Those who had anxiously sought my counsel approved, some of them with apparent reluctance, this proposed line of action. So I went directly from the boat on which we were ferried over the river, to my study, sat down to my self-appointed task, and did not rise until it was done. Over the sermon I wrote the following explanatory and conciliatory note. “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.