Northern political Religionists.
One of the most peculiar features of the Yankee war is the prominent part played in it by their political preachers. It has been so in every contest, civil and military, in which Puritanism has ever been engaged. The blending of politics and religion is a distinctive characteristic of Puritanism. The Divine Founder of Christianity repeatedly and emphatically announced to his followers that his kingdom was not of this world. The kingdom is just the reverse. It moves, breathes, and has its being in political agitation.It made war upon Church and State in England, not because of the principle, but because it was not the Church and State. It went to Holland for freedom to worship God, and having found it, was discontented, and accepted a large grant of land in America, where it worshipped God freely by permitting no one else to do the same. In the Indian wars and the wars with the Dutch, hostilities were always inaugurated and enforced in the pulpit. Washington Irving says that whenever the Yankees had a longing after the lands of their Dutch neighbors, their preachers prepared the way for plunder and spoliation by vilifying the character of the Dutch people from the pulpit, and sowing the seeds of dissension and war. In the last war with England they mounted the political hobby and rode it booted and spurred over all New England. Treason was openly preached from the pulpit, and disunion, now so horrible, was then as favorite a dogma as the predestination of everybody but themselves to eternal wrath.
Who could expect from the Puritan clergy, if clergy they deserve to be called, any other course than they have pursued in this war? When Abolitionism was invented by English Puritans and handed over to their breed in New England, they mounted the irrepressible negro as if their legs were born for his shoulders. They saw at once the inexhaustible capacities which the subject afforded of being righteous at other people's expense. Having no slaves of their own, all that they ever had having been sold to the South and the proceeds pocketed, they could afford to denounce slavery as the sum of all villainies. Moreover, it furnished them an opportunity of turning back from the plough of the Gospel, and exercising that political power which has ever been their darling passion. Let a Puritan preacher dabble in politics, and he is as happy as a hog in a mud puddle, and concerns himself about as much for the Heaven that is above him.
If that Kingdom which is not of this world were ever preached now in Puritan
pulpits, the congregation would regard it as a dangerous heresy, fit only for barbarian Confederates. The Puritan pulpit is the big drum of the Yankee war, calling sinners to the battlefield instead of to repentance. Yankee Doodle has taken the place of Old Hundred, and instead of the Cross as the emblem of salvation, behold the Stars and Stripes. Instead of the peace and good will of the Gospel, envy, hatred, malice, war and bloodshed are blown every Sunday from Puritan trumpets. Tens of thousands of dead bodies are now festering under Southern suns, whom Puritan preachers have sent to their last resting place.
But a day of reckoning is coming for these wolves in sheep's clothing. They will have their retribution even in this world. When the madness of the hour is over at the North, the influence of Puritanism will go down never to rise, and its name stink in the nostrils of their country for generations. Never had religion or freedom such, enemies as those who profess to be the most pious and liberty-loving of mankind.
