If our foundations are destroyed, our nation will be destroyed.
I have been studying the War Between the States for 53 years. In all
those years, the one quotation I have read which summarizes the true
reason for the differences between the North and the South which led to
that war was stated by James Henley Thornwell (1812-1862). He was the
President of Columbia Theological Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina,
founder of the Southern Presbyterian Review, and editor of the Southern Quarterly Review. This is what he said in the Southern Literary Messenger for July 1851:
“The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and
Slaveholders; they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red
Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and
regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle
ground, Christianity and Atheism the combatants, and the progress of
humanity the stake. One party seems to regard society, with all its
complicated interests, its divisions and subdivisions, as the machinery
of man, which, as it has been invented and arranged by his ingenuity and
skill, may be taken to pieces, reconstructed, altered or repaired, as
experience shall indicate defects or confusion in the original plan. The
other party beholds in it the ordinance of God; and contemplates ‘this
little scene of human life’ as placed in the middle of a scheme, whose
beginnings must be traced to the unfathomable depths of the past, and
whose development and completion must be sought in the still more
unfathomable depths of the future – a scheme, as Butler expresses it,
‘not fixed, but progressive, in every way incomprehensible;’ in which,
consequently, irregularity is the confession of our ignorance, disorder
the proof of our blindness, and with which it is as awful temerity to
tamper as to sport with the name of God.”
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