“E. M. Marvin,
“H. S. Watts,
“P. M. Pinckard.
“St. Louis, Mo., June 12, 1861.”
In compliance with this recommendation the churches of the State were generally well filled with devout worshipers, and the prayers of tens of thousands of earnest Christians ascended to the Lord of Hosts that his anger might be turned away, that “our country—our whole country”—might be spared the further calamities of war, and that “we might lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.”
These public calls to “humiliation, supplication and prayer” were frequent in occurrence and general and fervent in response; and the unpolitical ministry in those days presented a spectacle of touching moral sublimity, in their fidelity to the Church and their unselfish devotion to the cause of peace and righteousness in the midst of universal strife and war, that deserved a higher consideration and a better fate, while it prepared them for the scenes of suffering and the thrones of martyrdom that yet awaited them in the not distant future.
It has not escaped the observant, however, that the ministers who committed themselves and their pulpits to the purposes and prosecution of the war had more days of feasting than fasting; more seasons of glorification than humiliation; more days of thanksgiving than supplication; more banners and bonfires than confessions of sin and prayers for peace. If any of them observed a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer in the proper spirit, during the whole war in Missouri, the fact has wholly escaped the author’s mind. Their prayers, for the most part, consisted in “breathing out threatenings and slaughter,” and in inflaming the dangerous passions of men by the most unblushing blasphemies and the most envenomed imprecations.
The scenes and services which dishonored the gospel and disgraced the pulpits and those who occupied them in certain quarters during the war can not now be recalled without the most painful sense of humiliation and shame. It would be an outrage upon public decency and taste to reproduce even the best specimens of them in these pages. We have oblivion for the facts and pity for the fanatics; and if a faithful record of the sad history we have made should require any further allusion to such scenes, it will be made with mingled shame and commiseration.
While the ministers in Missouri were striving manfully and humbly to allay the bitterness of strife by frequent calls to public humiliation and prayer, and by wise and godly counsels of peace and quietness, designing men who had left the State, and some even who remained in the State, were at work, through the different media of reaching the public mind, trying to arouse the suspicions and inflame the passions of those in power against the only real “peace-makers” in the State. Specimen extracts have already been given from the Central Advocate of Missouri, and it may not be out of place to insert one from the Western Christian Advocate, of Cincinnati, of June 12, 1861:
“’Methodist Episcopal Church, South,’ Missouri.