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A Time to Pray.
There is great danger in a time of unwanted excitement, that Christians, instead of being led to more earnest importunity at the “throne of grace,” will neglect the duty of calling upon god. Surely while great men are talking and discussing-some to prevent the very thing they are engaged in-it becomes praying men to take firmer hold of the pillars that are underneath the very structure of our free institutions and if all that we most cherish. Our chief peril consists in being god-forsaken, left to the consequences of our own folly and crime. The Indiana, Witness, in an article on the Harper’s Ferry Tragedy, well puts this matter to its readers:
“That we are listening as people to a fearful issue on the subject of slavery there is no doubt, and we must not shut our eyes to the facts. God is evidently going before us in his providences, and with them is moving and controlling mighty and terrible agencies. And it becomes every Christian man to be humble and earnest in prayer. We need also to be gentle and kind with each other. We must be patient and forbearing. It does not become us to be lashed into excitement and fury upon the one side, or upon the other. That slavery is a gigantic wrong in almost every sense, we do not stop to argue in this connection, and that the removal of this wrong from our nation and land would be a blessed achievement of right,-of right and merry to the South no less than to the North. But to do it, so as to respect duly the interests of every man under their circumstances, we conceive to be a most difficult work. Hence we must take good care to maintain the spirit of Christ in all hearts. We must keep by our side, under all circumstances, the great Magna Charta, “As ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye unto them.”