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Like John Bright,

dread arbitrament of the sword. M.P., these men hold it to be as clear as the trumpets of the revelator's angels, that "it is no more immoral for a people to use force in the last resort for the obtaining and securing of freedom than it is for a government by force to suppress and deny that freedom." Our government in the United States did do this latter very strange and wicked thing; and yet, would he or his friends avow that it was not as immoral on the part of the Federal executive and the people who sustained it to do the wrong thing in regard to those who held property in man, as it was to help them to create a property in human chattels so called.

Moreover, war would have been utterly impossible in America, and also slavery and negro-hating, if the grand, vital, essential elements of Christianity had been faithfully diffused and practically recognised by our five millions of avowed disciples of Christ in that land. This is a process which would have left no stains of guilt or shame, no plague spots of blood or crop of heart-burnings behind it, and yet, this grand remedial process was either ignored or tampered with, so as to neutralise its mighty power and efficacy, whilst those who professed to hold a commission to make it known were first and fore

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most to cry, war to the knife," war to the bitter

end."

Some resort to strange assumptions and to deep strategy, to mask their true position and to justify

their irrationality and blood-thirstiness.

One of these is to be found in the person of the Hon. Neale Dowe, one of the latest arrivals from our American Golgotha of human skulls, bones, and blood.

In a speech recorded in the Alliance News, Oct. 27th, Mr Dowe says, "that in the early stages of the anti-slavery conflict, it was announced to be so irrepressible that it must go on to a physical issue." By the use of this language he designs to convey the impression that the anti-slavery conflict was a progressive one in America on moral grounds, than which no statement or assumption can be more false, as at no period of our anti-slavery conflict was the great cause of freedom at a lower ebb on moral grounds than at the period when the war broke out. John Brown was put to death, Dr Cheever driven to the necessity of passing his hat round in England, and others of us driven into exile, whilst the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher was painting our Northern States and people in the blackest colours, as shown in his Harper's Ferry sermon, which the Revs. Brock, Chown, and Federal visionaries would do well to read and ponder.

Methinks I see them, however, pointing to the sentiments contained in the late President Lincoln's oft-repeated predictions at Springfield, Illinois, June 17, 1858.

The paragraph reads as follows:-"If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to

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do it. We are now far into the fifth year policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe that this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved, I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new-North as well as South." After quoting this paragraph, methinks I hear a flourish of trumpets on the part of Northern special pleaders, but it is only of short duration, as on page 77 of Lincoln's Campaign Book, Lincoln says, "When I made my speech at Springfield, of which Judge Douglas complained, and from which he quotes, I really was not thinking of the things which he ascribes to me at all. I had no thought in the world that I was doing any thing to bring about a war between the free and slave states. I had no thought that I was doing any thing to bring

about a political and social equality of the black and white races; but I must say, in all fairness to him, if he thinks I am doing something which leads to these bad results, it is none the better I did not mean it. It is just as fatal to the country if I have any influence in producing it, whether I intend it or not." Such anti-slavery progress needs no comment.

We have said that deep strategy was also resorted to. This is seen in the word physical, introduced by Mr Dowe, not contained in the original and repudiated by implication or otherwise by Lincoln himself. Why, then, should Mr Dowe resort to such an artifice? He probably wished to impress the British public with a sense of the absolute necessity and justice of the late war. Hence the trick. To what desperate expedients and shifts men are reduced sometimes to cover up and defend what they know to be wrong.

We cannot therefore unite with Neale Dowe in his commendation of the late Federal war, or follow him with complacency into these terrific scenes, where fathers, brothers, sons, lay rotting in their bloody shrouds.

In an address recently given in the Friend's Meeting House, Bishopsgate Street, the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon said that "the Baptists and Presbyterians, becoming alive to the fact that they might put their hands on the carnal sword, grasped it and fell from their right place." If this be so, have our war

Christians, so called in America, lifted themselves into their right place by the use of the sword, or Spurgeon's intimate and chosen friends who abet them, maintained their right place in the presence of God or man?

A paragraph which savours of unaccountable eccentricity has been brought under our notice, in a lecture on George Fox by the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon. It reads as follows, "I have a notion that all deno'minations of Christians have in their time persecuted except the Society of Friends and the Baptists, and it has been shrewdly hinted that we Baptists have never done so because we have never had the chance, but this is scarcely correct, for Roger Williams certainly had an opportunity in Rhode Island to have set up a Baptist state religion, but he spurned the thought. We have both of us a very clear history to look back upon with regard to that." We have no state religion in America, but the thickening leaves in our eventful history, reveal some dark pages where those sections of the Christian Church claiming to be the most favoured and honoured, have displayed a spirit of intolerance which made them more heathen than Christian, and more savage than human. As, however, our testimony may be rejected by some who have put themselves into the hands of " dearly beloved brethren" possessing "great reputations," and are influenced thereby to show the carnal spirit and arm, we will call the reader's attention to a lecture published by

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