God Terms

 

Though we would have to index the entire book in order to make a good argument for what the God-term for the whole book would be, we can make some assessment of at least one of the key terms of the book from this little section. The highest levels of purpose seem to be discussing the "glory of the Union" and the "perfection of Christian and political perfection." Used as these were by Daniel Webster and others to plead against Civil War, one may suspect that this sentiment of peace rather than justice is the real target of her attack. Of course, these are not her God-terms, but they are the God-terms in the vocabularies of her characters who are arguing for the preservation of slavery.

 

These motives have in turn perverted both sentiment and judgment and made people go to absurd lengths to justify a terrible practice. One may differentiate between god-terms of individual hierarchies and THE God-term which stands over all hierarchies in a given work by seeing one as doing in a microcosm what the other does in a macrocosm.

 

Click here to go on the sample analysis