Readers of today’s North Carolina Baptists’ Biblical Recorder learn of a fast day sermon entitled “The Uses of War” recently preached in Richmond, Virginia, by a “Dr. Moore.” The paper reprints a portion of the sermon as follows:
War was a part of the agency by which God disciplines nations. So long as there was sin in the world we might expect to find this huge, colossal evil among men. — But war was not wholly an unmitigated evil, terrible as its ravages were. A long course of peace and prosperity tends to emasculate and corrupt a people. Mammon worship becomes supreme. Everything assumes a money standard, and corruption creeps slowly into the very heart of a people. The refined and intellectual withdraw from political life to scholarly ease or to the rapid accumulation of wealth, and leave the direction of affairs in the hands of selfish demagogues, while the fiery energy of the young is expended in revelry and dissipation. A worldly and epicurean expediency, that sneers at lofty heroism and sublime principles as Quixotic romance of impractical dreaming and barren speculations — a hard and brassy nationalism that brings everything to the standard of dollars and cents, and a secret skepticism as to the value of everything but money, take stealthy possession of the public heart. War breaks up the tendency of Mammon worship, effeminacy and selfish expediency. It shows that there are higher aims in life than making money; that there are nobler things to be contended for than natural advancement; and that certain principles and truth, which underline all prosperity, the sacrificing of the end will sap even material greatness; that heroism, daring, unselfishness and patriotism are realities, not romances. As men encounter hardship, peril, cold and hunger in defence of their rights, there is generally a loftier manliness and a higher tone of character that will descend in kindling memories of noble deeds, as at once a heritage and a model to the coming generation. It was thus that the Hebrew Commonwealth gathered its enduring strength; that the Greek Republics attained their athletic sinew and symmetry; and that the wolf-nursed twins of Tiber became Imperial Rams, stamping in lines of iron her mighty image on all nations and all time.
One of our sins heretofore had been a lazy dependence on the industry of others to do what we could and might have done for ourselves. We have allowed them to come and carry away our cotton, wool, iron, lead, copper, coal, hemp, our very cord-wood to return them in other forms, whilst we paid for this double transportation and brokerage, commissions, per centage, exchange, insurance, discount, storage, and a list of charges whose name is legion, for the privilege of being dependent on them for the very necessities of life. Separated from this people by the convulsive throes of war, all these ties must be broken, all these channels filled up, and a condition of commercial and industrial independence would be a sceptre without a throne, a sword without an arm to wield it.
Another important effect of war would… be a feeling of oneness, a broad, deep national unity, binding together the separate sovereignties of the Confederacy, so that politically, while they shall be distinct as the billows, yet, nationally, they shall be one as the sea. Had the original thirteen Colonies separated peacefully from Great Britain they would never have made that E Pluribus Unum under which they advanced to such peerless greatness, until the spirit and power of that revolutionary struggle became extinct in a race that knew not Joseph. It was necessary that these Confederate States should be put into the furnace of war, that they might be welded into one great united people; banded together by common weakness, common suffering, and common triumphs, having a common heritage of glory; mingling the blood of the border States with those of the Gulf and great Valley on the same battle fields, and thus creating memories so sacred, so deep, and so enduring as to fuse into one warm, loving and enduring whole this new birth into the great sisterhood of nationalities.
Another result of the war was far higher than the one just stated. Never was an army, since the days of Cromwell in which there was a more pervading sense of the power of God. When we saw boys, yet warm from their mothers’ heart, stand like veterans in the iron sleet of Bethel, or the Thermopylae gorges of Rich Mountain; when we saw squadrons of raw volunteers and militia stand as stone walls, while the hurricane of flame swept over the red plains of Manassas and Springfield, or the green hills of Carnifax Ferry and Leesburg; when we saw the very storms of the sea and the stars in their courses seeming to sweep disaster on our enemies, we could not wonder that many a brave man has found all of these battle fields to be “Bethels,” and said, “surely the Lord was in this place, and I knew it not;” and that many a dear child, when he paced his lonely round as sentinel, or stood in his perilous post as picket, beneath the silent stars, has found his place to be a Mannasseh, and that there has solemnly risen there to his memory words that he has heard amid the sweet scenes of home, from lips that may be even then in the deep silence of midnight, moving in wakeful prayers for the brave and beloved boy who is far, far away.
Lofty words indeed, from the pulpit: language and imagery that is repeated over and over by men of position and privilege in the Confederacy. This is a war fought on behalf of a relative handful of wealthy men who control most of the South’s wealth, their riches derived from the forced labor of African slaves.The slave-based economy, culture and society of the Southern Confederacy is often compared, from the lips and pens of the South’s leading men, to the great, ancient nation states. These men want to believe that their Confederacy is one of the greatest, purest and most righteous nations in the history of the world.
Baptist divines, now immersed in southern culture and holding places of power and prestige, are more often than not willing accomplices in the public effort to rally the common man to the defense of the slaveholding elite — even while deigning to be speaking against power and privilege. Or, perhaps they are not mere accomplices: maybe these Baptist divines are the South, the region’s race-based slave-driven world now fused into the marrow and soul of a people who once upon a time offered their very lives to pry apart the fusion of church and state.
Source: Biblical Recorder, December 4, 1861 (link)
