“Since the delivery of this sermon, on the evening of April 21st, its statements and sentiments have been greatly misrepresented. While it was not prepared for publication, no word of it in fact having been written before its delivery, at the suggestion of judicious friends, we give it to the press, in order to correct the mistatements that have been made.”
I at once carried my manuscript to the editors of The Republican, who apparently received it with pleasure. The next day it was published, and having been so extensively talked about, it was widely read. The effect of its publication was just what I had anticipated. The excitement aroused by the spoken discourse, whose scope and spirit had been greatly misapprehended by those who did not hear it, measurably died away; but no one thereafter doubted where my pulpit stood on the vexed question which was then dividing the nation.
The next Sunday morning, when I stepped into my pulpit, I had before me one striking evidence of the effectiveness of my patriotic sermon. In one entire row of pews, stretching from the pulpit to the outer door, there were only three families. There my secession friends, whom I highly esteemed, had been accustomed to sit; but a discourse on loyalty to the general government had driven them away, never to return. That row of empty pews was on the north side of the middle aisle, but a Southern brother of high standing with a twinkle in his eye said to me, “That is the South side of the house.” We deeply regretted to lose those who so unceremoniously left us; but as no man or set of men is indispensable, we went on prosperously without them. Their departure in some measure strengthened us. They had been a disturbing element, and after they had gone, we had that power that flows from unity of spirit and action.
They took with them when they seceded a bright young Scotchman; but after an absence of six weeks, he returned. At the close of the morning service he very cordially greeted me, and said in his broad Scotch accent: “I suppose you have noticed that I have been away. I went with the rest, and we were foolish enough to think that when we departed the roof of the church would fall in and the walls would fall down; but every morning, when I went to business, I looked over this way, and saw that she still stood, and so I thought I would come back.” But all did not have the horse-sense of this Scotchman; only a few of the seceders ever returned, but others came to take their places, and by the following October the pews were fuller than ever; but many who sat in them wore the shoulder-straps of army officers.
There was, however, one sad, yet ludicrous, incident, connected with my sermon on “Obedience to the State,” which shows that the brutal spirit of the mob was not wholly extinct. On Locust Street, two squares west of our house of worship, stood the Central Presbyterian Church. Its pastor was Rev. S. J. P. Anderson, D. D. He had occupied that position for fifteen or twenty years, and both on account of the length of his pastorate and his acknowledged ability was generally known, even among non-churchgoers, while I, having the same surname, had been in St. Louis not quite three years. It was therefore perfectly natural for godless outsiders to attribute to him my pulpit utterances, which had stirred up so much bad blood. So they determined to chastise him for what I had said. Now he was a secessionist. In the preceding winter he had preached the sermon to which we have already alluded, on “The Ultimatum of the South.” While of course he would have utterly condemned all mob violence, still the men who had marked him out for brutal usage were in political fellowship with him. They watched for an opportunity to carry out their ruthless purpose, and found it. He was accustomed, every Saturday night, just at dusk, to go to the Post-office, at the corner of Third and Pine Streets, to get his mail. There was then no free delivery. His assailants hid themselves in an alley which ran into Pine Street, and as he was passing by, threw brickbats at him, one of which struck him on the cheek, and knocked him down. The next day his face was so swollen and painful that he could not preach. They aimed at me and hit him. They ignorantly knocked down their own political ally. They compelled him to be my substitute. He unwillingly suffered in my stead. He soon recovered, and I hastened to assure him of my deep regret that he had been compelled to suffer vicariously for me. To which he very naturally replied: “Yes, indeed, I don’t wish to be mixed up with you.” Nor did I wish to be politically mixed up with him, however useful in this case it had been to me. On one point we were in absolute agreement, our mutual desire not to be confounded with each other in the public mind.
Two more incidents, though pertaining wholly to my own church and congregation, are worthy of notice, as revealing the peculiar sensitiveness of those among whom we lived and toiled. My secession brethren determined if possible to oust me from my pastorate; they declared that their opposition to me was solely because I had introduced politics into the pulpit. To carry out their purpose, they drew up a paper setting forth their grievances, and urgently praying me to resign. They made an extended canvass for signatures, but had such meagre success that they abandoned their project.
They then sent a committee to me, asking that, inasmuch as I had fully expressed my views on the great national issue, I would hereafter refrain from all utterance on the subject in my pulpit, promising, if I would enter into such an agreement, that they would resume their places and duties in the church. But I assured them that, while it would give me great pleasure to yield to their wishes, I could not enter into any such compact; that I might be under solemn obligation to speak again, and that I must not become a party to any bargain that would debar me from doing my whole duty. My answer enraged the chairman of the committee, and he declared that I wanted “to kick them out of the church.” I replied, “You will bear witness that that is your language, not mine. I should be glad to keep you all in the church, and have you willingly grant me unrestricted freedom of speech; but whether you go or stay I cannot put my neck under the yoke that you have prepared for it.” With this interview, so far as I am aware, ended their efforts to drive me from my post or to padlock my lips.
The sermon that provoked so much opposition had in itself no special merit. It was the time of its utterance, and the circumstances in which we were then living, that gave it importance. It proved to have been the first out and out Union sermon preached in St. Louis, and, with the sermons of other preachers North and South, was published in Moore’s Rebellion Record. There are some sentences in it that must be set down both to the hot blood of youth and the aggravation of the times; but at all events it was an utterance of intense conviction.
But in our varied experiences it is clear that the good far outweighed the bad. There was more honey than gall, more love than hate, more self-sacrificing toil for others than self-seeking; and while some Christian pastors were anxious and harassed, and all churches were more or less agitated and some of them divided, in the face of a common danger, sectarianism for the time being seemed to be utterly swept away. In the loyal churches men and women, irrespective of denomination, frequently met to pray for the Republic. Trinitarian and Unitarian, Baptist and Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist and Episcopalian stood or kneeled side by side and poured out their petitions to God for our distracted city and country. They prayed with special fervency for the President, his Cabinet, the deliberating Congress and gathering army.
In addition to the meetings in the different churches, we frequently met for prayer at nine o’clock in the morning in one of the large halls of the city. There were often from fifteen hundred to two thousand present. At the close of each devotional hour the whole congregation rose and simultaneously lifting up their right hands repeated in concert, after the leader of the meeting, the oath of allegiance to the government of the United States. During my life I have looked upon many impressive scenes, but never upon one so morally sublime as that. At each repetition of that oath, the loyalty of every one that took it with his hand uplifted to the God of nations, daily grew deeper and stronger. Every one thus crowning his prayer for his country with his oath of fealty to it went out from those meetings with a mightier purpose to do all within his power to maintain the integrity of the Union.