Discourse on the Aspects of the War: Delivered in the Indiana-Place Chapel, Boston, on Fast Day, April 2, 1863 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Discourse on the Aspects of the War: Delivered in the Indiana-Place Chapel, Boston, on Fast Day, April 2, 1863

There was another day of crisis, when you knew what it was to love. You found yourself caring more for another than for yourself, - going out of your own life into that of another, finding a divine joy in adoring the beauty of another, following her with your thought, and feeding your life daily out of hers. This also was history. Those days may have long passed by. Perhaps you are a gray-headed man, known on change as a hard and keen man of business; no mortal suspects you of such a thing as sentiment. And yet, I will venture to say, there is somewhere among your papers, In some locked drawer Of your bureau, a little faded packet of notes, with a withered flower which you cannot bear to throw away, for it marks that critical period when you were all alive with an idea when you were rapt away out of yourself into a seventh heaven. You were foolish as you could be, no doubt, -but - well, It was life; and you can never forget it.

So nations have long periods of annals, brief periods of history. The history of a nation is the time when it is filled with an idea, and when its lifeproceeds, self-directed, from that, and not from the instinct which seeks mere material pleasure, comfort, luxury. When a nation is inspired by the idea of patriotism, or of religion, or of freedom, it makes history fast. When it subsides from these ideas into a routine of mere growth, it only makes annals. Wars, waged for an idea, even a false one, - 1ike those of Alexander to carry Hellenic civilization into Asia; or the Crusades to carry the cross back to Palestine, and plant it above the crescent on the walls of Jerusalem, and the tomb of Jesus; or the Reformation and its wars or the religious movements which have stirred the life Of a people the Revival of Thought in such ages as that of Elizabeth of England, Louis XIV or the constellation of genius surrounding the Duke of Saxe Weimar in his little court; or great struggles for independence and freedom, as in the days of the English Commonwealth, or the American and French Revolutions these days, when a nation is warmed through and through by the enthusiasm of an idea, - these days make its history.

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