5 complain, have sprung, at least proximately, from our own evil passions. We may ascribe the evils we experience to God's special providence, but with manifest injustice. Our Heavenly Father never constrained as to that indolence or imprudence resulting in bankruptcy, nor to the physical intemperance ending in disease. Nor is it the great and gracious God, that for half a century has excited at the North and the South those extreme and intolerant fanaticisms which have brought this sore distress upon us. On the contrary, it is the very prodigality of His goodness unto us above all peoples of the earth, which, working perversely upon a corrupt nature—like Heaven's sunshine on tropical jungles, developing noxious and deadly growths—has strengthened thus malignantly these principles of evil. Verily, if our land be doomed to destruction, and this fair fabric which we fondly deemed Liberty's great temple, be now abandoned of God to the destroyer, nevertheless, will its mighty ruins remain through all time monumental of God's marvelous love unto a self-destroyed people, and upon every stone of shattered pillar, and arch, and aisle amid our death-dust will be found inscriptions testimonial of the tender mercies of our God ! If the American Nation be to-day dying on these hills like a strong giant in the very flush of its youth, it is not because God's thunderbolt hath smitten it — it dies as a suicide
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