4

[Treason], Lee, and Davis?

The incident so profusely commented upon on
both sides of the ocean, of Bishop Polk of Louisiana
having accepted a commission in the Confederate
army is no derogation from the religiousity of Con-
federatism, but rather the contrary, irrespective of
the right or wrong of the proceeding itself. Bishop
Polk had been educated as a solider; and he was
antecedently to his consecration at first 'missionary-
Bishop of the South-west,' an office he held before
Louisiana was raised into a Diocese, a proprietor—
a slave owner, we grant, on a considerable scale—
but a seigneur-cleric, who baptized, catechized, and
married all his belongings. He believed, with
whatever truth or falsehood, that the irruption of
the United States' invading army would be the ad-
vent of all disorder and irreligion into his State and
diocese. He was the contemporary and the friend
at the military academy of the President, to whom,
outside of his State obligations, his allegiance was
pledged. General as he is, he is so far from for-
getting his sacerdotal functions, that, as we learn
from the Church Journal, he recently ordained, un-
der exceptional circumstances, an army chap-
lain. Pupil, as he was, of Bishop M'Ilvaine, at West-
Point, it is very likely that Bishop Polk does not
draw the inferences adduceable from early canons
unduly tight: while possibly the examples of Abra-
ham and Aaron, of Samuel and of Maccabaeus,
are not absent from his recollection. We should
be sorry to assume the office of his apologists; but
at the same time, without appealing to the ex post
facto justification that his diocese is the State which
Butler now rules, we may venture to trust that there
is a side to the question which would bespeak a

lenient estimate of the proceedings of the squire-
Bishop, who made an offering of the experience
which he had gained in his youth to his beleaguered
country at its extreme need.

[page is torn] its statistical strength, the Church-
[page is torn] we believe, fulfilling a