In reading the record of such crimes against God and humanity as the enemy have perpetrated in this war, one is tempted to wonder that the thunders of Divine justice do not descend at once from the Heavens and crush the guilty perpetrators in the very commission of their wickedness. We do not complain of the "horrors of war," as war is conducted by civilized nations, under the recognized principle that each belligerent is to fight in his country's cause with all his strength, but that any annoyance, suffering and slaughter by which no ultimate advantage can be gained is a useless piece of barbarity.--But we appeal to the civilized world, we humbly appeal to that Great Tribunal at which all men must one day appear and render an account of the deeds done in the body, that the deliberate system of robbery, rapine, murder, starvation and burning, now carried on against this people, is not war, but a gigantic crime against humanity and against God.
Our readers will recollect the scene in Columbia, where four thousand people were turned out of doors amidst roaring flames, and the communion vessels of a church were plundered and used in their orgies by drunken soldiers, blaspheming, as they drank, the name of Jesus Christ; and the later scene, in Winnsboro', where, as the church was burning, they sang blasphemous songs to the organ amid the sea of fire. Men wonder, when they read such accounts, that Heaven itself does not interpose, and, by some signal interposition of its vengeance, mark its sense of the crime. But that is not God's ordinary mode of dealing with man. In the dispensations of His Providence, "sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily." Men are treated as free agents, which they could not be if every step the transgressor took thrust him at once upon the thick bosses of Jehovah's buckler. He has told them that, "after death, the judgment"; and because He knows how fearful that judgment will be, He waits with wonderful patience and benignity, exhausting the treasures of his goodness and long-suffering to bring them, if possible, to repentance, before he summons them to a bar where the voice of Mercy is no longer heard, and Justice condemns the guilty to pay, to the uttermost farthing, the long arrears of their crime.
But as nations have no hereafter, and must hence be punished here for their wickedness; and as the North, in the re-election of Mr. Lincoln, has deliberately sanctioned his mode of conducting this war, those of its people who have any belief in a God cannot look to the future of their country without some dismal forebodings. "With that measure ye mete to others, it shall be meted to you again," is as true of nations as individuals. We are aware that the North is now exempt from calamities and misery; that it flourishes like a green bay tree, and riots in wealth, luxury and licentiousness. But who knows that, amid its revelry, the hand- writing will not soon appear upon the wall: ‘"God hath numbered thy Kingdom and finished it."’ Who can say that the groans of helpless sufferers, the smoke of burning cities, the innocent blood crying from the ground, which daily ascend to the throne of the Most High, will not one day come down in storms of fire, and blood, and anguish, upon the heads of a guilty people? How and when we know not; but unless all history is a lie, unless the existence of God is a dream of the imagination, there is a future awaiting that nation so full of horror and agony that even we, who are the victims of their crime, could not look upon without a shudder.
We know how, in their impenetrable armor of self-complacency and atheism, they scoff at such a prediction. But what is now a prediction will as surely be come history as the sun rises to- morrow. There is, there must be, a just Governor of the Universe. Before Him we lay our cause. It may be His will that we perish by murderous hands, and if it be, we bow with reverence and adoration. But from our desolate homes, our churches defiled, and our bloody graves, there goes up which Heaven will hear and will not disregard.
