George Washington Flowers 
 Memorial Collection 
 
 DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 ESTABLISHED BY THE 
 FAMILY OF 
 
 COLONEL FLOWERS 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2015 
 
 https://archive.org/details/statenationsacreOObell 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The State and the Nation — Sacred to Christian Citizens. 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 PREACHED IN ALL SOULS’ CHURCH, NEW YORK, 
 
 APRIL 21, 1861. 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY W. BELLOWS. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 JAMES MILLER, 
 
 SUCCESSOR TO 
 
 C. S. FRANCIS & CO., 522 BROADWAY. 
 1861. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
SERMON. 
 
 e»- 
 
 <! And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud, 
 with power and great glory. 
 
 “ And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up 
 and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.” Luke 
 xxi. 28 . 
 
 There is something profoundly instructive in the 
 double title which our Saviour bears in the New Tes- 
 tament Scriptures, — Son of Man, and Son of God. In 
 Him are united the interests and the affections of heav- 
 en and earth. He is equally the representative of God 
 and man, the first-born of Deity and the only perfect 
 child of Humanity. His double name, too, is expres- 
 sive of his double office, which is to bless us in this 
 world, while it saves us for another ; to exalt us in time, 
 while it prepares us for eternity. Christ, by his life and 
 death, his precepts, example, and inspiration, moves 
 and fashions alike the institutions of society, and the 
 immortal character and destiny of men. In the Church 
 he is the Son of God, with tender human sympathy, 
 winning men’s souls to contemplations, hopes, and as- 
 pirations above time and sense ; in the world, he is the 
 Son of Man, with divine light and spiritual succor, car- 
 rying the principles of a heavenly society into the im- 
 mediate civilization of mankind. He is thus the light 
 of the world, and the bright and morning-star of im- 
 mortality ; the source of progress, improvement, lib- 
 
4 
 
 erty and happiness here, and of peace and joy and 
 sanctity and blessedness hereafter. 
 
 We have a dual nature ourselves, — a double life 
 and consciousness corresponding to our Lord’s twofold 
 ministry ; first, a conscience to be set right towards 
 God, a hope full of immortality to be nursed, to which 
 the Son of God makes his great appeal ; and then du- 
 ties and sympathies towards our fellow-men — offices of 
 immediate urgency and opportunity — to which the Son 
 of Man lends inspiration and guidance. These two 
 sides of our nature are represented in the world by 
 the Church and the State, both sacred and divine in- 
 stitutions : the Church, the home and guardian of our 
 purely spiritual and eternal interests ; the State, the 
 home and guardian of our relative, human, and social 
 interests. The Son of God is the head of the Church, 
 the Son of Man the head of the State ; and Church and 
 State are spiritually united in his indivisible character 
 and influence. Nothing can be less real than the im- 
 aginary separation between Church and State in this 
 country. The visible Church is separated from the 
 visible State, as to official and legal functions ; but this 
 exterior divorce was mainly necessary to secure a truer 
 interior union. Civil and spiritual powers, man as a 
 citizen and man as an immortal, were never so inti- 
 mately blended as in the very origin of our govern- 
 ment. Our fathers spurned ecclesiastical control, that 
 they might be more free to worship and serve God ; 
 and the use they made of the religious liberty they 
 acquired, was to render the voluntary support of reli- 
 gious institutions and the Church more generous and 
 efficacious than any enforced support of it ever had 
 been or could be. 
 
 We are not content that Christ as the Son of God 
 should rule in the Church alone ; we look for Him as 
 
5 
 
 the Son of Man to come in the State. We know that 
 these interests are one ; that man as a citizen and as a 
 saint has the same vocation ; that Christ is Son of Man 
 and Son of God; and that He must come equally in 
 Church and State before his kingdom is complete. 
 When therefore Christ as “ the Son of Man ” comes in 
 power and great glory, he sheds light, inspiration, and 
 freshness over society ; he invigorates its failing pow- 
 ers, pours a new life into its dull veins, reorganizes its 
 old and effete materials, and changes its fashion into a 
 brighter pattern of morality and justice. When Christ 
 as “ the Son of God ” comes, he kindles up the altars, 
 revives the devotional life, and quickens the spiritual 
 longings and aspirations of his people. And as there 
 are periods of Christian revival in the Church, so there 
 are periods of Christian revival in the State. They are 
 very unlike in their manifestations, though identical in 
 their origin, and inseparable in their purpose and ulti- 
 mate influence. When the' sense of humanity, the 
 longing to realize ideal justice, to extend the equality 
 of human privileges, to abolish immoral anomalies, to 
 embody in more perfect laws more perfectly kept the 
 maxims and fundamental doctrines of Christ — when 
 philanthropic instincts and aspirations surge in deep, 
 full waves through the heart of a nation or an era, then 
 the Son of Mem is coming, it may be in a cloud , but 
 still loith great 'power and glory. Christ is working on 
 the State, the kingdoms of this world are becoming 
 the kingdoms of God’s Son ; and blessed is the faith 
 that recognizes the source of this glorious and power- 
 ful advent. For, alas, the jealousy of ecclesiastics or 
 Christians of the half-breed, is always misleading those 
 who venerate the Son of God, to deny Him as the Son 
 of Man. They imagine they do Christ honor, by see- 
 
6 
 
 ing only half his work, and recognizing only half his 
 presence ! The great human side of his labors, the 
 regeneration of social and civil and political life which 
 he is steadily producing, they disown as if unworthy 
 of, or even inconsistent with, his purely heavenly and 
 spiritual redemption ! As if the State were not the 
 body of the Church, which ought to be its soul ; its 
 purification and strength and growth, as essentially and 
 vitally connected with the prosperity and life of the 
 Church, as the health of our bodies with the welfare 
 of our spirits. This unhappy alienation of Church and 
 State, of social and religious interests, has usually left 
 the movements of liberty and progress, and the read- 
 justment of society to better social and civil standards, 
 in the hands of the undevout and the unbelieving; as 
 if it v ere too much to love God and liberty at the 
 same time, or humanity and heaven together ; as if 
 philanthropy were the rival instead of the partner of 
 piety, and the State the antagonist, instead of the ally 
 of the Church. Are we never to learn that Christ is 
 equally Son of Man and Son of God, and that he is as 
 jealous of one name as of the other ? Is the humanity 
 of our Lord less precious and significant than his di- 
 vinity ? Nay, is life itself not the beginning of im- 
 mortality ; this world the predestined scene of Christ’s 
 first triumph ; and our ordinary, social, civil, and do- 
 mestic life the very sphere where his glorious kingdom 
 is to be set up ? 
 
 I speak of our secular, as distinguished from our 
 future interests, as all comprehended under that one 
 word, the State. That is the only grand, venerable, 
 symbolic word that can fitly represent them all. The 
 State — the great common life of a nation, organized 
 in laws, customs, institutions; its total social being in- 
 carnate in a political unit, having common organs and 
 
7 
 
 functions; a living body, with ahead and a heart, com- 
 mon pulsations, common interests and feelings, with 
 a common consciousness. The State ! wound it in any 
 part, and pain is felt in all. Warm it any where, and 
 its whole blood is cheered. Feed it at its head, and 
 its whole body is nourished. The State — it is no ab- 
 straction ! but a living, breathing reality, with a mem- 
 ory, a consciousness, a sensibility to praise and blame, 
 a conscience, a power to sicken and die, or to conva- 
 lesce, and grow, and thrive. When Louis XIY. said, 
 “ The State — it is I,” — if he meant that the State had 
 a personality like his own, he spoke a great and most 
 pregnant truth. For until we learn to affirm con- 
 science, intellect, obligation, shame, honor, unity of the 
 State as of an individual, we are in a grovelling me- 
 chanical humor, which tends all the time to carry us 
 back to the barbarous or savage condition. That old 
 “divinity that doth hedge a king’’ was the mere re- 
 flection of the sanctity that belongs to the State, and 
 only as its great representative was the veneration paid 
 to royalty, most fitly due. The State is indeed divine, 
 as being the great incarnation of a nation’s rights, priv- 
 ileges, honor and life ; that to which every man dying, 
 bequeaths all that he cannot carry with him — the State 
 being the heir of all the precious memories of succes- 
 sive generations, fed on their nobility, strong with their 
 good services, rich with their wealth, impregnated with 
 their spirit, and perpetuating in itself the glorious tradi- 
 tions of all its successive generations of faithful children. 
 
 Essential to the life and glory of the State, is the 
 sentiment of nationality. The progress of the world 
 has laid in the development of this self-consciousness in 
 peoples. And as great States have become more and 
 more humane, Christian, free; as their national spirit 
 and temper, their constitutions and laws have partaken 
 
s 
 
 more and more of what we love and admire in great 
 Christian characters, — the Son of Man has come in 
 them, with great power and glory. In the old world, 
 however, nationality — always and under all circum- 
 stances beautiful and glorious — ’has been more or less 
 in rivalry with civil liberty. Governments, which prop- 
 erly represent and externalize the national life and 
 spirit, have yet been commonly made strong at the ex- 
 pense of the rights and independence of the people. For, 
 by a noble instinct, people will consent to a great loss 
 of personal liberty, for the sake of national dignity and 
 power. They gladly merge their private rights and 
 privileges in the majesty of the State, and the loyalty 
 found under despotic governments, which are yet true 
 to themselves, is an affecting tribute to the love and 
 pride of country which sweetens even the wrongs and 
 sufferings of the over-governed and over-taxed. That 
 a proud loyalty should belong to England, where such 
 a steady advance in popular rights is always making, 
 does not surprise us. But it is equally true of France, 
 which perhaps even more than England beats with a 
 national pulse and pride, although her government is 
 a usurpation and her emperor a despot. But he has 
 the skill to make France great, feared, loved, — he is 
 true to her national instincts and aspirations, and her 
 people postpone their private rights and longings, to 
 the glory of France. But how sublimely is nationality 
 exhibiting itself in Italy and in Russia — in Italy, where 
 a common language and blood, common hopes and 
 fears and interests, are forcing one circulation through 
 all its lately manacled and paralytic limbs ; and a cen- 
 tral heart, true to generous ideas and human rights, now 
 sends for the first time for fifteen hundred years, lawful 
 pulsations from the Alps to the Ionian Sea. The icy 
 North is not behind the fervid South in national aspi- 
 
9 
 
 ration. Russia lias just achieved undying glory, by 
 an act surpassing even British emancipation in courage 
 and fidelity to conscience. Her splendid enfranchise- 
 ment of the serfs is perhaps the greatest tribute ever 
 paid by a nation to moral convictions; and the “Son 
 of Man came in great power and glory,” when that 
 lately-esteemed barbarous people, in the person of her 
 czar, her princes and nobles, laid down the intoxicat- 
 ing but corrupting and damning pride of man-owning , 
 at the feet of a Christian throne. The glorious author- 
 ity of the State, the worth and dignity of a national 
 character, the possibility of eradicating a moral cancer 
 from the breast of a nation — however near its life — 
 these ideas have been gloriously vindicated for modern 
 times — and for us, especially — in Italy and in Russia, 
 the extremes of Europe. 
 
 We have a different equation to solve here, and 
 one on which the attention of the whole world waits 
 with anxiety. 
 
 No people can be great, respected, loved, feared, 
 trusted, without nationality ; without patriotic devo- 
 tion and unity, national instincts, and affections ; a 
 common government round which they rally, and a 
 common soil, every inch of which is sacred to every 
 citizen. We have in several respects the grandest ele- 
 ments of unity ever possessed by any people ; a com- 
 mon language and a common religion ; a territory in- 
 divisible in natural boundaries ; a continent with all 
 the isolation of an island, and with the disadvantageous 
 vastness of its space overcome by the genius of mod- 
 ern locomotive arts. We have the solemn memory of 
 common Avars in which one people shed their mingled 
 blood now on Northern and noAV on Southern soil. Our 
 great names belong to the whole country. There is 
 every reason in the world — one only excepted — why 
 
10 
 
 our American people should be a unit ; and the trial 
 now upon us, is whether that one reason shall prevail 
 against all the others. 
 
 American nationality has doubtless some obstacles 
 in its way altogether peculiar in the history of civiliza- 
 tion. It is an attempt to organize the jealous individ- 
 ualism of democratic freedom — a condition in which 
 personal independence and the private man and local 
 authority claim, and are allowed, the largest liberty — 
 into a consentaneous, harmonious, and powerful nation, 
 able to wield its authority, to symbolize its majesty, to 
 unify its policy through a strong government, — and 
 yet one strong only in the confidence and affections of 
 the people. You cannot have a great nationality, with- 
 out a strong government. There must be a proper 
 expression and symbolism of the national life in an in- 
 violable national flag, and in trusted and sustained na- 
 tional rulers. But you cannot have a strong govern- 
 ment in our circumstances of democratic liberty with- 
 out the free and full consent of the mass of the people. 
 Can you have that consent in this country ? No ! says 
 the whole European world. No ! says the history of 
 the past. No ! says the Southern Confederacy. No ! 
 say the governors of the Border States. No! said a 
 week ago some of the leading presses of the North. 
 No! said the fears and misgivings of patriotic souls 
 everywhere. But, thanks be to God, the instincts and 
 affections of the American heart, the latent nationality 
 of the vast majority of its people, have rushed as with 
 the might of a deluge, to drown those fearful Nays, in 
 one sublime affirmation! Yea! yea! say the people, 
 we are a nation. We have a common heart and soul, 
 and are one body. The government (we care not what 
 party has put it there) stands for this nationality — stands 
 for our honor, power, unity, self-respect — stands for 
 
11 
 
 our dignity abroad and our peace and prosperity at 
 home — stands for America ! The American flag has 
 our hearts’ blood in its ruddy veins ; our national heav 
 en opens in its field of blue ; aud our lives shall set 
 sooner than its stars ! And clustering round its stand- 
 ard, flock at once a hundred thousand men — the flower 
 of the land — to maintain in the face of all the world the 
 proud assertion : This American people is not a set of 
 civilized squatters upon a common territory — ^a school 
 of wriggling fish accidentally caught in one federal 
 net — an aggregation of petty communities, confined in 
 some political kaleidoscope, to which any strong hand 
 at every election may give a shake that alters its whole 
 aspect and identity ; but instead of all this, it is a Na- 
 tion , like England, France, Russia, with an organic life 
 and destiny — a pride, a character, a soul, which it will 
 vindicate and uphold so long as it has an ounce of sil- 
 ver in its treasury, or a drop of blood in its veins. 
 
 We have long known that our nationality was pro- 
 nounced enough to make us safe against all foreign 
 foes. Our doubts have been whether our centrifugal 
 forces at home might not prevail over our centripetal ; 
 our local interests and passions over our national pride 
 and unity. And certainly, for twenty years, the omens 
 have been dark and discouraging. Our patriotism has 
 been all exhausted in efforts to hang together upon 
 eternal compromises and ever-shifting conditions. Our 
 statesmanship has been a perpetual feat of balancing 
 upon the ever-tightening rope of sectional jealousy and 
 exaction. The equilibrium , not the nationality, has 
 been our worship ! The States have been stealing away 
 the loyalty due to the nation. Parties have absorbed 
 the pride belonging to the country. National men 
 have been shrinking into petty politicians, and bribery, 
 
12 
 
 corruption, peculation, treason have flourished in the 
 capital. 
 
 / did not know — you did not know — the cabinet 
 did not know, a single week ago, whether the country 
 had a heart and soul or not. A horrid nightmare of 
 apathy, hesitation, doubt, sat upon the nation’s breast, 
 and it looked as if the country might die in this ster- 
 torous sleep. But the cracking of that splintered flag- 
 staff broke the spell. The nation woke on Monday 
 morning and shook itself, and brushed away the doubts 
 and difficulties and dissensions which had paralyzed it, 
 as a man clears the sleep from his eyes with the first 
 handful of water he snatches when he wakes ; and now 
 there is no more doubt that we are a nation and a gov- 
 ernment, to be respected at home and abroad, than 
 there is that shameful treason and folly have disgraced 
 a powerful section of the country, and are aiming 
 straight at the national heart. 
 
 American nationality is not on trial, — for we may 
 consider it established by the wonderful demonstrations 
 of the past week. But it is important to understand that 
 the contest before us is one in which some long-rooted 
 and deeply-bedded errors fatal to our peace, our na- 
 tional morals, our religion and our power and pros- 
 perity, are to be exterminated — it may be with bloody 
 hands. 
 
 It is no longer to be said with bated breath only, 
 Freedom is national, Slavery is sectional ; that is to be 
 thundered with constitutional cannon upon the deaf 
 and deluded ears of those who have refused to listen 
 to the ballot-box. It is no longer to be allowed that 
 secession is, perhaps, the right of disaffected States. 
 That word is to be blotted from our political vocabu- 
 lary with national scorn; and blacker lines drawn 
 about it than ever fenced in the iniquitous entry of 
 
13 
 
 some subservient legislature, from polluting the records 
 of the State. It is no longer to be admitted that we have 
 a divided sovereignty to distract and neutralize the loy- 
 alty of our army and navy and people. There is no more 
 pestilent heresy in the world than that of a double sov- 
 ereignty. God and mammon, Christ and Belial, may as 
 soon live together as two sovereignties! And our de- 
 luded brethren are themselves logically proving this, 
 by giving their sole allegiance to the only sovereign 
 they reverence, their separate States. This wretched 
 fallacy lies at the root of our troubles. We have 
 evaded it, covered it over, coaxed it, temporized with 
 it — but now we have to exterminate it. The supreme, 
 sole undivided sovereignty of the United States is to 
 be finally vindicated, and the nation is not to lay down 
 its arms while a single traitor to the flag remains to be 
 dealt with. It is unfortunate that our local govern- 
 ments are called States. It misleads the people by 
 clothing these admirable organizations with a delusive 
 seeming of sovereignty ; but this narrow, selfish, ig- 
 norant provincial pride must be permanently humbled, 
 and the wide and noble American patriotism of the 
 Fathers brought back to its original place and dignity. 
 
 Nor is it any longer to be admitted that a consti- 
 tutional majority holds its right to rule by sufferance 
 and dispute. This rebellion is a rebellion against the 
 Ballot-box, the most sacred possession of modern civil- 
 ization. The ballot-box is more vital to our interests 
 as Americans, than mints and forts and bank-vaults and 
 treasuries and armories. We may more innocently 
 and safely submit to assaults on these, than upon that 
 symbol and instrument of our peaceful liberties. Al- 
 low uncertainty, dispute, contempt, armed opposition 
 to hang over its decisions, and our country is lost! 
 No ! the ballot-box must be now forever lifted above 
 
14 
 
 the desecration of sectional or party rage and oppo- 
 sition. Its peaceful rights must be sustained with all 
 the force that its loyal supporters can command. A 
 million cartridge-boxes must see that the ballot-box at 
 the end of this struggle is henceforth safe without one 
 musket to protect it. 
 
 We have, then, a holy war on our hands — a war in 
 defence of the fundamental principles of this govern- 
 ment — a war in defence of American Nationality, the 
 Constitution, the Union, the rights of legal majorities, 
 the ballot-box, the law. We must wage it in the name 
 of civilization, morality, and religion, with unflinching 
 earnestness, energy, and self-sacrifice. God knows how 
 we have striven and prayed to avert the awful neces- 
 sity ! But the hour would not be delayed. And no 
 sublimer spectacle has dawned on the world than the 
 sudden dispersion of all partisan feelings, commercial 
 selfishness, and weak irresolution, by the solemn up- 
 rising of the ancient spirit of liberty. It has come 
 unexpectedly, but not a minute too soon to save the 
 nation. Another presidential term, under the auspices 
 of the spirit which has prevailed for five and twenty 
 years past, would have put the nation, bound hand and 
 foot, in the toils of a corrupted, insolent, and domi- 
 neering Slaveocracy. But the nation is aroused ! and 
 it must be kept awake. Our present dangers are the 
 penalties of past stupor. This noble patriotism which 
 now dignifies all hearts, must not be suffered to escape 
 in a temporary ebullition. It must be calmed on the 
 surface and deepened at the bottom. It must learn 
 patience, persistence, and gravity. We are providen- 
 tially called to a conflict more urgent than our first revo- 
 lution — more perilous and awful. We must not de- 
 spise our enemies, nor think slightingly of their saga- 
 city, their means, or their resolution. They are terribly 
 
15 
 
 in earnest, they are richer than we think, they have 
 long-arrangecl plans, they have a desperate game to 
 play, they have able, ambitious, and unscrupulous 
 leaders, and are under the sway of local delusions, politi- 
 cal fallacies, and military habits and tastes. It is only 
 by the instant rally of the largest force we can muster, 
 and by the immediate exercise of the greatest power 
 we can put forth, by the dropping of every hesitating 
 or half-way policy, by the most direct, aggressive, and 
 overwhelming vindication of all our laws and rights, 
 that we can diminish the effusion of blood, and control 
 within the narrowest limits the horrors and the injuries 
 of Civil War. 
 
 This is not a war against the South, or against its 
 institutions, its rights, or its people. It is a war for 
 the South, for the whole people, for the Constitution, 
 and the Union./ We see our brethren there under a 
 general madness, ready to fire the Capitol, drawing the 
 sword upon tlieir own and our own country. We see 
 them ready to commit national suicide, and we rush 
 in to prevent a catastrophe as fatal to them as to us ! 
 “We must be cruel, that we may be kind.” We must 
 be their enemies for the moment, because we wish to 
 be their permanent friends ; and God knows that their 
 distant posterity will bless us for restraining the mad- 
 ness which, if allowed to have its way, would bury 
 the American name, and its liberties and glories, in an 
 ignominious oblivion. 
 
 March on, then, ye noble patriots from the loyal 
 States of our sacred Union ! Your faces are set to- 
 wards the grave of Washington, which must never pass 
 into any keeping less dignified than the nation’s own. 
 You go to save the Capitol, where the Father of his 
 Country, and Jefferson and the Adamses and Madison 
 and Jackson presided over a common soil with irnpar- 
 
16 
 
 tial care ; where Marshall and Jay and Story judged 
 the people righteously ; where Gadsden, Pinckney and 
 Livingston, Hamilton and King, and Clay and Web- 
 ster honored the Union with their fervid devotion ; 
 and where patriotism and wisdom and justice still sur- 
 vive, and seek, with honest impartiality, to maintain 
 and allow the rights and claims of the thirty-four States 
 of the nation. What though your blood has already, 
 on the sacred 19th of April, rebaptized our liberties 
 on the soil of Maryland ? The men of ’61 are not more 
 precious nor less brave than those of ’76, and Baltimore 
 is as good a place as Lexington to die for one’s coun- 
 try ! Go, then ! ye noble sons of Massachusetts and 
 New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, Rhode Island and 
 young Minnesota ! offer your bodies as the first ram- 
 part to our invaders. The ranks will rapidly close up 
 behind you — for this is no time for men to hold their 
 lives dear ; no day for cowards, sluggards, or neutrals. 
 The Son of Man bids you “look up and lift up your 
 heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.” Your 
 country, mankind, history, and God’s holy bar, will 
 bless you for your alacrity, your courage, your fidel- 
 ity, and your sacrifices. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 


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