Our nation, by the early nobility of its faith and action, assumed such a debt to destiny, and now must pay it. It needed not to come in this shape: there need have been no horror of carnage,--no feast of vultures, and carnival of fiends,--no weeping of Rachel, mourning for her children, and refusing to be comforted, because they are not. There was required only a magnanimity in proceeding to sustain that of our beginning,--only a sympathy broad enough to take our little planet and all her human tribes in its arms, deep enough to go beneath the skin in which men differ, to the heart's blood in which they agree,--only pains and patience, faith and forbearance,--only a national obedience to that profound precept of Christianity which prescribes service to him that would be greatest, making the knowledge of the wise due to the ignorant, and the strength of the strong due to the weak. The costs of freedom would have been paid in the patient lifting up of a degraded race from the slough of servitude; and the nation would at the same time have avoided that slough of lava and fire wherein it is now ingulfed. It was not to be so. History is coarse; it gets on by gross feeding and fevers, not by delicacy of temperance and wisdom of regimen. Our debt was to be paid, not in a pure form, but mixed with the costs of unbelief, cowardice, avarice. Yet primarily it is the cost, not of meanness, but of magnanimity, that we are now paying,--not of a base skepticism, but of a noble faith. For, in truth, normal qualities and actions involve costs no less than vicious and abnormal. Such is the law of the world; and it is this law of the costs of worthiness, of knowledge and nobility, of all memorable being and doing, that I now desire to set forth. Having obtained the scope and power of the law, having considered it also as applying to individuals, we may proceed to exhibit its bearing upon the present struggle of our Republic.