party at a time when the interests of the Union were homogeneous as compared with those of the present day, and when the area and population of the Federation were comparatively insignificant. Since 1787, its growth in extent and numbers, over regions across which Providence has stamped the natural lines of demarcation, has made that impossible which then was barely possible. The South, reading the constitution according to the interpretation held, as it seems, even in 1787, by statesmen whom America calls illustrious, found there the doctrine of State sovereignty as the centre of loyal allegiance; and it found, according to its ideas of policy, that the time had come to give the practical preference to their State sovereignty, and on these principles it made Mr. Davis President of a Confederacy. The North read in the constitution that the Union had absorbed all State sovereignties, and it believed that its material interests favoured the absorption, and so it sustains Mr. Lincoln as President of a Union. But Mr. Davis is really no more a rebel from Mr. Lincoln, than Mr. Lincoln from Mr. Davis; they respectively and legitimately represent different readings of a document not meant to be straightforward by those who framed it, and who carried it with long delays, only in consequence of its ambiguity, through the legislatures of thirteen jealous sovereignties.
Dismissing, then, from our minds the natural and laudable prejudices which the apparent legitimacy of the Northern and rebellion of the Southern Government might have occasioned, we have to ask ourselves whether, as Churchmen, we see anything on either side which ought to bias our wishes. The good estate of the Church in the State of New York, not a little owing to the vast endowment which it possesses there, in consequence of the business district of the city being in a great measure owned by the corporation of Trinity Church, is, of course, a material consideration tending to influence our judgment. So, too, the orthodox complexion of the clergy in the dioceses of Seabury, Doane, and Whittingham, leads us to look at the fate of the commonwealth in those States with no little interest, and not the less so, because the facts are patent which indicate the possibility of the orthodoxy of Maryland being ere long ranged on the side of the Confederacy. But after we have made these admissions, we have said all. We believe it will be better for the orthodox party in the North to be so in a general convention of an exclusively Northern National Church. We shall give proofs that the prospects of Church progress in the 'councils,' general and diocesan, of a Southern National Church have been improved, and are likely still more to improve, by the separation. We believe, irrespective of the special accidents of
