[384] the United States to enter in and possess the lands of all whose destiny it is to live next us, and to plant everywhere the ‘peculiar institutions’ of a peculiarly Christian and chosen people, the land-stealing propensity of whose progressive republicanism is declared to be in accordance with the will and by the grace of God, and who, like the Scotch freebooter,—
Pattering an Ave Marywhile trampling on the rights of a sister republic, and re-creating slavery where that republic had abolished it, talk piously of ‘the designs of Providence’ and the Anglo-Saxon instrumentalities thereof in ‘extending the area of freedom.’ On the contrary, the author portrayed the evils of war and proved its incompatibility with Christianity, —contrasting with its ghastly triumphs the mild victories of peace and love. Our true mission, he taught, was not to act over in the New World the barbarous game which has desolated the Old; but to offer to the nations of the earth, warring and discordant, oppressed and oppressing, the beautiful example of a free and happy people studying the things which make for peace, Democracy and Christianity walking hand in hand, blessing and being blessed. His next public effort, an Address before the Literary Society of his Alma Mater, was in the same vein. He improved the occasion of the recent death of four distinguished members of that fraternity to delineate his beautiful ideal of the jurist, the scholar, the artist, and the philanthropist,
When he rode on a border forray,
