TEE AMERICAN PRESBYTERIAN AND GENESEE EVANGELIST. A Religions and Family Newspaper, IH THB IftTBBKST OP THE Constitutional Presbyterian Church. PUBLISHED EVERT THURSDAY, AT THE PRESBYTERIAN HOUSE, 1334 Chestnut Street, (2d story,) Philadelphia. Rev. John W. Hears, Editor and Publisher. Rev. B. B. Hotchhln, Editor of News and -' Family Departments. Rev. ft S P. Bash, Corresponding Editor, Rochester,». T. ftomtan THURSDAY, JULY 13, 1865. CONTENTS OF INSIDE PAGES, Second Page—The Family Circle : Paul Gerhard’s Hymn—The Clouded Intellect— Checking Perspiration-Good Natnred-The Storm, the Wolves, and the Bird—A Pleasant Parlor Pas time—Onr Idol. For the Little Folks: Familiar Talks with the Children—The New Scholar—Refining by Fire Rural Economy: Indelible Ink—A Hint to Gar deners—Cure for Dogs—The Seasons, Crops, etc. Third Page—Editor’s Table: ‘' Mary, the Handmaid of the Lord”—Smith’s " Al fred Hagart’s Household”—Tennyson’s "Songs for all Seasons —Pamphlets and Periodicals. . Miscellaneous: Who Shall Vote in the South ? Sixth Page—Correspondence : Words for Toug Converts —A Happy Sufferer-—Re construction—ln the Market Place—Mrs. Lucy L. Page—Republican Prayer—The Devil Doing Good. Seventh, Page—Religious Intelligence : Presbyterian—Congregational—Methodist— Baptist Toe Jews —Missionary—Miscellaneous—ltems. • J*y®o®*la.neous • Position of the Evangelical Party id the Episcopal Church—-Wesley *s Preaching—Take which Road You Please—Acuteness of the Hindoos. THE CHRISTIAN’S LIFE PLAN. The thoughtful Christian naturally desires *o cultivate his new character, and to nourish his new life, with some degree of system. It is an education of. the religious nature, and it requires method for its highest mea sure of success, quite as much as does the training of the intellectual part. A reli gious life without a plan, without specific objects, without intelligent foresight will be unsatisfactory in its results. The comman der of an army must sit down first, and consult whether he be able to meet him that cometh against him. If not, even though successful, he may lose the best re sults of victory. The thoughtless, uncal culating Christian may be saved; yet.there will be much of wood, hay, and stubble built upon the immutable foundations, which must perish, and himself will be saved as by fire. By the strength of Christ, the Christian may be master of the situation; —he may comprehend its needs, its perils, its advantages, and may intelli gently and prayerfully make ample arrang ments to meet them all. Some general directions may not be in appropriate to the Christian, who would make the culture of his religious nature more expressly the business of his life. 1. God has already planned our lives, and one important part of our plan is, to recognize and fall in with, this plan of God. By our assigned position in the world, our wealth or poverty, our business or profession, our family connections and responsibilities, our endowments and culture, and by the great events and providences of our lives, we' may learn this plan of God. From day to day it reveals itself, the ever unfolding apocalypse of life. What God would have all men do, is written in the Bible; what he would have you do, how he would have you train your characters, he hints to you at every turn of the daily round of your life. Bo the duty that lies nearest. Do not frame a scheme of cul ture from which you must descend, as from a transcendental region of piety, to the every day affairs of life. Conceive not of a life of unnatural seclusion and isolation from the ordinary circumstances of men, as more favourable to spiritual culture. It may produce a rapid, but it must be au un healthy, growth. It will partake of the hot-house; it may be a curiosity, like the cloister life of Elizabeth of Hungary. But he that desires a large, genial, and well balanced development of the religious na ture, will seek it in the open-air of God’s great school-house, the world—the world of business and of home. One’s daily duties are appointed to train the fundamental principles, the broad common-place virtues of Christian character, to develope the primal affections and to elevate them all ' into the new atmosphere of piety We need not bid, for cloistered cell, Our neighbor and our work farewell, Nor strive to wind ourselves too high For sinful man beneath the sky. The trivial round, the common task, Would furnish all we ought to ask: Boom to deny ourselves; a road To bring us daily near to God. 2. But the appointments of Providence are to be found not only in the form of en couragements or of plain opportunities. With these vre can fall in. There are events and circumstances which seem posi tively hostile to any purpose of piety; in the presence of which we must rely entire ly upon inward force and principle. Our lives are not merely full of tasks and diffi culties which an ardent nature may find actually stimulating; they abound in ma lignant enmities, in situations that require courage, devotion, sacrifice; that conduct through dark and terrible hours of strug gle, where we must resist sometimes untc blood, striving against sin. These antag onisms caused by sin, are permitted and employed by God, in his plan of our lives. By them we may cultivate new depths of •oharaoteT. As we come in contact with them, ISTew Series, YoL 11, No. 28. as they would forceps out of the path of duty, as they would crush our principles, as they loom up threatening to hide God and heaven from our eyes, there arise more critical but still greater opportunities of self-culture than before. No longer led gently forward by the common opportuni ties of life, in which God, our teacher, with patient iteration sets us our daily les son, we find his enemy and ours stretched completely across the way, and shaking his fearful dart at our lives, our property, our dearest earthly good. These are choice and frequently most profitable seasons of self-culture, when great and life-long les sons are learned, and when the roots of storm-rocked principles strike deep into the soul. ,3. The general fact of temperament’pre sents a broad and ever present field of cul ture to the Christian. Learn what your temperament is; whether impetuous or listless, whether sanguine or melancholic, whether amiable or fretful, and lay your plans accordingly. It is here you will fre quently find the besetting sin of your lives. 4. Finally there is one aim, beside which you must count all things as loss, to win Christ and to he found in him. Dare not lay an elaborate plan in which this is not fundamental. To'-have Christ formed in you by faith; to put on Christ; to be dead to the law and married to him; to be cruci fied with him, and yet to live, —not our selves but be living in us, —to be rooted and grounded in love; to aim at that “per fect man” which is measured by the stature of the fulness of Christ; to grow up into him in all things, from whom the whole body, fitly joined together and compacted, . . maketh ..increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love ; to he complete in 3ih; this is the one sure method, and this the consummation of all Christian cul ture. • Here is the Christian’s Life Plan. Add to your Faith, Virtue. All else' is Pharisaism, or hollow, inefficient, philoso phical morality. POLICY AND DUTY OF PUNISHING REBEL LEADERS* IY. FOREIGN OPINION AND PRECEDENT. To the two special reasons for punishing traitors against our free Government given in our last, we now add a third; namely:— We have almost nothing to maintain social and civil order throughout the entire range of our municipal, county, State and na tional arrangements, but respect for law among the masses of the people. We .have no standing armies; we' have no supersti tious reverence for the persons of our rulers; no cherished figment of hereditary divine right to prop up their authority. We sur round our rulers and their acts with no artificial state or splendor. Everything is managed with republican frankness and simplicity. The question might well be raised, how Government, under such conditions, can be sustained at all. Foreigners, accustomed to monarchy and imperialism, have doubted its permanence, and have been confidently waiting to see “ the bubble burst.” If there is no all-pervading, deeply rooted re verence for our laws; if there is no habi tual expectation of their prompt and righte ous execution, such as instinctively to pre dispose even bad men to avoid trangressing them, then indeed there is no security for a republican form of government. And the rebellion itself was originated by men who have been nurtured in a disregard for both human and divine law; men prepared by the education of slave-institutions for any aet of arrogance and self-will; men who counted on an equal indifference to the sacredness of civil order and the national authority in the North, and who, if they had been characterized by an equal reverence for law with the Northern people, would never have been guilty of such a crime. We maintain, therefore, that the great security for our existence as an orderly community, is the popular sentiment of reverence for law; and when the most monstrous and flagrant violations of law possible, have been committed, then, unless the sentiment is to be utterly ignored and irreparably damaged, the most conspicuous illustrations of the majesty, inflexibility, and severity of the law must be made. The very fact that we have so very few de fences for our Government, makes it neces sary to be more scrupulous in guarding what we have. We cannot afford, as perhaps some firmly seated tyrant might, from within the circle of ten centuries of precedent and of habit/) strengthened by a hundred thousand bayo nets and by garrisoned towns and military posts in every quarter of the land, —we cannot afford as such a one might, to dis pense with an impressive and wholesome lesson of the vigor of the law. The very lightness and easiness of our Government PHILADELPHIA, THURSDAY, JULY 13, 1865. makes it necessary that treason against it should be signally punished, lest it should cease indeed to be a Government at all, and secession itself get the broadest justifi cation from the very power which has crushed it. We call, therefore, upon our authorities to contribute the new and need ed confirmation to the highest law of the land, and through it, to all laws of State, county, city, and town, by promptly, solemnly, and condignly punishing the guilty authors and abettors of this rebel lion. Let the ineffaceble infamy of the gibbet be stamped upon traitor leadership. Let the conviction be more than ever sent' home to the hearts of the people, that the law of the land is supreme, that it must be obeyed and reverenced, that it cannot be broken with impunity, that the outrageously wicked attempt to overthrow the law itself .will recoil with tenfold force upon the head of him who attempts it, and who misleads millions of his fellow-citizens in the attempt. Never, never can we feel safe again, if traitor leaders in such a rebellion are suf fered to go unhung. Precedents are urged against the capital punishment of traitor leaders. It is said that such punishments have always reacted in favor of the victims, have made martys of them, and have but rendered sacred the cause for which they died. But the truth is, we lack precedents. There has never been a parallel in the world’s history to the causelessness, the unrighteousness, the atrocity of this rebellion. No rebel leaders, no foiled traitors, have ever been in mid-air. with half so heavy a burden upon their souls, as these disappointed plotters against the life of the American Republic would carry. From the history of what nation shall we draw parallels ? From that of Russia-in her dealings with the rebellious Poles, or of Austria in ,her treatment of rebel Hungarians and Italians, or of Spain in dealing with the revolted Netherlands ? lit is, indeed true, that the sanguinary course of these' Governments towards discomfited rebels have , made them martyrs, and has reconsecrated their cause in the eye* of the world;. hut their cause was already sacred before they suffered for it. They perished in upholding liberty. How can- Southern traitors, arrested in, their mad scheme for destroying a free and for perpetuating oppression,—that is for attempting the very reverse of these acts of Polish, Hungarian, and Dutch rebels, —rise into the same honorable posi tion before the world, because treated in the same manner ? The judgment of the people is not so perverse. If it has been gene rally on the side of political criminals, the reason is because, as human governments have usually been constructed and adminis tered, the fair presumption has most fre quently been in favor of the justice of the rebel cause. But where the rebellion has been with out adequate justification, no reasonable and properly administered punishment has wrought the change in favor of the con demned and executed authors, which we are urged to believe has been and must be the case. Turning to an Old Testament illustration, we observe that Absalom was not indeed brought to a formal trial; but his cause was lost while he yet hung alive in the oak. Joab slew him, not as the leader of a hostile army, for that army was flying in confusion, _ and Absalom abandoned and incapable of striking another blow. He slays him as a conquered traitor. That was not only a bold and able deed in view of the king’s unmanly and dangerous partiality for the youth, but it utterly broke the spirit of the rebellion. In spite of the powerful im pression made by Absalom’s appearance and bearing upon the people, in spite of the king’s deep and manifest attachment tor him and bitter sorrow for his death, we cannot find the slightest trace of a disposi tion among the Israelites, nor in all subse quent literature, to make a martyr of the man who fell a victim to his effeminacy and who was caught, like Jeff. Davis himself, with some falsely appropriated marks of womanhood upon him. We read in Samuel xix. 10, that the final reason assigned by the insurgent tribes for returning to their allegiance and settling all disturbances in the kingdom, is the death of Absalom. “And Absalom whom we* anointed over us, is dead in battle. Now, therefore, why speak ye not a word of bringing the king ■ back?” Joab was wise enough to know that the best way to secure ultimate pacifi cation, was not simply to put down rebel lion by force of arms and spare the leader, but it was to make a prompt and conspicu ous example. Those who would have us, out of mere clemency, spare the leaders of the late rebellion, show about as much judgment as David, who was fast going into his dotage, showed in regard to saving the life of Absalom. . Has modern literature or English opinion canonized the Jacobites, those obstinate adherents of a bad and ruined cause, who had a certain specious glitter of legitimacy to recommend them; does any perceptible quality- of reverence hang around their memory as of martyrs, because some of their leaders met with the treatment they de served? Who, but Irish Catholics hold in honor the victims of the unsuccessful re bellions which-Papal fanaticism has stirred up in unhappy Erin? Or if any others share with' the Irish, their regard for these unsuccessful bursts of national feeling, it is not because their authors fell, but because they are regarded as having in some mea sure deserved a better fate. Nor has the doom visited upon the leaders of the Cana da rebellion; of twenty-five years ago, at all helped to save it from almost utter oblivion, but has hastened and deepened it. In truth, the nations from whom this advice now so officiously comes, have invariably, and in recent times, pursued the policy of dealing rigorously with captured rebels. The pages of their history are stained by needless and revolting cruelties, and we may, if we choose to be unceremonious and outspoken, reply to their extraordinary appeals for clemency, in the famous words of General Butler's farewell to the citizens of New Orleans:— “To be sure,” he says, “I might have regaled you with the amenities of British civilization and yet been within the supposed rules of civilized warfare. Yon might have been smoked to death in caverns, as were the Covenanters of Scotland, by the command of a General of the royal house of Eng land; or roasted like the inhabitants of Algiers during the French campaign ; or you might have been scalped and toma hawed, as oUr mothers were at Wyoming, by the savage allies of Great Britain in our own revolution ; your property could have been turned over to indiscriminate ‘ loot’ like the palace of the Empeor of China;- Works of art which adorned your buildings might have been sent away, like those of the Vatican; yoiir sons might have been blown away from the mouths of cannon, like the Sepoys'at Delhi; and yet all this would have been within the rules of civilized war fare as practised by the most polished and most hypocritical nations of Europe.” Here we leave those nations. Their advice is unbecoming the# own precedents and utterly inapplicable to the case in hand. Eor ourselves, we deem it sufficient here to observe that our whole policy since our beginning as a nation, has been one of eminently dangerous leniency to disturbers of the public peace. It is a fact that no one has ever been executed for treason under our laws besides John Brown ! We let Aaron Burr and all his comrades go. We never punished, no, never touched the hair of the head of a single nullifier. An drew Jackson, in his last sickness, declared that-in reflecting on his administration, he chiefly regretted that he had not had John C. Calhoun executed®for treason. “My country,” said the General, “ would have sustained me in the act, and his fate would have been a warning to traitors in all time to come.”* Who knows but this severe course would have created such a whole some impression as even entirely to have prevented the breaking out of the late re bellion, the legitimate fruit of seed sown by the arch-conspirator ? O, let us pray to God that no Executive officer called to act in this far more solemn and significant era, shall have terrible cause to take similar regrets upon dying lips. Save, 0 save the country from what must be the far worse consequence of a neglect of Executive duty in a time so pregnant of influence upon all generations to come, as this. * Parton’sLife, 3. 447. Mason, Brothers New York, 1861. Ford’s Theatre. —We announced Ig.st week, in a single sentence, that the pur chase of Ford’s theatre, for the use of the Young Men’s Christian Association, had failed of being consummated. When the time, July 1, came for the first pay ment, the trustees for the purchase re garded the prospects for future payments too dubious to justify them in making the beginning, and so allowed the arrangement to fall through. We are sorry that any discouragement should befal noble hearted Christians, while de vising. liberal things for religion. Still, for reasons which we have before ex pressed, while speaking of this proposed purchase, we cannot regret its failure. We have also heard it hinted, we hope without foundation, that under the pro posed local management, there would have been some uncertainty about the room being made free for public discus sions, on some subjects, which must occupy the attention of the Christian public. Such, for example, -as the politi cal status of the colored people. Genesee Evangelist, TSTo. 999. On Friday, July 7, David B. Harold, the companion of Booth in his flight; Geo. A. Atzerodt, appointed to murder the then Vice President, Mr. Johnson, and a con spirator in the entire assassination plot; Lewis Payne, the assailant of Secretary Seward and his family; and Mrs. Mary E. Suratt, the directress of many of the par ticulars of the scheme, and confidential friend and hostess of the conspirators, were hung at the national Capital, in merited punishment of the great and historically unparalleled crime of which they were guilty. Michael O’Laughlin, appointed to : murder General Grant; Samuel Arnold, an accomplice some tiing before the assassina tion; Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, who was in the full confidence of Booth six months before the act, and who rendered him medical aid and assistance in his attempted escape—these three subordinate actors have been sentenced to imprisonment at hard labor for life. Edward Spangler, the carpenter, who facilitated Booth’s flight from the stage of the theatre, and hindered pursuit, was sentenced to imprisonment at hard labor for six years. These sentences were in substance the findings of the military court, which Presi dent Johnson approved without alteration; and which were carried into execution on the very next day after they were promul gated. The people in mass respond Amen ! to this simple act of justice. Anything less than this would have outraged their deep est convictions, their dearest principles, aind. their mournful and tender reverence for the noble victim of the conspiracy. The American people behold with satisfac tion this evidence of the fidelity of the Executive and his subordinates to the re quirements of the law. They have not hesitated to enforce it with the full rigor which the enormity of the crime demands. They have shown themselves no vain bearers of the magisterial sword. The case.was indeed clear, and the course of duty too plain to be mistaken, yet the na tion has an unquestionable feeling of relief, an increased sense_of security, in the fact that so plain an act of justice has been done; and that the first decisive intimation of the temper of our Government in regard t j extreme cases has been put upon record. The hanging and imprisonment of these wretches will not be without salutary effect upon such as are still disposed to cleave to the cause for which, in reality, they suf fered ; it is no uncertain intimation of what may yet be expected of the Government in dealing mth the conspicuous and deeply dyed traitors who are in its custody, and to whom this conspiracy and other atrocities ot the rebellion can be clearly traced. A BELIEVER, OR AN ATHEIST 1 John Stuart Mill, the well-known philosophical and political writer of Eng land, long a leading contributor to the in fidel pages of the Westminster Review, and more lately known as the earnest and able defender of the National cause in our late conflict, is candidate for a seat in the House of Commons for Westminster, London. Mr. Mill is a rationalist of the advanced school. Especially in the Review just mentioned he is associated with all the prominent as sailants of a supernatural revelation in his country; with the supporters of Colenso and the Essayists and Reviewers, and with the systematic detractors of all works written in the interest of Scripture truth, and the ready ushers to public notice and favor of every in fidel production in Europe, Asia, or America; Theodore Parker coming, we believe, nearest to their idea of what a religious man should be and believe. It is perhaps too much to say that Mr. Mill goes to the full length of these doc trines—that he is fairly represented by the Westminster Review but the question has arisen among his proposed constituents, whether he is not too radical an unbeliever to represent Westminster. And we must say we are gratified with the state of opin ion in the electors of London, which de mands such an investigation, and which will not suffer even such eminent services and talents in the scientific world as those of Mr. Mill, to protect from challenge the grave religious defects in his teachings, when he becomes a candidate for a high public position. The opponent of Mr. Mill is Mr. Smith, the great news-agent of the United King dom. He is represented as a conservative, though not a slavish one. His supporters have issued an address considered as the ablest electioneering document on the Con servative side. In this they quote from, or refer to a sentence in, Mill’s recent work on Sir Wm. Hamilton’s’philsophy, as proof that Mill is an atheist. The drift of the sentence is somewhat Byronic, or in the FATE OF THE ASSASSINS. b TERMB. A ”«r annum, in advance: , By Carrier, $3 50. JyZj/ cents additional • three ;ha - after three months. or more papers, sent to one address, payable strictly m advance and in one remittance* ByMail, $2 50 per annum. By Carriers. $3 per annum. Ministers and Ministers’ Widows, $2 in ad vance. Home Missionaries, $l5O inadvance. Fifty cents additional after three months. Remittances by mail are at our risk. Postage.—Five cents quarterly, in advance, paid qy subscribers at the office of delivery. Advertisements.— l2}4 cents per line for the first, and 10 cents for the second insertion. One square (one month).,. $3 00 two months.. .. 550 three “ 750 six ” .. 12 00 “ one year ... 18 00 The following discount on long advertisements, in serted for three months and upwards, is allowed: — Over 20 lines, 10 per cent off; over 50 lines, 20 per cent.; over 100 lines, 33J4 per cent. off. semi-blasphemous spirit of Shelley; a kind of defiance of the God in whom he regards evangelical Christians as believing; but it can scarcely be set down as a declaration of speculative atheism, to whatever practi cal rejection of the true God it may tend.* But if the address has used extravagant language, Mr. Mill himself, in a letter to a friend on the subject, has more than al anced accounts. He not only reiterates his belief in the correctness of all his pub? lished views on religions subjects, but in regard to the passage quoted by his oppo nents, he has the presumption to assert that it is one of the most religious and Christian expressions of feeling in all recent literature”!! He also defies any one to point out in his writings a single passage* “ that conflicts with what the best religious minds of our age accept as Christianity.” Among these “ best religious minds of our age” he refers to “a Bishop” in the Lon don Spectator and to the Spectator itself— “ a most religious journal” he calls it— though the Bishop was probably Colenso, and the “ religion” of the Spectator is about that of the Westminster Review. These two authorities having endorsed the Christianity of the sentence, no one “ who reads the passage and the context fairly, could pronounce it other than Christian in the truest sense." John Stuart Mill, instead of being an atheist, thinks he ought to be regarded as an eminent Christian, and his works as leading issues of the Christian literature of the times ! What a culpable piece of neg legence that our Tract Societies have not long ago secured his inestimable services, or at least that our Theological Seminaries have not included his treatises among their leading text books ! What an admirable stroke of electioneering policy, when one is accused of being an atheist, to claim to be a better Christian than one's opponent and to quote a live Bishop in proof of it! Certainly it shows that the reputation of being a believer is of some account in the eyes of the Westminster constituency, and that the charge of atheism must be flung off if one would get the votes of these men. Whether they are likely to be blinded by such dust as Mr. Mill throws, in speaking of his perfect accordance with the “ best religious minds of qur age,” and of “ the Bishop" who endorsed his piety in the Spectator, especially as the candidate abso lutely refuses to answer any questions on his religious opinions, we cannot say. We look with interest for the result. *“lf,” he says, “instead of the ’glad tidings' that there exists a Being in whom all the ex cellencies, which the highest human mind can conceive exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are the principles of his government, except ‘ the high est morality of which we are capable of con ceiving’ does not sanction them; convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as I may. But when I am told that I must believe this, and at the same time call this being by the names which express and affirm the highest morality, I say in plain terms that I will not. Whatever power such a being may have over me, there is one thing which he' shall not do: he shall not compel me to worship him. I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I ap ply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go. ” A New Fusion to be Expected. There is little doubt but the hope is strongly entertained that the new eccle siastical organization about to be made up from the non-Episcopal Methodist churches, may be induced, at no distant* day, to become a part of the Congregar tional body. The Western Methodist Pro testant,one of the most important papers of the Methodist churches concerned, speak ing of the late National Council’s “Decla ration of Faith,” while as yet it was under discussion, said:— “We shall note the action of the Coundlon this paper, which contains a brief but clear and comprehensive declaration of the funda mental and essential doctrines of the Christian faith, on which all orthodox Christians may fully unite. It is one of the most hopeful signs of the times, that Christians who agree on essential points of doctrine are seeking a more intimate union with each other, and manifest a disposition, in matters of indiffer ence, to permit the most enlarged liberty, while in all things they exercise charity.” Still more significant is the following from the last number of The Oongrega tionalist, on the Cleveland Convention Methodists:— ‘ ‘The spirit of the convention was eminently fraternal and Christian. With scarcely an exception, the principles advocated by Con gregationalists were those insisted on as the true basis of church government. . There is evident progress in the right direction among our Methodist brethren, and we should bid them a hearty “Godspeed.” Much frater nal interest and sympathy were manifested by the convention in the movements of the Con gregational churches. When a proposition was made to send a greeting to the National Council in session at Boston, it was warmly seconded, and carried unanimously; and the reply was received with marked expressions of pleasure and good will. I have no doubt that the ultimate result of this movement will be. all that the friends of Christian liberty and primitive church polity could desire.”
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