day no. 16,755: as far as the North is from the South

Psalm 103:11-113

As the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him.

As far as the East is from the West, the South is from the North. East is eternally distinct from West. You can go eastward forever without ever running into west. That same is not to be said for going north. If you go north long enough, you eventually end up going south. That said, in the War of Northern Aggression, God demonstrated the great philosophical chasm that is fixed between the North and South as Chesterton once observed.

"So far from evolution lifting us above the idea of enslaving men, it was providing us at least with a logical and potential argument for eating them. In the case of the American negroes, it may be remarked, it does at any rate permit the preliminary course of roasting them. All this materialistic hardening, which replaced the remorse of Jefferson, was part of the growing evolutionary suspicion that savages were not a part of the human race, or rather that there was really no such thing as the human race. The South had begun by agreeing reluctantly to the enslavement of men. The South ended by agreeing equally reluctantly to the emancipation of monkeys." — G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw In America

Evolution did not initiate a brotherhood of men, but rather introduced an excuse for the enslavement of monkeys. When men were all made in the image of God, it was a shame to murder or molest them, but sinful men still did so. But when they did, they had to do to other men what they could imagine being done to them as men. Evolution removed the need to consider them as image bearers and allowed for their treatment as animals.

The South sinned by subjecting some men to slavery;

the North sinned by subjecting all men to slavery.

The South's problems were not as bad as the North's solutions. The egalitarian impulse cried out that it was not fair for some men to be slaves and so used the sword to insist that all men should be enslaved by the State. An egalitarian slave state was promoted as being superior to tolerating a slaving holding suburb. It leveraged the cry that "the rights of some men should be the rights of all men," and then proceeded to insist that there were no men left, only highly evolved monkeys, who were not entitled to any rights because there was no God above.

The South maintained that some men were free;

the North insisted that all men were slaves.

The South insisted that God above made men;

the North maintained that man was the only god left.

The South sinned by enslaving some of its own;

the North sinned by stealing someone else's monkeys.

The North accepted evolution and the view that some men were more akin to property and then went on to steal them as property because they were not men. The North objected to man-stealing, but did not object to good ol' stealing stealing.

The South treated some men like machines;

the North treated all men like monkeys.

The South treated some men beastly;

the North treated all men like beasts.

All that to say, there were sins on both sides, but the sins of South were those of which they could have been called to repent. The South still held to the Scriptural view of man and as such could have been called to give an account for the passages concerning the kidnapping and trading of fellow men or a master's behavior concerning his servants and slaves. Repentance was a possibility for those who still held to the Book. The North accepted a view of mankind from outside of Scripture and set aside the Bible. The North, as such, could not have been called to repent of their breaking of Scripture for they no longer held or declared a loyalty to Scripture.

The sins of the North defeated the sins of the South, but you don't overcome evil with evil, you only learn to congratulate the kind of evil that prevailed.