Catholics successfully avoided public debates and voting, but the evidence suggests that they, too, were diametrically opposed on a salient matter of Christian principle. The parallel was not exactly with the wars of religion, but rather with the papal schisms and the papal-imperial contests of the Middle Ages, with both sides operating from precisely the same assumptions and using the same agreed texts, but reaching diametrically opposed and dogmatically asserted verdicts. Having split, the churches promptly went to battle on opposing sides, exactly like feudal bishops. Leonidas Polk, Bishop of Louisiana, immediately entered the Confederate army as a major-general: 'It is for constitutional liberty, which seems to us to have fled for refuge, for our hearthstones and our altars that we strike.’ Thomas March, Bishop of Rhode Island, told the militia on the other side: ‘It is a holy and righteous cause in which you enlist. . . God is with us . . . the Lord of Hosts is on our side.' The Southern Presbyterian Church resolved, 1864: 'We hesitate not to affirm that it is the peculiar mission of the Southern Church to conserve the institution of slavery, and to make it a blessing both to master and slave.’ (It also justified its separation from the Northern Church on the grounds that otherwise ‘politics would be obtruded on our church courts.) The dogma that slavery was inherently sinful was ‘unscriptural and fanatical. . . one of the most pernicious heresies of modern times’. To judge by the many hundreds of sermons and specially-composed church prayers which have survived, ministers were among the most fanatical on both sides. The churches played a major role in the dividing of the nation, and it is probably true that it was the splits in the churches which made a final split of the nation inevitable. In the North, such a charge was often willingly accepted. The Northern Methodist Granville Moddy said in 1861 : 'We are charged with having brought about the present contest. | believe it is true we did bring it about, and | glory in it, for it is a wreath of glory around our brow.’ Southern clergymen did not make the same boast, but it is true that of all the various elements in the South they did the most to make a secessionist state of mind possible. Both sides claimed vast numbers of ; conversions among their troops, and a tremendous increase in church-going and prayerfulness as a result of the war; and Southern clergymen were mainly responsible for prolonging the futile struggles. Thus Christianity on both sides contributed to the million casualties and 600,000 dead. The clerical interpretations of the war's lessons were equally dogmatic and contradictory. Robert Lewis Dabney, the Southern Presbyterian theologian, blamed the ‘calculated malice’ of the Northern Presbyterians, and he called on God for a ‘retributive providence’ which would demolish the North. Henry War Beecher said the Southern leaders ‘shall be whirled aloft and plunged downward for ever and ever in an endless retribution’. The New Haven theologian Theodore Thornton Munger declared that the Confederacy had been ‘in league with Hell’; the South was now suffering ‘for its sins' as a matter of ' divine logic’, the North being the ‘sacrificing instrument’. He worked out that General McClellan's much-blamed vacillations were an example of God's hidden cunning, since they made a quick Northern victory impossible and so ensured that the South would be much more heavily punished in the end. But this sort of thing was mere theologian's Billingsgate, the sort of abuse with which St Jerome cheered himself up in his Jerusalem monastery. More intelligent people tended to see the war as a national purging process, or, more optimistically, as a preparation, through self-redemption, for America's coming role in advancing world freedom. In his Second Inaugural, the Baptist Abraham Lincoln tried to rationalize God's purpose. America was ‘the almost-chosen people’; the war was part of God's scheme, a great testing of the nation by an ordeal of blood, showing the way to charity and thus to rebirth. Less sophisticated Christians did not want to rationalize, but to indulge their feelings. Some Northern churchmen clamored to destroy the dissident Southern branches. The Independent, an influential church paper, wrote in 1865: ‘The apostate church is buried beneath a flow of divine wrath; its hideous dogmas shine on its brow like flaming fiends; the whole world stands aghast at its wickedness and ruin. The Northern church beholds its mission.’ 119