to think of all the approaching advantages, even those remote ones which will wear the forms of knowledge and art.  For it is undeniable, that a war cannot be so just as to bring no evils in its train,—­not only the disturbance of all kinds of industry, the suppression of some, the difficulty of diverting, at a moment’s notice, labor towards new objects,—­not only financial embarrassment and exhaustion, and the shadow of a coming debt,—­not the maiming of strong men and their violent removal from the future labors of peace, nor the emotional suffering of thousands of families whose hearts are in the field with their dear ones, tossed to and fro in every skirmish, where the balls slay more than the bodies which are pierced:  not these evils alone,—­nor the feverish excitement of eighteen millions of people, whose gifts and intelligence are all distraught, and at the mercy of every bulletin,—­nor yet the possible violations of private rights, and the overriding of legal defences, which, when once attempted in a state of war, is not always relinquished on the return of peace.  These do not strike us so much as the moral injury which many weak and passionate minds sustain from the necessity of destroying life, of ravaging and burning, of inflicting upon the enemy politic distresses.  There will be a taint in the army and the community which will endure in the relations of pacific life.  And more than half a million of men, who have tasted the fierce joy of battle, have suffered the moral privations and dangers of