Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/10

4 cause only. No mention was made of it in the manifestos of the seceding states.

The struggle was one between Freedom and Slavery. But it was something deeper than this. It was a struggle between Christianity and all that is most hostile to Christianity. Christianity had founded a great community in the New World. Slavery came up against that community, as Mahometanism, with its polygamy, its fatalism, its exterminating ferocity, came up against European Christendom ten centuries ago; and, like Mahometanism, it has been overthrown. The Powers of Good and Evil, in forms perhaps more sharply defined than they had worn in any previous encounter, have fought for that New World, and the Power of Good has conquered.

I went to the United States believing, I returned firmly convinced, that not democracy in America, but free Christianity in America, was the real key to the study of the people and their institutions. Democracy is a political arrangement, dealing, like all political arrangements, with the shallower interests of man. It would be reversing the order of causation to deduce from it the deeper parts of the character of the people.

I mean by Christianity nothing sectarian or narrow. I mean by it the spirit of Christian society—the spirit which has hitherto alone shown itself capable of animating and sustaining a real community; for the spurious communities of heathen antiquity were oligarchial communities of masters tyrannising over a people of slaves. I mean the spirit which is present in many a champion of humanity, who, since Christianity has been degraded by superstition and allied with social injustice, would scarcely call himself by the Christian name, but who is nevertheless