hoped ere this to see the Northern and Southern wings of our venerable Presbyterian Church reunited; but I am confident that there are plenty of people now living who will yet witness their happy ecclesiastical nuptials.  Terrible as was that war in the sacrifice of precious life, and in the destruction of property, it was unquestionably inevitable.  Mr. Seward was right when he called the conflict “irrepressible.”  Abraham Lincoln was a true prophet when he declared, at Springfield, Ill., in June, 1858, that “A house divided against itself cannot stand; I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”  When in my early life I spoke to my good mother about some anti-slavery addresses that had been delivered, she said to me, with wonderful foresight, “These speeches will avail but little; slavery will go down in blood." That it has gone down even at the cost of so much blood and treasure is to-day as much a matter for congratulation in the South as it is in the North.

My first glimpse of the long predicted conflict was the sight of the Seventh Regiment,—­composed of the flower of New York,—­swinging down Broadway in April, 1861, on its way to the protection of Washington,—­amid the thundering cheers of the bystanders.  Before long I offered my services to the “Christian commission” which had been organized by that noble and godly minded patriot, George H. Stuart, of Philadelphia, and I went on to Washington to preach to our soldiers.  I found Washington a huge military encampment; the hills around were white with tents, and Pennsylvania Avenue was filled almost every day with troops of horsemen, or with trains of artillery.  While I was in Washington I lodged with my beloved college professor, that eminent Christian philosopher, Joseph Henry,—­in the Smithsonian Institution, of which he was the head.  One night, after I had been out addressing our boys in blue at one of the camps, and had retired for the night, Professor Henry came into my room and, sitting down by my bed, discussed the aspects of the struggle.  His mental eye was as sharp in reading the signs of the times as it had been when at Albany, thirty years before, he made his splendid discovery in electro-magnetism.  He said to me:  “This war may last several years, but it can have only one result, for it is simply a question of dynamics.  The stronger force must pulverize the weaker one, and the North will win the day.  When the war is over, the country will not be what it was before; the triumph of the union will leave us a prodigiously centralized government, and the old Calhoun theory of ‘State rights’ will be dead.  We shall have an inflated currency—­an enormous debt with a host of tax-gatherers, and huge pension rolls.  What is most needed now is wise statesmanship, and the first quality of a statesman is prescience.  In my position here, as head of the Smithsonian, I cannot be a partisan!  I did not vote the Republican ticket, but I am confident that by a long way the most far-seeing head in this land is on the shoulders of that awkward rail-splitter from Illinois.”  Every syllable of Professor Henry’s prognostication proved true, and nothing more true than his estimate of Lincoln at a time when there was too much disposition to distrust him.