god’s VIEW OF EEBELLION. 9 which, assertion they cannot quote one line of the Constitution or the laws. Now all sinners (rebels included) have excuses. That is the necessary toll paid to conscience. There never was a murderer that didn’t patch up a reason for his deed. Now so mighty a step, fraught with such dire calamity as the tearing away of a large part of the country from its government, should be undertaken by Christian agencies only with the most overwhelming proofs of its necessity as a Christian duty, not with trifling excuses that tremble as you look at them. But if we even grant that the political doctrine of State sovereignty is correct, even then this war is a godless rebellion, a sin before Heaven. Because actual facts modify all abstract doctrines, however true in themselves. For example, two others with myself own thirty thousand bricks; each of us owns absolutely and personally ten thousand, marked with the owner’s name. We agree to build a house with them. When it is built we live in it together, jointly furnishing it and hanging pictures on its walls, and combining so generally in its adornment that it is utterly impossible to tell who did what part. All you can say is, that we three did all. After a dozen years, I buy a new pickaxe and begin to pry into the side wall of the house. My two friends, astonished at my position, inquire my design. “ Oh,’’ I reply, “ I am going to build myself a separate house, and now I want my bricks.” Do you think because those bricks are
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