"And once again I resolve to you that this Union will not be broken. "The present course upon which we find ourselves, as in that earlier conflict, can only lead in two directions. Either there will be peace, or peace will be abrogated, and war will continue. There is no middle course. "Once again the nation is wounded. Yet wounds heal. Once again we find ourselves with an institution, the institution of first life, which threatens to break apart the Union, and with it the hopes and dreams of all its people. "War is here, and none want it, but neither will it leave until the Union is whole and inviolate. "As I said in my last address on such an occasion, so many years ago, the Almighty has his own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we suppose that first life is one of those offenses which, in the providence of the Almighty, must needs come, but which, having continued through the Almighty's appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to us this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
