_Christian Union_ as to the comparative morality of the Prussians
and Americans, or, rather, their comparative religiousness--meaning
by religiousness a disposition "to serve others and live as in God's
sight;" in other words, unselfishness and spirituality. We let it
drop, from the feeling that the question whether the Americans or
Prussians were the better men was only a part, and a very small
part, of the larger question. How do we discover which of any two
nations is the purer in its life or in its aims? and, is not any
judgment we form about it likely to be very defective, owing to the
inevitable incompleteness of our premises? We are not now going to
try to fix the place of either Prussia or the United States in the
scale of morality, but to point out some reasons why all comparisons
between them should be made by Americans with exceeding care and
humility. There is hardly any field of inquiry in which even the
best-informed man is likely to fall into so many errors; first,
because there is no field in which the vision is so much affected by
prejudices of education and custom; and, secondly, because there is
none in which the things we see are so likely to create erroneous
impressions about the things we do not see. But we may add that it
is a field which no intelligent and sensible man ever explores
without finding his charity greatly stimulated.

Let us give some illustrations of the errors into which people
are apt to fall in it. Count Gasparin, a French Protestant, and
as spiritually minded a man as breathed, once talking with an
American friend expressed in strong terms his sense of the pain
it caused him that Mr. Lincoln should have been at the theatre
when he was killed, not, the friend found, because he objected in
the least to theatre-going, but because it was the evening of
Good Friday--a day which the Continental Calvinists "keep" with