(1865) Problems in Language and Mythology The - Christian - Examiner PDF

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THE
CHRISTIAN EXAMINER.
VOLUME LXXVIII.
FIFTH SERIES, VOLUME XVI.
January, March, May, 1865.
' Porro ri aaplentia Dem at, .... Term philosophic est amator Del " — St. Acocstiki.
^^
WALKER, FU^&^' ft 00^246, Washington Street,
LONDON 178, Stkakd.

Cs ,
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Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1865, by

WALKER, FULLER, AXD COMPANY,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
T^V
BOSTON:
PKISTED BY JOHN WIL8OS AND SON.
CONTENTS.
No. CCXLVII.
Art. Pass
L The Ordee of Saint Paul the Apostle; and the New
Catholic Church 1
II. The Unity of the Spirit 26
III. Saint Francis of Assisi 47
IV. Under the Ban 64
V. The Last Phase of Atheism 78
VI. Hawthorne. 89
VLL The Eighth of November 107
VIII. Review of Current Literature 127
Theology. Bushnell's Christ and his Salvation, 127. Hymns of
the Ages, 128. — History and Politics. Miss Martineau's His
tory of the Peace, 130. Maine's Ancient Law, 132. Lewis's
State Righto, 135. Baxter's Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove, 136.
Marquess of Lothian's Confederate Secession, 137. — Essays, &c.
Smith's Dreamthorp, 139. Spencer's Essays, 141. Anster's -
Faustus, 141. Franck's Etudes Orientales, 144. — Geography
and IVavels. Newman's From Dan to Beersheba, 145. Felton's
Familiar Letters from Europe, 146. Perrot's Souvenirs, 147.
Herbert's Danes in Camp, 148. Burton's Mission to Gelele, 148.
Anderson's Hawaiian Islands, 149. — Miscellaneous. Kay's So
cial Condition and Education of the People of England, 150.
Saxe's Clever Stories of Many Nations, 151. Babson's Eliana,
152. Memoir of Mrs. Caroline P. Keith, 152.
New Publications Received 153
No. CCXLVIII.
I. The True Work and Method of the Preacher . .157

H. The Name, and the Idea, of God 198
1II. Giordano Bruno 206
IV. King Coal and King Cotton 241
V CONTENTS.
AST. Paoh
V. Our Convicts 250
VI. First Cycle of the History of New England . . 260
VII. The Fourth of March 274
VLII. Review of Current Literature 286
Theology. Sermons at the Church of St. Paul, 286. Strauss's
New Life of Jesus, 286. Kenan Controversy in France, 288. —
Essays, etc. Colani on Renan, 290. Laugel's Problems of
Nature, 295. Leigh Hunt's Seer, 297. Webster's Dictionary,
298. — History. Martin's History of France, 301. — Poetry and
Fiction. David Gray's Poems, 306. Jean Ingelow's Studies for
Stories, 307. Stifter's Nachsommer, 308. — Geography and
Travels. Miss Cobbe's Italy, 309. Invasion of Denmark, 310.
No. CCXLIX.
I. The Morbid and the Healthy View of Ld?e . . .313

H. Gerald Griffin 346
III. Problems in Language and Mythology .... 368
IV. Free Labor in Louisiana 383
V. The Encyclical Letter 399
VI. The National Conference of Unitarian Churches . 409
VII. The Nation's Triumpii, and its Sacrd?ice . . . 430
VIII. Review of Current Literature 443
Theology. Schenkel's Das Characterbild Jesu, 443. — Science and
Philosophy. Winslow's Cooling Globe, 445. Bowen's Coal and
Coal Oil, 447. — History and Biography. Journal and Letters
of Samuel Curwen, 449. Sybel's Historische Zeitschrift, 452.
Ddllinger's Die Papst, 455. — Geography and Travels. V&m-
be"ry's Travels in Central Asia, 457. Mrs. Williams's A Year in
China, 458. — Miscellaneous. First Annual Report of the Board
of State Charities ; Report on Prisons, 458. Trowbridge's
Three Scouts, 400.
INDEX 463
THE
CHRISTIAN EXAMINER.
JANUARY, 1865.
Art. I. — THE ORDER OF SAINT PAUL THE APOSTLE;

AND THE NEW CATHOLIC CHURCH.
1. Questions of the Soul. By I. T. Hecker. 5th edit. 1864.

2. Aspirations of Nature. By I. T. Hecker. 3d edit. 1859.
3. Riflessioni sopra il Presente e V Avvenire del Cattolicismo negli Stati
Uniti <T America. By I. T. Hecker. Two articles from the
" Civilta Cattolica." Rome. 1857.
4. Sermons by the Paulists. 3 vols. 1861-1863.
The Roman Catholic Order of St. Paul the Apostle was

founded in 1858 by a small band of priests, under the lead of
the man whose name is appended to the publications named
above. He is a man in middle life, an American, born in New
York. At the age of twenty-four, he passed a summer at the
Brook Farm Association in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, and
subsequently was connected, how closely we do not know, with
the " Consociate Family," a somewhat similar establishment,
at Fruitlands, a locality in Worcester County, Massachusetts.
In his book entitled " Questions of the Soul," he gives a brief
account of both these institutions from the point of his later
experience and conviction. In 1845, Mr. Hecker was received
into the Roman Catholic Church, and, purposing to enter the
Congregation of the Redemptorists, went to Europe, made his
novitiate at St. Trond in Belgium, and was admitted to the Or
der in 1847. Two years later, he was ordained priest by
Cardinal Wiseman, in London, and devoted two years to mis
sionary work in England. At the expiration of this term of
service he returned to New York, accompanied by several
VOL. LXXVIII. — 5TH S. VOL. XVI. NO. I. 1
2 The Order of Saint Paul the Apostle; [Jan.
members of his Order, and was for seven years engaged in
missionary duty in different parts of the United States. These
labors were brought to a close by a visit to Rome in 1857, un
dertaken, we believe, for the purpose of obtaining the Papal
release from his Order, whose austere regulations were some
what more than distasteful to him, and whose mediaeval type
of Catholicism seemed to him out of date in this generation,
and ill-suited to the genius and the needs of the American
people. The Pope granted him the release he asketLfor, and
gave him permission besides to institute a new missionary
Order under the name of the Congregation of St. Paul the
Apostle. He returned to America with his commission, en
tered with zeal and resolution on the work laid out before
him, collected money, and built the first religious house of
his Fraternity on West Fifty-ninth Street in the city of New
York. In this noble edifice, whose western windows command
a superb view of the Hudson, the founder of the Order of
Paulists lives with his little band of companions, cultivating
within themselves the spiritual life, devoted to pastoral offices
among the people, and strengthening their Order and the
Church by all means in their power. A large chapel in the
building is filled every Sunday with worshippers ; a broad,
open platform stands at one end, from which the earnest fa
thers deliver, without notes, such sermons as are printed in the
volumes above named ; at one side is the confessional, where
the penitents kneel for absolution, as in the European churches.
A large, pleasant room, called the Library, is well supplied
with books, old and new, in every department of philosophy,
theology, and science. The upper rooms are used as dor
mitories and studies ; cells they certainly are not. On the
lower floor is the refectory ; below are the offices. From time
to time, the priests go forth in companies of two or three on
missionary excursions ; and the fame of their frank, manly,
stout preaching never fails to get abroad beyond the imme
diate vicinity of their labors. They are sturdy preachers, who
feel that they have a living word, and are associated for the
promotion of a living cause. The cause is the conversion of
Americans to the Roman Catholic Church ; the word is, that
the Catholic Church is the Church best adapted to the needs,
1865.] and the New Catholic Church. 3
felt or unfelt, to the fundamental ideas, principles, institu
tions, genius, of the American people. Is this cause a living
cause ? Is this word a living word ?
The Paulists, if we understand them, admit that it is vain to
think of bringing the people of the United States into the
Church of the Middle Age ; but it is not vain, they contend,
to entertain the idea of bringing them into the Church of the
nineteenth century. They cannot be dragged back into the
Church, but the Church may be brought forward to them ;
nay, the Church must be brought forward to them if it is to
embrace them. It must show itself their friend by meeting
them on their own ground, by taking up the thoughts that
lie open in their minds, by responding to their aspirations, by
sympathizing with their cravings, by answering the questions
they raise, falling in with the purposes they cherish, and fur
thering the ends they have at heart. Taking you on your own
terms, they say to our people, We will prove that you are
logically bound to be Catholics ; we will show you that your
fundamental positions commit you to this Church ; it offers
you the one form of religion you have a right to accept, and it
furnishes for your social institutions the only basis on which
they can rest securely.
Our readers will naturally ask what concessions the new Or
der is willing to make for the sake of accommodating itself to
our people. The interval looks wide between the fifteenth
century and the nineteenth ; and, as the nineteenth is not
expected to go back, and the fifteenth professes a readiness
to come forward, some very important things must needs be
dropped by the way. What are these things ? The opposi
tion, as we are accustomed to think, is extreme between Bos
ton and Rome ; between American individualism and Catholic
absolutism ; between American liberty and Catholic centrali
zation ; between American naturalism and Catholic supernatu-
ralism. One side or the other must lay down its arms before
there can be peace. As America is not required to lay its
arms down, what arms will Rome lay down ? Does the new
Church concede anything in the department of ecclesiastical
authority ? Does it yield, for example, the infallibility of the
Pope ? No. " The man that occupies St. Peter's chair as the
4 The Order of Saint Paul the Apostle ; [Jan.
successor of St. Peter, as the head of Christ's Church, and his

representative on earth, his voice is Christ's voice." He
receives his commission .in Christ's own words, " Thou art
Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church." " He that
heareth you heareth me." " Behold, I am with you always,
even to the consummation of the world." (!)
Does it yield the point of priestly absolution ? No. " The
penitent sees the consecrated hands lifted up to heaven, and
hears the words, ' Absolvo te,' which, by a divine efficacy,
free him from the bonds and miseries of sin, renew the image
of God in his soul, and fill his heart with such peace and joy
that even nature, as if participating in his happiness, smiles
and seems clothed again in primal innocence."
Does it yield anything as regards the divine institution of the
Church of Rome ? No. " The Church is the body of Christ,
the organ of divine light and life to men, a visible organic
body instituted by Christ to teach those divine truths, and con
vey to men that divine life, which moved him to come down
from heaven, and unite his Godhead to our manhood in one
personality in the flesh."
Is Transubstantiation yielded ? No. " Fn Holy Commun
ion is received God entire, — the body and blood, the soul and
divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ." " The priest pronounces
the sacred words of consecration over the elements of bread
and wine, and their substance is changed into the body and
blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, wherewith is his soul and di
vinity." " 0, wonderful mystery ! God dwells in the hearts
of his creatures corporally ! " This is mediaeval, and it is jus
tified by the mediaeval proof-texts.
But perhaps the new Catholic Church makes concessions in
regard to the Christian life. Here, after all, is the more vital,
because the more practical, issue between the fifteenth and
the nineteenth century. We find no such concessions. The
new Church is ascetic. It eulogizes St. Francis of Assisi, and
commends " the faithful who have practised the most sublime
and heroic poverty, this being one of the three vows of all
religious, both men and women." It unreservedly praises
Cajetan for establishing an order of men who construed liter
ally the analogy of Jesus, and trusted in Providence, like the
1865.] and Ihe New Catholic Church. 5
birds of the air, not being even allowed to beg, but depending
entirely on the voluntary contributions of the faithful, and that
from day to day. There is nothing particularly suited to
Americans in a state like that.
The new Church lauds virginity as a state to be welcomed
by young men and maidens who earnestly desire to be holy
both in body and spirit. It " gives the timid maiden boldness
to pretend to have God alone for her spouse," and speaks in
dignantly of the Christian ministers who are sunk so deep in
the flesh that they have no esteem for the virtues which even
the heathens admired.
Father Hecker attaches full credence to the tales of miracle
said to have been wrought by the hermits who peopled the
deserts, and to " the charming anecdotes of the reverend and
familiar understanding that existed between nature and the
saints of this Order, which was effected by their great simpli
city, humility, and love of poverty." To quote from his pages
would be to quote from the Franciscan chronicles and the
legends of the Order of St. Dominic. Strange reading for
Americans of the nineteenth century !
Does the new Church make concessions in doctrine ? We
find none. We find the old mediaeval dogmas represented in
their most repulsive aspect. We have seldom read anything
more horrible than the description of the agony of Christ in
the garden. Nor is this all. So far from modifying in the
least the Catholic credence, Mr. Hecker indulges himself in the
most outrageous misrepresentations of the Protestant creed,
and tries to win American Protestants to his broad communion
by caricaturing their dearest opinions, and insulting their most
revered names. We have marked more passages than can be
quoted, but we must give a few specimens of the overtures
which this Neo-Catholicism makes to Protestant Americans.
" To be a Christian, according to this Gospel [the Gospel of Luther],

one has to cease to be a rational creature, and become a ninny."
"Deny to man free will, and you lower him down to the beasts
which perish, and make a total wreck of the noble structure of his
being."
After ingenuously quoting Feuerbach's " Essence of Chris
1*
6 The Order of Saint Paul the Apostle ; [Jan .
tianity " as the work of a " German Protestant " Father
Hecker persuasively says : —
" The best representation of the Protestant Church in the nine
teenth century, which we can imagine, is a cold-water-cure establish
ment with a tavern attached."
" Any one who knows how members are received among the Prot
estant sects, knows full well what indifference is shown to enlightening
the reason in regard to the great truths of the Christian revelation.
For the most part, little or no pains are taken to discover what the
candidates believe, or on what grounds their belief rests."
" Protestantism makes it her boast and glory to have disenthralled
man from all authority in religion, except his own private judgment."
" Christ condemns Protestantism, because it fails to represent him as
the unerring and divine Teacher and Saviour of mankind."
" To man's prayer for a guide, Protestantism answers, like a step
mother, Be your own guide."
" The first step to be taken in order to be a Protestant is to believe
one's sins are pardoned without any rational basis for it."
" Protestantism, at the dying hour, draws the curtain round the bed
of death, and leaves the soul alone in the dark, to struggle with its
deathless foes as best it may."
" What has Protestantism to say to this most' prominent virtue of
Christianity, self-denial ? It is silent, or if it speaks, it is in the lan
guage and tone of contempt."
" The religion of the nineteenth century teaches us to obey our in
stincts, to seek pleasure, to act out and gratify ourselves."
So much of opinions : now of men : —
" How many crimes would have been unknown in society, if such
men as Goethe, Schiller, Rousseau, Byron, Shelley, Bulwer, had
sought relief for their consciences in the divine sacrament of penance,
instead of flooding society with the details of their secret vices and
miseries."
" To the many-sided Goethe, with his broad and deep experience,
life is a round of sensual pleasures and defeated aims, and the idea of a
deeper purpose is tossed off with a cup of wine and a hurrah ! "
" Thomas Carlyle has gazed so long on a sham hero, that at length
he has finished by giving life to one in his own person."
Emerson gives counsel to men, which, " if man were a bee
a cat, or a pig, would answer quite well." Margaret Fuller's
aim in life was qne that might be equally well realized by a
melon, a pumpkin, or a squash. Is this argument ? Is it
persuasion ? Does the new Catholic Church really think that
Americans will be converted by abuse and slang ? Are we to '
be blackguarded into believing? The great mass of Protes
tants in America, who are orthodox in their creed, and evan
gelical in their faith, will not be disposed to listen kindly to a
man who holds them accountable for the opinions of Socialists,
Transcendentalists, and avowed Atheists. And these latter
will simply think more harshly of the Church which not only
caricatures them, but assumes them to be grossly and absurdly
ignorant of their own beliefs.
It must be pretty clear by this time, that the Catholic
Church does not mean to make advances toward the American
people. The fifteenth century remains where it was. But
what, then, is to be done ? By the terms of the compact, the
American people were not to be asked to go backward. They
were to stay where they were, and to be taken on their own
ground. It is not easy to see theh, as the matter stands, how
the two are to be brought together. We open the sermons to
discover the secret, if it may be there ; but there it is not.
The sermons have about them a certain freshness, vividness,
and point ; but this is mainly to be seen in the phraseology,
which is simple, frank, loose, natural, running into frequent
colloquialism, and sinking sometimes to the level of slang, in
such expressions as this : " A hickory Protestant is as poor a
thing as a hickory Catholic." There is some honest dealing
with vital matters, some earnest rebuke of prevalent vices,
some manly speech against private and social sins ; — not so
much as Protestant sermons contain, nor so well put ; but
more than we are in the habit of associating with the sermons
of Churchmen. They are loss dull than the average, for while
some of them are unreadable, others read and re-read them
selves. But the doctrine is hard, literal, and fantastical ; the
thought is usually commonplace, the illustrations are ordi
nary, the reasoning is for the most part deplorable, the exhor
tation is turgid. The pages are loaded with passages from
Scripture, quoted in high disregard of Biblical learning, and
interpreted in sublime defiance of Biblical exegesis. The lives
of the saints are freely alluded to as authoritative standards
of the Christian character, and the grotesque miracles therein
recorded are innocently detailed as facts of authentic history.
" The Saint of Our Day " is illustrated by the character of
" St. Joseph," the father of Jesus, which would seem to be
about equivalent to saying that the " Saint of Our Day " is an
unknown quantity. At the outset, it is admitted that every
age must have its own type of the saint ; and all goes very
smoothly as long as the saints of past ages are in ques
tion, but when the time comes for indicating the typical saints
of this generation, constructed, of course, on mediaeval prin
ciples, the preacher adroitly selects a personage whom nobody
is acquainted with. The old saintship is out of date. The
mould is broken. But it is all the Church has.
We come back to the question, How do these new mission
aries expect to recommend their Church to the American
people ? We shall see, perhaps, from the two articles taken
from the Civiltd Caltolica. These papers were written for the
express purpose of proving that the Catholic Church has a
great opportunity and a noble future before it in the United
States, and of pointing out the conditions which are favorable
to its spread and establishment there. They state the whole
case for the new missionaries.
The first paper aims to show that the state of religion in
America favors the increase of Catholicism, and indeed makes
its triumph all but certain. It sketches roughly but effec
tively the religious history of New England, and especially of
Massachusetts, for the past twenty years. Unitarianism, the
writer says, expressed the dissatisfaction of cultivated and
spiritual men with Orthodoxy, but failed to meet the deep
religious wants of human nature, and remained at last the
doctrinal peculiarity of the few who were contented with Deism.
The weakness and disintegration of the orthodox faith be
trayed themselves in Edward Beecher's " Conflict of Ages,"
and in Catherine Beecher's " Common Sense applied to the
Gospel." Even in the Episcopal Church, the spirit of unrest
found voice in the " Memorial " addressed by some of the
most eminent ministers of that Church to the Council which
met in New York in 1853, in which memorial it was clearly
intimated that the Protestant Episcopal Church was not doing
its whole duty in diffusing the Gospel among all sorts and
conditions of men ; that its ministers were lacking in zeal ;
that its liturgy was too fixed and monotonous ; that it did not
sufficiently consider the necessities of the poor, nor promote an
interest in religious associations and orders. From the sect
of the Baptists comes a cry that the Church is decaying
through the want of ministers ; that the Christian and the
unchristian can scarcely be distinguished from one another by
their general behavior ; that it is deemed almost an insult
to ask a man of the world to join the Church and confess
himself a convert ; that in twenty or thirty years, if the pres
ent state of things continues, the candlestick will be removed
from its place ; that the Church has all but lost its hold on
the affections of the people ; that for sermons the congrega
tions have general abstract discussions, which nothing short of
a miracle would make available for regenerating a single soul ;
that, in short, things must take a turn, or Christianity will
prove a failure. Methodism alone seems to be alive and ear
nest, with its Bible Societies, Tract Societies, and enormous
expenditure of money; but Methodism will prove the most
useful instrument in the hands of the Church when animated
by the true faith, as it easily may be, and placed under the
pure influence of the Divine grace.
The practical earnestness of the American people, mean
time, and especially of the highest order of them, the longing
for social fraternity, the yearning after simpler and more
natural human relations, the aspiration after a nobler civiliza
tion, the desire to realize the dream of the Messianic kingdom
on the earth by practising literally on the principles of Jesus,
broke out in various forms of Socialism. The experiment at
Brook Farm was made sincerely, bravely, heroically, with
pure devotion and sacrifice, by men and women who repre
sented the finest culture and the profoundest faith. The
experiment at Fruitlands illustrated an intention worthy of
the Gospel. But both these undertakings failed : the inaugu
rates of them went back to the world, and engaged in worldly
occupations ; their enterprise left no trace on American so
ciety.' There was, therefore, no satisfaction for the deep and
enthusiastic passion for an organized Christian association,
which has always from the days of the Apostles burned so
ardently in the breast of Christian men and women of every
profession, which has taken visible shape of some kind in
every earnest period of modern history, which has survived all
discouragement and failure, and will undoubtedly survive this
last one. The Catholic Church has met this want, and it is
the only Church that has, it is the only Church that can ;
and when society has done its best to live without her, society
will return to her once more, to find in her communion rest
for its unrest, in her religious associations ample room for the
indulgence of fraternal sympathies. America is full of dis
content and aspiration, of unbelief and longing. It is divided,
and it prays to be joiued ; it is disintegrated, and it sighs for
unity ; it has lost its credence, because its credence was hard
and saddening ; but it will not let go its faith. The Catholic
Church has only to recognize these palpable signs of the times,
and its victory is sure.
This is the argument. Will it hold ? The facts that Mr.
Hecker cites are indisputable ; he might have stated them
much more forcibly, and still kept himself within the limits of
sober truth. The process of disintegration is going forward
with immense rapidity throughout Protestant Christendom.
Organizations are splitting asunder, institutions are falling
into decay, customs are becoming uncustomary, usages are
perishing from neglect, sacraments are deserted by the multi
tude, creeds are decomposing under the action of liberal
studies and independent thought. A tendency to individual
ism was folded up in the early Protestant movement, and that
tendency has gone on towards its ultimate expression in
Transcendentalism. All this is plain, too plain for evidence.
The process has gone so far, that one of our own most ad
vanced and most resolute thinkers, a leader whom only the
boldest followed in his assault on tradition and formalism, has
lately surprised his friends by sounding the retreat and call
ing the fresh recruits back into the old, battered intrench-
ments, to make themselves safe there as well as they can.
But it will be hard strengthening a stockade with the ashes
of burnt fascines, and defending it by the shades of- slain
pickets. We are under the law of movement towards pure
individualism, and they will simply be marched over who

stand in the way. Naturalism is pushing Protestantism to its
results. But does the Roman Catholic Church stand outside
the line of the sweeping tornado and quite undisturbed by
it? Is.it not in the world ? Are not its members men and
women ? Are its brain and heart composed of other stuff
than that which makes up ordinary human nature ? Does it
not think and feel and live ? What then, we may ask, is the
meaning of Mr. Hecker's new Church ? What is the signifi
cance of his dissent from mediaeval Catholicism ? Where is the
point of his demand that the Church shall meet the Americans
on their own ground ? The very terms in which he couches
his appeal to the nineteenth century carry in them a confes
sion that the Church feels the action of the ages, and must
move with them or die.
His appeal is addressed to human nature, and to human
nature under this very law of individualism. Take the titles
of his two books, — "Questions of the Soul," "Aspirations of
Nature " ; they deliberately declare that Nature must take the
initiative, — that her needs are to be satisfied, her cravings
met, her questions answered. Turn over the leaves of his
books : on every page you find admissions of the singular re
ligious enthusiasm of the time. The whole argument is that
Protestantism does not satisfy the cravings of the generation,
does not give scope to the affections, does not concede its
rights to reason, does not allow free play to the will, does not
show tenderness enough to the delicate sensibilities of the
heart. A more sentimental volume than the "Questions of
the Soul," we never read. If it had been written for romantic
school-girls, at the susceptible age of sweet sixteen, it could
not have conceded more to the soft languors of the natural
heart than it does. The lines of transcendental poets trickle
lusciously through the dewy chapters, and gentle breezes of
invitation woo the languishing mind towards a religion that
will gratify the delicate aspiration of the immature soul. A
veil of gauze is spread over the dogmas to conceal their harder
features and make their forms alluring. The Church pre
sents herself to the fancy, not to the reason, and slips away
into the region of sentimentalism the instant knowledge comes
into view. When addressing Transcendentalists, the Church is
as transcendental as they are ; it clothes their ideas in its own
phraseology, professes to cherish the same hopes and aspira
tions, and would lead them to think that the only differences
between them were differences in name. It puts on the air of
a man of the world, talks cavalierly about opinions and men,
and claims to be on the side of liberty against authority, of
spirituality against formalism. A conversation with one of
these new missionaries is a very hearty sort of entertainment
to the natural mind. You will hear Christ spoken of as your
brother ; immortality as the unfolding of the spiritual man,
which is all lying germ-like within our bodies ; the act of con
fession as a brave face-to-face interview between a man and
his conscience. The Order of Paulists take it on themselves
to bring America into the Church ; they seem to us in a fair
way to bring the Church into America. In their attempt to
meet the World Spirit with his own weapons, the poisoned
rapier may change hands, and they be the first victims.
But even were there no danger of this, were the tendencies
towards naturalism confined within the limits of Protestantism,
and were Protestants alone the victims of all this unrest, it by
no means follows that any considerable number of them will
join the Catholic communion, either from conviction or from
feeling. The unrest does not seem to point that way, and for
the plain reason that it can find rest the other way. In the
earlier stage of the New England ferment, which Mr. Hecker
describes, when the process of breaking up was going forward
everywhere, and no points of organized thought or action
appeared, conversions to the Catholic Church were frequent.
We hear of them occasionally now in quarters where the tur
bulence of thought and feeling has lately arisen, or has not
subsided. But the violent agitations of the transition period
have passed by, and the road from the old system to the new
has been rendered smooth and even by the tread of many con
fident feet. People are accustomed to a state of considerable
mental uncertainty, and no longer feel distracted or forsaken
in it, as they once did when it was the state of a few ; they
have besides a promise of ultimate repose, if they go on, which
their predecessors had not. There are quiet little stopping-
I860.] and the New Catholic Church. 13
places by the way. There is plenty of good companionship.

The dangerous passages of the road are marked and measured.
The paths have all been carefully surveyed, and those who
have gone on before send back cheering tidings of the pleasant
abodes they have found at the end of their long and adven
turous route.
Transcendentalism, or spiritual Christianity, is no longer
the peculiarity of a small intellectual class, who have as much
as they can do to maintain themselves against the ridicule of
a great public. It is a definite system of philosophical faith,
firmly planted on immovable foundations, carefully con
structed in its details, popularly expounded, heartily wel
comed, and earnestly professed by multitudes of men and
women. It has churcTies and preachers, and is fast making
a sacred literature. It has succeeded to a very remarkable
extent in recommending its interpretations of the ancient sym
bols and dogmas. It has a theology, a christology, a consist
ent account of the Bible and the Church ; it gives its defini
tion of inspiration, revelation, and Divine influence. They
who accept it are among the calmest, quietest, serenest, and
happiest of people. They enjoy as much peace of mind and of
heart as the Catholics do, and they enjoy it on more rational
grounds, and with a surer confidence. For they fear nothing
from science ; they welcome knowledge ; criticism, and espe
cially criticism of the Scriptures, is all on their side ; the
movement of things is in their direction ; they have a sweet
and altogether childlike faith in the spiritual laws. They can
afford to tell the truth without equivocation. They can afford
to be generous to their opponents. They take no great pains
to make proselytes, for the ripe fruit drops into their hands as
fast as they can catch it. Unrest will not drive these people
into the Catholic Church, and as the majority must pass into
the Church through them, if they go thither at all, the acces
sions to it are not likely to be very numerous. So much for
the speculative disquiet and despair from which Mr. Hecker
hopes so much.
hi regard to the social dissatisfaction, the case, we fancy,
stands about the same. Socialism has tried its experiments
nobly, and has failed. The earnestness that gave the soul to
VOL. LXXVIII. 5TH 8. VOL. XVI. NO. I. 2
14 The Order of Saint Paul the Apostle; [\Jan.
their enterprises may or may not have declined with the ill-
". success of their particular schemes. Grant that it has not ;
grant that it is still as deep and intense and hopeful as ever ;
grant that the aspirations after a better social state burn as
brightly as they ever did, — and for our part we firmly believe
that they do, — what then ? Is there no refuge but the Church
for these practical enthusiasts ? Must they, will they, fall
back on the " Orders," the " Associations," the " Fraterni
ties," which were in vogue three or four hundred years ago ?
Is there no modern supply for this ancient but ever new
demand ? Why, of course there is. Social science is born,
and though it is in its infancy as yet, it has gathered around it
a large and most zealous body of disciples, among whom may
be numbered some of the most sanguine prophets of the new
kingdom of heaven. Bastiat stands out manfully against
Fourier, and advances principles which, if allowed full course
among mankind, will bring about naturally a state of things
as good as Fourier longed for, for the relief of suffering, the
abolition of poverty, the eradication of vice, the diminution of
crime, the strengthening of order, the adjustment of each part
of the social system to all the other parts, the reconciliation of
classes hitherto deemed hostile, the equal distribution of toil
and profit, the harmonious combination of the several interests
to which men are committed, the establishment of friendly
relations between the laborer and the capitalist, and the crea
tion of good feeling between the great and the small, the high
and the low, the wise and the simple ; practical recognition of .
the doctrine of mutual needs and of mutual service, complete
development of the working force in society, consequent
amelioration of the social condition in all its departments, im
provement in modes of life, increase of physical happiness,
extension and deepening of sympathy ; in a word, liberty,
equality, fraternity, are all promised by the new science,
which is a vast amplification of the science of political econ
omy, and a practical executor of the Apocalyptic dreams.
To us the Catholic " Communion " so graciously offered by
the new missionaries to the Americans hungering for better
social relations, is poor, restricted, formal, artificial, and
mechanical as compared with the system of vital, moral law
1865.] and the New Catholic Churck, 15
which one may enter without leaving the world, and may
remain in without departing a hair's breadth from the century.
The devotees of this new science are devotees indeed, and after
a very noble and enthusiastic sort. They have found their
Church, their brotherhood, their communion, and in it they
have all the rest and joy the Catholic has in his religious
order. We believe it will take no longer to bring Americans
into this kind of association, than it would to bring them into
the Church ; and as to the work to be done in either case,
there is no comparison of the one with the other. People
must be dragged into the Church ; they fall into the social
organization.
One more thought in connection, with this possibility of
return to the old Church of these restless and unsatisfied ones.
If anything is clear, it is that the movement of the American
people is towards greater intellectuality. However much
they may speculate, doubt, disbelieve, they think, and they
show a disposition to think harder all the time. They will
have their questions fairly answered, and will accept no solu
tion of their doubts but knowledge. Let us understand things,
is the cry. They go to science, to history, to criticism ; they
study natural laws ; they try Mesmerism, and " Spiritualism " ;
they work the understanding and the reason. The senti
mental nature is, for the time, and will be for a long time,
sternly in abeyance. Symbolism is not in vogue. Americans
are in search of a philosophy, rather than of a faith. Now this
is precisely what the Catholic Church never gave, and never
professed to give. It is a symbolical Church, whose office is,
as it always was, to represent truths in the shape of visible
emblems, in such a way that they may be apprehended by un
intelligent and undeveloped minds. It was instituted for
humanity in its childhood. Its function is not to instruct the
mind, but to impress the imagination through the senses.
Teaching has constituted a very small part of its mission and
of its work. Instead of communicating a lesson, it sets up a
sign. A crucifix represents the doctrine of sacrifice ; an
image of the Virgin stands for the Divine tenderness ; it brings
home the holy Omnipresence by setting up a box and hiding a
priest inside of it ; it strings its prayers on a cord, and bids
16 Ttie Order of Saint Paul the Apostle; [Jan.
poor people count them off by beads. To put a bit of bread

into the worshipper's mouth is its method of making him sen
sible of an imparted influence from the celestial world. It
leaves no sense unaddressed. The eye is enchanted by lovely
forms, the ear is solicited by delicious sounds, the touch is
brought into immediate contact with heavenly realities, the
nostrils are doors for sweet perfumes which intoxicate the
brain. The very first movement towards an intellectual
appreciation of spiritual ideas is a step away from the Catholic
Church. Luther took this first step ; Emerson takes the last
thus far ; they who succeed him will march towards a more
complete, comprehensive, and exhaustive statement of the
problems of the universe, as science or philosophy shall make
it. There, if anywhere, the coming generation will find its
rest, not in the region of sentimental faith, not in the house of
imagery, but in the green pastures of knowledge and in the
temples of wisdom. Even though the truths reached or
reverted to be the same essentially with the truths which the
Church represents through her symbolism, they will be not
symbolically apprehended, but intellectually comprehended by
the enlightened of the coming age. They will be received as
a system of the universe on grounds of reason, not as a
revealed theology on the grounds of faith, and they who
receive it thus will put away the Church of Rome, as the man
" puts away childish things."
In his second paper from the Civiltd Cattolica, Mr. Hecker

draws an argument for the future of the Church from the
singular correspondence that exists between American institu
tions and the ideas on which they rest, and the doctrines of
the Church of which he is a representative. Here are his po
sitions : — 1. That Catholic doctrines are more in accord with
American institutions than Protestant doctrines are. 2. That
political experience in America has abundantly established the
truth of this position, and has actually generated a disposition
to return to the Catholic Church, on the part of the more
thoughtful, enlightened, and consistent of the advocates of a
democratic government.
That the Catholic dogma is more congenial with democratic
I860.] and the New Catholic Church. 17
institutions than the Protestant dogma, is a fact too clear to

be disputed ; and if this consideration were of any vital mo
ment, we might leave the case here on the threshold. The
principle that lies at the foundation of democratic institutions
is man's capability for self-government. This principle im
plies the essential rectitude of human nature, in all its spheres
of faculty. It implies that man is possessed of reason and of
free will ; that he knows what is wise, just, orderly, beneficial ;
that he is at liberty to elect it, and that he has power to enact
it. It implies that his natural ideas of what is right, equi
table, and obligatory are correct, or may be made so by suit
able study, care, and attention. All this the Catholic theology
asserts ; all this the Protestant theology denies. The Catholic
dogma maintains that human nature preserved its essential
goodness after the fall of Adam. The Protestant dogma con
tends that human nature, in consequence of the fall of Adam,
became totally depraved. The Catholic dogma accommodates
itself to human reason, assuming its capacity to receive truths
presented to it ; the Protestant dogma almost vilifies reason in
its jealousy for faith, and allows it no power of judgment in
matters of moral truth. The Catholic dogma acknowledges
man's moral freedom ; the Protestant dogma affirms predes
tination. The Catholic ought', therefore, to be a democrat ;
the Protestant ought to be a monarchist. Neither can logi
cally be anything else.
This logical necessity is confirmed by other peculiarities of
the two systems. The Protestant Church makes a radical dis
tinction between different orders of mankind, by classifying
them as regenerate and unregenerate, elect and non-elect,
children of God and children of the world. It divides by pal
pable barriers the sheep from the goats. The church-meinber
is a person set apart from the general congregation, as an
object of peculiar consideration in the sight of God and men,
— a sacred person, specially illuminated, guided, upheld by the
Holy Spirit. Here, it would seem, is the basis, something more
than speculative, — a basis actually laid in institutions, — for
the most absolute of all governments, a theocracy, — a gov
ernment of priests ruling in the name of God, — a spiritual
oligarchy. The Catholic Church, on the contrary, puts all
2*
mankind in the bosom of the Church on an equality. Her

sacraments and symbols are for all on the same terms ; the
same articles of faith satisfy the wise and the simple. All so
cial distinctions disappear at the foot of her altar. Her priest
hood is not a caste ; no one of the faithful is disqualified by
his obscurity for the office of Supreme Pontiff. Side by side,
the rich and the poor, the noble and the plebeian, the lord and
the serf, bend in worship, and kneel on the pavement to receive
the consecrated elements. Church and congregation are one.
To be a Christian is to be a Catholic, and to be a Catholic is to
be one of the " elect." If all were Catholics, all would be
Christians, and consequently all would be priests and sons of
God.
Here, it would seem, is a basis — a very practical basis, too —
for the most popular form of government, the government that
assumes the equality of mankind, the democratic. If com
munities of men were only logical ! if people would only take
pains to square their practical with their speculative beliefs !
if states would just look to it that their living genius was con
formed to their inherited dogma ! But, alas ! they do not, and
they will not. The contradiction between creed and life which
preachers are always harping on, deploring, objurgating, en
deavoring vainly to annul, history delights in parading on a
grand scale. No nation of modern times exhibits a logical
accord between its creed and its life, for either the creed is an
inherited tradition and the life an original creation, or the
life is an inherited tradition and the creed an original creation.
The genesis of the two is not contemporaneous, nor do the two
births spring from the same stock.
The institutions, laws, civil and social arrangements, forms
of government and administration, in the nations of modern
Europe, were determined by a thousand causes, — material,
organic, ethnic, historical, — which were wholly independent
of speculative opinions in philosophy and faith ; and such
opinions as they have were conveyed to them, for the most
part, from regions lying outside of themselves, — from other
climates and spheres, — and were attached to them by statecraft
or priestcraft. Thought and life lack thus organic connection.
The thought belongs to one age, the life to another. The dis
cord is not felt, because the necessity of the concord is not

felt. A nation will exist hundreds of years with its soul in the
Eastern hemisphere and its body in the Western, with its
" faith " in Jerusalem and its knowledge in London, with its
speculative reason in Asia Minor and its practical understand
ing in the United States, with its fancy in the Middle Age
and its fact in the present generation, and not feel disturbed
by it. No doubt, where the nation's being is vigorous, the
effort is ceaseless and persistent, though unconscious, to estab
lish an equilibrium between its life and its thought ; but in all
such cases the life takes the initiative, and the vital energies
of the people absorb understanding, reason, hope, imagination,
more and more, and so reconstruct its views, and insensibly
substitute new modes of speculative thinking for old ones.
But the new modes of thinking are not a " scheme," a " sys
tem," a " theology." The creed is unwritten, unspoken, un
recognized as a creed.
The people of America are rapidly discarding their tradi
tional theologies, Lutheranism, Calvinism, Socinianism, as
systems hang very loosely on them ; but they show no symp
toms of accepting any other system in their place. They sim
ply throw off what incumbers their intellectual movements,
and are content to wear any rag of spiritualism, naturalism,
materialism, that they find will cover their nakedness and
make them look decent as they speed on their way. The
genius of a nation justifies itself. No people is uneasy be
cause it has not a speculative legitimation of its active being.
No community waits for a philosopher or a theologian to come
along and furnish a paper certifying that it has a perfect logi
cal right to go on and work out its own industrial, civil, and
social problems, according to the faculty that is in it. No
tribe of men frets, even for a moment, because it has not a
perfectly satisfactory theory of the universe authenticating its
historical altitude and giving it a rational title to exist.
Fancy the American people stopping short in their career of
self-government, and saying within themselves, — We have no
right to do this any longer, because we are Protestants —
and " orthodox " Protestants too ; we believe in total de
pravity, election, and the Divine decrees ; we deny the freedom
20 The Order of Saint Paul the Apostle; . [Jan.
of the will ; we distrust the natural reason of mankind ; we

ought to be monarchists ; we should by good rights reinstate
the Hebrew regime, or restore the social system of ancient
Egypt ; we must either get a new credence to suit our institu
tions, or get new institutions to suit our credence. To go on
in this way any longer is sheer absurdity. No people who
have the least regard for logical consistency will do it. — Fancy
the American people asking permission of the Catholic Church
to deal with human nature as if it were not corrupt, and to
exercise reason and free will in the administration of affairs !
Fancy the American people asking the Pope's leave to be good
democrats in the future, as they bave been heretofore quite
inconsistent and foolish democrats ! Fancy the American
people, driven by an agitated conscience, returning to the
Pope of Rome, because he tells them they may believe in the
substantial rectitude of human nature, may put confidence in
their natural faculties when aided by Divine grace, may exer
cise their natural reason, and may even feel assured that their
free will is not utterly gone ! We rather think the American
people will take all these things for granted. But if they felt
inclined to ask leave of anybody, we are very sure the Pope of
Rome would be the last person in all the realm of Christ or
Antichrist they would ask leave of.
And for this sufficiently obvious reason, that the Catholic
Church, notwithstanding the democratic spirit of its doctrines,
and the human import of its symbols, has always been asso
ciated with aristocratic governments, to an extent that has
identified it in the common mind with oligarchies, monarchies,
despotisms. This may be very strange, very inconsistent, very
illogical, but it is very true. Italy is Catholic, and most
Catholic where most monarchical. France is Catholic, and
there Catholicism and imperialism mutually support each
other ; the French people are democratic and rationalistic, the
court is despotic and Papal, — Papal because despotic. Spain
is a synonyme for Catholicity and for tyranny, in fast league
together. So is Austria, where Pope and Kaiser never quar
rel, but live together as sworn allies, Pope abetting Kaiser
in all his nefarious schemes against popular institutions, and
Kaiser abetting Pope in all his devices to put down rationalism
in religion.
"H cannot be denied," says Ernest Renan, "that Ultra

montane Catholicism does seriously embarrass civil society.
The state is obliged to make perpetual concessions to her.
These concessions always abridge the public liberty. The
Catholic party has already half a century of history ; it has
always been talking of liberty ; has this grand word regulated
its conduct ? The Austrian Concordat, and that of the Grand
Duchy of Baden, were both its work ; are they liberal achieve
ments ? It applauded Belgium's revolt against Holland, it
approved the separation of Ireland ; what has it to say about
the revolt of the Romagna ? It justly abhors terrorism, but
apologizes for Pius V. and for the Order of Saint Domi
nic ; it rouses itself against tyranny, but does it audibly blame
the Church for making alliance with every despotism that has
served its turn, from Philip of Spain down to this or that
nameless President of an American republic ? The grand
eur of the Papacy consists precisely in the fact that it is
outside of nationality and above it. It exacts consequently
the sacrifice of the nationality whose soil it occupies. It
is no superficial prejudice that in certain countries sets
the words ' Catholic ' and ' Patriot ' in opposition, and makes
them the symbols of conflicting parties." The same author
in another place says : " History supplies numerous ex
amples of this flat contradiction between the doctrines of a
party and the secret tendencies which the party represents.
In the dispute of the Jesuits with the Jansenists, the Jes
uits maintained a doctrine more consonant with reason, and
more favorable to liberty, than their adversaries ; and yet
Jansenism was essentially a liberal movement, round which
the most sincere and enlightened men might, we conceive,
have rallied."
For the rationale of this association of Rome with despotism,
we must be content to refer our readers to M. Renan's mas
terly essay on " The Future of Religion in Modern Society."
There they will see exposed the fatal logic whose law the his
tory of modern Europe has obeyed. For the explanation of
the other fact, equally remarkable, that Protestantism, even in
its extreme form of Calvinism, has always been allied with
liberty and human rights, we are content to refer now to
Buckle's " History of Civilization." * The republics of Switzer

land have always been Protestant. The republic of Holland
is Protestant. England, the bulwark of Protestantism in Eu
rope, has in its form of government a republican element
which is far stronger than the element of aristocracy there.
The Independents were Calvinists almost to a man. Calvin-
ists in Scotland, made the first open demonstrations against
the arrogant claims of Charles Stuart. New England was
born of Calvinism, and retains its temper to this day. When
its children leave Calvinism they adopt Unitarianism, Univer-
salism, Transcendentalism, — rationalism under one form or
another, — and are more democratic than ever.
Of course : there is no mystery in it. Protestantism means
individualism, which means liberty ; Romanism means cen
tralization, which means authority. There is the whole story,
and the last chapter of it will be exactly like the first. One of
Mr. Hecker's own arguments in favor of the fitness of Catholi
cism for our people is, that it will not disturb the system of
slavery, which Protestantism assails, to the infinite peril of the
Union. The American people, he asserts, love union more
than anything else, and the Church will help them to main
tain it, because the Church disturbs no existing political or
der, and keeps her hands clean of political matters. Her
priests confine themselves to their religious duties ; they take
no part in civil affairs ; they are quiet and orderly citizens
under every rigime. Hardly good democrats then, we should
say.
It is not worth while to follow Mr. Hecker in his attempt to
show that in America Catholicism and Protestantism have
exchanged the parts they have always played on the field of
history. Events have exposed the error of his interpretation
of the political movements in this country to which he alludes.
That Catholicism has ever been'identified with genuine demo
cratic principles here, however intimately it may have been
associated with the democratic name, — that Protestantism has
ever deliberately and from conviction played into the hands of
the aristocratic principle, — few will believe. There was a time
* Vol. I. pp. 610-614.

when, in a momentary crossing and mingling of the religious

and political streams, the Catholics appeared as the champions
of individual liberty and personal rights, and the Protestants
seemed to be on the side of the narrow, exclusive, oppressive
"Native American" policy. But this was an accident, as was
evident from its unproductiveness. The immense influx of the
Irish population, their speedy appropriation and illegal natu
ralizing by the aristocratic party which bore the democratic
name, because they were not democrats, and used it as a lure
to these poor fugitives from an oppressive monarchical govern
ment, excited the reasonable apprehensions of the sincere re
publicans, who foresaw danger to republican institutions in
this wholesale admission of ignorant foreigners to the rights
of citizenship, in the bribery that was connected with it, the
corruption of the ballot which resulted from it, and the con
sequent monopoly of power over the masses by a few unprin
cipled demagogues. It happened that the immigrants were
nearly all Catholics. So far as this fact had any connection
with their political attitude in this country, it would go to cor
roborate the evidence of history, that Catholicism is naturally
on the side of despotism ; for these ignorant people eagerly cast
their votes in favor of the party which represented the slave
power, the only aristocratic party in America, the party which
is now anxious to make a league with Jefferson Davis, aud
assist him in establishing monarchical institutions on this con
tinent. Evangelical Protestantism, always ready to undertake
a crusade against Rome, took advantage of the political situa
tion for sectarian purposes, and so it came about that Catholi
cism and "Democracy" on one side stood for individual liberty
and the sacredness of the person, against Protestantism and
Native -Americanism, which represented illiberality, exclusive-,
ness, limitation of suffrage, arbitrary distinctions between man
and man, on the other. The juxtaposition was startling and
comical ; it occasioned some rubbing of the eyes, and no little
shaking of the head. A few people, disgusted with Protes
tant spite, began to think that Catholicism was not quite so
bad as they had supposed. A few others, disgusted with
" Know Nothing " indecencies, began to think that repub
licanism was not quite so good as they had supposed. But
neither Catholicism nor anti-republicanism gained much by

the accident. Both the political and the sectarian movement
were soon forgotten, and affairs in both departments took their
natural course. Protestantism became once more synonymous
with individual liberty, education, enlightenment, progress.
Catholicism became synonymous with general authority, ac
quiescence in the reigning order, unquestioning obedience to
the will of the Southern oligarchy, and resistance to the lar
gest ideas of social advancement. It is now pretty well under
stood that the " Democrats " in America are the very people
who do not believe in the capacity of the masses for self-
government ; the very people who laud the democratic idea,
and vote for the autocratic candidate. As the Catholics are
" Democrats " almost to a man, the position of the Church
in America is very well defined.
Mr. Hecker's assertion, that " the most intellectually gifted
and independent minds of the age cast off Protestantism and
embrace Catholicity," is but one of a multitude of equally
rash assertions scattered at random over his pages. His in
stances are not greatly demonstrative of his position : in Ger
many, Haller, Phillips, Hurter ; in England, Newman, Allies,
Wilberforce ; in America, Brownson, Haldeman, Anderson.
Is Mr. Hecker so sure of his names that he does not think it
worth his while to mention them ? Is he playing with his
evidence ? We think his case calls for more seriousness. No
doubt, the Catholic Church makes gains in America, — large
gains. No doubt, brilliant, cultivated, elegant, and even in
tellectual people do and will leave Protestantism for her com
munion. The old Church will not die so long as men and
women demand visible authority in religion, palpable creeds,
. tangible sentiments, an audible Holy Ghost, or an edible
Grace. For many a generation to come, society and human
nature will furnish material for her large membership. Span
ish and Portuguese America will naturally be Roman Catholic.
The French populations of Canada seem to belong to the Papal
system. The Southern and Southwestern States and Terri
tories of the Union offered a fair field to the Catholic mission
aries, especially during the old regime of slavery, which favored
the kind of social stability in which Rome delights. A people
luxurious, unenterprising, fond of traditions, fond of display,

made sensuous by temperament, climate, institutions, aris
tocratic in social forms, ecclesiastical in religious preferences,
would become an easy prey to the Church that fell in most
entirely with its proclivities. But with the destruction of
slavery, the overthrow of aristocratic institutions, the introduc
tion of republican ideas and customs, the diffusion of educa
tion, the general gain of individual liberty, the substitution of
manly independence and free labor for the system of caste,
we shall expect to see Catholicism retire from its old haunts.
As Maryland becomes a Free State in fact as well as in law,
the spirit of individualism, the Protestant spirit, will come in ;
the cities and towns will change their character in all respects,
and even Catholic Baltimore, become converted to the gospel
of liberty, may cease to be Catholic. According to the last
census, there are now in all the United States, California and
New Mexico included, something more than three millions of
Catholics, most of whom are of Southern or else of Celtic
race ; — three millions who, according to Mr. Hecker, in spite
of a thousand disadvantages, " remain more attached to their
holy faith than to all else besides." If they do, they differ
remarkably therein from the Catholics of the last generation.
For, unless the figures falsify worse than facts, there ought to
be in the United States at least double this number from im
migration, territorial accession, and natural increase alone,
making no account of gains by conversion. The conversions,
therefore, are mostly the other way. The pioneers in the new
country travel far from the limits of the Church, mentally and
spiritually as well as corporeally. The explorers in the fields
of science and industry travel further still. The influence of
Catholicism depends very greatly on the presence of its estab
lishment, and that is too cumbrous to go in a saddle-bag. It
is not a portable, but a stationary religion. It likes the city
better than the prairie, and must resign itself to the loss of
its children when they go beyond the sight of its churches.
In a few spots it may anticipate them, but not everywhere.
The outlying territories to be added yet to the United States
are not in Southern latitudes, as Texas and California were ;
nor are their inhabitants limp and facile people, the miserable
VOL. LXXVIII. 5TH S. VOL. XVI. NO. I. 3
26 The Unity of the Spirit. " [Jan.
remnants of the civilizations of the Old World. They are for

the most part lands open to fresh cultivation, and to none but
hardy Northern influences. Protestantism, under one or
another of its forms, must be the religion there, as certainly as
the Northern spirit will be the soul of their civil institutions.
Nature has missionaries who travel faster than the brothers of
the Order of St. Paul. They are industry, enterprise, intelli
gence, knowledge, the awakened capacities of man.
Art. II. — THE UNITY OF THE SPIRIT.
An Address delivered (in part) before the Massachusetts Convention of

Congregational Ministers, Mag 25, and before the Western Confer
ence, at Meadville, Penn., June 30, 1864. By Rev. Cyrcs A.
Bartol, D. D.
This will be known as the age of secession, a word of old

English authority, for which we go to Bishop Hall for a defini
tion, to which recent events give new meaning.
But perhaps we have not thought how far political seces
sion comes of ' theological schism. Rightly the reformer
arraigns the church as determining the state ; for our hu
manity is born of our divinity, and misconception of the
Maker ends in maltreatment of mankind. Nothing in our
present premises is so important as religious unity. There is
no meaner maxim than that we must agree to differ, as though
dissension were our pre-ordained and final doom. An open
vision of general truth is our destiny. Like our great Lieu
tenant, we must fight it out, on whatever line of controversy,
into concord and peace. The soul in us is not satisfied till we
see eye to eye. The mark of genius is its power to resolve
contradictory opinions, and virtue or devotion is unwilling to
rest in diversity. Let us declare a truce to barren dispute,
but maintain all fruitful argument, believing in and striving
for the union in which, sure as a divine reality exists, all
debate must conclude. There can be no common action with
out spiritual consent. The atoms will form no compound till
1865.] " The Unity of the Spirit. 27
their wonderful little hooks are joined together ; the train will
not move till the coupling be complete ; society will not ad
vance without a bond through all its members. Toiling at
the forge of battle to weld together the fragments around us
into a fresh civilization, let us try to see where the copula,
which we seek for our outward salvation, runs in the region
of faith.
Our first effort should be, of course, after a common idea of
God. The English Quaker, William Allen, meeting, in Zante,
a Russian of the Greek Church, found they both knew the
force of but one word, meaning God, upon which they came
into cordial embrace. Yet even about God how the denomina
tions differ! The Unitarian thinks he has settled the ques
tion. But while God is on all hands confessedly somehow
one, is he, as most of us appear to fancy, a numerical unit ?
He cannot possibly be so ; for two, twenty, a million, are in
him just as much ; else those numbers were not at all.
Let us not think we are so easily and clearly at the end of
knowledge respecting him. We may think him one, yet think
him small. The Hebrews thought him one, and what did they
make him but a narrow and local god of their scanty tribes,
leaving Greek, Roman, Barbarian, as orphans out in the cold
Gentile court, where no father dwelt ? We may be as rigid as
Mahometans about God's singularity, and as bold as they in
our prayers. So Theodore Parker ingenuously complains of a
want, when he came forward, of piety in the rational school ;
though, without creative imagination adopting the intuitions
that were not native to his soul, he brought no contribution
for positive mending of this defect. The difficulty was in
poverty of conception. God was assumed to be one simply
because absolute, it being forgotten that he is relative too, our
nearest relation, to whom we are related as to none beside.
But let not the Trinitarian suppose he has solved the prob
lem. Doubtless, the Trinity began as an honest attempt to
express God's relationship. But why limit him to three ?
Three, numerically considered as expressing God, is not a
whit more, or nearer the truth, than one. It is astonishing
through what a round of metaphysical ingenuities, natural
symbols, and fanciful images, a supposed necessary threeness has
28 The Unity of the Spirit. [ J a. 1 1 -
been pursued, till it has become like the puzzle of ivory pieces
in a child's play. But there can be no limitation of divinity
to three persons. Are not all personalities, in heaven, earth,
or hell, his offspring ? What, then, is the Trinity but a
merely provisional and transitory notion ? Can articulate per
sonality be predicated of deity ? God is not, as distinguished
from others, a person at all. He is the unfathomable mystery
of person itself, the deepest fact of life and human conscious
ness. He is of countless personalities parental, prolific root
and whole. " 0 Thou greatest and best of beings," runs the
sentence of the old petition which we have heard in a thou
sand pulpits from our boyhood up. But is he one being
among many ? Then he is limited by all the rest, as we are in
a crowd, and his infinity is gone. Though we must contem
plate him as an object, we misconceive and confine him till we
feel ourselves part of what we contemplate. It is remarkable,
accordingly, how Miss Cobbe, the English disciple of Mr.
Parker, regarding Christianity as a vessel that must founder,
and planting herself on theism as a substitute, attains to but a
very partial and unsatisfactory apprehension of theism itself.
She individualizes and isolates God, and falls infinitely farther
short of the universal reality than some of the writers of the
sacred books whose authority she discards.
Rare, indeed, is the coupling and combining genius which
melts and atones opposing elements of belief into the crystal
of a universal truth. Renan, the French biographer of Jesus,
is broad in his scope, scholarly in his exploration, noble in his
temper ; but for this splendid resolution which we need of
differences into one glorious analogy of faith, he puts hospital
ity to all sects and systems that lie as far apart as ever in his
page ; while he speculates with so subtile a tolerance on them
all, we sometimes feel like those to whom Mephistopheles
offered the various wines in Auerbach's cellar, saying in sub
stance, with his genial smile round the table, Gentlemen, take
which you please ; or as the concert-goers, who, when the
famous violinist drew the note so fine with his bow, at last
found themselves listening to nothing. M. Renan is of a
catholic, but not combining force. His charity is not reconcil
iation. He does not add synthesis to his analysis. He uses the
1865.] The Unity of the Spirit. 29
disjunctive, but understands not the copulative conjunction.

He can say this or that, but not this and that ; so he loses or
slips from the higher combination, and misses verity by drop
ping veracity out of the portrait of the master whose separate
features and circumstantial details he so marvellously paints.
We have had dissectors and discriminators enough ; we wait for
the uniter. / know him all to pieces, one said of his friend.
Why do you not say you know me altogether? was the pene
trating reply, of wisdom as well as wit. When shall we have
this atoning intelligence of love ?
Some Unitarians and Trinitarians seem to find the copula
we search for, in the dogma of the Incarnation. But what is
the incarnation of God, but his manifestation in flesh and
blood ? How then is he incarnate ? In one solitary bit of
flesh and blood, which has thrown its shining shadow so far
into all our minds ? No flesh and blood ever held more of
God. But did it hold all of him, or was it the only flesh
and blood anywise holding him, of all that ever quivered and
flowed ? Let us not think so meanly of anybody's flesh and
blood, or our own, when no one's can quite keep him out !
Strange that the incarnation should have been perverted from
a principle into a circumstance ! It is a fact of the universal
order, let the degrees of it vary as they may. Wherever truth
has shone, or purity lighted her lamp, or goodness kindled its
flame, since the morning stars sang together, in this vase of
clay there has been something of the incarnation of God.
" I and my father are one," said Jesus ; and so it is declared
Jesus was God. Yes, as the spirit of God shone through
him without measure to make him the providential man of all
history. But whoever the spirit of God shines through is as
God, and reveals him to us. " Beware of man-worship," it
was said to a certain ardent admirer. " I do not worship the
man, but the God in him," was the instant and indignant
reply. Let us, man and woman, worship him in one another,
as the dying Bunsen said to his wife, " In thee I have loved
the Eternal." Doubtless, of the Eternal he had seen in her
more than in the earth or the sky. In my precious brother or
sister I see more of him than in sea or sun, as I childishly saw
bim once in my father and mother. Nobody is all of God to
30 The Unity of the Spirit. [Jan.
me ; and however much Jesus may be more thau anybody

else, he is not all. Enoch walked with God, nothing betwixt ;
and religion is always disappearance of the boundary-line
between human and divine consciousness. It is an exaggera
tion of Christ's personality to suppose this peculiar to him, or
him the absolute author of it in any one, although some carry
his virtue so far as to imagine he has made God himself good,
and that there was no mercy before he came. Immanuel, God
with us and in us, discovered or unknown, is the essence of
every soul, as well as the influence of any historic personage.
Jesus is son of God only, and eternally begotten. But has
God only one son ? The notion that from everlasting he has
not other children, without number, is of theological absurdi
ties the chief.
When we any of us blend nowhere with deity, when no
ecstasy with its wonderful light in the face blends the child
with his father, but the ring of self-consciousness runs on,
closes round, and cuts us off separate from him, then our
religion is gone. We are all by ourselves, and we are a very
little thing. A string can be put round us to get our girth
very quick. As the giant recovered his power when he
touched the earth, the soul revives at the touch of its Author.
Touch him let us believe that we may ! There is a point
where from him we cannot be discriminated or anywise set
apart. I am particle of that sea, spray from that infinite deep,
and inlet of that everlasting flood. I feel sure of myself as of
my Maker. He must forsake himself before he can me or any
of his works. Whoever is aware of this relationship with God
is clothed from him with inexhaustible interest. The sense
of it may come only in moments, and to different persons in
diverse degrees ; but, while it lasts, it is goodness and genius
too. In it you have a charm incomprehensible. People do
not get tired of your looks and manners, deeds and words.
You bring the water into our eyes when you speak, we know
not how, only that it is holy water. But, when you take leave
of your Author and proceed by yourself, on your own account,
men learn you out, finish and weary of you very soon ; and
pass on to some other specimen, hoping not to be disappointed
again, as Diogenes with his lamp hunted the earth about after
a man.
What the oneness is, in contact with which we thus come,

we know not. We are doubtless connected with particular
beings unseen, beside the One, as the stars exist in fellowships.
But what cluster or constellation of spirits, offspring and part
of the Infinite, so includes and affects us, we can only imper
fectly tell. Therefore, though God is one, and no monotheism
has represented how truly, God is many, and no polytheism
has reckoned the length of his train. " When we speak
of Him, we begin to err." Our first syllable does him in
justice. We name him in our pronoun as masculine, but
such he is not. To avoid a slight on womanhood some call
him father and mother, but the phraseology has a sound of
weakness and affectation, and does not take him in. What
in exact terms is he ? I cannot surmise. Words, says Goethe,
in this matter are but sound and smoke, feeling is all ; and our
feeling is that no fence of number can enclose his nature so
that he will not be beyond the fence more than within it. No
net of dogma can catch him, no material symbolism of allo-
tropic or other. Trinity hold his elusive and uncomprehend-
ed substance. This illimitableuess we, in our debates, may
shadow forth in affirming that he is neither strictly one nor
precisely three ; but manifold, in the souls of his inspiration, in
the annals which record all events, in the visible nature which
is the type and cipher of the mind, and in the providence
which arranges the unconcluded fortunes of all that lives. So
let the unity which runs through all contradictions be faintly
hinted at, for others to fashion better and fasten stronger, be
tween the current dissimilar teachings concerning God.
But this copula is no less needful to be brought out as respects
the worship of God. How men, in their systems and schools,
part and quarrel about it, on the one side making it formal,
on the other spiritual .' We may make it too much of either.
We need to find the reconciliation between spirit and form.
But can worship be too spiritual ? Does not Jesus say it must
be in spirit ? In opposing the notion that it could be accepted
only from one spot of especial sanctity, Jerusalem or Gerizim,
lie certainly does. But he does not say it is to have no form.
This would be a proposition of impossibility, and an insult to
nature. He tells us to enter into our closet ; he lifted up his
32 T/ie Unity of the Spirit. -[Jan.
eyes to heaven, he fell on the ground in the garden, — as we
close our eyes, raise our hands, bow our heads, or bend our
knees ; and what are all these things but forms ? Wherefore
do we use them ? Not for any corresponding celestial position
of the deity. We cannot get the meridian-line for an observa
tion of him. He is neither up nor down, in or out, behind or
before, on a throne more than in a hut. Heaven cannot hold
him, or hell keep him out. He includes all, and is not in
cluded. Put into any terms of space or chronology, he is no
longer God. There never was or will be more of him or his
work than now. Creation out of nothing is not possible to
him, any more than self-creation. All is forever that can be at
all, and all is essentially himself. Nevertheless, we must out
wardly and definitely, as well as inwardly, own him. We are
so framed that signs assist our thoughts toward him. " Her
very foot speaks," says Shakespeare : so our very body should
pray. It will, in every nerve, when the soul kindles. If we
break the vessels of form, we lose the spirit, as there were
vials, we read, for the sweet odors and for the tears of the
saints. Jesus uses wind and spirit indifferently, as though, at
bottom, all substance were one. Milton douhts if God and
light be not the same. But a falsely stated transcendentalism
would abolish language as well as ordinance, and miss its own
aim at the very object they too both seek. What is a word
but a form more effectual than any rite of baptism or supper,
even as Christ's word was more than his blood on the cross ?
All true Scriptures are as shining cups passed through every
age and land. Shapes and essences cannot bo divorced, and
some regular form is indispensable to social worship.
But is this a plea for formalism ? No, — the formal extrav
agances are worse than the most transcendent spiritualism.
The Church has wellnigh perished of formality, like a warrior
weighed to death by his defensive armor. The great peril of
the day to real piety is the attempt at perpetual sanctification
of outworn modes. The worst infidelity is fear that religion
will perish if its accidental garb is changed or dropped.
Rigidly imposed and invariable form is the coffin of the spirit,
not its house, and an imagined everlasting sacredness in any
mechanical or local custom, an offence alike to the unconfined
deity and the free mind of man. Let religion have her decent
dress, but let it be the yielding garment of a living organism,
not the wax-swathing of an Egyptian corpse. The copula is
a flexible worship, with the most meaning in the least rote.
Let our order be no dead timber, but the still growing tree !
It should have novelty, surprise, and suitableness to the fresh
wants of man, for whom, like the Sabbath, it was made, and
uot he for it. There is no danger at all that there will not be
plenty of persons to stick to old habits, and Liliputian cords
enough to keep religion from utter escape.
A binding ritual, forsooth ! An external pattern of piety
enjoined by divine authority ! We might as well say, because
Jesus went occasionally into the synagogue, he meant to per
petuate nothing but synagogues throughout the earth. A
high ecclesiastic among us spoke of his church as " the tem
porary residence of Deity." Nay, the Deity will not reside in
it more than out of it, everywhere beside ! A single style of
external adoration for him whose action is unbounded va
riety ? No, but if possible a recognition of him as fresh and
versatile as his goodness to us ! One collect and unaltered
phraseology for the ever-shifting circumstances of this myriad-
sided human case ? Not so, but spontaneous supply for each
exigency that comes ! It goes about as a sarcasm, that once,
after an unfortunate drowning in a canal, no fitter petition
could be discovered in the book than for a safe return from
sea ; and, although a venerable clergyman laughed because
every society was getting to have its own hymn-book, is not
even that better than putting ourselves into devotional uni
form ? How monstrous the attempt to tie up the heart's
struggles, through unfolding character, advancing years,
thrills of domestic joy and grief, agonies of a nation's trial,
the whole march and prospect of mankind, to the endless mill-
wheel revolution of a few concerted periods ! It is not strange
that a person, called to account for not going to church, re
plied, his reason was, that his religious feelings in what was
called the sanctuary had been so much offended ! The wind
of devotion bloweth where it listeth, and it listeth to blow
wider than the most stately chant or sonorous recitation.
Over public calamity or private anguish, in the heady fight,
by the big trenches, we so faintly conceive, of the grave-yard on

the field of battle, or at home for those there still exposed,
under that spirit one of whose touches is patriotic zeal, requests
should rise as gushing improvisations, the prayer that goes to
God being the breath that has just come from him. What
language can be devised sufficiently to shock this unchristian
sameness, this paper on the brain of so much printed devotion ?
Can human nature delight in this monotonous flow of verbal
adoration, or well proceed in this net of interminable repeti
tion ? No ; different jets are put on the fountain, to vary
beautifully its lustrous moulding iu the air. No ; insist that
the lover shall read his vows out of a book, the child spell its
affection from a page, the friend declare his gratitude by the
card ; but rule not the soul's emotions to God within an order
that may be useful for guidance, but is choking as a bond.
When our filial bosom swells with thanksgiving, aches with
sorrow, smarts with remorse, or, in wistful transport, longs for
communion with the unseen Source whence its being streams,
let us adopt whatever words will bear the burden of our con
fession and desire, or, in the closet that has no light to read
by, repeat for a litany God's own handwriting on the tables of
our heart. Whatever routine may be fixed for bodily necessi
ties or worldly affairs, be a fresh impulse and a severe sanctity
the stamp on our prayers !
We go clothed into the air ; and religion should not be left
naked. But put not her substance into her dress, of Hebrew
old clothes or a modern fashion. Let her, like a human face
we sometimes see, drop everything of form or lineament save
what serves for expression. Within the compass of a human
countenance is room for what manifold significance, endless
mobility of the same traits ! Such let her aspect be. Let her
not be part of our observance, but our whole observance one
of her accents. Let us not overload her person with orna
ments or her shrine with flowers, to make her like a silken
and jewelled devotee of fashion, the vain profusion on whose
hands and head enervates the atmosphere and taints her own
breath. Let the Spirit of God, as a mighty wind, blow the
superfluity away, to reveal the charm of a just proportion.
When any form is full of feeling, it will vindicate itself. It
has been said more effect can be produced by a baptism than

bv a lecture, with less fatigue. But our service of act or
speech is alike a failure unless we put into it our life, till in
the Master's figure, not too strong for us, others in it eat our
flesh and drink our blood. To throw ourselves on others' prep
arations in our great emergencies, leaning wholly on their
books, and not at all on our own thoughts, by the sick-bed,
over the coffin, and at the grave, with parrot-recitation instead
of personal exhaustion, is confession of impertinence and ina
bility. It is abdication of our duty. It is owning we cannot
meet the occasion ; we cannot interpret, except by hearsay,
the feeling of the hour. Let us rather, like scribe and house
holder described by our Lord, join old with new in a living
unity.
But this unity of the spirit is no less requisite in still another
point, of God's communication to us. What disputes here
again rage ! Some say this communication is by letter alone,
some by ecclesiastical authority, some by natural science, and
'every party makes exclusive claim. A direct inspiration too
is the copula running through and binding all these together.
On a slip of paper wrapping Channing's pen, sent after his
death to the present writer as a keepsakej was this line : " Au
thority in anything when I see it to be true " ; — and must we
not see truth always in an inward light? When the French
priests were charged with being ministers of a foreign power, the
Abbd Lacordaire answered : " We are ministers of Him who is
in no country a foreigner." But what aliens from Him we
fancy ourselves ! The last thing we realize is our divine
childhood. If those who shout their prayers knew how near
he is, they would not speak so loud. " Be consoled," says
God, " thou couldst not seek me, hadst thou not found me."
Evidences a priori or a posteriori all come afterwards, and are
secondary to this experience. We never trouble ourselves to
prove our author while the door he left in our heart is open.
The yearning after God, indeed, like that after a human
friend, is simply the effect of his being. When my longing, a
swifter traveller than the absent one, goes out to him over
wave and mountain, through distant battle-fields or dim
porches of the grave, is it not itself what I got from him ? So
our regard for God we get from God. He argues his own
case in court ; he teaches us at first hand ; he only waits to bo
acknowledged. Kepler said God had waited six thousand
years for an observer of his works ; how long waits he at our
door-posts for an observer of himself ? " Are there any spirits
present ? " the patient circle asks. Yes, the Spirit is present,
with the lesson we will take: Some one, not myself, is in me,
shining as a light, speaking as a voice, passing through me
like a wind. Who has not felt and started at this strange
tonic and sudden whiff? It is not all within paper or leather
covers. " The word of God is not bound." So reads the
Scripture, and the word of God is not bound vp, nor is every
thing itself that is under the lids. What a poor limitary
thing that everlasting word would be, could it all be put into
chapter and verse ! That it cannot, declare not only astrono
my, geology, botany, and every department of natural knowl
edge, but clergy and prelacy, Colenso, and many beside. The
letter must yield to the spirit, or it would not only kill us, but
suicidally die itself. Inspiration is not an everlasting trade-
wind set in one quarter only, blowing due east always. It
may be a westerly breeze. The spirit bloweth where it listeth.
Besides, there must be something not only to inspire, but also
to be inspired ; and this cannot be a word, but a soul. The
Bible alone does not suffice.
But shall science take its place ? All honor to Science !
open to her every avenue. Let not preachers suppose they
can afford to pass by any of her discoveries. But what does
she give us, after all ? Illustrations, not the essence. Thanks
to her for the splendid views in her huge stereoscope of the
creation, but bless God, in the name of all his children, that,
please and bless her votaries as she may, with new and special
flashes of the nature which is his garment, no closer to himself
can her curiosities bring us than does the familiar sight of his
works. Glasses are sometimes furnished in galleries to in
spect a picture. But the artist's genius is as well appreciated
by the naked eye. Technical science stops short of the amaz
ing reality which must convey itself to the soul, if at all, in a
breath. The lamented Staples, when stricken down, writing
to a friend to preach for him, said, " I want men in my pul
I860.] The Unity of the Spirit. 37
pit who have felt the mystery of the creation." This goes
deeper than science so called. Very fine and eloquent Science
is in her speech ; she tells us of the sustenance of the sun's
heat by the rushing of meteors or asteroids, as so much fuel
the stoker thrusts into his furnace. But if this mechanical
feeding be the last secret of the sun, his warmest ray is wintry
to me, and I shudder at him at midsummer. Science shows,
in atoms, resistless might, as of " giants in disguise." But,
lodged in senseless atoms, 'tis a comfortless strength. Science
exults in analyzing all life down to certain little bubbles out
of which every living frame is built up. But who blew the
little bubbles ? Who fashioned the hollow, invisible bricks of
all vital architecture ? When and how were they connected
with sensation and soul, and for what end ? Let the spirit
answer for itself. Science, without viol or organ, draws forth
notes of thrilling music through chance-pipes held over her
cunning drafts. But what poor harmony to the mind, till,
within or above the principles of resonance in solid bodies,
stands self-shown the Musician that makes all nature his harp !
When one of our spokesmen of science talks of the " thoughts
of God," his European compeers denounce him as unscientific
for linking together incompatible themes. In the premises the
charge may be correct. Blessedly unscientific in their sense
he is, because indebted for those thoughts less to his scientific
understanding than to his soul. He mixes the wines of inspi
ration and logic. When a mineralogist told a preacher of
jealousies respecting reputation and prior discovery among his
companions, and even of immoral conduct and professing relig
ion for popular effect, the preacher replied, " I had imagined
these pursuits of yours exalted the character." " Not at all,"
was the reply ; " that belongs to another department, which
is yours." God is not found by our search, but in his find
ing of us. No intellectual process will bring us to him without
the wings of his spirit and ours. He, whom we are conscious
of but' cannot comprehend, the Unknowable, as Mr. Spencer
calls him, must, in all our motions and observations, furnish
light, and take the first step.
Therefore the Bible stands impregnable, because in it he is
so disclosed. Say what criticism will of the authorship of
VOL. LXXVIII. — 5TH 8. VOL. XVI. NO. I. 4
Genesis, the mathematics of Exodus, the ceremonial of Deuter

onomy, the character of David, the habits of Solomon, the
date of Job, — descant as it may please on inhuman curses in
the Psalms or unfulfilled manifestoes in the Prophets, — these
old pages are of all literature, and spite of marked and glaring
exceptions, the warmest yet with breathings of deity into the
human breast. No modern treatise on chemistry, no essay of
Tyndall on heat, of Huxley on organization, of Darwin on nat
ural selection, or Agassiz on classification, can take the place
of its sentences. Immortal owning and response have they
through all the progress of human art and knowledge. The
copula of a divine inspiration runs through them into our
bosom. Science, in its specialties of investigation, as we have
melancholy proof, instead of approaching, may stray from
God. Mr. Parker, with his noble heart indeed believing what
he believed at all, burning with adoration of God and expec
tation of a future lot for himself and the human creatures so
dear to him, could not get over his astonishment and pain on
learning that distinguished students in Europe, whom he had
looked to as leaders of the race, on his better acquaintance
turned out to be atheists. Busy in particular material interro
gations, they had lost, or in their haste dropped by the way,
the spiritual copula ; or, tired out in the grapple with particu
lar baffling problems, they had not strength enough left to
grasp, or interest to care for it.
There is a copula between nature and the supernatural, as
much as of anything above with what is below. If nature
be not all, with God and spirit merged in it, the supernatural
must be. " Anti-supernaturalism " is out of place " in the
pulpit " on the ground of any religion, to say nothing of Chris
tianity ; and to define the Christian miracles as unnatural, or
violations of nature, or as more wondrous in themselves than
anything else, or wonderful at all to God, is the art of their
enemies, not the wisdom of their friends.
But there are two other ideas or terms that require this
uniting or reconciling word. Into whose ear, in these days,
has not the din come of the contending cries of liberty and
law ? But is it not a misconceived strife which makes liberty
and law contrary ? Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is
liberty. Man's freedom, so far from being hindered by, fcon-
sists in God's reign ; and it is the crowning shame, or rather
impudence, of the nineteenth century to undertake to pass
itself off for the true divine government, because the provincial
Jehovah of the Jews is understood to have cursed Canaan.
So religion has been disgraced and the Bible dishonored and
undermined by their own most ostentatious advocates. Slav
ery is not properly a law at all, but only abusive custom ; and
while we talk of it as justified by the theocratic constitution of
Palestine, or the political constitution of America, it may be
well to remember there is such a thing as the human constitu
tion, action after which is human liberty. For what else do
we wage a fearful war, but to vindicate this principle, essential
to our nationality ? As, for our heirs, we rebuild the Union,
so nearly lost in the violation of its spirit and money-calcula
tion of its value, let us spring its arch this time so true that no
crack, stealing from line to line among its courses, tumble it
to the ground !
We speak of-the first pioneers in the wilderness of this con
tinent ; we are fresh pioneers in a savage moral waste. Like
those who gashed the earth and shore away the wood before
the Oriental monarchs, we are preparing the way of the Lord.
It looks like a ruin we are making, but it is a road. Passing,
ten years ago, through the tremendous gully of the Fenster-
miinz, among the mountains of Austria, I saw far off on the
vast slope a host of men as though in a contest with each
other, aimless or angry as a swarm of hornets or bees, prying
up the rocks and rolling them down the steep, filling the air
with noise and dust, and apparently doing a work of purely
wilful destruction. But, gazing closer, I caught the faint lino
of a long bridge they were constructing for millions of travel
lers and teams of traffic from kingdom to kingdom for thou
sands of years. So, through the chaos of treason into which
our first fabric was dissolving, by the edge of one terrible
caldron, along the dizzy height of moral principles creatively
applied to social affairs, our armies are making that path or
order which reconciles liberty and law, and white-footed civil
ization and holy peace shall be the pilgrims to plant in it their
silent, beautiful, and salvation-bringing steps. They who
object to the reconstruction, and would have " the Union as
it was," would keep the rotten sleepers in a railway, or refuse
to prop a settling roof !
Let us not doubt we shall overcome disunion with fellow
ship. Let us not be troubled at the dust and smoke, the noise
of the warrior, or the piteous fragments he leaves strewn be
hind him in his way. Of their own precious bones our mar
tyrs are making across anarchy a bridge. We look at the
surgeon or Sanitary Commission as the only figure of mercy
on the field. But the sword for the body politic is a surgical
instrument too. We lament that the implements of hus
bandry are laid aside. But the cannon-wheels plough and the
toothed and serried bayonets harrow the soil of the people's
heart ; and out of that well-proved ground of human nature,
whose fertile strength daily events teach us more than ever to
trust, what harvests shall grow ! At the new-opening pros
pects of this nation, how does our heart at once, after going up
in thanksgiving to God, go out in love and admiration to our
kind ! In transformed swamps of rock and mud and bram
bles, how luxuriant spring the corn and wheat ! Alas for the
human brambles, stony hearts, and pollution worse than any
morass ! But when they are cleared away, for the sour land
of our national domain to be sweetened and cleansed, what will
any shining tassels or bending heads of grain be to the sheaves
of righteousness brought from where the drops now fall from
our eyes and veins ? It shall well propitiate the souls, sufferers
no longer, when they look from their glory. Any justification
of war, in Christian quarters, is thought sad and revolting.
But we must put Christianity herself on a war footing, and into
armor now. Weep at its horrors with a woman's sensibility
as we may, though with some fire as well as water in our
eyes when we consider the origin of our troubles, yet let us
be consoled for the awful process with visions of the blessed
result ! Like the little boy who said, God bless our armies !
and then cried as his sister smiled at his precocious enthu
siasm, let us mingle courage with our pain. For where we
sow, our posterity shall reap. It is distrust of God and deaf
ness to his voice in all history, it is atheism and inhumanity,
to doubt it. One who passed over the Virginia fields the day
1865.] The U,iity of the Spirit. 41
after a battle found a wounded lad plucking violets. The

nation, after this war no longer young, but venerable as if a
thousand years old, though broken and bleeding, shall pluck
violet and heart's-ease, rose and lily, all emblems of concord,
from the scene of carnage ; for the soul, that wondrous so
journer which deigns for a while to wear these dusty robes,
outlives all that is woful in its earthly lot. One conviction
at least out of the thunder-cloud flashes and spreads, — that of
another life. Who can be a sceptic now ? God will not leave
the dead heroes in their ashes and gore. They who prolong
their country's life shall themselves undoubtedly live forever.
But that the copula of liberty and law may be complete, let
us, in this time of distraction, own and use every real cement
of common love and the common weal. Certain people, a sort
of odds and ends of the community, sign off and absolve them
selves from social obligations. They slight and scorn church
and state. They secede, though in a different way, as much
as do armed rebels. They overlook the immense debt of the
land to the ministry of religion, and disown the bond of
obedience to civil statutes. They will think and behave as
they please, heedless of custom or conventional propriety.
But, passing by the injustice and ingratitude of such a course,
mark its inconsistency. My fine come-outer, my brave tran-
scendentalist and loud disowner of all authority beyond your
own conceit, I observe you use the advantages of society and
the municipal rule. I notice you avail yourself of the side
walk, the Common, the Public Garden, the railroad, reservoir,
gas-light, and market. I meet you taking or mailing your
letters at the post-office. Have you provided all these con
veniences for yourself? If not, see if you cannot amend your
theory, and muster reason enough out of your broad contem
plation here at home to imitate those who, on the islands of
the deep or a foreign shore, feeling with us the ties of patriot
ism and worship, send of their money and the sinews of their
heart to the support of our cause ! It is an omen that our
struggle will not only overthrow secession as a growth, but
uproot it as a principle, felling the tree and removing the
stump. Withdraw and set up for himself who will, cheering
tokens in plenty we have of increasing fellowship.
But our topic leads us beyond the strife of the hour, into
eternal contemplations of God's design in his children's desti
ny. How needful some reconciling here, too, betwixt opposing
creeds ! The article held on the one hand is the resurrection
of the body ; on the other, the immortality of the soul. But if
by the former be meant the restoration of the outworn organic
matter, which is ever rushing into fresh combination, it would
be a trivial doctrine were it not an affront to the thoughtful
mind ; and if the latter signify only the survival of some gen
eral principle of life, how poor, unsatisfying sort of continuance
for us or for those gone from us or ready to go ! The link of
the two views, or rather their reduction into one, that should
unite the holders of either or both, — what is it but the exact
Christian teaching of the resurrection or reappearing, not of
the body, but of the dead, each in the condition of personal
identity, relationship to others, and situation in the universe
that God's justice and goodness may appoint ? But we must
resent the exaggerations of the popular creed. On grounds of
reason and Scriptural interpretation let us protest against the
supposed state, for any, of hopeless torment. In the English
Church is great rejoicing that, in the late battle with free
opinion, the dogma of endless punishment has been rescued
and authoritatively reasserted, as though only on the piles .
and pillars of the infernal regions an earthly ecclesiastical
establishment could be built ! A strange subject of congratu
lation, indeed, that Satan should by his everlasting strength be
proved equal to God, dethroning him from his supremacy.
Besides, how inconsistent the inferior God who is left us, —
mercy one side the grave and revenge the other ! Let us be
lieve in equity, goodness, and forgiveness everywhere over
matching misery and sin in his creation, and that the Divine
rectitude as well as pity will appear, not only in opening doors
of happiness without ceasing to his children, but in that kind
of immortality which shall keep and set deeper the funda
mental qualities of all.
It is queried if we shall know our friends in heaven.
But if immortality be the development of every individual
type, and disclosure of the personal identity of each one,
we shall not alone, as we crave, know them beyond, but
know them better, and know them truly for the first time.
For, as in the features cold in the coffin an old resemblance
not seldom comes back, so death is doubtless a painter, the
touches of whose brush increase the liketiess of the celestial
body. " I wanted to see your face again," it was said to one,
"just as we go into an artist's room to behold the strokes, in
his sketch, he has added."
One copula more there is of the grounds of a faith so
sublime. Some find them in the facts of the Gospel, and
some in the yearnings of the soul. But the inward and
outward lessons combine in one revelation. What sage crit
ics they are who oppose religious intuitions to religious insti
tutions, as though the institutions had any other end than
to stir the intuitions ! Why find any duel between reason
and Christ's authority, when Christ's authority is but reason
to us answering to reason in us ? The mighty works con
tradict not, but play into our highest thoughts. Our relig
ious education is no spontaneous process ; it rests on a suc
cession of bequests from, the foundation of the world. All is
legacy, which our mental labor enlarges only by a mite, like a
crystal-increment, at a time. What is Christianity but the
accumulated fund of religion, the compound interest of virtue,
the moral capital of the human race ? Its Author has had
many titles given to him ; let us add one more, that he is the
creator far and wide of that very consciousness of God, duty,
and immortality, from whose interior well we pretend to fetch
our independent draughts. " Out of the old fields cometh all
this corn " with which the philosopher has filled his little
barn. What a poor storehouse his brain would be, occupied
only with his own products ! The bee might as well, sipping
his honey from the hive, despise the flowers from which it was
extracted, or the heir of his father's property pretend to have
made it by his own speculations, as the writer on " absolute
religion " discard help from systems of religion that have been
" relative " to him. It would be as insane to leave our Chris
tianity behind, as for a merchant to throw away his deposit in
the bank or his stock in trade. Why should we despise tra
dition when we are, body and soul, traditions ourselves,
handed down from former generations, as well as inspired by
the Most High ?
But everything, in morals as in matter, has two sides.

Holding to the one, let us not forget the other, but join both
in unison. Our heavenly claim rests on linked columns of
idea and fact, and our immortality is evinced from within no
less than from without. Do you say we shall rise from the
dead because Jesus did ? But why did he rise ? We want
not only the circumstance but the cause. A circumstance un
accountable and abnormal, peculiar to one person and exclu
sive of all beside, would be no argument for us. Jesus rose
because he was the Son of God. We shall rise for the same
reason, because we are children of God; and the smallest
babe, " morsel of humanity," you bear out to the burial, has
in its soft hand gigantic strength to burst the bars of the sep
ulchre.
Let such cases, covering a few points only in the field of
modern questioning, serve to elucidate the sense intended in
our phrase, the Christian copula. They may at least open
trains of thought, if they lead to no conclusions. They may
also suggest some better conception .of the clerical office, as
designed neither to discharge any function of bigotry, nor to
be a smoothing-plane of indifference. The true preacher is no
eclectic, neutral, or co'mpromiser ; but, in the words of the
prophet, " a restorer of paths for men to dwell in," a recon
ciler, and minister of the great Reconciler, who came to make
men one with each other in him and in God. This is their
only confessed mission. The occupants of the pulpit sink to a
low ebb when they have to advertise their thenie, as if there
should be any doubt about it, or when, as a lure to public
curiosity, they even take each other for their critical texts,
instead of holding forth impartial truth. Some larger view,
in which oppositions of opinion meet, some harmonious utter
ance, in which the strifes of tongues are turned to unison, —
as the tuner untwists or braids into harmony once more the
frayed strings and discords of a musical instrument, — may
save from this degradation.
There was one true man, dying last year in San Fran
cisco, who always comes to us with this image as a producer
of concord. He was always celebrating somebody else, and
making nothing of himself. He was one link always with
other men. He rose from his death-bed to marry a couple,

who, not knowing he was even then neariug the port, thought
they could not do without his blessing. He married California
to the Union, and the church to the state. A gold ring that
came hither from the Pacific, having in it his own more golden
hair, seemed a symbol of such sublime weddings at which he
so grandly officiated. We knew not that priestly and political
hand was so strong, interfused with tenderness as had always
been his force. We knew not that sweet, simple reed could
turn to such a trumpet, till God made it his mouth to blow
from it such a blast. No wonder our golden, far-off" argosy of
the Pacific, wellnigh lost to us in the mist of State-rights, and
beginning to wander from the fleet, heard the gracious recall
ing voice, and caught the rope flung by that sweet and mighty
spirit, in whose breast we might say the lion and the lamb had
lain down together, but that with him there had been no rising
of the lion against the lamb. Young as he passed on, no other
man's age has better accomplished the loving and reconciling
purpose of life. He found by instinct the harmony after which
our argument gropes. He was always tying bands, and, like
his Master, never broke the bruised reed. " He is not great,"
it was said by one man of another, "for I do not feel him
where I live." There are men, of character so real, and by
our conventional standards immeasurable, that they haunt us
with their ideal. Their souls swell out beyond their bodies to
fill the room they may be in, and the whole land. Others we
find only when we are present with their flesh and blood, in
which we have to search if at any point we may reach their
spirits. Mr. King was of continental size. It is not strange
the great marble monument under which his remains were
lately put should the next morning be found covered with
flowers.
In these times of alienation, when so many strands have
parted, and the vessel of church and the ship of state, al
though, thank God, fast righting themselves, still sway and
swing heavily and doubtfully, in the winds of passion, on the
tide of events, be ours the part of healers, not of sectarists to
embitter and divide ! Not that there need be any concession
to error, but only loving assertion of the truth, saying what
we see. Sight is final, and not to be sacrificed. If I see

Niagara or the White Hills, another's imperceptiveness cannot
wipe them from the face of the earth. Rightly placed, he will
see them too. So, against a principle, once discerne'd, no
man's donbt avails more than against the mountains or the
floods. We will avoid, long as possible, making it subject of
quarrel. We may not profitably dispute for it much in words.
But we must not fail at least to testify to it. The proof is
with us that for its political applications we may have to strive
unto blood. Spite of present ignorance, we must come to
gether in its perception, and cannot help doing so at last. The
day of contention is not indeed over yet. The sound of battle
is in our ears. We are soldiers of Jesus Christ against all
spiritual wickedness or carnal treason ; and we are enlisted
for the war. But war, with whatever weapons, is a means, not
the end. War has no excuse but to keep out what is worse
and more barbarous than itself; and its terrors of discipline,
its furies to cleanse, should be used no moment beyond the
providential ordination of imperative need. Honor to the
soldier and sailor, in army and navy, who have stood between
us and ruin. " Home " and hospital are but small return for'
their service. But Heaven grant their service soon end ! Be
ours tbe motto borne by Cromwell's medal, after his second
investiture, — Through war our quest is peace, Pax quce-
ritur hello; and though the peace the angels sang has not
yet come on earth, the peace Jesus left to his disciples we
shall have, and like him, in proportion to our possession of
it, impart.
1865.] Saint Francis of Assisi. 47
Art. HI. — SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI.
1. Histoire de Saint Francois cTAssise. Par E. Dadrignac. Paris.

1861.
2. Beati Patris Francisci Assisiatis Opera omnia. Curavit Joh. Jos.
von der Buhg. Colonise. 1849.
Upon a certain summer evening in the year 1210, just as

the last rays of the setting sun were reflected from many a
tower and spire of the Imperial City, Innocent III. paced
the terrace of the Lateran palace. Whether his meditations
were purely joyoTTs, or dark clouds had risen to give a sombre
hue to his evening reverie, is a fitting query. If ever the
audacious dreams of Hildebrand were to be realized upon
earth, — visions of a vast Christian republic with a Pope at its
head, — no era seemingly could have been more auspicious
for their accomplishment ; none could bring to the task quali
ties so commanding and various as had been already displayed
by Innocent III. For twelve years his indomitable energy
had been illustrated in every kingdom of Western Europe.
The spectacle of battle, intrigue, almost of anarchy, which
greeted his accession, had not availed to weaken his self-con
fidence, or restrain his ambition. Rather this dismal spectacle
had favored his bold monopoly of spiritual power, — had justi
fied the double-dealing which marked his course in Southern
Italy, — had pardoned the audacity which had discussed and
the partiality which had decided upon the claims of Frederick,
Philip, and Otho to the German crown, — had palliated the
stern interdict which infused so deep a sadness through the
whole realm of Philip Augustus, and the dogged gripe which
alone could change the note of John of England from that of
insolent defiance to a slavish whine. Surely, in the contem
plation of these, his vast domains, a more ambitious spirit
even than that of Innocent could not but have revelled with
delight.
But deeper than geographical bounds or exorbitant preten
sions the historian searches for the cause of energies baffled,
of hopes delayed ; and in the civil war waged for ten dreary
years between Guelph and Ghibelline, which had spread havoc
48 Saint Francis of Assisi. [Jan.
and desolation throughout all Germany, we trace many a deed
of cruelty which must have weighed heavily upon the Pontiff's
soul. One year of interdict had humbled the haughty Philip ;
for three years longer, Innocent must waste his ineffectual
thunders upon the head of John ; and at their expiration it
may have dawned upon him that he had laid the ground-stone
of English liberties and English greatness. Venice, too, which
had betrayed his confidence, defied his anathemas, and baffled
his fondest hopes, only the more convincingly illustrated the
unreality of the Papal power.
But darker far, and far more menacing, were the clouds
which colored the reflections of the Pontiff. It is a period of
deep unrest, when men groan and smart under the pressure
and burden of sorrow. The heart of the people has been
wrung by years of warfare and oppression, and gives forth
longing cries for something more than has hitherto sufficed
humanity. There is an awakening of the moral sense to
wrong, — a feeble, scarcely conscious groping for the right.
The Crusades, the long wars between the. Papal power and the
Hohenstaufens, have upheaved society with all the energy of
deadly mines, and strewn its wrecks through every province
of Western Christendom. Pilgrims and warriors returning
from the Holy Land have come with stories of wild wonders
and superstitions, which give to the religious enthusiasm of
the day a tinge of morbid exaltation and dreamy fear, which
impart a strange distortion to religious aspirations, and excite
a passion for self-subjection to some object beyond self. Abe-
lard has lived, and not a few solitary thinkers follow in his
bold steps. Still more unerringly than his illustrious teacher,
Arnold of Brescia has struck home to the souls of men, and in
the death to which his republican religion was condemned
has sown the dragon seeds of worse heresies. And now these
seeds spring up and flower in wonderful luxuriance. The
Troubadour, with his bitter satire aimed at the Pope, accom
panies the insurrections of Peter de Brueys and Henry the
Deacon ; and even he who had conquered Abelard and Ar
nold could gain but a transient victory. With the lapse of
fifty years, heresy gains a foothold at the very gates of Rome ;
in Northern France it is rampant, undisguised ; and Languedoc
1865.] Saint Francis of Assist. 49
is alive with Petrobrussians, Henricians, Paterines, and Catha-

rists. These, with the Waldenses, deny the Church of Rome
to be the true Church ; prayers for the dead, purgatory, and
indulgences they scout at, and in their poverty, humility, and
chastity assert themselves the only true successors of the
Apostles. Against these errors have been arrayed the cun
ning of Innocent, the sword of De Montfort, the counsels of
Dominic. Scarce a hearth in Languedoc beside which there
wept not some husbandless, hopeless woman ; scarce a village
which had not witnessed the wielding of the scourge ; scarce a
city in which fires had not been kindled, and heretics burned.
But not to sword, scourge, or brand has heresy bowed its head.
And the thought which most embittered the evening walk of
Innocent was, that blood and conquest are of no avail where
the immortal spirit is unsubdued.
A moment less opportune could hardly have been chosen
for twelve mendicants to enter the presence of the Pope, and
through their leader, a man of prayerful look and humble
bearing, crave permission to preach the virtue of humility and
poverty, and by their influence to convert the world. Inno-
ceut is not the man whose communings are to be disturbed by
crazy fanatics, and those of squalid dress and with unwashen
feet ; gladly they seek relief from his denunciations in devo
tion, and Innocent retires to his palace. That night, say
our records, he had a vision of a palm-tree, which shot up to
the heavens from between his feet, inviting the weary and the
desolate to rest in its luxuriant shade. Or some would have
it, that he dreamed of the Lateran tottering to its base, under
whose gigantic weight a single mendicant toiled and prayed.
And he who was to plant the palm-tree (so a Divine messenger
had whispered in the PoutifFs ear) was no other than the
squalid beggar who had just been spurned, and he it was who
propped the Lateran.
That it needed Divine interposition to turn the mind of In
nocent excites our wonder, since it inaugurated no innovation
upon the policy of the Roman Church. This it has often,
perhaps always, been, to silence the croaking of the sceptical
and rebellious by the painful labors of obedient enthusiasts.
Now, if ever, could an experiment of this nature be tried with
success. Innocent well knew that the other monastic orders,

the Benedictines, the Carthusians, the Cistercians, the Tem
plars, since their only object was their own isolation from the
world, could wield no effective weapons against the detested
heretics ; he knew that the preaching of these gospellers could
only be neutralized by preaching as fervent as their own, and
in the determined aspect and submissive bearing of these sup
plicants he had seen the promise of such counteraction. Such
human reasoning it was, we imagine, and no Divine admoni
tion, which induced him to recall in the morning the leader of
the vagrants ; to examine and approve his rule ; to sanction
his watchwords of poverty, lowliness, and chastity, and with
the solemnity of an Apostle bestow his blessing upon Francis
of Assisi.
How, striking deep its roots in this, an important mart of
Umbria, the Franciscan palm did sprout up, and expand her
foliage on every side in the vineyard of the Church, — how
already Francis had sported eighteen years as a wayward
youth, and lived ten more as an enthusiastic devotee, — is de
scribed in great detail by Saint Bonaventura in the Acta
Sanctorum, and by M. Daurignac, a writer of the nineteenth
century. These are both intensely fervent in their narrative,
and stifle doubt by solemnly vouching for its truth. Not a
gorgeous chamber had given birth to him whose life was to be
so closely assimilated to his Saviour's ; for Suskeu, the Bolland-
ist, has seen the wretched hovel over which was written in
golden characters, " This was the dwelling of the ox, and
stable of the ass, in which was born Francis, the mirror of the
world." Remarkable chiefly in his boyish years for his vanity,
prodigality, and love of pleasure, he yet gave such evidence of
future eminence in qualities of charity, compassion, and devo
tion to business, as to impress his father with the belief that
the names of the richest and the proudest would yet pale before
that of Bernadone. In a quarrel between the citizens of As
sisi and Perugia, Francis was taken prisoner ; on returning to
Assisi, he languished for weeks and months with a grievous
fever. By the meditations, long and deep, evoked by this con
finement, upon the frivolities of his previous life and the
dread realities of that abyss whose grasp he had just escaped,
1865.] Saint Francis of Assisi. 4—,
HA ^C^V
lis whole after-life was shaded; and when again he l^êd ;V r--7 »
upon the beautiful hills and valleys of his native town'âll W , f '..
seemed cold and dreary, and the stirrings of some gre»\btt-fc';/|^;V^"
undefined purposo were awake within his soul. \ip'\'^ î;-'* *Jf /<
From this moment date the religious thraldom of Fraîs, * ~""y/&.
his ecstatic faith, his gentle fervor, his mystic love. Thj£^>;:sy ^.>
streets of Assisi ring again with the shouts of jocund revellers.
Francis, as he gazes on the scene with melancholy thoughts, is
asked, " Why so sober, Francis ? art thou going to be mar
ried ? " and answers, " Yes, to a lady of such wealth and
beauty that the world never saw her like." " The three great
powers of earth have celebrated this union," says M. Daurig-
iiac ; but not poetry, eloquence, and art combined have added
to the sweet simplicity of Francis's words, that Poverty was his
bride, he her devoted husband, and the whole Franciscan Or
der their offspring. Now his dearest friends are the retired
caves and lonely forests of Assisi ; and while he wanders among
them, his sighs and tears are well deserving of a vision of his
Saviour fastened to the cross, — at sight of which his heart so
melted, and the memory of which gained so deep a hold upon
the fibres of his soul, that ever after he recalled it with groans
and tears. Before his loving eye it seemed to set in characters
of fire these words of the Evangelist, — " If thou wouldst be my
disciple, take up thy cross and follow me." Prompt and joy
ful was his response, as exemplified by many a charitable deed
to the pauper and the leper. " When in the bondage of sin,"
he says, " it was loathsome to me to look upon lepers ; but the
blessed Lord brought me among them, and what before seemed
bitter was changed to me into great sweetness both of body
and soul." In the hospital at Assisi, while others shuddered
at the open ulcers of these outcasts, Francis with his own
hand washed their feet and dressed their sores, and once upon
such a loathsome wound he imprinted a fervent kiss. Forth
with the man was cured. " I know not," says St. Bonaven-
tura, " which is to be more admired, the miraculous power or
the daring humility of that kiss." " The daring humility of
that kiss," it is our firm conviction.
In the suburbs of many an Italian town rose rudely-plas
tered sheds, on the edge of stagnant ponds and lazy ditches,
52 Saint Francis of Assist. [Jan .
which, receiving all the garbage of the town, sent up their fetid
odors, rank with fever and ague, into the stifled apartments of
these buildings. In such localities, the leprosy, introduced
from the East by the Crusaders, found ready victims, and did
its worst. The obscurity in which this disease was involved,
and its mysterious connection with the warfare in the East,
had combined to envelop it in a halo of sanctity and mystery.
The tendency of the age to be melted by the pathetic and
excited by the marvellous in religion, found expression in a
ritual which celebrated with touching solemnity the separa
tion of the lepers from their fellow-Christians, — a service in
which the sternest interdict is tempered with words of con
solation and of hope. Martene preserves it. " The priest,
having conducted the leper to the hospital, thus addressed
him : ' My brother, the dear poor of the good God, for hav
ing suffered much tribulation, thou wilt come to the king
dom of Paradise, where all are pure and blameless. This
separation is only of the body. Present in spirit, thou wilt
have part and portion of the prayers of the Church. Be pa
tient, and God will provide.' Then he pronounces the ter
rible legal warning. ' I charge thee, ziot to enter a church,
or a fair, or any company of people ; not to go out of doors
without the leper's garment, that all may know thee ; not to
wash thy hands or anything belonging to thee in a river or a
fountain, and not to touch anything for winch thou bargainest
until it is thy own. Neither shalt thou touch any well or the
cord unless thou hast on gloves, or drink from any vessels
other than thy own ; and if thou meetest upon the highway
any one who speaks to thee, thou shalt place thyself to leeward
before thou answerest.' Then the priest sprinkled earth from
the cemetery upon the sick man's head, saying, ' Die to the
world, live to God.' " * The generous enthusiasm and self-
denial of those who minister to the sick and dying in the fever
hospitals of Annapolis and Petersburg are worthy of eternal
honor. But theirs is bodily peril,— no more. The sick is en
nobled by the cause in which he is engaged. Not so the leper.
That he was the object of vengeance from God, of loathing
* De Antiquis Ritibus, Vol. II.

1865.] Saint Francis of Assisi. 53
from man ; that he was houseless, wifeless, childless, cast out,

excommunicated ; — by this fact it is that we can appreciate the
devoted labors of Francis in the towns and hospitals of Italy ;
this it is that will immortalize " the daring humility of that kiss."
But not as yet is Francis freed from all contact with earthly
interests. To a steady trader like his father, whose hopes of
seeing him elevated to distinction among the sons of Mammon
now began to dim, the madness and folly of his course ap
peared deserving of rebuke. Wild, emaciated, and pelted
with stones by a hooting rabble, he is summoned into the
presence of the Bishop of Assisi, that he may be compelled to
renounce all claims upon his father's estate. " I will give up
the very clothes I wear," said the enthusiast. He stripped
himself entirely naked. " Peter Bernadone was my father : I
have now but one Father, he that is in heaven." And now,
clothed in the old, coarse dress of an artisan, he went wander
ing over the beautiful Umbrian hills, singing hymns at the top
of his voice, and praising God for all his gifts, — for the sun
which shone above him, for the day and for the night, for his
mother the earth and for his sister the moon, for the flowers
beneath his feet and for the stars above his head, for the winds
which blew in his face, for the glancing water and the jocund
fire, — saluting and blessing all creatures, animate or inani
mate, as his brothers and sisters in the Lord.
But in a manner still more touching was his holy ardor to
be displayed. Hearing at the chapel dedicated to the " Queen
of Angels " the words of Luke, " Take nothing for your jour
ney, neither staves nor scrip, neither bread nor money, neither
have two coats apiece," he abandoned even his borrowed gar
ments, and in a cloak of coarsest serge, girt round him with a
simple cord, he wooed his affianced wife in every nook and
by-lane of Assisi until the consummation of their nuptials.
The poet has sung this marriage in the eleventh canto of the
Paradiso : —
" The time was not far distant from his birth,
When from his wondrous properties began
Some consolation to be felt on earth,
Since for a lady, whom another man
As lief as death had from his chamber door
5*
54 Saint Francis of Assisi. [Jan .
Excluded, into variance he ran

A young man with his father, and before
His ghostly court et coram palre made
Her his, and day by day then loved her more.
But lest too intricate my language be,
Take thou henceforward for this loving pair
In speech detailed, Francis and Poverty.
Their singleness of heart and gladsome air.
And love and rapture, and their glances kind,
To many a holy thought incentives were." *
Not a less fitting panegyric than Dante's is that of Bossuet,
and Art has offered her tribute in the form of a fresco by
Giotto, still to be seen in one of the churches of Assisi, where
Francis appears placing the wedding-ring upon the finger of
his bride, and she crowned with roses, but with a tattered
robe and bleeding feet. Worldly pleasures the most alluring
could not now swerve him from fidelity to his beloved. With
humble tones and earnest words, he commends to the charity
of all the ruins of three neighboring churches. Not rebuff or
sarcasm could allay his ardor, or even dissuade him from
■caling, with stones and mortar on his back, their rising walls,
till the sacred structures shone in renovated beauty, and the
Divine injunction was fulfilled.
Of the union of Francis and Poverty, a certain Bernard was
the first offspring. Soon another was influenced by his exam
ple, and the three together knelt before the altar of St. Mary's.
Three times in bonor of the Holy Trinity the sacred records
are opened at random, and the passages which in each instance
first catch the eye of the officiating priest are, " If ye will be
perfect, go and sell that ye have," " Take nothing for your
journey," and " He that will come after me, let him deny
himself and follow me." " This," said the man of God, " is
what I desire with my whole heart ; this must be our rule of
life." Here was the germ of the Friars Minores, an Order so
guiltless of all pretension that one of its later writers claims
that, if Abraham should say, " Pulvis et cinis sum," Francis
shall say, " Minor sum." If David, " Mendicus sum et
pauper," nay, " Vermis sum," — Francis, " Minor sum." If
Solomon, " Stultissimus sum virorum," — Francis, " Minor
* Cayley's translation.
1865.] . Saint Francis of Assisi. 55
sum." If Francis of Paula, " Nos minimi sumus," — our Fran

cis, " Minores minimis sumus." When by gradual accessions
their number had been increased to twelve, Francis gathered
his disciples round him in a lonely spot called Rivo Torto, and
thus addressed them: " My brothers, God has revealed to me
that he will diffuse our little family throughout the earth. I
have seen thousands coming to live as we do. The French
and Spaniards are coming. The English and Germans are
hastening. All nations are running to join us. Believe that
our Saviour will speak powerfully in us, though we seem
despicable and insane. Go and preach repentance for the
remission of sins, and the kingdom of God shall be your re
ward." Then, marking on the earth a figure of the cross,
whose limbs were directed to the four points of the compass,
and arranging his brethren in companies of three, he dismissed
them, with the solemn benediction so often on his lips, " Cast
your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you."
The rule, in twenty-three chapters, which Francis now drew
up, aimed at a literal fulfilment of the Gospel precepts.
Though chastity and obedience were vital principles of the
Benedictine Order, the sum and beauty of Evangelical perfec
tion could not be attained without a stringent vow to poverty.
For chastity, every brother was to beware of all intercourse
with women, and not to speak to one alone. For obedience,
the clergy of the Catholic Church were to be esteemed the
spiritual lords of the brethren, and if any of their number
swerved a hair in word or deed from the Catholic life and
faith, they should be expelled from the fraternity. Never
were they to be false to their mother, Poverty. A single gray
tunic, with a hempen cord, was to be their only covering, and
he who longed for more costly clothing should lose the vest
ment of glory in the kingdom of heaven. No brother upon
his travels should mount a horse or an ass, and " to him who
struck him upon one cheek, he should offer the other also."
The Friars could receive no money in return for any labor,
however arduous ; if a mine of gold should open beneath their
feet, it was to be shunned as " the vanity of vanities." But
alms they might humbly beg from door to door, not as
supplicants for a gratuitous favor, but as asserters of an
acknowledged right inherited from Christ himself.
56 Saint Francis of Assisi. . [Jan .
Scarcely had the finishing touch been put to the regulations,

of which the above is a brief summary, when an opportunity
was afforded their author of testing his power to meet their
requisitions. For a demon whispered to him suggestions of
luxury and sensuality. But Francis bravely repelled his cun
ning adversary, by darting from his hut, and rolling himself
in the snow upon a heap of thorns. And, lo ! from the thorns
sprinkled with his blood sprang roses of paradise, three of
which he plucked in honor of the Trinity, and offered them to
Innocent with a copy of his rule.
His return from Rome, with his rule approved, was at
tended with the ringing of bells, the chanting of choirs, gifts
of lands and convents, and the vows of enraptured devotees.
But pride was a profaneness which entered not his thought.
Of all, his was the humblest nature. " They honor God," he
cried, " in the vilest of his creatures." At the pinnacle of his
hopes, he now surveyed his future path with dread misgivings.
That ho struggled long and anxiously to decide the mighty
question, whether he should go forth and preach, or lead a
life of solitary prayer, his own words reveal. " Prayer
tends to purify the affections, and produce an increase of
moral strength. But preaching leads to a dissipation of the
thoughts upon outward things. In prayer, we discourse with
angels, and lead an angel-like. life. In preaching, we must
let ourselves down to men, think, see, discourse, and hear like
men." But one thought outweighed all the rest, — " that the
Son of God came down from heaven to preach to men the
word of salvation." Meanwhile, heavenly counsels or human
machinations have not ceased to direct the steps of Innocent.
It is revealed to him that the Friars Minores must go forth and
preach in the name of the Lord. And forth they went ; some
to spread the Gospel through Italy and Germany, some to pit
themselves against the heresiarchs of France, some to found
monasteries in Spain, some to court martyrdom in Morocco,
some to settle in London and lecture in the University of Ox
ford, some to establish convents in Ireland and Scotland, and
some in the depths of winter to Russia and Crim-Tartary.
But how like fire in the dry summer grass must all this
have crackled through the fervid, wonder-loving age ! "Fran
1865.] • Saint Francis of Assist. 57
cis's preaching," says St. Bonaventura, " went to the very

marrow of men's souls." And to the marrow of men's souls
it went because true Christianity was his constant theme.
Stripped of ritual and dogma, he sent it home in plain, homely
words and mother-speech. Like Arnold's of Brescia, and not
like Abelard's, his influence was over the hearts and actions of
men engaged in the real battle of life. These hearts, these
actions, it had been his aim to study, that to the poorest in
their poverty, the subtle in their subtlety, he might offer Chris
tianity, not as a trap for man's obedience, but the Gospel of
the poor and the oppressed. Happily freed from ecclesiastical
influence in his youth, he realized to men a Church, once
busied with dry dogmas, cold, distant, now changed into the
human, the personal, the sentimental. The earthly life of
Jesus and his human relationships were the burden of his
exhortations, and the degraded population of the large Italian
towns listened with greater readiness to lessons of patience
and endurance falling from the lips of one who was a living
example of what he taught. Unlike the secular clergy, he
prayed with those who prayed, wept with those who wept, and
did what he could to sanctify the sorrows and relieve the woe
which had left so deep a tinge upon the age. The call for
fraternity, which in this century was displaying its vitality in
so many various forms, was responded to by Francis, who sent
his humble friars, some of noble blood and education, over
unpaved roads and muddy streets, barefooted and bareheaded,
to succor the abandoned beggar, the sickly mechanic, and the
untended leper. Is it strange, that, to persons like these lat
ter, Christianity should have appeared as never before radiant
in attractiveness and beauty ?
But with what a fervent greeting must a people so poetical
as his fellow-countrymen have welcomed the unearthly music
which played round Francis, the unearthly light which shone
across his path ! That the fevered natures of the day could
not but admire the lustre of his sanctity, is illustrated by the
well-known tale of Clara, — " Clara Claris praeclara meriti,
magnae in coelo claritate gloriae, ac in terra miraculorum
sublimium, clare claret." This euphonious eulogy intro
duces us to the type of female piety ; — the " sweet-silvered
58 Saint Francis of Assist. [Jan.
dove " who built her nest in the church of St. Damiano ; who
renounced friends, wealth, all, to dedicate herself to God and
the Church ; who never showed the color of her eyes but once,
when she raised her head to receive the benediction of the
Pope ; who founded the Order of " Poor Claras," which, em
bracing queens and princesses in its limits, raised its tents
throughout all Europe.
At Rome, in 1216, Dominic and Francis met. Dominic,
thinking perhaps to find a tool as well as ally in his friend,
wished to weld their separate bodies. But Francis, keen
enough to evade the clutches of the dogmatic schoolman,
answered, " No " ; then they embraced and parted. A wood
cut, from a picture of this meeting preserved in the Spanish
gallery of the Louvre, brings it before us in all the wealth of
contrast and association, — this meeting from which they parted
to divide the world. The hard, heavy features of Dominic
fitly symbolize his rigor of intellect and polemic sternness.
The delicate, finer cut of those of Francis is suggestive of ten
der fervor and poetic warmth. His less passionate, colder
nature is typified by the sluggish eye of Dominic ; the spirit
ual, heavenward look of Francis speaks of an aspiring, strug
gling soul. The dog and fire-brand recall the combatant's
fierceness ; the penitent's meek sufferings find their symbols
in the lily and the lamb. They parted, the one with weapons
of eloquence and logic to subdue the world, the other to flood
it with waves of love ; the one the personification of the world's
haughtiness, rigidity, stiffness, the other of its humility, sus
ceptibility, gentleness ; " the one like the cherub in wisdom,
the other like the seraph in fervor."
Francis now, with his whole soul vowed again to the service
of God, set forth upon his mission, — his mission to preach the
Gospel to every creature. A love for nature was not incom
patible with his aspirations. Rather in his view did all sen
tient beings have a share in the Divine mission of Christ.
The outer world to him not only teemed with emblems, but
was instinct with the presence of the Redeemer. The lamb
which followed him was the pascal sacrifice. The very
stones he trod upon so reverently were " chief corner-stones."
Tho ox and ass he once entertained as Minor brethren ; but
above all, the dove and nightingale were his favorites. " My
dear sisters," he exclaimed to some larks, whose chattering
disturbed his preaching ; " you have talked long enough, it is
my turn now. Listen to the word of your Creator, and be
quiet." They listened. Such a congregation he addressed
at Bevagno. " My little brothers, God has clothed you with
plumage, and given you wings wherewith to fly. Without any
care of your own, he gives you lofty trees to build your nests
in, and watches over your young. Therefore give praise to
jour bountiful Creator." And the birds, so we are solemnly
assured, bowed their beaks in holy awe, or stretched out their
necks to imbibe his precepts. A- lamb, leveret, and falcon
attended his every step, and even the fishes in a lake, on the
borders of which he stood, lifted their heads above the surface
to hear his exhortations, and then disappeared at his com
mand.
But it was ever the holy ambition of Francis to crown his
labors upon earth by a glorious martyrdom for the cause of
Christ. With this in view, he arrived in Egypt at Damietta,
upon, the eve of battle, and when discord reigned in the camp
of the cross. To the man of God, thus to meet the foe in the
wantonness of passion seemed a prophecy of sure defeat, and
the rout of horse and foot, with the slaughter of six thousand,
justified his apprehensions. Long and fervently, in this hour
of rebuke, he invoked the Divine guidance ; then, rising with
a countenance radiant with joy, he marched towards the
Mohammedan camp, chanting as he went, " Though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,
for Thou art with me." On being seized by the Saracens, he
boldly declared himself sent by God to preach the Divine
Saviour and the Holy Trinity. When introduced to the Sul
tan, and invited to seat himself in his tent, " Yes," he cried,
" I will remain with you, if your people will be turned to
Christ. If they hesitate, kindle a furnace, and your priests
and I will enter it together, and the result shall show on
which side lies the truth."- At the bare thought of encounter
ing an ordeal so perilous, the boldest of the Imans started
hack in terror. " Only become a Christian," persisted Fran
cis, " and I will euter the furnace alone ; but should I be
burnt, conclude, not that my message was false, but that it

was brought you by one who was justly punished for his sins."
Stubborn as ever, but courteous still, the infidel chief dis
missed his visitor with rich presents, beseeching him always
to remember in his prayers " the Commander of the Faith
ful."
Returning to Assisi, Francis obtained permission from tho
Pope to celebrate the nativity of his Lord. A stall strewn
with hay, of which an ox and ass are the occupants, is chosen
for the scene of this episode. Before this stall, upon a certain
night, illuminated as the day by supernatural means, ho
preached the birth of the " poor King" ; and when all lan
guage failed to express the intensity of his passion, he con
tented himself with repeating, and smacking his lips after
every utterance as though tasting the sweetness of his words,
" The little babe of Bethlehem." * We hasten to add the
solemn avowal of an inquisitive disciple, that he saw reposing
on the floor of the manger a lovely babe !
And now it was meet that the Church and Rome should
acknowledge the services which had been rendered by Francis
to each respectively ; the Church, because he had flooded
Christendom with a noble army of evangelists, eager to
endure privation and suffer death for the cause of- Christ,
and Rome, because he had aided her to crush the inquiring,
fevered spirits of tho time. As lie was deploring bitterly the
sins of men before the shrine of Mary of Angels, it was prom
ised him in a revelation from his Saviour, that all who should
confess themselves to a priest in that church upon a given
day should receive a plenary remission from the guilt of all
their sins. This was the origin of the " Indulgence of the
Portiuncula," a privilege of which thousands of zealous Cath
olics, even to the present day, have joyfully availed them
selves. So great at times has been the multitude of the
mountaineers of Umbria, the peasants of Tuscany, and the
pilgrims from Spain and France with kings and princes at
their head, that tens and hundreds have perished in the press.
In 1450, upon the appointed day, thirty confessors welcomed
* Bleating the name Bethlehem, like a sheep, says Michelet.

1865 .] Saint Francis of Assisi. 61
two hundred thousand comers, thronging with cries and songs

the portals of St. Mary's, 'all eager for the moment when their
sins should be erased on earth, and their pardon sealed in
heaven.
Still more generously was the Church to requite the labors
of her devoted son, in the person of her Eternal Head. The
last years of Francis were those of a sad, thrilling ecstasy.
So fervent his aspirings, so keen the love for Christ with
which his soul was penetrated, that the society of men became
to him a burden, the wild and mournful forests of Mount
Alvernia his choice companions. All nature he called upon
for sympathy in this his grief; the rocks to soften, the lofty
trees to bow their tops, the birds of the air to sing no more.
At length the hour of the " holy sacrifice." drew nigh. On
the annual festival of St. Michael for -the year 1224, Francis
and Leoni, a member of his Order, worshipped together at a
church erected upon the summit of the mount. Three times
the Gospels were opened upon the altar, and when three times
they presented the history of the passion, it seemed clear to
the man of God that, as he had imitated the actions of his Re
deemer in life, so he was to share in the sufferings of his
death. As if in sympathy with his heavenward aspirations,
the body of the saint began suddenly to ascend. The feet as
they rose were bathed with tears by his companion from be
neath, till the figure mounted beyond the range of human
vision, and then the hushed sound of voices, the smothered
question, "Who are you, who am I?" attested the presence of
the Saviour. He was manifested to the eye of his enraptured
worshipper, nailed to the cross in the midst of six wings of a
lovely seraph, two of which arched over his head, two were
stretched for flight, two veiled the body. At the disappear
ance of the apparition a strange ardor suffused the soul of
Francis, and not less strange were its effects as visible upon
his body. For from the mystic seraph, as it hovered over him,
had darted rays like threads of light, leaving upon either hand
and either foot a black excrescence in the form of a nail, with
its head below, its point bent back above, and upon his right
side, as if pierced with a lance, a ghastly wound, from which
drops of blood trickled forth and stained his garment.
vol. lxxviii. — 5th 8. vol. xvi. no. i. 6
This stupendous miracle caps the series wrought to conform
the life of Francis to that of Christ. " As regards the credibility
of them all, the gist of some criticisms by Bauer * and Tho-
luck f may be of weight. It is Bauer's belief that all these
stories of visions of Christ vouchsafed to Francis were merely
figurative designations of the deep earnestness with which he
submerged himself in the sorrows of his Saviour. It is
Tholuck's testimony, that the earliest biographer is confused in
his account of all these miraculous visitations. From this and
other facts, he concludes that, though scars may have been
impressed upon Francis like those of Christ, it was through
his own energy of imagination, as can be shown by analogies
from anthropology.
It remains that we consider the claims of Francis to literary
eminence, and briefly trace, in art, poetry, romance, physics,
theology, religion, his influence upon the world. A small
volume, whose title appears at the head of our article, contains
all the prose and poetical writings of Francis of Assisi. The
following definition of " perfect joy " smacks of the spirit
already illustrated by several of his sayings. " If a Friar
Minor should know all tongues and sciences, if he could speak
in the language of the angels, and should know the courses of
the stars, his is not perfect joy. But if he should knock at
the gate of St. Mary's, drenched and chilled, and the porter
should say, ' Ribald, begone,' that is joy. But if he should
persevere, and the porter should pelt him with stones, and he
should bear it meekly, that is joy more enviable. But if the
porter should trample him in the snow, and lash him with a
rope, his is joy complete." " What a man is in the sight of
God," says Francis, " that he is, and no more." " I love to
read," he says, " the passion of my Lord ; if I lived to the end
of the world, I should need no other book. When I pronounce
his name, the heavens laugh, the angels exult, hell trembles,
the demons fly." Such are a few specimens of writing stamped
with life and fervor, but little more. Of his poetry, Montalem-
bert$ says, " It surpassed the efforts of all his predecessors,
all succeeding poets have written nothing equal to it ; few even
* Christliche Kirche. t Vermischte Schrifcen.
J Preface to " Ste. Elisabeth de Hongrie."
can comprehend it." If the first statement be correct, the
preceding poets of Italy are deserving of infinite commisera
tion. The second we are allowed to doubt. The third seems
less unreasonable. As the coin fresh from the mint bears the
impress of its stamp, so Francis's character is legible in his
poetry. It is but a pensive, monotonous wail, on a single
strain of melody, without order or completeness, whose burden
is love to his Redeemer, and only love.
" My heart and mouth sing alone the name of Love,
Let me die in love, O Jesus, Love, O Love,
Already I gain the port, have conquered the pinnacles of the sea,
0 Love, Jesus, O Love, life flies,
Give, give, sweet Love, thy blessed embraces,
May I then turn into Love,
Dead to myself, living to Love, and Love anew."
However musically this may ring in the vernacular, they who
were later to chant the strains of Dante and of Tasso must
surely have found a greater charm in the music of their saint's
ordinary speech, or the poetry of his daily life.
Francis was the first to sing in the language of Boccaccio,
Petrarch, Tasso ; and his religion of retribution and suffering
it is which breathes in the strains of Dante. Out of the mys
tery-plays of the Franciscans sprang the modern drama, and
with the Friars came the first systematic attention to medicine.
Prominent names which deck their order are, in romance,
Raymond Lull and John of Parma ; in experimental philoso
phy, Roger Bacon. Robert Grostete, Alexander of Hales, Wil
liam of Ocham, Dun Scotus, Burley, and Bonaventura are
some of the schoolmen, from whose ranks stepped forth the
most popular preachers, and, if the great asserters of Papal
authority, so also the precursors of the Reformation. And the
history of the Franciscan Order, viewed in whatever form, —
the artistic, as of Guido ; the poetical, as of Dante ; the roman
tic, as of Raymond Lull ; the scholastic, as of Dun Scotus ; or
that of the founder of experimental philosophy, as Roger Ba
con, — must be regarded as the link uniting mediaeval with
modern times, the richest development of the mind of the for
mer, the preparation for the latter.
His life of toil and sorrow lived, at the setting of an autum
64 Under the Ban. [Jan.
nal sun in the year 1226 they laid him, at his own request,
upon the naked ground. For each and all he had a kindly
look and parting word; till the requiem for the' dying ceased^
and his companions bent to catch his broken whisper, " Wel
come, sister Death." This was his broken whisper, these the
dying words of Francis of Assisi.
Art. IV. — UNDER THE BAN.
Under the Ban. (Le Maudit.) A Tale of the Nineteenth Century.

Translated from the French of M. l'Abb£ * * *. New York :
Harper and Brothers. 1864.
The Tinker-prophet, dreaming for immortality in Bedford

jail, speaks of what he beheld just at the end of " the Valley
of the Shadow of Death " in these words : —
" Now I saw in my dream, that at the end of this valley lay blood,
bones, ashes, and mangled bodies of men, even of pilgrims that had gone
this way formerly ; and while I was musing what should be the reason,
I espied a little before me a cave, where two giants, Pope and Pagan,
dwelt in old time ; by whose power and tyranny the men whose bones,
blood, ashes, &c. lay there, were cruelly put to death. But by this
place Christian went without much danger, whereat I somewhat won
dered f but I have learnt since that Pagan has been dead many a day ;
and as for the other, though he be yet alive, he is, by reason of age,
and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger
days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints, that he can now do little
more than sit in his cave's mouth, grinning at pilgrims as they go by,
and biting his nails because he cannot come at them."
John Bunyan puts Pagan and Pope in the same category,
— for practical purposes, well enough, and few will feel disposed
to dispute the classification. For purposes of philosophy and
history, however, a discrimination is necessary, and that dis
crimination will not a little illustrate the 'wisdom and good
ness of Him who has kept the advancement and recovery of
the human race steadily in view ever since the world began,
and has made even its " indirections " and errors to serve His
1865.] Under the Ban. 65
purpose well. This will farther appear. Meanwhile, it is re
markable what tenacity of life old giant Pope discovers. Devout
Bunyan wrote his dream two hundred years ago, and even
then the giant had grown so crazy and stiff that he could only
sit in his cave's mouth and grin. If the dreamer had been
asked how long this enemy of pilgrims might be expected to
survive, it is odds that he would not have post-dated his death
till now. But he is alive yet, and when we consider him,
seems little nearer his end than he was then. Bunyan's descrip
tion is wonderfully pat to-day. The giant cannot walk much,
he cannot reach far, but his clutch, when it closes upon what is
within his reach, is about as tight as ever. Goa and Spain have,
indeed, no Inquisition ; emperors no longer crawl painfully,
bare-kneed, up St. Peter's steps ; the thunders of excommu
nication no more frighten kingdoms ; an obsequious clergy
have not still the power to drag the noblest of a Christian
king's subjects from the foot of their master's throne, at a Pon
tiff's bidding. But in Rome itself the power of Rome is as
imperious and relentless as ever. The superior of the " Holy
Office " is substantially a co-ordinate Pope ; and if the world
hears no longer of the auto da f6, the diabolical thirst for
blood that once revelled in the flames and the robe and cap of
demons drinks a safer and as deep a draught in the dungeons,
temporary but .strong, that have taken the place of the half-
ruined prisons which, since the revolution of 1848, were fitted
up as barracks for the French troops. The Jesuits are cun
ning; they yielded to that storm, and let the senseless rabble
have its way with the shell, — the kernel they kept and carried
a few squares farther.
" There are few," says our Abbe, " who are not familiar with the
fearful details that were made known when the cells of the Inquisition
were penetrated and laid bare, in 1848. Skeletons chained up against
the walls ; others lying on the floor ; bodies buried up to the shoulders
in quicklime, — the most horrible punishment of all ; rooms full of in
struments of torture ; cells in the drains, where wretched victims, half
smothered in mud and pollution, used to be kept alive in their misery
by a daily dole of bread ; with an endless series of other atrocities no
less appalling." (And this was only sixteen years ago.) " The shriv-
elled-up corpses, the instruments of torture, the human mould in the
6«
underground passages, and that court, a hundred metres long, where
victims were secretly burned, after public exhibitions of the kind had
become no longer safe, — we should like to see all this kept up, as a
sort of gloomy museum, open to public inspection, where men may learn
what religious bigotry did in days gone by, and what it may again
do, at any moment, should a bigoted monk mount the pontifical throne.
Tourists who go the rounds of Roman curiosities really ought
to pay a visit to the French barracks behindHhe circular colonnade, and
ask to see the dungeons. Faugh ! they smell of dead bodies still."
Yet what an impertinence upon the face of the earth in this

latter day the mere Papal system is ! It does not matter that
Pio Nono is an apostolic Pope, or that he keeps the Jesuits a
little under. This is well, as far as it goes ; but it is clear
that the well-minded Pontiff is even crazier in the joints than
the old system which he represents, and that in the nature of
things his death will be the signal for a bigot's elevation to his
office. Not the Jesuits and the Inquisition, but the system
that sustained them is effete and impertinent. It hangs upon
the living age, like the dead body which old Roman ingenuity
chained to the loathing criminal, — liker, rather, to the old
man of the sea, who, in Oriental fable, clung to the sailor's
back, and could not be shaken off. Not the abuses of the
hierarchy, but the priesthood itself, and the vicegerent at the
head, are intolerable, and have no place above ground.
And truly,, the people of Europe were ready, twenty — fifty
years ago, to shake them off and let them die, as die they
would when let alone. Your priest is an animal that subsists
on pabulum; — deny him, and his vocation is gone; cease to
pamper him, and his paunch shrinks, and he becomes like an
other man ; refuse to spin for him, and his scarlet robe drops
off in rags.
But the startling thought for us who live three thousand
miles from Rome, in a land dedicated to religious as well as
civil liberty, is, that the old despotic allies of the Pope are
serving their common cause by keeping him alive till he gets
a firm foothold among ourselves. If Cromwell could have
crushed the Scarlet woman, as he had so good a will to do, —
if the first Napoleon had overturned her throne, as he could
have done, — or even if his nephew had made his Solferino the
I860.] Under the Ban. 67
Waterloo of the Papacy, — America might have heen saved
from its mummeries forever. There was not coherency enough
in the system of Romanism to keep it together in the Cisatlan
tic sphere, without the old-world centre to which to refer the
doubting, — a centre of veneration and authority.
Rome has wrought well with despotism all her days. Of all
the means that monarchs used to keep the people under, priest
craft was most potent. The fiction of being themselves sub
servient to the spiritual power was a web that kings entangled
their subjects in so completely, that the royal tribute exacted
by the Pope was willingly paid. Nor is it necessary to sup
pose that the kings were all or often insincere. They were
ignorant and superstitious themselves. Ambition, greed, and
tyranny are germane enough to these, and yielded an earnest
ness of faith to the hierarch that redoubled their influence
over the more ignorant people.
Rome, then, has served despotism faithfully ; and now that
she is ready to die of old age, despotism will reciprocate her
good offices long enough to give her heirs a standing in a vir
gin land. Indeed, she can serve her old ally yet, even in
her decrepitude. Napoleon the First could not discard, though
he despised her, — his crown sat firmer, he thought, from the
Pontiff's hand. Napoleon the Third, though, if he had the
stuff of a world's champion and deliverer in him, he is power
ful enough to sweep the abomination away and rid the world
of it forever, has even a European policy in keeping the
cracked concern together. He has no thought of freeing
France, but of making her an instrument of glory, and per
petuating a line as long as Capet ; and his mercurial people —
long ago sceptical of every religious faith — are characteristi
cally and sufficiently amused with the mummeries of their
Church establishment, — of which, for them, Eugdnie, bigoted
empress at once of fashion and religion, is the centre. French
men have no faith in Romanism, but they live upon grimace,
and this form is a universal cloak. Besides, it flatters them
by patronizing the old, clawless lion of the Quirinal.
This is the danger to our own country,— Napoleon holds up
Rome long enough to let the spirit of Rome get a hold .here.
This could never have been done without the ignorant Irish
element, and even that could not have been available under the
fast-melting influences of liberty and intelligence, without the
prestige of the time-honored centre in Italy. Now, it will make
no difference as to human rights spiritually trampled on, if,
when the spirit of Rome is established among us, the name of
Rome disappears. It is against this that we ought to be on
our guard, and we cannot be too vigilantly aware of it. It is,
as at first said, the essential spirit, life, and fact of the thing
called Romanism, that is worn out and to be cast away, —
not the forms and fardels of it, merely ridiculous as they are.
This suggests the main criticism upon the volume before us, —
a really valuable and impressive book, but, after all, insuf
ficient. It is valuable, as showing the remaining vitality
of the abominable system it exposes ; impressive, as indicat
ing the freedom of thought that stirs in its European member
ship ; but insufficient, because that very freedom of thought,
and even of expression, — of which the work itself is a wit
ness, — is too much hampered with veneration to be radically
corrective. How strange it is that such thinkers as this brave,
nameless Abbd do not see that nothing can be done for the
old system but to give the coup de grace, bury it out of sight,
and follow, without misgiving, the large leadings of a Prov
idence that has clearly done with such instrumentalities !
Luther hiiriself demonstrated this, nearly four hundred years
ago, and yet fell into the same error, — keeping back the
true Reformation by three centuries. Where might not the
world have been, in its emancipation from priestcraft, if the
great German monk, instead of trying to reform the depraved
Church, had dropped it altogether, and thrown himself upon
God and the people ? It may be, indeed, that he would not
have been visibly sustained. His body might have fed the
flames, as that of Wicliffe and of Huss, one hundred years
before ; but the phoenix of truth would have risen from his
ashes, sooner and more sublimely, and been careering now
over a brighter world.
We are not for a moment to think that the system of re
ligious belief known as Roman Catholic has existed so long,
and prevailed so extensively, in spite of the purpose and prov
idence of God. By no means, but rather in pursuance of
I860.] Under the Ban. 69
both. It is impossible, perhaps, to explicate that purpose

in the career of the Roman Church ; but it involves an ab
surdity to suspect that his purpose could be evaded, or even
postponed, by that or any church. It is equally unphilo-
sophical, on the other hand, to say that God might have
shortened his route, and saved us oceans of storms, wastes
of sin and trouble, and creeping millennia of blunders: God
indeed moves upon humanity, but he influences it only as
a great system of free-agency is influenced, — through the
laws of its organization. So the revolutions that tend up
ward seem slow to us, who look at one thing at a time, and
that time only the present. How the seed, divinely planted,
yearns in its narrow box of earth, — short behind, shorter
before, — cut off in its spring, when the whole year of its
earthly life, even to the outer limit of old age, is too little to
lap the simplest circle of the Immortal Father's purposes!
But so it is, and we can only grope a hand's breadth about us.
History itself is a glowworm's light in our path ; we, delving
moles. ,
If we take leave of speculations, however, and, taking
things as they are, look over the expanse of time as well as
we can, we may see a great possibility of good in the past
history of the Romish Church, and find, indeed, materials for
a theory of progress which makes its existence and office as
necessary as the Reformation which began to displace it. The
same course will lead us to the conclusion that it is now super
annuated, and even worse, dead and rotten, — an offence to the
nostril, and a cause of hindrance and disease.
We need not be reminded of the bigotry and cruelty
through which Jesus and his Apostles made their early way,
or of the subsequent triumph of the Christian faith, which,
deserting the primitive simplicity, seated itself upon the
throne of the Caesars. Until that unhappy prosperity choked
the word, (the greatest illustration of the Founder's parable
that the world ever knew,) all had been purificative. But
then the heart of religion began to be burdened by its spoils,
and it was not long before it seemed to lose its panting life
under the accumulation, and fell into asphyxia. In that life
less state it lay for hundreds of years, keeping up the forms,
that without the life became at length grievous and cruel

burdens, — forms that were made the pretence of a system of
priestly oppression such as had never been imposed upon the
world, and can never be again.
In the Almighty purpose, the germ of truth was not lost in
the dark ages of Christianity, any more than it was in those of
Judaism. Wicliffe caught sight of it, Huss died for it, Luther
— more happy — proclaimed it. It was' not, however, to be
expected that the Roman perversion would yield as easily as
the Jewish. It really " held the truth," though " in un
righteousness," and had the advantage of appealing to the
apostleship. It claimed the faith of the world on the ground
of an ancient and inalienable obligation. It spoke of " the lib
erty of the Gospel," " the liberty wherewith Christ maketh men
free," — and the world hesitated ; for, after all, this is what
men need, and what they desire, and the question was, What
if the assumed apostolic succession should be, after all, the
only depositary of the grace ? So little and yet so much has
the world gained, — so little as to underrate the largeness
of Christ, so much as to understand its need and cling to
him.
For every practical purpose, it will be perceived, we identify
the Episcopal with the Romish Church. Every rigid process
of thought will justify this identification. The two are one
except in circumstances; for the Reformation was not radical,
it was superficial, and consequently tends to be retrogressive.
There is no middle ground between individual freedom in
Christ, and church authority in his name. If we give up the
first, we shall not stop short of the spirit — however we may
amuse ourselves with denominational terms — of Rome, or, to
speak more accurately, of Constantinople. For Rome is the
Protestant of Greece, as Luther is of Rome.
Not only has the germ of truth been saved from the dark
ages, it has come to these times with advancing growth. If it
were not so, the prospect would be discouraging, and the
evidence of the co-operative grace of God small indeed. We
have certainly passed great progressive eras in the history of
our race, and it only remains that we take the lesson, and,
emerging from the shell of things, cast the rind behind us.
As it is, we see church authority holding on the race with
a grasp that, if we did not discern its hopelessness in its very
tenacity, we might well despair of disenthralment. This brings
lis again to our out-spoken Abbd and his book.
Le JMaudit (of which a good translation lies before us, hap
pily entitled " Under the Ban ") is a notable book. The anony
mous author has been hunted high and low, in France, by the
ecclesiastics, — hitherto unsuccessfully. Whether he is a
priest or not, we cannot certainly know ; but his book contains
strong evidences of the truth of the author's assertion. He is
clearly au fait with his topic, and spares nothing. The story
is simple enough, and evinces a degree of sympathy with the
natural relations of humanity which no ecclesiastic of an ear
lier age could have felt. There is nothing essentially monkish
in his social views. One of his priests, cutting loose from the
Church, marries his housekeeper ; and though the author,
only partly enfranchised from lifelong prejudices, evidently
thinks celibacy a somewhat higher and even measurably oblig
atory form of life, he abstains from animadversion, and even
puts strong arguments in the mouth of the recusant.
The story mainly concerns the Abbe- Julio, a young priest
who passed from the school of the Jesuits to that of St. Sul-
pice, and who with an ardent devotion to the Church com
bined a clear head, a tender conscience, and a fear of God
rather than man. The character of this noble youth is evi
dently the beau idtal of the author, who in his Preface r©r
marks, that " he can conscientiously declare that every line of
his pages is penetrated with a profound veneration for what
ever is venerable, though in the interests of religion itself he
has suffered no false charity to deter him from denouncing
those shameful proceedings by which it has been compromised
and disgraced." As the chief of " whatever is venerable "
stands the Romish Church, of the apostolic authority of which
the author seems fully persuaded. At our stand-point, we can
discern a confusion of ideas in his mind as to what religion
is. The author confounds it yet with the notion of a visible
and authoritative Church, and that Church, of course, the
Romish. Perhaps we expect too much of any priest, however
enlightened, especially in Europe, if we require him to do more
than expose the errors of that organization which he saw as
the outer enclosure and exponent of religion, before he thought
what the inner and spiritual essence was. It is hard to disen
gage the quiddity of a thing from the . medium through which
we get our first crude notions of it. Our intuitive ideas pale
upon the tablets of our souls before the material impressions
which, as soon as we perceive, think, and have contact with
outer objects and minds, begin to overlay the receptive sur
faces with their heavy characters. It is, therefore, generally
the office of some mind educated in another school to correct
the prejudices of ours, — though, by reason of his own, in
other ways imbibed, he will do it partially and imperfectly,
after all.
It is really affecting, therefore, to see the loyalty with which
the Abbe- Julio clings to the Church, though persecuted by it
out of measure. Before he became a priest, the ever-watchful
Jesuits had their eyes on him, and, learning that he had pene
trated their sophistries, tried to prevent his advancement.
There were three of his family, a rich aunt, his sister Louise,
and himself. The first was completely under the influence of
the Jesuits, who prevailed upon her to devise to a creature of
their Order her entire fortune, the fact being carefully con
cealed from the nephew and niece, who supposed themselves
her heirs. Julio, in spite of the Jesuits, was appointed by his
diocesan — a man of unusual clearness and purity — his pri
vate secretary ; but the amiable prelate dying suddenly, he
lost the position. The Bishop's successor feared the Jesuits,
and allowed himself to be easily prejudiced against Julio,
whose bold preaching and fearless pen had already marked
him as a Reformer. He was banished by the new Bishop to a
little church on the Pyrenees, where, while pursuing a godly
and useful life, patiently laboring for his charge, he was perse
cuted by every petty malice of his priestly enemies. While he
was here, his aunt died, and he first learned that the Jesuits
had wheedled her out of her fortune. He immediately deter
mined, by the aid and counsel of his friend Verdelon, a law
yer, and lover of Louise, to prosecute the Jesuits. His law-
suit was unsuccessful in the lower courts, and an appeal was
instituted, pending which the Jesuits employed an old family
friend of the deceased aunt to work upon the fears of Louise

for her brother's reputation and safety. This plot was suc
cessful to such a degree, that she consented to the dictation
of a letter to her brother, in which she declared her conviction
that the lawsuit was unjust, and refused to see him again
unless he withdrew it. She then placed herself in the hands
of her aunt's friend, who delivered her to the Jesuits, who
sent her secretly to Italy. Julio, though in great distress,
continued his legal appeal, in which he was finally beaten ;
and Verdelon, finding that the fortune of Louise was gone,
deserted her, and married another. Julio, having obtained
leave of absence from his diocesan, who was induced by a re
markable circumstance to forego for a time his persecutions,
started for Italy in search of his sister, who he suspected had
been abducted. After many adventures, he found her in a
convent, and by the aid of a Garibaldian, an old smuggler,
rescued her by force. As he was conveying her to the coast,
the Papal sbirri attacked his party, and, securing him, took
him to Rome, where he was imprisoned in the " Holy Office."
His sister, however, escaped to France, where she made in
terest with the Emperor to procure her brother's release. The
usual gentle-voiced diplomacy ensued, and Julio would have
rotted in his dungeon, but for an old friend, once a priest,
bound to him by a peculiar gratitude ; who went to Rome,
and by the old smuggler's aid, and judicious handling of
money, got him out of prison. Then Julio went to Paris,
where, under a tacit suspension of his particular diocesan
relation, he wrote and preached, by permission of the Arch
bishop. But the Jesuits soon hunted him from this position,
and had him returned to his old diocese, whence he was again
banished to a hamlet in the country, and again filled up his
days with gentle charities, unfailingly loyal to his priestly
vows and the Church, but still hammering away at its abuses.
Of course, he was a living martyr. His sister now lived with
him, and began to show symptoms of consumption. As she was
dying before his eyes, he found out that she was not his sis
ter, and at the same time discovered in his heart a tenderness
for her which the fraternal, relation could not satisfy. But he
maintained his celibacy, and she died without knowing him as
VOL. LXXVIII. — 5th 8. VOL. XVI. NO. I. 7
other than her brother. Then his own health began to fail,
and the persecutions of the Jesuits were redoubled. Finally,
he ended his days in a poorhouse, and would have been denied
the last offices of the Church, which, strangely to us, he still
valued, if a friend, touched by his patience and piety, had not
confessed and absolved him, in defiance of ecclesiastical au
thority.
Such is the web of the story upon which is woven the most
remarkable exposure of Romish abominations that was ever
made. The giant is old and crazy in his joints ; but his brain
is as active as ever, and his malevolence even more unrelent
ing. His weapons, indeed, are changed. He has not fire,
fagot, and instrument of torture, — except at Rome ; but he
has influences that in civil life and the social sphere are as
efficient to harass and destroy his victims as the other. There
is even a refinement of cruelty that he can practise, — pecu
liarly, congenial to the Jesuitical disposition, because it calls for
the exercise of perseverance, plotting, and skill, and is sure in
the end. There is a cat-like fascination in spinning thread
after thread of an inextricable web around a palpitating vic
tim, which is the very refinement of hypocrisy and cruelty, and
which belongs to a day when men refuse to submit to thumb
screws and the rack, but must be wrought upon by more sub
tile tormentings. To show how extensive are the ramifica
tions of these agencies, we take the following curious passage
from the book before us.
" Failing stakes and blocks, however, at the present day, there is a first-
rate engine of destruction, easily worked, whose name is Calumny, — as
Julio soon discovered on his arrival at Paris. Efforts were made on all
sides to destroy his reputation, to involve him in perplexities, to com
promise him hopelessly, and generally to render his name a by-word in
the narrow religious clique likely to be affected by such proceedings.
Sacristans, beadles, choristers, bell-ringers, holy-ware pedlers, little book
stall keepers, statuaries, and other artists engaged in the manufac
ture of rosaries and miraculous medals, composed this illustrious com
munity. Denis was among them with a train-band, asserting that Ju
lio had apostatized, and even become a sceptic ; that he had gone to
Italy on a visit to the excommunicated Passaglia,and that the two heretics
were putting their heads together to construct a new religion, specially
adapted to the views of Democrats and Red Republicans ; while in the
very hottest circles of wild fanaticism the rumor grew to the extent
, that Julio and Passaglia had all but completed their arrangements for
putting the latter in the chair of St. Peter, and Garibaldi on the throne
of France.
" Nor did they let Louise alone. They made the most of her escape
from the convent and her friendship for Loubere, declaring that she
was a professed nun who had flung off the veil. The society selected
for these latter rumors consisted mainly of female artisans, chamber
maids, fruit-sellers, and portresses.
" Such calumnies, when once suffered to alight in the public mind,
take deep root, and become almost ineradicable, — distilling their venom
at all times and in all directions. To destroy the reputation of a man
in a distinguished position, the most direct course is to prejudice the low
est orders against him in the first instance. The tide seethes and surges
upward, covering range after range in the social pyramid with its pol
luted waters, till it reaches the highest elevation, and engulfs the
whole."
Beginning thus at the bottom, the course of this resistless
uprising of calumny is traced in a masterly manner. To
expose this refinement of the art of persecution, Le Maudit
has been written, and the work is amply done. How the
author could fail to see what a case he has made out against a
church organization under which such a system as that of
Jesuitry is possible, it is amazing to consider. And it is espe
cially strange, when he admits that the probable election of a
Jesuit by the College of Cardinals upon the death of Pio Nono
will re-establish and confirm the worst features of the system
which that amiable but insufficient Pope is supposed to have
tried to curb.
The author of Le Maudit goes as far as this, — he supposes
all the abuses of the Papacy to result from the union of the
temporal and spiritual powers, and the remedy to be the sev
erance of the two.
"Pius IX.," he says, "is king only by the grace of Napoleon's
legions, and illustrates in his own person the absurdity of the notion
that the spiritual power cannot exist without the temporal, — a notion
which, though it is not asserted as a dogma by the cardinals and bish
ops, is so put forth as that the opposite creed is condemned as heresy.
Yet here we have had a Pope for fourteen years exercising his full spir
itual rights, decreeing doctrines, issuing encyclical letters ; yet main
tained in his political position all the while by an army of occupation,
on whose good pleasure his honorary kingship depends ; this vassalage,
however, in no way impairing his other rule. So the experiment has
been tried ; and should Victor Emmanuel once come to the Quirinal, no
matter what the form of government at Borne, the spiritual ascendency
of the tope would remain the same."
Influenced by the same fallacy, our author attempts the fol

lowing discrimination between the religion of the individual
Jesuit and the obligations of his Order.
" To any one who has not studied the monkish system, there are cer
tain considerations which appear monstrous, but which are capable,
nevertheless, of most easy explanation. To do evil deliberately, to
pursue with implacable animosity, to calumniate in every possible way a
known foe, — all this seems utterly opposed to the teaching of the Gos
pel, which urges the forgiveness of injuries and love of enemies
Such being the case, the question naturally arises, In what possible way
could men, devoted avowedly to self-mortification and strivings after
personal sanctity, justify themselves in a deadly persecution of a gentle
and blameless man, as though he had been a monster of iniquity and
an enemy of God and man ? Had Julio, instead of being what he
was, been an assassin,a Dumolard, — had he met one of these very Jesuits
in the dark of the evening in some out-of-the-way place and stabbed him
to the heart, — the victim would have died forgiving him, and prayed
for his murderer's soul with his latest breath And yet the expla
nation is very simple The morik pardons his enemy because that
enemy's attack has been directed upon himself. It is a private ques
tion, and he deals with it according to the Gospel law of love as applied
to his individual relations to his brethren. Be it added, in praise of
his piety, that his pardon is genuine. But the man who is condemned
by the Inquisition is regarded as the enemy of God, and the monk in
trusts himself with the high function of avenging the Divine honor.
He regards himself as being in the world for that purpose only. And
the more sceptical society becomes, the more conscious the monk is
compelled to be of the lessening influence of his rites and observances
on the society in the centre of which he practises them, the more furi
ously does he alight on the head of any offender whom he may regard
as a ringleader in the general disaffection."
The inference is, that if the piety of the Jesuits could be

disconnected from their organization, and have individual
scope, it would be just the thing for a sinful and needy world.
If the Pope and Conclave could be induced to relinquish their
temporalities, they would justly retain the spiritual dominancy
of Christendom. This is the very fallacy against which the
lessons of eighteen centuries unite to warn us. Rome and the
Jesuits know that, the moment they are stripped of their tem
poralities, they fall. We may know — whoever will think or
reason may know — that the inevitable tendency of an author
itative Church is to make to itself an accretion of temporal in
fluences in some form, about which its authority may hang,
and from which it may issue. If the desire and prayer of our
author is granted, and Rome is stripped of temporal sovereignty,
the scales will fall from his eyes in that self-same day ; for he
will hear the rushing of the mill-stone, and witness the sinking
beyond any plummet's sound of that entire system of spiritual
tyranny, which, bolstered by temporal power, has prevailed for
fifteen centuries, under the pretence of mediation, to keep the
Human from that contact with the Divine which the Messiah
made possible. The Messiah, long waited for by the Jews,
was rejected by them when he came ; turning to the Gentiles,
he was accepted, but almost immediately appropriated by a
hierarchy, and forbidden to the sympathy of a yearning, ex
pectant world. Jesus Christ disappointed the national expec
tation of Israel ; the longing of the people was not for a spirit
ual redemption, but for a restoration of temporal power and
glory, — their incurable pride being the natural result of the
great experiment of an aristocratic theocracy. But the Gen
tile world that took him up, being made of the same human
materials, tended the same way, and, in the attempt to force the
Messiah into a temporal throne and the patronship of earthly
pride and ambition, lost the essential spirit that could save it,
and kept instead a bedizened image that they called Christ, and
that they persuaded men to worship. So the Jew rejected
Jesus, and he eluded the Greek, and the world entered upon
the second test or experiment, which was to supplement the
first, and prepare humanity for the true dispensation of light
and progress.
Yes ! the time has come at last of which the Son of Man
spake to the woman at the well, in which we shall " neither in
7*
78 Tlie Last Phase of Atheism. [Jan.
this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father."

The period of symbols and sacrifices is past ; the era of eccle
siastical authority and priestly tyranny is accomplished ; the
day" of individual liberty, in Christ, is dawning. No man's
conscience need be fettered ; no timorous soul need wait upon
the authority of a self-constituted Church. The Bible is in
every man's hand ; the Saviour has lived, died, and lives for
ever, for all who will receive him. It rests with ourselves
whether the clear day of grace and salvation shall still be
darkened, or the mists be cleared away. The Sun of right
eousness shines full and clear, — the obstructions to his beams
are the effluvia of the soil that remains uncultivated under
our feet. What hinders the co-operative work that shall real
ize the prophecy of Hebrew David, when he sang that charm
ing strain, —
" Mercy and Truth are met together ;
Righteousness and Peace have kissed each other.
Trutf> shall spring out of the earth ;
And Righteousness shall look down from' Heaven."
Art. V. — THE LAST PHASE OF ATHEISM.
Le Bouddha et sa Religion. Par J. B. St. Hilaire. Paris. 1860.
The Renaissance Orientate, as it has been termed, is a

strange phase of contemporary thought. In Eugene Burnouf,
France may claim, perhaps, to have produced the ablest Ori
entalist of the day ; but it is in Arthur Schopenhauer that the
philosophy of the East has found its fullest recognition in Eu
rope. According to the philologers of Berlin, also, it is from
India tbat the last word of wisdom is to come to us, not, like
Christianity, corrupted on its way, but fresh with the vigorous
thought and the profounder intuitions of the earliest ages and
the wisest men.
M. Foucher de Careil, indeed, cannot express his surprise at
the progress of Oriental studies in Germany. The philologers
seemed to him, during a recent visit at Berlin, to have de
1865.] The Last Phase of Atheism. 79
throned the philosophers. Around the tea-tables of Albrecht

Weber and of Kuhn were assembled daily both Sanscrit and
Semitic scholars to discuss the doctrines of Nirvana or Dyana,
together with the most delicate questions in morals and phi
losophy. He found himself at once, as it were, among the
catechumens of Buddha. " Scratch a German," said a clever
diplomate to him, his neighbor on one occasion, " and you will
find an ancient follower of Buddha, — a sincere believer in
transmigrations and anterior existences. The Germans of the
Spree and the Hindoos of the Ganges seem to have had a
common origin, and upon that fact their men of letters found
pretensions which recall the pride of caste. The Indo-Ger-
manic race of which they claim to be the direct heirs, is the
representative to them of all grand speculation and poetry and
art." That the German nation, however, sees in the alliance
of Kant and Buddha the germ of the progress of the world, is
of course an exaggeration ; but that there exists to-day, not
merely in Germany, although there it has received its pro-
foundest development, but among the intellectual classes of
France and England as well, a school of philosophy founded
upon the deplorable doctrine of Evil, can admit of no doubt
whatever.
Liken ist Leiden, says Schopenhauer. Vivre c'est attendre,
says Lamartine. We do not ascend, if slowly yet always,
towards love and intelligence ; we descend, suddenly and at
once, into death and nothingness. Brahminism is better than
Christianity, because pessimism is truer than optimism. The
only morality of life, — it is the recognition of evil. The only
religion, — it is the worship of grief. Talk not of progress, of
human perfectibility. The triumph of democracy, — it is
barbarism. The French Revolution, — it was cannibalism.
Such are the doctrines which, like the poisoned zephyrs that
were thought to waft the plague from land to land, are now
exhaling the perfume of death upon many of the ablest minds
of the age. There is a cholera for the soul, says a French
critic, as well as for the body. But the philosophy of which
the negation of happiness is the supreme doctrine, in finding
its fullest exposition, as it has done in Schopenhauer, seems
to us to be on the way to its final condemnation, to its inevita
80 The Last Phase of Atheism. [Jan.
ble expulsion from the minds of men. In a certain sense it

may be true that man is a sinner by the sad inheritance of his
race, even before being so in his own experience ; and it is
quite easy to understand how Schopenhauer, misled by the
manner in which the consciousness of sin has been intensified
in the speculations of Protestant theologians and the practices
of Catholic superstition, should have declared that it was its
pessimistic principles alone which made Christianity superior
both to Judaism and Paganism. But it would be difficult to
prove that the strongest and most durable religious societies
have been founded upon a basis of pessimism and the idea of
sin, or that contempt for itself has been the conservative prin
ciple of mankind.
Yet Schopenhauer, with his bitter misanthropy and his
fierce despair, was not an accident in the West. He did but
give expression, unhesitating and exhaustive, to that singu
lar discontent which in the midst of a material age is always
sure to find its way to the surface as a protest against the
optimism of indulgence, while it justifies itself by philosophy
against the established religion, which in ceasing to be an
element of life has become an encumbrance to thought.
Thus it is the evil of the times that the doctrines which are
the foundation of Buddhism make up in great part the creed
of that unhappy class, headed by a handful of German philolo-
gers, which is ready to deny what it cannot explain, and eager
to insist upon theories before it has half mastered the facts, —
which, upon evidence as limited in extent as it is doubtful in
character, substitutes for the immortality of the soul the im
mortality of matter, or dethrones God in order to prove that
man is the only being in whom the infinite is first conscious of
itself. Sometimes it is in the name of science, sometimes in
that of history or metaphysics, that these theories assert their
existence ; but in all of them will be found at last some trace
of those fearful doctrines which took definite shape so many
centuries ago in the Buddhism of India, and which, encouraged
as they are by certain tendencies of the human mind, will not
disappear till a thorough display of their consequences shall
have brought out into its brightest light the necessity not less
than the holiness of the faith they deny, — till history has
ceased to be, as Schopenhauer declared, the long and troubled

dream of humanity, but has fulfilled the profounder affirmation
of Hegel by becoming to society what reason is to the indi
vidual.
It is a favorite defence, however, of every new system of
philosophy, to exhibit a confirmation of it in the experience of
mankind. And it was for the purpose of finding this conse
cration that Schopenhauer resorted to the ancient teachings of
India. The audacity of its despair fascinated his gloomy mind.
The Vedas became his Bible. Our age, in his opinion, was
destined to receive from Sanscrit literature an influence equal
to that which the sixteenth century received from the Greek.
In nothing, indeed, was the infatuation into which his long
course of solitary and cynic thought had plunged him so evi
dent as in this blind faith "in the Renaissance of the East. It
was in an age of intense intellectual activity that the Greek
literature was first born into the world, and its second birth
was possible only under the same conditions. It was not till
the torpor of the Middle Age had been broken up, till the new
time, with its fresh energy and its grand enthusiasm, had
stirred the souls of men, that Greece reappeared in Italy, and
the civilization of Europe, blossoming in the humanities and
in art, was established upon a durable basis. But the litera
ture of the East, embodying its religion we know not for how
many centuries in that silent, changeless life which is itself as
the shadow of death, — what has it to show as the fruit of its
transcendent speculation and its subtile analysis, but the spec
tacle of India helpless in the grasp of a dozen British regi
ments, or of China drunk with opium ?
But the singular phase of thought of which Schopenhauer
and the philologers of Berlin are now the representatives,
cannot be understood without a knowledge of the Oriental
doctrines they reproduce ; and from the briefest sketch of
these it cannot but be obvious how the last phase of atheism
was also the first phase.
The distinctive characteristic of the East is that sublime
ardor of the soul which nothing but the infinite can satisfy.
Brahma, the active principle of the universe, is not more mind
than matter, not more life and activity than immobility and
slumber : it is the universe itself, from which everything pro

ceeds, and to which everything returns. And this alternation
of expansion and contraction, of light and darkness, of activity
and repose, is what we call creation and dissolution, life and
death. After having created the world and me, says Manou,
he whose power is incomprehensible was absorbed in the
supreme soul, and creation was displaced by dissolution.
When he wakes again, the world renews its life. And thus,
by alternate sleeping and waking, the eternal Being gives life
or death to all this assemblage of earthly things.
In such a religion, of course, individual liberty is annihi
lated. Types, not persons, remain. Hence the idea of caste,
the fundamental institution of Brahminism. The Brahmin
is of right lord and master of all created things, for men are
the first among intelligent beings,' and the Brahmin is first
among men. And the end of his life is to return into the
bosom of this infinite Being, this incomprehensible source, this
substance indefinable. The creation of an unknown power,
unable to alter or indeed to conceive his destiny, a phantom
which comes and goes like the morning vapor, without inspi
ration, without personality, the Brahmin was stripped of his
conscience and paralyzed in his will, and the civilization of
Brahminism was stagnant and cruel.
But apart from its deadening political influence in making
necessity the basis of society, there was inevitably also a mys
tical element in Brahminism, for mysticism is never long
separated from pantheism. If all men were formed of the
same substance, it was for the common benefit of all to throw
off the burdens of this life, in order to meet in the bosom of
the Infinite. And it was this element which found its full
development in Buddhism. In its origin a reform of Brah
minism, Buddhism is now its irreconcilable enemy, admitting
no distinctions of caste, no impure races, no Coudras, no
Pariahs, — affirming that all men proceed from the same source
and tend to the same end. Buddhism is not, however, a her
esy like that of Arius, or a reform like that of Luther ; it is
rather, says another French scholar, like the grand revolution
accomplished for the Jews in Christianity. Founded at Be
nares, the sacred city of the Brahmins, in the seventh century
before Christ, it was first propagated in the North of India, —

and there is reason, says Emile Burnouf, to suppose that
Alexander the Great found it, three centuries later, in the
upper valleys of the Indus. At first despised by the Brahmins,
as one of the many heresies which were constantly springing
up, it was nevertheless received with enthusiasm by the kings,
whom it delivered from the yoke of the priests, and by the
people, whom it promised to redeem from misery. In time it
would doubtless have been master of India ; but after twelve
centuries of existence the Brahmins declared against it a war
of extermination, and it was expelled from the country. But
it passed over to Ceylon, and spread through Thibet and the
Birman empire and Japan, and, displacing among the masses
of China the too elevated philosophy of Confucius, it is the
faith to-day, according to Professor Neumann, of three hun
dred and sixty-nine millions of human beings, or, as a recent
French writer estimates, of a fourth, perhaps a third, of the
population of the world.
Buddha is not, as is generally supposed, the name of a man.
It is a title signifying simply the sage, — wisdom itself incar
nate in man, manifesting itself on earth whenever men are so
sunk in ignorance and corruption as to need its regenerating
power. The world has already been visited by several
Buddhas, and will yet again be visited by others. But history
preserves the name of the last alone, Cakya-Mouni, who is
supposed to have died about 544 B. C.
According to Buddhism, says Mr. Spence Hardy, there is no
creator, no being that is self-existent and eternal, and no such
monad as an immaterial soul. All sentient beings are homo
geneous, the only difference between them consisting in degree
of merit. The power that controls the universe and each
being in it is Karma, but the manner in which it originated
cannot now be ascertained. All that is known to Buddhism
is, that each being receives from the Karma of the previous
being that has given it life the aggregate of the qualities good
or bad existing at its death, and that the cause of the con
tinuance of existence is ignorance. From ignorance springs
merit and demerit; from these, consciousness; from conscious
ness, body and mind, and afterwards the organs of sense.
From the last arises contact ; from contact, desire ; from de

sire, sensation ; from sensation, the cleaving to existing ob
jects ; from that, reproduction ; from reproduction, disease,
decay, and death. But, abstract as they may seem, the doc
trines of Buddha were rather moral than metaphysical. There
are few religions, indeed, which repose upon so small a number
of dogmas. In the first stage of its history it was enough to
believe that Buddha was a man who had attained a degree of
intelligence and virtue which every one might propose to him
self as an example, and Buddhism consisted in the practice
of the simplest rules of morality. But at a later period, when
its dogmas had become developed, morality, though it did not
disappear, ceased to be its principal object.
The visible world, according to Buddhism, was a perpetual
change, life succeeding death, and death life. Man, like
everything which surrounded him, revolved in an eternal
circle of transmigration, passing successively through all forms
of life, from the most elementary to the most perfect, — the
place which he occupied in this vast ocean of living beings
depending upon the merit or demerit of his actions. But the
rewards of heaven, like the punishments of hell, had only a
limited duration ; time exhausted equally the merit of good,
and effaced the guilt of bad actions. To escape this prevailing
law of transmigration which he accepted — not, like that of
Plato, with the moral idea (however imperfect) of expiation,
but necessary and eternal — was the effort of (âkya-Mouni, and
his originality consisted only in the new means of liberation he
devised by throwing off all that was personal, by destroying in
one's self all the attributes that distinguish one from others ;
that is, by renunciation, annihilation. His secret was Nirvana,
or extinction. But if the object of life is the systematic sup
pression of all the faculties, it follows that there can be nothing
true or real in the world, — only appearances. The phenom
ena of nature are but illusions, which through our weakness
only have become realities. From this mistaking appearances
for realities arises indeed that very consciousness of ourselves
which distinguishes us from other beings. It is the attach
ment we have to the senses that makes their existence. It
was not the object, therefore, of Buddhism to regulate the
passions, but to extinguish them. And how definite and

absolute an annihilation was Nirvana of all the elements that
compose existence may be inferred from the opinion that the
eTils which Buddhism came to cure — birth, sickness, old
age, and death — had no beginning.
Yet there is no trace of God in Buddhism. It has not even
the confused and vague notion of the universal Spirit in which,
according to Brahminism, the human soul will lose itself at
last. It makes no distinction between mind and matter.
Thrown into a world he cannot understand, under the weight
of infirmities he cannot endure, the only object of Cakya-
Mouni was to escape the punishment he was undergoing. The
people, therefore, who received his faith never thought of
making of him a God, for the notion of God was foreign to
his creed, since Buddhism teaches that when .Cakya-Mouni
ceased to exist on earth he ceased to exist forever. Yet I do
not hesitate to say, writes M. St. Hilaire, excepting Christ
alone, there is among the founders of religion no one figure
purer or more affecting than that of Cakya-Mouni. Exhibit
ing all the virtues he inculcated, his life was without fault,
and his heroism was equal to his conviction. He made no
promises of earthly rewards, — either of riches or of power.
The path of virtue and knowledge was the path, not to glory,
but to nothingness. Not being by his nature distinct from
matter, but rather the' avatar or impersonation of the evil
principle of matter, the life of man could be nothing but an
incessant struggle between the body and its passions.
Mortification of his nature was therefore the chief duty and
the final object of life. The believers in Buddha were to wear
nothing but rags or a shroud, to live without shelter and by
alms, to meditate in cemeteries, to practise the most rigid ab
stinence, and to preserve the austerest silence. Instead of
accusing his oppressor, the true Buddhist was to accuse him
self ; the insults and the outrage which he might experience,
so far from being avenged, were to be accepted as the proper
chastisement of the faults which he had committed in a former
existence. Hence the abject submission of the many, and the
fearful despotism of the few. And hence also, we may add,
that sombre veil which Buddhism throws over life, together
vol. lxxviii. — 5th s. vol. xvi. no. i. 8
with its inconsolable sadness ; for the idea of good, which

always banishes scepticism, is confounded with that of reward,
which admits it. In the material world, with its ceaseless
play of forces, you can deny the existence of good and evil,
hut in man it is impossible to do so ; for in the face of con
science one must believe in something besides the senses, —
and Buddha believed in evil. Yet he had the power to work
miracles, not by virtue of his divinity, but by virtue of his
knowledge. The faith in miracles, however, it will be remem
bered, was common in India ; to reject it would have been to
disarm himself in the presence of Brahminism. Buddha sur
passed others in power, because he surpassed them in virtue.
Buddhism is therefore not philosophy in the sense in which
that word is commonly understood, nor religion in the sense
in which Paganism was a religion to the Greeks, or Chris
tianity is a religion to us.' It was something apart from and
above both, recognizing only man in the universe, and push
ing to its farthest limit that idea of unity of substance which
in comparison with the intrepidity of Buddhism has been so
feebly developed by Spinoza and the modern pantheists. M.
Abel R6musat declares that the Chinese, the Tartars, and the
Mongols have no word in their language to express the idea
of God. To use the words of M. St. Hilaire, Buddhism is
spirituality without a soul, virtue without duty, morality with
out liberty, charity without love, and a world without God.
Like the systems which in our day have sought to reduce man
to a level with the brutes, it is built upon a partial and one
sided view of his nature. It ignores psychology as a science,
because it denies the existence of the soul as a fact ; and it
not only throws into confusion all the relations of man to na
ture, vast and subtile as they are, but perverts those funda
mental distinctions in morals without which the world is a
serted and life a horror untold.
Yet there is a certain grandeur in the earnestness and the
courage with which Buddha followed his principles to their
end. Only the moral purity and elevation of Buddhism could
have enabled it to triumph in the face of a society founded
upon iniquity and violence. Its charity is saintly, — its hu
mility leads to confession. Twice in the month, at the new
and full moon, and with a loud voice, the believer is to con
fess his sins. " Let your life be a hiding of your good works
and a proclaiming of your sins," says Buddha. The Brah
mins reproached Q&kya-Mouni with admitting to his conversa
tion and discipleship men of the lowest degree. " My law,"
he replied, " is a law of grace for all." Knowing the state of
society in which it appeared and has existed, we cannot won
der that it counts monasteries by thousands and cenobites by
millions ; that the statue of Ciikya-Mouni is in every sanctu
ary, and that it is to him, the last incarnation of wisdom, that
prayers are daily addressed in innumerable temples as to that
eternal Reason which, surviving the changes of nature, has
manifested itself in human form.
The doctrine of the absorption of the soul in the universal
Being is not peculiar to Brahminism. It has been at all times
the creed of all mystics. It was taught by the Sufis of Persia,
and the Therapeutists of Egypt, as well as by the Essenes of
Palestine and the philosophers of Alexandria. And in Chris
tian Europe it is found in every school of mysticism, from
Amaury de Chartres to Madame Guyon. That the world is
but nothingness and life but misery, that the reason is an illu
sion and liberty a chimera, — such has been from the beginning
and still is the monotonous lament of mysticism. But, Bud
dhism is not mysticism, nor can it be considered a religion,
poisoned as it is at the source, with corruption and death in
all its tendencies. Forgetting that man is an intelligent and
a free being, it teaches contempt of the human person, and
abasement of the human will. It proclaims the necessity of
purity, but in degrading human nature is itself a moral con
tamination. It insists upon love, but in holding that life
itself is a pollution, it blasts the very affections it inculcates.
Yet, with all its defects, Buddhism was a great advance upon
Brahminism. For the pride of caste it substituted the equality
of man. In the presence of sorrow, all men are equal, says
Buddha. It introduced penitence and prayer ; and finally it
replaced the bloody cult of Djagannatha — the throwing off a
life of sin — by the simple laying of flowers before the statue
of Buddha.
That Buddhism, however, as it is now reproduced in Europe,
can long stand the light of day, is of course out of the ques
tion ; but it remains nevertheless a curious fact, which de
serves more study than it has received, that its essential prin
ciples of pessimism — that fatal premonition of intellectual
torpor and of moral death — should make their appearance
in the midst of the exuberant activity and the exultant hopes
of an age like ours. We are assured by an intelligent mis
sionary long resident in Ceylon, that in the East the advance
ment of Christianity will have an effect upon the literature of
Asia similar to that which it had upon the classics when it
first began to grapple with the religions of Greece and Rome,
•: preserving the wisdom it supplemented, and showing the way
out of the vices it denounced. But the West also still waits
for its redemption, not as of old through a purer moral doc
trine, but through a political revelation, like that which we in
' America, it may be, are now chosen of God to announce. In
Mie worn-out political society of Europe, darkened with the
^^nder-clouds of revolution, ever ready to burst, it may be a
. reBef to many minds in grim despair to embrace the worship
of Evil. But the genius of the New World will permit no such
pollution. Of the two doctrines given to man to live by, it
has chosen, not that of Evil, — older than Schopenhauer by all
the centuries of Hindoo chronology and all the ages of the
world, — but that of Good, younger and more resplendent
' with every battle lost and every victory won.
1865.] Hawthorne. 89
Art. VI. — HAWTHORNE.
The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston : Tieknor and

Fields. 14 vols, 1864.
The little that has been published of " The Dolliver Ro

mance " makes it more evident than it was before, if that were
necessary, that, when Hawthorne died, American literature
sustained the greatest loss that has ever befallen it. One is
tempted to say, — even in these days, when the turmoil of a
gigantic war is shaking the continent to its centre, when the
temper of earnest men grows stern, and mere literature seems
at some moments so trifling a vanity and conceit, — that there
is but one man living whom the country could so ill afford to
lose as this strange, wayward, fitful, unreasonable poet and */
dreamer, who sneered at the war and at the great nation that
is waging it, with the pettishness of a spoiled child. For the*
war with all its greatness is but for a time, and the portion of
the national character which it stimulates and educates, even
though it be the heroic portion, is still not the whole. And
when the war shall have ended, and our politics have become
less stormy and momentous, there will be felt a vacuum in the
national life, so long crammed with the feverish interests
which are born of revolutions, which should be filled with the
creations of a strong, pure, and elevated national literature, —
an American literature, as distinct from that of all the rest of
the world as the literature of England is distinct from that of
Prance or Germany. Now if this country has ever brought
forth one writer whose genius was American from the founda
tion, and not English, that writer was Nathaniel Hawthorne.
We remember being very much provoked some years ago by a
characteristic article in one of the English quarterlies, in which
the reviewer, running over the list of noted American authors,
quietly set them all down as reflections, each in his own sphere,
of some brighter light in the British firmament. " The relation
of Longfellow to Tennyson, of Prescott to Macaulay, of Cooper
to Scott, of Emerson to Carlyle, &c, &c, was a constant rela
tion," — and much more to the same purpose, which was not
8*
90 Hawthorne. [Jan.
the less provoking that it was not altogether capable of denial.

The complacent critic would doubtless, had the problem been
given him, have undertaken to find the fourth term in a pro
portion like this : —
Prescott : Macaulay : : Hawthorne : x,
and we should have been interested to see the result. What
ever may be said of any other writer, Hawthorne was a 'light
unto himself; in thought, method, conception, style, and mo
tive, he was
" Besonders, ungemischt, und nw sich setter gleich."
He rose so silently and so gradually, that he had become a
star of the first magnitude before he was generally known, and
nothing can be more amusing than the quiet humor with which,
after the success of his first great romance, he describes, in
the Preface to a newly collected edition of his " Twice-Told
Tales," the obscurity which they failed to illuminate. The
brilliant qualities which took the public by storm in his first
romance he has never suffered to grow dim. His last work —
alas that it should remain a fragment! — bade fair to-be the
finest product of his mind, and the sense of loss becomes heavy
indeed, when, in reading it, we reflect upon what the ripe age
of such a writer would have given us.
An author with such abilities, and so careful in the use of
them, is a perpetual stimulus and provocative to the intellect
of a people ; and yet it is not alone on that account that we
feel his loss to be so great a misfortune, for the national intel
lect is active enough, and there is no fear that we shall not by
and by have men of letters, who, in point of mental strength,
of knowledge, and of imagination, will bear comparison with
those of any other people. But Hawthorne, besides all the
rest that he accomplished, set his brother authors an example
of which they promise for yet another generation to stand in
sore need, — the example of an English style which has never
been excelled for absolute purity, and for the union of ele
gance and force.
This great merit of Hawthorne has never yet been fairly
stated. An accomplished essayist did indeed, we believe, once
venture to intimate that he sometimes rivalled, or even sur
1865.] .His Style. 91
passed, the felicity of Addison ; but he evidently did not ex

pect to be believed, and perhaps did not fully believe himself.
He might have put it more strongly. Addison, like most of
the literary celebrities of his age, has always been greatly over
rated. His style has the sweetness of honey, but lacking ideas ;
his beautiful sentences cloy as speedily as that delectable prod
uct. It is quite possible to write better English than Addi
son, without approaching the standard which Hawthorne set
up. We do not, of course, take into the comparison the di
dactic or historic writers, as Burke, or Gibbon, or Macau-
lay, whose magnificent periods put them, as it were by main
strength, at the head of the list. These are the masters of
what Scott would call the " big bow-wow style." But Haw.
thorne is to be measured by the side of the great examples of
imaginative literature ; and, in such a comparison, who will
not say that the most brilliant of these writers, that Addison
or Goldsmith, Dickens or Thackeray, does not pale before, the
grace, the power, the color, the perfect ease of Hawthorne ?
Bulwer has somewhere divided novels into three classes, —
the familiar, the picturesque, and the intellectual. If Haw
thorne were to be called a novelist, the classification would
need a revision, for his works are both picturesque and intel
lectual, and yet are so original, and so marked in their origi
nality, as to form a class by themselves. Versatile he can
certainly not be called ; but this has come to be an epithet of
doubtful significance, from having been so often applied to
writers who, having no perceptible ability in any direction, are
as good, or, as we might better say, as indifferent, in one as
in another. Hawthorne is not a versatile writer ; the move
ment is the same in all his stories, — we might almost say the
key is the same in all, — a minor key, with variations and
changes of wonderful power and beauty, but minor still, and
full of a strange sadness and a stranger terror, which haunt
one as in the most mournful and fantastic of Chopin's melo
dies.
For the most part, there is little of what is properly called
plot in his romances. He is generally content with creating
a limited number of principal characters, connected with or
bound to each other in some extraordinary fashion, and with
92 Hawthorne. [Jan.
some pervading mystery, inevitably involving more or less of
horror, which complicates and embarrasses their intercourse,
— and then placing them in a succession of strange situations
which develop in the most unusual manner the psychological
traits with which he has endowed them, and the various pas
sions, of fear, shame, grief, anger, revenge, amazement, — but
seldom of joy, — in the portrayal of which he has displayed so
remarkable a power.
A brief analysis of his principal works will show how peculiar
and invariable is this method.
Up to the age of forty-six, Hawthorne's literary reputation
rested entirely on the little tales and sketches which he had
contributed to various magazines and annuals, and which have
since become so popular under the happy titles of " Twice-
Told Tales," and " Mosses from an Old Manse." A more som
bre collection of little stories surely never was gathered to
gether ; but in the midst of their sombreness we find the same
exquisite delicacy of fancy, the same fondness for abnormal
conditions of mind, and the same beauty of expression (though,
perhaps, not in the same degree of perfection), which after
wards found larger scope in the romances which have carried
his name as far as the language is known. In 1850 appeared
" The Scarlet Letter," followed in 1851 by " The House of the
Seven Gables," and in 1852 by " The Blithedale Romance."
This was his period of greatest productiveness, — the epoch,
generally brief in the life of every literary producer, when his
power and fertility of imagination are at flood. Success ap
peared to stimulate him, and in the later of his works is dis
cernible a confidence in his position before the public, and an
enjoyment and freedom in the consciousness of it, which can
not be traced in his earlier writings. The Liverpool Consu
late broke disastrously in upon this productiveness, and during
the four years of its duration he appears to have written noth
ing. His whimsical picture, in the introduction to the Scarlet
Letter, of the complete suspension of the imaginative faculty
within him during the period of his sojourn in the Custom-
House at Salem, is probably not much exaggerated, and will
doubtless apply equally well to his second period of public
service.
1865.] The Romances. 93
" My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or

only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to
people it. The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and
rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual
forge. They would take neither the glow of passion, nor the tender
ness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and
stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous
defiance. ' What have you to do with us ? ' that expression seemed to
say. ' The little power you might once have possessed over the tribe
of unrealities is gone ! You have bartered it for a pittance of the pub
lic gold. Go then and earn your wages ! ' In short, the almost torpid
creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without
fair occasion An entire class of susceptibilities, and a gift con
nected with them, — of no great richness or value, but the best I had,
— was gone from me ! "
But with the administration of Pierce his consular experi
ence terminated, anjl he soon afterward travelled as far as
Italy, where for a considerable time he resided, and where the
half-extinguished flame of his imagination was kindled anew
amid the quiet fascinations of Italian country life. Here he
wrote " The Marble Faun, or the Romance of Monte Beni,"
published in England under the title of " Transformation."
This was his last romance, and was the most elaborate and in
some respects the most remarkable of his works, although dif
fering from the others in character mainly in this, — that for
the first time the writer had left the soil of New England, and
seemed to seek a wider liberty in the accessories of European
scenery and manners. The passion for psychological mystery,
for a muffled supernaturalism, reappears in the old manner
and with all the old power. We shall examine briefly this
peculiarity of Hawthorne's genius as it exhibits itself in these
four romances.
Of the four, the earliest is in every way, as we think, the
most perfect, — in boldness of conception, in purity both of
thought and of style, in the completeness and compactness of its
plot, in the beauty and appropriateness of its accessories, and in
the splendor of diction, never for a moment swelling into " fine
writing," with which the capital points of the story are pre
sented to the reader. There is in this romance less of mystery
than in either of the others, or rather the mystery is of a less
94 Hawthorne. [Jan.
extraordinary and fearful description, and is not for the be

wilderment of the reader so much as for that of the characters
of the story. But the more readily the secret is discovered by
the reader, the more strongly is he impressed with the intense
melancholy of the whole history ; — a melancholy not so much
of sorrow as of despair ; a gloom without hope of light, and
which the bright flashes of humor which abound in almost
every chapter seem only to make the more dense and depress
ing. A woman, young, beautiful, and of a noble and loving
nature, has, in the midst of the sternest Puritan society that
ever existed, yielded to a temptation which the Puritan dis
cipline was ill calculated to disarm, and is doomed thenceforth
to a life-long remorse and ignominy. Doomed equally to a
life-long remorse is the partner of her crime, — a remorse all the
more terrible and harrowing that the ignominy is spared him.
We can scarcely recall a more pathetic and tragical scene in
all literature than that in which Hester Prynne, standing on
the platform of the pillory, in the old Puritan town, with her
child in her arms, the Governor and the chief dignitaries of
the settlement sitting in state in the balcony above her head,
and the whole population of the joyless town gazing at the
scarlet symbol on her breast, is exhorted by the saintly young
minister to confess aloud the father of her child. And what a
pathos in the few words of his little speech.
" The Reverend Mr. Diramesdale bent his head, in silent prayer as it
seemed, and then came forward.
" ' Hester Prynne,' said he, leaning over the balcony and looking
down steadfastly into her eyes, ' thou hearest what this good man says,
and seest the accountability under which I labor. If thou feelest it to
be for thy soul's peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby
be made more effectual for salvation, I charge thee to speak out the
name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer ! Be not silent from any
mistaken pity and tenderness for him, for believe me, Hester, though he
were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee on
thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so than to hide a guilty heart
through life. What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt him —
yea, compel him as it were — to add hypocrisy to sin? Heaven hath
granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou mayst work out an
open triumph over the evil within thee and the sorrow without. Take
heed how thou deniest to him —- who, perchance, hath not the courage
1865.] • The Scarlet Letter. 95
to grasp it for himself — the bitter but wholesome cup that is now pre
sented to thy lips!'"
She will not confess, and goes back alone into her dungeon.
Meanwhile the husband, to whose age her youth had been
united in a foreign land, conies upon the scene. There is an
interview between them in the prison, in which Hester again
refuses, once for all, the information so eagerly desired. The
term of her sentence at length expires. The poor mother
comes forth from her prison, and begins the sad life of an out
cast in the midst of the community which has learned to shun
and despise her. From this moment the only interest of the
plot lies in the husband's efforts to make a certainty of his
suspicions in regard to the minister. But the real interest lies
not in the plot, but in the portrayal of the changing emotions
and passions of these three unhappy persons ; — the agony of
mingled remorse, shame, and terror in the breast of the young
minister, who, in his lofty position, fixed in the love and rever
ence of the whole community, feels dimly that he is hunted by
a half-recognized but implacable enemy ; the stealthy fierce
ness of the injured husband, who pursues his victim with a
cruelty as merciless and deadly as it is refined, and in the
pursuit gradually transforms himself into an Iago, or a Mephis-
tophiles ; and the patient, passive suffering of the wretched
Hester, compelled to witness this dreadful and secret tragedy,
and powerless to avert its catastrophe.
It will be seen at once how little opportunity for relief this
plan affords ; but in truth it seems that no relief is desired,
— unless the strange character of little Pearl may be felt as a
relief, which can hardly be the case, so fatally are all her little
whims and caprices directed towards the very centre of the
great drama. In other hands than Hawthorne's such a story
would be intolerable from the depth and intensity of its gloom.
What saves it from being so in the present case, and makes it,
instead, one of the most fascinating of narratives, is the ex
quisite grace of thought and language which clothes the dis
mal scenes, the dramatic power with which the most tremen
dous passions of the human heart are exhibited, and, lastly,
the skill with which the story is compressed within the nar
rowest limits. Even Hawthorne would, we fear, fail to keep
96 Hawthorne. * [Jan.
his readers with him through three volumes of such a mourn

ful history. Short as it is, however, it is alone sufficient to
make and fix the reputation of its author. Its three great sit
uations, — the exposure on the pillory, at the beginning ; the
" flood of sunshine " in the forest, when the tortured man and
woman, mad with pain and grief and the utter loneliness and
strange horror of their position, meet once more without re
serve, and recover for one short hour the bloom of youth and
happiness, as they reassure each other of their eternal love ;
and, finally, the closing catastrophe, where the scene returns to
the scaffold, where it opened, and shows us the dying minister,
fresh from the triumph of his eloquence in the church, stand
ing up before the astounded crowd with Hester at his side, and
the baffled avenger scowling darkly upon him, and revealing
the whole dreadful secret of seven years ; — these three scenes
we believe to be unequalled by any others in the whole range
of romantic literature. Victor Hugo has equalled them in
power, but never in delicacy and beauty. Tennyson may have
surpassed them in poetic expression, but has never approached
them in intensity of pathos. And there is no single scene in
any novel which we have been fortunate enough to see, which
can reasonably be compared to them as indicating the union of
the most remarkable power of imagination with the most splen
did power of language. Here is a single passage from the
second of these scenes. Hester has thrown away the hideous
letter : —
" The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the
burden of shame and anguish departed from her spirit. 0 exquisite
relief! She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom ! By
another impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined her hair, and
down it fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at orice a shadow
and a light in its abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her
features. There played around her mouth and beamed out of her eyes
a radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of
womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek that had been
long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty,
came back from what men call the irrevocable past, and clustered them
selves with her maiden hope, and a happiness before unknown, within
the magic circle of this hour. And as if the gloom of the earth and
sky had been but the effluence of these two mortal hearts, it vanished
1865.] ' The House of the Seven Gables. 97
with their sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth
burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, glad
dening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold, and
gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees. The objects that
had made a shadow hitherto embodied the brightness now. The course
of the little brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the
wood's heart of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.
" Such was the sympathy of Nature — that wild heathen Nature of
the forest, never subjugated by human law nor illumined by higher
truth — with the bliss of these two spirits. Love, whether newly born,
or aroused from a death-like slumber, must always create a sunshine,
filling the heart so full of radiance that it overflows upon the outer
world. Had the forest still kept its gloom, it would have been bright in
Hester's eyes, and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale's."
" The House of the Seven Gables " is less dreadful than its
predecessor, but is also, as a work of art, decidedly its inferior.
The fortunes of the Pyncheon family, from the building of the
stately mansion to its abandonment, are related with wonder
ful ease and skill, and the crime which still makes the key-note
of the composition is veiled in a most admirably contrived
mystery ; but there is less simplicity and unity than in " The
Scarlet Letter," and more conformity with the common usage
of novelists, in bringing all to a sudden and happy ending.
There is a wicked old judge, who has been the nightmare of
the family for a generation, who has kept the rightful heir in
prison for thirty years on a false conviction of murder, which
he has himself procured, and who dies in his chair by a timely
stroke of apoplexy, and in the old mansion which he has
invaded with fell intent to complete the final ruin of his vic
tim. There is a bright little Pyncheon maiden, who marries
with great satisfaction the sole remaining heir of the family
which was so grievously wronged at the hands of the original
Pyncheon, and whose history since has been mysteriously
interwoven with that of his descendants. There is a dim and
forlorn "old maid Pyncheon," who is reduced, not more by
pride and poverty than by the noblest devotion, to set up a
cent-shop in the old family mansion, which she inhabits
alone ; but who, by the providential death of her cousin, the
judge, comes at last into possession of the wealth that should
98 Hawthorne. [Jan.
have been hers in her youth. And there is a little urchin

who is the most prominent and interesting customer of the
cent-shop, who devours whole caravans of camels and ele
phants in gingerbread, not to mention an occasional locomotive
and whale, and is made happy at the close by a donation from
the kind old lady, sufficient to sate his immeasurable appe
tite for an indefinite length of time. So we close this book,
not in tears but in smiles, notwithstanding the blackness of
the shadows by which in its perusal we have been often sur
rounded.
But in " The Blithedale Romance " we are again plunged
into gloom, — a gloom not indeed so rayless as in " The Scar
let Letter," but sufficiently dark to generate a more dreadful
catastrophe even than that of the dying Mr. Dimmesdale.
Here, crime is not the foundation, but the result of tl»e history.
This book created perhaps a greater interest in New England
than either of its forerunners, on account of the slender thread
which connected it with the famous enterprise at Brook Farm,
and the expectation of those who were familiar with the his
tory of that notable experiment that some reflection of its
prominent actors might be found in the pages of the romance.
The expectation was hardly gratified, except by the slightest
and most subtile allusion here and there ; and indeed the
action of the story is scarcely dependent on the " foundation
in fact " of which the author gave his work the benefit, but
might, so far as concerns the fortunes of the principal person
ages, have proceeded just as well on any other foundation.
This is the only work of Hawthorne's which can properly be
called a love-story ; but it is far enough from being an ordi
nary love-story. For it is singularly characteristic of the pecu
liar nature of Hawthorne's genius, that, though he has in this
romance given us the outline of a plot which would have suf
ficed even for a novel of Charles Reade's, he has been himself
so careless of his plot as to condense nearly the whole of it
into a single explanatory chapter of great interest and beauty,
— the story of Fauntleroy ; while in the chief portion of the
book he concerns himself, as usual, much less with the inci
dents through which his plot is developed, than with the
emotions they awaken in the breasts of his characters, but
1865.] The Blithedale Romance. 99
principally with the strange contest between the two sisters

for the love of the shaggy philanthropist, who, being self-cen
tred, and bent only on reforming the world by theory, had no
love to give to either, until he had all at once the good fortune
to rescue the gentle Priscilla from the baneful influence to
which, by an extraordinary complication of relationships, she
had been long subject; when — whether on the general princi
ple that we love those whom we have greatly helped, or from
finding how complete was his own sovereignty in her gentle
heart, does not quite appear — he discovered at last that he
loved Priscilla. Then comes the tragedy. The proud Zeno-
bia, unable to bear the grief and humiliation of her lot, seeks
for rest beneath the black waters of the river. The chapter
which describes the recovery of the body, at midnight, by
the man for whose love she had died, is perhaps not surpassed
in intensity by anything even in Hawthorne's pages. A cold,
shuddering horror pervades every line of it, and yet there is
no horror expressed. Its tone is that of the quietest of narra
tives, and offers thus a lesson to those artists who cannot
believe in intensity without violent action. Mr. Conway has
said, we believe, that this account was written after an actual
midnight search, in which Hawthorne assisted, for the body
of a young girl of the village in which he lived. We are
reminded of the story of Rachel studying death in the hospitals
of Paris ; but we do not know that the fact takes anything
from the merit of this wonderful description, which consists
not in the action, but in the power which makes the reader a
participant in the heart-breaking grief of each of the actors in
the tragedy.
" The Marble Faun " appeared, as we have said, after an
interval of seven or eight years, — a period long enough, espe
cially when spent in foreign countries, for many changes in
the mind of an author. The circumstances under which it
was composed exercised of necessity an influence upon the
form and manner of the book, inducing much of description,
of art criticism, of quiet reflection, apart from the march of the
narrative, and giving the work an air of leisure and delibera
tion, in place of the concentration and intensity of his former
romances. It is much the longest of Mr. Hawthorne's works,
100 Hawthorne. [Jan.
and certainly the most elaborate and ambitious ; yet we should

hesitate to pronounce it superior on the whole to any of those
which preceded it. It has even more than the common infu
sion of mystery which is inseparable from all the conceptions
of its author ; in this case, indeed, the mystery is double, or
even triple, and is strongly tinged with the indefinable and
weird psychology which makes so many of Hawthorne's pages
produce the effect of a sketch by Dore\ The dual nature of
Donatello, the former life of Miriam, and her connection with
the model, the fate of Miriam and Donatello, — these are
puzzles which remain unexplained even at the close. Indeed,
the facility of Mr. Hawthorne in this kind of invention was
never more freely exercised than at the end of the second
volume, where three at least of the four personages of the
story are made to accomplish the most impossible appearan
ces and disappearances, enveloped in impenetrable clouds of
secrecy, and in a way which, at any hands less skilful than
those of Hawthorne, would be extremely exasperating to all
orderly and amenable readers. The charm of this book, how
ever, as of all the others, is not disturbed by any of these
minor eccentricities, or even absurdities, of action, but is to
be looked for iu the little traits by the way, the glimpses of
human nature wrought upon by strange and commonly dark
and painful emotions ; notably in the case of Donatella, in
whose nature the transformation which was effected by the
double influence of his love for Miriam and his remorse for
the crime to which it had impelled him forms the principal
thread of the story. Then there are a hundred passages, quite
aside from the general movement of the narrative, — passages
of description, as of Italian scenery or antiquities, — passages
of reflection or curious and intricate speculation, — which are
so exquisitely graceful and delicate in fancy and style, that they
would redeem more absurdities than can fairly be charged
against the plot. We will give a single example, familiar
enough doubtless to most of our readers, but which can
hardly be read too often. The text is Miriam mending a torn
glove.
" There is something extremely pleasant, and even touching, — at
least of very sweet, soft, and winning effect, — in this peculiarity of
1865.] The Marble Faun. 101
needle-work, distinguishing women from men. Our own sex is inca

pable of any such by-play, aside from the main business of life ; but
women — be they of what earthly rank they may, however gifted with
intellect or genius, or endowed with awful beaut)' — have always some
little handiwork ready to fill the tiny gap of every vacant moment. A
needle is familiar to the fingers of them all. A queen no doubt plies it
on occasion ; the woman-poet can use it as adroitly as her pen ; the
woman's eye that has discovered a new star, turns from its glory to
send the polished little instrument gleaming along the hem of her ker
chief, or to darn a casual fray in her dress. And they have greatly
the advantage of us in this respect. The slender thread of silk or
cotton keeps them united with the small, familiar, gentle interests of
life, the continually operating influences of which do so much for the
health of the character, and carry off what would otherwise be a dan
gerous accumulation of morbid s-ensibility. A vast deal of human
sympathy runs along this electric line, stretching from the throne to the
wicker-chair of the humblest seamstress, and keeping high and low in
a species of communion with their kindred beings. Methinks it' is a
token of healthy and gentle characteristics, when women of high
thoughts and accomplishments love to sew ; especially as they are never
more at home with their own hearts than while so occupied.
" And when the work falls in a woman's lap of its own accord, and
the needle involuntarily ceases to fly, it is a sign of trouble quite as
trustworthy as the throb of the heart itself."
Such passages as this, and many more as beautiful which we

should be glad to quote if we had the space, make the lights of
this history, whose shadow is nothing less dark than that of
murder. It is worth observing, that each of the four romances
which we have so imperfectly noticed; besides the gloom, the
remorse, the shame, the revenge, the painful death, the more
painful life, which shadow its pages, has its one overshadowing
and awful crime, which clouds the brightness of the happiest
scenes, and leaves its oppression on the mind and heart of the
reader long after he has closed the volume. Murder, adultery,
suicide, — these are the portentous and terrible foundations
on which this singular genius loved to build its airy structures.
With such a characteristic, it is no wonder if, in spite of all
their wealth of beauty and power, they affect us at every peru
sal like a troubled dream, from which we awake with a sense of
vague uneasiness and apprehension. We do not desire to see
9*
a school of fiction founded on Hawthorne's model. His atmos
phere is unhealthy ; it lacks fresh air and sunshine, and the
music of birds and of running brooks. There are no children
in his company, — they could not live under a sky so gloomy.
Little Pearl is hardly a child so much as an airy and uncom
fortable sprite, whose little hands wander as if by a malign in
stinct to the scarlet letter on her mother's bosom, and whose
prattle is sure to touch the sorest chord in her mother's heart;
— and yet, except poor Hepzibah's little customer in the Pyn-
cheon mansion, Pearl is the only child-figure in all these ro
mances of which we have spoken. Neither is there any exam
ple of quiet and happy old age. The only old persons who are
introduced at all are the troubled, harassed, frightened old
Hepzibah, her life one long sorrow for the brother whose life
has been so cruelly blighted^ and old Roger Chillingworth,
who, by concentrating every faculty of his mind upon one de
testable and hideous aim, grows finally into one of the most
repulsive and devilish characters that we can recall. The
feverish heat and trouble in which this writer so loves to im
merse his characters will not admit of the introduction either
of natural childhood or serene old age.
And this brings us to Hawthorne's last work ; to the frag
ment which has been left to us of what for want of a title has
been called " The Dolliver Romance." Here at last we have
a child and an old man ; both new subjects for Hawthorne's
pencil, and both so exquisitely drawn, with such a loving care
and patience of detail, with such a joy and delight in the draw
ing, that we might suppose a new period to have opened in the
mental life of the author, in which the old gloom and sadness
were dispelled by the warm sunlight of a renewed and healthy
imagination. We" do not at all know how to account for the
wonderful change ; it seems a leap forward into a new world,
of sweeter fancies, of purer life, of charming pictures set forth
in language which is perfect music. In what we have said of
Hawthorne's style, there is perhaps a suspicion of what a year
ago would have been thought extravagance. But in regard to
the style in which this romance has been begun, it is scarcely
possible to be extravagant. And the only way which occurs
to us of giving to our admiration the emphasis we desire it to
1865.] The Dolliver Romance. 103
have, is by extracting two or three of its passages as an exam

ple. Here is a half-page of poetry on so simple a matter as
good Doctor Dolliver's dressing-gown: —
“Its original material was said to have been the embroidered front
of his own wedding waistcoat, and the silken skirt of his wife's bridal
attire, which his eldest daughter had taken from the carved chest of
drawers, after poor Bessie, the beloved of his youth, had been half a
century in the grave. Throughout many of the intervening years, as
the garment got ragged, the spinsters of the old man's family had quilt
ed their duty and affection into it in the shape of patches upon patches,
rose-color, crimson, blue, violet, and green, and then (as their hopes
faded, and their life kept growing shadier, and their attire took a sombre
hue) sober gray and great fragments of funereal black, until the Doctor
could revive the memory of most things that had befallen him by look
ing at his patchwork-gown as it hung upon a chair. And now it was
ragged again, and all the fingers that should have mended it were cold.
It had an Eastern fragrance too, a smell of drugs, strong-scented herbs,
and spicy gums, gathered from the many potent infusions that had from
time to time been spilt over it; so that, snuffing him afar off, you might
have taken Dr. Dolliver for a mummy, and could hardly have been
undeceived by his shrunken and torpid aspect as he drew nearer.”
What a gleam of fancy is this, of little Pansie : —
“A motherless child, dwelling in an uncheerful house, with no other
playmates than a decrepit old man and a kitten, and no better atmos
phere within doors than the odor of decayed apothecary’s stuff, nor
gayer neighborhood than that of the adjacent burial-ground, where all
her relatives, from her great-grandmother downward, lay calling to her,
‘Pansie, Pansie, it is bed-time, even in the prime of the summer
morning. For those dead women-folk, especially her mother and the
whole row of maiden aunts and grand-aunts, could not but be anx
ious about the child, knowing that little Pansie would be far safer under
a tuft of dandelions than if left alone, as she soon must be, in this dif
fºul and deceitful world.” -
And what a sob there is in this sentence : —

“A whole family of grand-aunts, (one of whom had perished in her
cradle, never so mature as Pansie now, another in her virgin bloom,
another in autumnal maidenhood, yellow and shrivelled, with vinegar in
her blood, and still another, a forlorn widow, whose grief outlasted its
vitality, and grew to be merely a torpid habit, and was saddest then,)
—all their hitherto forgotten features peeped through the face of the
great-grandchild, and their long inaudible voices sobbed, shouted, or
laughed in her familiar tones. But it often happened to Dr. Dolliver,
while frolicking amid this throng of ghosts, where the one reality looked
no more vivid than its shadowy sisters, — it often happened that his
eyes filled with tears at a sudden perception of what a sad and poverty-
stricken old man he was, already remote from his own generation, and
bound to stray farther onward, as the sole playmate and protector of a
child ! "
And here is the wonderful close, than which perhaps nothing

sweeter or more poetic was ever written in prose or verse : —
" Yet there were moments, as many persons had noticed, when the
great grandpapa would suddenly take stronger hues of life. It was as
it his faded figure had been colored over anew, or at least, as he and
Pansie moved along the streets, as if a sunbeam had fallen across him
instead of the gray gloom of a moment before. His chilled sensibili
ties had probably been touched and quickened by the warm contiguity
of his little companion, through the medium of her hand as it stirred
within his own, or some inflection of her voice that set his memory
ringing and chiming with forgotten sounds. While that music lasted,
the old man was alive and happy. And there were seasons, it might
be, happier than even these, when Pansie had been kissed and put to
bed, and Grandsir " Dolliver sat by his fireside, gazing in among the
massive coals, and absorbing their glow into those cavernous abysses
with which all men communicate. Hence come angels or fiends into
our twilight musings, according as we may have peopled them in by
gone years. Over our friend's face in the rosy flicker of the fire-gleam
stole an expression of repose and perfect trust, that made him as beau
tiful to look at, in his high-backed chair, as the child Pansie on her pil
low ; and sometimes the spirits that were watching him beheld a calm
surprise draw slowly over his features and brighten into joy, yet not so
vividly as to break his evening quietude. The gate of heaven had
been kindly left ajar, that this forlorn old creature might catch a
glimpse within. All the night afterwards he would be semi-conscious
of an intangible bliss, diffused through the fitful lap.-es of an old man's
slumber, and would awake at early dawn with a faint thrilling of the
heart-strings, as if there had been music just now wandering over
them."
With what sweeter words could a great poet take his leave
of the world which he had enriched ? It is almost a matter
of regret that the publishers, who have given us this fragment,
1865.] His Lack of National Feeling: 105
so perfect in itself as a picture of peaceful and lovely old age,

have announced that other scenes have been found among the
papers of the author, which they shall print in the Atlantic
Monthly. At any rate, there can be no further doubt, we
should think, of Hawthorne's right to the first place among
the imaginative prose-writers of the English language.
And here we should be glad to close our unworthy and wholly
inadequate sketch of the work which this great writer has
done. But we must not take our final leave of him without a
word as to one peculiar idiosyncrasy which displayed itself
with most unpleasant prominence during the last years of his
life. We have had occasion once before to speak of it in terms
of greater severity than we care to use now, when the account
of his literary life is made up, and praise or blame is alike
impotent to change a single line of the record.
Hawthorne has formed the only exception to the great fact,
that every writer of eminence in the country has been true to .'"
the country in the present war. That Hawthorne did not show
himself to be so points directly to the peculiarity of his intel
lectual, and perhaps as well of his moral constitution. The
exquisite grace of his intellect was mingled, as all grace is so
apt to be, with a fastidiousness which was absolutely intolerant
of whatever crudity or harshness it was brought in contact
with ; and the predominance of the intellectual over the moral
perceptions prevented the appreciation of the nobility which
may underlie even the roughest exterior. He could not for
give his country for being so prosaic, and complains with em
phasis in the Preface to " The Marble Faun," of the difficulty
of making up a romance from the traditions of so common
place a history as that of this young republic. We laugh at
the fastidious irritation which appears in the account of the
life of this poetic dreamer in the custom-house at Salem, or
in the consular office at Liverpool, but we are more inclined
to tears than to laughter when the same caustic sarcasms, the
same petulant contempt, reappear in a hundred intangible
forms wherever he has had occasion to allude to the rebellion.
We made such a noise with our battles and proclamations
and recruitings, that there was no corner of the land where
peace enough could be found for the working out of his new
romance ! When France was reeling with the drunkenness

of the Revolution, or mad with the glory of the Consulate and
the .Empire, it is quite probable that the author of Galatte, or
La Promenade, or Anaximandre, should have felt some lively
disgust at the tremendous prominence which the execution of
King Louis or the victories of Napoleon were assuming in
the eyes of Europe, which had lingered in the good old days
of peace with so much delight over the perfumed pages of his
placid pastorals. And in these later days the grim spectre
of civil war has not respected even the retiring habits of liter
ary gentlemen, but has entered every door, and sternly post
poned for a season the graces of belles-lettres to the prosaic
and matter-of-fact requirements of armies and taxes and sani
tary commissions. What could Hawthorne do? He only
asked that he might plunge backward out of this angry tur
moil of fighting armies, of exasperated parties, of political
dangers and crises, and shocks of military disaster or. success,
of a vulgar press, of vulgarer clowns newly rich and swelling
with ridiculous pride, and wander away amid the quiet com
pany of his own rich fancies, that he might bring back from
the phantom-land of his imagination the scenes and the char
acters among which he loved best to dwell. And lo ! wherever
he turned his weary steps, there stood in his path the genius
of the time, not beautiful, not romantic, to his eyes not even
grand, — but stern enough and in grim earnest, demanding of
him what he could not give, the heart and voice of an American
citizen in the hour of America's danger. The only wonder
is that the apparition did not chill the life out of his languid
heart in the first year of the war.
But we will say no more. If We grow sad as we contrast
his coldness with the pure flame which has burned in the
heart and in the verse of Whittier, or which has brightened
the tedious monotony of Bryant's journalism, we may at
least pardon the inevitable failure, when we remember that
what his heart could not do his intellect has accomplished,
and that greater than the glory of many victories in the field
is the pure lustre which his genius has reflected upon his
country.
I860.] The Eighth of November. 107
Art. VII. — THE EIGHTH OF NOVEMBER.
1. Citizenship' Sovereignty. By J. L. Wright, assisted by Prof.

J. Holmes Agnew, D. D. Chicago : Published for American
Citizens, the true Maintainers of State Sovereignty, pp. 208.
2. New Phltings in Aid of the Rebel Doctrine of Slate Sovereignty.
A Second Letter on Dawson's Introduction lo the Federalist.
By John Jay. New York : American News Company, pp. 62.
3. Report of the Judge Advocate General on " The Order of American
Knights," alias " The Sons of Liberty" a Western Conspiracy
in Aid of the Southern Rebellion. Washington : Office of Daily
Chronicle, pp. 16.
4. The Presidents Message to the Two Houses of Congress, December 6,
1864.
5. A Report of the Debatts and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of
the Conference Convention for proposing Amendments to the Con
stitution of the United States, held at Washington, D. C, in Feb
ruary, A. D. 1861. By L. E. Chittenden. New York :
D. Appleton & Co.
The election of November 8, 1864, was an event which still

moves a certain wonder in the recollection of it, as we consider
on one hand the passions of the struggle and the magnitude
of the issue ; and on the other hand, the absolute order and
quiet with which the decision was made, and the perfect acqui
escence with which it was received. It would be unbecoming
in us not to welcome, with gratitude and honor, the evidence
given once more, on so grand a scale, that even in the violence
and fury of political discord, amidst the strange passions and
unknown perils of conspiracy, rebellion, and civil war, great
questions of public policy can be discussed, — brought to the
peaceable tribunal of the polls, — determined there without one
show of tumult, alarm, or threat, — and the decision, thus si
lently pronounced, be accepted within four-and-twenty hours
over the whole breadth of the continent, from ocean to ocean,
as the nation's verdict, which no one is hardy enough to dis
pute, no one mad and criminal enough to resist. This is the
real triumph of democratic institutions, — that they have
trained a population capable of pronouncing a verdict in that
way, and capable of accepting it when pronounced as an au
108 Tlie Eighth of November. [Jan.
thority without appeal. A tremendous power, — the decision
of principles that lie at the very base of our system of govern
ment and law ; and intrusted, almost recklessly it would seem,
to the chances of popular debate free as the winds, and of a
ballot in which every man is absolutely free of responsibility to
every other man. In one day, between sun and sun, the de
cision is recorded ; and the step is already taken which seems
to fix irrevocably the character of our government and nation
for long periods to come. American democracy finds itself
justified in the mere fact that our people have advanced so far
as to understand such an issue, meet it, vote on it, and abide
by it.
It is not to be disguised, and it ought not to be forgotten,
that this decision had been long looked forward to with a
vague misgiving and dread. We accepted the necessity, as
one part of that thorough and peculiar trial of its strength,
which the nation was foreappointed to encounter. It was not
enough, that for thirty years of treacherous truce there had
been the standing menace of Disunion, which was so sure to
burst into mischief at the last. It was not enough that the
hands of the nation had been purposely tied beforehand, its
energies crippled, its resources plundered and betrayed, — that
it must begin its struggle of life and death with an enemy al
ready flushed and triumphant with anticipated success. It
was not enough that the lack of military discipline, still more
of military spirit, should have made two years of war so blood
ily undecisive, or that the division of counsels among the peo
ple should have been reflected in the so often hesitating and
irresolute course of an administration which sought its only
inspirations from the people. It was not enough that the
radical hostility of the elements at war — republican freedom
and slave-holding despotism — should have been recognized so
slowly, so timidly, so reluctantly, when the energies and hopes
of a considerable portion of the country were already wellnigh
paralyzed. It was not enough that people and government
should have been floundering on together, through political
intrigue, pecuniary corruption, financial alarms, and the slow,
obstinate dispute as to the moral issue involved in the great
campaign, — all, perhaps, inseparable from a condition of civil
1865.] The Anxiety beforehand. 109
war in such a state as ours. To have triumphed over these —

amidst the derision and incredulity, the calculating and half-
concealed hostility, of the ruling classes in friendly nations
abroad, and those trading piracies that had nearly ruined a
commerce already second to none upon the globe — to have
done this, and only this, would have been too easy a victory
for the principle of popular liberty and constitutional authori
ty, at this period of the world ! There must be added to it the
peculiar source of uncertain peril — inseparable from the work
ing of our political machinery — which at the precise crisis of
the struggle divides the loyal part of the country into hostile
parties, foments old jealousies, keeps fresh the fires of new
resentments, throws the suspicion of petty ambitions on one
party of those whose business it is simply to defend the state,
and the suspicion of petty rivalries upon the other. Such was
the threatening and (in some respects) disheartening cam
paign, in the aspects it presented to some of us, only two short
months ago. That period of supreme anxiety is past — so qui
etly, that wajiave almost forgotten how deep and real it was.
It is the habit of some, not merely opponents, but friends of
the administration, to make light of the danger now that it is
past ; at least, to consent easily to forget it, in the press of new
thoughts and cares that grow out of the altered situation.
But there are some points, at least, which deserve to be kept
in mind as part of the history of the time, and there are others
which ought to be brought very clearly before the public mind,
because they will prove the cardinal points in the debates
and strifes of the coming years. It is not well to forget the
desperate plot to get possession of the polls in Chicago, only a
day or two previous to the election, or the seizure of the
" thirty thousand stand of arms " destined for traitor hands in
Indiana, or the wholesale and wicked fraud by which it was
hoped to reverse the vote of New York through forged ballots
of soldiers. The border raid of St. Albans, the threats which
made necessary so formidable a demonstration of military
force in New York, the hints and menaces of Southern news
papers, the plots for plunder and conflagration in our great
cities, happily foiled hitherto, all indicate a desperate and con
certed effort to transfer the horrors of war to Northern soil,
110 The Eighth of November. [Jan.
and break up by violence, if it were possible, the very machin
ery of government itself. It is not the party of " the Opposi
tion " that we suspect of complicity with deeds like these.
But it is no more than fair to think that the deadly enemies
of the government, so widely scattered at the North as well as
South, through the lenient and unsuspecting temper of our
people, should wish to take advantage of any change in ad
ministration, hoping, in the confusions and uncertainties and
delays of it, to find an entering for the wedge of destruction.
It was a wise and wholesome instinct that foresaw the danger
of changing the hand at the helm in such a time.
How great the immediate danger which seems to be now
averted, it is impossible to know. Its traces will be obliterated
just in proportion as the suppression of it has been complete.
Its nature and its formidable proportions are best told in the
Judge Advocate's Report, cited at the head of our article.
Rumors had been current for many months, — some of them
we had copied in our pages more than a year ago,* — which
spoke of a conspiracy wide-spread, desperate, and hardy,
intended to co-operate directly with the armed forces of the
public enemy, to introduce ruin and anarchy at home. How
faB these rumors might possibly have grown out of the excite
ment of invasion, and the apprehensions of the Gettysburg
campaign and the Morgan raid, we had no means of knowing.
To many they seemed a false alarm, and practically they
passed by and were forgotten. But now the testimony comes
again in a much more definite shape, and on authority which
seems quite unimpeachable. A secret treasonable Order ex
tends, we are told, through nearly the whole breadth of the
Northern States, with its watchwords, military organization,
and supplies of arms, and claiming to number not far from
half a million of men ; with its close affiliations with armed
rebellion in the South ; with its political creed, sworn to be
maintained by force of arms, strictly denying " sovereignty "
to the government of the United States ; with its definite pur
pose, to cripple and thwart the military power of the govern
ment by disorganization of its forces at home, as well as. to
* See Christian Examiner for September, 1868, p. 235.

1865.] Plots at the North. Ill
co-operate actively with raids and invasions from the South, to
destroy public and private property, and, at need, to assas
sinate those agents of the government most likely to prove
troublesome ; with its political aim, taking advantage of any
lassitude, confusion, or defeat in our affairs, to establish a
" Northwestern Confederacy " in armed alliance with the
South ; and, finally, with its scheme of organization complete,
" its provisional government, officers, bureaus, &c. in secret
operation." We quote from the Report in question the " plan
of a general armed rising of the Order, and its co-operation on
an extended scale with the Southern forces."
" This plan has been twofold, and consisted, — first, of a rising of
the Order in Missouri, aided by a strong detachment from Illinois,
and a co-operation with a Rebel army under Price ; second, of a
similar rising in Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, and a co-operation with a
force under Breckenridge, Buckner, Morgan, or some other Rebel com
mander, who was to invade the latter State. In this case the order
was first to cut the railroads and telegraph wires, in order that intelli
gence of the movement might not be sent abroad, and the transportation
of Federal troops might be delayed, and then to seize upon the arsenals
at Indianapolis, Columbus, Springfield, Louisville, and Frankfort, and,
furnishing such of their number as were without arms, to kill or make
prisoners of department, district, and post commanders, release the
Rebel prisoners at Rock Island and at Camps Morton, Douglas, and
Chase, and thereupon join the Southern army at Louisville, or some
other point in Kentucky, which State was to be permanently occupied
by the combined force. At the period of the movement it was also
proposed that an attack should be made upon Chicago by means of
steam-tugs mounted with cannon. A similar course was to be taken
in Missouri, and was to result in the permanent occupation of the
State.
" This plan has long occupied the minds of members of the Order, and
has been continually discussed by them in their lodges. A rising some
what of the character described was intended to have taken place in the
spring of this year, simultaneously with an expected advance of the army
of Lee upon Washington ; but the plans of the enemy having been antici
pated by the movements of our own generals, the rising of the conspira
tors was necessarily postponed. Again, a general movement of the
Southern forces was anticipated to take place about July 4, and with
this the Order was to co-operate. A speech to be made by Vallan-
digham at the Chicago Convention was, it is said, to be the signal for the
rising ; but the postponement of the Convention, as well as the failure

of the Rebel armies to engage in the anticipated movement, again
operated to disturb the schemes of the Order. During the summer,
however, the grand plan of action above set forth has been more than
ever discussed throughout the Order, and its success most confidently
predicted, while at the same time an extensive organization and prepa
ration for carrying their conspiracy into effect have been actively going
on. But, up to this time, notwithstanding the late raids of the enemy
in Kentucky, and the invasion of Missouri by Price, no such general
action on the part of the Order as was contemplated has taken place, —
a result, in great part, owing to the activity of our military authorities
in strengthening the detachments at the prisons, arsenals, &c, and in
causing the arrest of the leading conspirators in the several States, and
especially in the seizure of large quantities of arms which had been
shipped for the use of the Order in their intended outbreak. It was
doubtless on account of these precautions that the day last appointed
for the rising of the Order in Indiana and Kentucky (August 16)
passed by with but slight disorder."
It is unnecessary now to vindicate the sagacity and boldness
of that " Wilderness Campaign " of General Grant, by which
this scheme of invasion, coupled with the tumult and terror
of armed insurrection at home, was frustrated. That cam
paign was no wanton squandering of our forces, but was
strictly in anticipation of the great disaster known to be im
pending. It was as prudent as it was bold a move, when the
commander of our forces took the first step, and compelled
his opponent to follow his lead. The initiative he seized then,
he has not lost for a single day ; but, through all the vicissi
tudes and perils of the campaign, it is he who has dictated the
general course of action which both armies must follow. A
movement daring, hazardous, costly in much brave blood and
many precious lives, — so daring and hazardous that it has
been called wild, foolhardy, the bravery of recklessness and
despair ; but, as it has proved, the coolest prudence, and the
safest defensive policy, — saving us, at its very start, from a
struggle and a peril to which even its own great efforts and
risks were comparatively slight and safe. That strong, firm,
stern, inexorable hand, which planned and guided the terri
ble summer campaign, has crowded back the rebellion stead
ily ever since, and has drawn a boundary to defend the loyal
1865.] Nature of the Campaign. 113
North, with a wall, as it were, of fire, which hardly even the
frenzy of despair will hereafter attempt to cross. Only the
standing menace of such a calamity as then threatened us,
only the desperate effort in July to break the cord tightening
round the lines at Richmond by such exploits as the burning
of Chambersburg and the attack on Washington, would have
compelled — much less justified — that dreadful task of mili
tary policy, which has stripped the valley of the Shenandoah
of the rich harvests that for four successive summers had sup
plied the armies of invasion, and made it the gateway of per
petual war. If there must be war, at least let its calamities
be limited and hedged by the frontiers of those States which
chose it and forced it on us. Let not its miseries be multi
plied tenfold by its alliance with armed conspiracy at home.
Make a desert of that one too vulnerable spot, rather than
spread the whole country over with the desolation which we
trust to restrain within steadily narrowing bounds, — month by»
month, and, if it must be, year by year !
The existence and the aims of that conspiracy have been
indicated to us clearly enough to hint the motive which may
be supposed to have prompted the military policy of the gov
ernment. We see, too, the great generosity and courage of
its home policy, which has suffered every sort of party attack
to go on unchecked, and has protected the freest play of all
the machinery of opposition, even to violent charges of tyr
anny and usurpation, and undisguised threats of revolution.
And the facts now before us serve to show how great cause we
have to rejoice in the stability and strength of our political
fabric, which has endured so severe a strain without a sign of
fracture, or any loosening of its joints. There are tides in
the affairs of men, ebbs and flows of the popular courage and
temper ; and there have been times during this war when the
result of such a trial might have been doubtful. It was for
tunate that the moment of it coincided with a slow but steady
uplifting of the wave ; and that the swell of the flood-tide has
floated us over the shoals where a few weeks earlier we might
possibly have stranded. It is hard to estimate at such a time
the value of that magnificent vote of confidence which has
been recorded, or the shock which might have been given by
10*
simply withholding it. A change of administration, even to

hands equally strong and faithful, would at least have found
them untrained to the precise duties and emergencies of the
hour ; and it would certainly have opened the door to all dis
loyal hopes — wild and groundless as they might be — which
would crave any change for the chance it might seem to open
to secret treason and conspiracy, with its dark and bloody
counsels.
What, then, has the election settled ? What is the nature of
the verdict that it has given ?
First, and most obvious of all, it has settled, as far as the
assertion of the national will can settle it, the absolute sup1
pression of the rebellion, without surrender or qualification
of the main point, — the just sovereignty of the Nation which
the rebellion had attacked. It has asserted for the nation's
policy that stern watchword of the campaign, No compromise
with traitors in arms. It has shown that the spirit with
which the vast burden and dread of this war were undertaken,
near four, years ago, was not a flush of momentary heat, but
was the glow of a steady conviction, and the inspiration of a
settled purpose. To have reaffirmed, in all its intensity and
breadth, the resolution of that time, — now, after the terrible
experience of war, in the midst of its anxieties and sufferings,
in the face of bitter complaints and dreads, with the clear
knowledge of what it must yet cost to carry this work through
to the end, — to have done this is an assertion of national res
olution and confidence and conscious strength, which seems
already to have carried us a long way towards the end.
And we see this, still further, in the temper with which all
parties seem to have accepted the result. It seems not too
much to hope that, in a very large degree, factious opposition
to the government will cease, and be discouraged ; that those
who have been alienated about the means and policies will
act together for the result ; that something like an era of good
feeling, of unselfish patriotism, over all distinctions of party
and class, may possibly be one of the births of the time. We
have good cause also to hope that the government of our
country, delivered from conspiracies and threats, and finding
itself so strong in the support of the country at large, may be
1865.] Southern Doctrine of States' Rights. 115
able to work with a more direct and single aim, to secure the
return of peace and order and the authority of law. So firm
a resolve of so vast a population, that peace can be had only
on terms which secure at once the nation's integrity and its
honor, must have of itself great weight to secure that end.
As the leader of our armies himself has said, it is worth more
to the cause than the greatest victory in the field.*
But, besides, the election has settled, as definitely as such
matters can be settled, two distinct points, — one touching
the nature, and the other touching the policy, of that national
government, now staked on the issue of the war.
It has not always been distinctly kept in mind how inevi
tably what we call the Rebellion — but which, in the view of
the authors of it, is by no means a rebellion — has grown out
of the different theory of State Rights held at the North and
at the South. Here, we have been educated all our lives to
believe in the authority and majesty of a great Nation ; at the
South, they have been trained just as steadily. to believe in
the independent sovereignty of States. In the very month
of the outbreak of the War, De Bow's Review, speaking in
the name of the Southern people at large, used the following
words : —
"Nothing perhaps more stvikingly illustrates the irreconcilable if not
' irrepressible conflict ' of opinion between the North and South, than
the prevailing discussion as to the right of a State to secede from the
Federal Union. In the South it is no longer an open question, and it
seems almost as useless to adduce arguments to prove as to refute the
doctrine. It has for years been part and parcel of our organic laws,
and is now affirmed, not only theoretically, but practically, in the ordi-
* We copy here the closing sentences of the President's late Message : —

" In presenting the abandonment of arms to the national authority on the part of
the insurgents, as the only indispensable condition to ending the war on the part of
government, I retract nothing heretofore said. As to slavery, I repeat the declara
tion made a year ago, that, white I remain in my present position, I shall not attempt
to retract or modify the Emancipation Proclamation, nor shall 1 return to slavery any
person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress.
If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to
re-enslave such persons, another, not I, must be their instrument to propose it.
" In stating a single condition of peace, I mean simply to say that the war will
cease on the part of the government whenever it shall have ceased on the part of .
those who began it."
nances of secession, adopted with unparalleled unanimity by conventions
of the people in South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia,
Louisiana, and Texas, soon to be followed by co-operative action in the
other Slaveholding States, and the formation, at no distant day, of a
Southern Confederacy. While such is the popular verdict in this case
at the South, the right in question is universally denied by the people
of the Northern States ; and not only by rabid Republicans, clamor
ous with bloodthirsty threats of coercion and war, but by the most
orthodox and conservative statesmen of the Democratic school. The
secession of a State from the Union is treated even by this class of
politicians as an act of revolt, and the citizens of seceding States, pro
tected by the regis of their sovereign authority, are put in the same
category with rebels and traitors to the government. Our contradictory
opinions on this subject are, no doubt, founded on processes of argu
ment equally logical ; and the difference between us results from the
fact that our conclusions are deduced from premises diametrically op
posite.
" The Northern judgment obviously proceeds on the assumption that
the general government at Washington is the centre of a grand con
solidated empire, of which the States are mere appurtenances or
provincial subdivisions. Upon no other hypothesis could a State be
accused of rebellion. This, as all men know, means the resistance of
an inferior to the lawful enactments of a superior. It implies the vio
lation of allegiance. To predicate, therefore, rebellion of a State, or
of citizens of a State, in obeying its sovereign authority, in opposition
to the laws of the Federal Congress, is equivalent to the assertion that
the allegiance of the citizen is due to the government of the United
States ; and since allegiance is the correlative of sovereignty, it must
follow that the government is supreme, and the States subordinate.
Such notions, it is needless to say, ignore or falsify all the facts of our
history, and contravene the whole theory of federal government. If
we turn to the record, it will be found that the government at Wash
ington is, in truth, but a corporation, possessed of no original author
ity, created by the several States for certain specific purposes, with all
its powers delegated, enumerated, and limited in the Constitution, its
charter ; and that the only sovereignty is with the people of the several
States composing the Union, to whom alone is due the allegiance of
the citizens respectively." — pp. 385, 386.
We have not space to discuss that theory of State sovereign

ty thus explicitly set forth ; or to illustrate, what history shows
so clearly, the impracticable nature of it as a working theory
1865.] Theory of State Sovereignty. 117
of government. Nor need we dwell on those passages in our
own past histoFy, — such as the Louisiana purchase, the Kan
sas territorial legislation, the expatriation of the Indians, the
annexation of Texas, the war with Mexico, the Fugitive Slave
Law, the attempts on Cuba, — in which the most arbitrary
lines of policy, and those most positively asserting a high na
tional jurisdiction, have been most vehemently upheld by these
" States' Rights" politicians of the South, whenever chancing
to harmonize with their policy of extending a great slave em
pire on this continent, whether by conquest, purchase, or an
nexation. We copy these paragraphs, because they are the
latest, precise, and most authentic wording of the challenge
which was thrown out to the national government in the act
of secession. They tell us plainly what it waS we had to con
tend with then ; and they define very clearly the theory which
is going to be our great embarrassment and danger in dealing
with the questions which have grown out of the war.
We do not undertake to question the sincerity with which
the theory is held. Its very peril and mischief consist in the
sincerity with which it is held. We wish to call attention only
to the one point, that it denies, explicitly and in terms, the ex
istence of any American Nation to which allegiance is due, or
of any common government, except a mere committee, or
agency, of twenty or thirty independent sovereigns. We would
only point how direct and how fatal a denial it is of the con
victions we have held, and of the faith which sustains our
people in this war. We would only show how precisely con
trary it is to the instinct, the pride, the hope, the loyalty, which
make the glory of the American name as we have claimed it ;
and how certainly it must lead, sooner or later, to an " irre
pressible conflict," in which one or the other theory of the gov
ernment must give way.
The conflict came in our own time ; and perhaps it may as
well have come up for settlement now as at any time, before or
since. It came to a point on the question of slavery, — that
is, the relations of labor, race, education, and public justice on
the very largest scale, — making it, in fact, a conflict between
two eras of civilization and two hostile orders of society ; and
perhaps it may as well have come in that shape as in any other.
The character of the government which is to control the future
of this great continent for many generations fli unknown pe
riods of time, is one of the questions on which we cast our
votes the other day ; — whether it shall be a league or federa
tion of petty sovereignties, — according to De Tocqueville, the
most impotent, weak, awkward, and incapable machine to lead
a nation to anything but anarchy; or whether it shall be a
united and single nation, resting on the loyalty, intelligence,
and patriotic faith of its entire population, — which is probably
the strongest, most durable, and just. This is one of the ques
tions which our people were called to decide by November's
verdict of the polls.
And let us not disguise from ourselves the doubtfulness and
hazard of the decision. There is a charm in that phrase
" State sovereignty," in the name of independence, in bounda
ries and places and local names, in the immense multiplication
of offices and careers open to personal ambition. Probably
never in all history has patriotism been so keen a passion as in
the petty states of Greece, where its antipathies and hostilities
were arrayed against a public enemy ten miles off. There is,
too, a natural jealousy and dread of central power, with its
dangers of corrupt patronage and unscrupulous despotism,
which makes the State-rights theory very attractive to men of
ambitious temper, and very plausible to those of a speculative
turn of mind. This controversy has made one great danger
— perhaps we may say the one great danger — of our political
history. Very intimately, very subtly, and in many ways, it
has been mixed up in the political campaign we have just
passed through. And it is a source of thankfulness that, so
far as may be by the decision of that great tribunal of a peo
ple's voice, it is effectually set to rest for a time.
We by no means charge the party of the opposition — that
is, the large and as we believe the entirely loyal majority of it
— with complicity in the underhand and treacherous attempt
which has been made to pervert the meaning of the Constitu
tion, and alter the theory of our government, so as to meet
the wish and carry out the purpose of its enemies. But a
party platform is not only a public document ; it becomes a
fact of history, which we are invited to interpret by such best
1865.] The Chicago Platform. 119
light as we can get. The reputed " inspirations " of the
Chicago Platform, and the known connections of Mr. Vallan-
digham with disloyal men, justify the suspicion that that plat
form may be written in a dialect, and may couch its political
creed in phrases, requiring some key to give it the true render
ing known to the initiated. We are struck in reading it with
the reServed and cautious way in which its loyalty is professed.
Thorough loyalty, of the stamp we generally hear, is not
measured and apologetic in its terms, such as we find it here.
Fidelity is professed to the " Union under the Constitution "
— we have been wont to hear of a nation competent to ordain
and amend its constitution — as " equally conducive to the
prosperity of all the States, both Northern and Southern."
The " failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war "
means what ? Not the inability to assert the authority of the
government, for that work has been going on these three years,
and is proceeding rather hopefully now ; but it means that
war will not secure a voluntary acquiescence in the principles
against which war was declared : who supposed it would ?
So the " ultimate convention of all the States " is proposed as
the highest tribunal of appeal, — not any lawfully constituted
authority of the nation. So the resolve is registered, " to pre
serve the Federal Union " — the chosen phrase, as we have
seen, of Southern theorists — " and the rights of the States
unimpaired," meaning probably more than a mere protest
against Mr. Sumner's doctrine (which has never been accepted
by the administration), -that States in rebellion are ipso facto
in the condition of unorganized Territories. The charges of
" open and avowed disregard of State rights," and denial of
" the right of the people to bear arms," are charges, no doubt,
against what would be very arbitrary and wrong, but for the
desperate efforts to maintain a form of rebel State-sovereignty
in Missouri and Kentucky, — States which there is no pretence
of having "regularly" seceded from the Union, — and that
unlucky discovery of " thirty thousand stand of arms " in In
diana, on the way to the secret allies of the Rebellion. With
all respect to the loyal many in the ranks of the opposition in
November, it is well to keep a jealous eye on the movements,
and on the published declarations, of the disloyal few.
*
In the second publication on our list, Mr. Jay has made a
vigorous exposure of the means by which the Northern mind
is approached, with insidious defences of State sovereignty,
with misinterpretations of our political history, with falsifi
cations of the part borne by the statesmen of the Constitution-
forming period, with arguments and learned citations which,
if accepted, would undermine the structure of our national
existence, and eat away the heart and nerve which have sus
tained the nation in the great contest that is on us now. A
literature and a dialect of this style of political opinion are in
process of growth ; and a library of some extent, in the interest
of the State-rights school, is announced for speedy publication.
The handsome volume of Dawson's " Fcederalist," which took
us by surprise a year ago with its statements of the history of
the acceptance of the Constitution in New York, and particu
larly of the part taken in it, among others, by Mr. Jay, who is
asserted to have had little or no faith in the theory of the Con
stitution from the first, is to serve, it seems, as entering
wedge. But the book which we have put at the head of our
list is by far the most remarkable and explicit exposition
hitherto of this new political school, and deserves a few mo
ments of our particular attention.
In form, it is an " Introductory Compend " of an extended
work, to consist of five large octavo volumes, entitled " Our
Fcederal Union : State Rights and Wrongs." In argument, it
is a vehement, and apparently earnest plea, by one who pro
fesses himself the convert of his own investigations, for the
doctrine of State sovereignty, as opposed to American nation
ality, perhaps in the most definito and consistent shape in
which it has yet been presented. The argument is fortified by
a sketch of the history of international law, — a subject that
seems to have seized on the author's mind with a singular and
enslaving fascination, — and by an immense citation of pas
sages from almost all the eminent writers on that subject ; the
leading American authorities only, Kent, Story, and Wheaton,
being steadily disparaged and set aside. The South is said to
have held the true doctrine on this matter ; only the South
committed the fatal error of neglecting to appeal to the Fed
eral Court, and of striking the first blow in a war which the
1865.] " Citizen Sovereignty." 121
• *
loyal States must now follow up until the South surrender.
But surrender to what ? To a realization and enforcement of
their own cherished theory of State sovereignty ; to a decision
which declares that " Britain, France, and Russia are not
more independent nations than Massachusetts, Virginia, and
Illinois " (p. 23) ; to a union of States resting avowedly " on
principles of international law " (p. 40) ; to a theory that " no
means exist, none can possibly be devised, to bind a sovereign
State, except a compact or league " (p. 48) ; to a creed which
calls the Constitution a mere " power of attorney," and the
States " joint proprietors " of the public domain (p 78) ; to a
compact for " returning to the South all icho have been slaves "
(p. 93), and denning the whole matter of slavery by the inter
national and the Hebrew code, giving it harbor in all the States,
and eminent domain in all the Territories ; to a reconstruc
tion which provides that " the South, as hitherto, till the last
three years, will plan and manage our political concerns, and
the West will furnish the votes for their adoption " (p. 134) !
We need not be surprised, accordingly, to find a rather ob
trusive effort to smooth the way of such a " surrender " for
the Southern leaders. First, the great Northwest must be
thrown open to slavery, by pronouncing the Ordinance of 1789
" void, as a gross usurpation " (p. 52) ; slavery is so clear a
right of the dwellers in the Louisiana purchase, that " France
has just cause of war " if we refuse it (p. 63) ; the present ad
ministration is charged with " the blackest, foulest spots of
despotism that in modern years have defaced the historic
page " (p. 69) ; a class aristocracy is declared to be our great
need, and " a pure democracy is our special abhorrence "
(p. 149) ; the name American is " a detestable word that we
have to use," for want of better (p. 191) ; " the star-spangled
banner," it is hinted, must " give way to a new emblem "
(p. 205) ; as to the Constitution, its fatal error was in com
mencing " We the people," instead of " We the Peoples " ;
and we are told, " Tear it in shreds, trample it in the dust,
damn it to everlasting infamy," as an " infidel " document,
because it ascribes the right of sovereignty to the people (p.
198) ; while, in the coming struggle for State rights, " it will
not be the most improbable of circumstances, if the Fedehal
Republican citizens of the North should be joined with the
armies of the South, to re-establish the federal institutions of
our fathers, against the efforts of Consolidists and Abolition
ists " (p. 195).
These, it should be said, are the theories and phrases of a
" reconstructionist," — one who professes, indeed, the abstract
right of secession, but vehemently repudiates disunion. They
are the legitimate inferences from the doctrine of State sov
ereignty, coupled with the resolution to restore " the Union as
it was," on terms which shall be satisfactory to the revolted
States. And, as we see, the sarcasms of " The New Gospel of
Peace " do not exaggerate one whit that political doctrine here
6et forth. In the present temper of the public mind, we ap
prehend no danger whatever from these theories. But they
deserve, at least, some other treatment than mere indifference
and contempt. They are evidently backed by a party which
has command of much wealth, of no mean talent and erudition,
and of a very considerable amount of political zeal. They are
the theories, not of mere pedants and bigots, but of propagand
ists and doctrinaires. The names indorsed on the volume
from which we have quoted indicate a wide-spread, concerted,
and formidable attempt to prepossess the public mind, in view
of the questions of reconstruction which are sure to come with
the declaration of peace. And it should not be forgotten,
either, that public opinion abroad has almost universally as
sumed State sovereignty as the true theory of our government,
and has predicted its overthrow, with absolute confidence, on
that very ground. The mere fact that this nation calls itself
by a plural name seemed enough to show that its natural es
tate was that of division, and not union.
Nor have we any care to dispute the postulate of these the
orists, that our political history begins with the pure and
single sovereignty of independent States. That is, undoubt
edly, what was assumed in the Declaration ; it was tried and
failed conspicuously in the scheme of Confederation. In the
Constitution itself, the precise boundaries of local and central
power were neither clearly nor alike discerned by those who
framed the instrument ; still less by the legislatures charged
with carrying it into practice. All this we may well enough
1865.] The Assertion of National Power. 128
admit. The theory of our government has no douht been
modified by years and experience. That accurately balanced
compromise attempted in the Constitution could not, in the
nature of things, be always strictly kept. The pendulum
would swing a little, now this way, now that. And it may
well be that the seventy-six years of our constitutional history
— certainly these last years — do show a general drift in the
direction of central power. But what then ? Shall States be
governed by the theories of the past, or by the necessities of
the present ?
But have the States ever been in fact checked, or limited,
or oppressed in one single thing by this so much dreaded " cen
tralism," — except, indeed, in the one matter of slavery ? Or
would slavery itself, in the last fifty years, have been safer
in the feuds and rents of twenty or thirty independent sov
ereignties, than it has been under the formal sanction of the
Constitution ? It is very instructive to turn the pages of the
Discussions of the " Peace Congress" of 1861, and find, from
beginning to end, no one hint of a solitary grievance, except
in respect to slavery ; no one hint of any terms of peace,
demanded or offered, except fresh concessions and guaranties
to slavery. Hinc illce lacrymm ! All this loud complaint of
central despotism, all this menaced insurrection for State
rights, comes to a mere protest against that general advance
of public opinion and Christian civilization, which more and
more threatens the cherished property in man. To that
advance the war gives full and irresistible sweep. And we
have little question that, when slavery is once thoroughly
swept away, — as the late popular verdict has decreed it must
be, — the theory of States' rights will settle itself, easily and
practically ; and will be shelved among the questions of mere
speculation, always interesting but never solved, in the limbo
of political metaphysics. "•
There are a few matters on which, no doubt, the central
government, representing the nation as such, must come to as
sert more and more its high sovereignty. It is not until now,
for example, that Congress has claimed or used the authority
the Constitution gives it in matters of currency and finance •
Let that serve for an example. If the nation is to continue
124 The. Eighth of November. [Jan.
one, the central power must expand in proportion to the im
mensely expanding power, wealth, and population of the single
States. In the General Post-Office at Washington the visitor
may still see the thin ledger in which Benjamin Franklin once
kept the accounts of the seventy-five local offices. Last month's
Report shows that their number now is 28,878. An enormous
growth of central power and patronage ; but purely for help,
not harm, to local freedom. And this is a fair symbol and
sample of the rest. The local and central powers, in the nor
mal and average condition of the country in time of peace, no
more exclude each other, than the elements of light and heat.
Each is essential to the other. . Each is bnt one of the organ
ized forces of an advancing civilization. The stronger the
central organism, the more vigorous and free each single mem
ber of which it is composed.
The full consciousness of national unity and strength could
never have come to us, unless in the heat of such a struggle as
that we have been called to pass through. For the time, the
life-blood and the central heat seem poured most vigorously
into the extremities ; as it would appear from the statistics of
the late election, that the great Middle States were compara
tively neutral, while the immense preponderance of the national
party was found chiefly in the extreme East and West. Far
more intense than ever before we find the conviction of that
oneness, in history, heart, and destiny, which had seemed to
many finally lost. It is as a token of the revived and powerful
nationality of temper that we consider now, for a moment, the
order of questions immediately before us, whose solution is to
fix the future character of our policy.
At the head of all — urged by the President in his late
Message and waiting the last stage of Congressional action —
is the proposed amendment of the Constitution, defining our
portion as a nation in which it shall be impossible henceforth
to hold a slave. It were earnestly to be hoped it might be
carried, in such shape as to enjoin the absolute equality before
the law of every race and color. The technical or legal form
of slavery, it is probable, is not what we have chiefly to dread
hereafter. Caste, sanctioned or tolerated by law, is almost
as bad in itself, and even more hopeless of cure. Enough of
1865.} Legislation affecting' Slavery. 125
that misnamed " democracy " which intrusts political power
and privilege to aliens, criminals, and fools, — to the classes
which make the dread and shame of all great cities, — while
refusing it where there is no just bar, but only that of blood !
The monstrous abuses of universal suffrage in our great cities
would be no way mended by merely extending it to the multi
tudes whom slavery has kept so long in ignorant barbarism.
They can be fairly met only by some system of probation, lim
iting that great trust by some test of competency and worthi
ness. Whatever that test shall be, the Constitution itself
should ordain that it shall not be the test of race and blood.
The present hour should be seized to deliver the nation, once
for all, from the curse of a great population hopelessly shut
out from all political privilege, cut off from our great inherit
ance of freedom, under the ban of an unjust prejudice sanc
tioned and fortified % law.
Another measure of simple justice waits in Congress, which
it is to be hoped will speedily complete the noble record of
anti-slavery legislation, — the establishment of a Freedmen's
Bureau, by which the nation shall frankly assume the guard
ianship of a class having so peculiar a claim upon its care.
This charge, which must be undertaken by some one, — unless
we would see this population perish in heaps, or sink into a
hopeless savagery, the disgrace and peril of the nation itself
that should harbor it, — is a task infinitely beyond the re
sources of private charity. Not that charity, either, is what
is chiefly needed. Charity, no doubt, at first ; and private char
ity has nobly led the way. But next and permanently, not
charity, only justice and organizing skill. It is a very'strik-
ing testimony in favor of the negro population, and a very
great encouragement in the work that must be done, that that
population has generally been so apt to learn, so easy to or
ganize, so willing to help, so ready to pay for teaching. In the
great convulsion and anarchy of war that has swept over the
slave-holding States, forty thousand more whites than blacks,
we are told, have been cast upon the support and protection of
the military authority. This does not make the guardianship
of them needless, it only saves the task from being hopeless.
No jealousy at the encroachments of central power, no delicacy
11*
about using the means and instruments in the nation's hands,
need prevent the thorough organizing and the rigorous execu
tion of this great task of the new civilization that is dawning
upon the enslaved race. Mere self-defence would demand it
of us. And it is a task which only the resources, the intelli
gence, and the official authority of a great nation could possi
bly undertake.
It is only by attempting great things that a nation, like a
man, becomes competent and fit to do them. That one source
of jealousy and embarrassment among us, which has stood in
the way of every scheme of internal improvement, of every
marked step in the advance of a higher civilization, will be
done away in the final conquest of that evil power which chal
lenged the nation to the terrible contest of these last four
years. With the overthrow of the rebellion, and the complete
establishment of our undivided nationaHsovereignty, the way
will be open to all great works and policies of peace, — to
every public enterprise for the prosperity, the rights, the cul
ture, the liberties of men. Even these years of bloody con
flict, and financial embarrassment, and public fear, have seen
more wise, liberal, and enlightened legislation, — even aside
from all matters growing directly from slavery and the war, —
than many a long year before. The pressure was taken off.
The hostile and vigilant suspicion was no longer a hedge and
check. And now that problems in the practical art of govern
ment stand right before us, bearing on interests so vast, on
populations and territory of so grand a scale, — problems in
volving the construction of a new order of society in place of
one shattered and effete, — now that our statesmen must deal
with the destinies of all this wide continent at once, and with
perhaps the greatest tide of emigration of all history waiting
the signal of peace to pour itself upon our shores, — let but
the nation be equal to the opportunity and the need ; and the
verdict of November shall be the pledge and the beginning of
a new and nobler era to that Union of States which it has so
emphatically affirmed.
1865.] Theology. 127
Art. Vin. — REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.
THEOLOGY.
Dr. Bushnell is certainly one of the chief ornaments of our theo

logical literature. With a felicity of diction that borders close on
poetry, and a fineness of fancy often approaching genius, with a facile
and graceful movement of thought, fresh from the living contact with
the out-door world, he has done more than any other we can readily
name to illustrate and adorn some of the rarest and finest phases of
Christian piety. That delicate touch and almost feminine refinement
which charmed us in the hearing of his discourse on " Work and
Play," are relieved by the clear good-sense we find in what he says,
whether of New England farming or of " the Day of Roads," by that
wealth of the open vision which has given us the finest picture we have
yet of the scenery and climate of California, and by the analytical skill
which has contributed some of the best material to our theories of lan
guage in its higher uses. It is only just, "in alluding to his name, to
hint at the variety and breadth of the field which he has illustrated in
his own peculiar style of refined, cultivated, and Christian thought.
Whatever he has done to justify the expectations of a few years ago,
that he would powerfully advance and liberalize the prevailing theology
of the New England churches, seems to have been purely by the tone
and temper of his religious writings. Intellectually, he appears de
sirous of proving that he has not moved out of the circle of the current
religious views. At one time, suspicions of " heresy " began to attach
themselves to him ; but whatever liberal sympathies he then invited
seem to have caused a certain shyness in him, and a recoil from the
tendency he might unconsciously have followed. Or rather, perhaps,
hi9 slight divergence from the popular creed only brought into more
vivid relief the features of the religious system from which he never
held himself to dissent. Without the robust intelligence needed for the
reformer, or even the independent critic of prevalent moods of thinking,
the service he could render was to develop in more refined and thought
ful ways the germs already at hand. The very titles and topics of his
volumes are for vindication of his orthodoxy. The circle of his relig
ious thought gathers and narrows very closely about the vital centre of
his theological creed. His new volume of Discourses * is in large part
an illustration of single points connected with the speculative conception
of the divine humanity of Jesus.
As sermons, some of them are exceedingly tender and beautiful.
In style, they have once or twice reminded us of Jeremy Taylor, — far
as their clear, crisp diction might appear frem his loose exuberance*and
riotous play of words. We think the reader will catch a glimpse of the
likeness in some phrases of the following, from the sermon on " The
Gentleness of God": — _i
* Christ and his Salvation. In Sermons variously related thereto. Also, Work
and Play [a volume of Miscellaneous Addresses] . By Horace Bushnell.
New York : Charles Scribner.
128 Review of Current Literature. [Jan.
" It is with us here, in everything, as it was with Jonah when the Lord
sent him to Nineveh. It was a good long journey inland, but Jonah steers
for Joppa, straight the other way, and there puts to sea, sailing off upon it,
and then under it, and through the belly of hell, and conies to land nobody
knows where. After much perambulation, he gets to Nineveh, and gives his
message doggedly, finally to be tamed by a turn of hot weather and the wilt
ing of a gourd. Just so goes the course of a soul whom God is training for
obedience and life. It may be the case of a young man, setting off wilfully,
with his face turned away from God. Whereupon God lets him please him
self a little in his folly, and finally pitch himself into vice, there to learn, by
the bitter woes of his thraldom, how much better God is to him than he is to
himself, how much worthier of trust than he ever can be to himself. Or he
takes, it may be, a longer course with him, gives him a turn of sickness, then
of bankruptcy, then of desertion by friends, then of slander by enemies, tam
ing thus his pride, sobering his feeling, making the world change colors, but
not yet gaining him to the better life. Then Le fetches him out of his disas
ters by unexpected vindications and gifts of mercy, such as soften unwontedly
the pitch of his sensibilities. A faithful Christian wife, gilding his lot of
adversity before, by her gentle cares, and quite as much his recovery now,
by the beautiful spirit she has formed in his and her children by her faithful
training, — making them an honor to him as to herself, — wins upon his wilful
habit, melts into his feeling, and operates a change in his temperament itself.
Meantime, his years will have been setting him on, by a silent drift, where his
will would never carry him, and changing, in fact, the current of his inclina
tion itself. Till at length, dissatisfied with himself, and more softened to God,
as he is more diverted from the satisfaction he once had in himself, he turns,
with deliberate consent, to the call of Jesus, and finds what seemed to be a
yoke to be easy as liberty itself." — pp. 88, 39.
The sermon from which we have' quoted seems to us to show the
finest insight of all, in its illustration of those " indirections " by which
the heart of man is won to piety. Another example of the same quality
is that on " Christian ability." Two very striking sketches of charac
ter, illustrating widely different points, are found in the sermon on
" Integrity and Grace." Two references to the passions and events of
the present time, one to the dignity of our soldiers' service, and the
other to the righteous wrath of the defenders of the state, are the only
departure we notice from the strictly religious and personal character
of the discussion. And the features we have named appear to us
strongly relieved above the general tone and level of the book. We
complain — though with some hesitation — of a lack of precision in the
thought as presented here. What, for example, is the nature of that
" lost condition," from which the Christian salvation was the only pos
sible escape ?
TnE " Hymns of the Ages " * have now come to a third series, and ap
pear this year again in the same handsome, soberly elegant form as here
tofore, and with like familiar matter of well-selected sacred lyrics, high-
sounding or sweet-toned, and spiritual songs tender and truthful.
We trust it is a hint that this is not the last in the series, where the
Preface tells us that in this volume not half the manuscript material
* Hymns of the Ages. Third Series. Boston : Ticknor and Fields.

in the compilers' hands could find place. The next edition will offer
the chance to correct the oversight of attributing to Milton the verses
on page 250, and to give the right name, Elizabeth Lloyd Howell. We
should like to see, too, an index of authors' names. And it may be a
whim of ours, but the title of " Rev." here and there seems a bit in
trusive, and may well be omitted.
It does not take from the value of the book, to find some of our most
familiar hymns in it, but rather adds to the worth and pleasure of it.
The best hymn-book is one founded on Watts. We are well aware
that this is, nowadays, the deadest conservatism. But such is our taste
and belief. Barring that he is unequal, and disfigures his hymns with
an atrocious theology, which can be made no more lyric than true, still
he remains easily the first and head of our writers of hymns, in certain
eminent points of excellence. He is, in truth, more hymn-singer than
hymn-writer. And that is the condition to a real hymn, that it shall
come out of the singing spirit, not by the composing, constructing wits.
Comparatively few sets of stanzas which take that name have a right
to it. In few is it given to the lyric power to have free course and be
glorified.
" In Time of War," is the first caption. And the hymns under it
are fitly selected ; trumpet-notes, for the most part, leading on the
fight and leading in the victory of the cause of the people and of God ;
not wanting either the milder mood of the songs of Peace ; and, where
there is funeral music, the triumph of heroic souls, with strong and
tender comforts to the sorrowful heard in it, such as Beethoven and
Chopin put into their death marches.
The captions succeed one another: Patience, Praise, God, Christ,
Son, Quiet, Heaven, The One Church. Under these headings, what
treasures should riot be found ? And we do find fit expression given
to many great thoughts, gentle moods, deep desires, and soaring faiths,
in many a hymn truly precious in the agreement of form with inspira
tion. They date all the way from the sixth century to to-day. But,
oldest and newest, they deal with that which is older than the ancient-
est, and newer than the latest of them. And this is the ground of their
excellence, and of the esteem in which they are held, that worthily and
sincerely they deal with that Truth in souls, whose infinite variety age
cannot wither, and custom cannot stale, and with which every heart, as
it is pure, finds itself at home, in a dear and sacred kinship.
At the opening page is figured Fra Angelico's splendid " Bird of
God," with loud uplifted angel-trumpet sounding his high heavenly
Gloria in Excelsis Deo. On the closing page we read an aspiration
of this newest time toward that Life of Ages, the Love of God flowing
in the Prophet's word and the People's liberty to His high earthly
glorifying. It is well and becoming in a Hymnal of the Holy Catholic
Church so to be*nn and end.
HISTORY AND POLITICS.
It has long seemed strange to us that Miss Martineau's History of

the Peace * — on which her great and deserved reputation in England
mainly rests — should be so rare a book, and so difficult to be found
by American readers. Having given it some study a few years ago,
we were prepared to welcome in advance the announcement of its
republication, in a completer as well as more convenient form than the
costly English volumes.
This History, it appears, was bdgun by Mr. Charles Knight, who,
with the assistance of Professor Craik, had completed the First Book,
or half the Introduction, — carrying the narrative half-way through the
period of the wars with Napoleon. The entire Introduction, down to
the second Treaty of Paris, in 1815, fills the first volume of this edi- '
tion. We have found it very interesting, not merely as a summary in
outline of the events of that great struggle, but because the point of view
is that of the home policy and home feeling of the English themselves
during that period. So that it loses its dryness as a chronicle or sum
mary, and becomes a perpetual reflection of the national mind and tem
per. And the incidents, personal and biographical, in which the politi
cal history of the time is given, are not only very interesting in them
selves, but are just those features of the history rarest to find in popu
lar compilations, and most desirable to preserve.
Miss Martineau's own share in this work is one of those marvels of
literary industry of which her own life is full, — among the most re
markable in all the history of letters. It was begun, she tells us, " in
the autumn of 1848, and the last pages were at press before the
close of 1849," — the sequel, from 1846 to 1854, haying been prepared
for the present edition. These dates, when we consider the period of
time, thirty years, and the vast amount of material to be included, quite
disarm criticism on the literary workmanship. Assuming it as such an
amount of work to be done by contract, and delivered at such a date,
the wonder is not merely that it should be done so well, but that it
should have been done at all. We have to regard it as a work of in
dustry, rather than as a work of art. And this, perhaps, explains its
limited reputation compared with its intrinsic value. The conditions of
its composition make it unjust to look for the qualities we demand in
the great classical histories, and forbid us to expect anything else,,
essentially, than a chronicle. What we do require is, that the chroni
cle shall be complete as far as may be, and that it shall be fair. We
believe it is absolutely without cavil in both respects.
We should reckon as the first of its merits, that it is indispensable.
History, in the popular imagination, leaps from brilliant point to point,
among the events that dazzle the fancy and stir the pulses of the blood.
But history, as the maturer judgment sees, must also move quietly, in
plain paths, and its best lessons are often those which are oftenest neg-
* History of the Peace ; being a History of England from 1816 to 1854. With an
Introduction, 1800-1815. By Harriet Martinkab. Vols. I., II. Boston:
Walker, Wise, & Co.
1865.] History and Politics. 131
lected. The comparatively dull level of the thirty years of peace has
left its deep marks on the institutions, the literature, the thought, the
art and Business, the social and home lifeôf the English people. Even
to understand their' writers, much more to apprehend the spirit of their
thinking, and the lessons of their experience, we need some clear, brief,
accessible narrative of tjje plain facts, such as we have never had until
now. This is the first, unchallenged merit of the work before us, — its
necessity.
Again, one learns, with a constant surprise, the interest both of char
acters and scenes in this comparatively neglected level of almost coa-
temporary annals. To the older reader, they bring back in brief the
vivid reminiscence ; to the younger, they give a fund of serviceable in
formation. Merely to hint at the course of the narrative is to suggest
its great interest and value. The reaction after the long desperate war
waged on the continent of Europe ; the financial embarrassment and
collapse; the "labor-battles," resulting from the passions and distresses
of the population ; the long parliamentary struggles of a liberalism that
made such steady though slow advance; the reform-triumphs of 1832,
with its fruits in the colonial and home policy two years later ; the con
spiracy to set aside the succession of the crown in the interest of a baf
fled toryism ; the warm enthusiasm that welcomed a new and maiden
reign ; the well-won triumph of free-trade over protection in 1846, —
these topics suggest something of the nature of that interest to be looked
for in these volumes. And when we include with them the personal
memories of the writer, and the keen sympathy with the feeling and
movement of the period she describes, growing warmer and clearer
from year to year, from the eager thoughts of an intelligent childhood
to the mature convictions of her later years, we have said enough to
indicate the remarkable and unique value of this work.
One further remark on its mode of composition will help us to a fair
judgment of its merit, whether as a literary work, or as a source of in
struction to us in the problems that await our future. The mere state
ment that it was begun and finished in about the compass of one year,
shows that — unless a careless and idle compilation, which it is not —
it is written by the dogmatist of a theory, and is the mouthpiece of a
clear, definite, precise, perhaps narrow, creed in politics, philosophy,
and life. Miss Martineau has suffered some radical changes of opinion
in her day ; but whatever opinion she has held, it has been with no
misgiving of its truth and with no hesitation in its defence. She is a
woman too intelligent and too largely informed to be. called a bigot ; but,
in the strictest meaning which can be given to that word, she has always
written, thought, and spoken as a doctrinaire. She never forgets that she
is writing in the interest of the latest school of English liberalism ; she
never misses the chance to strike a blow in the name of free-trade against
protection. She has no need, in this History, to search for truth, only
to expound doctrine by events. Even the brief Preface in which she
commends her work to the new circle of American readers, hoping it
may serve us in the imminent exigencies of the time, is nearly half
taken up with a lecture on free-trade, and an admonition of the error
of our American policy. For which advice we heartily thank her, and
hope to follow it — when our war-debt is paid off, and when protection
has had its perfect work in developing the sources of our national in
dustries, as thoroughly as they in England have developed theirs.
Meanwhile, the reader will mark these two members of what mathe
maticians call the " personal equation " in this book ; — the hints of per
sonal experience here and there, which it is so pleasant to detect, and
the substructure of personal opinion which crops out here and there,
and of which we can always foretell the dip and trend. This latter
may hurt the value of the book as a work of philosophy or art ; but it
was the one indispensable condition of its having been produced at all.
The two very neat volumes of the present issue bring the history
down to the year 1826. Among the incidental matters of interest
which we have referred to may be mentioned the sickness and death
of Pitt (Vol. I. p. 140) ; the abolition of the slave trade (id. 201) ;
machinery and frame-breaking (id. 334); the bitter winter of 1814
(id. p. 415) ; the heat and drought of 1826 (Vol. II., p. 429) ; the col
lapse and panic of 1825 (id. p. 413) ; and the "necrology" of illustri
ous names which closes each of the volumes under review. But the
topics of larger interest, both in the political and the personal history of
the time, are more abundant in the later portion of the work, which, we
trust, will not be long delayed.
The title of Mr. Maine's " Ancient Law " * hardly suggests the ex
traordinary interest of his volume, not merely to students of his own
profession, but to scholars generally, and, in particular, to those who
wish to understand the first principles of Social Science. Mr. Maine
himself has pointed out the striking difference between the speculations
of a century ago, which proceeded from a baseless theory or idea of the
origin of society, and those of the present day, which proceed upon
a careful and accurate study of known facts. And one of the most
fruitful suggestions of his volume is that of the complex, artificial and
' highly developed condition of what we are apt to take for primitive
facts in our reading of ancient history and custom. The value to the
philosopher of positive institutions and existing codes has never per
haps been so fully set forth as we find it, quite incidentally and by im
plication, in the present volume. We should be apt to say that its
philosophical importance is even greater than its literary or technical
or legal value.
We have copied Mr. Maine's personal titles in full, because they
suggest the sources and the quality of that learning of which he ex
hibits so remarkable and so easy a mastery. The classic erudition of
the schools, familiar knowledge of the ponderous and highly developed
* Ancient Law ; its Connection with the Early History of Society, and its Re
lation to Modern Ideas. By Henry Sumner Maine, Member of the Supreme
Council of India, formerly Reader on Jurisprudence and the Civil Law at the Mid
dle Temple, and Regius Professor of the Civil Law in the University of Cambridge.
First American from the Second London Edition. New York : Charles Scrib-
ner. 8ro.
Civil Code, with parallels and illustrations drawn from laws and prac
tices in Hindostan, — these three are about equally conspicuous in his
pages, the marked predominance being given, of course, to the second.
But the quality which appeals most forcibly to the reader's mind, and
carries most instruction, is the extraordinary steadiness of grasp and
clearness of treatment with which he has developed the antecedents of
written law. For the very earliest codes known to us, as he illustrates,
are by no means the creation of the lawgiver, but are the term and
summary of a long period of spontaneous development ; and rightly to
interpret the code, it is necessary to. go behind it, and trace out the ele
ments from which it has grown.
The earliest form in which law is distinctly spoken of is as the spon
taneous edict, or (as it were) the special inspiration, of the lawgiver :
in Homer, the " Themis " who inspires him, or the " themistes " which
he delivers ; precisely, in fact, like the sentences pronounced by the
Turkish Cadi, in so many popular tales, the edict of an unchallenged
and divine authority. It is a later stage of generalization that makes
of these " themistes " a tradition and a mystery, — the peculiar pos
session of an aristocracy, — a rude system of common law, administered
and interpreted by a ruling order, — as in Rome by the patriciate and
in Oriental countries by the priesthood. And later still, that tradition,
edict, custom, and " case-law " we find gathered and harmonized in a
written code, — like the " Twelve Tables " of the Decemvirs, — which
thence becomes the germ of a vast development, and the theme of end
less commentary.
But what is the origin of the deference paid to the " themistes " ?
and, in particular, whence the regard for the rights of person and prop
erty ? What is the ultimate fact in human nature, or the history of
human society, which stands to us as the absolute beginning of property
and authority and law ? Some say, the mere assertion of brute force ;
some, the occupation, by any one man, of a given spot of ground, and
the inînctive respect shown to that occupation by other men. But
the earliest known facts prove neither. Rather they show that ancient
society, and the laws of ancient states so far as known to us, know ab
solutely nothing of the individual. The unit of the state is the family,
not the man. Each householder — like the tribe or clan, which is
made of many households — is represented by its chief. Ancient law,
in defining the relations among these households, was of the nature of
international law. In fact, modern international law mostly borrows
the principles and maxims of the civil codes which first applied to the
relations of citizens in their representative capacity as heads of house
holds. The property there recognized is not the property of the man,
but the common property of the family. The father, or the eldest male
representative of the family after him, holds and administers it in trust.
Hence the theory of the " gens," or house, as made up of families
allied in blood, and of the pure aristocratic state, as made up of many
houses. Hence the frequency and. importance of adoption, to maintain
the existence of a family in a male representative, and the law-maxim,
that mulier est finis familice. Hence the theory of " gentile inherit-
ance," — the estate, in default of lineal heirs, reverting as a common
possession to the house ; that is, to all free citizens bearing the gentile
name. Hence the importance of the " agnatic " relationship as defined
by Roman law, — that is, the relationship purely by male descent, the
woman marrying into another house forfeiting her claim on that in
which she was born. Thus the "gens" Smith includes all, and in
cludes only, those who have kept the surname Smith. Hence the
abhorrence among the Romans of dying intestate, and so suffering
perhaps the dearest loved of all one's children or descendants, the
favorite daughter or the emancipated son, to lose all share in the family
estate. The family, the paternal authority, the patriarchal rule, thus
becomes the key for interpreting those parts of ancient life most apart
from modern custom, and, in particular, for tracing the wide difference
in the origin, the title, and the inheritance of wealth. " Joint ownership,
and not separate ownership, is the really archaic institution." (p. 251.)
It is the late effect of legal interpretation to " convert the patrimony of
many into the estate of one." (p. 231.)
Such, very imperfectly stated, is the theory of ancient society which
is laid down by Mr. Maine, with clear and masterly precision, and
which must serve hereafter as the corner-stone of our historical as well
as our legal philosophy. In a measure, and as a key to the early
history of Rome, Niebuhr had already made the thought tolerably
familiar ; and, simply as matter of interesting comparison, we should
have been glad if Mr. Maine had traced the analogies in the Mosaic
code, or had borrowed Vico's vivid illustration of the early condition of
society which he portrays, — both which seem rather difficult to avoid
in an investigation of this kind. The peculiar merit of the present
volume consists, first, in the clear, firm, and demonstrative way in
which the point is laid down ; and secondly, in the extraordinary skill,
felicity, and learning with which it is traced, through its developments
and modifications, into its relations with modern law and the history of
modern thought. Mr. Maine's powers of philosophical analysis and ex
position are of a high order, as shown in what he says (pp. 342 - 345)
of the intellectual differences between the Romans and the Greeks,
and in a passage (pp. 329 - 332) in which he treats of the study of
Roman jurisprudence as part of the philosophical training of modern
Europe, together with its application (p. 337) to the development of
Christian ethics.
Besides the high critical and speculative value which the student of
this volume will recognize, there are many extremely curious points of
ancient manners, — such as those pertaining to the formalities of be
quest and the obligation of contracts (see pp. 186, 229, 263, 303), —
which are important not merely as antiquities, but from their bearing
on moral science, throwing light on those most perplexing and offensive
examples of trickery which meet us in Greek and Roman story. For
it was an unquestioned maxim of ancient law, that the formalities, with
or without the promiser's will or understanding, were valid, while the
promise without the formalities was void.
Among the ancient habits of thought upon which light is thrown in
this volume, perhaps none is more instructive than the theory of the
"law of nature" as held by Roman jurists (p. 76), together with its
modern interpretations. From the latter we copy the following, respect
ing "the effect which it produced on the minds of the French lawyers."
While holding tenaciously, in practice, to the existing code, whose evils
they were helpless, or at least hopeless, to remedy,
" They became passionate enthusiasts for Natural Law. The law of nature
overleaped all provincial and municipal boundaries ; it disregarded all distinc
tions between noble and burgess, between burgess and peasant ; it gave the
most exalted place to lucidity, simplicity, and system ; but it committed its
devotees to no specific improvement, and did not directly threaten any ven
erable or lucrative technicality. Natural Law may be said to have become
the common law of France, or, at all events, the admission of its dignity and
claims was the one tenet which all French practitioners alike subscribed to."
— p. 82.
Then the sequel. This hypothesis
" passed suddenly from the forum to the street, and became the key-note of
controversies far more exciting than are ever agitated in the courts, or the
schools. The person who launched it on its new career was that remarkable
man who, without learning, with few virtues, and with no strength of charac
ter, has nevertheless stamped him*lf ineffaceably on history by the force of a
vivid imagination, and by the help of a genuine and burning love for his fel
low-men, for which much will always have to be forgiven him. We have never
seen in our own generation — indeed, the world has not seen more than once
or twice in all the course of history — a literature which has exercised such
prodigious influence over the minds of men, over every cast and shade of intel
lect, as that which emanated from Rousseau between 1749 and 1762." — pp.
83, 84.
A complete review of this volume would require us to examine Mr.
Maine's summary of the influences at work in the modification or re
form of written codes, viz.: 1. Legal Fictions; 2. Equity; 3. Legis
lation (p. 25) ; his account of the Roman judicature, so aptly described
as a " cycle of offices briskly circulating among the leaders of the bar "
(p. 34) ; the comparison of Roman and English " precedents " (p. 38) ;
and the detailed exposition of the nature and character of that patria
potestas, the original source of human authority, with its relation to
the state, the children, and the slaves. But we can do little more, in
this brief notice, than call attention to its very unusual interest to schol
ars and thinkers generally, as well as to the honorable profession which
it especially addresses.
Ox whatever subject Tayler Lewis writes, he writes learnedly, vigor

ously, and with a genuine enthusiasm. His devotion to classic studies
does not hinder his zeal in the questions of his own time. He is at
once a scholar and a patriot, a Greek of the Greeks, and an American
of the Americans. He is ready for any discussion, whether it be of the
meaning of Plato in his Dialogues, of the " Six Days of Creation," of
" American Slavery, the sum of all villanies," or of that fatal heresy
of " State Rights," which ruined the republics of Hellas, and has come
near to ruining our own republic. In his last work * he has given the
historical parallel between those Grecian States and these States which
are now at war, and has shown in a very striking manner how weak
and how disastrous is this pleading for a confederacy instead of a na
tion, — how all the force that the States can hold and keep comes
from their united, and not from their separate life, — how petty and
contemptible disunion makes them. The tone of this pamphlet upon
State Rights is like the blast of a trumpet or the voice of a prophet.
It ought not to be lost in the strangely inadequate edition of two hun
dred and fifty copies, but ought to be sent far and wide through the
land by the Union League Committees, as far as the heresy that it com
bats has gone.
Op all the books which the war has called out, there is no class more
valuable to the historian than that which gives an inside view of the
Rebellion, like Mr. Baxter's narrative of events in Northwestern Ar
kansas during 1861 and 1862.f In this remote mountain region, per
haps the least accessible part of the Union, in a beautiful and fertile
valley on the upper course of the White River, is — or rather was — the
pleasant and thriving town of Fayetteville, which we know from other
testimony than Mr. Baxter's to have teen, in its quiet beauty and cul
tivated society, like a New England village transplanted into the very
borders of the wilderness. This region was loyal through and through,
Washington County (with the largest voting population in the State)
giving " a Union vote of from nineteen hundred to twenty-one hun
dred, out of a voting population of twenty-five hundred." The book
before us, by the President of Arkansas College, before the war a
promising young seminary in Fayetteville, tells in a simple and earnest
way how Secession has ravaged and ruined this region. The author,
with his stanch Union friends, stayed by his home as long as possible ;
but at last, when the country had been swept over again and again by
the tide of war, the town made desolate, the College burnt, and his
means of livelihood all gone, he reluctantly went North, and is now
preaching in Cincinnati.
The testimony given here as to the contrast between the conduct
of the two armies which alternately occupied the country is most em
phatic and gratifying. The brutal coarseness of McCulloch and the
more refined heartlessness of Hindman do not differ more from the
chivalrous magnanimity of Asboth and Herron, than the behavior of
one army did from that of the other. It was the Rebels that burned the
College, plundered the town, and murdered the citizens, although in
their own country, as they claimed. The Union forces came, with few
exceptions, to protect. It is well to notice this. The eyes of the
North, as well as of Europe, have been so dazzled by the genius and
* State Rights. A Photograph from the Ruins of Ancient Greece. By Prof.

Tatler Lewis, LL. D. Albany : J. Mnnsell. 1864. pp.96.
t Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove ; or, Scenes and Incidents of the War in Arkan
sas. By William Baxter. Cincinnati: Poe and Hitchcock. 1864. 12mo.
pp. 262.
personal honor of General Lee, that we are apt to forget that wherever
his personal influence does not extend the Rebellion is now what it was
in its beginning, lawless and barbarous.
Very striking is the history given of the fate of the college class
which left their teacher early in the war, dragged — many of them
aginst their sympathies — into the army. One,
" who had ever advocated the Union side," " was in the Confederate ranks at
Wilson's Creek, and came out of the conflict unharmed, although four of his
comrades fell by his side ; but disease contracted in the camp fastened upon
him, and with words of prayer upon his lips he died, and peacefully sleeps his
last sleep near the scene of the fearful struggle at Fort Hudson. Another, a
noble Union boy, had his leg torn away by a cannon-ball at the Pea Ridge fight,
and bled to death, — dying in a cause he never approved. Some were with
Price at Lexington ; one was taken prisoner in the rifle-pits at Fort Donel-
son ; the last I heard of another was, that he was dying in a hospital at Mem-
Ehis; another spoke when I last saw him of death being preferable to the life
e> was compelled to lead ; and my favorite, if favorite 1 had when all were
loved so well, with the unsparing conscript law hanging over him, spoke
mournfully of the necessity which compelled him to fight without giving him
a choice as to the cause in which life must be perilled ; another fell at Cor
inth, and two brothers, side by side, at Iuka ; the leader of those in College in
favor of the South, after having passed safely through several battles, was, in
my presence, taken not an 'unwilling prisoner, and returned to his allegiance."
— p. 83.
The following entertaining story is told of a crazy Rebel prisoner.
" On the night of the 27th of October, 1 862, General Schofield was reported
to be near our town. By some means Bill had heard the rumor, and pre
pared himself accordingly. He went out to the edge of the town, and sta
tioned himself by the roadside, and waited for the enemy. About midnight
the head of the column came up, and Bill, in a commanding tone, gave. the
order to halt ; it was obeyed, and they stood for some time in doubt, not know
ing but that the order was given by authority. At last an officer asked,
' Who are you?' and Bill replied, ' Gen. Jim Bains.' This was enough; a
number of guns were levelled, a volley was fired, and Bill fell, exclaiming in
piteous tones, ' O, you have killed your grandmother ! you have killed your
grandmother ! ' He was unhurt, having, perhaps, fallen as he saw the guns
levelled. His exclamation revealed his true character."
The flower of the British civilization has at length delivered its ver
dict on the American contest.* The nobility has spoken, and its oracle
is one William Schomberg Robert Kerr, otherwise known as the Mar
quess of Lothian. This distinguished person has evidently nerved
himself to the unaccustomed labor in a spirit of magnanimous dirty.
Here is an aristocracy of chivalrous gentlemen, the descendants of the
Cavaliers, with " the habits of command, and the refinement and eleva
tion of character which follows on the possession of hereditary wealth,"
actually in danger of destruction from a population of coarse and fanat
ical Puritans, who earn their own living, and don't know who their own
grandfathers were, and who, with the instincts of low-bred and plebeian
* The Confederate Secession. By the Marquess of Lothian. Edinburgh and

London. 1864.
12*
natures, undertake to continue by force a partnership which every well
connected person must see to have been unnatural from the first.
" The Southerners did not secede from caprice, but from reasons which
would have justified not only a secession but a rebellion. They did not pro
voke the war, for all the provocation .... came from the Northern Abolition
ists. They did not commence it, for the first act of war was Lincoln's perfid
ious attempt to throw supplies into Fort Sumter. And finally they could not
know that the North would resist it by force^r there is no provision for such
resistance by the Constitution." — p. 8.
When the Marquess says that all the provocation came from the
Abolitionists, we are to presume he means the immediate provocation,
for in another chapter he recites a dreadful list of Northern outrages,
the most prominent among which is the persistent adhesion to the policy
of protection. He cites also the expenditure of all the public money
on public improvements, as an example of which we have this state
merit. •
" The coast-line of the Northern States is about 800 miles ; that of the
Southern States is about 2,500 miles, or more than three times as long. Will
it be believed that . ... the amount of lighthouses provided for it is not more
than half that provided for the North, perhaps hardly even that!"— p. 53.
The noble Lord, as might be expected, considering the righteousness
of the cause he is defending, is occasionally Scriptural in his illustrations.
He personifies the North and South, for instance, under the characters
of Jacob and Esau. He might have been more complimentary to his
aristocratic friends, but he chooses to be correct and impartial. Esau's
great mistake, he says, " was in not seceding in 1828," when the defeat
of the Indigo Bill " snatched the bread from the lips of Virginia in or
der that Massachusetts might hang her walls with damask and dine off
turtle-soup" ; but the cup, it seems, was not yet full ; " she could not
make up her mind to desert the Union, cruel step-mother though it had
been, and so she determined to try and bear her wrongs a little longer."
The noble author displays a commendable impartiality as to the helps
of which he avails himself in making up his judgment. In regard to
the character of New England, for instance, more especially of " ag
gressively godly Massachusetts," he has evidently consulted home
cources, as the Boston Courier or the New York Express. He also
speaks of the " Northern adder," which is probably a generalization
from a certain Northern candidate for the Speakership of the House
of Representatives, who was obliging enough to allude to his own
'constituency as " a nest of vipers." But in regard to facts, he has, we
fear, depended too much upon the Morning Post or the Standard,
and has been thus betrayed into some slight errors, — as where he says
that " the only Federal fortresses in the seceded States are at Charles
ton, namely, Sumter and Pickens " (p. 152) ; or where he alludes to
the voting population of the South as including three fifths of the slaves.
But we ought not to expect from a Marquess the same servile accuracy
that we should demand from a commoner.
His Lordship admires, with reason, " the stainless good faith of the
1865.] Essays, etc. 139
South, its scrupulous regard for the rights of hostile property, its tender
consideration for the vanquished and the weak, its determination not to
be provoked into retaliation by the most brutal injuries"; also its free
dom from that offensive habit of boasting, so characteristic of the North.
" The South does not brag. It is almost a pity that it does not a little
more."
On the other hand, we are compelled to say that his opinion of the
Northern States and their population is the reverse of flattering. He
reckons up a dreadful list of atrocities which ought to freeze the blood
even of the godless hypocrite of New England, and is convinced, " from
statements he has seen in the papers," that " the horrors are all on one
side," and that the " distinguished commander who told it as a good
joke, that his soldiers, having sacked a place, found a couple of old
women, who, being fit for nothing else, were made into soup, — would
have been welcomed in the Federal army, and none the less for being
of princely blood."
Lastly, he is profoundly impressed with the astonishing development
of military talent in the Southerners, and with the equally remarkable
absence of anything to correspond with it in the North ; and he has un
doubtedly seen reasons for confirming these impressions in the extraor
dinary failures of General Sherman in Georgia and General Thomas
in Tennessee.
ESSAYS, ETC.
Mr. Smith * is not one of the few who can write essays. You feel
in reading his book as if you were as idle as he was in writing it. Yet
not idle in the way the philosopher or the poet seems idle to the noisy
'world he shuns, but idle with that vacant pretence of doing something
which the world cannot appreciate, nor himself quite approve, as one
sees by the pains he takes to defend himself. For the supreme idler,
who throws off the burden of earthly ambitions, content to live on a
crust for the sake of that intellectual freedom which alone is life, makes
no excuses. He dwells in absolute unconsciousness of any motive for
work ; and never alludes to the subject except with a certain pity, as
one touches upon a necessary evil. But the superficial idler, like Mr.
Smith, is always uneasy. The world is vulgar, and I am not, he seems
to say to you ; behold me, therefore, withdrawn into the stillness of my
garden, whence my wisdom goeth out unto the ends of the earth.
But the comparison which he seems thus ever to obtrude between
the quiet of his life and the tumult of yours, does not tell much in his
favor when you come to look at the results. For the man who " cares
more for Charles Lamb than for Charles XII.," and would " rather
build a fine sonnet than have built St. Paul's," who would rather
discover a " new image than a new planet," and values " fine phrases
more than bank-notes," and winds up by condensing his object in life
in the statement that the " only fame he cares for is to be occasionally
* Dreamthorp: a Book of Essays written in the Country. By Alexander
Smith, Author of " A Life Drama," " City Poems," etc. Boston : J. E. Tilton
and Company. 1864.
quoted," must show more power than Mr. Smith has done in this in
stance before the world will check the currents of its tumultuous and
turbid existence to listen to the plaintive declarations of his individual
preference to be everlastingly remembered. We certainly cannot but
commend Mr. Smith for the frankness with which he defines his posi
tion ; but he seems to have forgotten that there are certain fearful bar
riers in this inharmonious world to the immediate success even of
aspirations so moderate as his. He forgets that it is one thing to dream
of glory, and another to win the glory he dreams of, — that a great essay,
like any other great achievement in literature, is not to be produced to
order by retiring to the country and pensively contemplating nature,
but is to spring from a profound inspiration which compels the utter
ance and fashions its form.
Mr. Smith's poetry may be good or bad, — it is not at this moment
under discussion, however much his reputation as a poet may be
relied on to sell his prose. But certainly he has exhibited in these
essays nothing of that imagination and insight and communion, if we
may say so, between thought and feeling, without which essays are
worth little and poetry nothing at all.
Not to be unfair, however, to Mr. Smith in general strictures, we
select for a moment's consideration his essay upon " Men of Letters,"
as being the one we involuntarily turned to first, upon looking over the
table of contents. It is there that we learn that, although not hero-
worshippers like Hazlitt, we like to know what dishes our favorite
heroes were partial to, and what sort of women they married ; that it
is pleasant to think occasionally of the " Mermaid in session, with
Shakespeare's bland oval face, the light of a smile spread over it"; and
that Boswell's Johnson is likely to last ; that Charles Lamb stuttered
puns as he dealt the cards with an odor as of punch in the apartment, —
and that he (Smith) is fond of imaginary conversations, which, though
they may not be as brilliant as Landor's, are quite as entertaining to
him (Smith), — information which cannot possibly do any harm, indeed,
but which is not perhaps exactly what we bargained for when we paid
our money for the book. But when he goes on in his peculiar vein of
quiet reflection and latent humor to apprise us that poets are likely to
be remembered by name, and engineers are not, that Chaucer conceived
a wondrous hall of glass centuries before it rose in Hyde Park in 1851,
and that the electric telegraph is not so swift as Ariel (who can do
the earth's circuit in forty tainutes, as we have been told by Shake
speare, a great authority in the electric way), that, when a man " gazes
at the stars, he is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road,"
and finally, that, " when Apollo puts his name to a bill, he must meet
it when it becomes due, or go into the Gazette," we feel a certain re
spect for the vacuity of our author's mind, which cannot but be deep
ened when he tells us that " the heat of inspiration may be subtracted
from the household fire," and that, after being flayed in the " Saturday
Review," the grasshopper becomes a burden, — the skin of a man of
letters being " peculiarly sensitive to the bite of the critical mos
quito."
1865.] Essays, etc. 141
But it is only when he rises to the consideration of the great question
as to the effect of the profession of letters upon the character, that he
attains the just measure of his philosophical perception and his prac
tical wisdom. It is to Mr. Smith that men of letters must always owe
the discovery that their profession interferes with the " elemental
feelings." while the world in general will derive consolation from the
knowledge that it is not given to every one to live (the italics signifying
in a pecuniary sense) by " the artistic utilization and sale of his primal
energies."
The new volume of Herbert Spencer's Essays,* which has recently

appeared in the issues of the Appletons, is more miscellaneous in its
topics and more popular in its style than the scientific works that have
preceded it; but is not any less remarkable for the wisdom of its views,
the vigor of its thought, and the clearness of its expression. However
profound, abstruse, and severely logical Herbert Spencer may be, he
cannot be dull. He writes always with the practical understanding
and purpose of a man of the world, and only dull readers can mistake
his meaning. His discussions, too, with all their seriousness, have
just that shade of humor that suggests a keenly observing and sympa
thetic spirit. . The least' satisfactory of the ten essays in the present
volume are those on Personal Beauty and on Gracefulness, which seem
to us too slight for insertion among discussions of so much larger reach
and weight. The essay on the Philosophy of Style, full as. it is of
amusing hits and hints, is rather suggestive than thorough. But the
four essays on Over-Legislation, on the Morals of Trade, on Repre
sentative Government, and on State Tamperings with Money and
Banks, belong to the first class of essays in ability and completeness.
In the essay on Representative Government, however, we cannot find
that the vindication is as clear as the objections. The faults of this
form of government are stated with masterly force and cumulative
effect, but its virtues are rather affirmed in general phrases than dis
tinctly exhibited. The Impression left by the article is that Mr. Spen
cer, as a Liberal, wishes to believe in popular government, rather than
that he does heartily believe in it. He has certainly made out a strong
prima facie case for the aristocratic side.
It is proper to add, that some of the abuses which these essays (writ
ten several years ago) expose have been corrected by subsequent
legislation. Some of the remarks about Prisons, Banks, and Parlia
mentary Reform are obsolete.
The Second Part of Faust t has long been a puzzle to the world, and
will doubtless long remain such. In striking contrast with the first
part, — which deals with human life in a concrete form, if one may say
* Essays, Moral, Political, and ./Esthetic. By Herbert Spencer. New
York : D. Appleton & Co. 1865. 12mo. pp.386.
t Faustus. The Second Part From the German of Goethe. By John An-
ster, LL. D., M. R. I. A., Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of
Dublin. London : Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green. 1864.
so, making the experience of an individual to stand for that of the race,
— it passes from the region of fact to that of ideality in exchanging for
the definiteness of a single career of trial and sorrow the weird phan-
tasmagory of the follies of nations and the fitful allegories of human
progress. The first part was the growth of a long life, the sum of a
vast experience, the necessary expression of a profoundly poetic nature,
a master-piece of art because truest to fact, unrivalled in ancient or
modern literature. The second part was essentially an artificial pro
duction, not a necessity of the poet's nature, far less an expression of
his life ; it was rather something foreign to both, written to oblige the
critics or to satisfy an imaginary sense of completeness. Thoroughly
naturalistic as he was, its character impresses us at once as out of har
mony w,ith the tendencies of his mind. The mystery of life was as
dark to him as to the Greeks who brooded over the fate that pursued
the generations of men, and, like them, he was content to recognize its
existence without attempting to discover its nature. His thought dwelt
with earth and the things of earth, not in a low, but in a high and
mighty manner, as befitted the man of so many endowments, of such all-
embracing culture ; in that respect in manifest contrast with Schiller,
whose struggle was ever gilded by the ideal to which it was directed,
far beyond and wholly irreconcilable with the common mind and the
vulgar world. Goethe knew the heart of man better. He had studied
it in too many ways, through too many years, to have any strong convic
tion that the moral perfection of which the world might be capable was
likely soon to be attained. When he left the field of real life, there
fore, as he had mirrored it in so marvellous a manner in the first part
of Faust, to sweep through the regions of symbolisms and allegories
and phantasms into which the ambition to complete what could not be
completed, to explain what could not be explained, had driven him, he
fell upon difficulties and took refuge in obscurities as wearisome and
perplexing to us as they were insurmountable and vague to him.
It has been said of Goethe, that he was biographical in all that he
wrote ; that he had lived the dramas he composed and the songs he
sung ; that his works are the outgrowth, or, if we may say so, the mean
ing, of the scenes and events, of the gladness and the grief of his life.
And no doubt this is true, not only in the sense in which every great
writer expresses in his works, consciously or otherwise, the results of
his experience, but in an especial degree in his case, since it was the
teaching of his philosophy to write as he lived, if not to live as he
wrote. The Second Part of Faust, therefore, in which he abandons at
once his experience and his rule, is all the more difficult to understand,
in that it contradicts not merely the principles of interpretation which
are applied to the first part, but the life-long direction of his striving,
and the general tone of his mind. It seems, indeed, as if for once he
had resolved to give full sway to that very vagueness which he had
guarded against so vigilantly all his life, — to those wild fancies he had
hitherto so well repressed.
Again, the old age of a man of such transcendent genius has been
said to have a tendency to lose itself in mysticism ; it was so with
1865.] Essays, etc. 143
Michael Angelo, it is added, as with the few other great masters that
have been permitted to reach the summit of the years, whence they
could look backward upon the path they had traversed, so narrow and
devious, and forward upon the ascending highway, luminous with the
golden sunset light, through which, as through a flaming portal, the
finite passes into the infinite. But if such be the case, the Second Part
of Faust is not for us to read till we too have reached an equal summit
to witness an equal glory. For our part, however, we are disposed to
regard it in a more intelligible manner, as a departure, wayward or
intentional, from the rule of his life, — as an excursion permitted at the
last into the regions he had hitherto avoided, — as an attempt, grand,
impressive, to penetrate a domain which it is not for us to enter, to
commune with mysteries which it is not for us to explore. And the
fragmentary manner in wkich it was written and published confirms
our impression. The third act, Helena, so familiar to us in the trans
lation of Carlyle, was the only one published during his life. The rest
of it, which, as Gervinus so pompously says, was sketched in twenty
years, and finished in eighty-two, was written in the last few years of
his life, but not published till after his death.
The criticism in Germany upon the Second Part of Faust has
been voluminous, but, as might have been expected, has contributed
nothing whatever to the understanding of it. The favorite view, as set
forth by Gervinus in his Geschichte der deutschen Dichtkunst, is to
consider it in a double sense biographical, — as typical not only of the
struggles and sorrows of humanity, but of those of Germany in its histori
cal development. As B'aust's earlier life, for instance, was an effort to
reconcile intellectual and sensual things, so the life of the German
people in the fifteenth century was a struggle to throw off the dogmatic
asceticism of the Middle Age. But one has not to read far to find how
worthless this view is as a key to the work. Gervinus came nearer the
truth when he said it was meant to remain a puzzle, and as such to
baffle the commentators it employed. To read in it an allegorical
description of his life, or of that of the German people, is not only to
misunderstand the character of the work, but to misunderstand Goethe.
The mysteries, physical, moral, aesthetic, which he brought forward in
it, so far from being the results of his culture, are just what his culture
had taught him to shun as dangerous, or to resign as inscrutable. The
phantom of Helena may have haunted the poet, indeed, as he writes to
Zelter, for fifty years. But the fact that he avoided speaking of it, lest
it should vanish utterly, is a certain corroboration of the view we have
suggested. So very vague was it, so unreal, suggestive of so many
relations, the shrine as it were of so many fancies, it is not strange that
he should be afraid lest, if he sought to give it a bodily shape, it should
escape him forever. Nor is the statement of Eckermann, that the work
was intended for the stage, in necessary contradiction with what we
have said. It is easy to conceive it adapted, not merely to dramatic
representation, but to the production of great scenic effect.
Like Milton's Paradise Regained, or Klopstock's dramas, the Second
Part of Faust will be praised, and left unread. Yet we cannot agree
with Gervinus, that it exhibits the effects of age upon Goethe's poet
ical powers. There is a beauty of imagery and a melody of verse in
it unsurpassed in some respects by anything he has written. It is in
its singular harmony of style, indeed, — the grace inimitable with which
the word meets the thought, and both blend into music, — that the
absolute impossibility of translation consists. We have often doubted,
indeed, whether any great poem could be translated. But with the
Second Part of Faust there can be no question. The attempt of
Bernays, who, while avowing his conviction that it was never meant
to be understood by any one, has yet had the effrontery to put it
into English in prose, will not permit the mention of criticism. Of M.
BlaztS's translation into French we are fortunately wholly ignorant.
Mr. Anster makes greater pretensions. It was more than forty years
ago, we believe, that he first printed some ftf his translations of it in
Blackwood's Magazine. They are now collected, and completed, and
we dare say the work is as well done as it can be by one not born and
educated for this special task. And if one is anxious for a notion of
the chaos of the original, it would be well to read it ; but one must go
to the original itself if he would listen to some of the divinest melody
ever breathed in human ears, or would learn whether Gervinus was
right or wrong when he said that allegory was at once the cradle and
the grave of poetry.
The work of M. Franck* is a popular statement of the philosophy

of the East, by no means complete, but clear 60 far as it goes. His
special object is to show in what degree and under what forms the
idea of law was developed among the earliest nations of the East; and
how in respect to certain great principles of ethics, as well as in a more
elevated tone of thought, the East was superior to both Greece and
Rome, that is, to the most civilized nations of the West. Beginning
with the influences exercised in India by Brahminism and Buddhism,
he passes on to Egypt and Persia and Judaea, and ends with China,
which, in uniting the laws and manners of the East to the mental
activity and the positive spirit of the West, seems to form a transition
between the two.
China no more resembles India, he says, than India resembles Eu
rope. Inferior to Palestine in religious ideas, inferior to Greece in
poetical genius, it was superior to both by its political unity, by its per
severance in toil, and by the precocity as well as fecundity of its indus
trial talent. From time immemorial one finds their manufactures of
metals and porcelain and silk. Two thousand years before Christ it
knew the polarity of the magnet, the composition of powder, and the
use of artillery. It early invented printing and engraving upon wood.
Its inlaid work of precious stones, its enamels and bronzes, are of in
comparable beauty. Its sculptures in ivory and mother-of-pearl have
defied the emulation of Europe. But though the arts of peace have
* blades Orientates par Adoi.imie Framck, Membre de l'Institut, Professeur

au College de France. Paris : Michel LeVy Freres, Libraires-Editeurs. 1861.
1865.] Geography and Travels. 145
always prevailed over those of war, the Chinese are by no means a
wholly material people. Few nations possess a literature richer and
more varied. What we .call the worship of Confucius is only the sol
emn homage rendered to the memory of a great and good man. There
is no religious idea in it whatever. Religion implies revelation, and no
revelation is claimed for Confucius. The Chinese are philosophical
rather than religious. They show no indications of the possession of an
ideal in spiritual life. Entire liberty of conscience is their favorite doc
trine. " Religions are diverse, reason is one," says a Chinese maxim.
Christianity was excluded probably from purely political reasons,
lest it should be made an instrument of European interference. It
was essentially moral philosophy that Confucius taught. " Virtue con
sists in loving men," he said, " and science in knowing them." " How
shall one know what death is," he replied to some one interrogating him
as to its nature, " when one does not know what life is ? "
GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVELS.

Dr. Newman's journeys in Palestine* were unusually extended.
He went through the land in every direction, visited nearly all the sa
cred sites, and saw some things that very few travellers have seen. He
was permitted to visit the enclosure of the Harem in Jerusalem, to ex
amine the Mosque of Omar, and to explore the galleries of the substruc
tions. He penetrated into the cave of Adullam. He witnessed the
Samaritan Passover on the top of Gerizim, and he ascended Ebal. He
can describe from personal memory nearly all the famous localities, the
picturesque ruins, the rivers, mountains, gorges, and plains of the whole
Syrian land. He is, withal, a good observer, and a good-natured man.
Yet he has made an unsatisfactory book. Its style is ambitious, invert
ed, stiff, overloaded with epithets, and strangely ungrammatical. It is
amazing to find the rules of Murray so disregarded by a Doctor of Di
vinity. There is a frequent inaccuracy, too, whether from ignorance or
from carelessness, in the spelling of proper names. He calls the Lebanon
the "Lebanbns"; Abeih, " Abuh." There are provoking contradictions
in his statements, as when, on page 414, he tells us that Hermon is "the
second highest mountain in Syria," while on page 460 he shows it as
the third in height. In the descriptions, too, both of cities and scenery,
his language is truly Oriental in its hyperbole. The gardens around
Sidon are praised as the " most luxuriant in the world," — and this, too,
by one who has seen the gardens around Damascus. The Holy Land,
which is bare and barren as he first tells its features, becomes in his
special sketches a land everywhere of the most exuberant fertility and
the most fascinating beauty. He is moreover exceedingly credulous,
and repeats monkish legends about the sacred sites with no disapproval
* From Dan to Beersheba; or, the Land of Promise as it now appears. Includ
ing a Description of the Boundaries, Topography, Agriculture, Antiquities, Cities,
and present Inhabitants of that Wonderful Land, with Illustrations of the Re
markable Accuracy of the Sacred Writers in their Allusions to their Native Coun
try, Maps, and Engravings. By Rev. J. P. Newman, D. D. New York : Har
pers. 1864. 12mo. pp. 485.
VOl. LXXVIII. — 5TH 8. VOL. XVI. NO I. 13
or scepticism. He doubts about the Holy Sepulchre, indeed, adopting
Dr. Barclay's untenable theory, but accepts a multitude of other sites
which have far less evidence in their favor. He is equally credulous
in the Biblical narratives, and has no doubt that the sun and moon stood
still at the command of Joshua. He confounds at Hebron the terebinth
with the oak, treating them as identical ; tells us of tigers on the banks
of Jordan ; and characterizes Jerome as the " Father of Church Histo
ry." And he has a virtuous indignation against all the personages who
in the Biblical story do not appear to advantage. Joshua, Samson,
Solomon, have found no more valiant defender, and Ahab and the Her-
ods no more truculent foe than this good Dr. Newman.
In the spring of 1853, Professor Felton sailed from Boston for

Europe. Rapid travel through England, a short sojourn at London
and Paris, brief days in Switzerland, and a crowded tour in Germany,
brought him by the middle of October over the Alps, through Venice,
Florence, and Rome, to Naples, where he embarked for Malta on his
way to Constantinople and Athens, — the seats of that ancient learning
to which his life had been devoted. The letters which, through all this
swift travel and this rich experience, he wrote home to his family and
friends, have now been collected ; * and though we have to regret the
loss of several on the way, the sketches which they give of the in
cidents and cause of his journey are sufficiently complete. As the
title indicates, they are wholly familiar letters, occupied with his per
sonal experience, and seldom deviating into any of those general specu
lations or those curious disquisitions which to a scholar of his taste
and temperament must seem almost inevitable while traversing the
fields and surveying the monuments of that splendid civilization which
he had done so much for so many years to illustrate.
It was in this his first visit to Greece, that, as all who knew Mr.
Felton will recall, his life seemed to receive a new and sudden enlarge
ment, — that the enthusiasm with which he had studied the literature
of ancient Greece was vivified and transformed as it were into some
thing like a religious conviction of its ceaseless influence and its in
creasing importance, by the exhibition he beheld now with his own eyes
of the wonderful vitality of the race, speaking the same language and
displaying so many of the same intellectual traits by virtue of which
it had once given form to the civilization of Europe. It is in that part
of the present volume, therefore, which relates to Greece, that its chief
interest will be found. Mr. Felton's opportunity and preparation,
however, for seeing the best Greek society in Athens and elsewhere,
must make us regret that he has not been more systematic and minute
in his account of it, knowing as we do how difficult it is to obtain an
accurate picture of it from one competent, by a knowledge of the lan
guage, as well as by a study of the history and a sympathy with the
aspirations of the Greeks, to do it justice. But his remarks upon
* Familiar Letters from Europe. By Cornelius Cokway Fslton, late

President of Harvard University. Boston : Ticknor and Fields. 1865.
186$.] Geography and Travels. 147
Athens, and the present condition of its inhabitants, will nevertheless
be found instructive ; while the vivacity and humor which characterize
the account of his short tour in Greece cannot fail to attract even those
who care nothing for 'classical associations, and know nothing of that
ancient world of which their own is the heir.
The condition of " the sick man " comes before us again in the ac
count which M. Georges Perrot has given of the provinces and the
peoples of the Lesser Asia.* M. Perrot is a scholar and an investiga
tor, a very " learned Theban " in his mousing love of old records and
his antiquarian patience in discovering inscriptions. Yet he is withal a
lively writer, with a genuine appreciation of creature comforts, a quick '
sense of the ludicrous, and a, shrewd observation of the facts of the life
which passes before him. This goodly octavo is not a report of scien
tific results, which will appear elsewhere in their proper place, but is a
very entertaining and edifying journal of travel and adventure. M.
Perrot writes well, without trying to write well. His journal is a sketch
book, so graphic that it needs no illustration of the pencil, and scarcely
even needs a map that we may trace the course of the wanderer. It
tells of some towns that are rarely visited, and tells new things of some
cities that are often visited. It will mortify the tourist who has come
back from the ordinary track of Eastern pilgrimage, that he was so un
wise as to omit from his survey the mountains of Bithynia and Pontus,
the bazaars of Broussa and Angora, and the curious ruins of ancient
Amasia, when he could have seen these with such moderate outlay,
with such slight hardships and dangers, and within such a reasonable
time.
M. Perrot occupies a middle ground between those who think that
the Turkish Empire is just ready to fall in pieces, and those who think
its condition satisfactory and its future assured. He thinks that it is
decaying, but that it will not fall just yet ; that the reforms which have
been attempted may hold it up for a while longer, but cannot finally
save it. The Turks will hold sway in this strange conglomerate of
races, simply because there is no other race in the Empire who are
either fit to rule, or whose rule would be tolerated. The Greeks are
bright, ambitious, and enterprising ; but a revival of the Byzantine Em
pire is neither practicable nor desirable. It would give the East no
better government, and would certainly lead to interminable civil wars.
The increase of Russian power in the Levant is of course intolerable to
a patriotic Frenchman. In the matter of religion, M. Perrot is not a
bigot, though on the whole he considers the Latin Church as most
favorable to public order and the peaceful development of material re
sources. He makes small account of missionary efforts, and insists
upon the impossibility of making Western theosophies intelligible to the
Eastern mind. The barrier of language is fatal. " We must never
* Souvenirs d'un Voyage en Asie Mineure. Par Georoes Perrot, Ancien

Memhre de pfecole Francaise d'Athenes. Paris : Michel LeVy Freres. 1864. 8vo.
pp. xxiv., S16.
lose sight of the fact, that in words of which we seem to have the equiv
alents in our Dictionaries, our Oriental companions in conversation hide
always ideas which are quite foreign to us." One promising fact, how
ever, for the future of education, he mentions. Wherever there is edu
cation, wherever the Greek schools go, the teaching is free. At the
foot of Bithynian Olympus, there is still gratuitous teaching of the
tongue of Xenophon and Plato.
Seldom has a sadder book appeared than the series of letters ded
icated by Hon. Auberon Herbert to his mother, the Countess Dow
ager of Carnarvon.* It is but a brief view of a hopeless struggle,
confined to a single point of space, and leaving us in the midst of the
unequal resistance of a brave race to national dismemberment. In the
contest which has just closed, the Danes had nothing but their just
cause and their hereditary courage. Immensely outnumbered, they
were miserably armed, wretchedly fortified, and weakened by too great
extension. Called suddenly from peaceful .pursuits, unacquainted with
the wonderful improvements in weapons of destruction, awkward in
military movements, officered with inexperienced generals, or with
none at all, the heroic defenders of their country stood up in their fee
ble breastworks without hope, yet without a murmur; expecting to
perish where they stood, but seeking no escape from their unavailing
doom. A small band of undrilled peasants, with no better cannon than
twelve-pounders, behind a row of enfiladed earthworks, slowly slain by
the German military science, forbidden to check their enemy's advance
by a single sortie, one cannot help admiring the victims, however use
less the sacrifice. Their private virtues only add to the indignation one
feels at their slow murder. Herbert found them strictly temperate,
uniformly courteous, thoroughly honest, the finest peasantry he had ever
known. An unlocked portmanteau of his travelled several days through
this disturbed country in search of its owner, and reached him at Son-
derborg entirely undisturbed. All such favors he returned by hazard
ing his life to save a wounded Dane lying within range of the Prus
sian rifles. That England should have betrayed this unwarlike people
to their ruin, should have taken the cards out of their hands, played
them to the advantage of their antagonists, then have thrown them in
their face when the game was utterly lost, is too shameful, — is, as Her
bert says, a " hateful subject." As this is not the first time English
selfishness has played this base part, her advice will be less regarded
in (he future ; her friendship will be seen to be a burden, not a bless
ing; her policy will be despised as cowardly; her place among the
leading powers will be in danger of being forfeited.
The report of the recent English mission to the brutal King of Da-
home f is- one of the most unpleasant books of travel ever written.
* The Danes in Camp : Letters from Sonderborg. By Auberon Herbert.
London : Saunders, Otley, & Co. 1864.
t A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome. By Richard F. Burton. London :
Tinsley Brothers. 1864. S vols.
Neither the style, the details, the spirit, nor the result commend it to
any Christian person's regard. From his scorn of the black race, his
hearty approval of slavery, his entire despair of philanthropic effort,
and his inability to urge upon (icicle any steps for the elevation of his
people beyond the abolition of- human sacrifices and the slave-trade,
Richard Burton was certain to fail in his mission, as he did entirely.
He has failed, too, in making a tolerably interesting book. The body
of it, being descriptions of public solemnities held by Gelele before his
ill-starred expedition to Abeokuta, is absolutely disgusting, unspeakably
tedious, and more, barren of instruction than any similar narrative of
savage life. Its very language is strangely affected; such words as
u castey-looking," " fighteress," " anastomose," " stratopyga," disfigure
every page, mingled with hundreds of allusions very intelligible to Mr.
Burton's personal friends, but mere Sanscrit to the general reader.
According to him, most of our knowledge of Dahome is an error.
The population does not exceed 150,000 ; the Amazons are not more
than 2,500, and the male troops will hardly number 10,000. The coun
try is a parched-up desert, depopulated by tyranny, reduced by aggres
sive war, compelled by a cruel despot to depend upon the slave-trade
for income, while sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton, might be raised to im
mense profit. Milk is unknown, meat rarely eaten, poultry very dear ;
water itself has to be bought. As the reigning monarch, ailer declaring
that he and the Queen of England are one, — that Gelele is the head
of the kingdom of Dahome and Victoria the tail, — resolutely refused
to abandon human sacrifices, to relinquish his war upon Abeokuta, or
prohibit the slave-trade, the English commissioner returned a humbler,
if not a wiser, man than he went. Absurdly enough, after asserting
repeatedly in his book that there is no longer any United States, he
threatened Gelele with what the United States would do if he kept up
the slave-trade. Letting us know the fact of Dahome's having adopted
many Christian emblems, he asserts that Mohammedanism, by pro
hibiting impure meats and spirituous liquors, by enforcing ablution and
decent dress, by discouraging monogamy and introducing polygamy,
has improved the African's physique, and consequently, his morale.
The Foreign Secretary of the American Board of Commissioners

for Foreign Missions was sent out to the Sandwich Islands, as we
erroneously term that group discovered by Captain Cook, midway be- '
tween China and Panama, to ascertain if the mission churches were
ready for self-government. After forty years' correspondence on the
subject, and four months' stay among the islanders, Dr. Anderson gives
a lengthy report,* favorable, as might be expected, to the missionaries,
eulogistic of their labors, and decisive in favor of giving up this new-
made Christianity to its own guidance. His standard of judgment
regarding Hawaiian piety would naturally lead him to estimate highly
the results of forty years' missionary labor and the expenditure of a
* Hawaiian Islands. ' By Eufds Anderson, D. D. Boston : Gonld and

Lincoln. 1864.
13*
million of dollars. Not denying the intemperance and licentiousness
which have characterized these islands from their first discovery, he
contrasts their piety with that of the Corinthian church in St. Paul's
time, and with their own past. He admits that their population is
decreasing, through their own besetting sins ; but he declares that this
decay began before the arrival of the missionaries, and has been strug
gled against by all their influence. And undoubtedly he is right.
What the future of these promising outposts of Christianity will be,
he does not pretend to predict. The productiveness of the rich soil in
sugar, rice, cotton, and coffee, their position midway in the Pacific, and
the healthiness of the climate, insure them against depopulation ; but at
present it seems as if other races would come in to reap the harvest, to
set up other religious institutions, and counterwork the influence exerted
by the American missionaries, who are generally aged men, and are
not to be replaced by similar emissaries from the United States.
' Besides a small settlement of Mormons who are not polygamists,
and a Roman Catholic mission under a bishop, the English Episco
palians seem to have violated the comity of missions by sending out
Bishop Staley as the head of a High-Church establishment, under the
immediate patronage of the court, and in a spirit of hostility to Evan
gelical Congregationalism. Dr. Anderson does not question the right
of Episcopalians to hold service there ; but, as the American mission
aries had wrought a great work at immense cost, he thinks they ought
to be protected from disturbance, that any other form of Protestant
worship ought to be in sympathy with those already in possession of
the field, and that the natives should not be perplexed by the pitiful
spectacle of controversy among their spiritual guides.
MISCELLANEOUS.
It is manifestly unjust to entitle a book devoted to the perishing

classes, " the condition of the people of England," * and to publish in
1863 statistical tables not brought down below the year 1849. Though
the American war has notoriously increased English pauperism, though
the diminished duties on liquors have favored intemperance, though sec
tarian jealousy still blocks up the road to national education, yet a book
whose whole force is its statistical details does not satisfy if not brought
as near as possible to our own day. And this the American editor was
bound to do, from the English blue-books, when he gave us these chap
ters from the larger work, " The Social Condition of the People of Eu
rope," published thirteen years ago in London. It is not enough for
the American Preface to state that English paupers had increased since
1851 about five per cent annually ; that, with three millions more pop
ulation, less land was under cultivation than in 1851 ; and that the thirty
millions of population consume thirty-one million gallons of spirits, be
sides rivers of wine and oceans of beer. Foot-notes should have been
added from the latest government reports, making it sure that we are
* Social Condition and Education of the People of England. By Joseph Kay.
New York : Harpers. 1863.
1865.] Miscellaneous. 151
not lamenting over a defunct abuse. Such awful statements as crowd
these pages could scarce be true in any country thirteen years after
they were put before the whole public, commented upon in the reviews,
enforced in the leading journals, and discussed in the supreme legisla
ture.
Mr. Kay's examinations touch three main points. First, the misery
of the peasantry. While population increases, cottages diminish, small
farms decrease, small estates are getting swallowed up in large ones ; so
that round after round of the ladder by which a young farmer could
rise is cut away. The English peasant is unable to buy land, to own
a house, to secure a farm as tenant at will, to carry his wife, when he
marries, anywhere but to his father's or brother's thatched hovel, and
occupy the common bedroom of the family. Second, the increase of
profligacy. In Wales, the sexes " herd together like beasts," so that
it is idle to expect them to be restrained by religion or conscience. In
Norfolk and Suffolk, " there appears to be a perfect want of deceney
among the people." Several clergymen testify that " the immorality
of the young women is literally horrible, and is increasing in the most
extraordinary degree." One does not see how anything else can be ex-
, pected, when not only whole families sleep together in a single cham
ber ; but boarders of either sex share this human pig-pen, from which
the commonest decencies are excluded by want of room, by absolute
poverty, and by the stupor of utter abandonment. Third, that half of
the poor can neither read nor write ; that more than half the children
from five to fourteen attend no school whatever ; that many even of
the village teachers cannot read and write correctly ; that many of the
dame schools do more harm than good, creating a disgust for the Scrip
tures and a loathing for the restraint ; that in many an unventilated
cellar or garret the school-children are kept standing all day ; that
many districts are too divided. in religious opinion, and many others
too stupid and poor, to build, equip, or sustain decent schools. So that
the closing words of the book cannot strike any one with surprise, that
the English poor are more pauperized, more irreligious, and very much
worse educated than the poor of Europe generally.
Among our few humorous poets, Saxe is deservedly one of the most
popular. His versification is smooth and facile, while an overflowing
humor and a lively wit underlie nearly all his productions. The spirit
of mirthfulness has been somewhat sobered, perhaps, in his, more recent
poems ; but it is still one of his most marked characteristics, and if
it finds, on the whole, less frequent expression in his new volume*
than in some of his previous collections, it nevertheless colors the whole
of these very clever stories. They are twenty in number, — Italian,
Persian, Arabian, Norwegian, German, etc., — and are admirably told.
Several of them, indeed, are among the best pieces that their author
* Clever Stories of Many Nations. Rendered in Rhyme by John G. Saxe.

Illustrated by W. L. CHAMrNEY. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1865. Small
4io. pp. 192.
has ever written ; and no one can read them without a smile. " The
Tartar who caught a Tartar," " The Blind Men and the Elephant,"
and " Ho-Ho of the Golden Belt," to name no others, are in a marked
degree characteristic of their author's genius. The illustrations by
Champney are nearly perfect in their way ; and the typographical execu
tion of the volume is not surpassed by any recent production of the press.
We have already * told our love and admiration for Charles Lamb.
Holding his " chaff" to be indeed regal, we of course welcome the
gathering of it by a painstaking hand and a vigilant and seeking eye.
In thorough sympathy with his congenial task, Mr. Babson (we cannot
allow such a literary benefactor to be known only by his initials)
hunted far and wide, in every nook, (Jorner, and crevice, for the neg
lected and forgotten essays and trifles of his favorite author, with so
much success that his well-named volume f is really a fresh produc-
tiqn, almost an original contribution to the world, of writings from a
pen whose most careless touches are autographs of him who held it, —
autographs wherein he signs himself that meek, heroic, quaint, and
loving self, some mood ' of which is ever manifest in his word. The
table of contents is a bill of fare to a rich entertainment, to be enjoyed
none the less because not quite equal to the banquets "of true wit,
genuine humor, fine fancy, exquisite pathos," to which crowds have
heretofore been invited. The feast is made up of fragments, thrown
together in a miscellaneous fashion. But most of the fragments are
tidbits, and some of them substantial dishes. To say that here are
upwards of four hundred pages of what, as the editor says, will have
to most readers the freshness and novelty of manuscripts coined from
the whimsical brain and full of the quaint, sweet disposition of " Elia,"
is to say all that is necessary to commend to attention the results of the
faithful gleaning that has completed the handsome American edition
of the writings of the most charming of essayists.
The story of Mrs. Keith's life, J — of her character in childhood

«nd orphanage, and of the growing beauty and force of that character
as she advanced in years, — of her many trials and disappointments, her
struggles after entire self-conquest, and her subsequent devotedness to
the work of a Christian missionary, — of her happiness as a wife, and her
lamented death in the midst of Christian sympathies and attentions,
though far away from home and kindred, — is happily told. The task
was a delicate' one, and has been performed with affectionate tenderness
and conscientious fidelity to the truth. We commend the work to the
notice of all who would observe the workings of a strong and active
will, guided by an enlightened and tender conscience, or present to the
young a picture of singular beauty and force of religious character.
* Christian Examiner, November, 1860, Art. V.

t Eliana : being the hitherto Uncollected Writings of Ciiari.es Lamb. Boston :
William Veazie.
J Memoir of Mrs. Caroline P. Keith, Missionary of the Protestant Episcopal
Church to China. Edited by her Brother, William C. Tenney. New York :
D. Appleton & Co.
1865.] New Publications Received. 158
NEW PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.
THEOLOGICAL AMD RELIGIOUS.

Christ and his Salvation ; in Sermons variously related thereto. By Hor
ace Bushnell. New York: Charles Scribner. 12mo. pp. 456. (Seep.
127.)
Lyra Anglicana ; or, a Hymnal of Sacred Poetry. Selected from the best
English Writers, and arranged after the Order of theApostles' Creed. By
the Rev. George T. Rider. New York: D. Appleton '& Co. 12mo. pp.
288.
The Blade and the Ear ; Thoughts for a Young Man. By A. B. Muzzey.
Boston : William V. Spencer. 18mo. pp. 233.
Hymns of the Ages. Third Series. Boston : Ticknor and Fields. 1 2mo.
pp. 331. (See p. 128.)
The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living ; also,
The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying ; by Jeremy Taylor, D. D. Bos
ton : Little, Brown, & Co. 24mo. (Dark vellum, gilt.)
The Gospel according to Matthew, together with a general Theological and
Homiletical Introduction to the New. Testament. By John Peter Lange,
D. D., Professor of Theology at the University of Bonn. Translated from
the Third German Edition, with additions original and selected. By Philip
Schaff, D. D. New York: Charles Scribner. 1865. 8vo. Double 'col
umns, pp. xxii., 568. (" At once copious, able, agreeable, suggestive, and
outrageous, — particularly the last in the American Editor's part." We shall
make it the subject of a careful review in March.)
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY.

Memoirs of Lieutenant-General Winfield Scott, LL.D. Written by Him
self. New York : Sheldon and Company. 12mo. 2 vols, pp.658.
History of the Romans under the Empire. By Charles Merivale. New
York: D. Appleton & Co. Vols. V., VI. (Faultless in style of publication.
These volumes bring the history down to the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus.)
Martin's History of France. The Age of Louis XIV. By Henri Martin.
Translated from the Fourth Paris Edition. By Mary L. Booth. Boston :
Walker, Wise, & Co. 8vo. pp. 568, 543. (The publishers have done their
part admirably, in presenting these handsome volumes to the public. Of the
author and translator we shall reserve a full judgment till a future number.)
Queens of Song ; being Memoirs of some of the most celebrated Female
Vocalists who have performed on the Lyric Stage from the earliest Days of
the Opera to the presentVTime ; to which is added a Chronological List of all
the Operas that have been performed in Europe. By Ellen Creathorne
Clayton. With Portraits. New York: Harper and Brothers. 12mo.
History of New England. By John Gorham Palfrey. Vol. HI. Boston :
Little, Brown, & Co. 8vo. pp. 648. (To be reviewed.) '
A Tribute to Thomas Starr King. By Richard Frothingham. Boston :
Ticknor and Fields. 18mo. pp. 247.
Cousin Alice ; a Memoir of Alice B. Haven. New York : D. Appleton &
Co. 12mo. pp. 392.
POETRY.
Tragedies ; to which are added a few Sonnets and Verses. By T. N. Tal-
fourd. . Boston : Crosby and Ainsworth. 21 mo. pp. 268.
154 New Publications Received. [Jan.
Enoch Arden, &c. By Alfred Tennyson. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
82mo. pp.128. (Blue and Gold.)
The Poetical Works of Thomas Gray. With a Memoir. Boston : Little,
Brown, & Co. 32mo. pp. 146. (Green and Gold.)
Real and Ideal. By JoHh W. Montclair. Philadelphia : Frederick Ley-
polilt. 12mo. pp. 119.
Cabiro ; a Poem. By George H. Calvert. Cantos III. and IV. Boston :
Little, Brown, & Co. lGmo. pp. 87. (Cantos I. and II. were published in
1840.)
Essays, Historical and Biographical, Political, Social, Literary, and Scien
tific. By Hugh Miller. Edited, with a Preface, by Peter Bayne. Boston :
Gould and Lincoln. 12mo. .pp. 501.
The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed. Revised and Enlarged Edi
tion. With a Memoir by the Rev. Derwent Coleridgo. New York : W. J.
Widdleton. 12mo. 2 vols. pp. 432, 430. (An extremely elegant edition.
See Christian Examiner for November, 1864.)
Lyra Americana ; or, Verses of Praise and Faith from American Poets.
Selected and Arranged by Rev. George T. Rider. New York : D. Appleton
& Co. 12mo. pp. 295.
Shakespeare's Sonnets. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. lCmo. pp. 160.
Young America ; a Poem. By Fitz Greene Halleck. New York : D. Ap
pleton & Co. 18mo. pp. 49.
Familiar Letters from Europe. By Cornelius Conway Felton. Boston :

Ticknor and Fields. 18mo. pp. 392. (See p. 146.)
Arizona and Sonora ; the Geography, History, and Resources of the Silver
Region of North America. By Sylvester Mowry. Third Edition. New
York: Harper and Brothers. 12mo. pp.251.
Overland Explorations in Liberia, Northern Asia, and the great Amoor
River Country. By Major Perry McD. Collins. New York : D. Appleton
& Co. 12mo. 'pp. 467.
Arctic Researches and Life among the Esquimaux ; being the Narrative
of an Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, in the Years 1860, 1861,
and 1862. By Charles Francis Hall. With Maps and 100 Illustrations..
New York : Harper and Brothers. 8vo. pp. 595.
Treasury of Travel and Adventure, in North and South America, Eu
rope, Asia, and Africa. A Book for Young and Old. 120 Illustrations.
New York: D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. pp. 456.
NOVELS AND TALES.
Gypsies of the Danes' Dike ; a Story of Hedge-side Life in England,

The Gy
in the Year 1855. By George S. Phillips. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
12mo. pp.416.
Twice-Told Tales. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. 2 Vols. Boston : Ticknor
and Fields. 32mo. (Blue and Gold.)
Under the Ban. (Le Maudit.) A Tale of the Nineteenth Century.
Translated from the French of M. l'Abbe" . . . New York : Harper and
Brothers. 8vo. pp. 247. (See Art. IV.)
Wood Cliff. By Harriet B. McKeever. Philadelphia : Lindsay and Bla-
kiston. 12mo. pp. 464.
John Godfrey's Fortunes, related by Himself. A Story of American Life.
By Bayard Taylor. New York: G.P.Putnam; Hurd and Houghton. 12mo.
pp. 511. (Boston: A. Williams & Co.)
Margaret Denzil's History, annotated by her Husband. New York : Har
per and Brothers. (Paper.)
The Perpetual Curate. New York : Harper and Brothers. 8vo. pp. 239.
Diary of Mrs. Kitty Trevelyan ; a Story of the Times of Whitefield and
the Wesley*. By the Author of the Schonberg-Cotta Family. New York :
M. W. Dodd. 12mo. pp. 436.
, JUVENILE.
Uncle Nat ; or, the Good Time which George and Frank had, Trapping,
Fishing, Camping Out, etc. By Alfred Oldfellow. New York : D. Apple-
ton & Co. pp. 224.
The Adventures of Rob Roy. By James Grant, Esq. With Elustra-
tions. Boston: Crosby and Ainsworth. pp.887.
Life in the Woods ; a Boy's Narrative of the Adventures of a Settler's
Family in Canada. Edited by John C. Geikie. Wifli Illustrations. Bos
ton : Crosby and Ainsworth. pp. 408.
Winfield the Lawyer's Son ; and how he became a Major-General. By
Major Penniman. Philadelphia : Alhmead and Evans, pp.323.
Romantic Belinda ; a Book for Girls. By Mrs. L. p. Tuthill. Boston :
Crosby and Ainsworth. pp. 250.
Uncle John's Library. Hi mo. 16 vols. (Illustrated.)
Library of Travel and Adventure. 16mo. 3 vols. (Colored illustra
tions.) New York : D. Appleton & Co.
Willard Prince. Boston : J. E. Tilton & Co. pp. 290.
Mother Michel and her Cat. By Emile de la Bedollievre. Translated' by
Fanny Fuller. Philadelphia: Frederick Leypoldt. pp.104.
Following the Flag. From August, 1861, to November, 1862, with the
Army of the Potomac. By " Carleton." Boston : Ticknor and Fields.
24mo. pp. 336.
American History. By Jacob Abbott. Illustrated with numerous Maps
and Engravings. Vol. VII. War of the Revolution. 24mo. pp. 288 ;
Walter's Tour in the East. By Daniel C. Eddy. Walter in Constantino
ple. 24mo. pp. 222. New York : Sheldon & Co. Boston : Gould & Lin
coln.
Freaks on the Fells ; or, Three Months' Rustication, and Why I did not be
come a Sailor. By R M. Ballantyne. With Illustrations. 18mo. pp. 379 ;
Grace's Visit; or, The Way to cure a Fault. Illustrated. 24mo. pp. 138.
Boston : Crosby and Ainsworth.
HOLIDAY BOOKS.
Forest Pictures in the Adirondacks. By John A. Hows. With Original
Poems. By Alfred B. Street. pp. 61.
A Selection of War Lyrics. With Illustrations on Wood by F. O. C. Dar-
ley. pp. $2. New York: James G. Gregory. 4to.
Clever Stories of Many Nations. Rendered in Rhyme by John G. Saxe.
Illustrated by W. L. Champney. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 12mo. pp.
192. (See p. 151.)
Golden Leaves from the British Poets ;
Golden Leaves from the American Poets ; Collected by John W. S. Hows.
New York : James G. Gregory. (Selected with skill, and published in an
extremely neat and handsome form ; vellum gilt.)
MISCELLANEOUS.
Religion and Chemistry ; or, Proofs of God's Plan in the Atmosphere and
its Elements. Ten Lectures delivered at the Brooklyn Institute, Brooklyn,
156 New Publications Received. [Jan.
N. Y., on the Graham Foundation. By Josiah P. Cooke. New York:
Charles Scribner. 8vo. pp. 848. (A very handsome volume, full and in
teresting in its scientific information, and rather obtrusively teleological in
its argument ; valuable to common readers, and to those who wish to see the
latest illustrations of that argument. In style, eloquent and clear.)
A New Atmosphere. By Gail Hamilton. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
12mo. pp. 810.
Sacred and Legendary Art. 2 Vols. ; and
Legends of the Monastic Orders. By Mrs. Jameson. Boston: Ticknor
and Fields. 32mo. (Blue and Gold.)
To Be or Not to Be, that is the Question. Boston : Geo. C. Rand and
Avery, Printers. 16mo. pp. 47. (A presenting of Hamlet's doubts in the
form of a familiar letter.)
Looking towards Sunset ; from Sources old and new, original and selected.
By L. Maria Child. • Boston : Ticknor and Fields. 12mo. pp. 455. (A
charming miscellany, in very handsome style of publication.)
The Autumn Holidays of a Country Parson. Boston : Ticknor and Fields.
16mo. pp. 352.
How to get a Farm, and where to undone ; showing that Homesteads may
be had by those desirous of securing them ; with the Public Law on the Sub
ject of Free Homes, and Suggestions for Practical Farmers. By the Author
of "Ten Acres Enough." New York: James Miller. 12mo. pp. 845.
The Correlation and Conservatism of Forces ; a Series of Expositions, by
Prof. Grove, Prof. Helmholtz, Dr. Mayer, Dr. Faraday, Prof. Liebig, and
Dr. Carpenter. With an Introduction and brief Biographical Notices of the
chief Promoters of the New Views, by Edward L. Youmans. New York :
D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. pp. 438.
Sargent's Standard Series of Readers, Second Series, including First to
Fifth Readers. Boston : John L. Shorey. (In some particulars, a clear im
provement on the previous course, and on other courses of reading-books we
have known, especially in the first and last of the series.)
The Railway Anecdote Book. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 16mo.
pp. 240.
The American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events for
the year 1868, embracing Political, Civil, Military, and Social Attairs, Public
Documents, Biography, Statistics, Commerce, Finance, Literature, Sciences,
Agriculture, and Mechanical Industry. New York : D. Appleton & Co. Bos
ton: Dinsmore & Co. 8vo. pp.865. (We have not space to repeat what
we have said before of the merits of this most valuable and useful series. The
present volume is, in its various departments, without doubt, the most full, in
teresting, and authentic history accessible of an eventful year. It still lacks,
however, the almost indispensable feature of a tabular chronicle of events.)
THE
CHRISTIAN EXAMINER.
MARCH, 1865.
Abt. I. — THE TRUE WORK AND METHOD OF THE

PREACHER.
'
The mere success or failure of the preacher is less impor
tant than the dignity of the end he proposes and the purity
of the means he employs. A charlatan may triumph, yet de
serve contempt ; a prophet fail, and still he admirable. For
example, the success which attended the preaching of Jonah
at Nineveh reflects no great credit on him. Suppose the cir
cumstances of the place in which we live were the same. Im
agine a stranger to come before the people and find them pre
pared to believe his declaration,,that, unless they placated the
anger of God, in forty days the town would be destroyed and
all within it indiscriminately perish. Would not the inhab
itants fall on their knees in supplication, or rush forth to avert
the calamity ? The preaching of Jonah to the Ninevites was
simply a threat of destruction. Giving credence to the threat,
as they did, no wonder it produced a ferment. Could preach
ers to-day deliver a similar message, and be believed, how
quickly they would have the world prostrate in selfish prayer !
The success of Jonah, instead of proving his greatness as a
preacher, only shows the external quality of his end, and the
sensational adaptation of .his means. Jesus does, not eulogize
him or his method, but merely contrasts the docility of the
Ninevites with the stubbornness of the Jews. " The people
of Nineveh shall rise up in judgment with this generation, and
shall condemn it ; because they repented at the preaching of
Jonah ; and, behold, a greater than Jonah is here ! " Many
vol. lxxviii. — 5th s. vol. XVI. NO. II. 14
158 The True Work and Method [March,
a sermon, incomparably greater in beauty and eloquence1 and
profundity than that of Jonah, has been preached to modern
congregations who have slept under it or yawned at it. The
fact is, in preaching, as in other things, in individual cases, the
grandest agencies do not always appear to produce the grand
est results. A blast may seem more effective than the atmos
phere, a billow than the tide, a gun than the thunders of
heaven. The exertions of the rarest powers of the human
mind, equipped with their costliest endowments, wielding the
sublimest truths of nature and grace, may tell for nothing on
an audience too coarse and hard to appreciate them. Yet, in
the long run, the influence of the highest gifts and attain
ments of the soul, in the loftiest regions of experience, exerts
a despotic control on the destinies of mankind. The phenom
ena of the aurora borealis would not appear to have any les
son for moles burrowing in the earth ; but that weird shim
mering of skyey lights is the play of forces whose vibration
and equilibrium hold the globe in its orbit, retain the ingre
dients of earth and air in their adjustment, and support the
existence of the humblest animalcule as well as that of Shake
speare and Leibnitz. On the other hand, a preacher may at
once produce large visible consequences simply because his
weapons are gross and his aim low, precisely in the range to
do execution among the perceptions and passions of his audi
tors. Cater to a voracious desire, and you will give pleasure
and receive thanks ; though the gratification be transient and
the issue pernicious. But unveil a celestial ideal, and the
blind will see nothing, and the swinish will rend the hand
that exposes such a rebuke to them ; though growing num
bers of aspirants in after ages may be ravished by the sight.
Hit a prejudice, and you may shudder at the fierce reaction^
but plant a principle, and no shock will succeed, though in
due season a harvest may be reaped.
Jesus himself, with his incomparable superiority, did not
immediately produce so great an external effect by his preach
ing as Jonah did. But what a contrast in the quality, the
enduring and diffusive power of their respective teachings !
The first purpose of Jonah was to make the people put on
sackcloth, and crouch before their altars. He effected this
1865.] of the Preacher. 159
by frightening them. The result was as poor and transient

as it was quick and general. In what respect are mankind
any different to-day from what they would have been had
Jonah never preached ? The aim of Jesus was to implant in
the minds of his hearers regenerating sentiments, germs of
divine truth, religious principles, which would take root and
bear fruit unto eternal life. This was a work beset by a thou
sand obstacles, and only to be accomplished slowly, here and
there, in individual souls. The result was spiritual, the death
less cause of other results which have already overspread half
the earth and will at last redeem it all. The style of preach
ing exemplified by Jonah is a frantic effort to excite men to
special formal acts. The style of preaching exemplified by
Jesus is a wise effort to inspire men with a consecrating pur
pose, to infuse into their souls a principle of spiritual assim
ilation which will build them into moral images of God.
For the true direction of our preference between these two
ideas of preaching, we must, by perceiving the sophistry that
underlies it, neutralize our natural inclination to attribute the
greatest importance to that which is the most impressive to
the senses. We must remember that, if a gale can strip a
field or level a house, the summer atmosphere ripens the har
vests of a world ; if a wave can crush a boat, the tide bears
the commerce of the nations and refreshes the globe with its
embrace ; if the gun of a sportsman can sever a twig or slay
a bird, the electricity of heaven constrains the firmament and
fertilizes a universe. And the same principle is true in the
moral sphere. Though the overt effects of arbitrary doctrines
and extravagant methods, the terrifying and convulsing of
men by the skilfl^ plying of artificial or overstrained motives,
may produce effects more swift and startling, yet they are so
much less deep and fruitful, so much less fitted to the healthy
realities of our nature and situation, that they are insig
nificant in comparison with the steady cultivation of the type
of character exemplified in Jesus, — that spirit and character
which constitute the essence of salvation, and whose ever-
multiplying reproduction is finally to bring heaven itself down
on the cities and fields of earth to permeate all the homes of
humanity.
What should the occupants of the pulpit at the present time
aim at, and how shall they compass it ? By considering this
subject we hope in some degree to remove the erroneous no
tions and clear up the confusion prevalent in regard to it.
The false and the genuine aims and methods of preaching, is
a subject as practical to the audience as to the speaker. It
would be of the greatest mutual service to every congregation
and minister if both of them, at the outset of their partnership,
had a vivid knowledge of the truth on this subject. Let us
endeavor to compass that knowledge.
We are confronted on the threshold by the deadly error
into which so many preachers and congregations fall, that the
object to be aimed at is the excitement of the feelings. This
opinion is widely prevalent, and is pernicious in many ways.
It is undeniable that the first demand of most listeners to pub
lic speaking is emotional entertainment. The average rep
resentatives of nearly every assembly like that speaker best,
not who is the truest and wisest, but who most thoroughly
stirs them from their lethargy. They do not praise that ad
dress most which gives the most instruction, but that which
transports them with the most unwonted fervor. Merit with
them does not consist in the conveyance of profound thoughts,
the illustration of great principles, the expression of sacred
and exalting sentiments, the exhibition of inviting privileges,
the enforcement of imperious duties ; but in the contagion of
heated feeling, skill in mirroring back to them, in heightened
hues and forms, what they themselves think and feel, —
ability in playing on their senses by artful sentences, tones,
and gestures. Under the influence of this standard of merit
the preacher is tempted to present to his a^fjience the vulgar
stimulants which are more commonly applicable, but which
degrade while they amuse, instead of the noble ones which
refine and exalt, but to which only the few are at once sus
ceptible. He is tempted to devote himself to the coarse por
trayal of mental pictures which generate in the contemplator
an effervesoent zeal soon going out, instead of devoting him
self to the careful exposition of those eternal ideas which
would kindle convictions and desires to last and work with
the endurance of our being.
I860.] of the Preacher. 161
Considering that the principal demand of most audiences

from their preachers is excitement, there is one singular phe
nomenon often presented in their conduct, one frequent fea
ture in the treatment, of the clergyman by the laity, which,
although at first sight it seems curiously incongruous and
unfair, on a deeper inspection will be seen to be quite nat
ural. There will be found in almost every congregation a
body of persons who, while they greatly enjoy aesthetic exhi
bitions of power and eloquence, and eagerly desire to be
warmed and thrilled by .their preacher, would yet prohibit
him from touching any of the themes best calculated to call
out his genius and energy. They would confine him to com
monplaces and abstractions, about which they are themselves
deathfully indifferent, but on which they expect him to be so
inspired, that from his tingling batteries he can surcharge their
frozen bosoms every Sunday. Should a humane heart or a
vigorous conscience lead him to speak in downright earnest
ness of the aspects and duties of the time, public wrongs cry
ing for redress, unholy institutions and cruel usages, or their
own favorite sins, they start back in disgust and anger, and
tell him he must not touch these topics ; they are too excit
ing ! How is this ? Do they not wish excitement ? 0 yes,
only — this is the secret — they wish to be stirred with tru
isms, not with anything counter to their private views and
passions, not with anything new that will interfere with their
rooted opinions and require the labor of thought on their part.
If not offended themselves by such agitating novelties, they
fear others will be, and that the church will not be filled ; for
getting that not the repletion of pews, but the education of
souls, is the end of preaching. They want excitement, but
only an excitement that will shock no prejudices and disturb
no ease ; that will heighten and entertain their consciousness,
but make no demand on their will. They love to be electri
fied by the superb declamation of the orator, but they hate
to feel obliged to go and fight Philip afterwards. They are
therefore perfectly consistent in vetoing the introduction of
the vital subjects of the hour into the pulpit, or any bold pre
sentment of the newest phases of old subjects, because the
feeling these would engender would call for active sympathy,
14«
reformation of prejudices, manifold laborious exertions ; and

what they exclusively covet is a sensational and ideal excite
ment, whirling inwardly in the circles of the soul, and dying
inanely away with the occasion that begot it, in a sort of sen
timental voluptuousness.
There are fatal objections to regarding this kind of excite
ment as the end of preaching. In the first place, it ministers
to the degradation of character in him who practises it. When
a preacher permits himself to fall in with the popular craving
for excitement, and labors for it as an end, it tends to debauch
his sincerity, his truthfulness of feeling and manner. It be
trays him into exaggerations. Sophistry supersedes wisdom,
and rant and cant take the place of studious reasoning. He
toils after the most effective ideas, instead of the soundest ; the
most moving expressions, whether correct or incorrect, instead
of the simple utterance of unperverted facts. He prefers what
is telling to what is honest, works himself into galvanized
fervors, loses the dignified consecration of truth and nature.
This is an evil in itself, and cannot fail to be productive of
spreading evils in its effects. To think more of show than of
reality, to put impression above worth, is to be a trickster ;
and when the primal fount of character is thus corrupt, all the
influence sent from it will be corrupting. One of the most
.popular preachers in Massachusetts for several years, afforded
a strik:.:g instance in proof. He drew thousands to hear him
every Sunday. They hung as if fascinated on his feverish and
infectious lips. Hearing him several times, we made a study
of his method. His discourses consisted of a cunning dove
tailing of uucredited quotations from the most eloquent au
thors, scraps of orations and bits of poetry, the obvious law of
selection being neither inherent value nor relevancy, but sim
ply adaptedness for impassioned declamation. One in a hun
dred of his hearers was disgusted ; the rest were delighted,
and looked on him with admiration. He was detected in
offences not decent to be named, and left his parish in dis
grace.
Secondly, these extravagances of statement and manner,
catering to a vulgar level of mind, this comparative reckless
ness of means if so be the end is attained, not only imply a
1865.] of the Preather. 163
shallow and undedicated nature in him who stoops to them ;
they are seen through by sober and discerning minds, and
they nauseate such minds. Undue transports of pretended
or real feeling, assertions and manifestations that overstep the
modest realities of nature for the sake of creating excitement,
by the reaction they produce do more harm, provoke more
dissent and dislike, and leave more coldness, than would
readily be thought. When the preacher waxes fanatical, and
screams denunciations or exhorts to piety at the utmost pitch
of his voice, and beats all the dust out of the pulpit, the ma
jority of the audience, sitting quietly in their pews, so far
from being excited to deep religious warmth, coolly ask them
selves, " Why so heated and noisy ? Is it not out of keeping
with the holy stillness of the hour, the unmoved solemnities
of God and Truth ? " And of those who fall in with the de
clamatory ferwr, and like it, the most are not permanently
influenced. They merely feel, " How eloquent that is ! What
a smart minister we have got ! " Preaching with vehement
exertion for the sake of moving the feelings can be successful
only with ignorant or frivolous persons. To those of earnest
hearts and keen minds it is ever repugnant. Of course we
do not object to a . delivery honestly inspired with power, —
that is a different thing. The spontaneous venting in great
speech and action of deep energies kindled by glorious visions
is always admirable.
Thirdly, the stirring of an immediate excitement in his
audience is an aim which, even if they strive solely for it, not
one preacher in a hundred can secure without having recourse
to meretricious and mischievous artifices. The people assem
ble in church so often, from youth up, under the same gen
eral circumstances, to pass through the same order of services,
to listen to exhortations or disquisitions on the same subjects,
that it becomes a routine subjecting them to a deadening
set of habits. All around is silent and calm. No sudden
events, novel and thrilling issues, help to enlist the passions
and give a fresh interest to the scene and the address. The
concrete outward exigencies, the intense zeal and expectation,
the absorbing party-spirit and personal loyalty, the instant
material prizes, which lie ready before the lawyer and the pol
itician, as tinder and torch, are wanting. Under such condi
tions, to ask the preacher, week after week, with his worn
themes and instruments, to make all those passive breasts
heave and throb with religious excitement, all their nerves
burn with spiritual vitality, is asking too much of a mortal
man. Genius is competent to do it occasionally ; but not
even the richest genius can always do it. To live long in
such an unnatural state of fervor as that would require, if
dignified and sincere, would exhaust the powers of the brain,
and induce delirium or paralysis, — as has repeatedly hap
pened, untimely quenching bright lights of the pulpit. Merely
to excite a strong sensation should never be regarded as the
cardinal end of preaching ; for no man can regularly and per
manently do it. Then disappointment is felt, and complaints'
and other evils arise. There is a perilous temptation, further
more, to take the shortest cut to the object, to »use the cheap
est means when the costlier are too arduous ; and then we are
treated to exhibitions of antic gesture, speech, and thought, as
when a celebrated American divine plays pantomimes in the
pulpit, or the English Spurgeon tells his hearers, " If you find
the Bible dry reading, you will yourselves be dry enough in
hell ! "
But, fourthly, suppose the preacher could sweep every bosom
through the whole diapason of feeling at his will. Suppose he
had a miraculous power, and every Sunday should seize the
hearts of his auditory and wind them up to the highest pitch
of passionate emotion, flooding their whole consciousness with
ecstatic fervor. What good would that be ? If they were as
people now are, the excitement would be merely so much aes
thetic enjoyment to them for the time. It would die out with
the occasion and leave no fertilizing deposit. If the preacher
concentrates his power in driving home to some regenerating
purpose or fruitful issue the heat he stirs, or if the auditor is
so much in earnest as to the import of his life as to apply
every stimulus given him to its proper end in his own im
provement, then eloquence is a blessed agency. But most
frequently these conditions fail to be met. There is a show-
oratory whose false glare, having no fire to burn up any evil
or to kindle any good, idly dazzles the gazer. There are di
lettanli hearers whose interest in listening to splendid speech
terminates in a depraving luxury. We have in mind, at this
moment, a man who for twenty years has sat under the min
istrations of one of the most eloquent preachers in America.
He has taken houndless delight in hearing him. We have
repeatedly heard him say that, on listening to some outburst
of extraordinary power and beauty, he "was so moved that
he actually thought he should have jumped out of his skin."
Yet, after this experience of twenty years' burning eloquence
from the pulpit and fervid response in the pew, he is to-day
as odious a specimen of selfishness, meanness, egotism, petty
conceit, as we know. The eloquent preaching has not tickled
him out of one old weakness or vice, nor into one new grace
or virtue. It has been perverted from a means into an end.
His delight has been so much titillation of the nerves, so
much detached force spinning to waste in the centres of the
brain. Obviously this sort of excitement is but an evanescent
series of pleasurable sensations. For the most part, it fades
ineffectually out with its cause. Sometimes it perverts the
feelings, turning them inwards and making them insensible
to their legitimate outward objects. It is not, therefore, even
regarded at its best, a good worthy to be made the aim of
preaching.
We conclude, then, on the whole, that the preacher who
aims merely to awaken the warmth of momentary emotions
in his auditors, by spiritual charlatanry, the tricks of the
rhetorician and the elocutionist, fails even when he succeeds,^
— fails, that is to say, to do anything worth doing. He does
not determine their wills, convince their judgments, alter their
hearts, elevate their lives, or improve the characteristic spirit
that dominates them. He sows nothing that will bear fruit.
He but strikes a note whose echo dies with the sound that
made it. The essential error and injury of this is, that it is
the squandering of so much time, life, and soul. The greater
the energy, the deeper the loss. The wheel of thought rolls
in its wasting stream, the upright shaft of feeling revolves in
its idle socket, out of gear with the machinery of practical pur
pose, so that the entire display is an empty expenditure, .not
weaving an inch of real fabric of life. Men ought to go to
church, not to feel a vain excitement, but to gain a solid ben

efit, — to make progress in the attainment of wisdom, virtue,
and piety, devotion to the best improvement of the faculties
of their souls and the opportunities of their lives.
The characteristic end of preaching is personal edification,
the improvement of character and experience. This peculiar
aim discriminates the sermon from all other literary products,
distinguishes the preacher from all other public speakers.
The aim of the poet, as such, is pleasure, in the purest and
highest sense of the word, — an ideal heightening of function.
He does not, as a poet, seek to teach, to convince, to persuade,
or to improve his reader, but simply to charm him by en
riching his current of consciousness. Philosophical, political,
moral, or religious ends may be associated in his work, or
even dominate it: still his essential function is to minister
to delight, and so far as these other purposes are subserved
in his production, the philosopher, the patriot, or the Chris
tian shines through the poet. Absolute poetry is the product
of the purposeless play of the faculties, the spontaneous ex
uberance of the mind. It may be used for an end ; it has
no conscious end except the enjoyment which is in itself.
A poem which profoundly pleased every reader would be re
garded as successful and justified, although it did nothing
else. In contrast with this, the distinctive aim of history, sci
ence, and philosophy is instruction ; — to impart to the mind
information concerning facts, events, and laws; to convey a
.knowledge of the truth, and satisfy rational curiosity. The
historian, scientist, or philosopher, who clearly teaches his pu
pils the facts in his department, narrating events, describing
subjects, explaining phenomena, solving problems, so as ade
quately to impress the memory and convince the reason, has
successfully fulfilled his function, irrespective of any other ef
fect, interior or exterior. All that is asked of him is simply
instruction in truth.
Besides these two ends of pleasure and instruction, there is
a large amount of writing, there are many varieties of speaking,
whose aim is to secure some outward result, either directly,
by an appropriate stirring of the feelings, or indirectly, by an
adapted biasing of the judgment. The politician labors to
get a vote, the statesman to pass a measure, the lawyer to gain
a verdict, the leader to animate his men for the battle ; and so on
with the rest. The dilettante declaimer aims, by his power and
grace in the arts of rhetoric and elocution, to play on the facul
ties of his hearers, kindle emotion in them, awaken their ad
miration, and win their applause ; his show-speaking W really a
species of sham poetry whose aim is pleasure. But all earnest
oratory, outside of the province of the pulpit, looks to some
definite overt result. It is a persuasion to an act.
Now the distinctive aim of the preacher is an inward result,
a moral and spiritual step or evolution, some improvement of
character, some advance in experience. It frequently looks
indeed to the production of new and better conduct in the out
ward life, but to this only as the fruit of some beneficial in
ternal change or impression in the springs of the being. The
aim of the drama, like that of poetry, — of which, in fact, it
is a complicated variety, — is entertainment. The actor is con
tent when he sets the thoughts and passions of his audience
in absorbing action ; he does not ask any abiding result,
either outward or inward. The aim of all the fine arts, the
true aesthetic constituent in any experience, is pleasurable
excitement, no matter if it begin and die in itself. Poetic
and dramatic speech falls entirely in this category. Forensic
speech applies the excitement for the production of a ma
terial result in action. Pulpit speech, or preaching, ap
plies the excitement for the production of a spiritual result
in some alteration of the being or experience of the hearer.
Preaching, therefore, may be a fine art in its instruments and
means, but it is a useful art in its end. Its votary ceases to be
a genuine preacher, and becomes a mere poet or player, the
moment he is satisfied with aimless pleasure, content to en
gender an occupying excitement without applying it for a
desirable and enduring result. Thus it is clear, then, that
the object of all the arts of the Theatre is entertainment ; the
object of all the arts of the School is instruction ; the object
of all the arts of the Church is edification.
The Theatre once, before there was any popular School or
Church, aimed in some degree both to train the minds and
to purify the passions of its patrons ; but ceasing, long since,
"0 .N -"V
V
to do that, it now caters merely to the harmless amusement
of the hour ; and for the last generation it has been rapidly
degenerating from the legitimate to the illegitimate drama,
from the tragedies and comedies of the great masters of psy
chological and ethical science to the most grotesque farces and
extravaganzas. The encroaching success of the opera is due
to the fact that it adds to the other effective instrumentalities
of the drama the richer and keener stimulus which music
administers to the emotions, — is a greater aesthetic luxury,
and makes a smaller moral demand. The School, common,
collegiate, and professional, undertakes to equip man for
worldly success, to secure his well-being as a member of
society, furnishing him with the tools and methods whereby
he may win his way in the crowd of rivals. The proper voca
tion of the Church is to train man for spiritual success, to
secure his welfare as an immortal soul, an inhabitant of the
City of God, by building up a character in harmony with all
divine laws. These three institutions differ as much in the
methods by which they try to compass their respective aims, as
they do in those aims themselves. The School imprints the
matter of its instruction in the memory by dint of exposition,
precept, and repetition. The Theatre employs every available
artifice to allure the faculties to yield themselves up in the
most careless abandonment to the sights and sounds offered for
their entertainment. The Church strives by its endeared and
venerable associations to touch the heart, arouse reason and
conscience, suggest solemn and commanding realities, engage
the spirit in exercises calculated to result in personal edifica
tion. The most original and distinguishing agency by which
the Church labors to effect its object is that of typical example
on one side and aspiring loyalty on the other, the contagion of
personal exhortation and sympathy, the living face and voice
of the preacher in breathing motion, charged with a power
which no formal routine of .the school-room, no inarticulate
pages of a book, can approach. Lifted above his congregation
in the pulpit, the preacher is to deal with truth and grace at
first hand, and let their workings in him shine forth for those
who gaze on his countenance, that their consciousness may ap
propriate and reflect the edifying spectacle he exhibits. Look-
ing on him and seeing that he sees God, their eyes are to fol
low his, and catch the same beatific vision. He sees, and
shows to others ; thinks, feels, is, and imparts to others what he
thinks, feels, and is, for the purpose of rectifying and enriching
them. Theâim of genuine preaching, accordingly, in contrast
with those modes of speech which aim at pleasure and outward
action, is to furnish nutriment to the spiritual being, to make
contributions in help of the growth and discipline of the soul
and the wise conduct of life, to exalt and harmonize character,
to make experience deeper, richer, and nobler. It may stir
transient fervors, give great pleasure, and lead to overt out
ward acts, but these are not its end : its end is always the
personal good of the hearer. And for the accomplishment of
this end the preacher may rightfully use many of the instru
ments of the poet, the orator, and the actor ; it is only when he
uses those instruments for other ends, or for their own sake,
that he mistakes his place and forgets his function.
In the light of the foregoing exposition we are prepared to
perceive in detail precisely what the proper method of the
preacher is, his fitting topics, and the presiding stamp of pur
pose they should always bear. The foremost office of the
preacher, in pursuit of his great .end of edification, is to
awaken the pious sentiments of his hearers, purify and in
vigorate the sources of emotion, smite the rocky mind till the
spring of devotion flows forth in it. The people have come
up to the temple of worship and peace, — come from the dust
and struggle of the week, from the hurly-burly of the care-
laden world. Now, for a brief respite, they tarry in the
church. Surely the preacher will rather seek to soothe and
strengthen, than to excite or amuse them. Surely he will
perceive that the processes of spiritual nutrition are more ap
propriate for them than the processes of spiritual friction. In
the circumstances under which they assemble, he cannot ex
pect to meet their deepest wants by regaling them with an
episode from the history of the Jews, or with a fragment from
a treatise on book-keeping by double entry. It will be ob
vious to him that they cannot be truly ministered unto by the
presentation of the trite alphabet of moral commonplaces, nor
by the abstract technicalities of any branch of science or phi-
losophy. He will remember the differences that intermediately
separate the glowing and edifying effusions of the Church from
the entertaining recreations of the Theatre in one direction,
and from the dry didactics of the Academy in the other. He
will endeavor to touch their feverish, denied, andireary hearts
with the cleansing and cooling thoughts of penitence, God,
and heaven. He will strike the keys of holy associations to
«all out the sentiments of faith, purity, and reverence. Well
and happy is it then, both for him and them, if he can make
the balm of heavenly consolations sink deeply into their
wounds and sorrows, if he can kindle their sensibilities and
lift their imaginations by strains of lofty fervor.
This may appear like a covert advocacy of what we have all
along been arguing against, namely, sensational excitement.
But we make a fundamental distinction. It is unapplied ex
citement, circular and fruitless motion, that is to be depre
cated, — an excitement out of connection with improving char
acter and beneficent activity, — the creation of eddies in the
soul-current, which carry down no freight to the inheritance
of our destiny, contributing nothing to, but taking away from,
the momentum of the stream of life. A legitimate applied ex
citement, an excitement which makes the hard and closed fac
ulties tender and receptive, which melts the soul in order to
recast it in lovelier and nobler moulds, which inspires the
heart and gives it wings to fly thenceforth on a higher level
of experience, — this is the grandest of spiritual achievements.
This is the function of genuine eloquence, which is a fusing
power wielded by wisdom and directed by consecration ; a
heat generated by the orbital movements of great thoughts
in great souls, not by the friction of petty fancies and vani
ties moving at random in vacuo. This weapon of disinterest
edness is quite a different affair from that false eloquence
which belongs to the sophist and the demagogue, the tool of
selfishnesss. The sham orator practises the art of applying
passionate words to the passions of his audience by means of
passionate tones and gestures for the sake of pleasure or some
base outward design. This is the test by which you may
always know him. The true preacher practises the art of
convincing the judgments and persuading the feelings of his
auditors by an earnest and sincere manifestation of truth and
good, applying noble motives to their nobler faculties, for the
improvement of their characters, conduct, and experience.
This is the test by which you may know him. Instead of
playing on the existing opinions and prejudices of his hearers,
powerfully echoing and reflecting what they like best, for the
sake of pleasurable excitement, he labors either to impart new
ideas and motives, or else so to stir the existing dormant ma
terials of their minds as to give it fresh color and glow, and to
deduce conduct from it. There is, therefore, no objection to
eloquence in the pulpit ; rather every reason for coveting and
admiring it. But it must be kept in its true place, as a means ;
never made an end. Its office is preparation. It is spade,
plough, and harrow, to open and soften the soil. Then spir
itual influence is the seed, and purpose is the sowing hand.
If there be no seed to scatter, or no hand to scatter it, the
ploughing and loosening are useless. This, however, is no
argument for dulness in the pulpit. Your prosers not only
do not sow any good seed, they do not even make the prelim
inary preparation. They merely put their auditors to sleep,
or weary and disgust them from going to church. Let not,
therefore, the tedious proser plume himself as if he were
superior to the exciting declaimer. He may be really inferior
to him. It is only he who, eloquent, dedicates his eloquence
to sound edification, who is to be praised as a model for the
pulpit.
The greater the eloquence of a preacher, the better, if it
be honest, unselfish, devoted to the true aims of sacred elo
quence ; the greater the excitement he causes, the better, if it
be healthy, and be applied to the production of its proper con
sequences in character and experience. But it should ever
be remembered that the genuine evocation and enhancement
of the moral and religious feelings depend on the presentation
of their objects, — God, truth, duty, humanity, beauty, good.
The exhibition of the vehement signs of the effects of feeling,
or mere eloquence, may stir up a feverish excitement : only the
exhibition of the intrinsic nature and relations of the objects
of feeling, or true preaching, can create the healthy glow of
inspiration. And this latter activity is no empty diversion,
but a just fruition of the ends of life, a rightful action and

reaction between the soul and the various manifestations of
the will of God. Accordingly, the preacher is well employed
when he occupies himself in unveiling the everlasting realities
of the universe, and exposing their operation, in order that the
breasts of his people may be filled with their unfailing solace
and strength, their blessed light and warmth. But this, it is
to be recollected, is not left exclusively to the sermon. It is
emphatically the office of the other services to do this. The
simple gathering of the congregation in the building dedicated
to that purpose brings the soul within the still and soothing
atmosphere of religion, beneath the mystic wings of the pres
ence of God. Then the public prayer calls on every heart to
leave the noise of earth and the burden of trouble behind, and
commune with God in the spirit's loneliness and sincerity.
The hymn adores and gives thanks to the- Great Benefactor.
In the dullest and poorest church-service it is the fault of the
individual if he does not fervently worship God and recognize
tljp exhaling purifications of worship. Opportunity is offered
for the secret indulgence and outpouring of every religious
emotion, from penitential sorrow to grateful aspiration. And
so it is the first object of the preacher to counteract the exces
sive attraction of outwardness and selfishness ; to direct atten
tion and dilate and lift the affections to impersonal and invis
ible realities ; to spiritualize the character and fix the thoughts
on God, on ideal purity and beauty, on heavenly perfection and
eternity.
The preacher should next seek to achieve his aim by so dis
cussing and exhibiting the moral virtues and vices, with their
sanctions and warnings, as to recommend the former and deter
from the latter. He should discourse on the personal excel
lences and faults of character in all their forms and aspe'ets,
exposing the seductions and dangers of evil, enforcing the
beauties and obligations of goodness. And, in treating these
subjects, we are more and more convinced of the falsity of the
idea entertained by many, that, in any permanent and fruitful
way, loud assertion and confident appeal are more effective
than patient argument and rational illustration, authority bet
ter than proof, hot declamation more persuasive than calm
logic. They may be more generally applicable, but they are

less valuable. Eloquence, as an ally of reason, is admirable ;
as a substitute for reason, it is contemptible and detestable.
We had rather get one man — it would be a greater work to
get one man to keep the moral law, because he has a personal
knowledge of its intrinsic sanctity, than to get fifty men to
observe it merely out of deference to conventional opinion.
The former is solid, and can pass the Divine scrutiny ; the lat
ter is hollow, and can never stand before God. The most effect
ual and lasting mode of influencing men, we are sure, is to
persuade the will through conviction of the reason. Still, the
vices and virtues of human character, the temptations and
boons of human life, are to he treated by the preacher not in
one way alone, but in many ways, the end he always keeps in
view being the personal improvement of his hearers. Now he
will dissect and explain them by philosophical analysis. Now
be will set them fortli by poetic or literal description, to make
them attractive or repulsive to the sentiments. Now he may
illustrate and enforce them by biographical sketches. Though
some might object to this last-named method as a novelty, it is
certain that the lessons of virtue and sin may be impressed
more powerfully by the narrative of a life embodying them in
an eminent degree, than by the most labored abstract discus
sions. We think it would be well often to introduce such
narratives to the pulpit. But when we preach about the good
and evil of character, the right and wrong of conduct, we are
met by not a few with the exclamation, " This is interesting,
and is well as far as it goes ; but then it is not religion ; it will
never save souls ; it is mere morality." To such objectors we
reply, that their remark is not just nor weighty ; that the style
of preaching which they like, which is everlastingly harping on
the vague generalities of repentance, conversion, the atone
ment, and holding the horrors of perdition in terrorem, tires
men and repels them by its unreasonableness and unpractical-
ness. It is not even interesting, and cannot be made so
to unbiased minds. And it can never save souls by any of its
peculiarities ; for the only salvation there is consists in the
purification of the character from sin and hate, and its edifica
tion in truth and love. Moreover, we would ask such persons
15*
what they mean by stigmatizing virtue as mere morality?
What warrant have they for assuming its contaminated worth-
lessness ? Do they know what it is that they sneer at ? Is
not God a moral being ? Is not his government a system of
moral laws ? Is not conformity to his will or likeness to his
being the ground of his favor, the condition of harmonious
communion with him throughout infinitude and eternity?
What else is salvation but precisely that ? Virtue is to man
before God, what wealth is to the merchant in business ; and for
the preacher to depreciate the former as being " mere moral
ity," is just as wise as for the broker to depreciate the latter as
being " mere money." For our part, we say give us as much
as possible of the filthy rags of righteousness : let them cover
us all over, plated sevenfold thick. Well we know that no
coronation robes, stiff with gold and diamonds, were ever so
costly or so dazzling as these same rags shall be when the
blaze of the judgment-day illuminates the heavenly host.
The second province or instrument of preaching, then, is the
accurate discussion and portrayal of the moral virtues and
vices, that the latter may be abhorred and expelled, the former
honored and built into a perfect character.
Another function of the preacheV, or another province in his
work, is the interpretation of the Scriptures. His life being
set apart to theological and the affiliated studies, he ought to
be betfor informed on these subjects than his hearers can be
expected to be. He will accordingly from time to time bring
forth from his treasury things old and things new to explain
the abstrusenesses of the Bible and solve the perplexities of in
quisitive readers. This has become, perhaps, the least impor
tant of the offices of preaching, both because of the less space
occupied by the Bible in the religious life of modern times and
the multiplication of good and cheap commentaries, and be
cause that part of the Scriptures which is of a practical charac
ter, and therefore of the most moment, is generally plain to the
intelligent reader. The obscure passages, for the most part,
relate to topics not essential to be understood as a help in
forming the Christian character and leading a Christian life.
" Thou shalt not steal," " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy
self," are statements of all-important principles, and they are
clear enough. The purport of the opening of the seventh seal

in the Apocalypse is very mysterious, and of little consequence.
Still, since the position and authority of the Bible are so un
paralleled, since there are so many conflicting opinions about it,
— since minds are often so much troubled as to the real drift
of certain texts or chapters, the real force and value of certain
documents, or even the true relation of the whole volume to the
questions of revelation, inspiration, nature, and conscience, —
the preacher is sometimes called to enter on the criticism of
these points, and can never be thought to desert his proper
field of labor when engaged in such inquiries. Other themes
may be more entertaining, more instructive, more edifying,
than the study of a song in the Old Testament or the exposi
tion of an epistle in the New*. Nevertheless it is a part of the
preacher's vocation to do that ; and when he undertakes it, the
hearer ought not to shrink from it. If this be the Word of
God, its meaning and all connected with it must be unspeak
ably important. If it be the mere work of men, then, certainly,
that ought to be known. And if it be partly Divine and part
ly human, just discrimination ought to be made. The Bibli
cal documents are historically and actually intertangled with
almost all our religious institutions and experiences. There
fore their real origin, contents, office, and authority, the
canons of criticism applicable to them, the whole range of
principles by which they are to be accepted and interpreted,
ought to be thoroughly canvassed and explicitly set forth. An
immense work of the most vital character remains yet to be
done in this department. The wholesome and adequate doing
of it requires — what is rarely found — a due union of learn
ing, vigor, boldness, and reverence ; all of which, in striking
combination, have of late been exemplified by Colenso.
Finally, one of the chief departments of preaching, one of
the most potent instruments or methods of the preacher, is
the exhibition and enforcement of truth as it appeals to the
intellect ; not merely the technical truths of morals and relig
ion, but any truth affecting the experience and destiny of
man. On this point difference of opinion exists, though it is
hard to understand how there can be more than one opinion
on it. Unquestionably the ablest and freest minds, those
who have studied the subject longest, and most earnestly and
widely, are at one in the conviction that the core and crown
of preaching, the life and soul of the pulpit, are the establish
ment and application of truth, the defence and illustration of
the moral and religious aspects of pure truth, all truth which
can be made to edify. Nevertheless there are many who hold
that it is foreign to the vocation of the preacher to discuss any
of the great speculative questions of truth, and educate the
reason up to the consciousness and obligation of its nobilities.
They declare that this falls within the range of academic
work; that the only legitimate business of preaching is the
direct inculcation of duties, urging upon the people with end
less iteration the details of morals and piety. It seems to us
very clear that these persons ar« partially right and partially
wrong in their position : right in rigidly limiting the preacher to
one end ; wrong in refusing him unlimited freedom of subject-
matter and method. Instead of their narrow motto, " Noth
ing for instruction in the church, everything for edification,"
we should take the broader motto, " The richest variety of in
struction for the sake of the most varied and enduring effect
iveness of edification." To those who think the stress of
preaching should be forever, Repent, repent, agonize to avoid
hell and to secure heaven ! we should reply, even on their
own ground of expediency and effect, that such preaching
is a wearisomeness that neither clergy nor laity can always
bear. Its repetitions become stale, flat, and unprofitable. The
wielding of its weapons turns to an edgeless beating of the air ;
and nearly all, if they honestly confessed the facts, would own
themselves sick of it. This style of address undoubtedly may
have its subordinate place and use, and sometimes be highly
effective ; but to make it exclusive, and to denounce all other
modes as out of their sphere in the sacred desk, is a mistake,
— an extremely unfortunate mistake for all concerned. Our
proposition is, that one of the most legitimate and useful aims
of preaching is the recommendation of truth to the intellect,
the enforcement of any nutritious truth in its spiritual bear
ings. This view is sustained by the following considerations.
First, the details of duty, the obligations of piety, rest en
tirely on the ground of eternal truths, and can spring up and
be nourished in genuine life only out of them and by means

of them. The way to make a man just and charitable is by
proving to his reason and conscience the real claims of justice
and charity. Exhortations, threats, promises, can only induce
him to conform to public opinion ; nothjng but conviction of
its obligatory rightfulness and becomingness can make him
sincerely upright and benevolent from within. ' All the en
treaties in the world will not lead a man into the experience
of piety ; it must in some way be proved to him that God is a
being worthy to be adored and loved. That style of preach
ing which virtually condenses itself into " You must soon
die ; therefore be moral. There is hell, and you may fall into
it ; therefore be religious. God is* a flame of fire ; therefore
love him ! " — seems to us to be about on a par with the pro
cedure of the man who, pining for friendship, points a horse-
pistol at the head of his comrade and cries, " Be my friend, or
I will blow your brains out ! " Show yourself to be noble,
beautiful, and friendly, and you will win his affection. So
the best way to make men virtuous and religious is to demon
strate the infinite wisdom and goodness of God through the
infinite attractions of his works and ways, and illustrate by
every available method the intrinsic and everlasting beauty,
nobleness, and authority of virtue. Indeed, to produce lasting
moral and religious results in the heart and conscience, you
must establish corresponding convictions, of truth in the realm
of the intellect. Splendid ideas in the mind are the true gen
erators of precious emotions in the soul, as seeds in the soil
are fructified by the sun in the heaven.
Again, the iutellect as an integral and foremost element of
our being is a pre-eminently important part of the character.
Accordingly, every contribution to its prerogatives and wel
fare is edification. Intellect plays the front part on the stage
of life and destiny. Its interests are as sacred and binding as
those of the heart or the conscience ; in fact, they are all in
separably joined together. An empty, sluggish mind is per
haps as sad a sight to the angels as a corrupt heart lying be
low it ; at any rate, it is a sad sight. It is a transgression of
the purpose of God ; for truths, all truths of nature, morals,
religion, are expressions of God's will, the published mind of
our Maker. We are put here, endowed as we are, to become
acquainted with them. Rightly apprehended, every truth is
an audience-chamber where the soul approaches God and
hears his whisper, or gazes in rapturous awe on some hallowed
lineament of his visage. Efforts to know and obey it make
the discipline of life and the education of the soul. The love
of it and conformity to it constitute our salvation. Ignorance,
indifference, feebleness and torpor in the intellect, are not
only disgraceful, but criminal ; and it is a high and holy func
tion of the pulpit to attack them by summoning the mind to
manly exertion in grasping the arduous treasures of truth. If
truth be the material on which the soul feeds and grows, cer
tainly without it no great and enduring edification is possible.
Furthermore, the peculiarities of the time — the freedom
from authority, the rivals and opponents of the Church, the
immense diffusion of a rich, able, and fascinating literature,
showering its rapid succession of sheets everywhere, the ac
tivity of unyoked thought, the restless curiosity of the age,
the chief intellectual tendencies and wants of the people —
demand this extension of the old province of the pulpit. Un
less preaching be in some degree thus liberalized to meet the
changed exigencies of our times, the resistless discontent with
it and neglect of it will prove its undoing. This undoing will
come in two directions. First, the most intelligent and ear
nest men and women will go to literature instead of to church
for inspiration, guidance, and culture, leaving congregations
to be made up of the indifferent, the ignorant, the shallow,
the idle, and the fanatic, who wish to be amused or excited.
Secondly, the character, -the relative attainments, and the
number of ministers are all diminishing. Mr. Buxton re
cently offered a resolution in the English Parliament to re
lieve the members of the Episcopalian Establishment from
subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Prayer Book.
In the long debate which followed — filling fourteen columns
of the London Times — it was maintained that "the existing
restrictions were seriously telling both upon the quality and the
. numbers of the clergy, who were in danger of being severed
from the, intelligence of the country. In twenty years the num
ber of Oxford and Cambridge graduates who wished to take
orders had gone down from five hundred and twelve to two
hundred and ninety-eight." It is a startling fact, that in our
own country, in one denomination, the Baptist, over three
thousand pulpits are vacant, and nobody can be got to fill
them, while every other profession is crowded to excess. The
Old School Presbyterians, who cling obstinately to medi
aeval dogmas and sentiments, have in the United States nine
hundred less clergymen than they have churches, while the
New School Presbyterians, who allow some latitude and pro
gress, have three hundred more clergymen than they have con
gregations. No single thing would have so much effect in
rallying the best supporters around the Church, and improv
ing and increasing the ministry in it, as a liberal extension and
elevation of its intellectual province and quality, a larger free
dom of range. All zeal, heart, joy, must die out of men fed
only on the humdrum diet of traditional doctrines and rou
tine. And what attraction such a diet has for vigorous souls
outside of the Church may be inferred from the following illus
tration. Benjamin Franklin attended the ministrations of a
Presbyterian divine in Philadelphia, and gives this account
of them : " His discourses were chiefly either controversial
arguments or explications of the peculiar doctrines of the
sect, and were all to me very dry, uninteresting, and unedi-
fying, since not a single moral principle was inculcated or
enforced. At length he took for his text that 'verse of the
fourth chapter to the Philippians, ' Whatsoever things are
true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are
pure, whatsoever things are lovely, or of good report, if there
be any virtue, or if there be any praise, think on these
things.' I imagined in a sermon on such a text we could
not miss of having some morality. But he confined himself
to five points only as meant by the Apostle. Keeping holy
the Sabbath day ; being diligent in reading the Holy Scrip
tures ; duly attending public worship ; partaking of the sac
rament ; paying a due respect to ministers. These might all
be good things ; but, as they were not the kind of good things
I expected from that text, I despaired of ever meeting with
them from any other, was disgusted, and attended his preach
ing no more."
180 ' The True Work and Method [March,
Let such questions as the moral and religious lessons of
history, the moral and religious aspects of physical science,
the leading phenomena of the age, with the duties they im
pose, the abuses of society, the possibilities of reform, the
original data and implications of natural theology, the struc
ture and functions of human nature or the principles of psy
chology, the types of character, the ideals of men, the uses of
poetry and philosophy as consolers and strengtheners of hu
manity, — let such subjects as the foregoing be handled by
the clergy with independent investigation and honest avow
al, — that is, include in their province the whole realm of
truth addressed to the intellect, founding consistent morals
and piety on as solid and rational a basis as that which sup
ports chemistry or physiology, —.and unexampled results of
good would follow. Preaching would then be a healthy organ
for the education of the whole character of man for time and
for eternity. It would then be respectable in the criticising
judgments of all, interesting to the docile minds of all,
inspiring to the responsive hearts of all, a corrective and
strengthening guidance to the open consciences of all, — so
far as it is possible to bring them within its sphere of in
fluence.
There are two formidable obstacles to the establishment of
this more generous standard of preaching, this allowance to
the pulpit of a more extensive sphere and a more flexible
method. First, it is opposed by a rooted prejudice growing
out of the traditional style of preaching fastened on the Church
by the exceptional characteristics of the Apostolic age. The
popular demand from the pulpit at the present time is the
product of an obsolete state of things, an inherited remnant
of the past, bolstered up by lazy habit, which general earnest
ness of thought on the subject now would soon cause to be
repudiated. When the walls of the prison were tumbling,
and the fetters of the captives were snapped, and a marvel
lous light was shining around them, the jailer at Philippi
sprang forward in terror, exclaiming, " What shall I do to
be saved ? " " And Paul said, ' Believe on the Lord Jesus
Christ.' And he believed, and was baptized in that same
hour." Furnish preachers with the miraculous conditions
of that occasion, and they may be asked to produce the same
effects ; but in the absence of the former, it surely is not right
to demand the latter. The end of the world, the restoration
of the dead, the general judgment, and the beginning of a
new and endless life, were events then immediately looked
for. All the immortal hopes of the Christian disciples were
vitally connected with the death, resurrection, and return of
Jesus. No wonder they determined to know nothing but
Christ crucified ; and no wonder the burning concentration
of faith, fear, and love, drawing all the energies of the soui
to a focus, produced astounding revolutions of character and
life. But the mental and historic peculiarities of that age
have gone, to reappear no more. The forensic portions of
the system of theology then prevalent, with the philosophy
of life it implies, have been long outgrown. We no longer
regard the world as an alienated scene, in which the only
chance for salvation rests on a preternatural grace thrust in
through the crack of miracle. Yet, as a general thing, both
clergy and laity still cling to the methods of edification which
that exploded scheme of thought alone can legitimate, — seek
ing salvation by rites, dogmas, and convulsions, instead of by
harmonious perception and growth, — by partial excitement,
instead of total education. To remove this prejudice, which
makes congregations ask friction and stimulus rather than
instruction and inspiration, — to remove this prejudice by
showing that the true function of the preacher is the same
as that of every morally consecrated scholar and teacher,
namely, to incite men to the fulfilment of their destiny, — is
an immense desideratum for the Church. When this is done,
the preacher will try to minister unto the real wants of men.
The labor of most preachers now is expended in first creating,
then satisfying, artificial wants. Some seem to regard the
Church as the tripod of a pythoness, a stool for the produc
tion of spiritual convulsions, by the appropriated experience
of which they are to bo instantaneously converted into new
creatures. Others seem to look to it as a mere house of
ease, where they may escape the eating cares and noise of
the world. Still others seem to have recourse to it. as an
electrical machine, whose recurrent shocks are statedly to re-
l
»
vive certain opinions and emotions in the rusty and dusty ruts
of habit. And many more seem to think of it only as a temple
of magic, where by altar-forms and ceremonies, priestly incan
tations and spells, the laying on of hierarchic hands, manipu
lations of charmed dogmas and rites, they are to be enchanted
out of the power of perdition into the exclusive salvation of a
sacramental circle. All the ignorant or obstinate prejudices
which sustain these views of the nature and mission of the
Church must be swept away by the illuminating presence of
the deeper, healthier, and wider thought that the aim of the
Church is the education of the characters of men into har
mony with their true conditions. It is not the business of
the preacher to give his people fits, but to give them nourish
ment. .
In many cases where this more wholesome and generous
interpretation of the office of the pulpit is not opposed by the
traditional prejudice in favor of the hortatory and convulsive
theory, we are met by a still worse obstacle in the indifference
of the people. The galvanic style of preaching is so much
more easily furnished, and sp much more easily responded to,
that it is sure to be equally preferred by a clergy not blessed
with superior endowments of spiritual faculty and furniture,
and by a people without earnestness. It is easy to declaim
traditional warnings and exhortations, treading the ancestral
and social routine of ideas and methods ; but of the average
clergy, how many are thoroughly competent by original in
sight, fervor, and skill to teach their hearers how to think,
how to feel, how to extricate themselves from vices, how to
cultivate virtues, how to resist temptations and improve priv
ileges, what good and evil are, what is the best type of charac
ter and life, and how it is to be attained ? And in an average
congregation, what proportion are really in earnest to master
these subjects for the genuine beautification of their souls, and
the solid enrichment of their lives ? To do this requires an
effort that few of them are prepared to make, while, on the
other hand, to lean back in their pews and be entertained by
an artful performer, or stirred with what is considered a moral
and religious excitement, without any personal effort, is so
pleasant, that it must be welcomed by every one who is not
deeply in earnest to secure substantial and permanent edifi
cation. And this brings us directly to the worst evil and the
sorest need of the Church in our day, to a consideration of
which we ask the careful attention of the reader.
In the Middle Age, when the people lay in abject ignorance
and superstition, the Church, by its material symbols, pictures,
plays, sermons, music, and imposing ritual, drew great crowds
to its services, and, beyond a doubt, profoundly interested and
edified them, teaching them almost all they knew of the most
impressive parts of human history, initiating them into the
rudiments of morals and religion, giving them a deep and up
lifting imaginative excitement. For two or three centuries
after the Protestant Reformation the essential principles in
the dogmatic scheme of mediaeval ecclesiasticism, with un
important modifications by Luther, Calvin, and others, con
tinued to be sincerely believed, and crowds of earnest people
frequented the Church to hear these doctrines expounded
and applied for the salvation of their souls. But the state
of things in the former period, and the state of things in the
latter period, have ceased to exist. A portentous change has
passed on Christendom. The Church no longer has any
monopoly either of spiritual excitement or of doctrinal in
struction. Thousands of places of varied and novel entertain
ment are open, and constantly thronged by the laughing and
shouting multitude ; thousands of newspapers, journals, maga
zines, reviews, books, of every style of mental ministration and
every grade of merit, addressing all classes of character, are
claimants for attention. Meanwhile the ablest and most ear
nest men of the age have ceased to occupy the pulpit, taking
to literature instead ; and the central dogmatic tenets of the
Church, the foremost principles of its traditional scheme, have
been a hundred times exploded by philosophical and scien
tific criticism, and are generally repudiated by intelligent
men. Under these circumstances, a vast decay in the power
and the popular interest of the Church is inevitable. And we
see the signs of it everywhere, especially in the two extremes
of society. The most reckless never go to church now ; they
betake themselves to the haunts of amusement. The most
cultivated and earnest do not go to church now ; they have
recourse to choice literature. A young man of consecrated
purpose and powerful intelligence, who wants to learn how
to live most largely in accordance with truth, will frequent
the lecture-room of science rather than the conventicle of
tradition. He will not hear C. H. Spurgeon ; he will study
Herbert Spencer.
What now is to be done to secure for the Church a new
lease of power and attraction ? Two sets of clergymen,
prompted by their own characters, look in different direc
tions, and make two distinct bids. A traditional ministry,
incompetent for the new conditions and duties of their posi
tion, look towards the superficial and idle average of the com
munity, and make the bid of easy amusement. A vital min
istry, fully equipped for the work of showing men how to
live, look towards the thoughtful and earnest members of
the community, and make the bid of inspired instruction.
The former, without being distinctly conscious of their atti
tude, virtually say by all their methods, Come to us, submit
yourselves to our influence, accept our doctrines, fall in with
our routine, and we will every Sunday give you Scripture,
hymn, prayer, sermon, and sacrament, enliven and repeat
your habitual ideas and emotions, and fulfil with you the
requirements of ecclesiastic social usage and respectability,
without exacting any arduous spiritual activity on your part ;
we will lead you weekly through an easy round of observ
ances, grateful to all your inherited associations, and when
you have attended our services fifty years, you shall not, so far
as our ministrations are concerned, know one iota more, or be
one particle better off, than when you began to come ! The
latter class of the clergy, on the other hand, by the whole
spirit of their method, say to the public, Come to us, with
docile and co-operative minds, and join in our efforts to make
the Church what it ought to be, — a moral and religious school
for the education of souls in whatever directly pertains to
the fulfilment of their destiny, — and we will set you the ex
ample of, and give you every incitement to engage in, an
earnest study of the science of human character and human,
life, and the art of moulding them after the best models ;
in the most varied, truthful, and sustained manner in our
power, we will discuss before you the subjects most inti

mately connected with the profoundest interests of human
nature and experience, the opportunities, exposures, and fate
of man ; and all this we will do for the purpose of edifying
ourselves and you, exalting the functions, purifying the qual
ity, and enlarging the boundary of consciousness.
Is it not piteous and melancholy to notice the response
made by the laity to these contrasted bids of the clergy ? The
ignoble bid of a pleasant routine or cheap entertainment finds
the great majority just on the level it addresses. They flock
into the Church, as they flock into the Theatre, not to engage
in any important spiritual action, but to be passive subjects
of moving spectacle and sound, to be excited and amused.
The noble bid of edifying instruction, the clarion summons to
girded exertion, speaks on that costly elevation where compar
atively few are found ; and these few scarcely think of seeking
in the Church a supply for their wants, they find a ministra
tion so much more nutritious and ample in the immortal
works of standard authors which they make a business of
mastering. Accordingly, there is at the present time, arising
from the ignorant professional bondage of ministers, and tbe
shallowness and indifference of congregations, an extremely
powerful and pernicious tendency to turn the Church into a
Theatre, adulterating the true spirit and method of the pul
pit with tbe spirit and method of the stage. The distinction
between tbe Theatre and the Academy, sharply taken, will
illustrate what we mean.
The aim of the Theatre is, by means of sensational devices,
to entertain and please its votaries without any unwelcome
exertion on their own part. They come into it with unbent
minds, self-surrendered to the play of spontaneities, idly wait
ing to be stirred and occupied. The Academy aims, by means
of exposition, guidance, and emulation, to awaken the interest
of its pupils in the topics with which it deals, and induce them
to master and commit to memory the processes and subject-
matter of their studies. Now, turning from these two great
institutions of civilized society, with their distinctive purposes
and methods, to the Church, towering broadly between them
with its own peculiar purpose and method, we affirm that it
16*
is impossible not to recognize here a lamentable corruption
going on, a tendency away from instruction towards amuse
ment, a movement in the wrong direction. The preacher,
standing in the Christian pulpit, with Christ behind him, the
Bible before him, God over him, and a Sabbath peace all
around, has three advantages over every other speaker; — first,
the incomparable vitality and grandeur of his aim, edification ;
second, the enforcement of this aim by the influence of char
acter and experience, personal magnetism, emphasis, tone,
gesture, look, and the conspiring action of a sympathetic as
sembly ; third, the grand impersonal authority under which
he speaks, the accumulated adjuncts of the time and place
with their overawing and uplifting associations. But, on the
other hand, he labors under two terrible disadvantages ; — first,
the desire of the illiterate and weary crowd to be simply ex
cited and amused, without effort and without result, — a de
sire skilfully catered to in a thousand other places ; second, the
lack of any earnest interest on the part of his hearers in the
themes with which he properly deals, — their almost insuper
able repugnance to enter into any set study of these things.
The indispensablenoss of academic knowledge to worldly suc
cess, and the intense eagerness of the people for worldly suc
cess, make the studies of the School attractive, and so atten
tion is secured and'effort is sustained. But people, as a gen
eral thing, are not interested in the subjects of morality and
religion, not eager for spiritual success, not determined to
make the most and the best that is possible of their souls in
this world. An ordinary congregation gathers on Sunday in
passive conformity to usage, and lazily waits to be electrified
by the preacher, or to be entertained by the choir, or to be
complacently soothed by the liturgy. They seem each one
to lie down with utter relaxation of nerve, and say to the
minister, " Lift me if you can ! " It must be a pretty des
perate undertaking to thrill such limp and flaccid souls to
their feet. This unnerved aesthetic attitude belongs to the
place of amusement, not to the place of edification. Men
ought not to come into the Church unbent and ungirt for
enjoyment, but, under the impress of a sense of duty, to co
operate with their teachers in earnest efforts to learn what
they ought to know, and to acquire impulse to do what they

ought to do, struggling to free themselves from falsehood,
purify themselves from corruption, hate, and pride, train
themselves to wisdom, strengthen in themselves all kindly,
godly, and heroic resolutions. But when, as is the case now,
nine tenths of the attendants on its services feel no interest
in truth, have no earnestness for spiritual advancement, but
merely wish for ease and pleasure, it is inevitable that there
will be a drifting of the Church towards the Theatre ; in an
swer to the demand, there will be an increased supply of eccle
siastical pomps and parades, sensational points, showy decla
mation, luxuries of taste, changes of dresses, chants, genuflec-
tionsj altars and candles, and, in place of the bracing regimen
of a logical discourse, the enervating indulgence of a vesper-
service which is only a disguised concert without any charge
for admission.
A keen observer wrote in a letter from England not long
ago : " Mr. Spurgeon's popularity, I find, is considered only a
successful piece of galvanism wrought on tissues dead but not
yet decayed ; and'he has now to fight off the inevitable relapse
into torpor by all kinds of tricks. The other day he had in
his church a. representation of Eastern dervishes, and dancing
women attended and fanned by eunuchs, — all got up in dra
matic costumes. The audience presently became aware that
the dancing women were disguised men, and made a terrible
fuss over the deception. Staid church-folk are loud in de
nouncing such things : but Spurgeon has only to point to their
deserted and his own well-filled pews in reply."
Yes, the Church has become a Theatre, the pulpit sunk to
the level of the stage, and the most successful preacher, like the
most successful player, is the one who draws the fullest houses !
Now we hold this displacing or overlaying of the character
istics of the Church with the characteristics of the Theatre to
be a shocking profanation. The remedy for it is a movement
in the other direction, the transfusion of the true characteris
tics of the Church with the best characteristics of the Academy,
still keeping conspicuously on all that it does the great moral
stamps of authority and edification. So far as with the alter
ing age the pulpit alters from its old function, let it tend to
188 TJie True Work and Method [March,
become the stand of a teacher and leader rather than the

exhibiting platform of an actor. So it is infinitely better that
the relation of the pews and the attitude of their occupants
should tend towards the busy forms of the school-room than
towards an amphitheatre of gaping gazers. Of course no one
wishes to introduce into the Church the academic apparatus
and discipline of text-books, maps, blackboards, recitations,
and prizes ; but it is inexpressibly desirable to introduce there
something of the presiding spirit and profit which keep School-
going from being, like so much Church-going, an idle repeti
tion. Must it not be confessed that there is something lamenta
bly amiss in the relation of preacher and people, when this
steep contrast is noticed, that a youth after attending school
a year knows a good deal of grammar, geography, history,
arithmetic, and how to apply them, but a man may attend
church a dozen years and be unable, from anything he learns
there, to answer a single fundamental question in morals or
religion, or to tell anything about the differences in human
characters and lives ? It would be a reformation greater and
more fruitful than the Lutheran, which could establish in the
Church, without any cumbersome technicalities, the martial
drill of divine studies, making whole congregations feel them
selves soldiers and scholars of God, bound to equip and per
fect themselves for his work, which is to know truth, to
admire beauty, to love goodness, and to aspire towards all
possible refinement, expansion, and progress. By the method
of influence thus outlined, the Church would become, to a con
siderable extent, a Sacred School, where competent teachers
should analyze the ingredients and classify the laws of human
experience, and where the people should come for the pur
pose of studying and learning to practise the things which
concern their inmost welfare. Whenever and wherever the
laity are not sufficiently earnest to feel interested in such
a course, it is the first business of a free and enlightened
preacher to endeavor to impart that earnestness to them.
This is the first and indispensable condition of his useful-
nsss. In regard to every sermon he preaches, he ought to
ask, and to insist on a perfectly definite answer from him
self, What do I compose and preach this sermon for? If it
has its legitimate effect, what good will it do my hearers?

Whenever he can give satisfactory replies to these two ques-"
tions, his efforts will always justify themselves, even if his
auditors fail to profit. Their failure will then be their own
fault.
The Church which does not edify is a Usurper ; the Church
which does not edify by instruction and inspiration is a Char
latan. Of course it is obvious that the extension of the cler
ical function of teaching here proposed will not reach the
dregs of society to draw them into redeeming contact with
a regenerated Church. They are too low and gross to feel
' such an attraction. Neither will any increased lightening
and dramatizing of ecclesiastical services allure the most de
graded classes to the embrace of the Church. Their passions
and tastes are better met elsewhere. But one effect the in
creased freedom, healthiness, variety, and solidity of minis
tration recommended would have ; it would command the
unqualified respect and the growing interest of those whose
attention it secured, and it would gradually diffuse' its infiu--
ence until it included all, — a result which can never, never
be compassed in any other way. For a Church which seeks
to keep the doctrines and rites of antiquated superstition in
force by means of puerile entertainment and an obstinate ex
clusion of light, is an Incubus which ever larger numbers of
the intelligent and earnest will heave off, and either resolutely
assail or contemptuously neglect. The representative of such
an institution is
"A witless shepherd, who persists to drive
A flock that thirsts not to a pool disliked."
All endeavors to impart are futile until there be readiness to
receive. Let there be wisdom on one side, and docility on
the other, with a bridge of mutual interest between, and the
fruition of use and good follows. In vain is the mechanism
of the mint perfect, and its motion fine and strong, if, neither
fed with its metal nor directed to its object, it yields not a
coin for currency ; its operation is an empty show. The pul
pit must not cater to the foolish desire of men to be tickled
without exertion and without result. It must confess that
reflection and study are as good as repentance and worship ;
intelligent insight and resolve, as profitable and beautiful as
regret and aspiration. Religion is not one act, but the right
spirit of all acts. When the preacher acquires the same sub
stantiality and authority of teaching which the professor of
the natural sciences has, — when he imparts as much impor
tant truth with reference to edification, and imparts it with
as much originality and weight, as the masters of science do,
with reference to instruction, — he will have a right to ex
pect his congregation to hurry to his sermons with something
of the enthusiasm with which companies of students of natu
ral history hurried to the lectures of St. Hilaire and Cuvier,
and still hurry to those of Darwin and Agassiz. The hope
of increased attraction and efficacy for the pulpit lies in mak
ing its instructions sounder, richer, more profoundly practi
cal ; and in persuading the laity to an earnest personal co
operation with it. Without this latter element very little can
be done. It is the presence or the absence of personal appli
cation that makes or mars every blessed opportunity and in
fluence for mortals. Because they make no earnest effort to
see the truth of God, and to feel their own privileges and
duties, multitudes of men remain cold and careless amidst
the tremendous accumulation of agencies intended to quicken
them into deep and enduring consciousness, — the circulating
goblet, dance, and dirge, the sable train of disappointments,
the golden round of successes, the strange gleam of rising and
setting suns, the circles of love and home, the buds and birds
of spring, the falling leaves of autumn, the incessant activity
of death in every path of being, and the glittering march of
worlds and silent waiting of eternity around all. The mis
sion of eloquence in the pulpit is to pierce this torpid indif
ference, and inspire men with an interest in their destiny and
its concomitants. Then the mission of instruction is to nour
ish and guide this newly awakened interest, and make it self-
sustaining and self-directing. Eloquence is good for nothing
as food, though it may be useful when given as a tonic to
edge appetite for the bread of life. The pulpit will always
have this advantage over literature, — that no book, in power
to attract and interest the careless and superficial, can rival
the stimulus and contagion of a rich, energetic personality
illuminated all over with spiritual signals of its states. Lit
erature will always have this advantage over the pulpit, — that
no speaker, in power to instruct the earnest and profound,
can rival the systematic treatise wherein the greatest masters
of a given subject have displayed its truths in complete order,
and to which the student can devote his best moods at will.
The text-book, however, will be least formidable as a rival
of the speaker, when the speaker has as thoroughly system
atized a knowledge as that the book contains, with the ad
dition of a living inspiration. In listening to an eloquent
speaker on a subject about which we are indifferent, we en
joy the passive reception of his action ; in studying a subject
in which we are interested, we enjoy the positive application
to it of our own action. The effects of the former are tran
sient ; of the latter, enduring. The frivolous prefer that, the
earnest choose this. But the co-operation of both is best of
all.
There are two great errors in preaching, more commonly
exemplified, and more injurious to its power, than any others.
The first error consists in trying to move the hearer, rather
than to teach him. Most preachers have but a confused per
ception of what they should aim at in the pulpit. Some seem
to aim simply at securing the attention of their auditors by
entertaining them. We once heard an eminent clergyman
preach on the parable of the Supper. We listened for twenty
minutes to a most ornately elaborated description of the gor
geous scene of the banquet, the tables, the dresses, the ves
sels, the viands, and the lights, — and then we left. Of what
use is it to preach or to listen, if the preaching and listening
are an idle entertainment, doing no good ? Many preachers
who aim to make their sermons yield a positive result lamenta
bly err as to what that result should be. They seek to produce
an effect on the hearer's nerves. They should aim to make a
contribution to his being. Few preachers seem to appreciate
the worthlessness of fortuitous impulses as compared with
ideal principles, — the immense superiority of results which
are assimilated as soon as experienced, over results which are
shed as fast as felt. Hundreds of sermons are adapted to kin
dle an acute excitement by making sensations, where one is
adapted to awaken a chronic inspiration by imparting ideas.

The former, regarded as an end, is beneath the dignity of
one whose labors deal with the immortal interests and des
tinies of immortal souls. Is not the piety engendered by the
feverish atmosphere of a prayer-meeting immeasurably less
trustworthy than the piety engendered by a lonely perception
of God ? Subjective feelings die and go ; objective causes
stay and energize. A vivid description of hell may rustle
a congregation with momentary terror, but a perception of
the law which ultimates in hell may edify them, and inspire
conduct through their whole lives. Standing at Niagara you
are filled with awe. Go eway — and it is gone. But a fine
picture of it on your wall renews the wondrous emotion as
often as you look. Pictures are portable equivalents of scenes
not present. So are ideas portable equivalents of truths, the
realities of God. In the mind, inseparable parts of it, they
send forth their influences in endless issues. Sensations are
passing gusts ; ideas ate dropping seeds. A life made up of
thrills is a poor, precarious, Evanescent affair ; a life drawn
from principles has divine permanence, as well as divine purity
and depth. Between these two, still sounds the heavenly voice
as of old : " Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again ;
but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall
never thirst, but it shall be in him a well of water, springing
up into everlasting life."
The other cardinal mistake or defect in ordinary preaching
is the superficial and sophistical character of much of its teach
ing, when, having outgrown the vanity of playing on the
senses, it really undertakes to teach. Before one is competent
to teach the truth, he must see the truth at first-hand. Be
fore one can see the truth at first-hand, he must throw off the
bandages of commonplace, extricate himself from prejudices,
and with heroic singleness of mind and unweariable tenacity
of purpose study the original facts of philosophy, science, re
ligion, human history, human nature, and human life. And
on every subject that he sets before his audience he must take
the most scrupulous pains to understand exactly what the
truth is, and to present it without perversion. In this deli
cate and difficult task the minister is beset by a thousand
1865.] of the Preacher. . 193
temptations to haste and carelessness, — a thousand tempta
tions to discolor, to overstate, to understate, for the purpose
of effect. And besides, in the throng of labors pressed on
them, in the multitude of subjects they are obliged to treat,
it must be admitted that many ministers are incompetent in
faculty and training always to see what the truth is, try they
never so hard. But nothing is more obligatory, nothing more
remunerative, than the utmost painstaking, in this respect.
Recklessness is undoing. Extravagance, if strength for an
hour; is weakness for a year. The preacher who will not
exaggerate or pervert, who is consistent with himself, who
strives to state the precise truth with its due qualifications,
grows in the confidence and respect of his hearers. They
surrender themselves to his influence. But if he teach one
thing to-day, a contradictory thing to-morrow, if he make un
warrantable statements, declaiming at random, if he betray
himself into shallow mistakes, his hearers put themselves sus
piciously on their guard ; they make deductions from his as
sertions ; the leverage of his word is shortened. Every in
competency discerned in a preacher goes to neutralize his
power. The value of the pulpit is vitiated by every sophism
launched from it. In every congregation there are critical
minds enough to detect the mental shortcomings, and un
cover the errors, of their professed teachers. How imperious,
then, is the obligation on every preacher to see to it that he
teaches nothing but the truth, and to strive to teach the
truth with the closest possible approach to adequacy ! Un
less our experience as a listener misrepresents the general
state of the case, the average pulpit is as lame on this point,
of mixing errors with the truths in its instruction, as it is on
the other point, of preferring sensational excitement for the
occasion to ideal inspiration for life.
Two or three actual instances will illustrate. We heard,
not long since, a sermon on the religion of active life. The
entire drift of it was to depreciate the value of recluse purity
and devotion, to warn against the attraction of cloistered re
treats, the sentiments and exercises of a mystic piety. Spoken
in the busiest centre of Protestant New England, it exhorted
the people to beware of exactly what they were freest from,
vol. lxxviii. — 5th 8. vol. xyi. no. ii. 17
least exposed to, and needed most to cultivate. All our
tendencies are outward, into the whirl of publicity and ma
terialism. An imaginative withdrawnness, the brooding awe
and love of the eternal sentiments of the soul in the solitude
of God, is precisely what we ought to cherish. The sermon
was like an exhortation against gluttony addressed to a man
starving in the desert.
The next sermon we heard was on contentment. The
preacher strenuously and unqualifiedly argued, first, that we
ought to be contented with what we have ; secondly, that we
ought to be contented with what we do ; thirdly, that we
ought to be contented with what we are. Ho affirmed that the
richest, strongest, most favored, are least contented ; the poor
est, weakest, and least favored, most contented. He instanced
an old man who got his living by beggary in the streets as
the most beautiful illustration of entire contentment known
to him. Yes, every thoughtful hearer would at once object,
but it was this very contentment that made him a beggar and
kept him one. Dissatisfaction with the actual and aspiration
towards an ideal, are the first condition of progress. They
kindle the struggle that results in nobleness, power, riches,
and station. And certainly it is better to be at the top than
at the bottom. The preacher showed a lack of discrimination.
The true lesson of his subject, which he wholly failed to teach,
is that we ought to be contented with necessities, but not with
imperfect conditions which it is in our power to remedy and
improve. Cheerfully acquiescing in all unalterable appoint
ments, we should aspiringly labor to alter for the better every
thing which is capable of amelioration. The proper journey
of man is not a tread-wheel, nor a dead level, but an ascending
path.
The other sermon which we shall adduce as an instance of
sophistry was on sacrifice and suffering. It was a highly pop
ular discourse. Its argument was, All the greatest and best
things in human nature and history have grown out of agony
and hardship. This was illustrated by striking examples of
persons whose powers, obstructed and intensified by adverse
and painful conditions, at length forced a way, and achieved
greatness and fame. The conclusion was, Therefore hardship
and agony are good things. The application was, Therefore
let us court hardship and agony. The logic, of course, was
not so barely put : it was hidden in flowers ; and the moral
was insinuated throughout the discourse, not distinctly pro
pounded at its close. This sermon — so sincere, pointed, pic
turesque, and emotional, that the audience were enraptured
with it — taught by implication five fundamental errors.
First, that the glorious results occasionally wrung out of ad
versity are normal and covetable, the law of life, instead
of being, as they really are, exceptional and compensatory.
This view does gross injustice to the sunny side of life, to the
operation of favorable conditions on human nature. Second,
that, because brilliant results have in distinguished instances
followed on bitter sacrifices and sufferings, they will in our
case too. This is an inference palpably unwarranted. Glori
ous persons have become glorious through the power and in-
. spiration in them, not through mere disappointment and pain.
Severe trials crush thousands, where they redeem and elevate
one. If we have not great powers and inspiration, all the
sufferings we can undergo will not make us illustrious cham
pions and exemplars. Third, that the same glorious effects
will come from voluntarily assumed denials and hardships, that
sometimes come from divinely appointed or inevitable ones.
The difference is world-wide. It is an overstrained, senti
mental morality that seeks sacrifices and courts adversity ;
a true, robust morality simply confronts and accepts them
when they are sent. The fallacious fancy which the former
is, weakens as much as the stern substance of the latter braces.
The hero in conceit and words may ostentatiously flourish the
cross as though it were a banner ; the genuine hero rather
hides it and goes quietly into the deeps, where God awaits
him, saying, " If it be possible, let this cup pass from me."
Fourth, that it is the end of man, or a desirable thing, to ac
quire genius and fame by means of hardships and sorrows.
It is no proper part of the destiny of man to be gloriously
prominent before his fellows. His end is simply to be good,
wise, and blessed, in the perfecting of his nature, and in a
happy harmony with his conditions. To hold a brilliant prize
of fame before an audience, and tell them exciting stories of
its plucking, will doubtless excite and fascinate them. Will
it do them any good ? It inflames low passions already too
strong, and administers a soporific to high impulses as yet
too dormant. Fifth, that fanciful and exaggerated portrayals
of heroic endurance will impel and strengthen men better to
bear the real trials of life, and derive good from them. The
effect truly is of an opposite character. Gorgeously colored
descriptions of the nobleness, beauty, and rewards of self-
sacrifice, patience, and toil, instead of stimulating to the ac
tual performance of such feats, serve as substitutes for the
reality. The truths of life, set forth strictly as they are, en
gender an action of thought and feeling fitted to result in
accordant deeds of duty. But all illusions and exaggerations
belong in the realm of imagination, and set a group of mo
tions spinning in the ideal spaces of the mind, which cannot
be brought into working connection with the machinery of
outward life. Under the influence of such a style of preach
ing, huge ideal sacrifices and heroisms contemplated in church,
so far from preparing for real moderate ones to be executed
in the world, take the place of them. Easy imaginative frui
tions of virtue supersede, instead of producing, those actual
fruitions of it which cost, — cost energy, valor, toil, and pain.
Shallow dilettanti, self-deceiving sentimentalists, may dally
with phantom feats of fancy, — play with verbal pictures of
brave renunciations and noble sufferings ; but the wisely ear
nest are in too close contact with the exacting facts and trage
dy of the real exigencies of life for any such mock substitutes.
Here we touch the antithesis between that experience under
preaching which is aesthetic, and that experience which is
agonistic. At the very time when Leonidas and his little
band were perishing in the battle at Thermopylae, an army
of Greeks amply sufficient to have driven the invader back
in overwhelming discomfiture, were celebrating the games at
Olympus. There is a tonic eloquence of severe truth fitted
to start ideal motions, divine leapings and wrestlings of the
spirit, which are a gymnastic training to win the prize of
victory when the genuine struggle comes. There is a sim
ulating eloquence of verbal illusion and extravagance that
deceives and enervates, starting ideal motions which are a
mere indulgence, looking to no end beyond their own lux

ury. That is agonistic, this is aesthetic. That is the proper
voice of the pulpit ; this is a profane intrusion there.
To say that the preacher should beware of aiming at idle
entertainment, beware of aiming at sensational excitement,
and, when he undertakes to teach for edification and inspi
ration, beware of carelessly falling into errors in his teaching,
is to thrust a deep probe into all those kinds of mock preach
ing which are no better than wastes of the opportunities of the
pulpit.
The primary and essential end of poetic and dramatic forms
of speech or literature is pleasure, a heightening of the sense
of life by the excitation of function, merely in and for itself.
The primary and essential end of academic or pedagogic
forms of literature and speech is instruction, the impartatiou
of truth, either for the simple sake of knowledge, or for use in
the practical round of life.
The primary and essential end of the various forms of foren
sic and political oratory is conviction, and persuasion to some
outward act or course of conduct.
The primary and essential end of all forms of literature and
speech appertaining to the office of the pulpit is the applica
tion of the forenamed pleasure, excitement, instruction, con
viction, and persuasion for the interior purpose of rectifying,
purifying, and enriching the character and experience of those
within its influence.
The preacher is, indeed, so far as it lies in his power by
appropriate means, to please, excite, instruct, convince, and
persuade ; but distinctively he is to apply all these influences
for the spiritual improvement of his hearers, and to endeavor,
by the personal exhibition of contagious signals and guidances,
to initiate them into the superior states of consciousness de
sired for them. Suppose a public speaker, by his artful elocu
tion and gesticulation, and cunning arrangement of matter,
to bewitch an audience with delight, — by his learning, logic,
rhetoric, and earnest manner, to give them information, con
vince them of the soundness of certain opinions, and persuade
them to such resolutions as he pleases ; but all this to no
purpose beyond a display of his skill and power, the whole,
17*
198 The Name, and the Idea, of God. [March,
so far as the characters and lives of his auditors are concerned,
being a transient fermentation. You may call him an artist,
a scholar, a logician, an orator. You cannot properly call
him a preacher. The work he does is not fit to be done in a
church. The spiritual effervescence he induces deteriorates
the fibre of character, as the too frequent heating and cooling
of a metal destroys the strength and elasticity of its texture.
The true preacher strives rather to smelt, anneal, and dam
askeen the native substance of character, purging it from dross
and slag, toughening it to sensitive and tenacious coherence,
and adorning it with beauty.
Art. H. — THE NAME, AND THE IDEA, OF GOD.
As we walk the streets, we hear a name of a single signifi

cance pronounced in careless merriment, or in vehement pas
sion. As we enter the church, we encounter the same name,
appended to the obligations of duty and the conditions of hap
piness. When we meditate on themes beyond the smallness
of our immediate personality, the name writes itself again and
again upon the spaces of our thought. When we close the
day's work in sleep, the name stands sentinel for us against
the midnight terrors which, waking or sleeping, we are weak
to meet. We pronounce with comfort the heavenly counter
sign, and so assure ourselves that, whatever may happen, the
worst shall not befall, between this and waking. .
In the courts of justice, the name is made to attest good
faith. To shield a lie with it becomes a capital crime. In
public acts, the name is wielded as the symbol of power, and
revered as the pledge of patience. In familiar life, the name
helps out the soldier's or sailor's story, the guardian's wrath,
the lover's vows. In all good deeds, the name is invoked
with a free and joyous cadence. In evil enterprises it is
equally invoked, but with a spasm of doubt, and a design of
propitiation.
The name is the first end or attainment of human knowl
1865.] The Name, and the Idea, of God. 199
edge ; it marks also the absolute limit of that knowledge. The
races that know it not have scarcely passed beyond the ani
mal stage of human progress, — the history of thoughts or
events that can dispense with it has yet to be written.
From such history as we have, let us take at random a pic
ture here and there to illustrate the treatment which the name
has undergone.
Let us call up a vision of ancient Rome. The Samnites are
over the border, desolating the Roman fields, and laying waste
the harvest of the year. The legions are inscribed, the Con
suls chosen, the banners placed. Why do they wait, and
what pregnant question does the leader utter in the ear of
the Pullarius ? It is this one, of grave and momentous im
port: " How has the sacred chicken fed ? " Or now, the Car
thaginians are upon us. Hannibal has crossed the Alps, de
feated the soldiers of the Republic. ' Our villages are in flames,
our national existence is in danger. Let us go to the Sibyl
line books for the reason of these misfortunes, and their rem
edy. Here we find that a vow made to Mars has been insuf
ficiently fulfilled. This is the cause of the present visitation.
The vow must be renewed, and amplified. Great solemnities
must be promised to Jove, and shrines to Venus Erycina and
the Deity of Mind. The gorgeous Lectisternium must be held,
with public supplications. Chiefest of all, the Pontifex Max-
imus commands the Ver sacrum to be observed, marked by the
immolation of spring-born animals, sacred and profane. These
acts of piety accomplished, Fabius Maximus gets leave to de
part on his errand, to defeat Punic art with Roman endur
ance. .
In these ancient rites, the name was honored to the best of
men's knowledge and ability. It suffered, indeed, a division,
being worshipped in separate letters, and not yet discerned as
one word. What most interests us is the fact that, although
the limited experience of that time left many links wanting
in the chain of causation, experience and thought together
crudely referred the sum of results to a purely ideal cause.
This is the most individual power of man, and the basis of all
thought that transcends animality. Man may be characterized
as the God-discerner.
The masses of mankind have scarcely got heyond this ru

dimentary mental operation at the present day ; the presence
of any grave social danger among us is met by supplication,
and by such sacrifice as wealth knows how to make, without
becoming the poorer. The many have not the time nor the
mental discipline to recognize the perfection of the chain of
secondary or empirical causation. One thing, however, they
clearly discern, — the cause of all that is, is ideal. Whatever
limbs we may miss from the body, or links from the bonds of
our daily life, in that ideal is our resource and compensation.
Our Lectisternium differs from that of the Romans in this.
Our women carry their gorgeous stuffs into the temple, but
they cover with them the symbolical earth of their own bodies,
not the bare ground for the gods to walk on.
We remember fasts and prayers appointed among all de
nominations at the time of the first visitation of the cholera
among us. The terror inspired by this new enemy was wild
and weird. It led to great public utterances of penitence for
the social and personal sins supposed to have unloosed the
vials of the Divine wrath. There were intense excitements
of conscience and imagination in sensitive natures. A coarse
method of entreaty prevailed among the less cultured sects.
Those polite in learning were politer in their prayers. But
this was the substance of all the petitions : " God had sent
the cholera for our sins. God was always right, but would
God be pleased to remove it as soon as possible ? " The name
was now revered in its unity, but revered as if its magic lay
in itself, and not in any part of what it could be supposed to
represent.
Subsequent misfortunes, or events that were deemed such,
have been met by like demonstrations, though scarcely oh so
extended a scale. Commercial reverses are usually followed
by crises of religious feeling. The present war has brought
its fasts and feasts, the latter mostly among ourselves. There
is a certain logic in this. The changes in form and action
which seem to men a giving way of the real order, throw
them back for all steadfast comfort upon the ideal, whose
unchangeableness lies at the end of all their delusions.
Look at this sailor in a storm, Hindoo, Chinese, or Catholic.
As perils increase, he places a small image before him, and
addresses his supplications to it. Nothing can save him, if
this cannot. It may be Siva, Brahma, Buddha, Virgin Mary,
or the crucifix, — it marks at least an ideal point outside
of the man and of the powers of nature that threaten him.
Upon this, the emblem of substantial and primary power, he
is compelled, however ignorantly, to rely. The wonder is,
that, with so little of thought and of reason as he is likely
to have, he should be so wise.
Like the eye of sense, the eye of inward perception can be
trained to a large multiplication of its original gift of dis
cernment. In early stages of civilization, man will have his
symbol of the ideal as near him as possible, its essence being
proportionately removed from his modes of sympathy and of
consciousness. Culture continually increases in one ratio the
distance of the symbol, and the nearness of the substance. So
the man of one time could carry his Divine in his pocket, —
the man of our time must carry him in his heart, in his con
science and consciousness.
The writer of these pages recalls a revival meeting in New
York, more than twenty years ago, in which an assembly of
young men and women, not chosen from the ruder classes,
was called to order after the following manner: — "My
friends, salvation is a business which each of us is called
upon to transact for himself. The debt is sin, the penalty
eternal suffering, the liquidation and settlement provided is
the atonement of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Now, friends,
we are one party in this matter, and God is the other party.
We are here, therefore, to transact business with God."
This last phrase, often repeated, seemed dwelt upon by the
speaker with peculiar satisfaction. In the prayers that fol
lowed, the Divine bondholder was urged to make large invest
ments of his grace in the securities then and there presented.
All this, though impious to us, was not so to a man whose
only modes of thought were derived from banking and bro
kerage ; whose religion, if he had any, was solvency, and his
heaven a considerable excess of income over expenditure.
This commercial jargon is probably still current in religious
circles of a certain sort in America, recalling the Psalmist's
reproach, — alas! how often justified, — "Thou thoughtest
that I was altogether such an one as thyself."
Let us picture another phase of belief, not historical nor
special, hut of common occurrence.
Ellen has built her life upon the idea of a marriage whose
conditions exist only in her imagination. She firmly believes
this especial marriage to be the will and intention of God.
All her faith in God revolves around this point. The name
for her symbolizes the indulgent parent who will gratify her
favorite wish, at whatever cost to others. Should the desired
marriage fail, one does not see where her faith will find a ref
uge, so narrowly is it shut within this simple hypothesis.
Following this end with unswerving determination, she re
gards all who oppose it by reason or authority, not only as
her enemies, but as the enemies of her God. To. hate and
denounce them becomes as much her duty as her pleasure.
Are they prosperous? Wait a little. God is on the look-out
for them. Does misfortune overtake them ? She knew that
God would visit their sins upon them. The name here stands
for the deification of personal passion. The faith is chiefly
* characterized by the virulence which runs through the Jewish
theology. It is derived in a great degree from that adoption
of the Hebrew Scriptures which allows their spirit to domi
nate and obscure all that is most valuable in the precepts of
the New Testament. This small and personal cherishing of
the worst features of Judaism is the silliest Antichrist of the
present day, scarcely to be palliated by any excuse short of
lunacy.
Our Puritan fathers are chargeable with errors akin to
these. They were Jewish rather than Christian in their doc
trines, but the society with which they quarrelled was, with
whatever politeness and elegance of culture, heathen, and
therefore farther from true Christianity than they. The
power that was in them was a true one. The sincerity of
their protest against religious tyranny, the resolution to estab
lish human rights on a broader and more fundamental basis
than any hitherto acknowledged in human society, the cour
age to cross the dreaded ocean and possess new continents in
the name of religion and of liberty, — these are their true
1865.] The Name, and the Idea, of God. . 203
merits. But what was religion to them can never be religion
to us, and what they called liberty would be to us an unen
durable form of slavery. Thus, their spirit may be emulated
in all time, but their doctrine and discipline are outgrown.
The weighty " Thus saith the Lord " of the Hebrew
prophets was a recognized formula of discipline and reproof.
Their anathemas were fulminated against the enemies of their
nation, — oftener yet, it would seem, against the enemies of so
ciety, the men of violence, the deeds of rapacity which marred
the peaceful order of trade and agriculture. The truth of
their passion gives their utterances a value which may be mis
applied and misinterpreted, but not destroyed. And the
harshness of their polemic zeal is redeemed by their glimpses
of the ultimate moral unity and harmony which make their
words ever prophetic, and significant of good things yet to
come. Woe to them if these utterances were ever made the
instrument of a personal intention ! Even Balaam, desiring
the gifts of Balak the son of Ziphor, was not able to bless or
curse otherwise than as the spirit commanded.
Shall we mention the strange feast in which Robespierre
crowned his career of bloody fanaticism by the recognition
of the Eire Supreme? It was a costly holocaust that he
brought to the god of his worship, but that god was a theory,
emancipated from the practical restraints of duty and neces
sity. Or shall we give one look at Auguste Comte, as he
stands, surrounded by his neophytes, girt with the green em
blems of hope, to sacrifice to the Grand Etre ? This Grand
Etre, his readers will remember, was a new and curious ab
straction, an aggregate of the memories of noble men. In
corporation into this aggregate was the highest boon that the
living could accord the dead. It was immortality. And yet
this man despised the constructions of metaphysical hypothe
sis ! He said he did, at least, and thought so.
But now we come to one of. the marked women of the last
thirty years. Harriet Martineau, of Unitarian antecedents,
of wide reputation as an humanitarian and social economist,
travelling in the East, dropped one day a diamond from her
finger, and believed in God no more. She returned to Eng
land without this family jewel, far richer, in her own opinion,
than when she left it. And so the name was thenceforth
banished from the study and sick-chamber at Ambleside. The
Ruler of the Universe was no longer needed at Harriet Mar-
tinQau's. The door was politely opened, and the superfluous
guest was asked to depart. So He whose presence cannot be
excluded is nameless there. He is neither praised, blamed,
nor invoked. And many awkward formulas are resorted to, to
cover the unhandsome void of this omission. An ingenious
volume is also published, which we may call an attempt to
reconstruct morals, as if there were none. And Miss Marti-
neau continues to write and live, although God does not.
But, dear Madam, you are continually employing forms of
speech which, after discarding that of God, it does not become
you to use. You persist in speaking of Justice, Virtue, Lib
erty. But you surely know that no entity corresponding to
any of these names is discoverable, or, upon your ground, im
aginable. These all express the elaboration of certain ideal
agencies from the observation of certain real facts. The uni
versal human mind makes these abstractions for itself out of
an incalculable sum of conditions, actions, and intentions.
To get along without these words will indeed require the
coining of a new vocabulary. But if you will not allow us
to express the supreme unification, which is a personification
of the sum of all good, we cannot allow you to employ the
minor unifications, which express the components of that
sum. For here the objections which apply to the whole
apply equally to all its parts. Between us, we shall thus
deprive the human mind of that power of abstraction on
which its noblest results are contingent. For without this
very twofold power of generalizing agency and of unifying
acts, no process of human thought, moral, scientific, or imagi
native, could be carried on to useful ends.
In this connection, then, let us call new councils through
out benighted Christendom, to remodel the grammar and the
dictionary. We will keep only the words that express ma
terial processes and results, these being for us the only
substantial facts. Love and Friendship will be dismissed as
inexact expressions. In their place we shall speak of the
affinity of sex and the affinity of interest. Truth and Duty
will not suit our turn, Fact and Expediency must replace
them. We shall say that A. has ceased to function, when
we announce his death. We shall take oath after the fol
lowing formula : " So help me no God ! " We shall make
a world-wide auto-da-fe" of the books of past ages, — centres of
delusion, that continue to mislead mankind. Both Testa
ments must go, — Latin poets, Greek also. Dante must per
ish in a brief hell of flame. All the great thinkers will follow
him. In language and literature we shall make wide havoc.
In morals and manners we shall do no less. Every assign
able reason for man's discipline and improvement, from the
rudest to the most refined stages of culture, will be wiped
out at one touch of the Martineau brush. " Do as you like
as far as you can," is the simple starting-point of nature.
There being no absolute reason why you should do more or
better except the compulsion of those who would find your
service and moderation useful to them, we should swiftly re
vert to the tyranny of the few and the passivity of the many,
or, failing that, to a state of anarchy in which the excess of
human passion would tend towards the rapid extinction of
the race. So little do the rules of animal life suffice for the
guidance of man. So little does mind avail when considered
simply as a mechanical phenomenon, without ideal cause or
consequence, and with no intrinsic obligation save those of
its own fortuitous generation.
Were we to apply the same method rigorously to the con
structions of natural science, and abide the logic of its con
sequences, the question is, whether we should not find our
selves obliged to dismiss hypothesis after hypothesis, general
ization after generalization, until our retrogradation should
lead us to an impossibility of co-ordination and statement
whose inarticulate confusion would be the only fit expres
sion for the moral chaos of a world with no foundation for
law, with no reason for order.
The name, then, seems to have served the interests of the
race, and to have: been inextricably woven into the whole
web of its thought and of its life. Like all else with which
man deals, it has been used for ill, as well as for good. Its
weight has been added to injustice as well as to justice, to
YOl. LXXVUI. — 5TH S. VOL. XVI. NO. II. 18
206 Giordano Bruno. [March,
deeds of cruelty as well as to deeds of mercy. It has been
appended to many an illustrious death-warrant, between Jesus
Christ and John Brown. Yet to the pure, the sincere, the
steadfast and fervent, it has been the ne plus ultra of support
and consolation. These have not feared to walk to the tor
ture-chamber, the stake, and the gallows, strong in its sole
companionship. Those who have forced it to sanction the
violation of human rights and duties have trusted little to
its simple protection, filling up the void of faitK by outward
guards and defences. But if, in view of its uses and abuses,
we should call together the sons of men throughout the world,
and put it to vote among them whether the name, in all the
varieties of its reading, should be dismissed or retained in the
future, we believe that the savage would give his skins, the
sage his studies, the merchant his gains, ay, the woman her
child, rather than that this one possession should pass from
the archives of the race. For it is the title-deed of man's
nobility, and the patent of his immortal estate.
Art. m. — GIORDANO BRUNO.
1. Opere di Giordano Bruno, ora per la prima volta raecolte, da

Adolfo Wagner. 2 vols. Leipsic. 1830.
2. Jordani Bruni Nolani, Scripta qua latine redegit omnia. Ed.
Gforer. Stuttgart. 1834.
3. La Ragione, Foglio ebdomadario di Filosofia religiosa, politico e
sociale. Turin. 1856-57. Arts. La Morte (T un Filosqfo, and
Giordano Bruno, in the Nos. from November to August.
That was an arduous, protracted, and fearful struggle

through which men passed in breaking away from the torpors
of the Middle Age, and commencing the ascent towards intel
lectual freedom. The night had long hung dark and heavy,
the decay which had supervened upon the culmination of the
Greek and Bx>man civilizations was wide-spread and deep-
reaching, paralyzing all energies, and seeming to quench all
1865.] His Early Life. 207
life. The enchantment and stupefaction were all but com
plete and universal, and it was impossible that the return
should be other than embarrassed, slow, and painful.
In just this period falls the era of the Italian philosopher,
Giordano Bruno. He was born at Nola, a little town near
Naples, about 1555. Of his father we know nothing save the
name, Gioan Bruno. Such obscurity rests upon the history
that we are able to gather almost nothing of Giordano's early
circumstances and culture ; a few hints only, and those
dropped incidentally by. himself, being all that remain to us.
He would seem to have been a studious, thoughtful boy,
eager and apt at acquisition, and fond of solitude. In the
companionship of nature he sat much and mused. Vesuvius,
he tells us, was on the boundary of his little horizon, and
seemed the end of the world to him. Distant and strange it
looked, xmlike his own Cicada, " crowned with ivy and cornel,
laurel and myrtle, with olive-bough and rosemary, girdled
with chestnut and oak, poplar and elm rejoicing in the em
brace of the grape-bearing vine." But bidden forth and
abroad, he visited Vesuvius, and found that it too was of
nature, everywhere abloom with richest life. Hence he took
hint of the world. Elsewhere, says he, the sky is blue and
earth is green, — the horizon spreads still untraversed, and
all things are much the same as here. Nay, the stars
yonder, — are they not, mayhap, worlds like this, and "we
heaven to them as they are heaven to us " ? His principal
studies were mathematics, philosophy, and poesy, for the
acquisition of which he seems to have had as good opportuni
ties as were then accessible. His rearing was among the in
cantations of Rome ; into her bosom he was born, from her
lips his ears caught their first words, and at her hand he
received his early impressions. Still a youth, scarcely past
boyhood, he joined a monastic order, the Dominican, prompted
probably by the opportunity thus afforded of pursuing his fa
vorite culture.
The cloister proved no home for him. Born and reared
amid dreary wastes and choking death-damps, he was yet
alive. He had thirsts and loves. His soul went (jut in
quenchless longings after truth. In early boyhood, as he
somewhere mystically describes, while musing in deep soli

tudes, beneath his native Campauian sky, he had caught
glimpses of the fair Diana, and he was henceforth kindled
with a flame. In later years he read Plato, and the words
came fresh and life-inspiring to him. He had no patience
with the hollow mummeries and stupid conceits which pre
vailed all around him. His speech was caustic and cutting,
and gave great offence to the friars, as their hypocrisy and
pedantry were a standing disgust to him. He was guilty of
heresy, also, for Scioppius (a German monk, an apostate from
Protestantism, who was present at his trial and execution,
and writes a somewhat free account of him to a friend) says
that he denied the doctrines of transubstantiation and the
miraculous conception. Renouncing the order, he fled in
peril of his life, and sought refuge in foreign climes.
He came, in 1580, to Geneva, one of the homes of the Ref
ormation, the renowned seat of the Swiss Reformers. But his
first experience with Protestantism was not happy. He had
an instinctive aversion to everything dogmatic and narrow,
and was soon the determined opponent of Calvinism. There
was no tolerance here for such freedom, and he was quickly
driven out by persecution. He entered Papal France, and
gave lectures as he found opportunity in the principal cities,
in behalf of what he terms " a more rational philosophy."
At Paris, Henry III. offered him a professorship in the Sor-
bonne, on condition that he would attend mass, a thing he
had no thought of doing. But it was a bold refusal, where
the scenes of Bartholomew's night were still so fresh in every
recollection, and the echoes of the cry, La messe ou la mortl
had not yet died away. He professed in his own way, with
out royal sanction, " an academician," as he announces him
self, " but of no academy."
A warm dispute was in progress touching the character
and claims of the Aristotelian philosophy, or rather of that far-
famed scholasticism which, under the prestige of Aristotle's
name, had now for centuries held such unbroken and all-
withering sway. It was discovered that numerous corrup
tions had crept into the writings of the great master, as com
monly received ; there were interpolations and mistranslations,
1865.] In England. 209
occasioning manifold obscurities and perversions of the sense,
and numbers had become well persuaded that a great part of
what passed current under his name was entirely without
sanction or authority from him. There was a growing dispo
sition to return to the original sources, and ascertain the pure
text, in the hope that much improvement would come of it.
It was at best a very partial affair, occupied as was all the
Protestantism of that day very much with questions of text
ual authenticity, and of the more or less to be received on
authority, never touching upon the vital question of all. But
poor and superficial as it was, looking to but slight ameli
oration, it was resisted stiffly by the Aristotelians generally.
This was innovation and change, and might lead no one knew
whither. The dispute had grown violent, provoking much
heat on both sides.
With characteristic ardor, Bruno threw himself into the
midst of this controversy. He could hardly be said to take
any side, but he spoke very unambiguously. Striking deeper
than any, he affirmed the test of all authority to be in inner
character. He subjected Aristotle freely to criticism, setting
forth the inconsistencies and absurdities of which he was un
deniably guilty, and exposed the mock pretensions of the self-
styled followers and expounders of the master, showing that
they did not even apprehend and represent him as he was.
In doing this he made very free with certain then living repu
tations. Of course there was an outcry raised greater than
ever. The Aristotelians became very hot against him, rous
ing the violence of popular prejudice, and he was compelled
to fly.
England was the next place of refuge, now (1583) already
noted as a hospitable shore for the homeless exile. He was ad
mitted to Oxford, and gave lectures in the University, for a
time numerously attended and much applauded. The views
were novel, and the utterance was singularly eloquent and
stirring. His themes were cosmological and psychological,
"the fivefold sphere, and the immortality of the soul." Much
of his metaphysical doctrine had hitherto been involved in
more or less concealment through the form of its presentation,
being brought forward professedly as a certain exposition and
18*
expansion of Raymond Lully's Art of Topical Memory. From

this time forward he spoke on his own account, and with
much greater clearness. Here also he held debate with the
best champions Oxford could pit against him, in advocacy of
his favorite doctrines, and in contravention of Aristotle and
of Ptolemy. It was conducted, he tells us, with great good
nature and courteousness on his side, and great heat and rude
ness on the other ; the antagonist being repeatedly discomfited
and silenced, his only weapon left was insolence and abuse.
But the old prejudices were too much ; manifold opposition
was roused against him, and he could not remain in Oxford.
Withdrawing to London, he opened private classes in the
house of a friend, Fulke Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke.
This was a sunny spot in his stormy life. Here, apparently
for the first time, he found friendships, the joys of living com
munion. Sidney he evidently regarded as beyond all others
his friend,-— one whose soul had met his own, to whose pro
tection he might commit whatever he should write, sure that
there it would find recognition, wise judgment, and kindly
welcome. This attachment remained unabated to the last,
and it seems to have been thoroughly mutual. Sidney ad
mired and cherished Bruno deeply as Bruno loved and hon
ored Sidney. Only the early death of the latter terminated
this intimacy. Bruno speaks several times of Greville (Lord
Brooke), always in terms of high respect and esteem. Brooke
sought Bruno's instructions, and invited him to the conver
sation of which the Cena de le Ceneri (of which more here
after) is a professed report ; but the friendship seems never
to have ripened into intimacy, and an alienation at length oc
curred through the agency of some jealous busybody. The
impress of Bruno's type of thought upon both these minds,
Brooke and Sidney, was marked and lasting, and the traces
of it are not difficult of recognition in the writings they have
left.
But not even here was there rest for this wanderer. His
withdrawal from the public eye, his steady occupancy of him
self in the quiet walks of domestic and social life, could not"
shield him from notice and pursuit. His position was too in
dividual, he stood in conflict with too much of the limitation
1865.] In Germany. 211
and prejudice of the age, to be permitted to remain anywhere
unmolested. Rome was busy, and the power that laid snares
for every escaped subject, sure in one way or another to com
pass his destruction, — decoying De Dominis from London, a
few years later, into the very arms of the Inquisition, and dis
patching Marsigli by poison infused into his food at an inn, —
had doubtless her plot against this man. All the leading in
fluences were against him, ecclesiastic and scholastic, Papist
and Protestant as well ; he was a heretic in all the theologies
and in letters, an ultraist and a disturber everywhere. His
few friends, gifted and eminent as some of them were, were
quite unable to protect him against the universal intolerance.
Exposed and alone, he had but to betake him again to flight.
He returned to Paris about 1585, engaged afresh with the
Aristotelians in debate, of which he seems to have been im
moderately fond, was set upon by violence, and escaped nar
rowly with life to Germany. Here he traversed the country,
visiting the Universities, and expounding his doctrine wherever
he could find hearing. In Wittenberg he received a regular
appointment as Professor. In his word of acknowledgment to
the Senate of the honor conferred, he describes the grounds
of its bestowment ; as "a teacher of a more perfect theology,
professor of a purer wisdom, a philosopher who rouses the
spirit from its slumbers, who battles with ignorance, who
cherishes an impartial regard for all mankind, holding all na
tionalities in like esteem, falling prostrate before no anointed
head, no mitre, crown, cowl, or coat, but bowing reverently
before the true presence of man, before greatness of soul and
of life." The charge that while here he pronounced a pane
gyric upon the Devil, is wholly without support, as also the
assertion that he connected himself with the Lutheran Church.
He remained to the last entirely individual in his attitude,
and was " rather unfriendly to any set form of belief and wor
ship." *
In 1588 he was at Prague, but found no hearing there, and
went next to Helmstadt, where he remained some time under
the protection of the Duke of Brunswick, who appointed him
* Wagner's Introd. to the Open, p. 29.

private instructor to his son, and afterwards Professor. The
old fortune followed ; his protector died in 1589, and he had
scarcely commenced his lecture course, when sentence of ex
communication was pronounced against him by one Boetius,
a, clerical notability of the place. He sought and obtained
refuge in Frankfort, where, under the hospitable roof of the
Wechels, he was immediately busy in the preparation and
publication of certain works, almost or quite the last we have
from his pen. What was the nature of the interruption that
broke him off from these labors is not known. The merest
hint is given, barely sufficient to inform us that in the midst
of his work, while engaged upon the closing paragraphs of the
treatise De Innumerabilibus, he was suddenly " torn away,"
and compelled to commit all farther care of it to another.
What immediately became of him, whether he withdrew to
some retired nook, remaining buried in deep concealment,
or, as the words just quoted would seem to indicate, was for
cibly abducted and carried away to unknown parts, none can
tell. All that we certainly know is that erelong, in 1592, he
was found in Italy. To the astonishment of all, there he was,
living in quiet retreat at Padua.
, Perhaps he had grown weary of this perpetual flight, and,
fully aware that the death of violence awaited him, that from
this cross there was for him no escape, he returned to receive
his martyrdom at Rome. More probably, however, he hoped
as a last resort to find protection with the Republic of Venice,
now the freest state in Italy. He remained in his retirement
for a time unmolested, writing constantly, and for support
giving private instruction in mathematics and philosophy. He
fondly hoped to bring to something like completion the work
he had commenced, though aware, as he hints, of the magni
tude of the undertaking, and of the imminent hazards to
which he was every moment exposed.
The eye of the vulture was upon him. The clergy of
Padua, noted even among Papists for the depth of their igno
rance and the violence of their prejudices, were soon advised
of the presence of the arch-heretic among them, and instigated
to seize him. To escape their hands Bruno removed (Sep
tember, 1592) to Venice, where he hoped he might trust in
1865.] Before the Inquisition. 213
the protection of the laws and the assurances of friends. But

he had scarcely arrived, when he was seized by the Inquisition
and thrown into prison. Word was quickly carried to the
presiding Inquisitor at Rome, and the demand as quickly re
turned for his surrender and extradition to Rome at the first
opportunity. The minuteness of the indictment drawn up
evinces the vigilance that had followed him, from the moment
of his escape from the convent. Nothing is omitted ; every
incident of his life, so far as known to any, is brought forward
and described with singular exactness.
The Republic hesitated and procrastinated, urging, through
its Council of Ten, the press of business, and the importance
of time for deliberation upon so grave a case, and finally de
clined to give any immediate decision. The gondola of the
Inquisitor left without the desired victim, but Rome abated
none of her hope and determination. The demand was re
peated with renewed emphasis. Venice averred that Bruno
was arrested on her soil, was a Neapolitan by birth, and that
it belonged to herself as much as to any to judge him. Rome
declared that he was a subject of the Church, an apostate from
the Dominican order, and erelong produced a certificate from
Olivares, Governor of Naples, granting her full permission to
take him into her custody. After about six years spent in the
protracted diplomacies, the bargain of blood was consummated.
Bruno was given up, and early in the year 1598 conveyed
under strong escort to Rome.
Here the attempt to reduce him to submission, termed the
opportunity for repentance, consumed two more years, in the
gloomy cells of the Inquisition. Torture was tried, but with
out avail. Friendless and alone, the victim of crushing cru
elty, he was still inaccessible to the demands of his torment
ors, and beyond the power of their inflictions. He mocked
them, he sneered at their pretensions. " Giordano," he some
where says, " deals in plafn, homely speech, describing each
thing as it is, holding idlers, quacks, jugglers, and vampires
for what they are, and workers, benefactors, sages, and heroes
for what they in turn are. Nor in thought, word, or deed
does he affect aught, or exhibit other than sincerity, sim
plicity, truth." Such was he in early years, in ardent, im
pulsive youth ; such now in attained manhood, the fiery en
thusiasm tempered and ripened into deep devotion ; such to
the last, amid whatever trials and extremities of suffering.
The appointed period at an end, no time was lost in pro
nouncing the long prepared sentence. Bruno was led forth
to the sacred tribunal, held at that time in the palace of the
presiding Inquisitor. The appointments were in all ways stu
diously adapted to the inquisitorial purpose to strike with ter
ror, the walls covered with hideous representations of the im
pending fate of heretics, and the atmosphere surcharged with
the dismal presence of a long array of church dignitaries, car
dinals, — Robert Bellarmin, the great theological watch-dog
of the time, and Severina, an acquaintance in old days of
Bruno, among the number.
Hither was the prisoner conducted, barefoot and nearly
naked, forced upon his knees, and bidden to listen. A long
paper was read by the Grand Inquisitor, professedly stating
the leading incidents in Bruno's life, — his early connection
with the monastic order, his renunciation of it, his studies
and journeyings and inculcations ; not omitting to describe
with minute .particularity and solemn emphasis the efforts
put forth for his recovery by the Church, the deep interest
felt in his behalf, the very many paternal admonitions ex
pended upon him by the reverend fathers, — all, as thus far
indicated, in vain. He was now, therefore, declared guilty of
apostasy and atheism, and delivered over to the secular power,
with this significant recommendation, " that he be punished
mildly as possible, and without the shedding of blood " ; in
other words, for such was the meaning well understood to
lurk in the phrase, that he be burned at the stake.
Bruno heard with imperturbable composure, not a shade
of a change discoverable in his look. To the final words, so
oblique yet so significant, he replied quietly, but with stern
glance into the eye of his judges, '" Perhaps you more trem
ble to pronounce sentence upon me, than I to hear it." Then,
nodding to his keepers, he promptly withdrew to his prison.
A few days' extension was still given, in the hope that, in
such near view of the stake, retraction might be obtained, or
at least certain disclosures extorted, deemed of importance to
1865.] Martyrdom. . 215
the Church. He was transferred from the ecclesiastical to the
civil prison, and thrown into the midst of the most loathsome
and abandoned criminals. Torture was again plied, but with
no new effect. The persecutors, wearied of the very presence
of one they could by no possibility reduce, or in the remotest
degree make subservient to their purposes, grew eager to be
rid of him.
At the end of the eight days the stake and the fagot were
in waiting. The place selected was the Camponore, a large
square in Rome, since the days of Arnold of Brescia used
many times for the " mild punishment " of heretics. Rome
was just now full of strangers, for all Christendom had by
order" of Clement, on the opening of the new century, gone
into festive rejoicings and gratulations over the brilliant suc
cesses, such as imperial alliances, Bartholomew massacres, and
the like, which had latterly crowned the efforts of the Church.
Crowds, therefore, greater than usual for such an occasion,
nocked at an early hour to the place of execution.
In slow march through the principal streets of the city
came the long procession. In the midst, and escorted on
either side by Jesuit fathers, was the condemned victim, clad
in the san benito, his form pale and wasted from his long con
finements and dreadful inflictions, — some of the tortures hav
ing galled and fretted away the flesh to the bone, and drained
large quantities of the precious lifeblood, — his arms swaying
helpless at his side, drawn from their sockets by the rack, —
his face worn and saddened by the weight of crushing sorrows,
but still beaming with inextinguishable beauty, still youthful
and radiant with the deep intelligence that dwelt within. The
giddy multitude was for the moment touched and moved. In
instinctive pity and respect for the young sufferer and hero,
they shrank back and opened clear way before him.
At the stake it was the same serene face, the same high
bearing, the same unbroken composure, — not a cringe of re
luctance, not a whisper of renunciation. With eye upturned
and looking into the face of the great Infinitude, — that eter
nity, immensity, and power whose presence had filled and
awed his childhood, whose voice, articulate in the high laws
of nature, the ordinances of justice and truth, had quickened
216 . Giordano Bruno. [March,
and armed his manhood, — in fast trust in the Everlasting, he
was inaccessible to the jeers of the multitude, and beyond the
reach of the fagot's fires. It is said that on his way to the
stake he murmured to himself the words of dying Plotinus, —
" I am striving to draw to me whatever the universe contains
most divine."
One of the old monks relates, that, in the midst of his last
moments, the crucifix being held up for him to kiss, Bruno
frowned indignantly upon it, then raised his eyes heaven
ward and expired in his perverseness and obstinacy. " So,
consumed in the flames, he miserably perished," says Sci-
oppius, " going to tell, I opine, in those other worlds which
he imagined, what sort of handling heretics and blasphem
ers are wont to receive of the Romans. This then is our
customary manner of dealing at Rome with heretics and
monsters of such sort." It was on a bright, refulgent day,
so we read, Sunday, the 16th of February, 1600. Italy had
within it, at this time, a great number of men of letters,
philosophers, and historians, yet not one among them ven
tured — such was the terrorism of the Church — to lisp a
syllable of this burning.
His ashes were collected by the executioners, and scattered
to the winds. His books, after the lapse of three years, were
re-examined and put in the prohibited list, his name covered
with execration, and condemned to unending oblivion by sen
tence of the Holy See.
Giordano Bruno has no biographer. Scarcely a fragment

of his history, saving the few hints contained in his own para
graphs, is'preserved to us. So far as represented to us at all,
he is doubtless considerably misrepresented, — as he was ill-
known and misknown. No friend speaks, giving us aught of
his impressions of this philosopher, or recording anything of
his person, presence, characteristics, — of his doctrines or
history.
We turn to his writings, and find them few, scanty, and
partial, the performance throughout of early youth, and there
fore far from affording any full representation or adequate
index of the man. And there is ground for supposing that
1865.] His Writings. 217
we have not all even of them, some having perished, as would
seem, in the flames, or perhaps remaining still inaccessible,
locked up in Romish chests.
A part come to us in the Latin, and a part in the Italian
tongue ; those in the former, however, with two or three ex
ceptions, seeming of rather light value, since occupied mainly
with speculations in cosmology, dialectics, mnemonics, and
the like. The Italian writings are all in the form of dialogue.
The style is strongly individual, bold, affluent, vivid, dealing
much in hyperbole and exaggeration, full of imagery and
mystic sense, and rising not seldom to heights of true beauty
and power. The paragraphs lack in compactness and finish,
— thrown off as they were in haste, in the brief and un
certain intervals of an almost perpetual flight. A graver
fault is, that they sometimes run to excessive length through
the inordinate passion of the author for tautologies and va
riations. There is an opulence of culture, very remarkable
for those times. He is familiar with the ancient masters in
thought, as also with his nearer neighbors, the Arabians and
scholastics.* Pythagoras, Plato, and Plotinus are the favorite
names with him. It is evidently a young man that writes,
full of the ardors of a youth's enthusiasm. He pants with
thirsts, and burns with loves, and leaps with exultation.
II Candelajo, a comedy in five acts, (Paris, 1582,) is designed
to hit off the ridiculous pedantries, superstitions, and sensual
ities of the time, and although perhaps not discreditable as a
whole, having much that is witty, apt, and instructive, is evi
dently a very juvenile affair, coarse and rambling, and far in
ferior to other things that we have from him. The Spaccio de
la Beslia Trionfante, the oftenest referred to and best known
of his writings, having been done during the earlier half of
the last century both into French and English, is an allegori
cal representation of the final overthrow and expulsion of
Falsehood and Wickedness from the world, (not without refer
ence, moreover, as the author aptly hints, to the conflict and
conquest that must be wrought out in every individual bosom,)
and the inauguration of Truth and Virtue in their stead. The
* References arc not unfrequent to Avicebron, Avicenna, Averroes, Algazel, &c.

VOL. LXXV1II. — 5TH S. VOL. XVI. NO. II. 19
scene is laid in the heavens among the gods, and the parts are
well chosen and skilfully done. There are many satirical hits,
and pregnant hints upon problems of gravest import are not
wanting.
The Cabala del Cavallo Pegaseo is a satire upon the
anointed ignorance and stupidity, the " holy asshood " of the
time, — cool and caustic, — such as Rome in no age could have
known forgiveness for. The Cena delle Ceneri is devoted
mainly to the exposition and defence of the Copernican doc
trine of the heavens, — a favorite theme with Bruno, as open
ing a new universe to the gaze, and paving the way for mani
fold emancipations yet to come. The astronomical fable had
intimate connection with the ecclesiastical. As the world was
held the centre of the universe, so was Rome the centre of the
world, and the Church its great sovereign institution. That
dogma once well exploded and sent going, much else, Bruno
saw, must go with it. There are also in this book a number
of incidental reference's, highly curious and instructive, to the
people and their manners in Britain in those days.
In the De la Causa, Principio et Uno, and its counterpart,
De VInfinito Universo e Maidi, (Venice, 1584,) he ascends
into the regions of Cause, denning and illustrating the meta
physical distinctions here made of Principle, Cause formal,
extrinsic, and final, and resolving all into the central unity,
examines the relations of seen and unseen, and argues the in
finity of the worlds, the utter boundlessness of the universe.
A more full and complete exposition of his metaphysical doc
trine is here given than can elsewhere be found. He affirms
the being and existence of a Somewhat absolute and eternal,
inaccessible to sense, in itself invisible and ever-during, all-
containing, and all-pervading. By this vital breath are all
things quickened and upheld ; into this ocean of eternity the
river of time falls and is lost, all flux and change are here
quenched and hushed to silence, and on the bosom of immen
sity the worlds rest and repose evermore. Nature is the liv
ing garment of God, — his footprint, shadow, symbol. In its
laws his character is manifested ; and in the principles graven
upon the corner-stone of our being — " nel centro del nostro
core inscolpite " — his presence is revealed, his voice articulate.
1865.] Philosophical Problems. 219
In De gli Heroici Furori, (Paris, 1585,) he celebrates in
mystic sonnets the loves of the soul, its deep longings, quench
less aspirations, ceaseless strivings, and the sure satisfaction
that awaits in the home of Possession, the bosom of the In
finite and Eternal.
Such were the themes that filled Bruno's mind. Upon
these his spirit dwelt, around these his thoughts revolved
continually. They were ever-besetting ; all things reminded
him of them. Fain would he explore their depths, and know
their significance. For this he yearned and toiled, and wres
tled and wrought unceasingly. It is no disparagement to say
of him that he did not prevail. These problems are too high
for mortals. Thor could not drink that cup dry, or wrestle
with the Ancient Woman. To the last man, as to the first,
the world is still a riddle, and all existence a miracle, an un
explored mystery. High in the heaven of human conscious
ness shines the Infinite Presence, pouring its sublime radiance
on world without and world within, greater than conception
can reach or philosophy explain, refusing to be thought, refus
ing to be named. '
Bruno's affirmation of the Divine existence is of such breadth
and clear emphasis as ought forever to put to silence the
charge of atheism, so loudly repeated and so widely believed
against him. Whatever else he may or may not have been,
he was manifestly far from that. No man, one would think,
was ever more keenly alive to the Great Presence, none ever
penetrated more deeply and powerfully with its pervading in
fluence, than he. It is, he affirms and repeats constantly,
most near and intimate of all things to the soul, — " still more
within us than we within ourselves." The Infinite, the In
finite, he exclaims, is everywhere around us.* God is " the
* " En ut qaocumque nos vertamur, infiniti species nou deserit." — De Lumauo.
" Causa, Principio ct Uno sempiterno,
Onde 1' esser, la vita, il raoto pende,
E a lango, a largo, e profondo si stende,
Quanto si dice in ciel, terra et inferno I
Con senso, con region, con mente scerno,
CV atto, misura e conto non comprende
Quel vigor, mole, e numero, che tende
Oltr' ogn' inferior, mezzo, o superno.
220 .Giordano Bruno. [March,
Idea of ideas," — " the simplest essence, in which any com
position or intrinsic difference is impossible. Consequently
in him is the identity of being, power, action, and will, and
indeed whatever may be truly said of this, for he is verity
itself." * " The deep foundation of Nature is God. God is
in affairs, articulate in creation, — in creaturis ezpressus.
Through Nature God is manifested to the reason, and by
Nature reason climbs aloft to God." f Bruno has his own des
ignation by which he would characterize the Supreme. " The
universal mind, called by the Pythagoreans th^ Motor and
active Power of the Universe ; by the Platonists, the Smith
of the world ; by Orpheus, the Eye of the world ; by Empe-
docles, the Separator ; by Plotinus, Father and Progenitor ; by
ourselves, the internal Builder." $ In his view idolatry and
" insane atheism " are near of kin, children of the same birth,
and often enough found side by side together.
Here he pauses, not essaying to describe or define the illim
itable. He knows the limitations set to the human under
standing, the utter impotence of the mind to grasp infinity.
" The infinite cannot be an object of sense. And therefore
he who should require to know this by means of the senses
would be like one attempting with the eye to see substance
and essence." § We can see the Divine, he often repeats,
" only in the mirror of similitude. AVe can know the Divine
Substance only in trace, as the Platonists say ; in remote ef
fects, as the Peripatetics; in vesture, as the Cabalists; in back
parts, as the Talmudists ; in mirror, shadow, and enigma, as
the Apocalyptics say." ||
" Only through existence can we arrive at essence ; through the path
way of effects attain to knowledge of cause. And these means are so
Cieco error, tempo avaro, ria fortana,

Sorda invidia, vil rabbia, iniquo zelo,
Crudo cor, empio ingegno, strano ardire
Non bastnranno a furmi 1' aria brnna,
Non mi porrann' avanti gli occhi il velo,
Non faran mai, ch' il mio bel sol non mire.*
De la Causa, etc., Introd.
* De Immense $ &e I'hfmto Universo, etc.
t De Minima. || De la Causa.
I De la Causa.
1865.] God in Nature. . 221
far from sufficient to bear us to that goal, that it is much rather to be
supposed that the most profound knowledge of divine things is nega
tive, and not affirmative, considering that the Divine Beauty and Ex
cellence is not that which does or can fall within our conception, but
is out and out incomprehensible, — oltre et oltre incomprensiMe." *
Thus musing and impressed, he goes out into Nature. He
finds it the image of God, " the infinite effect of the infinite
cause." This infinitude he deems is involved in the very ex
istence of the Infinite Power ; the causa causata must corre
spond to the causa causans. " Potentia infinita non est nisi sit
possibile infinitum; non est inquam potens facere infinitum,
nisi sit potens fieri ; qjjae enim impossibilis vel ad impossibile
potest esse potentia ? " f The Universe, therefore, is boundless
and eternal. The world is everywhere alive and symbolic.
" We find the footprint, mirror, and image' of infinity in all
and singular that we see." The gradations from lowest to
highest are infinite, and each thing is representative and mi-
crocosmic. " Each is in all, and all in each." He exults in
the riches of the exhaustless volume. Here is instruction and
enlargement without end.
Especially do the heavens, with their silent grandeur, their,
immense spaces and ceaseless processions, awe and inspire
him. He is never done with celebrating them. Here is the
temple of the Infinite Majesty, here the throne of his Power.
Finite blends with infinite, seen melts away into unseen.
Every star with him has consciousness, and utters its song.
" These resplendent bodies are the heralds that proclaim the excel
lence of the glory and majesty of God."
" There we may contemplate the host of stars, of worlds or living
creatures, deities unnumbered, unending, each in its appointed sphere,
singing together and dancing to the One Most High. Thus from the
perpetual, immense, and innumerable effects in the visible is that sem
piternal and supreme majesty and excellence mentally beheld, and
duly glorified, by the attendance and choral symphonies of innumer
able gods or worlds, uttering forth the glory of Him in the expressive
language of vision, To Him illimitable no limited temple will cor
respond ; to the acknowledgment and fit worship of the plenitude of
his majesty there would be no proportion in any numerable array
* Heroid Furori. t De Immenso.
19*
of ministrant spirits. Let us therefore cast our eyes upon the omni-
form image of the all-forming God ; let us reverence his living and
sublime Symbol ! " *
The tendency with Bruno is throughout to etherealize every
thing, to lose the world in God. He sinks form in essence,
annihilating all individuality. All difference and change are
phenomenal, not real. All things are but modes of the one
substance. This doctrine appears prominently in all his writ
ings, and in the De la Causa it is stated broadly, and applied
with a freedom hardly excelled by Spinoza himself.
" Being is indivisible, and most purely single (semplicissimo) ; hence
it is not correct to speak of it partitively, M that the earth or sun is
'part of Substance; we may only say Substance in this' or that part.
Even as it is not proper to say a part of the life in the arm or head, or
the like, but the life in this or that part."
In the sphere of substance is the indifference of power and
action ;' possibility and fact are one. Distinctions of time and
space, form and number, there are none here. Point is line,
line is surface, surface is solid. An hour, an age, have no dif
ference in eternity. Death is birth, the end of decay the
commencement of growth. Extremes meet, contradictions
agree, discords blend together and swell higher the harmony
in the realm of the everlasting.^
The scale is the same, says Bruno, through which nature
descends, and thought ascends ; the one starting from unity
and going out into multiplicity, the other starting in the
midst of multiplicity, and rising step by step to the central
unity. " The descent is from one Being to numberless indi
viduals and kinds ; the ascent is from these to that." The
nearer our approach to the One, the deeper our knowledge,
the more luminous the world. Genius simplifies and resolves ;
and he would be the most consummate geometer who should
reduce all the propositions of Euclid to one. Here is the gra
dation of the intelligences ; for the inferior cannot understand
except with many examples, the superior understand better
than they with fewer, and the most gifted perfectly, with few
est. The highest intelligence in a single idea comprehends
* De Immens. ti Innumcrab. t Op., Vol. I. pp. 281, 282, 283, 285, &c.
1865.] Be Immenso. 223
all completely ; the Divine Mind and the absolute unity with
out form at all, is the same that understands and is under
stood.*
We find in Bruno an exalted view of man, his nature, rela
tions, and mission. With full recognition of the limitations
that beset, of the twofold character of human existence, —
man himself being dual, on one side the child of time, the
creature of circumstance, the breath of an hour, dependent,
subject, fleeting away, — there is yet most positive affirmation
of the pre-eminence of the soul, its sublime power, preroga
tive, responsibility, its eternity of possession, and the untold
greatness of its destiny. There is a significant passage upon
this general theme in the opening of De Immenso, from
which we take the following: —
" This, in the midst of all his devotions and activities and successes,
is really with man the primal object of regard, — that his thought may
rest in the original True, his will in the original Good. For in what
acquisition soever, the human intelligence and affection are not satis
fied ; hence it is most plain that these look not to any special and par
ticular true or good, beyond which they evermore seek and aspire after
another and another, but to the universal, beyond which there can be
Done. In nothing which has limitation, therefore, can there be any end
of search and desire. In every soul inheres the desire to possess all,
to be evermore what one sometimes is, to enjoy wholly what he in part
enjoys ; and it can never rest satisfied in any attainment so long as
aught remains yet to be attained. These things are the birth of the
infinite ; and as infinite space is, which surrounds all, so are possibility,
capacity, power of reception, growth, and transformation. Universal
Nature is not too small to satisfy the full want of each particular, and
in respect to its greatness itself also universal nature ; hence most
clearly is it wholly unfit that any should account the aim and aspiration
inborn in every soul — inherent, inseparable, and consubstantial with
it — as in anywise idle or fruitless, looking to an unreal and impossi
ble object.
" Nor are we deterred from accepting this vision of light, by the fact
that desire of the present life is hereby disappointed ; for such desire
comes of this, that no particular existence can know universal action ;
it comprehends things only in succession and one by one, so that only
that which is present is the object of knowledge and desire. Hence by
* Op., Vol. L p. 287.

the sovereign utterance of nature it wishes to exist forever, but through
its lack of knowledge it wishes to exist forever that which it now is ;
for it knows no other existence whence it issued, or whither it goes. A
wise spirit does not fear death; nay, sometimes it seeks and
goes forth to meet it of its own accord. For there awaits all actual
beings, for duration, eternity, — for place, immensity, — for action, om-
niformity Thence was man termed by Trismegistus ' the great
miracle,' since he passes into God, — transeat in Deum, — as if he
were himself a god, — tries to become all, as God himself it All."
Elsewhere, with more of the poet's warmth and rapture, he
declares the same broad privilege. In a sonnet in De la Cau
sa, addressed " to his own spirit," he speaks thus : —
" Mount, though the sustaining earth at thy deep foundations clasp
thee, yet dost thou avail to lift thy head among the stars. Lose
not here thy birthright, nor reclining earthward, hindered, touch the
waters of black Acheron. Up and on ; nature shall try deepest re
cesses, for at touch of God thou shalt be fervid flame ! "
The heroic spirit has alchemies whereby it transmutes all
things to gold. Misfortune cannot befall it. " They know to
draw a higher freedom from chains, and turn defeat into
greater victory." No virtue is complete until it has risen be
yond the reach of temptation, and come to dwell in an atmos
phere so serene that trial cannot touch it. The self-command
must be perfect. The hero can lie down upon burning coals
as on bed of roses, — " de prunis ardentibus velut e roseo
strato." This, he says, is the perfection of constancy, not
that the tree break not nor bend, but that it move not at all.
Then will philosophy have wrought its perfect work, when in
the exaltation of his thought one shall be so far removed from
bodily sensation as not to feel pain. This superiority to suf
fering, he avers in another place, has its origin in the fact
" that one is wholly absorbed in the thought of virtue, or the
true good and blessedness. So Regulus had no sense of the
chest, Lucretia of the poniard, Socrates of the poison."
He recognizes the value of society, but remembers the lim
itations. Use it sparingly, holding all things sacred to cul
ture, giving yourself only where you may impart or else
receive, and above all things avoid the intoxications of a
crowd. For meditation and deepest communion, frequent
I860.] Idealism. 225
withdrawal is indispensable. Richest visits come in solitude.
Only in the wilderness of retired contemplation is the Diana
of purest Beauty found. Very rare are the Actaeons who
have been privileged to see her nude. Those arrested and
haunted henceforth have become devoured of the high con
ceits. Truth is coy, dwelling in nooks and silent retreats, vis
ited by few, often in caves hedged up with thorns, and seeming
inaccessible, but where wise men, following, penetrate and
take her by surprise.*
Such an idealist naturally believes in magic. But it is
something different from the empty juggle of the day, which
passes current under that name. It is the getting possession
and use of Nature's forces through the exploration of her
subtile laws, or, as he himself defines, " versa circa la contem-
plazione de la Natura, e perscrutazione di suoi secreti." Mir
acles of accomplishment, untold feats of genuine thauma-
turgy, lie wrapped up here. It is through the symbol to learn
the secret ; in the face to read the experiences, the joys and
sorrows and behaviors of the life ; in the form and structure to
know the length of days appointed. Everywhere is the work
of this " scribe, who in marking makes all, and in making
marks all," and his is the skilful eye that can decipher the
character.
To the imagination he assigns, fitly, high place in the mak
ing up of the philosophical endowment. The philosopher is
near of kin to poet and to painter. " Philosophi sunt quo-
dammodo pictores atque poetae." " Nemo est philosophus
nisi fingit et piugit."
He finds no line at bottom between liberty and necessity.
" The Divine will is not only necessary, but is necessity itself,
whose opposite is impossible not only, but even impossibility
itself." Man's freedom is alone to act in obedience to the
great necessities.
" Necessitas et libertas sunt utiiira ; unde non est formidandum quod
cum agat necessitate naturae, non libere agat ; sed potius immo omnino
non libere ageret alitor agendo quam necessitas et natura, imo natura
necessitas requirit."t
* Op., Vol. II. pp. 406, 408. t De Immenso.

Some of the most remarkable observations and statements
of his near successors in philosophy, commonly deemed dis
tinctive and characteristic of them, are anticipated in Bruno.
Descartes's doctrine of doubt as a starting-point and essential
condition for just, fruitful inquiry, is distinctly enunciated in
the De V Infinito. His acute observation, too, that scepticism
overthrows itself, that all doubt must stand finally in belief
and affirmation, " the stoutest doubter not being able to doubt
that he doubts," is here. " If we know no truth, they them
selves know not what they are saying, nay, cannot even be
sure whether they are speaking or braying, are men or asses."
Spinoza's natura naturans and natura naturata appear in Bru
no's natura generata e generante o producente e prodotta, and
in one instance we have noticed the expression natura natu-
rante to occur. The Leibnitzian doctrine of monads is found
in Bruno. In physics Galileo, Bayle, and others are said to
be much indebted to him ; the first, in particular, drawing from
him some of his finest demonstrations touching the truth of
the Copernican system.
The Divine influences, he affirms, are constant, uniform, per
ennial, ever present to the soul, " always knocking at the door
of the perceptive and apprehensive powers." Man's entire
business in his relation to them is " to open the window "
that the sunlight may came in. Virtue is its own reward, sin
" bears within itself the principle of its own punishment."
Jesus stands pre-eminent through all ages, " Shepherd of shep
herds," but Moses, Hermes, Zoroaster, Zamolxis, and the like,
have wrought to the same high end, and are of kindred spirit.
Truth is Bible, and the volume of the sacred canon is broad as
the inspired utterance of man, confined not to Greek and He
brew tongues, but extant in fragments more or less complete
in all the monuments of human speech. Let all the records
be searched, and by careful scrutiny and sifting of " profane "
and " sacred " both, the sentences of the immortal Scripture
be gathered up. This was "Abomination" No. 2 found
against him'by the court, — an atrocious heresy in those days,
and not become approved orthodoxy even in ours. The
Church is no narrow ecclesiasticism, no petty conclave set
apart by solemn rite and maintained exclusive by certain rig
1865.] His Character. 227
orous specialities of belief and observance, but is evermore
the brotherhood of the true, its ritual broad as the practice of
all virtue, its fellowships deep, spontaneous, and living as the
communion of souls. Its priesthood are the interpreters of
Nature, expositors of the Divine, anointed not with oil, but
with Truth ; wielding the keys of a kingdom of heaven not fic
titious, but real ; opening day by day the immensities of Life
to men, and lifting them ever to new freedom and blessedness ;
a hierarchy of wisdom and nobleness, God-ordained and per
petual.
These last, according to monk Scioppius, whose hints,
although partial and distorted, are yet without difficulty in
telligible, were among the grounds on which Bruno received
condemnation. The doctrines were accounted blasphemous,
" horrid absurdities," " abominations," far more monstrous
than anything yet found in Lutheranism. The common peo
ple in Borne had it on the day of the martyrdom, that a Lu
theran was burned ; " and I might," says Scioppius, " have
thought the same, had I not been present at the sacred tribu
nal when sentence was pronounced, and so been in posi
tion to know what sort of heresies he. held." " So absurd and
monstrous," he declares, " have not been maintained by any
philosophers or heretics, whether ancient or modern."
Bruno seems to have been a solitary man, a homeless wan
derer, driven perpetually from place to place, — always, as the
homely phrase is, " in hot water." He never, so far as appears,
was married, and probably knew little of home, or the sweets of
domestic relation. It was a restless, weather-beaten, tempest-
tost life. The portrait given of him in Dr. Wagner's edition
of the Opere, one can without difficulty believe genuine. It
is a remarkable face, singularly riveting and impressive.
" Per man d' amor scritto veder potrcste
Nel volto mio 1' istoria di mie pene," —
begins one of the sonnets ; and one would say this face, young
as it manifestly is, seems already written over with experi
ences of sorrow. The look is grave, nigh to sadness, earnest,
thoughtful, elevated, as of one naturally dwelling in the upper
airs, and wholly freo from the trace of anything passional or
sensuous. The front brain is massive, the eye clear and prom
inent. Every feature testifies to great positiveness of tempera
ment and character.
The polarities are very strong. He has everything in in
tensity. He is a stern incorrigible hater, having no jot of
patience with falsehood and pretence. Pedants and quacks
he holds in utmost detestation and abhorrence. They are
"mountebanks," "play-actors," "jugglers," "bloodsuckers,"
" cheats." They " pervert nature, putting darkness for light,
and light for darkness," and " have filled the world with in
finite madness." The age seems to him a degenerate one, as
far gone as possible in stupidity, sensuality, and conceit. The
worship was a mockery, and the living base. There was no
longer any manhood, any trust or nobleness. The world
could not be worse governed, men could not become more
deeply benighted and besotted. " Earnest contemplation is
madness." " Devotion to the religion of the soul is a capital
crime." " Truth is made one with marvels, wisdom with cun
ning, law with force, justice with tyranny." The lowest
depth has been reached ; henceforth any change must be im
provement, any alteration relief.
It is amid such surroundings he writes. No thoughtful,
earnest man could be tempted to lift his pen out of any con
sideration of interest or outer welfare. Every visible induce
ment would constrain him to maintain unbroken silence. But
out of regard to the " eye of the Eternal Verity," he is im
pelled all the more to interpose. There is a lofty indifference
to the immediate verdict. Time will bring sure vindication.
The truth is good enough for him. He is well content to rest
in its protection, and bide its issue. " To have sought, found,
and laid open a form of Truth, — be that my commendation,
even though none understand. If with Nature and under
God I be wise, that surely is more than enough."
With such intense heat, however, there is sometimes angry
flame. Doubtless he was occasionally more vehement and vio
lent than was meet. There are traces of acerbity in these
writings. And in the annals of the University of Marburg it
stands recorded, under date of July, 1586, in the hand of
Peter Nigidius, Rector, that Bruno grossly insulted that digni
1865.] His Courage. 229
tary in his own house, when the latter refused, "for impera
tive reasons," to grant him permission to lecture publicly in
the University, " as if I were acting in violation of the laws of
nations, the usage of the German Universities, and all the
promptings of humanity."
The loves are alike ardent. He cherishes tenderly the
friendships he has. found. The Dedications, some to the
French Ambassador, others to Sir Philip Sidney, are through
out replete with expressions of deep gratitude and warmest
devotion. He renders high homage to the ladies he has met
in Britain, " fair nymphs that dwell upon the green banks of
the noble Thames." Their gifts and graces and worth had
charmed him. Whatever words of severity he may have for
men, he has none for them. With the gallantry of a knight
he lays all at their feet; — " Genius, tongue, pen of what gift
soever, must hold effort and art obedient to you." Yet he is
ethereal in his loves. He lays his soul's affection at the feet
of no person. One there is of whom he is " enamored," a pres
ence which never fails. At sight of the fair Diana issuing
from the wood beneath his native Campanian sky, he exclaims
exultantly to Love, " Myself I give to her " ; and the god com
mends his choice.
He has exhaustless vitality. His activity is tireless and
invincible. Set upon and broken off from one form of exer
tion, he is instantly at work in another, lecturing, privately
instructing, or solitarily writing, according to his occasion,
everywhere indefatigably busy. Dangers gather close ; he is
like the hunted hare, hard-pressed and momentarily on the
point of being taken and devoured, day by day conscious and
expectant of the near impending fate, yet on he writes, —
" not to stand idle or ill-employed, while awaiting his death,
'his transmigration, his change." There are portions of the
Heroici Furori which would seem to have been penned dur
ing the imprisonment.
He has also great personal courage. He never cowers ;
he fronts any peril for the sake of his conviction. His daring
went to the very verge of audacity. And yet he was a man of
fine texture, deeply, acutely sensitive. Every wound pierces,
every wrong pains him to the quick. He feels himself alone,
VOL. LXXVIII. — 5TH 3. VOL. XVI. NO. II. 20
renounced, maligned, and hunted everywhere, " in every
place made a mark for the arrogance of sophists, the jeal
ousies of the ijl-disposed, and the violence of the multitude."
" Driven," he says, in the Oratio Consolaioria, " even in my
first years, from country, friends, studies, exposed evermore
to the devouring teeth of the Roman wolf, an outlaw for
love of freedom and of truth." " See now this man, citizen
and companion as it were of the world, see how he must be
hated, set upon, hunted and driven from the world, because
he loves it too well." *
" If, O illustrious knight," he exclaims in the Dedication of De t In-
jinito, " I were holding the plough, feeding a flock, cultivating a gar
den, or repairing a garment, few would notice, hardly any would find
fault with me, and I might easily live on peaceable terras with all.
But for marking out the field of nature, for seeking pasturage for the
soul, for being devoted to the culture of the mind, for devising gar
ments for the thought, see how I am eyed and menaced, sought and
assailed, seized and devoured! Not of one or of few merely, but of
many, nay, as it were, all."
The sonnets of the Heroici Furori are pervaded with a cer
tain mystic exaltation. Taken as a whole, indeed, this book
is hardly aught else than a sustained rapture, an anthem of
the soul, celebrating the warmth of its love, the strength of
its will, and the glory of that destiny which through sublime
reaches and heights of character awaits the heroic doer. The
elevation is grand ; such fervor of devotion, such exultation
in privilege, such protestations of constancy, such assurance
of largest realization. Much is doubtless autobiographic, de
scriptive of inner experience, in a measure also of outer his
tory ; for there seems often a singular play in the sense, lit
eral and tropical, fact and figure being strangely mingled^
and blended together. Love's dart has pierced ; the heart
quivers with the sweet wound, it is touched and kindled with
a quenchless flame. A celestial ray has visited, which bathes
the being in light, waking the powers to new measures of
strength, calling them forth to highest feats of exertion and
achievement. Love is the medium " through which I discern
* Op., Vol. II. p. 109.

I860.] " Heroici Furori." 231
the deep truth, which unlocks the dark adamantine gates,
discloses whatso earth and heaven and hell contain, brings
present true forms of the absent, takes captive the powere,
wounds evermore the heart, and opens all within."
The following sonnet is of singular elevation, (described by
an Italian writer of the present day as perhaps unrivalled in
this respect elsewhere in his nation's literature,*) and also
well illustrative of the tone of deep mysticism that pervades
the book generally : —
" Poi che spiegate ho 1' ali al bel desk),
Quanto piil sotto il pie 1' aria mi scorgo
Pill le veloci penne al vento porgo,
E spregio il mondo, e verso il ciel m' invio.
Ne del figliol di Dedalo il fin rio
Fa che giii pieghi, anzi via piil risorgo.
Ch' io cadro morto a terra ben m' accorgo ;
Ma qual vita pareggia al morir mio ?
La voce del mio cor per 1' aria sen to :
Ove mi porti, temerario ? china,
Che raro fe scuza duol troppo ardimento.
Non temer, respond' io 1' alta ruina I
Fendi sicur le nubi, e muor' contento,
S' il ciel si illustre morte ne destina ! " j
When, 0 when, he exclaims in another sonnet, " shall I

mount the mountains ? " " When ascend to the realm of
Universal Presence, where all obstruction is removed, all
veil taken away, the ideal become real, the absent present,
and aspiration possession ? Then shall I become free and
strong and blessed, filled with boundless light and joy."
The form of this sonnet is peculiar, each line closing with a
paronomasia, as if to represent the parallelism of the two
spheres, seen and unseen, here to be blended into one.
* D. Levi in Ia Ragione, Tom. VI. p. 107.

t Which we may render thus : " Since I have given wing to the fine desire, the
more I see the earth beneath my feet, the more I spread swift pinions to the wind,
and, despising the world, press onward to heaven. Nor can the harsh fate of I)e-
dalus's son make me descend ; rather, the higher I rise. That I shall fall dead upon
earth, well I know ; but what life can eqnal my dying 1 The voice of my heart I
feel in the air : ' Whither nearest thon me, rash one ? Down ; for seldom is great
boldness without sorrow.' Fear not, I reply, the deep fall ! Secure cut the clouds,
and die content, if Heaven appoint us so illustrious an end ! "
" Destin, quando sara ch' io monte monte,
Qual per bearmi a 1' alte porte porte,
Che fan quelle bellezze conte conte,
E '1 tenace dolor conforte forte
Chi fe' le membra mie disgionte gionte,
Ne lascia mie potenze smorte morte ?
Mio spirto piu ch' il suo rivale vale.
S' ove 1' error no piii 1' assale sale,
Se dove attende, tende,
E la 've 1' alto oggetto ascende, ascende
E se quel ben, ch' un sol comprende, prende,
Per cui convien, che tante emende, mende,
Esser felice lice
Come chi sol tutto predice dice."
In the fifth dialogue of the first part, a series of armorial
designs is brought before the eye, each purposed to symbol
ize some feature in the condition, inward or outward, of M
Furioso. Upon one shield is a representation of the sun
pouring its light and warmth upon the earth, and the motto
itf, Idem semper, ubique totum; upon another, a burning torch,
with the motto, Ad vitam non ad horam. Upon another is the
figure of a naked youth, (naked, he explains, as subject to
all the exposures of existence here,) reclining upon the grass,
and intently .gazing upon certain sights in the skies, dwell
ings, towers, gardens, and a castle of fire. The motto is,
Mutuo fulcimur, or, as he interprets, " Hope prompts the im
agination, and imagination by its creations lifts and sustains
the hope." The palm-branch, with its motto, Ctesar adest,
symbolizes the power of the ideal inspirations. As the mien
and voice of a great commander, reappearing in the midst of
his spent and flagging troops, reanimates and nerves them on
to new conflict and victory, so does the ideal brought afresh
to the view of " the militant thoughts." " That sole pres
ence, 0, the remembrance of it gives them such renewal, that
with a God's rule and might they bear down all opposing
power." The oak is type of his constancy : —
" Ancient oak, that spreadest thy branches to the air, and makest
firm thy roots in earth, neither earthquake nor the fierce winds can
e'er pluck thee from thy stable home ; — thou art a true picture of my
faith, which sternest trials never shake. Thou, thyself of earth, dost
evermore embrace, worship, and possess it. .... I upon one sole ob
ject hold fixed my spirit, sense, and mind."
1865.] Symbols. 233
His consciousness of the harsh fate that awaits him is sin

gularly clear. • Many of the scenes, and even of the minute
incidents, that marked the close of his career, seem to have
risen and passed before his mind's eye years previous to their
occurrence. The hazardous venture into Italy, the swift seiz
ure, the long, terrible imprisonment, the final procession and
fiery martyrdom, — these are seen with fearful distinctness,
and drawn with rigorous fidelity by that mystic pen. He
stood prophetically present at his own execution, and par
tially removes for us that veil which the history of the time
dared not to lift. A fly, attracted by the bright flame, gy
rates towards it, and is burned. An eagle rises skyward, but
is weighed down by a heavy clog fastened to his feet, and the
motto is Scinditur incertum. A heady boy, tempted by the
clear sky and unruffled sea, pushes out his frail bark, but
suffers the penalty of his rashness in being overtaken by the
gale, and exposed momentarily to be swallowed up of the
devouring waves. A chill of horror creeps over him in the
thought of the dire fate that impends ; anxiously he casts
about, for the instant asking himself, Must it be? — then
yields unresisting to the inevitable. Significantly enough the
sounet closes : " Clear type of my ill-fortune is he, the thought
less youth, that sportive committed himself to the unfriendly
bosom." *
Again he sees a serpent writhing upon the ice, where he
had been thrown by a peasant, and hard by, " with other mi
nute incidents and circumstances," a naked boy consuming
in the flames. Each looks longingly towards the place of
the other, but to neither is there possibility of change or es
cape. Moved with pity, as also affected by a sort of fellow-
feeling in view of a creature so struggling in death-agonies
upon the frozen element, perishing of a fate different, yet like
* This, he would have us think, is enigmatical even to himself, for adds the
scholiast, "I am not sure that I understand, or can determine, the entire meaning
here of // Furioso." It may be, hints the companion, thnt, looking beyond the out
ward and historic side, this has reference to the impotence of the human spirit, and
typifies it* "engulfment in the abyss of the incomprehensible excellence," as the
drop of water is swallowed up in the sea, or the little breath lost in the surrounding
air.
' '20*
his own, the boy addresses the reptile, his words fitful and
broken, through his own dreadful agonies: —
" Had the ice ear to hear thee, thou, voice to ask or answer, I think
thou wouldst have effective plea to make it clement to thy torture. I
in endless flame writhe, beat, burn, consume ; and for my rescue, with
my icy goddess neither love for me nor pity e'en finds place : alas ! for
she feels not how intense the fire of my burning.
" Seek, serpent, to fly ; thou canst nothing : try to recover thy hole ;
it is gone. Summon up thy forces ; they are spent : look towards the
sun ; the dense cloud hides it : cry to the peasant for mercy ; he hates
thy fang : invoke Fortune ; senseless, she hears thee not. Flight, place,
strength, star or man or lot, — none is there to rescue thee from
death. Thou congealest, I dissolve ; I look amazed at thy cold, thou,
at my heat ; thou wouldst this ill, I, that desire ; I cannot thee, nor
thou me, deliver from pain. Now made aware sufficient of the dire
fate, let us give up all hope." *
Elsewhere there seem references distinct and unmistaka
ble, though deeply masked in symbolism, and interpreted ap
parently in different sense, to scenes of imprisonment and
experiences of torture. He is in the midst of enemies, cruel,
relentless, desperately intent upon reducing him, plying him
with every expedient, now essaying with promises, and now
bullying with threats. He cries to them all in God's name,
Avaunt ! " Let them not think to turn his eyes from the dear
sun which so delights him." The merciless tormentor mul
tiplies his inflictions, doing his utmost to break him with tor
ture. Yet he assures him of the utter futility of all his
attempts, the worse than waste of every expenditure. His
heart has been pierced through and through, and there is no
longer place for any new impression. He is preoccupied,
filled with another presence, and therefore inaccessible to all
approaches.
" Volta, volta siour or ¥ arco altrove !
Non perder qua tue prove !
in vano, a torto
Oltre tenti amazzar colui, eh' e mono."
* " This," says the interpreter, " seems to me more deeply enigmatic than any.
I do not assume to explain it I think it requires more extended* and particular
consideration." " Some other time," replies the companion. " Let us go, for on
the road, if possible, we will see the solution of this involved matter."
1865.] " Heroici Furori:' 235
And finally, a poor desolated object, scathed and scarred

and maimed, appears upon a public way, moving with sure
step to some appointed fate. Blind from having seen un
earthly light, deaf and dumb too for the tones he has heard,
he asks of the surging multitude around one indulgence, —
an open path, an unobstructed road to death.
The book closes with the Song of the Illuminated. Nine
youths deeply in love, haunted with irrepressible longings, yet
smitten blind in an unguarded hour by hand of the witch
Circe,* go wandering over the world. Having at length jour
neyed through all the kingdoms, having traversed the entire
domain of experience, and made proof of every form of trial,
they are conducted to restored and greatly exalt*! vision, and
perfect joy. A fair nymph, dwelling upon the banks of " no
ble Thames," prevails to open " the fatal vase," whose waters
restore. The Universe is luminous now, all things flow into
harmony, every veil is taken away, and the eye gazes upon
Substance without impediment or limitation. Life is large,
luscious, free in 'the Infinite Presence forever.
Such, in brief, is the Heroici Furori, a song of the soul, a
celebration of the ideal love, of the majesty of an uncon-
quered will, enduring all, achieving all, illustrating the Infi
nite in character, and rising into full inheritance of the In
finite Life. Much appears partial, as if written under harsh
limitations, and therefore left of necessity in a fragmentary
condition. Some portions seem confused, and hardly at all
intelligible, all is strangely dilogistic, and the real import
often not easy to take. Numerous marks within, especially
the Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, seem to fix its period dur
ing the sojourn in London, but other indications point later.
The date upon the title-page is " Paris, 1585 " ; but in the old
editions the type, paper, and form, experienced bibliographers
affirm, show a Venetian imprint. Perhaps its writing was
mainly in London or Paris, but the final publication with ad
ditions, whether from the author's hand or another's, at
Venice.
Amid all that is juvenile and immature in these writings,
* " Circe, onniparente materia, la maga moltifornic ci confunde spesso e ci alletta
carle varietfi dei numeri, e le combiuazioui diverse." — Lm Rayione, Tom. VI. p. 119.
there is everywhere the sobriety of earnest thought, free sur
render of the spirit of truth, eagerness to receive in largest
measure the celestial visions. Here is undoubtedly the espe
cial characteristic, the emphatic merit of Bruno, — his spirit
uality, the vivid strength of his consciousness. With a clear
ness and emphasis not before approached in modern times, he
affirmed the infinite world higher than the seen, more than
experience. He affirmed it, not as an inference in logic, a
conclusion of the understanding, but as the primal truth of
consciousness. He affirmed it, not as a barren negation, mere
antithesis of finite, but as a positive pregnant reality, — more
real than aught beside, than any sight or sound, or the world
itself, nay, the very essence and soul of all things.
Others had more or less positively averred this, often rather
instinctively than consciously, from inward feeling more than
intelligent conviction. All heroisms imply it, and the martyr's
blood had all along attested the strength of the soul's faith.
But Bruno firstdistinctly proclaimed it, making it the primal
truth of consciousness, and attempted to know its significance.
He saw it to be the final certitude whereon all things rest, the
basis and groundwork of philosophy, the quarry whence all
the conclusions of thought are to be mined out, the founda
tion of religion and the inspiration of life.
He did not live to draw out the applications in detail. He
could only hint them, his period was so brief. Perhaps also
the vision of light was too recent and overpowering with him.
Some of the perceptions were but glimpses, and it remained
for others to attain a riper view.
" At mihi sufficit rerum pro pondcre lucem
Adpetere, et templum solido ex adamante futurum,
Erigerc in seclum,"
His ambition was not doomed to disappointment. He heads
a class, and from him dates a new epoch in the history of phi
losophy. Wide emancipations began, not yet completed. A
new life was infused into the spirit of inquiry, and the suc
ceeding ages were distinguished as none had ever been before,
for the bold freedom and the significant issue of their specu
lations. The forgotten world of consciousness had been laid
open anew, and it proved a continent rich in exhaustless ores.
1865.] His Influence. 237
The master-thinkers that appeared commenced working at
the idealistic pole, seeking thence to educe that higher knowl
edge empiricism and dogmatism could never give. Des
cartes founded upon the innate ideas. Malebranche " saw all
things in God," and Him immediate to the soul. Spinoza
affirmed without qualification the world of substance, demon
strating through his masterly processes its sole existence, its
sovereign, vital character. Leibnitz, though an ardent oppo
nent of Spinozism, his mind tending to multiplicity, yet of
deep unitary discernments, could not rest in the empiric
statement. He held with the idealists, testifying to the posi
tive nature of the soul, the preinscription of all the possible
knowledges upon the tablet of its being, and its underived
consciousness of the realm of substance. The influence of
these ideas has been singularly pervasive and powerful. They
have taken fast hold upon the mind of the age, have stirred
afresh the blood of mankind, and initiated a revolution with
out parallel in history. Never before was such utterance, so
broad and clear; never before such ready acceptance, such
prompt application.
Bruno is first among the modern transcendental thinkers.
He taught the teachers. He is the earliest apostle, as also■ a
sainted martyr in that church. Marching in the van, he bears
the first torch-light in that grand illuminating procession. All
see clearer for his ray, all articulate plainer for his word.
The debt of these thinkers to him it is not easy to compute.
His presence appears constantly, and the traces of his thought
arc in every page from Descartes to Hegel.
But more than this, higher than any speculative service of
whatever value rendered by Bruno to mankind, is his brave,
manly life, his heroic death. Philosopher of the infinite, pro
claiming the soul, the wealth of its privilege, the exhaustless-
ness of its powers, he sought to realize his thought in life, to in
carnate it in character. The history, partial as it is, tells how
well he succeeded. To the end it was a glorious march, every
step a triumph. Here was the consummation of culture, the
conquest of circumstance, repose in the inner verities of truth
and being, untouched by any utmost severity of infliction and
loss.
The trials he was called to endure were of no ordinary type.
In point of intensity, of severe, unabated rigor, they have, per
haps, no parallel in the history of suffering. A lone, un
friended man, everywhere obnoxious, he was hated and hunted
from country to country, no foot of " free soil " for him in all
Europe, at length seized and immured, wasted by long con
finement, and broken again and again with the most excruci
ating tortures ; — shut out during those eight long years from
the dear sunlight he loved so well, and seeing in all the time
never a friend's face, hearing never a friend's voice, — only
the hollow mockery of false lips, — kept moreover in a state of
harrowing suspense, not a sylable broken to him of the nature
of his fate, or the probable duration of his sufferings. No pen
has drawn the record, the darkness of the dungeon shuts
down upon it, the prisons at Rome are purposely without
echo, and this history, like so much else of tragedy, must re
main forever unwritten.
But we know the issue. There was such temper in this
steel that no extremest heats could draw it. Dungeon and
rack and impious breath were alike powerless to soil this pu
rity or touch this virtue. Bruno came out as he went in, a
tru,e man, a loyal spirit, unreduced, nay, indefinitely enriched,
invigorated, and exalted.
And the martyrdom seems a fit close to the career, a fit
crown to so grand a life. There was no shrinking. Cheer
fully that form, — pale, wasted, and broken, seeming too atten
uated for human, the feet, scarcely touching the ground, the
eyes glancing upward into the unbarred immensity, — issued
from the dungeon's gate, and glided forth to meet the last
infliction. Himself prophetically present in the scene, he
gives us his word to the thronging multitude. "If of the
infinite ill ye have dread, give me place, 0 people ! guard
you well of my consuming fire ! " And again : " Open, open
the way ; in kindness spare this sightless, speechless face all
harsh obstructions, ye dense multitude, while the form, toil-
, worn and drooping, goes knocking at the gates of less pain
ful but of deeper death ! "
Without fear or sorrow he placed himself against the stake,
and accepted the fiery torture. In all the multitude of men
1865.] His Greatness. 239
and women gathered that day about him, no friend's face
beamed, no friend's voice spoke, to lift with cheer the heart of
the dying martyr. All was hate and cursing. But not un
used to solitudes, he was able to staqd now in this deeper soli
tude, to walk this howling waste also, alone.
And after that they had no more that they could do. Flames
could not quench this life, nor wild, exultant shouts, rending
the air, drown this voice to silence. Higher and more than
before it rises, sounding over the world, and mingling hence
forth with the eternal. Bruno could in no other way have
achieved such success. It was transcendent, sublime. The
majesty of an unbroken will, a soul equal to its utmost occa
sion, rising superior to all considerations of condition, know
ing only to walk with God, to do and endure for truth, vir
tue, mankind, laying down life freely at the hands of those it
toils to save, its magnanimity exhaustless, its faithfulness in
vincible, — there is no such grandeur in nature, no like mira
cle in history.
It cost sacrifice. All greatness does. He stood at the open
ing of life, the full years yet before him. He had not yet
wrought anything, had not uttered himself. All thus far
written was only rudest hint of what he felt within him, —
" preludes," as he describes it, " of the piece, dim outlines
and shadows of the picture, threads laid and arranged for the
web." He would fain have remained, so as in some sort to
finish the work hardly yet begun. Plans peer out in these
youthful writings of many things yet to be done, and far more
entire and worthy than aught yet realized. " I purpose," he
says in the Spaccio, " yet to treat moral philosophy according
to the inner light wherewith the divine sun of intelligence has
illumined and does illumine me." A little farther opportunity'
were a priceless privilege. Might he not have it ? But great
necessity called, and he was ready for the answer. Bowing
manfully in resignation, he accepted the mandate, and retired
from history.
Bruno died, be it remembered, by no extrinsic, outward
necessity. The necessity was intrinsic, the requirement from
within. Only eight days before the burning, he might have
saved his life by recantation. But dear as was the gift, and
precious as seemed the advantage, he refused to purchase it
at a price so fatal, and chose rather the stern alternative.
And the surprise was better than any fulfilment. He too
was building greater than he knew. Whatever gift of speech
had in his best hour been his, — and we are told he was an
orator of singular range and power, perhaps no such voice in
Europe,* — Bruno was never so grandly eloquent, so resist-
lessly powerful, as now. The apostle of the soul, it was fit
that he should utter also this testimony, should baptize his
evangel in blood, and go up in the fire-chariot to heaven.
Nor may we say that this death befell too early, cutting off
young life in its opening, and forbidding the promised per
formance. The mission of the visible is intimation. It can
not give more. Any life, though of the longest, is but a hint,
the completest scripture only a fragment, a broken paragraph
of the Universal Volume. This done, its errand is performed ;
it has completeness such as in any case is possible to history.
Faces pass away, beaming but for an hour. We look, but can
6ee them no more ; yet the reality that there dwelt enshrined
in symbol, abides untouched of death. Jesus likens his ap
pearance among men to the lightning, which flashes from
east to west for the instant, illumining the heavens with its
splendors, then vanishes from the view forever. But that eye-
glance, though but for a moment, was omnipotent with effect.
It wrote with sunbeams, and touched the heart of all the gen
erations. Bruno came, and remained for his hour, glistening
with light, and filling the air with music. It availed for the
purpose of destiny. He had made his sign-manual, had
dropped his hint, and he also withdrew.
As a speculative thinker, Bruno may be known to but few.
* Perhaps the dialect is too rude, the things given many of them
too initial and embryonic, for any considerable number ever
to feel drawn to their study*. But in character, which was
the flowering of his thought, the consummation of his philoso
phy, — as doer, great in action and suffering, triumphant
amid the utmost rigors of trial, tinshaken and loyal to the
last, — he speaks in a universal tongue, intelligible and im
* La Ragione, Tom. VI. p. 297. Comp. Lewes's Biog. Hist. Philos., p. 379
ttseq.
1865v] King Coal and King Cotton. 241
pressive to all hearts. And as, age "after age, men come more
and more to draw from the sacraments of the past, gathering
baptisms from all noble deeds, and bread of life from every
heroic example, — so more and more shall they bless Heaven
for the gift also of this soul, and for the high record of wis
dom, loyalty, and love wrought out in this shrouded, but re
splendent history.
Art. IV. — KING COAL AND KING COTTON.
1. Transactions of (he Association of Coal, Lime, and Ironstone Miners.

Leeds : Longmans.
2. The Spectator, (London,) August 6, 18G4.
3. The Times, (London,) October 24, 1864. ,
Old King Coal is scarcely the " merry old soul " that we
knew him in our nursery days. He calls for something else
besides his " pipe " and his " bowl " ; and his " fiddlers three "
no more find him in a mood to dance. The expenditure for
education of £700,000 where a few years ago £70,000 only
were spent, — the increase of the number of newspapers and
periodicals from 40,000,000 to 550,000,000, — have set in
operation forces that lay hold on that pit where the jolly old
king, with his pipe and bowl, having no other than his brute-
hood's horny eyes to see with, fancied himself really living
upon and enjoying this beautiful planet. Nay more, a few
years ago there was only Mrs. Browning to utter the plaint
of Humanity for that child " who had never seen a flower";
but now the finest minds in Europe — the Ruskins, the Mills,
the Hugheses, and others, of whom may England have more
and more! — are laboring day and night to plant such flow
ers as hope and knowledge and faith in that fearful under
world which so many human beings must inhabit from cradle
to grave, in order that England may have its railways, and
dinners, and firesides. Socrates taught that all of us were
only in the midst of our planet, not by any means on the out
side of it, — a sort of human fishes down at the bottom of an
242 King- Coal and King- Cotton. [March,
atmospheric sea, only liberated by Virtue and Death into the
purer ether where holy souls dwell. But some of us live in
cellars and pits beneath even the stratum given the race to
dwell in ; and yet they have as firm a clutch upon the rank
next above as these have upon the higher, so that the great
procession goes forward still chanting :
" Beneath this starry arch
Naught resteth or is still ;
But all things hold their march,
As if by one great will :
Moves one, move all :
Hark to the foot-fall !
On, on, forever ! "
England has just come through a Colliers' strike, the im

portance of which may be estimated by the fact that it was
the greatest that had occurred for twenty years. Of course
the colliers had to yield ; but it was not to the coal-owners,
it was to starvation. Neither pride nor consciousness of a
just cause are apt to stand long before the increasing pallor
of the wife, and the child's cry for bread. Nevertheless, dur
ing the strike some ominous haudwritings flamed out on the
walls, which have not left the coal-owners, nor their class-
brethren in other walks of trade, quite easy. People are
sometimes conquered by their own victories. We are not
about to discuss whether, in this particular strike, the pitmen
or their lords were in the right; but to note a few changes
indicated during the progress of the affair. When the coal-
owners informed the pitmen that a few pennies must be taken
from their wages, they found not the submissive slaves they
hoped to find, nor yet the rebellious slaves they would have
preferred to what they did find : they found reasoners. By
this we do not mean that they merely asked Why, but that
they proved themselves formidable analyzers of that Why
when it was given. Tbese Staffordshire masters replied that,
a diminution having taken place in the price of iron, Staf
fordshire could only maintain its trade by cheapening the
manufacture of iron ; and, as coal was the most important
article used in the manufacture, the reduction in the wages
of the miners must take place. Then the colliers, instead of
1865.] King Coal and King Cotton. 243
breaking out into an old-fashioned riot, with which their mas

ters know exactly how to deal, called a meeting ; planted
themselves upon the laws of political science ; claimed that
the reduction naturally would fall on the iron and not on
the coal workmen ; and argued their case before the Eng
lish nation with such effect, that even the London Times,
owned as it is by the class confronted by the pitmen, had to
concede to the verdict of the intelligent, that they " would by
no means express a decided opinion that the men have no
right on their side." Another sign of importance was the
spirit displayed by these men. Their enemies tried hard to
show that the strike was disorderly ; but with the exception
of a few instances of violence which, in a movement of thou
sands, some few bad spirits are always able to commit, the
best witnesses declare that the movement had even a relig
ious aspect. The men met, and opened their consultations
with singing progressive and fraternal songs. They then lis
tened to their speakers, who spoke with eloquence and pathos,
and in excellent English, so that the better classes, drawn by
a real interest, began to appear on the edges of the gather
ings. And one of these — a gentleman aud a scholar —
wrote concerning this intellectual part of the movement thus :
" Turn over the files of the provincial papers in the days of
riots in the northern districts in by-gone days ; examine the
fly-sheets, placards, ballads of those days ; study the speeches
of the orators who then led, or rather, I should say, stirred
the men, — would such trash go down now? No! it would
not take in the boy who oils the machinery of any workshop
in the kingdom."
The upshot of the whole was, that the reflecting English
people were impressed by these men, by their deportment
and their reasonings ; and their failure only added to the
impression. They had held on to the strike long enough
to sink the earnings of many previous weeks, but they had
startled the nation with a conviction that what capital had
built its fires upon as an island, was in fact a living and a
powerful thing ; that Labor had now a conscious brain and a
heart ; that under the wand of education the dark mines had
suffered a mighty transformation, and become the dwelling
of winged and immortal spirits aspiring to the light.
244 King Coal and King Cotton. [March,
The perception and recognition of a pit-humanity was, of

course, attended by an outburst of sympathy and sentiment.
But there was another side. Coal is important, — the most
important thing, say, in England. The men who worship a
steam-engine, the men who love pleasant firesides, the all,
who " would respect no God who should disregard a pound
sterling," had ears pledged to listen well to the remarks
of the gentleman on the other side. Hawthorne tells the
story of the chemist who tried to remove the birth-mark
from his bride's cheek ; he removed it, indeed, but with it
her life. Similarly, you may fix on the manifest, plain evil
of any system, and be moved to eradicate it ; but in nine
cases out of ten you shall find that this birth-mark is secretly
connected with the very heart and life of that system. Trade
demands that laborers shall be trained for their special labor :
as a race-horse is bred one way and a draught-horse another,
so must the workmen be bred. You cannot point to a single
miner of genius, or who spends his odd hours reading, who
is not trying to get out of the mines himself, or certainly to
manage to train his children for the outside world of air and
sunlight. But if this goes on ! What class of this outside
world will ever consent to go into those depths ? And if
every pitman gets a knowledge of the upper world, the means
of getting there and living there, will not the mines be de
populated ? It is easy to say, " Hang the mines ! " — but
if some wintry morning one should find a fireless* grate, or,
wishing to get to his business, should find at the station a
steamless engine, he would be inclined to have a deep sym
pathy with the poor forsaken coal-mines.
Fortunately for humanity, the coal-owners, recognizing that
the birth-blotch represented the life of their system, have in
clined to the straightforward and only means of defending it.
What that is, the following facts will show.
Lord Lyttleton reports some of the coal-owners as having
said
" that they disapproved of night schools ; that the more a man was
educated, the worse workman he was; that they should for the future
decline to assist the working classes in any way ; that education and
the — penny papers had done all the mischief, and that public houses
were the proper places for workingmen to meet in ; that they should
leave the working classes to themselves for the future ; that the more
was done for the working classes, the more ungrateful they were; that
if education went much farther, there would soon be no colliers to be
had, and that the utmost a workingman should know was to read his
Bible ; that education had filled the men's heads with all kinds of non
sense; and that the best-educated men misled the others."
Lord Lyttleton further states : —
" The collier population generally have some grievances. Much will
be found about them in a volume called Transactions of the Association
of Coal, Lime, and Ironstone Miners, published at Leeds in November,
1863, (Longmans,) of which an abstract and review will be found in
the Spectator of the 6th of August last. They are chiefly such as
these : — the demoralizing employments still allowed to women ; imper
fect ventilation and imperfect inspection of the pits ; want of proper
provision for security ; and employment of boys too young and too ill-
educated. It is certain that the better the men are educated, the more
these grievances will be felt."
Another able writer on Education says of the sentiments
quoted above as those of the coal-owners against the educa
tion of colliers : —
" I have no hesitation in saying that it is no more nor less than what
has been the private talk of many masters in every kind of business
for some years past; nay, more, — that in all it implies, as against edu
cation and its result, it is the talk of a very large number of those who
are masters and mistresses of domestic servants, or employers of labor
in agricultural work. The real fact is, that the laborer has been quick
to realize all that education has given him in the improvement of his
reasoning power, in the capacity for the enjoyment of a higher nature
than beer and skittles ; having gained more self-respect from the fact
that his eyes are opened to what constitutes real respect for self, he has
gradually emancipated himself from the condition of a mere animated
tool, a digger, and hewer, and server, per force of muscle trained for
the purpose, and has arrived at the conviction that, although he must
dig, and hew, and serve, he may do this and yet become a thinking,
reasoning workman, — something better than a mere tool after its
kind."
We must give another extract from this writer.
" It is argued, if education goes much further, there will soon be no
colliers to be had ; the best-educated men have their heads filled with
21 *
nonsense, and mislead others. Really, sir, this seems to me to be the
opinion of men who, consistently with what they say, should argue tftat
coal-pit work should be the work of savages ; it. has a taste of the hu
manity that used to make little children act as trappers, and young
girls, almost naked, draw on all fours the loaded barrows of coal up the
dark, steep tunnels. We may next hear that black work should be
done by black men ; but as we have no niggers, we must keep our
coal-blacks to the nigger standard of intelligence."
Now the alternative of imprisoning these men, women, and
children in a coal-pit, by bars of ignorance added to those of
necessity, is simply that the coal-owners shall make less. Only
let them consent that the miner shall be so compensated for
his work that he can spend a good portion of his time above
ground, and have the means of improving his own and his
children's minds, and coal-mining would be no more repul
sive than any other work. That is, every repulsive work must
balance itself against others by some advantages. It is con
trary to the very essence of economical law, that the most
repulsive work should be also the most ill-paid ; and where
the trade is so eminently lucrative as that of coal, it is sheer
selfishness in the coal-lords, strong only because backed by
the selfishness of society it represents, to diminish the pit
man's wages rather than their own gains. But why did they
put a reduction consequent on the cheapening of iron on the
coal instead of the iron workmen ? Simply because the pit
men were supposed to be comparatively ignorant of their
rights under economic laws, — the iron-men living in less in
fernal regions. It is certainly conceivable that, to those lordly
occupants of the fine castles crowning the heights around coal
pits, and to their fellow-capitalists at the West End in London,
it should appear that the order of the universe could not en
dure if two per cent were taken from their incomes. But they
must find that it is much more against the order of the uni
verse that, under the subtile and all-penetrating rays of " the
— penny papers," spirit after spirit should not cast its shell
in those lower regions, and rise to the upper air. And their
incomes will be reduced far more than two per cent, if they do
not speedily so make the wages (etymon, gauges') of the pit
men the fair measure of the kind of work he does ; in which
case his descent will be really ascent, and the dark mine will
be the foundation of a spirit's true mansion. Every occupa
tion that shall last in England must have a wide hospitality :
it must furnish " entertainment for man and beast," — not for
beast alone, as many of them now do.
Might not King Coal, in his present graver mood, study well
the grief to which King Cotton has come ? He really seems
inclined to do this. One writer, we have seen, anticipates the
logical end of the coal-owner's position, and finds it to be that,
as they have no blacks to do their black" work, they " must
keep their coal-blacks to the nigger standard of intelligence."
The London Times of October 24, 1864, commenting upon
the strike, sees that it is " of the nature of a civil war," and
adds this curious and suggestive remark : " Precisely the same
desolation which has been made so vivid to us by the Ameri
can contest is inflicted upon hundreds of homes by such a
struggle as is now going on in Staffordshire, and the worst
sufferers in the contest are the operatives themselves." Dif
ferent as the two kings seem to be, there are some essential
points of resemblance between them and their histories, that
may not be safely neglected in prognosticating the future of
either of them. King Cotton, also, was a " merry old soul."
Being an American Southerner, instead of an Englishman, he
called for banjo instead of " fiddlers three," and he doubtless
would have called for " pipe" and " bowl" if he had not been
a black man with a very small probability of obtaining either.
But with "banjo" and " corn-shuckings," songs and dances,
King Cotton certainly was merry enough in the earlier years
of his reign. Yet there came a time when his song and dance
ceased, and he fell into a grave mood. What was the cause
of this ? They who represented King Cotton had no penny-
press, nor was expenditure made by Congress for their educa
tion. The difficulty was just here : the world had insisted on
revolving, despite the protest of King Cotton's cabinet, and
had brought a republic close to his realm. This republic
radiated such light and heat that there was no doubt the
chains of King Cotton's subjects would soon be not only seen
by those who bore them, but melted also. What was the
remedy ? To liberate, or to add more chains, — to make the
chains stronger and heavier. Then it was that " all smiles
stopped together," and meeting-houses and hymns replaced
the cry of " Clear the Kitchen," and the jolly dance. The
stricter laws against the teaching a slave to read and write
were the inevitable responses to the growth of the neighboring
republican civilization. It was rightly charged, " The Abo
litionists have increased the slave's hardship and multiplied his
ehains." How could they help it ? Nevertheless, chains are
never so near to breaking, it turns out, as when they are most
galling. " When the tale of bricks is doubled, Moses comes."
The multiplication of chains that would not melt beneath re
publican rays became expensive, then difficult, then impossi
ble, — except the limbs were too much loaded for King Cot
ton's work. Then in a frantic day the umbrellas lifted hith
erto against the pelting rays were thrown aside, and the fran
tic champions of King Cotton attacked the sun itself.
What will be the result of a conflict between bullets and
sun-strokes ? Analyze the war in America, and it will be found
to be the Humanity of the negro, rising against the denial of
such intellectual, moral, and spiritual wages as were necessary
for that Humanity's support. Before that Humanity had grown
strong enough to recognize itself, the negro was contented,
and so long a revolution was impossible. When that period
came, Humanity's " strike " for higher spiritual wages, or
against the cotton-lord's denial of them, became inevitable.
And though this strike should be put down temporarily, it is
to be chronic until the law that raised it is satisfied.
Now, what lesson can King Coal read in this chapter of the
once brilliant Transatlantic monarch's history ? Simply this :
that any, the best system of one age may become — indeed, is
likely to become — a flagrant wrong in the next. It can be
demonstrated both historically and philosophically, that Slav
ery, which now scourges men, once blest them ; that Slavery,
which now sacrifices to cotton twenty-two years of the average
life of a generation of negroes, once was a merciful interference
between captives and death. Things will not rest as they are ;
and so, where interests are planted upon systems of labor, the
changing of the conditions of which demand some temporary
or normal diminution of these interests, there arises a con
1865.] King Coal and King Cotton. . 249
flict between the new conditions and the system. Of course

the system refuses to yield ; but not to yield no longer means
remaining as things were before ! It means stronger bolts
and bars, — heavier chains, — now that the terrible question
has been asked. So the coal-owner must manage to smother
that young family of moral and mental wants, which Educa
tion has borne him, and which inspire the new demand, or
else furnish wages enough out of his own income to satisfy
them all. To suffocate them by depriving them of the air
they breathe, the Book ; or to drown them in the beer of those
public houses, — "the proper place for workingmen to meet
in, " — these are the dreary alternatives of giving the digging-
machine, who has now become a pit-MAN, the wages that can
sustain him as a man, though the coal-owner be no longer sus
tained as a money-lord.
It is certain that the present systems of labor in England
can o;ily be kept by the immense interests dependent upon
them, — by the nearer and swifter approximation of the English
laborer's condition to that of slavery. These capitalists will
have to check the present rage for Parliamentary expenditure
for education, and even in the end to restore the duty on pa
per, under which a newspaper cost a shilling ; and then they
will have to check emigration, by which the miner and agri
cultural laborer shall find all other posts than those occupied
by themselves and families overcrowded. The laws and regu
lations of England will have to show such a downward devel
opment as the slave codes of the South to-day show in com
parison with those of the days of Washington and Jefferson.
So often does progress take place through a series of reactions.
So often must things get worse to grow better. But nothing
can be surer than that, if Workingmen's Institutes and the
cheap press continue, they will prove very different from Davy-
lamps in the dark, damp abodes of the English laborer, and, in
fact, will explode ajl the old systems.
" That Old Serpent " crawls on from age to age, in every
land. At certain periods he is held fast in his cuticle, but
manages to shed it, and people often hold up the shed skin in
triumph (e. g. Louisiana) as the serpent itself. But that has
gone on into a new skin, — and will be as fascinating and as
250 Our Convicts. [March,
deadly as ever for a while. At last, perhaps, he is grasped too

firmly to get off with merely giving his skin. We cannot yet
say with certainty whether these shrivellings of the snake-skin
in the kingdoms of Coal and of Cotton are ultimate or penul
timate, but we do know that at last the heel of Humanity shall
be upon the serpent's head.
Art. V. — OUR CONVICTS.
Our Convicts. By Mart Carpenter. In two volumes. Vol. I.

London : Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green. 1864.
In this great work, a large octavo of over three hundred

pages, Miss Carpenter gives the world the fruit of her studies
and practice in the fields of Reformatory and Prison Disci
pline. Without waiting for the appearance of her second vol
ume, of which we have the highest expectations, we propose
to notice the present publication, or rather to quote freely
from it, in the hope of reaching those who may not have
seen it.
In asking, " Who are ' Our Convicts ' ? " — in answering,
" They are a part of our society ! they belong to ourselves,"
— she gives the key-note to her whole work. They are subjects
of the same great empire, they belong to the same British Isles,
the same small centre whence must go forth laws, principles,
examples, which will affect, for better or for worse, the whole
world. An awful responsibility lies in the term, " Our Con
victs." They are men, women, and, alas ! too often children,
who were born and brought up among us. The legal sen
tence which makes us wish to separate them entirely from
ourselves, only binds them closer to us. The law has placed
them in our keeping. We cannot, now they are proved guilty,
drive them from our shores. We have deprived them of the
right to guide their own actions since that right has been
abused ; we subjugate their will, we confine them in our own
country, and put them under such treatment as we consider
1865.] Our Convicts. 251
best for them and for society. We cannot, if we would, shake

off the responsibility arising from this relationship. Besides,
events of the last two years in Great Britain strongly em
phasize this motive. Those crimes of violence, so multiplied
of late in the British Isles, most formidably in the police re
ports of London itself, are mostly committed by British con
victs, — subjects of the penal treatment of the realm, and, ac
cording to their sentence, still under the responsibility of con
vict directors. It has been found, that, instead of becoming
better in convict prisons, they have become worse, more hard
ened, reckless, and experienced in crime. Regard for per
sonal safety, therefore, as well as duty to society, demands a
serious study of this matter. Publio opinion must be brought
to bear upon the government, so that a system may be altered,
which, while so costly, is at once so unskilful aud so mischiev
ous."
The evidence laid before the Royal Commission, last year,
or presented by witnesses before various Parliamentary Com
mittees, furnishes Miss Carpenter with her information. Her
aim is reformation,' not merely restraint or punishment. A
clear distinction must be made- between those who may have
been led by a sudden temptation or by peculiar circumstances
to commit a crime which is followed by the legal sentence of
penal servitude, and those who have been for many years liv
ing in known defiance of morality and law. Our treatment
of convicts, and all our hopes of their future good, depend
upon keeping this distinction well in view.
But, inquires Miss Carpenter, as she proceeds, How are our
convicts made ? We must gain some insight into the nature
of the temptations and circumstances of their fall. This is
true of all our convicts. How far is society, directly or in
directly, to blame in the matter ? Here is a brief history of
a criminal career, given by an old offender to his jail chap
lain : —
* Miss Carpenter gives an estimate of the loss inflicted on the public by a family
of sixteen pickpockets. Their ages were from fifteen to thirty years. Their career
of vice was from two and a half to twenty years each, and their aggregate stealings
were .£25,000 sterling, or, adding £ 1,500 for prison maintenance, cost of prosecu
tion, &c., £ 26,500, — more than $ 130,000.
" I have been told a thousand times to go and get work, but it
was never said to me during twenty years, in or out of prison, 'I 11
give you work.' Hence I have cost the country some two thousand
pounds, [ten thousand dollars ! ] and I expect to cost a great deal more
yet. I was sent to jail for two months when a boy for stealing a loaf
of bread, and no one cared for me. I tramped thousands of miles
when I was a lad to get honest employment, in vain. I was tempted
to steal. I stole. Imprisoned again, and again, — transported to Ber
muda, — I learnt the trade of a thief, and I mean to follow it, I care
neither for God nor man. The jail, confinement, the gallows, are all
the same to me."
This is the history of thousands ; and who is to blame ?

How was the boy " who would tramp, sore-footed, thousands
of miles to get honest employment," transformed into a man
who disbelieved humanity, scoffed at religion, gloried in his
shame, and consequently defied all laws, divine and human?
Born in poverty or misery, — reared in neglect and sin, —
influenced in every evil way by low and vile associates, —
corrupted by such books as the life of Dick Turpin, Jack
Sheppard, and others, or such haunts of ruin and resorts
of depraved or illicit enjoyment as are alone open to these
classes, — how can multitudes of our fellow-beings escape be
coming criminals ? Has society no responsibility in the mat
ter? Add to all these malign influences that of intoxication
alone, and how fearfully, fatally, we seem to be forming and
recruiting our criminal classes !
Now, upon what principles is our system of convict treat
ment to be based ? Whatever may be the causes of their con
dition, however much or little they may morally themselves
be to blame, the habitual inmates of our prisons are in abso
lute antagonism to society and law. Yet, hardened, reckless,
self-indulgent, depraved, vulgar, ignorant of all good, skilful
only in wickedness, they still possess an immortal nature,
are still children of our Father, still members of the same
human family with ourselves. We can trace their downward
course, — how may our treatment of them assure us of their
recall or their recovery ? Their antagonism to society, their
hostility to God and man, must be destroyed. No fear of
punishment, no hope of advantage, can produce a change
of heart, or true penitence, and without this nothing i9

gained.
Now such a change, proved -genuine and enduring by the
future life, has been secured again and again. The moving
spring in each instance was some person of large and Chris
tian heart, who worked on principles founded in human na
ture and in God's laws, and who framed a system in harmony
with these principles and laws, carrying it out with earnest
purpose, and enlisting in it the hearts of all under him or
around him, because it was true and good. Miss Carpenter
quotes freely from a powerful paper read by Recorder Hill
at the general meeting of the Law Amendment Society, Jan
uary 12, 1863, and ordered to be printed. Her learned friend
leaves it clear, that, the great object of legal punishment being
to minimize crime, the end is to be attained, —
1. By deterring society and the individual from a further
commission of crime ; —
2. By reformatory treatment, whereby the criminal will en
tirely alter his future life ; —
3. By " incapacitation," or preventing the criminal from
ever injuring society again, either by death or by incarcera
tion for life.
Miss Carpenter proceeds to bring forward some remarka
ble cases in which these combined principles have been suc
cessfully carried out by individuals in different parts of the
world, and quite unconnected with one another. Her first il
lustration is the system pursued by Colonel Montesinos in the
prison of Valencia in Spain, as furnished in a charge to the
Grand Jury of Birmingham by Recorder Hill. Colonel Mon-
tesinos's skill consisted in urging his prisoners to self-reforma
tion. He excited their industry, and allowed them a small
portion of their earnings under due regulations. He enabled
them to raise their position by perseverance in good conduct.
Acquiring their confidence, he intrusted them with commis
sions beyond the prison walls, and relied on his moral influ
ence to prevent desertion, and, finally, he discharged them
before the expiration of their sentences when he was satisfied
that they deserved it. His success was equal to his wisdom,
zeal, and humanity. Relapses rarely occurred. During his
r
twenty years of service he never needed an armed force with

in the walls, nor over gangs of prisoners at work outside, often
numbering four hundred. Plets or desertions were unknown
inside or abroad. Under his administration annual recom
mitments fell from thirty-five to two per cent. He was made
Inspector-General of all the prisons of Spain. But unwise
legislation and the appointment of incompetent subordinates
led him at last to retire from the field. His monument re
mains as he reared it.
The next triumph is that of Herr Von Obermaier in the
prisons of Munich, as furnished in a letter from George
Combe to the Illustrated News in 1854. Obermaier had
charge of six hundred of the worst male convicts of Bavaria.
A more unpromising set could not be imagined ; yet there
were no separate cells, no severe discipline, no paid super
intendents, except a turnkey to each ward, whose station
was outside the door, and who did not see into the apart
ment. The prisoners were collected in workshops. They
were to oversee each other, sleep and live in the same groups
in which they labored, eat in common, exercise in the yard
together, and hardly appeared to be under any restraint but
that of the external walls. They looked like men at work in
a common factory. They did not break prison, — they obeyed
cheerfully, remained contentedly, and labored diligently, with
an air of mental composure truly extraordinary. Of course
they differed in expression, but there was a moral calmness,
and a soft moral and intellectual expression in those who
had the best brains and who had been the longest in prison,
which spoke unequivocally of the success of their treatment.
The genius of one man accounts for it all, — the genius of a
man competent for the great task of taming, guiding, instruct
ing, training, and reforming the rudest and most brutal of his
countrymen. His hold is on their hearts. Sympathy and
humanity, firmness and kindness, are his instruments. A
certain self-respect, self-restraint, is aroused in every con
vict's breast, — a certain public spirit, esprit de corps, is dif
fused among them all, in favor of obedience, steady conduct,
propriety, and virtue even. Severity cannot affect this, — an
enlightened, just, and tender spirit, emanating from the gov-
ernor and reaching through every individual in the prison,

alone supplies the means. And all the elements, elsewhere
supposed to be indispensable in prison discipline, are supplied
by the mind and heart of a single man.
Another even more remarkable instance was worked out
by the late Captain Machonochie at Norfolk Island. Let this
remark by Recorder Hill precede it : —
■ Here let me say, that the utmost care must be taken not to drive
criminals, adjudged to undergo the longest sentences, into a state of des
peration, by the withdrawal of all hope of alleviation. Perseverance
in good conduct, unwearied industry, and perfection in mechanical arts
useful to the establishment, might be made to entitle convicts thus dis
tinguished to an improved condition, to more generous fare, and to
privileges of various kinds, graduated by a discreet consideration of
what may befit so exceptional a society. My experience has revealed
to me the impossibility of working exclusively by coercion. You must
not, by extremities, reduce to despair ; you must improve the disposi
tion and elevate the mind by rational encouragement, assured that
kindliness and discriminating mercy will beget suavity, and a grateful
recognition evidenced by behavior."
Miss Carpenter quotes liberally from Captain Machonochie's
pamphlets, published in 1839 and 1848 : —
"The example of severe suffering," says he, " consequent on convic
tion of crime, has not been found very effective in preventing its recur
rence ; and it seems probable that the example of necessary reform, or
at least sustained submission, and self-command through a fixed period
of probation, before obtaining release, would be practically more so."
" With reform as the object of criminal administration, the better feel
ings of even the most abandoned criminals would from the beginning
sympathize ; whereas, when merely suffering and degradation are
threatened and imposed, it is precisely these better feelings that, both
first and last, are most revolted and injured by them."
Reform, punishment for the past, training for the future,

are his three cardinal points. To his view, a prison was " a
field for the exercise and cultivation of active social virtues,
as well as for the habitual voluntary restraint of active social
vices."
He arrived at his island in March, 1840, and found things
worse than he expected. Fourteen hundred doubly con
victed prisoners, the refuse of two penal colonies, were rig

orously coerced all day, and cooped up at night in barracks
which could not decently accommodate half that number.
In every way their feelings were habitually outraged, and
their self-respect destroyed. Their officers treated them with
cruelty and contempt. For the merest trifles the convicts
were flogged, ironed, or confined in jail for successive days
on bread and water. Neither knives nor forks, hardly any
other conveniences or necessaries, were allowed them. They
tore their food with their fingers and teeth, and drank out
of water-buckets, in the open air or in an open shed. The
island had been fifteen years without a chapel, seven years
without a chaplain. There were no schools, no books, — and
the men's countenances faithfully reflected this treatment. A
more demoniacal assemblage could not be imagined ; it was
a most formidable sight. Yet three years afterward their
great reformer had the pleasure of hearing Sir George Gipps
•ay, " What made the men look so well ? I have seldom
seen a better set, — they are quite equal to new prisoners ! "
"I sought," is his reply, "generally by every means to recover the
men's self-respect, to gain their own wills towards their reform, to visit
moral offences severely, but to reduce the number of those that were
purely conventional, to mitigate the penalties attached to these, and
thus gradually awaken better and more enlightened feelings among
both officers and men. I built two churches, got a catechist to assist
the chaplain, almost every Sunday during all my four years read the
service myself, with a sermon, at some out-station, established schools,
distributed books, gave prizes for assiduity, was unwearied in my coun
sels and exhortations wherever I went, — and went everywhere alone,
showing confidence and winning it in return. I gave every industri
ous man a small garden. I encouraged those whom I camped out in the
bush to rear pigs and poultry, thereby improving their ration, and, still
more, infusing into them by the possession of property that instinctive
respect for it which makes it safer in a community than any direct pre
servatives. I thus also interested my police, who were all prisoners,
in the maintenance of order, their situations, which were much coveted,
being made to depend on their success. I gave the messes knives,
forks, a few cooking-utensils, tin pannekins, &c. I allowed the over
seers, police, and first-class men to wear blue jackets and other articles
of dress not portions of usual convict clothing ; and nothing contrib
nted more than this to raise their spirits, revive their self-respect, and
confirm their good purposes
" My task was not really so difficult as it appeared. I was working
with Nature, and not against her, as all other prison-systems do. I was
endeavoring to cherish, and yet direct and regulate, those cravings for
amelioration which almost all possess in some degree, and which are
often strongest in those otherwise the most debased. I looked to my
men for success, and I found it. Every one was saved, as far as I
could save him, from unnecessary humiliation, and encouraged to look
to his own steady efforts for ultimate liberation and improved position.
This was the real secret."
Towards the end of her volume Miss Carpenter gives the

story of one of the colonial convicts, in order to convey an idea
of Captain Machonochie's difficulties and success. Charles An
derson, a poor, helpless, friendless orphan, was sent early in
life to the workhouse. There he remained, untaught, uncared
for, till he went to sea at nine years of age. Knocked and
buffeted about through his apprenticeship to a collier, he
joined a man-of-war, and was severely wounded in his head
at Navarino. Ever afterwards irritation and drink brought
on violent fits of excitement. Street-rows, sailor's fights,
followed, — and poor Charles erelong, for shop-breaking, was
transported for seven years. The deep degradation and gall
ing character of his punishment, and the fact that he was un
conscious of his crime from being in liquor at the time, filled
the breast of the lad, now only eighteen years old, with the
bitterest animosity. Utterly ignorant, mentally and morally,
he had little idea of patient submission, if, indeed, his physi
cal condition rendered it possible under any but the most
gentle treatment. Violence only created violence. His flog
gings were innumerable, but, sturdy and stanch for good or
evil, they were lost upon him. He would not submit to
harshness, and kindness was never dreamt of. One hundred
lashes at a time, irons for twelve months in addition to his
original sentence, twelve hundred lashes for trivial offences,
— all proved of no avail ; and, as a last resort, he was chained
to a rock in the harbor for two years, with barely a rag to
cover him. He was fastened by his waist to the rock with a
chain twenty-six feet long and with trumpet irons on his legs,
22*
A hollow in the rock was his bed, and a wooden lid his only
shelter, locked down upon him at night. His food was pushed
to him upon a pole. None of his fellow-prisoners were al
lowed to approach or speak to him, under a penalty of one
hundred lashes, which his former messmate received for giv
ing him a piece of tobacco. Regarded as a wild beast, people
passing in boats would throw him bread or biscuits. Ex
posed to all weathers, and without clothing on his back and
shoulders, covered with sores and with maggots engendered
in a hot climate, he was denied even water to bathe his
wounds, and, when rain fell, he would lie and roll in it in
agony ! Forced next to labor in irons, on shore, carrying
lime and salt upon this excoriated back, the human worm
turned still, in spite, upon the heels that crushed him ; he
was sentenced at length to death, but was respited and sent
to Norfolk Island to work in chains for life.
When Machonochie arrived to change the scene, Anderson
was charged with ten violent assaults, three attempts to avoid
labor, besides numerous instances of insolence and insubor
dination. He was only twenty-four, but looked as if forty
years old. The Captain was told he was " cranky." The
prisoners amused themselves with teasing him and making
him vicious. This was at once forbidden. Casting about for
any means of reclaiming the unhappy creature, now sunk so
deep in wickedness, Machonochie gave him charge of some
unruly bullocks. Many thought one side or the other would
come to grief. Strict orders were given not to interfere with
him. Very soon a marked improvement is apparent. Charles
becomes less wild ; he feels his own value ; he is praised for his
good conduct, for his management of his bullocks. He and
they grow tamer together. He knows that high and strong
tempers will not bend to the lash, and anxious watchers are
amused by Anderson's just insight into criminal discipline.
Cattle-training is succeeded by something more sailor-like,
suggested by the Captain's fertile brain ; the poor creature
of the harbor rock is put in charge of a signal-station on the
highest point of the island. His delight was full. Here was
his hut, his garden patch, his flag-staff, his code and set of
signals. Not a sail appeared on " the great and wide sea,"
1865.] Oar Convicts. 259
but Anderson reported it to the whole settlement. His heart

revelled in his plantation, — a new flower was the richest gift
jou could make him, — his potatoes were the hest on the
island, and it was his special pride to serve the Captain's din
ner-table with an early freshly-dug basketful as the genial
season rolled round. When Sir George Gipps visited the
island, he met, in his rides, Anderson tripping along in his
trim sailor-dress, full of importance, with his telescope under
his arm. " What little smart fellow may that be ? " asked
he. " The man who was chained to the rock in Sydney har
bor." " Bless my soul, you do not mean to say so ! " was
the astonished rejoinder. As he regained his self-respect, An
derson revealed a noble, generous heart, and a gay, sociable
disposition. His excitability eventually became madness, and
when his great benefactor was peremptorily removed from the
scene of bis glorious labors, Anderson was last seen by a friend
of the Captain in a lunatic asylum. The poor fellow recog
nized his visitor, and spoke of nothing but Captain Macho-
nochie and his family.
Our limits oblige us to close. We may improve a future
opportunity to sketch Miss Carpenter's comparison of the Eng
lish convict system with the three eminent examples upon
which she dwells with so much satisfaction in the chapters of
her present volume devoted to the aims and accomplishments
of Montesinos, Obermaier, and Machonochie. And may we
not hope to hail, at no very distant day, the appearance of
some American treatise upon the convict system of our own
country ? The reformatory movement was inaugurated in
the United States forty years ago. Our first Reform School
was opened by Joseph Curtis, in New York city, and in his
hands it was a model which has been rarely equalled, and
never surpassed. The number of our reformatories is very
large, and not a few of them are of the highest rank. Some
competent observer and reporter, like Miss Carpenter or Re
corder Hill, may arise to collect and concentrate the lights
shed upon the great question of reformatory management,
and upon prison discipline generally, in various portions of
the Federal Union. Before the war two national conventions
were held of the conductors and friends of our houses of ref
260 First Cycle of the [March,
ormation. And others will doubtless follow upon the return

of peace. Their discussions, transactions, and publications,
with the annual reports of the several reformatories, will
form the basis eventually of some work, worthy, we trust,
of a place with Miss Carpenter's volumes.
Art. VI. — FIRST CYCLE OF THE HISTORY OF NEW

ENGLAND.
History of New England during the Stuart Dynasty. By John G.

Palfrey.- In three volumes. Boston: Little, Brown, and Com
pany. 1859, 1860, 1864.
•
It is not local pride only which speaks of the history of
New England as an essential contribution to the history of
free government throughout the world. There are few intelli
gent writers on social economy who have not had occasion to
declare this, in one form or another ; — and iu the works of
writers not well enough informed to refer to our experience
here, or our institutions, we, to whom that history is often
more familiar, are apt to think that we can show where bet
ter knowledge of us would have saved them from error. Tho
forming period of this New England is described, in a thorough
scientific study, in the three volumes which Dr. Palfrey has
now completed. He describes in these three volumes the first
of New England's cycles.
" The cycle of New England," says he, " is eighty-six years. In the
spring of 1603, the family of Stuart ascended the throne of England.
At the end of eighty-six years, Massachusetts having been betrayed to
her enemies by her most eminent and trusted citizen, Joseph Dudley,
the people, on the 19th day of April, 1689, committed their prisoner,
the deputy of the Stuart King, to the fort in Boston which he had built
to overawe them. Another eighty-six years passed, and Massachusetts
had been betrayed to her enemies by her most eminent and trusted
citizen, Thomas Hutchinson, when, at Lexington and Concord, on the
19th of April, 1775, her farmers struck the first blow in the war of
1865.] History of New England. 261
American Independence. Another eighty-six years ensued, and a

domination of slaveholders, more odious than that of Stuarts or of
Guelphs, had been fastened upon her, when, on the 19th of April,
1861, the streets of Baltimore were stained by the blood of her sol
diers on their way to uphold liberty and law by the rescue of the na
tional capital." — Vol. III. p. viii.
The story of New England, from the time when Gosnold
made his futile settlement on one of the islands to which last
year Massachusetts gave his name, down to the popular rev
olution in which the people of Massachusetts sent their Gov
ernor to the Castle, is told with every picturesque illustra
tion, with every careful comparison of surrounding history,
and with the most laborious investigation of the original doc
uments, in these three volumes.
It is the accurate comparison of English history, as it was
passing in Old England, which, throughout this book, lifts the
transactions it describes from the humble level of provincial
or local annals, so that the reader feels that they deserve the
name of history. With the dynasty of the Stuarts New Eng
land was born. Under what we once called " the Great Re
bellion " it flourished. With the Restoration it pined. And
when England, in one agony, threw off the Stuart family for
ever, New England, in a like agony, true to her origin and
traditions, inaugurated at the same moment the independent
revolution, in which, ignorant of events at home, she did the
same thing.
Of the history which illustrates the life of the mother and
the child through these periods, much must be the same. His
torical names of the first importance are common to both.
To find the clew to the policy pursued here, one must trace
through the tangle of the intrigues of the Star Chamber, the
Parliaments, and the Cabal. If England would now erect a
monument to the sovereign whose policy did most to make her
a first-class power in Europe, she would set up in Westmin
ster Hall that statue to Oliver Cromwell which, thus far, she
has refused to him. And if Massachusetts chose to erect, op
posite Cliantrey's Washington in her own Capitol, a statue to
the man who best represents the principles out of which Mas
sachusetts was born, she would erect it to this same Oliver
Cromwell. It might be well to do so, — with an inscription

which should show how New England honors him, — and an
intimation that, when Old England shall learn who her real
heroes are, we will send this statue to take its fitting place
among her sovereigns.
Local antiquarians, the several legislatures of the New Eng
land States, and different writers of care and scholarship, from
Governor Winthrop down, have collected and preserved ma
terial for the American part of this history. But for its springs
of movement, for many of its more secret causes, and for that
unity and dignity which, as we have intimated, lifts the rec
ord from the range of chronicle to that of history, there was
needed careful study of the unedited documents, as well as
the public history, of England. This study Dr. Palfrey has
made with great diligence in the stores of the State Paper
Office, which England throws open so generously to all faith
ful students. Hence the wholly new illustration of a theme,
which, when he announced it, may have been thought hack
neyed, by those who did not know it as well as he.
First of all, this book shows conclusively, as we believe,
that, in the beginning, the men who made New England
went to their work with the hope of an independent state.
The Pilgrims, at Plymouth, probably thought of no other in
dependence than the " independency " of their churches. To
them and theirs we owe the word in our language. Of polit
ical independence they hoped for none, save such as their in.
significance gave them. They were subjects of our dread lord
James the First. But ten years helps us on fast in critical
times. And when, in 1630, Laud and Strafford, and the other
"Thorough" men,* were working their own way, — when
Charles had embarked on that system of reigning without Par
liaments which lasted eleven years, " the state of England being
by the usurpation of the bishops under great declinings," —
the emigrants who founded Massachusetts came with the de
termination to have as little as might be to do with the gov
ernment at> home. Yet their very exile affected that govern
ment. John Hull, who was among them, says that " their
* Hence, perhaps, our word Tory.

roluntary banishment and their writings from home awak

ened so many hearts, as that in few years the whole nation
thought it was high time to think of a general reformation,
and were willing to enter into a war, though such a formida
ble means yet, when no other way could gain the desired
end." This is perhaps claiming too much for the reaction
wrought by New England on the mother country. Yet Mil
ton says, in 1641 : " I shall believe there cannot be a more ill-
boding sign to a nation — God turn the omen from us ! —
than when the inhabitants, to avoid insufferable grievances
at home, are enforced by heaps to leave their native coun
try."*' He urges this exile as one of the most terrible signs of
the times. There can be no doubt that the reaction was very
great. And when the English rebellion had well asserted it
self, the emigration from New to Old England became larger
than that into New England. Then the dream of indepen
dence faded away. The colonists of that time were willing to
cultivate relations with Cromwell and Parliament, which they
would not maintain with Charles or his Star Chamber.
A charming novelist makes James Otis say, in a supposed
popular harangue, " It is true that in the beginning we aimed
not at independence." There is no doubt that was the stead
fast assertion of the Revolutionary patriots. Miss Francis was
as accurate as Mrs. Child is apt to be in putting it into the
mouth of James Otis. He and his friends believed it when
they made it. But, in the light of to-day, we believe it will
be conceded that "in the beginning" Massachusetts did hope
for independence, whether she aimed at it or no. It was
not till England showed herself competent to self-reform, that
there grew up, on this side, any willingness to be more closely
connected with her rulers.
We regard the complete establishment of this truth as the
first essential ground gained in history by Dr. Palfrey's dis
cussions. As he closes his first volume, — after describing
the first union of the four New England Colonies in 1642,
the year when Charles I. " flung his rebel banner to the
breeze," — he says: —
* llvfonnuiiou in England, Book II, quoted by Dr. Palfrey, Vol. I. p. 557.

" The New England Colonies had taken their affairs into their own
hand?. By the counsels of hrave men, and by the progress of events,
a self-governing association of self-governing English commonwealths
had been founded in America ; and the manifestation which they had
just now made of confidence in themselves and in one another may
well have had its place along with the sympathies which allied them
to those who had come into power in the parent country, in prevent
ing interference from abroad with the local administration." — Vol. I.
p. 634.
The second point of great importance, illustrated in this
history, is one which is not so gratifying to local vanity. It
is a point which the poets of the second class, and other sen
timentalists, never appreciate. It is a point which even stu
dents of history are slow to acknowledge, and it will only
gain its full acknowledgment, after the world has tried dem
ocratic institutions, working under a Christian spirit, much
more faithfully and persistently than it has yet done. This
is the central truth, that a Christian people — with equal
rights of education and of property — have intelligence
enough to manage their own affairs wisely, with forethought,
courage, and consistency, — to improve and enlarge their own
institutions, — and, in general, to save the commonwealth
under the help of God, — though they have no distinguished
leaders.
The popular theory of democratic government still amounts
to this : — that, if the democracy be well regulated, the very
ablest men will somehow be brought into office ; that these
men will then exhibit their aptitude for command, and will*
control the state and its affairs as well as if they had been
born kings instead of becoming kings by election. Such a
theory states sufficiently well the case of Pericles in Athens,
of Hannibal in Carthage, of some Consuls in Rome. But it
is not the true theory of a Christian democracy.
A Christian democracy, on the other hand, advances, lives,
and works, not by the wit and power of certain leaders whom
it elevates to the place of king, but by the wit, power, con
science, and long-suffering of the whole people. It may very
often happen that, in its arrangements, merely average men
have to discharge the public functions. But in the same ar
rangements it is ordered, — first, that average men have bet

ter chances for culture and conscience than most princes have
in other lands ; second, that the determination, intelligence,
and instinct of self-preservation of the whole body of the
people give such a steady drift to the movement of the state
in the true direction, that the weakest or the worst officer
cannot wholly compromise it. Time becomes the ally of such
a people. And therefore, at the end of a cycle of discussions
which seem most petty, — of rivalries the most narrow, — of
bigotry the most intense, — one looks a second time at their
history, and finds that institutions have been established on
the broadest footing, where there may never have been one
man with cultivation enough or insight enough to state their
law ; one finds that the commonwealth has grown in phys
ical power by accretions from without and by development
from within, of which perhaps no observer can trace the pro
gress or even cite the statistics ; one finds a constitution of the
state, and a living element in the church, which are recog
nized among the eternal principles of men's affairs, though
no one man living under them can state in words the consti
tutional law, or the ecclesiastical creed. Social institutions,
material greatness, political constitution, and church order,
have all been attained in the separate petty discussions and
experiments of men building better than they knew, — be
cause, in his own sphere, each man was permitted to build
as well as he knew how. " A headless democracy " stumbles
towards victory, — and at last wins it, — without distinguished
'leaders.
This principle of a Christian democracy is illustrated in the
most suggestive and the most valuable way in Dr. Palfrey's
study of the first cycle of New England. The illustration is
of especial value, because it-is the study of so long an arc of
the orbit. We have had many curious illustrations in single
moments of agony. Thus the battle of Bunker Hill has some
prominence in the world's history. Yet the annalists still dis
cuss the question who was the republican commander there,
— a question tantamount to the question whether there was
'any commander at all. It was a headless democracy which
that day in its acts gave omen of the issue of the war. As for
VOL. LXXVI1I. — 5TH 3. VOL. XVI. NO. II. 23
the day of Lexington and Concord — when half the English

army retreated twenty miles to rest under the guns of their
fleet — there was not a general officer, if indeed there was a
colonel, who exercised any command over the republicans.
Such specific instances are familiar in all the histories of re
publics. But we know no instance as fine as this in these
three volumes, of the success, amounting to triumphant vic
tory, of a people left to themselves, in planting a wilderness,
in organizing civil society, in establishing and maintaining
government, and in acquiring all the forces of material, in
tellectual, and moral power, which, if well organized, make
a strong commonwealth, — who did all this without the as
sistance or the suggestion of one leader, after the beginning,
of distinction sufficient to rescue his name from oblivion.
We are willing to grant all that any intelligent critic will
ask, as to the immense advantage gained by the Colonies, even
in the beginning, from the steadiness, the purity, the unself
ishness, the piety, and the wisdom of John Winthrop. We
are willing to grant all that can be claimed with any reason
for the influence of Milton, Cromwell, Eliot, and the other
leaders in England, acting, at a distance, in New England.
But here we have a right to say that those men failed at
home, and that somebody succeeded here. After we have
granted all this, the facts remain. In 1630 here were a few
thousand people on the edge of the ocean, — in- a climate se
vere beyond all their experience, on the edge of a territory
which from that day to this day has not produced as much
food as the State of Illinois would produce next summer, if it
were needed. This people, with little more wealth then than
was represented in their fish-hooks, axes, and Bibles, had be
come in 1689 a commercial state, carrying on extensive, haz
ardous, but successful enterprises with all parts of the world.
In 1630 their governments were in the embryo condition of
quarterly meetings of the directors of a trading company. Iu
1689 they had a confederation of four states, each of which
had its executive, its judiciary, and its legislature ; they were
competent to their own defence against all savage and most
European enemies, and in all the methods of civil order,
as far as those methods are shown in legislation, and in the
proceedings of courts, they were in advance of all the rest of

the world.
In matters of social order, the emigrants who in 1630 were
building their hovels on the shore had in 1689 established,
in advance of all mankind in modern days, a system of free
schools for the education of all their children, a system of
churches for the religious needs of their own people and for
the conversion of the savages, and a college for the necessi
ties of the schools and the churches. And all these advan
ces had been made after such a series of experiments, that,
although the matters discussed were often things of the most
trifling detail, it becomes important now to every faithful stu
dent of the affairs of society, of the church, or of the state, to
attend with minute care to the methods of those beginnings.
Now all this progress, as we have said, is made without the
assistance or the counsel of one man who has left a name iu
general history. Here is the value of the lesson.
We do not know that Dr. Palfrey himself will accept this
view. He has done his duty by his several heroes most gal
lantly. It was his part to call them from the faded canvass,
and make them live and breathe for us once more, — and,
for the moment, he has done so. But, for all his success, we
feel, still, that the men who step forward at his bidding were
no better, indeed were no other, than the men who sur
rounded them. As we read, we get a conception of LevereU,
of Phipps, or of the traitor Dudley. But it is with a distinct
understanding that, but for a moment, neither they nor any
other man were, in any sense, leaders of the state. And,
however vivid the historian's picture, we know, as we study
it, that he has been obliged to reproduce it where the tap
estry was all faded on the wall. There is not a book written
by a New England man in this first cycle which can claim a
place in literature in our time, except as it contributes to the
history of that time. . There is not a poem, nor one verse
of a ballad, there is not one philosophical discovery, there
is not one axiom of government, which can be distinctly re
ferred to one individual New-Englander of that day as its
origin. Yet, as we have said, in those eighty-six years New
England became a power in the world, and organized the iu
stitutions of government which contain the essential princi

ples of modern democracy, which the whole world is obliged
to study at this day.
To say this is not to say, that, in the long run, folly or
mediocrity succeeds as well as wisdom. It is simply. to say,
that, in the long run, moral qualities have more to do with
the welfare of states than intellectual qualities have. The
men who made New England in her first cycle were men of
courage, men of heart, men of real faith, men of endurance,
and, in every sense, men very near to God. The ultimate
analysis of the great problem of their success shows, not
that the world drifts on to victory without any leader, but
that God may be trusted to lead, where man really strives
to open every way for communion with God, and in each
child of God to give fair chance for each faculty to work
its best, and to contribute to the common weal. Where the
people are thus left free to work out the experiments of a
human nature which is not depraved, God becomes again
Ruler and King. Even out of their evil he brings good,
and in the midst of their follies he works out wisdom. For
we may borrow a figuro here from Darwin's brilliant gener
alization. Give all the people their chance to try in their
school districts, their town meetings, in their churches, and
in their general court, all their experiments in social order,
and the bad methods will fail, — by their mutual contra
diction they destroy each other, or of their native weakness
they die away. The good succeed, — are copied, — multiply
themselves. From a township or a parish they pass upward
into a state, — from a state they are proclaimed to the whole
world. The law of selection illustrates itself, — as Dr. Dar
win claims that it does in the generations of seeds and of an
imals. Which is to say that, because God is, all evil is tran
sitory, and all good succeeds. Faith, hope, and love, in a
statute or in a constitution, abide, — and that forever.
It is of course impossible to make an extract from Dr. Pal
frey's book which shall show how completely the first cycle
of New England illustrates this principle of Christian democ
racy. The principle is illustrated, not in one passage or two,
but in the recondite analysis and delicate research into trans
actions which would seem trifles to men less philosophical

than he, — which, in fact, contained, folded up in their white
leaflets, the essential germ of the great truths of modern po
litical science.
In the conduct of the book which thus lifts New England's

history into its fit place among the histories of the nations
which have successfully wrought out new experiments of gov
ernment, Dr. Palfrey removes many of the erroneous impres
sions which have, for different reasons, hung over the record
heretofore. He disposes of some of them, as we may hope,
finally. It is true that innuendoes are hard to kill, and a re
ceived prejudice lives long. Still a standard authority, like his
book, — which not only announces principles in history, but
proves their truth, — becomes, in time, the recognized mag
azine for facts, as well as the fountain of argument. For this
reason only it eventually outlives prejudice and innuendo. The
impression has at times been nearly universal, that the legis
lation of New England in the first century, and her systems
of constitutional order, were a narrow ecclesiastical burlesque
on Jewish institutions. This is one of the prejudices we speak
of. The truth is, that the fortunes of the rising states were
carried forward with a more rigorous adherence to the neces
sities of the living hour, and a more complete disregard to
any precedents, sacred or profane, than the history of gov
ernment ever showed before. Dr. Palfrey has shown this in
the great critical points, and he has shown it equally well in
those studies, which we are already tempted to call distin
guished, of the manners and the interior life of the Colonies;
— where he drags from the reluctant silence of our fathers
their unwilling confessions of the way in which they really
lived.
The whole study of the methods in which their religious
zeal exhibited itself, — and, in the end, expanded itself, — is
most interesting. Sometimes it is amusing, — sometimes it is
grand. They came here, often sour, often bigoted, always at
the explosive point, — because their rights of conscience, and
still more their rights of theological expression, had been de
nied. Arriving here, they were free. The first impulse, of
23*
course, was to explosion. We will declare everything ! We
will utter everything! And the congenial forests seemed to
bid them declare and utter, — nay, even echoed the utter
ance, if it were loud enough. But no matter how loud or
how extravagant, nobody forbade. Was it possible — alas !
— that nobody cared ?
The liberty of private prophesying was granted. To the
great body of the elect, indeed, all liberty of speculation was
granted. And almost from the beginning, therefore, contro
versy began to die out, from the want of somebody to contro
vert. The attacks on poor Mrs. Hutchinson and Roger Wil
liams indicate the old leaven, just at the beginning. But
here, in Williams's case, his exile was scarcely punishment,
— and in Mrs. Hutchinson's, the fire burned out long before
the fuel was gone. The truth was, that religious life began
to find much more available spheres for exercise, — spheres
much more worthy, too, than protest or controversy. These
men had the world to subdue, as all men have ; — and they •
had their work so put before them, that they could not fail to
engage in it. As they engaged in it, and religion asserted
itself in the active work of a new civilization, there grew up
.an indifference to the formulas of the Puritan days, which
their clergy could not but observe. These came in the in
tensely practical method of looking at life, law, and society.
No man can study the records of the Massachusetts, Connect
icut, or Plymouth Colony without feeling this. In the midst
of old formal expressions, there is a life wholly new.
The dying out of Puritan theological statement, and of
merely ecclesiastical forms of work, may be ascribed, there
fore, to two causes. First, there was no oppression, there was
no controversy. A hospitable desert invited all, and per
mitted all to say what they chose. It was an illustration of
Sydney Smith's principle, when he said the best thing to do
with a Methodist minister was to ask him to dinner. Here
these bellicose Puritans were, — in the luxury of freedom and
a new world, — and with whom should they do battle ? Be
sides this, the work before them absorbed their real activity,
and gave full work to their religion. We cannot but ex
press the hope that a like destiny awaits our liberal theology
in America at this moment. It has the first and greatest of

duties thrown open to it, in the pacification of the land. In
introducing Christian arts, Christian books, Christian educa
tion, and Christian charities through the States but now des
olated with war, it has the infinite duty of any true relig
ious system offered to its most eager enterprise. We cannot
but believe that that work will give to the whole Liberal
Church new energy in proportion to the field ; and that it
will prove the end of the petty self-inspection, and hyper
critical analysis, to which liberal speculations tend, just as
certainly as the most narrow systems do, when there is not
a broad field for endeavor and action. The Fifth Monarchy
man into whom the Puritan degenerated, when his day of
work had done, was no whit more absurd than is the euphem-
ist philosopher of to-day, counting the minims of his own
pulse-beats, as he decides on the counter " attractions " of
fered him in his Brummagem gospel.
We copy Dr. Palfrey's own statement of the general char
acteristics of New England law in this cycle.
" The laws are such as presuppose on the part of the people a habit
of respect for law, and a capacity for joint and for individual self-gov
ernment. In their general character they suggest that, agreeably to
the practice of English legislation in all times, they were dictated by
necessities and occasions, and not by theories. Compared with other
systems of the same period, they are on the whole humane ; but on
the other hand, as to methods and penalties, they have an exhaustive
minuteness which expresses an absolute purpose not to be defied or
evaded. The men who framed tjjese laws had comprehensive no
tions of the rights and the obligations of a government. The opinion
that the world is governed too much was by no means theirs. Their
ideal was rather an authority residing indeed in the citizens collec
tively, but responsible for and vigorously controlling the individual
citizen. Charged with the protection of the people, the law-maker
meant to hold them back with a tenacious and a strong hand from
harming themselves, and to compel them to keep their ranks for mu
tual defence. He had no scruples about demanding personal service
or pecuniary sacrifice to any extent that the public well-being re
quired. He intended to be just and beneficent, but at the same time,
and for that purpose, he claimed universal, precise, and prompt obe
dience. And if such a government was absolute, still it was free ; for
it was the people's government over themselves, and no pains were
spared to give to each citizen his due weight in the common adminis
tration. The men of Charlestown had no privileges beyond those of
the other towns of Massachusetts, when they pronounced themselves
' the most happy people that they knew of in the world.' " — Vol. III.
pp. 66, 67.
In this connection Dr. Palfrey gives an important opinion
as to the supposed degeneracy of the second generation. We
are desirous of copying it, because we believe it sets us
right on a mooted point where we have at some times ex
pressed another opinion. •
" Their wise forecast proved adequate to the occasion in an admira
ble degree. It would be unsafe to argue from any documents of the
time, or from any other evidence that touches the question, that the
half-century which followed the immigration of Winthrop's company
witnessed a sensible degeneracy under the unpropitious influence of
the new circumstances of life. At no earlier time was government in
New ringland more quietly or prosperously administered, than in the
first twenty years that followed the restoration of the British monar
chy. And as the laws of that period are the monument of a capacity
for prudent legislation, so even in the luxury of learning there was
no token of decay. The works of Mitchell, Oakes, and many other
early pupils of Harvard College, are in our hands, and we find them
not unworthy to be compared, for rich and scholarly rhetoric, with the
writings of Chauncy, who came from a Professor's chair at Cambridge,
or of Cotton, the light of the first Protestant foundation at that Univer
sity. The Puritan Dean of Christ Church, the universally learned
Owen, felt such assurance of finding congenial society in New Eng
land, that he would have emigrated but for the consideration of duties
which seemed to require him at home." —.Vol. III. pp. 69, 70.
With this brief allusion to the greatest principles illustrat
ed in these interesting volumes we must leave them. There
is no need of speaking of their accuracy, — which displays
itself; there is no reason to look for passages to contro
vert, in the pride of criticism. The truth is, as it may be
'well to say, that the book passed through the stage of crit
icism before the author published it. It was his conscien
tious habit to print it first for private circulation, and then,
intrusting to a few of the persons most familiar with our his
tory the agreeable opportunity of reading it in advance of
the world, to ask for their doubts or objections regarding

any of the statements of fact which had been made in the
narrative. No writer needed such criticism so little as Dr.
Palfrey. This is the very reason, indeed, why he chooses to
court it and to make use of it. After these friendly critics
had presented to him their lists of all the "queries" which
their ingenuity or their special training could suggest, the
author took his text again in hand, and, with the stimulus
of these inquiries, examined again the authorities on which
he had been working. The result, of course, of a system so
diligent and s0 praiseworthy is, that the public's first edi
tion may boast an accuracy, even in slight details, which a
work of range so wide can seldom claim for many years after
its first appearance.
The success of the three volumes bids us hope that the
author will continue his work, and give us the narrative,
needed no less than this, of the cycle — almost mysterious,
so little do we know of its inner laws — between Andros's
imprisonment and Lexington ; — the cycle in which Cotton
Mather lived and died, — in which Franklin was born, and
fled New England, — in which were bred such men as Otis
and the Adamses, — in which the race, whose only wars till
now had been wars with savages, were trained in arms against
the soldiers of France, and learned the arts which they were
to employ in greater war ; — the cycle of Whitefield's rev
olution, and of so much other change in the Church; — the
cycle when wealth and luxury and cosmopolitan indifference
came in. Who will tell us, so well as Dr. Palfrey, how out
of the New England of that second cycle — the cycle of mys
tery — stepped forth the men who made the Independence
of America ?
274 Tlie Fourth of March. [March,
Art. VII. — THE FOURTH OF MARCH.
1. The President's Message on the Peace Negotiation, presented to Con

gress February 10, 1865.
2. Army and Navy Journal.
The re-inauguration of President Lincoln is a fact some

what noteworthy in itself, as the first instance of the sort in
our history for thirty-two years ; but is chiefly memorable for
the contrast it shows, in all its circumstances, to the scene of
four years ago. Secession had been sprung upon a public
excited and incredulous, and had plunged the nation into the
extreme of vacillation and doubt. It was the golden opportu
nity of the reckless and bold, the pitfall of the timid and
weak. Hardly any price seemed too great to pay for that
boon of peace which then first was seen seriously to be threat
ened. An unofficial "Conference" proposed to the nation
the abandonment of all the ground in dispute with the South,
and it seemed no impossible thing, to many not improbable,
that tliis might in fact be done. Congress formally offered to
the country a Constitutional Amendment, designed to insure
slavery against any political attaek thenceforth ; and probably
only the sudden movement of events prevented this pledge
from being ratified. Every step of the President elect, as he
moved towards the capital, was watched by conspirators, and
was in the face of a well-understood plot of assassination.
For the first time in the history of the government, a strong
military guard was necessary to guard the peace of the capi
tal, and protect the public ceremonial from violence. The
public treasury was empty, and the public credit almost gone.
And so little did the new administration know how far to de
pend on the temper of the people, that for more than a montli
the question was unsolved, whether it would not surrender to
the mere menace of open rebellion, and let the nation perish
by default.
Four years have changed all that. The President is com
mander-in-chief of an army of near a million men, and of a
fleet of six or seven hundred vessels of war. The new Peace
1865.] Hie Contrast. lib
t
Conference is held on board an armed ship in Hampton
Roads, between commissioners who bring for signature " a
blank sheet inscribed with the one word independence," and
an Executive who informs them that the will of the nation
will suffer no terms to be listened to which imply a division of
its territory, that the question of slavery is laid finally on the
shelf no more to be discussed, that absolute submission to the
sovereignty and the laws of the nation is the only condition of
peace that can be entertained. The Amendment now passed
by Congress, and already ratified by seventeen States, is one
disposing forever of the question in dispute, by forbidding
" Slavery or involuntary servitude except for crime " through
out the limits of the United States. In the face of the fright
ful outlays of the last few months, the value of the govern
ment credit as compared with gold lias steadily risen from
one third to more than one half. And, as an index of the
general will and temper, a popular loan is pouring funds into
the hands of the government — now, at the opening of this
fifth campaign — at a rate ranging from three to nine and a
half millions of dollars in a day.
These few points of contrast help measure the prodigious
advance made in these four years in the sentiment, the tem
per, and the spirit of our nationality. We do not think we
have underrated, at any time, the importance of the immedi
ate issue which brought this controversy to a head, or the mo
mentous results to civilization, public morality, and republi
can freedom of a conflict on which the existence of human
slavery was staked. But the controversy was one whose germ
lay in the ambiguous wording and the hostile interpretations
of our theory of government itself. It was inevitable that
American Federalism should be put to this test. It was inev
itable that, in the fulness of time, the question should be set
tled once for all, whether this " Union" is a Nation, or only
an aggregate of independent States. The question of social
justice and humanity involved in it has given a grandeur,
depth, and passion to the struggle which it could not have
had otherwise ; it has been our glory and privilege that lib
erty has been the inspiration of this new and powerful senti
ment of nationality. But the leading fact in the struggle has
276 The Fourth of March. [March,
been from the first that which the government itself has
assumed, — that it was to vindicate the existence, the author
ity, the majesty of the nation, which had been assaulted and
defied.
We shall not stay to inquire whether this sentiment — so
pale, feeble, bloodless, though genuine and sincere in past
years — could have been developed into the same vigor in
any other way. Neither, with all our profound sense of its
value, as we come hereafter to live out this nation's life and
meet the problems of its future, shall we try to justify there
by the horror and the crime of war. There are some things
which are quite beside any attempt of ours at justification.
Human passion, error, wilfulness, antagonism, — that under
lying lava-flood, beneath the structures of civility and law in
which we abide, — we must be content to assume as ultimate
facts. They meet us everywhere, as soon as we come to deal
with human nature on a large scale, face to face. And the
occasional outbreaks of them in furious strife and bloody col
lision — we fear that we must accept them, for the present, as
inevitable facts. We have never considered ourselves called
on to "-justify " this present dreadful fact of civil war. We
have considered that the government did right, in the main,
in accepting the responsibility that was forced upon it, rather
than suffer the nation to perish. Only traitors at heart and
cowards in grain could have met that matter differently. But
to us of the people — to us especially who stand outside the
sphere of active politics — the war came as a solemn, an aw
ful, an inevitable fact. The only question then was, how to
meet it ; how to guide the moral issues of it ; how to inter
pret the questions it should raise ; how to perform the duties
it should bring ; how to determine its place in the evolution
of our national life.
Of these bearings of it, we are concerned at present with
only one. And it is enough for us to say that, considering
the diversities of latitude, region, population, temper, and
social life, — considering the mere breadth of territory and
variety in occupation and production, — considering the weak
ness and uncertainty of the federal bond, and the inevitable
collisions of central and local power, — considering the hostile
1865.] The Story of the War. 277
interpretations of our form of government itself, resulting

from hostile orders of society and differing eras and types of
civilization upon our soil, — considering the mere fact of alien
blood poured in such floods every year upon these shores, and
mingling freely in the veins of so great and so ill-knit a body,
-—considering the mere tidal movements of population, surg
ing restlessly over river-valley, mountain-chain, and rolling
prairie, — considering these diverse and countless elements of
which this people, if it is to be a people, must be made, — it is
not easy to imagine a heat less fierce for the fusion of them,
or a forge less terrible to mould and hammer them into one.
To tell how far and how well that work has been done,
would be to tell the story of the war. It would be to repeat
the illustrations the war has given — magnificent yet weary
ing from the mere weight and number of them — of heroic
devotion, of fervent enthusiasm, of patience never weary and
bounty never stinted. It would be to tell of the passionate,
almost adoring loyalty to our flag, that splendid symbol of
the nation's life and faith. It would be to repeat the story
of battle-field and hospital, of ship and fort, of camp and
home. It would be to speak of the prayers that have min
gled in this struggle, the profoundly devout and serious tem
per in which it has been met, the noble tone of sympathy and
cheer going from the heart of the family, and keeping the
heart of the soldier strong. It would, be to recount that as
tonishing patience under the bitterest pain, that resignation
under the keenest loss, out of as purely religious sense of
sacrifice as is ever seen in human things. It would be to
recite the tale of that large liberality, which has flowed stead
ily, without stint or weariness, from every city, village, ham
let, of the land, and is streaming perhaps more, copiously than
ever at this hour. It would be to repeat those words of noble
eloquence from lips still kindled and alive, or from lips scarce
yet cold in death, which from the beginning of this struggle
have been the interpreters to our people of the meaning, the
duties, and the sure results of it. It would be, finally, to re
cite the acts of the government, acting in the name and by
inspiration of the people, which has created out of nothing,
as it were, the most complete and formidable equipment of
national force which, probably, any nation has ever brought

to the dreadful uses of war.
But an illustration still more striking to the eye is seen in
the actual position of the campaign, as compared with former
aspects of the struggle ; the narrow and narrowing circle, out
side of which the national authority is the only recognized
strong and coherent force. It is but a little while ago that
the government, finding itself suddenly challenged, and almost
unarmed, began to muster its scanty forces ; and, by way
of sketching a frontier which might perhaps be guarded,
grouped a few regiments at Cairo, at Washington, at Fort
Monroe, pushed its way through Baltimore, and planted its
flag securely off the Bay of Pensacola. A year later, it had
just crowded the Rebellion back from the line of the Ohio,
recovered the mouth of the Mississippi, secured the Sea
Islands, and occupied the waters of North Carolina. More
than a year, still, before it definitely severed the forces of its
adversary by holding all the great river-courses of the West ;
and more than a year, again, before it could march its armies
through the heart of Georgia, from the mountains to the sea.
Now, the great campaign, so bewildering and all but hopeless
at first from the mere scale of geographical magnitude on
which it must be waged, is narrowed to the strip of country,
perhaps three hundred miles in width, and five hundred in
length, which reaches- from the Savannah to the James. In
all the rest of the " Confederate " territory there are but the
smoking embers of the fires so lately fierce, — only guerilla
plunderings and forays, that accursed progeny of war, which
must be dealt with not by war with its vast armaments, but
by peace with its code of law and its military police. The
wide region west of the Mississippi, and eastward as far as the
Alleghanies, is free from the presence of great contending
armies. Both the powers at war have by common policy con
centrated their forces within the space just indicated. The
contest is narrowed within moderate and definite limits of
space ; it must in all likelihood come to its decisive moment
within narrow limits of time ; and it is not for us to question
the result. But our business now is not to prognosticate, —
only to state the fact, that outside the Carolinas and a small
1865.] Tlie Narrowing of the Field. 279
portion of Virginia there is no longer any formidable power

afoot which can dispute the authority of the nation ; only free-
booting gangs to harry and torment the land, or strip it of its
products for speculation in foreign ports.
If we now look at the political field, we find the questions
at issue there narrowing in like manner to one or two cardi
nal points. As the President is reported to have said in
his late interview (February 3) with the Richmond Com
missioners, the question of slavery is disposed of, once for all,
and cannot enter into any future negotiations between North
and South. Maryland, West Virginia, Missouri, and (prob
ably) Tennessee have by voluntary acts of unchallenged au
thority decreed its immediate abolition. Arkausas and Louisi
ana, in the State Constitutions claiming recognition, have also
forbidden it. Kentucky and Delaware drift reluctantly, but
helplessly, the same way. The Amendment to the Constitu
tion prohibiting slavery, adopted by Congress January 31, and
hailed with such grateful testimonials as have greeted no
public act of our generation, makes the question of the com
plete legal extinction of slavery on this continent merely a
question of time ; sooner or later, the twenty-seven States
required will give their assent ; sooner or later, its provisions
will be embodied in public statute. The margin of fog and
haze which has prevented a full accepting of the position is
cleared up by the conference of Hampton Roads, which defi
nitely informs the North that " independence " pure and sim
ple is the demand of the Southern leaders, and definitely
informs the South that this is precisely what will never be
consented to. And now that the ground is so thoroughly
cleared for action, both militarily and politically, it would
seem that the final crisis of the conflict cannot be far off.
We do not claim the astonishing changes in the public
mind as evidence of an extraordinary growth of genuine moral
insight and Christian justice under the fierce stimulus of war.
It is neither right nor safe to estimate the public virtue at a
higher rate than it really is. Intense hatred of slavery, and
very genuine hatred, is no doubt one of the growths of this
bloody soil. Army and people, too, arc fast learning many
lessons of true humanity and universal justice. To see one
fact as it is, is a great help to the right seeing of other facts.

To know slavery as the deadly enemy of the nation, greatly
helps to see how all injustice is the enemy of man. But this
fact, as we understand it, has been seen from the point of
view of patriotic feeling, rather than that of abstract justice.
If, unhappily, slavery, and not its abolition, had happened to
be the principle coinciding with the national unity and life, —
as ten years ago was taken for granted by almost everybody,
— justice and humanity might have pleaded in vain, and we
might have had all the atrocity of the war with little of its
recompense. It might only have succeeded in enthroning a
bloodier despotism and a darker guilt as the sovereign power
on this continent. Happily, the enemies of the. nation were
also the enemies of liberty and humanity. Happily, in declar
ing war against our flag, they made that flag the symbol at
once of freedom and equal right. Happily, in insuring the
triumph of^ the nation, we shall insure the victory of prin
ciples which are at the heart of Christian civilization, and
which will forever inspire and guide all ameliorations of so
ciety and law.
The vindication of a true and noble nationality, therefore,
never had in it so confident hope and promise as now, when
we are just entering on the second term of an administration
committed to those principles, and sustained by the deliberate
reaffirming of the people's will. It will almost inevitably
be the case, that "the great task of this second term will be the
task of " reconstruction," — the work of peace which must
follow up and heal the wounds and ravages of war. Perhaps
it is as well, even at this late day, that the government is not
definitely committed to the principles and methods which it
will adopt. The President is reported to have said that no
system of reconstruction which does not recognize the new
Constitution of Louisiana shall have his consent. Louisiana,
Arkansas, and Tennessee are the States understood to be ready
waiting recognition and restoration. In Tennessee, the popu
lar movement appears to be genuine and hearty, under respon
sible leaders, and on a scale broad enough to represent fairly
the popular will. We do not dispute that it is so in the two
others. At this distance the facts are very imperfectly known,
1865.] Reconstruction. 281
and are open to keen dispute. It has even been said, that the
one great demand of political justice at this time is the rejec
tion of the Louisiana Constitution, — as made under military
authority and menace, as representing only a small portion of
the real population, as giving the real power to a class mostly
rebels at heart, while withholding it from the sincerest and
most intelligent loyalists, the enfranchised blacks, whom it
leaves subject to many of the wrongs and disabilities of slav
ery. The new Constitution of Arkansas is probably more
genuine in the quality of the elements which make it up
since the disloyal population of that State have been either
drafted into armies or driven beyond the frontier ; but what
is left of loyal Arkansas is but a meagre remnant, thinly strewn
in a few towns under military protection, absurdly few to repre
sent the authority and political power of a free commonwealth.
Yet the danger is perhaps quite as great the other way. The
value of local liberties and self-government, the mischief and
harm of a military system of provincial rule, are so apparent,
that only the risk of admitting treacherous and evil counsels
to the seat of national authority should prevent State govern
ments in some form from being organized as early as possible.
Looked at from this single view, undoubtedly the problems
of reconstruction are among the. knottiest that can come up
to solve.
The truest and safest solution — if it could be looked at
quite clear from prejudice — would unquestionably be, to
commit political power to the entire mass of the loyal popula
tion at the South, as fast as it could be organized and made
secure, — to whites and blacks alike, and on the same condi
tions, as to property, intelligence, and morality. Looked at
as a matter of simple justice and expediency, nothing can be
more clear than the wrong of dividing political privilege and
trust by the lines of color and caste. By all the testimony
that comes to us, the enfranchised blacks are not only the
most trustily loyal part of the population, but are far superior
in industry, intelligence, self-respect, and willingness to learn,
to a very large portion of those white refugees whom the for
tune of war has thrown upon our hands, and who will, with
24*
282 The Fourth of March. , [March,
hardly any question, have a share in any future distribution

of power. Deplorably ignorant, incredibly insolent, incorri
gibly idle and squalid, as the lowest class of poor whites in
the South are known to be, — and submitting, many of them,
sullenly and resentfully to a fate too strong for them, — they
must yet be citizens of the free commonwealths of the future,
to claim their share in controlling the policies of this great na
tion. The danger thus threatening will be held in check, no
doubt, by the more loyal and intelligent classes already there,
or who may emigrate into those rich but desolated fields.
But, unquestionably, political prudence would require strict
tests of fitness in a population to be reconstructed under such
conditions. The easiest and the only honest test would be
one that should regard mere fitness, and let all other consider
ations go. And, as we fear, our experience in the past offers
no great present encouragement here. Free Maryland and
free Missouri join with free Ohio and Illinois in inflicting dis
abilities of race and caste ; and the right of defining its own
constituency is surely one of the last to be withheld among
the local immunities of States. But the protest of simple
justice, however ineffectual for the present, ought to be heard.
The question, if not settled presently by Congress, must be met
ultimately in the States ; and, for two strong points in it, we
copy the admirable statement given in a late speech of Fred
erick Douglass: —
" If I were in a monarchical government, or an autocratic or aristo

cratic government, where the few bore rule and the many were subject,
there would be no special stigma resting upon me because I did not
exercise the elective franchise. It would do me no great violence.
Mingling with the mass, I should partake of the strength of the mass ;
I should be supported by the mass, I should have the same incentives
to endeavor with the mass of my fellow-men ; it would be no particu
lar burden, no particular deprivation. But here, where universal suf
frage is the rule, where that is the fundamental idea of the govern
ment, to rule us out is to make us an exception, to brand us with the
stigma of inferiority, and to invite to our heads the missiles of those
about us. Therefore I want the franchise for the black man
" What have you asked the black men of the South, the black men
of the whole country, to do ? Why, you have asked them to incur the
1865.] Negro Suffrage. 283
deadly enmity of their masters, in order to befriend you and befriend
thia government. You have asked us to call down, not only upon our
selves, but upon our children's children, the deadly hate of the entire
Southern people. You have called upon us to turn our backs upon
our masters, to abandon their cause and espouse yours ; to turn
against the South and in favor of the North ; to shoot down the Con
federacy and uphold the flag, — the American flag. You have called
upon us to expose ourselves to all the subtle machinations of their ma
lignity for all time. And now what do you propose to do when you
come to make peace? To reward your enemies, and trample in the
dust your friends ? Do you intend to sacrifice the very men who have
come to the rescue of your banner in the South, and incurred the last
ing displeasure of their masters thereby ? Do you intend to sacrifice
them, and reward your enemies ? Do you mean to give their enemies
the right to vote, and take it away from your friends ? Is that wise
policy ? Is that honorable ? Could American honor withstand such
a blow ? I do not believe you will do it. I think you will see to it
that we have the right to vote When this nation was in trouble,
in its early struggles, it looked upon the negro as a citizen. In 1776,
he was a citizen. At the time of the formation of the Constitution, the
negro had the right to vote in eleven States out of the old thirteen. In
your trouble you have made us citizens. In 1812, General Jackson
addressed us as citizens, ' fellow-citizens.' He wanted us to fight. We
were citizens then ! And now, when you come to frame a conscription
bill, the negro is a citizen again. He has been a citizen just three
times in the history of this government, and it has always been in time
of trouble. In time of trouble we are citizens. Shall we be citizens
in war, and aliens in peace? Would that be just? "
With this one strong word on the course of absolute jus

tice, which we believe to be the course of prudence and safety
as well, we take leave of a matter which must be left, after
all, to the shaping of events. Ultimately, we think, events
will prpve to be working in the direction of liberty and right.
When we take the measure of the advance made in the four
years past, no gain of justice seems hopeless to look for in
the future. Thirty months ago, the question was pending
doubtfully, whether negroes should be admitted to serve as
soldiers, to defend the nation's honor and fight under its
flag. Now. not only that question has been answered in some
of the most heroic achievements of the war, — not only the
284 Hie Fourth of March. [March,
government at Richmond is hazarding, under angry and ter

rified protests,* that last card in the desperate game, of the
enlistment of negro troops on a large scale, — but men of
the race so long outlawed and oppressed are fast coming to
take positrons of honor and credit, with scarce any bar of
jealousy to hinder them. Frederick Douglass is welcomed
to Baltimore by the very man he fled from as a slave, more
than twenty years ago, and repeats, there and in Washing
ton, his singularly telling eloquence. Within these two
months a negro lawyer has been admitted to the bar of the
Supreme Court, and a negro preacher has discoursed of slav
ery in the Capitol. These are the high-water marks, so far,
of that social revolution which is following up the steps of
war. And to the forces whose drift is shown by such way-
marks as these, we must confide the settlement of the great
questions of abstract justice, only imploring our legislators
to take good heed of them.f
Meanwhile, the fact of peace must be settled by the act of
war. The field of it is steadily narrowing ; the fury of it, as
both sides now anticipate, will be concentrated mainly in one
great, decisive blow. The loss of Savannah (December 21),
Columbia and Charleston (February 17, 18), and Wilmington
(February 22), slowly pushes back the strength of the rebel
lion upon its citadel and heart at Richmond. That grand flank
movement of our armies, commencing on the left wing at the
Rapidan, and on the right at Chattanooga, has swept in the
resisting forces, along that arc of a thousand miles, till the
debatable ground seems easy to embrace in the average calcu
lations of military engineering. And the highest official judg
ment is reported to have promised the definite result, provided
* Sec, especially, the late speech of Mr. Gholson, of Virginia, in the Rebel Con
gress. The Charleston Mercury says : " South Carolina entered into this struggle
for no other purpose than to maintain the institution of slavery. Southern inde
pendence has no other object or meaning. Independence and slavery must stand
or fall together."
t The terms of reconstruction in Tennessee, now under consideration by Con
gress, include the three following : — 1 . That no person shall be allowed to vote who
has held a Confederate military office higher than that of colonel, or a civil office
unless purely ministerial ; 2. That slavery shall be forever prohibited ; 3. That no
State or Confederate debt, created under the action of the usurping power, shall be
recognized or paid by the State, and no Rebel law of confiscation shall be binding.
1865.] Temper of the Parlies. 285
the material of war is not lacking, in the course of the open

ing spring campaign. And if we look to see in what spirit
that campaign is met by the South, we find it in such declara
tions as the following, from the Raleigh Whig : —
" In the purest spirit of patriotism, in the highest love for the South
and all her cherished institutions, — her brave, courageous, self-sacri
ficing people, — we affirm that it is worse than madness for us to con
tinue the one-sided conflict. The spirit of our people is broken under
a succession of disastrous defeats ; the Yankees are flushed with bril
liant and flashing victories ; we have lost the sea-coast ; Sherman and
Thomas menace the interior, and Grant holds in his vice-like grasp the
only effective army in the Confederacy. Anything, — peace, honor
able or dishonorable, with or without slavery, — the old Union, — any
thing under Heaven is preferable to the utter, irretrievable ruin now
awaiting us."
As to the temper of the coming reconstruction, as testified
at the North, it is, as we have always claimed, glad and gen
erous and only too confiding. When was there ever such a
token of public confidence to be recorded, as the serious pro
posal lately made among responsible business men, to pay off the
vast national debt by subscription, as a good business invest
ment, to relieve the burden on the future ? When was such
welcome given to rescued city or conquered province, as the
spirit in which General Sherman's " Christmas gift" of Savan
nah to the nation was received, and the spontaneous flow of
bounty from our Northern ports ? When before was it the
first act of the forces occupying a city won by a weary siege, —
as of ours just now in Charleston, — to rescue the miserable
population from the terror, and the buildings from the flames,
to which they had been doomed by their defenders? This
absolute confidence in the good feeling subsisting at bottom,
through all the storm of war, — this cheerful reliance on the
elements of a common nationality, to be found at the heart of
the population, both North and South, — has never once been
shaken through these years of contest. It was the privilege
of Edward Everett to close his fifty years of splendid service
to this nation by the noble utterance of that sentiment, with
which. we conclude: —
" While we subdue the armies which a merciless conscription of old
286 Review of Current Literature. [March,
and young drives to the field, and maintain a cordon of iron and fire
around the shores of persistent rebellion, from the moment a desire is
manifested on the part of the ma-ses to acknowledge the authority of
the government, let us hasten to extend to them the right hand of
Christian love, to supply their wants and to relieve their sufferings,
and to mark their return to the Union by the return of a prosperity to
which, by the selfish and cruel ambition of their leaders, they have so
long been strangers."
Art. Vin. — REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.
THEOLOGY.
The article on the Paulist Fathers, in our January number, would

lead readers to expect something in their sermons different from the
usual style of Catholic discourse. In the new volume, for the year
1864,* there are several things remarkable. It is issued by a Protes
tant publisher. Three quarters of the twenty-six sermons might be
preached in a Protestant pulpit, in a Unitarian pulpit even, with no
suspicion of their Catholic origin. In one discourse we learn that
" heaven " is not a place ; in another, that the Scriptural description
of hell torment is only " figurative " ; in another, Jesus is called our
" elder brother " ; in another, we learn that there are good Christians
who are not in the Catholic Church, — yet who are saved ; in another,
that conversion may come more than once ; in another, that the only
damning sin is voluntary and conscious sin. It is pleasant to read (on
p. 14), that those who do not find heaven where they are, in their daily
business, have a poor chance of reaching it at all ; though it is not so
pleasant to know (p. 105) that the paradise of infants is in the " low
est corner of heaven, farthest from the throne of God." In simplicity,
clearness, and grace of style, in purity, vigor, and freshness of thought,
and in aptness of illustration, these sermons are among the best speci
mens of pulpit addresses that we have lately seen. The weakest among
them are the four or five that are specially Catholic, and undertake to
explain Catholic dogmas and customs.
The new Life of Jesus, by Strauss,t of which the accurate French

translation is more easy and pleasant to read than the hard original, is
declared in the Preface to be a wholly new work, prepared not for
scholars, but "for the German people," —f&r das Deutsche Volk bear-
beitet. Yet, after all, though the form is somewhat changed, and the
* Sermons preached at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, 'New York, during
the Year 1864. New York : D. Appleton & Co. 1865. 12mo. pp 404.
t D. F. Strauss. Nouvclle Vie de Jesus. Traduite de l'Allemand, par A.
Nefftzer ct Cii. Dollfdb. I'm is. 1864. 8yo. 2 vuls. pp. xviii., 425, 428.
style is somewhat popularized, it is only the old work in a new dress.
The theory is the theory of the former work, that the Evangelical his
tories are collections of myths, — of legend and fable, laid more or less
thickly upon a very thin fabric of fact, which can hardly be discovered
beneath the covering. The tone is that same cold tone of the scientific
critic, who does not care what comes of his criticism, what feelings it
wounds, what faith it destroys, what inferences are drawn from it.
Again, the facts in the life of Jesus, his miracles, his parables, all the
scenes in which he appears, pass before us only to reveal the way of
their invention, and to lose reality. This new Life of Jesus, like the
former, is a chilling and cheerless book. It lacks the warmth, the
glow, the human interest, that carries us along in the brilliant romance
which Renan calls the Life of Jesus. With all its subtlety, with all its
sincerity, with all its learning, it is a painful and desolate book to read.
And yet it is certainly an interesting and valuable book. Its plan is
scientific. We have first an Introduction, critical and historical ; then
a sketch of the life of Jesus ; and, finally, an elaborate discussion of the
origin, growth, and purpose of the mythical stories, from the Genealo
gies to the Ascension, arranged in orderly groups. The Introduction,
too, is in three parts. The first of these states and criticises (on the
whole with fairness) the several modern theories of the life of Jesus,
from a hundred years ago to the late works of Schenkel and Renan.
The theories of Herder, Paulus, Schleiermacher, Hase, Neander, El-
vard, Weisse, and Ewald, besides Strauss's own former work, pass
under review. In speaking of these writers, particularly of Ewald,
Strauss is not particular about his tone, which is often petulant and
abusive. Yet he does not misrepresent the views of the men whom he
berates. This review of other lives of Jesus, and sketch of the progress
of thought upon the subject, is one of the new and one of the agree
able features of Strauss's work. It gives a good deal of information in
a small compass.
The second part of the Introduction discusses the four Gospels,
how far they are to be trusted, what are their relations to each other,
the external and the internal evidence of their genuineness. The con
clusion of this survey is, that no one of them is genuine, and no one
authentic ; that they are none of them by eyewitnesses of the facts
which they relate ; and that the names which they bear are not the
names of their authors, in any instance. Strauss agrees with Mr. L.
A. Sawyer in finding another sense than the one usually received in
the preposition Kara, according to, in the titles of the Gospels. It
seems to him that this implies that the nominal Evangelists were not
the actual authors of the books. All the Gospels, he thinks, were com
piled not earlier than the second century, and compiled with a more or
less distinct dogmatic purpose. Their relative worth he does not pro
nounce upon very decidedly, though on the whole he seems to find the
order of their place in the canon the order of their probable importance.
John's Gospel is certainly the least trustworthy, and gives really no
correct idea of Jesus, either of what he said or of what he did.
Strauss's discussion of this subject seems to us to be by no means
thorough or candid. It ia a special plea more than an honest investi
gation.
The third part of the Introduction states distinctly the " Principles "
of the work, what it denies and what it affirms. And these " princi
ples " change the work from a purely scientific to a semi-dogmatic
work. They are, first, that, all miracle being impossible, all stories of
miracle are necessarily false ; and, second, that myth is to be presumed
in all cases where there is contradiction between the narratives, or
where any plausible account can be given of their fabulous origin. On
the principles of Strauss, it is not necessary to find any reality in the
Gospel narratives. The veracious history which they contain does not
give thein any greater value. The myths are worth just as much as
the facts, just as much for the faith of the believer and for the history
of the Christian Church. In giving an " historical sketch " of the life of
Jesus at all, Strauss only condescends to a popular prejudice. .
And this makes the " historical sketch " which he gives the most
meagre and unsatisfactory portion of his work. It fills only one quarter
of the book, and, if the critical and destructive portion of this were ex
cluded, would fill hardly more than a tenth of the book. It utterly fails
to give any distinct portrait of Jesus. It has rather the effect of putting
the man Jesus out of sight. Renan substitutes another Jesus for the
Jesus of the Gospels, but nevertheless brings his Jesus out very dis
tinctly. Strauss only shows that the figure which the Gospel narratives
give is impossible as an actual man.
The third part of the work is only a" reproduction of the former his
tory, in which ingenious analogies, far-fetched likenesses from Hebrew
and Pagan history, are brought to show how the fictions of the Gospels
might have arisen, and therefore did arise. The argument is too in
genious to be convincing. In some particulars it is plausible ; but the
universal application which Strauss makes of his mythical theory
brings the whole of it into suspicion. The conclusion is anything but
comfortable. Very few, we imagine, will agree to the statement of
this writer, that Socrates, in the narratives of Xenophon and Plato, is a
more living personage than Jesus in the records of the four Evange
lists. The honor to the Man of Nazareth is doled out most grudgingly.
AH that Strauss allows of the man Jesus is, that he uttered probably
some valuable maxims for individual morality and conduct. He did
nothing for the political or industrial interests of the world, or for the
welfare of the family.
The Renan Controversy in France.

The war of pamphlets in France, stirred by the publication of Re-
nan's " Life of Jesus," and already counting its several scores of publi
cations, is so curious a chapter in the history of opinion that it deserves
a careful study by itself. We have been disappointed, hitherto, in ob
taining materials for such a sketch of it as we had wished. Meanwhile,
and by way of introduction to some further criticisms on the work
itself, which we hope to give in May, we will illustrate the controver
sy by a brief examination of three of the more important publications
in it, — one from the point of view of a modified advocacy, one from
that of pure scientific criticism, and one from that of a religious and
enlightened liberalism.
I.
In the first which we shall mention,* M. Haret professes not to ad
dress those fixed in the orthodox beliefs. All he can do is to put his
conscience against theirs, and to claim the right which they claim, of
holding the opinion which seems to him true, and of publishing what he
believes profitable to be read. But he does address those — a large
number — who think the agitaiion of such matters unsafe, or a bad ex
ample, or in ill taste. Let them take the honest course, either rank
themselves frankly with orthodoxy, or not complain at free discussion.
Renan's book could hardly be more praised than by M. Haret ; and,
on the whole, the praise is given for what in the book is admirable. No
one can have a higher opinion of Renan's qualifications for the work,
whether as schojtff or artist or writer. He plainly has a great liking,
a personal affection, for the man. He esteems the Vie de Jesus as one of
those books which fill a need so exactly, that one wonders at their not
appearing sooner. One man might have written the Life of Jesus, i. e.
Pascal. He had the eloquence, imagination, genius, for it. But he died
at the age of thirty-nine. Voltaire, in the article " Religion," in his
Dictionary, gives a hint that he was not so wholly a railer that he did
not appreciate something of the true place and character of Jesus. He
had the free thinking for the work, but not the genius. D'Holbach's
criticism of the Gospels was polemic, not historical. Strauss's book is
not a biography so much as a criticism of the evidence. And Salva
dor's " Jesus Christ and His Doctrines," being written by a Jew, is not
a book outside of all dogma and of every church, as the Life of Jesus
ought to he. Lamennais might have done it, as is shown by his Trans
lation of the Gospels, and his notes, except that at the time he did that
promising book he was close upon seventy-one. Thus the way was
left open to M. Renan. And in this finished philologer and Orientalist,
this intellect at once learned, forceful, and poetic, this long sojourner
in the places where the life of Jesus fell, is found the trusty writer of
the story of it.
The first part of M. Haret's book is taken up with the consideration
of what M. Renan has accomplished in bringing out the figure of Jesus
in a lifelike way and with consummate skill and truthfulness. In
closing this part he says : —
" I like, then, in the book of M. Renan, equally the philosophic largeness of
the thought, the sagacity which penetrates the past, the imagination and the
style which makes it live again, the soul in it which is itself moved and moves
us, and, lastly, the generous freedom which places itself above false scruples,
and boldly accomplishes good by truth."
In the second part, Haret brings forward objections to certain details
in the Vie de Jesus, where criticism is not applied firmly and severely
» Je"sus dans l'Histoire : Examen do la Vie de Jesus, par M. Renan. Par
Eknkst Haret. Paris. (First published in the " Revue des Deux Moudes.")
VOL. LXXVIII. — 5th S. TOL. XVI. NO. II. 25
and young drives to the field, and maintain a cordon of iron and fire
around the shores of persistent rebellion, from the moment a desire is
manifested on the part of the masses to acknowledge the authority of
the government, let us hasten to extend to them the right hand of
Christian love, to supply their wants and to relieve their sufferings,
and to mark their return to the Union by the return of a prosperity to
which, by the selfish and cruel ambition of their leaders, they have so
long been strangers.”
ART. VIII. – REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.
The OLOGY.
THE article on the Paulist Fathers, in our January number, would

lead readers to expect something in their sermons different from the
usual style of Catholic discourse. In the new volume, for the year
1864,” there are several things remarkable. It is issued by a Protes
tant publisher. Three quarters of the twenty-six sermons might be
preached in a Protestant pulpit, in a Unitarian pulpit even, with no
suspicion of their Catholic origin. In one discourse we learn that
“heaven” is not a place; in another, that the Scriptural description
of hell torment is only “figurative "; in another, Jesus is called our
“elder brother ”; in another, we learn that there are good Christians
who are not in the Catholic Church, – yet who are saved; in another,
that conversion may come more than once ; in another, that the only
damning sin is voluntary and conscious sin. It is pleasant to read (on
p. 14), that those who do not find heaven where they are, in their daily
business, have a poor chance of reaching it at all ; though it is not so
pleasant to know (p. 105) that the paradise of infants is in the “low
est corner of heaven, farthest from the throne of God.” In simplicity,
clearness, and grace of style, in purity, vigor, and freshness of thought,
and in aptness of illustration, these sermons are among the best speci
mens of pulpit addresses that we have lately seen. The weakest among
them are the four or five that are specially Catholic, and undertake to
explain Catholic dogmas and customs.
The new Life of Jesus, by Strauss, f of which the accurate French
translation is more easy and pleasant to read than the hard original, is
declared in the Preface to be a wholly new work, prepared not for
scholars, but “for the German people,” — für das Deutsche Volk bear
beitet. Yet, after all, though the form is somewhat changed, and the
* Sermons preached at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, "New York, during
the Year 1864. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1865. 12mo, pp. 404.
t D. F. Strauss. Nouvelle Vie de Jésus. Traduite de l’Allemand, par A.
NEFFTzen et CH. Dollfus. Paris. 1864. 8vo. 2 vols. pp. xviii., 425, 428.
style is somewhat popularized, it is only the old work in a new dress.

The theory is the theory of the former work, that the Evangelical his
tories are collections of myths, – of legend and fable, laid more or less
thickly upon a very thin fabric of fact, which can hardly be discovered
beneath the covering. The tone is that same cold tone of the scientific
critic, who does not care what comes of his criticism, what feelings it
wounds, what faith it destroys, what inferences are drawn from it.
Again, the facts in the life of Jesus, his miracles, his parables, all the
scenes in which he appears, pass before us only to reveal the way of
their invention, and to lose reality. This new Life of Jesus, like the
former, is a chilling and cheerless book. It lacks the warmth, the
glow, the human interest, that carries us along in the brilliant, romance
which Renan calls the Life of Jesus. With all its subtlety, with all its
sincerity, with all its learning, it is a painful and desolate book to read.
And yet it is certainly an interesting and valuable book. Its plan is
scientific. We have first an Introduction, critical and historical ; then
a sketch of the life of Jesus; and, finally, an elaborate discussion of the
origin, growth, and purpose of the mythical stories, from the Genealo
gies to the Ascension, arranged in orderly groups. The Introduction,
too, is in three parts. The first of these states and criticises (on the
whole with fairness) the several modern theories of the life of Jesus,
from a hundred years ago to the late works of Schenkel and Renan.
The theories of Herder, Paulus, Schleiermacher, Hase, Neander, El
vard, Weisse, and Ewald, besides Strauss's own former work, pass
under review. In speaking of these writers, particularly of Ewald,
Strauss is not particular about his tone, which is often petulant and
abusive. Yet he does not misrepresent the views of the men whom he
berates. This review of other lives of Jesus, and sketch of the progress
of thought upon the subject, is one of the new and one of the agree
able features of Strauss's work. It gives a good deal of information in
a small compass.
The second part of the Introduction discusses the four Gospels,
how far they are to be trusted, what are their relations to each bther,
the external and the internal evidence of their genuineness. The con
clusion of this survey is, that no one of them is genuine, and no one
! authentic; that they are none of them by eyewitnesses of the facts
which they relate; and that the names which they bear are not the
names of their authors, in any instance. Strauss agrees with Mr. L.
A. Sawyer in finding another sense than the one usually received in
the preposition « ar 4, according to, in the titles of the Gospels. It
seems to him that this implies that the nominal Evangelists were not
the actual authors of the books. All the Gospels, he thinks, were com
piled not earlier than the second century, and compiled with a more or
less distinct dogmatic purpose. Their relative worth he does not pro
nounce upon very decidedly, though on the whole he seems to find the
order of their place in the canon the order of their probable importance.
John's Gospel is certainly the least trustworthy, and gives really no
correct idea of Jesus, either of what he said or of what he did.
Strauss's discussion of this subject seems to us to be by no means
enough. Learned and bold as the book is, he finds certain placebot in
it, certain "compliant suppositions," which suppose too much for a
strict historical treatment. That Haret is destructive enough appears
in this : " I think that not only Jesus wrote nothing, but that the com
panions of Jesus wrote nothing ; that therefore no Gospel and no portion
of a Gospel is authentic, and that there is no authentic writing in what
is called the New Testament, save the letters of Saint Paul." No won
der, then, that Renan seems to him indecisive and shifting in his use of
the documents, and is blamed by him for using the ideal Jesus some
times in his picture, instead of simply bringing out all — the little — that
can be reproduced of the historical person.
II.
Colani * thinks himself fortunate in taking up the work after the

noisy declamation against M. Renan is over, and after the excessive
enthusiasm is calmed which was excited by the boldness of the enter
prise. He proposes to consider the Vie de Jesus from the point of
view of cold and impartial science. And he does it, bringing to the
work a most careful, calm, and searching criticism, armed and equipped
with an admirable knowledge of all the points at issue between the
Gospels and their historical critics, and of all that has been said for
destruction and construction. He gives Renan's incertitudes and in
consistencies and arbitrary dealing with the documents a thorough sift
ing.
He considers, first, his historic method, second, his principal result.
Under the first head, he criticises, with great clearness, Renan's
use of the fourth Gospel as if it were the work, to all intents, of an
eyewitness. As to Renan's explanation of the raising of Lazarus:
" He has shocked the religious feeling and even the moral sentiment
of his readers, simply because he believes in the authenticity of the
fourth Gospel." With great keenness he shows up many a contradic
tion, indicating a method but little sure of itself. He shows the arbi
trariness with which Renan uses and refuses facts, — especially in
his treatment of the accounts of the " Supper." Giving him the right
of artistic, imaginative divination, he blames him for substituting in
vention, once and again.
He shows — in respect to the fourth Gospel — that Renan declares
for its relative authenticity : again, in comparing John with the Synop
tics, he seems to trust entirely to the credibility of it : still again, he
makes no more account of John's narrative than the school of Baur.
" His scientific process has a certain something shitting, intangible,
inconsistent, about it, a mistiness hardly to be expected after the rude
criticism of Strauss." Considering the vital differences between the
Synoptics and John, the writer of a Life of Jesus ought at first to take
a side which shall show its influence throughout his work. M. Renan
has not done this.
* Ex amen de la Vie de Jeans, de M. Renan. Par T. Colani. (Extreit de la

" Revue de Thcologie.") Strasbourg.
Colani is especially severe on Renan's two epochs in the life of
Jesus ; — the one, the Galilean, joyous, ideal ; the other, the Jerusalem,
sombre, polemic; — and upon Renan's fancy that Jesus was one thing
before John the Baptist's influence, and another thing after it. He
shows it to be by an arbitrary dealing with the documents, and by the
foregone conclusion of a theory, that Renan finds Jesus not at once,
but successively, the gentle comforter of the sorrowful and the bold
accuser of hypocrites. " He breaks the living unity which tempers
and solves the contrasts of this mighty life, and makes of the tender
ness and zeal of Jesus, not two qualities, but two epochs."
The framework of Renan's book is neither that of the Synoptics, nor
that of John. His periods of the development of Jesus are not sus
tained by a single trace in either Gospel. This framework is pure
invention both as to facts and as to dates ; which seems passably severe
in M. Colani, but he shows good reason in the penetration and skill
of his criticism, backed by that knowledge of the Gospels, and of the
pro and con of the critical controversy, which marks all the Strasburg
school.
In Part Second Colani asks what portrait Renan has painted, using
the Gospels in this manner. The portrait is faulty : especially in this,
that Renan attributes to Jesus the notions and preoccupations of his time
and his people as to the Messiah. In short, it is the portrait of a Jew
who believed himself to be the Messiah and had the apocalyptic no
tions of Paul and the first century of the Church. This Colani com
bats sit length, with all his might and with striking ability. It is the
same course that he pursues in his excellent book on the " Messianic
Beliefs of the Time of Jesus." He shows that Jesus does not claim
to be " Son of David," nor " Son of God," in the prevalent Messianic
sense, but calls himself (eighty-three times) " Son of Man." This
title is of his own creation. Renan, building up his framework on
the basis of Jesus believing himself Messiah, is all wrong. " If Jesus
held the apocalyptic beliefs you ascribe to him, his life and his death
have nothing real, serious, human in them."
To Colani, this Messianic matter is the capital question. " It is
because he has solved it ill, in my judgment, that the new historian
of the sources of Christianity has not been able to comprehend the
peerless greatness of the Galilean, but has found himself obliged to
impute to him I know not what shabby policy The painter
has painted what he saw from his very false point of view ; he has
taken for reality his optical illusions ; he has drawn conclusions from
his own premises."
Colani gives credit to Renan, touching the miracles, for many just
observations; but is down upon him, with all his criticism, for his
suggestions and accusations of vulgar wonder-working to satisfy the
Messianic hopes of the people. Colani does not switch off into relig
ious or moral sentiment, but holds himself firm to the ground of impar
tial science and history. He is particularly sorry and indignant at the
wretched Lazarus fiasco of Renan.
This leads him to Renan's doubts of the pure sincerity of Jesus,
which he demolishes, — still by scientific criticism and historic testi
mony. Renan does not believe heartily (only artistically) in the Ideal.
" How should he then comprehend Jesus of Nazareth ? He could see
in him only a noble dreamer, who knew nothing of the true conditions
of humanity. We touch here, I believe, the capital vice of the new
Vie de Jestu."
Colani lays down the pen, giving due credit to Renan for many
excellent things in his book ; but concludes, frankly, that the por
trait in it is of a more than doubtful likeness, and, besides, not living.
Speaking for the Strasburg school, he says : —
" We opened the book of M. Renan with sympathetic interest. AVe closed
it with lively disappointment. Our hope does not lie in that direction. We
must have a Life of Jesus based upon critical researches much severer and
more original, and written with a loftier moral sentiment, more conformed ty
the spirit of Him who gave his life for the victory of the truth among men."
in.
ReVille* is not so sharp against Renan as Colani, — likes him bet
ter, knows him and admires him. He divides his pamphlet into two
parts; — I. An apology for the book. II. A criticism upon it.
I. An apology, not as an advocate of the book, for it needs none,
but as entering an energetic protest against the intolerance and ill-will
which have been shown toward it and the writer of it. Yet may Re
nan say with Strauss, when they told him of the injurious replies to his
Leben Jesu, that they were to be regarded not more than women's cries
when a gun is shot off. " These cries," he said, " do not mean that any
one is hurt, but only that a gun has been fired."
The orthodox replies to Renan, Reville complains justly, have been
marked with that most offensive and insolent form of intolerance, the
fatal confounding of belief with the moral temper. This is effective in
abusing a man, but it is not good against that prime and leading ques
tion, the question of the supernatural. Reville shows how, in this
regard, the Deistical orthodoxy, the Protestant orthodoxy, and the
Roman Catholic orthodoxy have dealt with the book.
As to the first two, he cites two pamphlets: — 1. "Opinion des De-
istes Nationalist!'-; sur la Vie de Jesus selon M. Renan. Par P.
Larroque." 2.,"L'Ecole Critique et Jesus Christ, a propos de la Vie
de J«5sus de M. Renan. Par E. de PressenseV'
When we read the first, it seemed to us the work of a man some
what annoyed and spiteful that any one should try to reinstate the
Christian religion by any means, and who would formally read out M.
Renan from the deistical ranks. RcVille blames this orthodoxical
tone, and finds fault with Larroque because he cites here and there
passages at random, and judges the book in this external way, instead
of discussing the principles of it.
As to the other, one is struck, in reading it, with its power and its
* La Vie de Jesus, de M. Renan, derant les Orthodoxies et devant la Critique.
Par M. Albert Reville. Paris.
clear and cultured style of writing, and the good hits at Renan. Still
there is a savor of orthodoxy unto orthodoxy about it. This Re\'ille
much dislikes, — and the more, it seems, as coming from a liberal ortho
doxy, — making against it this telling statement : " His conception of the
Trinity is more Arian than anything else ; his theory of Inspiration
logically issues in the sovereignty of the individual conscience ; in re
gard to Redemption, his views have something indecisive and foggy
about them which- prevents equally criticism of them and consent to
them ; and as to Tolerance, no one has more warmly defended the cause
of freedom in worship." From one in this position, R^ville thinks to
see good treatment of the book. But here is an "orthodoxie effray-
ante," and the proceeding of an advocate, not a critic, and the true
orthodox illusion which supposes an adversary refuted because he has
been parried with a flippant and cutting answer. In fine : —
" Deism cannot understand Renan, and consequently cannot refute him,
because it cannot conceive a Christianity without miracle. Orthodoxy shows
the same impotency, because it is condemned to treat, from its own tradi
tional, aprionstic, supernatural point of view, an order of facts of which his
torical criticism has decisively taken possession."
As to Romanist Orthodoxy vs. Renan, Rdville takes up a " criti
cal (?) examination of the Vie de Jesus " by the Abbe Freppel, Sor-
bonne Professor, which abuses to the top of its bent, after the way of
popes, priests, and fishwomen, and insinuates that Renan is something
like a second Judas. " Never was folly so joined to insolence." " The
author has done a bad deed and made a wicked book." We remember
as more dignified and decent, — in the high episcopal mood, — a charge
to his clergy by Mgr. Plantier, Bishop of Nismes, finishing with a for
mal condemnation !
Reville's second part — the critical — is the best thing in this con
nection we know ; — best in respect to temper in treating Renan and his
book, being perfectly generous and fair and kind ; best in truly earnest
religious sentiment, which warms up and brightens every line ; best in
its clear loyalty to the truth and keen penetration of the critical faults
and blunders of the Vie de Jesus. It is not so minute an .investigation
as Colani's. But it is as outspoken and damaging as to the delicto in
interpretation and criticism. And it is in this respect, perhaps, more
damaging than Colani, because he puts a so much higher estimate on
the book in general. And then his style is charmingly fresh and bright,
and by his suggestions and his honest view he is, perhaps, more satis
factory than Colani in his minute search.
His objections are threefold ; — 1. In the way of Art (the historian's
art).; 2. In the way of Religious Philosophy; 3. In the way of Bibli
cal Criticism. In these three ways he finds the Vie de Jesus faulty.
1. Renan is not true to his art, both in not being true to the peerless
moral sublimity of Jesus, and in his failure to see the perfect congruity
in Jesus, from the beginning to the end of his work. Jesus is not, as
Renan inartistically fashions him, the charmant docteur of Galilee and
the sombre yeant of Jerusalem.
2. Rerille regrets that there is not a more thorough harmony be
25*
tween Renan's religious philosophy and the constituent ideas of the
doctrine of the kingdom of God. He indicates the shifting of Renan
hetween the objective and subjective God, the Heavenly Father of
Jesus, and the transfiguration of self of the speculator. He thinks there
is a better reconcilement between the religious sentiment and the claims
of scientific knowledge than in this incertitude.
" Say that God is the Ideal. Very well : but this ideal must be living, and
not an abstraction. If it is not living, if there is nothing objective in this
allurement by which it acts upon me individually, then the world is turned
upside down, it is I who create my God, who beget my father, and we are
floundering in an inextricable logomachy, where words, dancing on their
heads, mean just the opposite of what they lay."
So much for the objection to the religious philosophy of the Vie de
Jesus. But Reville will not allow Renan's ambiguity and indecision to
be treated by the enemies of his book as tricky, disloyal subterfuge.
" If they were as religious as they think themselves, and as familiar with
high philosophy as they claim to be, they would sooner respect the embarrass
ment of an honest conscience, which doubts, which seeks, which likes better
to rest in what is vague, and even to contradict itself, than to disfigure the
unknown truth by giving it features fixed and perhaps unfaithful. This state
of mind comes too naturally by the religious crisis in which our age is strug
gling, to astonish any save those who have the good fortune or the evil fortune
to remain apart from it."
3. In respect to Biblical Criticism, the point of difference and
offence is with Renville as with Colani, — Renan's use of the fourth Gos
pel as authentic From the clear authenticity of the Synoptics, Renan
persists in not drawing the conclusion that the fourth is inauthentic
Therefore, he tumbles into that wretched Lazarus business, anil hints at
thaumaturgy, and falls into arbitrary conclusions which do not stand
before a severe method, and into exaggerations, and into amazing mis
takes of interpretation. This is all treated in the clearest and most
cogent manner, and with the most charming temper in the world, — de
cisive, it seems to us, against Renan's use of the fourth Gospel and the
critical slips he is guilty of.
Here, Reville takes up the apocalyptic vie vs of Jesus in contrast
with those of his time, and his view of his miracles. Both these points
are taken up with striking vigor and vivacity, as against Renan.
" I close," he says, " although matters of criticism and of praise multiply
further than the eye can reach, or, rather, because of that M. Ke
nan's book will mark a date in our literary history, and still more in the his
tory of our spiritual progress. On the other hand, I believe I am right in
adding that Jesus does not appear in this biography as grand, as pure, as he
is in reality."
In connection with this extreme liberty of discussion in religious

matters, the sudden appearance of the Pope's Encyclical Letter of De
cember 8, 1864, with its Appendix of December 22, reciting eighty
prevalent heresies of the present day, condemning liberty of thought,
and reasserting the most arrogant claims of ecclesiastical power made
in any era of the Papacy, offers a very curious problem. Very re
1865.] Essays, etc. 295
spectable Catholic authority has declared it a. political blunder, a coup
d'elat, a serious blow at the very existence of the spiritual power
of the hierarchy. As to its effect in Europe, we are told : " The
Encyclical Letter has been condemned by every Catholic power. In
France its publication has been prohibited, in Spain the ministry have
announced that they will ' act energetically ' against any priest who
may break the law, in Italy the government has allowed the procla
mation of jubilee and disallowed the remainder, and in Bavaria the
Cabinet is resolved to ' maintain the privileges of the state.' In Rus
sia the Emperor will, it is asserted, take advantage of the opportunity
to abolish the Roman Catholic Church of Poland, not by prohibiting
that form of worship, but by declaring that all the powers possessed
by the Pope shall henceforward be exercised by an archbishop, to be
appointed and removed by the Czar." *
But we are chiefly interested to know how it has been received
among the Roman Catholics of America. If they accept the asser
tion of the head of their Church, putting " under the ban " the very
foundations of republican government itself, it would seem that they
must elect between their allegiance to the United States and Rome,
or else invite a deadly struggle for religious liberty in this hemisphere.
We hope- and expect better things of them, as American, citizens ; but
it must tax the resources of casuistry to reconcile true allegiance here
with submission to that ecclesiastical prerogative which asserts itself
to be the same to-day as when its agencies were a St. Bartholomew's
Massacre or an Albigensian Crusade.
ESSAYS, ETC.
M. Acghste Latjgel is known in this country as the author of

several articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes, in which the objects
and character of the present war have been explained with ability, and
its justice defended with eloquence. His recent work, entitled Pro-
blemes de la Nature,^ exhibits the same powers of analysis, and the same
generous fervor, but in a critical application and a different sphere. It
is an effort to reconcile, so far as may be, not dogmatically, for he has
no system to establish, but in a large, necessary way, the study of phi
losophy and the pursuit of science ; to take up again the abandoned
traditions of Pascal and Leibnitz, and once more to reunite positive
and speculative science ; for mental speculation is but another form of
observation. Logic does not create, it only develops ideas, — " and
that which I have sought in the retorts of the laboratory, behind the
glass covers in the museums, among the leaves of herbaria, and in
zoological gardens, — it is ideas." In the presence of thought, the
world becomes ideal, assumes as it were a soul. " The formulas of the
differential calculus and of mechanics, as well as the marvels of the
physical world, have always brought me back to philosophy." There
is, indeed, a singular pleasure in thus wandering at will in the vast and
* The Wcsleyan Methodist.

t Les Probleines de la Nature. Par Auguste Laloel. Paris : Germer Bail-
lierc. New York : Bailliere Brothers.
vague regions which lie between the domains of metaphysics and of
science. You may follow different streams, but they all conduct you
to one and the same great ocean at last. And those who have felt the
fascination to which M. Laugel alludes will thank him for the many
acute suggestions contained in the little book he now gives to the world,
— to be followed hereafter by two other volumes devoted ^respective
ly to the Problemes de la Vie, and the Problemes de FAme, — as
cending thus from the inorganic world to man.
In the Problemes de la Nature, he considers only the universe as it is
subject to chemico-physical forces, without touching upon life otherwise
than to show its point of contact with them ; and in his analysis of ma
terial phenomena he reduces everything to two terms, force and form.
Substance he considers to be subject to the action of a universal and
eternal force, changing with its metamorphoses ; and he indicates the
necessity now existing in science to trace side by side with dynamics
the outlines of a system of aesthetics, since force does not explain every
thing, but only modifies form, while the latter, like force, is something
absolute in itself. The present volume, therefore, is chiefly occupied
with an exposition of the method and the character of the sciences, and
the limitations which they encounter from our senses and the infirmity
of our understanding, incapable of comprehending intuitively laws of
which the expression is not reduced to simple terms. Stripping them
of what is tangible, he exhibits them in their ideal relations, reducing
astronomy, chemistry, physics, to universal dynamics, indicating thus
the profound and mysterious communion of all scientific laws as yet
known with the rational and ideal laws of movement.
It is impossible, as M. Laugel says, to separate psychological from
scientific studies. And if the latter have served the cause of a vulgar
materialism, it is either because they were not pushed far enough, or
were badly interpreted by minds too eager to protest against the ancient
syi.tem of metaphysics. As water escapes from between the fingers, so
the idea of substance eludes our grasp the moment we attempt to sep
arate it from that of movement (and by consequence of force) and
from that of form. The consciousness of universal law is present to
this age in a greater degree than it has been to any other. This faith,
indeed, in the harmony and eternity of the forces of the world, breathes
through all the literature of the time ; our poetry is naturalistic ;
our criticism aims to detect the influence of climate and race in the
confused history of mankind. Yet, as M. Laugel says, and the fact is
too often overlooked, this idea of law takes from the world none of its
charms ; on the contrary, its beauty becomes even more fascinating.
The revelations of modern science may satisfy and weary the wildest
imagination ; for if they deny the miraculous, they present a world
which is itself a perpetual miracle. Their dominant idea is that of
development, finding expression alike in the formation of languages, as
of worlds, in the transformation of religions, as of plants, — a reason
sovereign, universal, ordering all things, — a force infinite, varying,
ceaseless. And to one who has such a faith, nothing can be indifferent,
for the slightest act brings with it the remotest consequences. Life
becomes invested with a grand solemnity.
1865.] Essays, etc. 297
Form and force are the supreme terms of human science. Esthetics
investigates the one ; dynamics exhibits the other. But the study of
form is still in its infancy. The ancient philosophy made no attempt to
reconcile these two terms of matter and thought, but the discovery of
the correlation of forces has changed the whole face of science ; life is
no longer separated from the living being, nor thought from the think
ing being, — universal Law is one with the universe itself.
Leigh Hunt, ever genial and instructive, is nowhere more genial

and instructive than in his " Seer." * The author was one of the most
loving and nimble-witted of men. What a happy spirit he was, and
what a good teacher he is of happiness to other men ! If any one is
pad, or grouty, or misanthropic, or disappointed, we can recommend no
finer or easier cure than for him to read the Seer of Leigh Hunt.
Thus it begins: — " Pleasure is the business of this book ; we own it.
We love to begin it with the word : it is like commencing the day with
sunshine in the room. Pleasure for all who can receive pleasure ; con
solation and encouragement for the rest, — this is our device." These
words truly describe the character of " The Seer." The writer, with
keen eye, warm heart, and felicitous pen, Irovers over a hundred topics
aiming to point out " the largest and the least sources of pleasure, to
break open the surfaces of habit and indifference and show what treas
ures they conceal." He believes man has not yet learned to enjoy
the world he lives in, and he would help him to do so. To this
high and beautiful task he brings rare qualifications. No one, until
he has read the papers, would imagine what riches of subtile thought,
good humor, and practical philosophy our author manages to extract
from such simple themes as Windows, Color, A Pebble, A Flower,
The East Wind, Nightmare, A Rainy Day, The Cat by the Fire, A
Gentleman Saint, Put up a Picture in your Room, Strawberries. The
treatment of these and kindred subjects is so wise, so graceful, so in
geniously calculated to profit while pleasing, that the reviewer feels it
a satisfaction to praise the work, a duty to thank the publishers for re
producing it in such an exceedingly attractive style, and a privilege to
urge all purchasers of the best books to add these volumes to the shelf
on which they keep their choice treasures. Here are a couple of sen
tences as specimens : — '• We feel a tenderness for every man when we
consider that he has been an infant, and a respect for him when we see
that he has had cares." " The reason why sweet music produces sad
ness surely is, that we have an instinctive sense of the fugitive and
perishing nature of all sweet things, of beauty, of youth, of life ; of all
those fair shows of the world, of which music seems to be the voice,
and of whose transitory nature it reminds us most when it is most
beautiful, because it is then that we most regret our mortality."
* The Seer : or Commonplaces Refreshed. By Leigh Hunt. Boston :
Roberts Brothers. 2 vols.
The new edition of Webster's Dictionary * is the completion of a
work of revision which was proposed and laid out as far back as 1847.
Nearly a score of years is none too much for so arduous and important
a labor. And the excellent result now shows the time has been well
spent. The long changing, amplifying, adding, and pruning are brought
to a good ending. The last revision is a great advance upon the first,
and most honorable to those who have had it in hand. There will be
always room for the criticism of a scrupulous judgment and a fastidi
ous taste. Individual crotchets will not be kept out of any dictionary ;
and he who is nice about words will find every one open on some
points to his censure. But all intelligent and conscientious work of
this kind helps the cause of good letters. We congratulate, with a
good will, those who have had this in hand, upon crowning their labors
with so real a success. And we heartily welcome the new Dictionary
as a true service to literature.
The battle has been fought already whether dictionaries are to be
made picture-books. The praiser of the time which has gone must
compose himself, a9 gracefully as may be, to the existing state of things.
This is certain, that the Family Bible has lost its old place in the liking
and use of the children. Here 's metal more attractive. The dull dic
tionary has been changed into a treasury of pleasure for the little folks.
Nor is that uncouthness wholly wanting in these, which, as we remem
ber, made part of the charmed surprise in the Bible prints. If any
child wishes for a shuddering pleasure and a delightful horror, such as
his father had at sight of Apollyon in the Pilgrim's Progress of his
youth, almost any of the birds here will help him to it. Let us recom
mend the Flamingo, as likely to touch him that way. Or if he would
know how the German artist drew a camel " out of the depths of his
consciousness," let him turn to the " Bactrian." The Zebra will give
him an animating sense of the festive and " deboshed" manner of that
beast. The mild Aard-vark may show him that the contemplative life
has charms for brute philosophers, as well as human. And if the Rhi-
twhphus does not scare him even to nightmare, he is a boy of very dull
fancy. Any dulness, however, in that direction, will be done away at
once upon sight of the mythologic deities here figured. Faculty the
most dormant must stir responsive to the wild fancy which presided at
the drawing of these forms. It were insidious to choose. But Saturn,
perhaps, most amazes us. The "ancient statue" from which it is taken
were worth a pilgrimage to see.
In seriousness, we regret that these pagos should be loaded and dis
figured with so many poorly drawn and worse conceived little pictures.
Illustrations in a dictionary are an obvious help, if given with discre
tion. What could be made of "Putlog," or "Ampyx," without the
pictures ? Many terms in mechanics, science, art, heraldry, in naval
and military matters, and the like, are most clearly defined to the eye.
* An American Dictionary of the English Language. By Noah Webster,
LL. D. Thoroughly Revised and greatly Enlarged and Improved, by Ciiauncby
A. Goodrich, D. D., LL. D., and Noah Pobtkr, D. D. Springfield, Mass. : G.
& C. Merriam. 1864.
1865.] Webster's Dictionary. . 299
We recognize the fitness of illustrations in respect, of these, and find
them here, for the most part, well done. The terminology of botany
is specially well illustrated, with correct and graceful drawings. The
conservative lover of the clean page of Johnson or liichardson may
lament their intrusion, but we would not be without their help. Their
aid compensates, without doubt, for the lumbering of the book with
frequent ugly and useless ones. But we could wish it were not too late
to rid it of its many deformities.
The battle, too, seems fought out in respect to the Websterian orthog
raphy. It is not worth while to discuss the peculiarities of it, since
they will go, in the long run, for what they are worth. It is in a very
few words that it differs from the best use. And this new edition, with
good sense, leaves the choice open. Only, if the jus el norma loquendt
decides, at last, for "mold" and "theater" and "worshiper," we are
thankful it will not be till we arc dead, and gone where the orthographic
wicked cease from troubling.
The advance in philological study, in these last years, made a care
ful revision of the etymology necessary. The new edition merits atten
tion for the pains bestowed on it, and for the completeness of the work.
What scholarly learning and research have gone to finish it fairly,
and give it real value, a glance at any page is enough to show. The
Preface tells us that it has been, since 1854, in the capable hands of
Dr. Mahn of Berlin, whose competency is newly certified here, as
it was before marked in his editorship of the last edition of Ileyse's
Fremdworterbuch, and in his own Etymologische Vntersuchungen auf
dttn Gebiete der Romanischen Sprachen. If the Dictionary deserved
less in other respects, the faithfulness and ability shown here would be
its sufficient recommendation.
It is almost superfluous to speak of the excellence, in the main, of
the definitions. Musical terms, we note, are laid down with marked
simplicity and clearness ; as " Symphony " and " Melody." The same
is true of the terms of science and art in their various branches. It
seems that particular pains were taken with these, and experts set to
. work upon them. Some of their definitions amount to little treatises ;
as, for example, " Geometry," "Chemistry," "Geology." And not less
care is given to the general definitions, of which capital instances are
found under " Hand " and " Get." We observe with pleasure that
the absurd and pedantic subdivisions of meaning in former editions
have been subjected to a severe revision. The number of definitions,
for example, of " Go," is reduced from 39 to 11 ; of " Good," from 40
to 10 ; of " High," from 35 to 4 ; of " Give," from 23 to 7 ; of " Take,"
from 40 to 3; of "Turn," from 32 to 8; of "Run," from 56 to 3,—
all to the gain of fulness and clearness, as well as brevity. A similar
good work has been done in the vocabulary (consisting of more than
114,000 words), in which "self-explaining compounds have been de
signedly omitted by hundreds, if not by thousands." This reduction
might well be carried indefinitely further, by omitting nine tenths of
such prefixes as " un " and such affixes as " ness " and " ly," — which,
we hold, should be regarded by the dictionary-maker as simple infleo-
lions, such as the meagre genius of our language admits.
Of the introductory papers, we have read with most attention and
interest that on the " Principles of Pronunciation." This little treatise
is marked by nice observation and accuracy of ear, by just theory,
where theorizing comes in play, and, above all, by common sense in
the rules and suggestions. It is matter of regret that, in the rule for
the digraph, ph, the writer should have found the law of use too rigid
to admit of a decisive rebuke to the odious pronunciation dip for dif in
such words as *' Diphthong." And if he had anything to do with set
tling the pronunciation in the body of the work, we must wonder that
he allowed to " Fuchsia'' the slovenly, and, by the very definition there
laid down, patently incorrect pronunciation, fu-sht-d for the proper
fooks-x-a. Not long ago, we heard a conceited lecturer pronounce
" Vase," vaws. Think of it ! " You may break, you may shatter the
raws, if you will ! " We could hardly believe our pained and insulted
ears ; and thought that, if that inanity got ground in common speech,
the pillared firmament were rottenness and earth's base built on stub
ble. We turn to the " Synopsis of Words differently pronounced " ;
and, with special pleasure, we find one only authority for this wretched
cacophony, and that the Irish orthoepist, Knowles. Obviously, it is
the rich brogue passing itself off for English. The long o in "Bronze"
is a conceit originating with the same dubious foreign authority. Yet
we call to mind hearing our most fastidious of orators say bronze. The
synopsis is full and careful, and we have found reading it as amusing
as it is profitable.
This notice would be incomplete without a word upon the novel —
as far as we know, the exceptional — and valuable addition, in the
" Vocabulary of the Names of noted Fictitious Persons and Places." The
tutor used to prescribe to the young men in college a page of diction
ary every day. Had they followed the excellent advice, their thought
and language might have been medicined out of the crudeness and
many peccant humors of their callow age. But they would have taken
the prescription with a better grace, had the dictionaries of those days
held this vocabulary which it is so pleasant to look over. It may well
be believed that, as the maker of it says in his Preface, it was a task
of great difficulty. But it must have been not so much in gathering
material, as in choosing what to keep. The rule he followed seems
the sound and judicious one ; namely, to admit or reject names not by
" the intrinsic merit of a book, or the reputation of the writer, but by
the hold which his characters have taken upon the popular mind." It
is the application, again, of the wise rule of use, as far as it may be
made to fit the matter of such a vocabulary.
Of course, it is not complete. What portion of a dictionary ever is
final ? Upon close criticism, many omissions will doubtless be found,
hardly to be accounted for. But the work is done with care and
judgment. Too much was not proposed, which is a prime condition of
doing a great deal well. The idea was a happy one, and the carrying
out of it is as felicitous. To those who consider the difficulty of breaking
ground in a new field, the enterprise and -its issue must be a surprise.
The compiler is honored in the suggestion of it, and in his admirable
1865.] History. 301
performance. It is most creditable to the publishers also, that they
saw at once its value, and made a place for it in their great work. It
will prove its importance in the use both of men of letters and the gen
eral reader. It is a worthy addition to the encyclopedic character of
the Dictionary, and it is not the least among the many things which
recommend it.
We are not of those who will not read a book before reviewing it, lest
they get a prejudice ; but we cannot claim to have looked this big one
through. Yet it is not a careless reading we have given it, and we
have found that the more care we spent upon it, and the further peru
sal, the more profit and pleasure we got from it. It is perhaps some
what too weighty praise to say, with some, that " Webster's Un
abridged " is a book no volunteer should be without in his knapsack.
But we commend it heartily, and we believe with reasons which those
who consult it will understand.
HISTORT.
It speaks well for the prosperity of the literary calling, that Messrs..
Walker, Wise, & Co. have felt themselves warranted, in time of war, in
commencing so important an enterprise as the publication of a History
of France, in sixteen volumes.* Nothing but the magnitude of the un-.
dertaking can have prevented the translation of M. Martin's great work
long before this. There is not at present in our language any History
of France which meets in any adequate degree the wants of those
readers, still so numerous, to whom the French tongue is unknown.
The voluminous works of Ranken and GifFord are out of date. The
work of Sir Eyre Crowe, recently published, is confessedly written
" from an English point of view," and lacks, as most histories do, the
philosophic spirit which can alone make such works either profitable or
interesting. Probably no Englishman could write an impartial his
tory of France. No more can a Frenchman, we admit; but admira
tion and patriotism are better preparation than national antipathy and
jealousy, and the story is best told by a Frenchman like M. Martin,
who, while wanting nothing of the French spirit, is able to temper it
with a calmness of judgment and a warmth of sympathy which give us
the assurance beforehand, that his work is not in the interest of the
French nation alone, but of the human race.
The French men of letters have by no means been indifferent to the
attractions of this great subject. There are many French Histories of
France, — several which cover the whole ground, notably those of Sis-
mondi, Michelet, and Martin. Sismondi's fills thirty-one volumes, and
was too formidable to be approached by any but the boldest of transla
tors. He considered it, however, a compact work, saying of the three
volumes which treated of Louis XIV. and his time, M Trois volumes
ne peuvent offrir qu'un abrege de l'histoire de Louis XIV." Of the
other two, it may be said that they are so utterly unlike as hardly to
* Martin's History of France. The Age of Louis XIV. By Henri Martin.
From the Fourth Paris Edition. Translated by Mary L. Booth. Boston : Walker,
Wise, & Co. 2 vols. 8vo.
VOL. LXXVIII. — 5TH 8. VOL. XVI. NO. n. 26
occupy the same ground. Michelet presupposes in bis readers a knowl
edge of the principal events of the history, and so does not trouble
himself to narrate much, but entertains them with a brilliant running
commentary on the remarkable or hidden points in the diplomacy of
the government, the biography of the royal families or of the nobility,
not disdaining a choice bit of scandal now and then, but employing all
his skill and grace of expression to render it the more piquant. Like
Carlyle in his " French Revolution," he gives us a series of pictures,
strongly painted, with infinite variety of detail, but without much of
continuity or coherence. His work is therefore complementary of Mar
tin's, which is more like a history of Macaulay's, — a simple, continuous,
and perfectly honest and faithful narrative of the action of the time, so
far as it appeared on the public stage. In the present volumes, for ex
ample, he shows us France, in the person of the great king, devoured
by ambition, and laying reckless hands on the resources of her people,
that the name of Louis might gain new splendor by conquest abroad
and luxury at home. He shows us the rapid growth of the insane
passion for display, which became the ruling motive of Louis, and
which ended by hardening his heart, and stifling the little that was
generous or honorable in his nature. He shows us, though less in de
tail, the nation, thus used for its master's glory, sinking under the cease
less drain of physical energy, and yet more under the frightful persecu
tions of religious bigotry, until, long before the end of the chapter, its
strength and spirit were utterly broken down, and it answered but
feebly to the demands of its ruined monarch. A melancholy picture !
Yet this is the reign which has been, nay, which still is, the pride of all
Frenchmen ! This is the age which even the nineteenth century is
not ashamed to call the Augustan age ! A great nation, twenty mil
lions strong, first in literature, in the arts, in material resources, among
the nations of the world, prostrate at the feet'of a selfish and heartless
tyrant, and yielding up treasure and blood, the comforts of life and life
itself, that he might humble the pride of his rivals and exalt his own
too famous name. The first generals of Europe exhausting, at his
command, the population of their country to fill the armies, now of
conquest, and now of persecution. The noblest intellects of Europe, —
poets, philosophers, men of science, statesmen, priests, — ministering
on bended knees, with panegyrics which rivalled each other in extrava
gance and falsehood, to his ridiculous and insatiable vanity. And as
the natural result, a nation plunged in the extremest depths of misery
and gloom, worn out with hunger and cold, with idleness and apathy,
and a court with its old brightness faded, its old conquests relinquished,
its haughty king borne down to the grave with grief, disappointment,
failure, and shame, and his wretched people left at his death helpless
in the hands of a Regent, whose name stands for all that is profligate
and beastly in human nature.
For the manner in which M. Martin has told this story, we have
great, though not unqualified admiration. His style is admirable, —
bright, direct, compact, and forcible. His descriptions are never ambi
tious, never wearisome, always intelligible. His summaries are ex
1865.] History. 303
tremely good, — that, for instance, with which the first of these volumes
commences, which describes rapidly the material condition of France
when Louis began his reign ; the account of Colbert's system of govern
ment, of the growth of literature, science, and the arts ; his accounts of
the great men of the time, as Bossuet and FiSnelori, Corneille and Ra
cine, Moliere and La Fontaine, Lebrun, Perrault, Mansart, and Lenos-
tre, of the gigantic military works of Vauban, and of the varying finan
cial systems of the successive ministers. But his accounts of the life-of
the people are meagre. He repeatedly shows us the extremity of wretch
edness and want to which they are reduced ; but we get no intimate
view of them in their homes, in the fields, and about their daily work.
We hear of the just-au-corps a brevet, — a costume worn only by the king
and a few nobles who received express permission from the king's own
hand, — but we hear nothing of the dress of the people. The magnifi
cence of Versailles and of Marly is described with minuteness, but not
the domestic architecture of the cities, the homes of the peasantry, the
methods of agriculture and trade, the wages of labor, and the thousand
details which make up the life of the nation. Yet there must be mate
rials ample enough for the historian who desired to enlighten his read
ers on these points. With M. Martin, as with most other writers, the
history of Fiance is the history of its court. " Vitat, c'est moi."
Another objection which we are inclined to make to this work is that
the author excuses Louis too much, even while admitting and condemn
ing his crimes: Martin is a true Liberal, that is well known; his sym
pathies are pretty sure to be given to whatever cause is the cause of
Justice and Freedom and Human Rights. America will not soon forget
the noble words he has spoken for her, against the full tide of European
prejudice and interest. But it is useless to expect a Frenchman to re
fuse his admiration to anything which has about it the halo of military
glory. The name of France under Louis XIV. was incontestably glo
rious; and Martin, in following the splendid history of the earlier portion
of his reign, while he docs not omit to censure, cannot retrain from
occasionally throwing up his cap with the rest. And at the close of the
second volume, this is the way he sums up and delivers his verdict : —
" Quand le monde nouveau, eclos dans les tempetes il y a soixante-
dix ans, aura trouve sa forme et son assiette, quand la societe libre et
democratique sera definitivement fondle et incontestee, quand les
partes n'auront plus a chercher des amies dans 1'histoire, le nom de Louis
XIV. n'excitera plus la colere du peuple, comme l'expression d'un prin-
cipe ennemi, et sa statue, tour a tour adornee et brisde, se reposera
enfin pour les siecles parmi les grandes images du Pantheon national.
Si le peuple n'oublie pas les coupables et funestes erreurs de Louis, il
se souviendra aussi que Louis a merite d'etre identifie au siecle le plus
eclatant qu'ait encore vu la civilisation moderne. La France pardonne
volontiers, trop volontiers peut-etre, b. tous ceux qui font aimê, meme
d'un amour personnel et tyrannique, h tous ceux qui font faite glorieuse
meme au depens de son bonheur ; elle n'est implacable qu'envers les
memoires des chefs qui l'ont degradee."
.Now this is amiable and patriotic, and withal beautifully expressed ;
but it is not quite just. Nothing can be dearer, upon M. Martin's own
showing, than that Louis was an odious character. He had perhaps
at the beginning not a bad heart ; but he was bursting with the most
monstrous conceit which the world has ever seen. Pope's couplet he
would have considered a moderate statement of his importance in the
universe, —
" Seas roll to waft me ; suns to light me rise ;
My footstool earth, my canopy the skies."
No rights were sacred which stood in the way of his inclinations. He
opened letters from the mails ; he kept in a long imprisonment the
nobleman whose only offence was that of serving as a medium between
Mademoiselle de la Valliere and her convent, after Louis had forsaken
her for Montespan ; he exiled the husband of Montespan, who was ab
surd enough to object to giving up his wife ; he revoked the Edict of
Nantes, and burned alive for heresy the satirical poet Petit and the mys
tic Morin. Martin condemns the offences, but says that Louis was " led
away by the logic of a false principle, and- not by depravity of heart."
He admits that Louis and the government, once started on the career
of " glory," pursued it without regard to the awful suffering which it
caused the masses of the French people. " Never was error more ex
cusable ! " he exclaims ; " how resist this seduction which all endured
and which all practised ? Society was like an immense concert, in
which all the parts joined to form a universal harmony Marvel
lous whole of the most elaborate and complete society thai has appeared
in the world since the ancients ! vast and living picture, the aspect of
which fascinated all who surrounded it ! All people admired and imitat
ed. The language, the fashions, the ideas of France overran Europe," &c
His later life was worse than his earlier. He intrigued meanly
with the German Emperor and the English King for the partition of
Spain ; he shirked his treaties, he bribed the Electors, he devastated
the Palatinate, he bombarded Genoa, he hunted his Protestant subjects
like wolves ; he hated, in Martin's words, ' " both political and religious
liberty with ever increasing hatred " ; he was guilty of the meanest in
gratitude towards every one of the great men who made his greatness
for him (witness the end of Colbert, of Vauban, of Fdnelon) ; but — his
career was eclatant ! Would M. Martin accept the same excuse for
his present Emperor ?
We have a word to say respecting the manner in which the trans
lation of this work has been begun. So important a work deserves to
be fairly treated in this regard, not only for its own sake, but because
the translation itself depends so much for its interest and its popular
ity upon the skill and competence of the translator. Unfortunately, to
translate the best French prose, with all its idiomatic grace, into clear
and vigorous English, without losing either the sense or the spirit of
the original, is by no means an easy task, and demands a knowledge
of both languages which very few persons possess. A translation is
not a good one unless the reader is made to forget that it is a transla
tion. We are compelled to say that the volumes before us will not bear
this test, and no one at all acquainted with the French language can
1865.] History. 305
help remembering and regretting the original at every page. Miss
Booth has undertaken a work of great magnitude, and we cordially
recognize and commend the courage and industry with which she has
commenced it. The great merit of faithfulness, so often despised by
ambitious translators, she possesses in an eminent degree, and we might
even say that the excess of it has been the cause of most of the faults
of her translation, inasmuch as it has led her, as a rule, to preserve in her
English sentences the precise construction of their French originals ; a
practice of which the necessary result is either awkwardness or incorrect
ness, or both. One form of expression in particular she uses so fre
quently, that it becomes finally either ludicrous or annoying, according
to the mood of the reader. Describing the exhaustion of Spain in
1665, at the close of the "War for the Queen's rights," Martin says,
" La monarchic de Charles Quint, la monarchic des deux mondes,
n'avait plus en face d'elle que le petit royaume de Portugal, et ne
pouvait l'abattre." Which Miss Booth translates thus: "The mon
archy of Charles V., the monarchy of both worlds, had no longer to
face but the little kingdom 'of Portugal, yet could not overthrow it,"
— which is of course precisely the reverse of what M. Martin says
in French. This is not an oversight; it is the constant rule through
out these two volumes, whenever a similar form of statement is to be
made. Under Fouquet, the treasurers of state " were no longer but
his bookkeepers," the close of Colbert's career " was no longer but a
painful struggle " ; the position of governor of a city or province, for
merly held for life, was now granted " no longer but for three years " ;
— and so on, until, on the fifty-eighth page of the second volume, we
find for the first time the correct form of expression, — " the conduct of
the government presented no longer anything but variations and incon
sistencies." A gleam of hope encourages us to believe that the trans
lator has at length been reminded of her error. But alas ! it is the
only instance of the correct rendering ; on page 95, we find again
the old form, — " France had no longer but a single general of re
nown, Luxembourg"; "Italy was no longer but a shadow of itself";
" Holland was no longer but a plain of ice " ; — and so on to the end of
the volume. Then we have frequent examples of sentences so dislo
cated as to be not only awkward, but almost unintelligible ; — as this:
" The governments of cities and provinces, for life by law, hereditary
in fact though the system of reversion passed into use, had wellnigh
renewed feudalism." Or this about Malebranche : " This contem-
plator of the divine ideal, who seems to have sprung up from the
depth of a Thebaid, was, the painter of Heaven, like Leseur, a child
of Paris, that city bustling and active, above all others." In these in
stances, as in scores of similar ones, the translation is perfectly literal,
but is literal like that of a school-girl who has yet to get knowledge
and experience in the use of English. Another class of faults arises
from this literalism. We mean those in which, without absolute in
correctness, the English word which answers in the dictionary to the
French word is by no means equally appropriate. A moment's thought,
for instance, would have shown Miss Booth that, although crihler means
26*
" to sift, to riddle," yet the French language easily allows exaggera
tions which in ours are absurd ; and that to talk of " riddling " with
musket-balls the facade of the Farnese Palace at Rome, is one of these.
Similarly, John de Witt was "felled with a pistol-shot"; the wounds
of Holland were still green ; the magnificence of Versailles cost the na
tion " grievous efforts and inexhaustible sweats " ; &c, &c. Miss Booth,
if she ever stops to choose a word, chooses not that which is most ex
pressive of the author's idea, but that which is most like the original.
Thus combattre is always to combat, an awkward word ; ineptie becomes
" ineptness," which is hardly an English word ; affaiblusemerU is " en-
feeblement," cupide, " cupiditous," an abominable word, .and, worst of
all, francisee is rendered in strict accordance with the dictionary,
" frenchiiied " ! Of grammatical errors, pure and simple, these are
examples : — " With this public calamity had coincided to him a great
private calamity"; Marlboro' was "reinstated into his offices"; "the
18th, at evening, the trenches were opened"; &c, &c.
We are sincerely sorry to find fault with these handsome and inter
esting volumes, but we are sure the translator will have the good sense
to own that we are only doing her a kindness in helping her to perceive
what every one who reads her book cannot fail to see, and in endeavoring
at least to induce her to bestow upon the volumes which are to follow
that careful and deliberate revision which shall render criticism for the
future unnecessary.
POETRY AND FICTION.

No tragedy of purer pathos has been lived in our days than the brief
-existence of David Gray.* Born in the cottage of a handloom weaver
near Glasgow, eagerly using every means to educate himself, the mo
tions of genius impelled him to find his way to London. After a short
struggle there with the unpropitious social elements, sickness seized
'him, and he wandered back to the parental roof, and died at the early
age of twenty-three, — the proof-sheets of his poems in his hand.
David Gray is a character of extraordinary freshness and genuine
ness. He is one of those pronounced and vivid persons who are
strangely attractive and hard to forget. His sensibility is wonderfully
deep, quick, and lucid. His affection is singularly tenacious in its ten
derness. He has that unmistakable quality of high poetic genius, the
dissolving and crystallizing power of imaginative moods. Each mood
converts its related universe into an amber chamber, where we walk or
gaze enchanted, seeing all things in silent picture. Our author says: —
" Once more, O God, thy wonders take my soul.
A winter day ! the feather-silent snow
Thickens the air with strange delight, and lays
A fairy carpet on the barren lea.
Mo sun, yet, all around, that inward light
Which is in purity, — a soft moonshine,
The silvery dimness of a happy dream."
There was in the poor, loving, unhappy, yet happy David Gray the
* Poems by David Ghat. With Memoirs of his Life. Boston : Hobcrts
Brothers.
1865.] Poetry and Fiction. 307
making of a great man and a great poet, if he had possessed the phys
ical stamina to live. Alas for poor humanity, so often subdued to sor
row and oblivion by that stern and balking if! While the stricken
poet lay fading towards eternity, he wrote to a friend : " As my time
narrows to a completion, you grow dearer. I think of you daily with
quiet tears. I think of the happy days we might have spent together
at Maryburgh ; but the vision darkens. My crown is laid in the dust
forever. Nameless too ! This shall be my epitaph, if I have a grave
stone at all, —
' 'T was not a life,
'T was but a piece of childhood thrown away.' "
But not so. His genius has flung a purer lustre on the fields that
knew his boyish footsteps, and he has sung the pastoral beauty of his
Scottish streamlet into fame. As long as the " Luggie " runs to the
sea, it will whisper to the dwellers and visitors there the name of the
gentle minstrel whose love has lent the lapsing current a music sweeter
than its own. Already his neighbors and friends have built a monu
ment to him in Glasgow. The best living critic in the English lan
guage, Matthew Arnold, characterizes him as "a youth of genius, whose
name, but the other day unheard of, is henceforth written in the history
of English poetry." And now, in this choice reprint beginning to cir
culate over America, the touching narrative of his life and death —
with the delicious beauty, sincerity, and tenderness of his translucent and
limpid poetry — will make many a sympathetic bosom ache, and keep
his memory alive in thousands of affectionate hearts. To use his own
words, he
" Died while the first sweet consciousness of manhood
To maiden thought electrified his soul ;
Faint heatings in the calyx of the rose.
Bewildered reader ! pass without a sigh,
In a proud sorrow ! There is life with God
In other kingdom of a sweeter air.
In Eden every flower is blown."
It is rare that a writer with such sterling merits as Jean Ingelow ac

quires such sudden and extensive popularity. Her poems — recently
introduced to the American people by a new firm, rapidly distin
guishing itself for a happy combination of judgment, taste, and enter
prise — have run through twelve editions. They are in all respects
worthy of the success. Now she appears as a writer of prose.* We
have in one volume five carefully studied stories. All have morals
which are not mechanically tacked upon them, but are vitally inwrought
with their substance. They are written in a style of uncommon correct
ness, sincerity, and vigor. They are deeply interesting, without being
in the least degree sensational. They are quite free from morbid taint
and extravagance, emphatically pure and wholesome. We earnestly
recommend this book for Sunday-school libraries. It is admirably
fitted for teachers and the elder pupils ; and there is nothing in it, we
think, to which the members of any Christian sect will object.
* Studies for Stories. By Jean Inoelow. Boston : Roberts Brothers.
Adalbert Stifter is ranked by the critics among the best prose-
writers of Austria. We do not think the praise is too high. His last
work, entitled Der Nach&ommer* would certainly give him a place
among the successful writers of a country more distinguished for liter
ary excellence than Austria. It hardly describes it to call it a novel.
In our sense of that word there are very few novels worth reading in
German, in spite of the stupendous quantity of printed matter the press
throws upon the market under that name. It is a poetic creation, in
deed, a Dichtung, of a naive and original kind, but not a novel which
pictures life as it ought to be or is. It is rather an ideal portrait, just
far enough removed from reality to make it idyllic, without making it
impossible, — a dream, perhaps, yet with all the outlines of the real
world so carefully preserved that you feel that you live in it, ennobled
by its beauty and calmed by its peace.
But before we "describe the book, let us explain the writer, for the
two go together. Born in Southern Bohemia, in 1806, the son of a
cotton-spinner, he was prepared by the Benedictine Abbey at Krems-
miinster for the University at Vienna, which he entered in 1826, to
study law. But he soon turned away to the pursuits of political
science, and then to philosophy and history* and finally to natural
science and mathematics. Upon leaving the University, he became a
private tutor, and presently was appointed to the charge of Prince
Richard Metternich. In the year 1848, he removed from Vienna to
Linz, where in 1849 he was established as Councillor of the Educa
tional Board for Upper Austria. But he had already shown great
talent for drawing and painting, as well as for fiction. And from 1844
to 1851 were published his various contributions to the periodicals of
the day, in six volumes, entitled Studio n. In 1852 appeared, in two
small volumes, a charming collection of stories under the title of Bunte
Steine, remarkable for their combination of dramatic effect with extreme
simplicity of motive and style.
His last work, so far as we know, is Der Nachsommer, in which, it
is obvious, are concentrated the results of the experience of his life. It
is the story of a young man of the middle class, — his father a shop
keeper in Vienna, as one easily recognizes from the description of cer
tain localities, — who shows early a great fondness for study, in which
is indulged and helped by his father, himself a person of good attain
ments in literature and art, though assiduously devoted to his calling,
and finding his only recreation in the collection of engravings and
books and gems. The family live a quiet life in the city, and as time
goes on and the boy increases in knowledge and in years, it becomes
a question what shall be done with him ; but the kindly father with a
good sense only met with in the ideal world, lets him go his way and
develop himself. In the winter he lives at home ; in the summer he
makes journeys on foot among the mountains for scientific investigation.
It is in the course of one of these pedestrian excursions that he seeks
refuge from an impending storm in a rose-embowered white house,
* Der Nachsommer. Eine Erzahlung von Adalbert Stifter. |Drei Bande.]
Pesth: Verlag von Gustav Hcckenast. 1857.
where, after a curious preliminary dispute as to whether there will
be any rain, he finds a hospitable welcome. The description of this
house is one of the most beautiful creations in German literature. We
hope it will some day be translated into English. The acquaintance
thus made is renewed year after year, as the youth goes forth in the
spring-time on his journeys. By and by appear other characters ; an
elderly lady, Mathilde, and her beautiful daughter, Natalie, visit at the
Asperhof, as the "white house" is called, and with two or three sub
ordinate personages they make up all the actors. There is really no
plot in the work. With the exception of part of the last volume, which
is devoted to a painful narrative of the early relations of Mathilde and
the white haired host of the Asperhof, who proves to have been a cab
inet minister, the whole three volumes are simply the description of a
quiet country life. And the marvel of the book is, that this description,
drawn through three volumes of at least five hundred pages each, in
stead of being tiresome, should grow more and more fascinating, so
that we read slowly, anxious not to finish it. If the length of a book
is to be determined by its interest, Der Nachsommer cannot be said to
be long. But the secret of its charm is obvious. There is no proper
development of character in it, no action whatever. The persons play
an inferior part ; they are merely the staffage to the landscape, beau
tiful and calm with the valleys and hills and forests, and the fragrant
air, and the gorgeous sunset, and the greensward, and the roses.
" Next to religion," says the author in another work, " I look upon art
as the highest thing on earth," — art, that is, not so much in its limited
and lower sense of music and painting, but rather as it flows from that
grander faculty which penetrates the secrets of life and the charms
of nature, and blends them both together to lift you as on a wave of
thought to a higher plane of being. In this delicate apprehension of
nature in all its subtle relations, Stifter has few rivals, perhaps, among
recent writers ; there is something wonderfully rich in his descriptions ;
an enthusiasm almost religious pervades them, while the exquisite sim
plicity of the style crowns them with the last attainment of art. Yet,
with all that is ideal, there is a healthy practical meaning in the work.
Art, poetry, science, — this is not the whole of life. Love is better than
ambition ; culture is better than success ; the family life is the best life,
for without it all earthly striving is upon a false basis, and will lead to
false ends.
Miss Cobbe has furnished one of the best works on regenerated
Italy.* It is not a passing glimpse of places familiar to the world ; it
is not another dissertation on well-worn antiquities ; it is the united
kingdom of Italy as seen by the brightest English eyes, and told by a
pen eloquent in description, frank in avowal, hearty in hope. Every
thing about the book is attractive. Her anecdotes are new, spicy, and
abundant ; her word-painting, as in the chapter on Nervi, is altogether
* Notes on Politics, People, and Places in Italy in 1864. By Fraxces Poweb

Cobbe. London : Triibner & Co. 1 864.
S10 Review of Current Literature. [March,
felicitous ; her conclusions are confirmed by all we know from other quar
ters, and all the experience of mankind elsewhere. Excluding the
Fiedmontese valleys, she does not allow that there are three thou
sand Protestants in all Italy, and these mostly added in the last year,
with very few men of education in their number. None of our forms
of worship seem at home there. English Episcopalianism is plainly
an exotic, and New England Calvinism still more an alien. But may
we not expect some new development of worship, adapted to the artistic
taste of the people, to their luxurious climate, and passionate cravings ?
Miss Cobbe intimates nothing of the kind. She thinks it well, on the
whole, that Rome has not yet become the seat of the new kingdom, be
cause the antiquated views there prevalent could not benefit the Depu
ties, because the kingdom could hardly continue as united in senti
ment as now, and because " each day that Pio Nono holds Rome, he
loses moral influence." She shows that France could only be hearty
in Italian revolution when there was a hope of a confederation of
petty states over which she could rule ; but that when Italy deter
mined to be powerful, created an army of four hundred thousand men,
organized a government as constitutional as that of England, it was all
over with the efficient sympathy of France. She criticises Garibaldi
with some harshness, but does not feel the absurdity of Victor Em
manuel's plunging into the abysses of bankruptcy for the sake of main
taining an enormous army which he dare not use, abandoning the lib
eral clergy to starvation, and surrendering the schools to new teach
ers. On the whole, Miss Cobbe's intelligence is recent, valuable, and
trustworthy ; her descriptions are successful, and her promise of the
future is brave and full of hope.
The ambition of making a large book out of small materials has

made the Times correspondent's account of the Danish invasion exceed
ingly tiresome, and spoilt a fine subject.* The same groundless con
jectures about the London Conference do duty through several chap
ters ; while hardly a single surmise about the Danish government but
is repeated again and again, with the undaunted purpose of making
something out of a good many nothings. The same high testimony
given to Danish character by Hon. Mr. Herbert, in " The Danes in
Camp," is everywhere offered by Mr. Gallenga. He could find no
such thing as hovel, beggar, thief, or camp-follower ; — hardly any illit
erate persons, or soldiers weaned from home affections. He experi
enced the largest hospitality, especially from country persons ; the inn
keepers nowhere proved extortioners ; there was no disposition to make
money out of the distressed state of affairs ; friendliness, good nature,
thorough honesty, marvellous endurance, seem native to the soil ; he
awards the Dane the palm for associating the simplicity of patriarchal
morals with the thorough refinement of civilized manners. The estates,
he suggests, in precise opposition to the statements of McCulloch, are
too large, and too many royal parks abridge the already limited terri-
* The Invasion of Denmark in 1864. By A. Gallenoa, Special Correspondent

of " The Times." London : Bcntley. 2 vols.
1865.] New Publications Received. Sll
tory ; but he does not penetrate to the real cause of the nearly sta
tionary character of the population. In the singular war now brought
to so disastrous a close, the Danes were utterly deceived by foreign
powers, especially England, — whose advice they followed in hope
of its being sustained by armed interference. And the Danish war
department proved itself imbecile ; it shut its eyes to the immense
improvements everywhere made in military weapons ; it built no ade
quate defences ; it provided no rifled cannon ; it promoted generals
for mere seniority ; it made the worst use of thoroughly brave troops,
confining them where they were slowly butchered by the superior Prus
sian and Austrian batteries. So that, after four weeks' incessant bom
bardment at Dybbol, the defenders of their country were obliged to
give up everything, — obliged to let their enemies take as many lives as
they pleased, mutilate the dead, and insult these deserted heroes by
stripping them nearly naked. Mr. Gallenga evidently favors the idea,
however impracticable at present, of uniting Denmark with Norway
and Sweden, in such a Scandinavian empire as would resist the aggres
sions of liussia and constitute a first-class power.

THEOLOGY.
History of the Planting and Training of the Christian Church by the Apos
tles. By Dr. Augustus Neander. Translated from the German by J. E. Ky-
land. Translation revised and corrected according to the Fourth German
Edition, by -E. G. Robinson, D. D. New York : Sheldon & Co. Boston :
Gould & Lincoln. 8vo. pp. 547.
A Critical and Grammatical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles. With
a Revised Translation, by Right Rev. Charles J. Ellicott, D. !>., Lord Bishop
of Gloucester and Bristol. Andover: Warren F. Draper. Boston: Gould
& Lincoln. 8vo. pp. 265.
Meditations on the Essence of Christianity, and on the Religious Questions
of the Day. By M. GuizoU New York : Charles Scribner & Co. 1865.
12mo. pp. 356.
HI8TORY AND BIOGRATHY.
History of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of Amer
ica. By Abel Stevens, LL. D. New York : Carlton & Porter. Vols. L, H.
12mo. pp. 423, 511.
Autobiography, Correspondence, &c. of Lyman Beecher. . Edited by
Charles Beecher. New York: Harper & Brothers. Vol. H. 12 mo.
pp. 587. (To be noticed.)
SCIENTIFIC AND PROFESSIONAL.
Introduction to the Study of International Law, designed as an Aid in
Teaching, and in Historical Studies. By Theodore D. Woolsey, President
of Yale College. Second Edition, revised and enlarged. New York:
Charles Scribner. 8vo. pp. 441. (To be noticed.)
Preparatory Latin Prose Book, containing all the Latin Prose necessary for
812 New Publications Received. [March.
entering College, with Grammatical References, Notes, Vocabulary, and In
dex. By J. II. Hanson. Eleventh Edition, enlarged and improved. Bos
ton: Crosby & Ainsworth. 12mo. pp. 881. (This excellent compilation
now includes all the Latin prose required at Harvard, and is to be made still
more valuable by being adapted to Harkness's Latin Grammar. Sallust's
" Catiline," and the selections from Cicero's Letters are a peculiar and useful
feature of this book.)
Lectures on the Science of Language, delivered at the Royal Institution
of Great Britain, in February, March, April, and May, 1868. By Max Miil-
ler. Second Series, with Thirty-one Illustrations. New York: Charles
Scribner. 12ino. pp. 662. (A volume of special interest, for its analysis of
vocal utterance, its illustration of the growth of verb-roots, and its sketch of
Comparative Mythology. Some of these we hope to illustrate more fully
hereafter.)
NOVELS AND TALE3.
My Brother's Wife. A Life History. By Amelia B. Edwards, pp. 112;
Quite Alone. By George Augustus Sala. pp. 195;
Mattie, a Stray, pp. 157. — New York: Harper & Brothers.
Chateau Frissac ; or, Home Scenes in France. New York : D. Appleton
& Co. 12mo. pp. 239.
The Boy Slaves. By Captain Mayne Reid. With Illustrations. Boston :
Ticknor & Fields. 18mo. pp. 82i. (A Tale of the Desert of Sahara.)
MISCELLANEOUS.
Chambers's Encyclopaedia, a Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for the
People. Illustrated. Vol. VI. Labrador — Numidia. Philadelphia : J. B.
Lippincott & Co. 8vo. pp. 827.
Also, the succeeding numbers, including the 88th, — Numismatics —
Phrenology.
House and Home Papers. By Christopher Crowfield (Mrs. H. B. Stowe).
Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 1 8mo. pp. 338. (Reprinted from the Atlan
tic Monthly.)
Enoch Arden. By Alfred Tennyson. Boston : Ticknor & Fields.
24mo. pp. 42. (Paper, price 25 cents.)
The Culture of the Observing Faculties in the Family and the School ; or,
Things about Home, and How to make them Instructive to the Young. By
Warren Burton. New York : Harper & Brothers. 18mo. pp.170.
The Handbook of Dining ; or, Corpulency and Leanness scientifically con
sidered. By Brillat-Savarin. Translated by L. F. Simpson. New York:
D. Appleton & Co. 18mo. pp. 200.
The American Union Speaker, containing Standard and recent Selections
in Prose and Poetry, for Recitation and Declamation, in Schools, Academies,
and Colleges. With Introductory Remarks and Explanatory Notes. By
John D. Philbrick. Boston : Taggard & Thompson. 8vo. pp. 588.
Lessons on the Subject of Right and Wrong, for Use in Families and Schools.
Boston: Crosby & Ainsworth. 12mo. pp.88.
ERRATUM.
Page 218, line 21, for Maidi read Mondi.
THE
CHRISTIAN EXAMINER.
MAY, 1865.
Art. I. — THE MORBID AND THE HEALTHY VIEW OF

LIFE.
1. Literary and Historical Miscellanies. By George Bancroft.

Essay : Ennui. 1 vol. 8vo. New York. 1855.
2. Du Suicide Statistique, Medicine, Histoire, et Legislation, par E.
Lisle. 1 vol. in 8 de 488 pages. Paris. 1856.
Mb. Bancroft is most honorably known throughout the

limits of the English language, and beyond them, by his
thoughtful and brilliant "History of the United States;" a
work of liberal politics and learning, critical power, condensed
thought, and picturesque charm. In the eloquent essay indi
cated above, he displays his usual acuteness and vigor, with
his generous disposition to an optimistic philosophy ; a wise
inclination to draw the diagram of history in lines of light,
and to interpret ihe dubious phenomena of humanity by a
reference to the irresistible laws of the world, — laws whose
co-ordinated sum represents, if it does not constitute, the
providence of God. The great works of genius are fruits of
a triumphant spontaneity : a stamp of inferiority is on all the
products of depression. Yet even the weaknesses and follies
of man have compensations ; and a large part of the enter
prises and creations of human energy have resulted from the
endeavors of men to find escapes or reliefs from the insuffera
ble irksomeness of ennui. The whole argument is a piece of
true insight not less edifying than original and piquant.
VOL. LXXVIH. — 5th S. VOL. XVI. HO. Ill; 27
314 The Morbid and the Healthy [May,
The other work whose title we have set at the head of our
article is an extremely interesting and thorough treatment of
the question with which it deals. It handles every portion
of the subject with a happy combination of learning, intelli
gent breadth of attention, patience, and sympathetic liberality.
It betrays no trace of the old bigotry that pursued the un
happy suicide, even after death, driving a stake through his
body at the crossing of a highway, and making his soul over
to a hopeless doom. Medical, legal, ethical, historical students
equally, will here find materials to attract their curiosity and to
ansVer their respective inquiries. The extraordinary prepon
derance of suicides over murderers in the most civilized
countries of Europe is a fact of great impressiveness and im
portance. Many men kill themselves where one man kills
another. It is an instructive and a pathetic fact. What a
glimpse it opens into the world of human unhappiness, the big
statistics of woe ! It is powerfully confirmatory of that
modern tendency which every philanthropic moralist will be
glad to see encouraged, — the tendency to look on crime more
and more as disease, less and less as diabolism. We turn from
the able work of M. Lisle with this inadequate notice, because
we do not intend to discuss the subject of hypochondria in
its technical nature or its merely professional bearings. We
intend to treat it in a freer manner; and, under its more
popular aspect of weariness of life, to illustrate the general
principles involved in it, and to enforce the cheerful and
just views best adapted to neutralize its dismal workings in
the soul.
There are more persons in the world than we are aware of,
who, finding no novel prizes or unworn joys, are weary of the
ordinary round of existence. Sated with what they have
gone through, their monotonous souls pass the lagging days in
an indolent and irritable unrest. They are tired of seeing
the same sights, handling the same tools, treading the same
paths, reaching the same results. Somehow, they fancy, they
have exhausted the sources of interest. Life has become an
old story, and they are sick of listening to its hum. The
bloom is gone from nature, the gloss rubbed from hope. The
1865.] View of Life. 315
prodigal senses have spent all the startlingness of life ; and

neither wonder nor consolation has any stimnlant edge to cnt
with, or any vivacious pleasure left to give. Trying every
resource, they still turn away, sighing, with ineffable expres
sion, " There is nothing in it." They suffer from an incessant
nausea of soul which at once forbids private comfort, and
makes the game of social ends seem not worth the candle of
labor by whose light they must play it. Like the unhappy
Solomon, they feel that all is vanity on vanity, and that there
is nothing new under the sun. A perpetual ennui saturates
the fibres of character. They want some unhackneyed shock
of motive to string their nerves, some door of strange adven
ture opened before them to break up the chronic tedium
beneath whose spell they groan. But nature pays no heed,
society very little heed, to their condition or their cries : the
course of habitual things moves on its dull way. And their
mood, if not relieved in some manner, continues aggravating,
until at last they chafe upon the almighty canon set against
self-murder, longing —
" To shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh,"
•
and set up their rest in some clime where unguessed enchant
ments may break to view, and an unpalling variety of expe
riences continue in vivid succession for ever I
The victims of this state of mind, which sees no inspiring
objects, thrills with no keen impulses, but is enslaved to a
tame repetition of blunted perceptions, and therefore is bur
dened with fatigue and disgust of life, — are almost certain to
misinterpret the experience. By the re-action of that healing
self-esteem native to the human breast, they solace themselves
with thinking that they have seen through the deceits and
gew-gaws, and learned to appreciate the real worthlessness, of
the game and spectacle whose mock passion and superficial
glitter still excite others. But, ah ! it is not so. Their dis
heartening experience argues, not that they have grown wiser,
but that they have become morbid. The apparent emptiness
of the world, falsehood and misery of life, are the result, not of
a sharper discernment, but of a diseased misperception. They

mistakenly conclude that the world has ceased to be rich in
beauty, glory, and enterprise, only because their souls have
become poor in ambition, love, and energy. The sad change
bewailed has not come over the scene, but has arisen in the
spectators. The staleness and monotony which they have
come to regard as attributes belonging to nature, providence,
and history, are really but experiences lurking in the dregs of
their passion, and pressing on the nerves of their indiffer
ence. These motiveless sufferers from melancholy and from
unfed cravings cannot bear to believe that themselves alone
are to blame. It is so much more flattering to their conceit,
so much more quieting to the uneasiness of conscience, min
isters so much better to their indolence, that they naturally
prefer attributing their vague and restless despondency to the
inherent unsatisfactoriness of a shallow and transitory world,
whose phenomena, both of matter and of consciousness, soon
fall into an intolerable routine of samenesses. But this is a
false solution of the problem. To the darkening eyes of one
who dies at noon, the light seems to go out ; but, in truth, the
sun still shines as before. It is the sick charioteer who calls
the Stadium dull. It is the disabled champion who says that
the herald's trumpet has lost its music, and that the olive gar
land has faded.
Those whose lives have thus grown insipid and tiresome to
them, — a sluggish load which they wearily carry, not pene
trated by sharp desires, dominant resolves and fruitions, but
full of aches and sighs, — after the above-described misinter
pretation of their experience, seek, by various sophistical ar
guments, to justify it to their own minds. The best service,
therefore, that can be rendered in the further treatment of the
subject before us, will be to expose the sophistry of these ar
guments by a passing analysis of them in their unsound origin
and in their pernicious effect. Such a course will enable us
to rend the deceptive veils of sin, sloth, and error, so that we
may recognize, as they are revealed in the normal experience
of vigorous and well-attuned souls, the perpetual freshness of
life and the undecaying charm of its theatre.
First to be specified is the Fallacy of Sickness. Good

health, undisturbed by any morbid element, is followed, as a
matter of course, by a contenting enjoyment of life. The
conscious sense of existence in harmony is full of satisfaction
and peace, and every faculty in the spontaneous fulfilment of
its functions affords a grateful exhilaration. To a man com
manding the normal fruition of all his powers and relations,
every prospect wears a charm ; and the stream of his experi
ence is a flow of quiet bliss. A state of thorough soundness
and vigor, surcharged with harmony and elasticity, is almost
invulnerable to depression or fretfulness. Black cares cannot
alight on muscles glowing with tonicity. Then simply to
breathe the breath of life is luxury. Spiritual flabbiness,
oftener than we think, comes from muscular prostration, and
is followed by conscious melancholy and wretchedness. While
curiosity keeps its pristine vigor, and the appetites their
hungry eagerness, and assimilating thought and love their
salient activity, all life is a delicious feast ; but the moment
disease interferes, in consequence of excess or perversion,
discord mars the music, and gloom begins to spot the gay
colors. The glow of strength which made exertion a pleas
ure gives way to a flaccid exhaustion which finds effort
pain. Satiety loathes what was sweetest and raciest before.
Inflammation writhes with agony at a silken touch or a
breath of air. The trenchant will, robbed of its elasticity,
droops timid and forceless ; the rich electric blood, deteri
orated, creeps thin and pale ; the degeneration of the nervous
tissues destroys the vivacity of every sensation, deadening
the telegraphic ligaments that connect the individual with the
universe. Now the splendor of nature has fled, the happiness
of the soul has gone ; contentment is an impossibility. Under
these circumstances, a vacant and complaining depression is
inevitable. And those who have undergone the wretched
metamorphosis, by a natural sophism charge the alteration
upon surrounding things ; a profounder estimate of facts, as
they imagine, having dispelled illusions and unmasked the
sorry farce. But surely the error of this is bare when we
contrast the feelings of an exultant horseman, on the hills, in
27*
the steely sparkle of a winter morning, with those of an in

valid crushed with languor, crawling out of bed, towards noon,
in a heated chamber, his lungs feebly laboring in the de-oxy
genized air. When a weary brain makes a dull world, it is
plain that the original difference lies not in an old dulness,
nor first perceived without, but in a new weariness which has
come within. When a diseased condition of abused powers
incapacitates for gust in the delights of existence, the foolish
conceit of self-love would have us believe that the preroga
tives of our state and course below have been emptied of
their exciting sweetness ; but the mistake is as clear as that
made by an intoxicated person who supposes that his reeling
is because the globe totters.
A second cause of complaints, on the part of many against
the unsatisfying nature of life, arises from the Fallacy of Dis
appointment. He who sets his heart on the acquisition of an
object, and cannot succeed in obtaining it, is in danger of
being smitten down by the failure, giving himself up to dis
gust and despair. And is not society full of thwarted aspi
rants, tempted to sit down in their affliction, and gnaw their
own hearts till they die ? During the race, while the battle
lasted, the excitement of contention filled their capacities,
and they rejoiced in their opportunities ; but when the shout
arose, and, looking up, they saw others decked with the gar
lands they had striven for, the gladness of expectation per
ished, and the pain of chagrin took its place. Few persons
affect to despise the world, unless the world neglects them.
The souls who are so much greater than the world, that they
must need be careless of it, form quite a small class in any
community. But a multitude cursed with restless vanity
without dignified ability, towering ambition without commen
surate power and application, or rare genius without harmo
nious accompaniments and adapted position, have, by the
consequent disappointment and incongruity, been made most
miserable, regarding nature and society through jaundiced
eyes, with an envious and spleenful spirit. From premises
that touch the feelings we draw the most exaggerated conclu
sions. Failing in our designs on fortune, we say success
waits never on desert; and the order of things is so odious for

its injustice that we would fain escape from it. Deceived or
neglected by an adored friend, we exclaim, in desperate
grief, Friendship is a deceit, or at best an impalpable ideal, to
lure us from this cold sphere of forms to some happier shore
where the outstretched arms of longing shall no more close
upon the eluding air ! The re-action of wounded vanity is the
mightiest cause of that morbid melancholy which dwells on
the hollow mockeries of the world until the hopeless soul
relucts at every thing. We also look too much to exceptional
ends, rare occasions, for harTpiness. These are more beset by
difficulties, and therefore more likely to be missed of. We
turn the precious material of a thousand days into common
brick and board to build the festive arch of one triumphal
hour, when, after all, that hour may balk our grasp, or, if
we reach it, prove at last but a joyless pageant. Diogenes
once asked a young fellow whom he saw sprucing himself up
very finely to go to a great entertainment, " Is not every day
a festival to a wise man ? " Admiration, wisdom, love, and
service are the true ends of our life. Those who devote
their energies to these ends may be quite sure to win satisfy
ing degrees of them. On the other hand, those who turn
contemptuously from these things with a burning thirst to
pursue artificial prizes, run a fearful chance of failure, and,
even when they succeed, soon learn, to their sorrow, that suc
cess itself is disappointment. The heart was not made to
worship fame or wealth or pleasure or power, but only truth,
beauty, virtue, immortality, God ; and selfish ambition often
cheats its votaries most when heaping its profusest favors on
them. The foolish and the sinful, awakening to their errors,
sicken at the contemplation of the part they have played, tire
of the scene in hand, and revolt from the sequel they foresee.
Like the baffled chieftain when he was losing the crown he
had murderously won, tliey begin to grow aweary of the sun,
and to wish that the estate of the world were now undone.
Conscience affrights reason, and makes those sophists after
wards who were cowards first. For the trouble is simply
that they have made wicked mistakes, and are disappointed ;
not at all that the handiwork of the world and the boon of
life are unworthy of acceptance or incapable of furnishing
their holders dignified employment and joys of enduring
relish.
The next support of that dissatisfaction, gloom, and pangful
absence of hope, constituting life-weariness, the great genera
tor of complaints, is the Fallacy of Comparison. Selfishness,
unnaturally stimulated by the universal rivalries of society, is
the most constant and powerful of the springs of action. By
the essence of its unwholesome activity it continually induces
us to make comparisons. When tliese comparisons are to our
own disadvantage, as, through the working of envy and ambi
tion, they usually will be, they result in repinings. Conscious
ness swiftly becomes diseased, its unhappy irritation infects
the world, and then all grows dark and wretched together,
until our very existence appears a curse. The evil influence
of contrasting our fate with that of another resides in the
fact that we are so apt to depreciate what we have and to
overvalue what we want; to mis-esteem the privileges of our
own lot and to magnify those of our neighbors. Seen and
used from within, day after day, our domain tends to lose all
romantic investiture and to seem rusty and prosaic. Viewed
occasionally, from without, at a proper artistic distance, an un-
brushed enchantment clothes theirs, the "morning mist rolling
more proudly, the purple eve lying more softly " there. It is
hard to contrast the lucky side of a rival's fortune with the
unlucky side of our own without overcharging both the glory
and the gloom, and thus ministering to an unhealthy experi
ence prolific in misery. And yet this is a most frequent
habit. We should remember, in partial correction of it, that,
in viewing the lives of other men and other ages, the ideal
faculties have freedom to work ; and we contemplate those
lives as they lie now in our imaginations, all tediousness and
turmoil, all harshness and horror, -eliminated. The result
would be quite other, if we analyzed the real traits and ele
ments as they were commixed in the lives themselves, to those
who actually led them. But, in estimating our own experi
ence, stern fact is at hand to rectify any poetic coloring, and
1865.] View of IAfe. 321
prevent the verdict of an exhilarated fancy. Consequently,

we can hardly help exaggerating the prerogatives of others,
and underrating our own. Our vexations are felt, their suf
ferings are unseen ; our familiar comforts are carelessly de
spised, their tantalizing prizes are restlessly coveted. And
we forget, that, conversely, we are often the subjects of the
same comparison and envy. The sailor, tossing on the deep,
pines with the wish that he were a peaceful occupant of the
cottage whose windows gleam far over the surging wave, un
witting that, at that very moment, the shepherd in turn, weary
of a stagnant round, longs to be in his place on the adven
turous deck. While we are desponding and complaining, hun
dreds are eager to occupy our posts and be faithful to our
opportunities. Ought not any one to be ashamed to sit down,
stolid and morose, amidst objects and motives which would
thrill others with pride and delight ? The true effect of set
ting our condition over against that of those better off than
we are, should be to fill us with gladness at their greater pros
perity. And, when we contrast our lot with that of those less
favored than we are, we should be made grateful, and vow to
repay our indebtedness by loyal service to humanity. The
experience of a contrary effect proves disease on our part,
—- some imaginative perversion of the facts. For, when we
healthily look on what is littler or lower than ourselves, a
reflex sense of complacency naturally results, our feeling of
power and privilege is heightened, our murmurs hush, our
incubus lifts and dissolves. The same result is also brought
about by a contemplation of what is larger and higher than
ourselves. For regarding superior objects healthily, that is,
with admiration and love, we sympathetically enter into their
superiorities, and ideally appropriate them as our own ; and
the consequence is an enriched and strengthened conscious
ness. In this to-and-fro motion between ourselves and others,
the last impulse is always given by the superior pole. That
impulse, in a mind polarized by true perceptions of true stan
dards, will be in our favor; in a mind" polarized by morbid
feelings, it will be against us. Selfish ignorance, malignity,
every kind of degradation, load us with an unhappy bias
against ourselves in the contrasts and resemblances we regard;

causing every vibration of the axis of comparison, whether
towards the initial pole in ourselves or towards the terminal
pole in others, and whether aimed up at superiorities or down
at inferiorities, to engender an acrid deposit of wrong, a bitter
complaint. This divine arrangement to re-enforce, sweeten,
and heighten our life from both moral directions, by the com
placent shock of the self when we think of those beneath, by
the appropriating shock of sympathy when we think of those
above, is wonderfully beautiful and important. Its frequent
inversion is fearful, when a sight of superiors imbitters and
depresses us, a sight of inferiors drags us down to them by
a wrong magnetism, instead of ideally lifting them up to us
and exalting us in their ascent. When, therefore, our com
parisons have the effect to stir envy and sullen unhappiness
in us, disgusting us with a world where it goes better with
some than it does with us, and seems to go worse with us
than it ought to, the devilish sophistry of sin is too evident to
need further refutation or rebuke. There is in such cases a
misadjustment, or polar disturbance and vitiation, of those
standards of good which are set in the substrata of the mind
to adjudicate on our acts. The sanitary lights of critical
study should be darted in upon them until they are rectified.
The fourth ground of that heavy despondency, leading at
last to reckless disgust, by which a class of persons are tor
tured, is the Fallacy of Idleness. Doing nothing, they per
suade themselves that there is nothing in the world for them
to do. Feeling no motive impelling them to energetic enter
prise, they conclude that life is destitute of adequate motives.
The very definition of ennui is, the painful re-action of unsat
isfied capacities of performance. If there be one secret of a
joyous experience, it is the presence of a generous ambition,
electrifying the nervous centres, and keeping volition in tri
umphant play. The enthusiast, following distinct plans with
eager toil to secure worthy ends, is the most enviable of mor
tals. One cardinal element in the usual happiness of youth is
the presence of glowing expectancies, inexhaustible hopes and
pursuits. It always has something to do, and salient energy
to undertake it. But, ah me ! the change that comes some

times with added age ! The chase of a butterfly gives the
child a more complete exhilaration than, forty years after
wards, he can find in the chase of a million pounds or a ducal
coronet. By the influence of unwholesome views, the recoil
of injured vanity, the poison of hatred, the exhaustion of over
wrought passions, the undermining power of grief, or some
other such cause, he loses his interest in what once inspired
him. His wavering will, deprived of its polarity, fixes no
where ; his flagging faculties feel incapable of effort ; his
irritated sensibilities shrink from all contact. The inevitable
consequence is weariness, repining, a miserable indolence in
which the dispirited heart, loathing all things, eats itself. Ex
ultation yields to lassitude, listlessness supplants enthusiasm,
and " the soul's indifference dulls the sated eyes." Once
every thing was in nothing; now nothing is in anything.
Sky and earth, and all the ingredients of the social scene, are
nauseous; and immitigable ennui sets in until some revolution
shall arise in the recuperative mind to send an army of demo
cratic spirits rushing and shocking through the Uase breast.
The sun shines not on the eyeballs of the dead, and the mag
netic battery discharges its power in vain upon a disinte
grated tissue : so the chief relishes of existence shun the
unstudious brain, and all the pleasures of function are impos
sible to an idle hand.
The malady of an unemployed nature colors the world with
its own distorting hues, and finally infuses into every thing
its unnerving sophistry of self-condemnation and universal
disgust. That such a result is the effect of indolent error,
the working of the wretched disease of sloth, observation
quickly teaches. For who is it that complains of the unvary-
ingness of things making life a burden ? Is it the astronomer,
sitting night after night in the same tower, watching the
same phenomena, using the same instruments, repeating the
same kind of calculations ? Is it the teacher, month in and
month out occupying the same desk, hearing the same recita
tions, returning on the same circling tracks ? No : these, in
earnest devotion to high ends, receive ever-living satisfactions
of reward. It is not the blacksmith nor the washerwoman

doomed to the unceasing tasks of a humble and heavy lot,
but the fop and the fine lady vacantly lounging their time
away in scented and golden drawing-rooms, who pine in a
stale routine of days. It is not the martyr suffering in a holy
cause, but the epicure dissolving in contemptible luxury, who
writhes with discontent, and sickens of existence.
The last cause to be mentioned as producing a vacant ache
of the heart, and complaints of an unbearable monotony, is
the Fallacy of Custom. There is perhaps no other so prolific
parent of this unhappy state of soul as the habit of living in
the ruts of usage, without spontaneous impulse and fruition,
crusting life over with custom. Surprise, from the very
essence of its effect, can never lose its freshness ; but we
may cease to be surprised. When this happens, it is only by
painstaking thought that we can keep ourselves from the
sophistry of concluding, that the startling phenomena and
characteristics which once so thrillingly confronted our expe
rience no longer exist. When Hamlet and Horatio came
upon the clown, who was jovially singing a catch as he dug a
grave, the philosophic prince said, " Hath this fellow no feel
ing of his business ? " And his thoughtful comrade replied,
" Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness." So it
is with us all, throughout life, if we heed not to prevent it.
The natural force of custom, unless counteracted by con
scious attention and correcting thought, is to destroy the
vividness of repeated experiences until they seem tame, and
we grow careless and weary. Under the influence of custom,
men take things mechanically, without sharp apprehension:
they glide unthinkingly upon the surfaces of things, with ever
less of quick and deep consciousness. They thus come to
regard every thing as old and worn. Sated and capricious,
they turn from the familiar array in which they have no stu
dious intelligence or living love invested to yield them in
return a constant interest, and cry for something new and
strange to move them to feeling and to enterprise again.
They seem to think that so many generations have come and
departed that the freshness and romance of the world are
18G5.] View of Life. 325
gone ; its select prizes plucked ; human experience, so long

tried, trodden on, and handed down, become a vapid affair ;
in short, that the days of exuberant enthusiasm and achieve
ment were over long ago ; the wine of life drawn, and only
the lees left to this age. They sigh for the great spirits and
the rich occasions of an elder, nobler day, — magnanimi
heroes, nati in melioribus annis, — unaware that the happier
years are wanting only because they are not the magnani
mous heroes. Had their lot been thrown in those happier
times of old, before nature began to decay and man to sink
into the mere service of mammon, were that poetic era but
back again, they flatter themselves they would start from
their inglorious supineness, and be foremost in the lists of toil
and adventure.
Mistaken men ! know ye not, that, in every period, obtuse
and feeble persons, deceived by their own unhappiness, have
reasoned just as you do now ? Plant yourselves amid the
hazardous events, the stormy struggles, the pastoral and
predatory scenes of five hundred, two thousand, four thou
sand years ago. Alas ! no golden age is there, but much
worse times, much more stupid times, than these ; and the
men of that period, too, are sighing over a fancied Eden far
away in the past, when indeed life was a boon worthy the
gods. So sighed the ancients, and so sigh the moderns, un
taught by the exposed folly of ancestral experience. In both
cases, the fault is not in the circumstances, but is in the men ;
their lack of motive power and wholesome excitability. When
life grows a mechanical and traditionary truism, the quickened
and tender insight of genius still discerns in it the electrify
ing novelty of its originality ; as the words buried in that dry
collection of faded metaphors, a dictionary, when handled and
breathed on by a poet's soul, become a fragrant and blooming
poem. And never yet has the time come, when, if the per
sonal conditions were fulfilled, the outward contents fortune
offers to experience might not make the aspect and round
of human existence as fresh and beautiful as a new banner
suddenly unfurled to glorious music at the head of a host.
Who so unthinking as not to detect, when attention is
vol. Lxxvrn. — 5th s. vol. xvi. no. in. 28
called to it, the shallow fallacy of habit ? To-day, wherein

are the earth and sky not as bright and strange, the seasons
not as charming, life not as varied and dramatic, experience
not as marvellous and thrilling, as ever they were ? What
needs it more than the eye to see and the heart to feel the
splendid and solemn realities that move and burn beneath the
encrusting veil which custom has gathered above the round
of ways we tread, in order to perceive that there has been no
falling-off from the intense interests of the game played by
every soul during its fleshly transit of the earth ? no decay
of grandeur in the surrounding and overhanging spectacle
that sees us live, and sees us die, and beholds us rise from our
ashes with the exulting song of the phoenix soaring from his
nest of aromatic fire ? Show the proofs of any waning of the
beauties or powers of outward things, of the values or excite
ments of inward things. Grows not the earth younger with
every advancing year? She began, for the human race,
with barren and decrepit age ; the moulding hands of culture
are obliterating her scars and deformities ; and she is nearing
a state in which, covered with complete loveliness, she shall
flourish in the all-defying bloom of eternal youth. Such as
creation's dawn beheld do not the azure heavens arch over us
yet ? Is it less sweet and pleasant a thing to behold the
light of the sun this day than it was two centuries since?
Does the moon, convoying the stars over the blue deep, sail
any less serenely than it did once above the mingled scene of
human homes and graves ? Do not the bosoms of highland
lakes, fringed by pines and girt by mountains, reflect the
dread pomp and glitter of the nightly dome as accurately as
ever? Was the song of birds ever sweeter, the grass of the
meadows ever greener, the cooling flow of streams ever
fresher, the burst of morning on the hills ever more glorious,
the ripening effulgence of noon ever more welcome, the
black and crimson magnificence of sunset clouds ever more
diversified, than they were the last summer ? Rolls the flood
of harvest its golden waves on the autumnal shore less pro
fusely than in other years ? Had the colors on the pallet of
Frost lost their glory when he paused, last October, to paint
the woodlands as he passed ?
If we dwell as closely with Nature as the men of yore did,

and have as well developed and healthy powers as they had,
we shall find her the same lovely and sheltering mother of us
all in the modern world that she was in the antique. Our
perception sometimes fails ; her beauty never. When the
ancient shepherds gazed on the starlit landscape, compared
by Homer with the embattled plain before Ilium blazing
with watch-fires, did they see any newer and grander sight
than that which twelve hours ago greeted the chamois-hunter
when the virgin, Moonlight, laved the icy peaks of the Alps
with silvery kisses ? or that which at to-morrow's dawn will
confront the American pioneer when the stainless goddess,
Sunrise, gilds the gray crags of the Rocky Mountains ? A
cultivated, imaginative man of the nineteenth century, stand
ing on the rocks of our own shore and looking at the gambol
ling waves, will see as many Nereids and Tritons ; climbing
the misty sides and blue summits of our own mountains, will
pass as many Oreads ; wandering by lonely streams and
fountains within «ound of the passing steam-car, will meet as
fair Naiads ; roaming the murmurous woods of our uncleared
townships, will catch glimpses and hear the sighs of as coy
Dryads, — as any favored poet ever encountered in the myste
rious age of Orpheus, in the enchanted laud of Greece. For
is he not acquainted with the facts and phenomena of lights
and shades, forms and colors, the latent forces, aspiring
growths, spiritual suggestions, which in the olden time were
thus personified ? And cannot he, too, personify and robe
them? To a soul filled with sympathetic life, able to assimi
late the accumulated wealth of science, the change is no loss,
but is a gain. When the rattling artillery of the skies crashes
overhead, he does not painfully feel that the great Olympian
has been disinherited of his bolts. If he never sees the cars
of the gods moving along the empyrean floor, he recognizea
massive worlds unnumbered wheeling their noiseless evolu
tions there, in mystic dance, not without song of their own
sort. Poetic fictions have given way to more poetic verities.
The visionary personifications of the mystagogues have but
yielded place to the immanent forces of unknowable Deity.
328 TJie Morbid and the Healthy [May,
" Earth outgrows the mythic fancies

Sung beside her in her youth ;
And those dtbonnaire romances
Sound but dull beside the truth.
Phoebus' chariot-course is run :
Look up, brothers, to the sun !
Truth is fair : shall we forego it ?
Do we right to sigh for wrong ?
God himself is the best poet,
And the Real is his song."
Neither has the flight of time, sparing thus the unstaled
loveliness of Nature, taken any thing from the wondrousuess,
the fascinating pleasures and pains, the exhaustless secrets, of
the individual experience of man. To realize that life is now-
all that it ever was, needs but a little more sharpness of sight,
vigor of thought, and openness of sensibilfty, brought face to
face with the emotional contents of affairs and the daily ex
pressiveness of things. In reality, every new conquest of
discovery, invention, philosophy, or sentiment, subduing our
habitation to our use, drawing our race into a sympathetic
solidarity, makes the earth a kinglier residence, and existence
a grander privilege. What was the troubadour's guitar when
he struck it before castle-moat or convent gate, singing,
" News from Palestine," compared with the telegraphic wire,
which, swept by a passing breeze at dawn, becomes the
string of a gigantic esolian harp, and sheds music on the
morning air, traversed around the globe by invisible tidings
of rapture and tragedy ; now the farewell message of dying
innocence, now the horrible note of an empire's fall ? For
mere daring, the feat in the pass of the Thermopylaean hills
shrinks before the charge at Balaklava ; and, for poetic chiv
alry, the image of Jason skimming the Pontic Sea with his
Argonauts is dimmed by the lustre of Kane on the deck of
the Advance amidst the groaning floes of Rensselaer Bay.
For what is the selfish snatching of a golden fleece compared
with the disinterested saving of a brother's life ? Indeed the
adventurous age of knighthood itself, whose illusory romance
weaves such a spell over us, boasts no essay not outdone by
that Hyperborean crusade of our time which projected above
the Arctic Ocean, in thrilling tableaux of mutual fidelity,
1865.] View of Life.
solemn daring, superhuman effort and unconquerable endu-

ranee, so magnificent a series of frozen cartoons set in so ap
palling a framework of northern lights, polar darkness and
spectral armies of ice. Feats more redoubtable than those
"which used to snatch plaudit and palm on the edge of fight,
secret martyrdoms more trying than those the earlier confess
ors suffered at the'stake and the block, are enacting at this
moment in ten thousand places over the silent world. The
miserable fallacy of custom chiefly causes the complaint, so
often heard, of modern dulness and degeneracy. It is soph
istry all. The recording angel of this century, moving over
land and sea, by battle-plains, through hospital-wards, above
sinking decks, along the avenues of literature and science,
around the haunts of pious love and toil, will gather as fra
grant a sheaf of shining names as any former period ever gar
nered into the niches of historical renown.
Outwardly, then, as we see, the magic hues that robed skies,
hills, rivers, vales, trees and flowers, in the sight of earth's
primitive children, have never faded before the admiring eyes
of pure affection and reverential thought. So, inwardly,
right and wrong, corruption and purity, wisdom, folly, peace,
madness, exultation, wretchedness, and despair, the heights
and depths of nobility and degradation, have not lost to aspir
ing souls, and in the course of a million ages cannot lose, any
of the attractions and horrors, joys and agonies that ever sur
charged or encompassed them. Wherein is life in this world
not still as regal and mystic a thing as it was when Abraham
roamed the plains of the patriarchal East, or when Moses
gazed from the top of Mount Nebo, his eye not yet, dim ?
Alluring veils hang all around us ; and what is behind them
who knows any better now than weary Jacob did, when, with
a stone for a pillow, he slept at Padan-aram, and dreamed he
saw the skyey ladder thronged with celestials commercing
between the two worlds ? Discovered crime blanches the
coward cheek with as unhackneyed a pang, and shoots the
horrifying bolts of agony through the guilty soul with as
frightful an effect, now, as when, in the lurid shade of Eden,
conscience thundered to the first murderer, " Where is thy
28*
330 Ihe Morbid and the Healthy [May,
brother ? " Surely love is as delicious a sensation, as pro

found a power, in the throbbing hearts it possesses now, as it
has ever been since the avenging angel waved the first pair
from the walls of Paradise lost. And is not jealousy just as
terrible as when its earliest victim was torn with agony? Full
tragically is the fate of despairing Sappho, who threw herself
from the Leucadian steep, paralleled by the' wretched girl who
this night stands on London Bridge, bids a wild farewell to
heaven and earth, flings herself into the dark torrent, and is
borne turbidly down to the sobbing sea, —
" Mad from life's history,
Glad to death's mystery,
Swift to be hurled
Any where, any where
Out of the world !"
Is not the pursuit of truth as fresh, as noble, as delightful

an occupation as when it absorbed the imperial souls of
Pythagoras, Plato, and Archimedes ? And are there not as
many astonishing revelations to be made now as there were
then ? Since our knowledge is merely a point in the centre
of an infinite ignorance, how can there not be starry wonders
without limit yet waiting to be unveiled, stupendous secrets
close at hand and burning to be born ? Is not fame's green
laurel just as desirable to-day as when the passion for it
broke the sleep of Themistocles ? And is not the shout of
good men's applause, resounding along the ages to kindle the
souls of ingenuous youth, as glorious a prize in the year of
Christ eighteen hundred and sixty-five, as when the pursuit
of it fired the lofty genius of Cicero, in the year of Rome six
hundred and ninety-four ? Were the alternative possibilities
of character ever more momentous than they are now ? was
the line that separates them ever more hazardous ? was death
ever a more awful turning-point, did the future ever tremble
more fearfully on the present, than in the very hour we are
living? What absurdity to talk of the decay of romance and
passion, to say that every thing has lost its interest and grown
old and trite, when every year the intensity of the game be
tween imaginative passion and limiting circumstance in
thousands of instances reaches the transcendental climax of

suicide; the beleaguered soul voluntarily exploding the maga
zine of life, and, through the pale and bleeding breaches of
ruin, rushing out of its fleshly castle into the glimpseless king
dom of the unknown ! To lift or pierce the dull veils of cus
tom is to escape the most discouraging fallacy which afllicts
us, and to discern that the brilliant colors of things have not
faded, the forms of success not parted with their maddening
beauty, sentiment not turned its edge, the problems of
thought not been stripped of their luring mystery, the ele
ments of romance not diminished in their number nor waned
in their power.
When, therefore, with monotonous fret, men complain that
existence is a wearisome burden, the reason lies not in nature
and life, but in the sophistry of worrying sickness, re-acting
disappointment, envious comparison, remorseful idleness, and
blunting habit. God has made the universe, and orders exist
ence, most generously and handsomely ; but men, sick, jeal
ous, disappointed, lazy, surfeited, refuse to conform to the
conditions of a noble and joyous experience. They suffer
hollowness and monotony simply because they have not kept
their faculties susceptible and keen, healthily animated by
genial affections. Wonders have not deceased from the
world, but astonishment is dead in them. Belief may putrefy
in the tank of a stagnant breast: truth is a living spring.
Sympathy may contract and die in the selfish breath of a cold
heart: love is the warm boundlessness of God. And it is
the most precious fact of experience, that to those who
through advancing years keep the keen curiosity of their
minds unblunted, the tender ingenuousness of their hearts
unhardened, the live source of their energies undrained, and
the loving aspirations of their souls unchilled, no glory that
their youth saw ever departs from the mountains and the
sea ; the ambitions which society early kindled in them but
purifyingly broaden and ascend ; action always continues to
yield an undulled pleasure, and life possesses the enriching
charm of perennial novelty. Those who, by indulgence of an
over-weening selfishness, have soured their sympathies and
332 The Morbid and the HeaUhy [May,
imbittered their tempers, or, in jading voluptuousness and

dawdling reveries, have lost the tingling zest of resolution
and exertion, if they can brace their muscles again by the
tonic of vigorous use, make exercise sharpen their restrained
appetites with the cloyless sauce of hunger, acquire a genial
affection for their neighbors, recover a strong desire for the
grand prizes of wisdom and usefulness, and go zealously to
work, will at once see how wretchedly disease through its
green goggles misreads all the lessons of time, idleness by its
enervate judgment underestimates the opportunities of man,
and selfishness with its dark mistakes dims the splendor of
his environment.
Having thus stated the experience of weariness and dis
gust constituting morbid melancholy, shown the misinterpre
tation the interested parties are naturally inclined to put
upon it, and exposed the fallacies by which they sometimes
try to justify it to themselves as if it rested on grounds of
truth and wisdom, the final part of the subject now confronts
ns in the question, What is the method of overcoming this
wretched sickness and sorrow of the mind ?
The first step towards its removal is to see clearly through
the sophistry which supports and enshrouds it, obtain a good
understanding of its causes, its nature, and its effects. A
distinct discernment of the diseased and fallacious character
of any given experience naturally produces a revolt from it,
and stimulates efforts to be free from it. The first thing,
therefore, is to see the truth. Now, that the psychological
phenomena under investigation are sickly and contemptible,
based on errors, appears from the fact that they are usually
exhibited, not by the children of affliction and hardship, where
there would seem to be some excuse for them, but by the
rich and idle who lead a poppied life. There must be mis
take and wrong at the bottom of complaints which are silent
in the abodes of destitution and the rounds of toil, but are
long and deep in the voluptuous haunts where Fortune has
showered her favors. Raw self-conceit, weak, and thwarted
in the struggle, often pampers its owner with the soothing
fancy, that, in suffering the pangs of vague melancholy, he
shows the proof of a finer soul than is common. But, really,

to loathe the offers of time is to have suffered vulgar discom
fiture. He truly is of a noble nature, and acts the heroic
part, who, capacious of sorrows, vanquishes their power, and
maintains a high heart of cheer. There is a whining melan
choly resulting from a morbid exaltation of self-consciousness,
whose subject is acutely sensitive to every trouble of his own,
stonily careless of the calamities of others, preserves a good
appetite, is exacting, irritable, censorious, finding little to ad
mire, less to praise, nothing generously to enjoy. The un-
justifiableness, the wickedness of this state is obvious. Yet
its victims are numerous and obtrusive. There is sometimes
a poetic melancholy arising from thoughts and sentiments too
high and pure for the vulgar facts of life ; from hopes, plans,
and affections so vast and delicate as to be out of tune with a
discordant world, forced by disappointment to weep and bleed
in yearning solitude apart from the coarse jokers and jostlers
of the time. This style of experience is much more rare
than self-love would have us think ; and, when it does exist,
it is never noisy, but shrinking and still. It has unutterable
compensations of its own. God never abandons it to clamor
to the passers-by for relief, but causes it often to exclaim in
the midst of its desertion, with a strange joy, " I am not sdone,
for the Father is with me ! "
Quite obvious, furthermore, on a moment's reflection, is the
sophistry under the feeling, that, because others have enjoyed
and suffered the same things with ourselves, these are there
fore the less fresh to us, their bloom and vivacity worn away.
Except for the egotistic greed for precedence, and the social
honor of discoyery, it is exactly the same with us in every
realm of experience as if we were sailing an unkeeled sea.
To the newest voyager, if he turns towards it a guileless
heart and a poet's eye, shows not the emerald crest of the
Bahamas, rising airily aloft out of the sea, the same outlines,
tinted with the same hues, that saluted the straining gaze of
Columbus?
The spectacle of existence, momentarily renewed, is ex-
haustless in itself; and, besides, we do not stay long enough
to wear it out. New generations are ever coming, to whom

each feature of the marvellous show is not only untested, but
unanticipated ; for whom untried enchantments flash from the
dun clouds of usage. Every individual's experience is his
Garden of Eden, given to him to dress it and to keep it. The
boundary of his personal consciousness is the true flaming
sword turning every way to keep him from escaping, and
others from entering; for every heart alone knows its own
bitterness and its own blessedness. Each man and woman,
therefore, walks the world, a new Adam and Eve, in a new
Paradise. The chief difference, leaving theological theories
out of account, is to the inexpressible disadvantage of the
primal pair, as they had no past. Volumes of meaning are
expressed in the simple statement, that literature and music,
science and art, society and civilization, have all been
since achieved. Equally with them we inherit the wondrous
visions and sensations of the present, and the boundless
hopes of the future ; but, in addition, we inherit an untold
enlargement of perception, emotion, and thought, in conse
quence of history. What an enrichment we gain in possess
ing that great and silent domain of soul, wherein, as we
wander at will, the weird kindred of the mind glide from
every ruin and shade ! Man's martyrdoms and triumphs have
given sympathetic voices to the air, and his architecture and
agriculture have new-created the earth.
" Nature herself is proud of his designs,
And joys to wear the dressing of his lines."
Standing on the mighty vantage-ground of the present,

whence our retrospective study commands all the precious
results achieved by foregone men, let us not, enviously exag
gerating their prerogatives in the world's antique youth by
the bank of the Euphrates, fail gratefully to appreciate the
superiority of our own accumulated privileges in the world's
young antiquity on this American shore ! For, reckoning on
any rational data, the first experiment is youngest and
crudest ; the last is oldest and wisest, and newest too ! It is
impossible human life should ever become intrinsically a spir
itless tale ; because every one must experience it for himself,

and no one can experience it a second time. It is handed
down from generation to generation as a joy, a peril, an
enigma, an opportunity, an excitement, unceasingly vivid
and attractive. New things arise, and the old are not old.
" In Florence, Dante's voice no more is booming,

Nor Beatrice's face by Arno blooming ;
But hearts that never heard the poet's story
Have their own heaven and hell and purgatory ; " •
for all that is beautiful and appalling in the meaning of those

words has its symbol and prophecy reflected in our individual
breasts and lives, from man to man, in each succeeding mo
ment.
There are, in addition to the everlasting freshness of our
cardinal experiences, two specific elements of perpetual
novelty in life. First, the identical old materials combine in
new shapes, proportions, and colors. Secondly, we are con
tinually confronting them with new experiences and in modi
fying moods. It is undoubtedly true of every man, that just
such a one was never before born into space ; and of every
career, that exactly such a one was never before run in
time. Every human life has its marked originality, its distin
guishing idiosyncrasies. It is in this respect " like morning
out of the east, — the same sunlight, but a new day." Wher
ever God comes, he makes all things new; and he comes every
where for ever. He new-creates the universe each instant.
Should he for one moment suspend the exercise of his crea
tive power, the whole universe would vanish, and nothing
remain to fill infinitude except himself. This new creation,
being continuous and incessant, is the same as if all were an
everlasting fixture. The result, to those who look on it from
without as we do, appears monotonous and ancient ; but, to
him who is ever new-making from within, it retains the un
worn aspect of eternal novelty. This is what we need in
regard to our life, — fresh insight and vivid feeling to make us
recognize the apparently trite routine of our existence, as
really fresh and zestful, making all things new. Why should
friendship fade, ambition mould, or imagination grow stale ?

Did you ever hear of an old decayed rainbow, or see a rotten
sunrise ? Is it not a mysterious pleasure at any time to think
of that invisible Workman who polishes the eye of the ante
lope, perfumes the cup of the lily, and arches the cloudy
dome with his shimmering prism ?
The second step for the miserable subject of melancholy to
take for freeing himself from his inward curse, and securing
an incessant charm of freshness and stimulus to his life, is to
endeavor to suppress the exaggerated craving for great and
rare things, for extraordinary achievements, unwonted de
grees of emotion ; and to fall back on the elementary satisfac
tions of his nature and relations. It is only the quiet and
usual tenor of feeling which can be sustained without ex
haustion or injury. Any overstrained experience swiftly
blunts and wearies the enjoying capacity. Therefore, to
avoid fatigue and nausea of spirit, man must prevailingly
dwell in the fruition of those relations, and the exercise of
those faculties, which are so simple and constitutional that
they can neither fail nor pall. Are not health, purity, disin
terestedness, friendship, the sight of a buttercup blooming by
the roadside, the sound of a bee's note in the odorous thicket,
the acquisition of a truth, a child's kiss, a mother's smile, a
sense of self-approval, a draught of cold water, a breath of
pure air, the experience of a poetic thought or a chivalrous
sentiment, — fresh joys as often as they are felt ? And may
they not be frequently felt anew as long as we live ? It is
high-strung sentimentalities, artificial luxuries, unnatural ex
cesses, that pervert our powers from their poise and pleasur
able play, sicken our disgusted palates, and oppress our minds
until we tire of life and complain of every thing. But truth
and love, sunrise, blossoming orchards, and the evening
breeze, exercise, aspiration, and progress, never betray, never
desert, never satiate their wise and wholesome votaries. Who
ever knew a lark dispirited, blase", refusing to mount and sing
when the purpling East threw open its gray gates for the
golden procession of the day? If we would be contented
as the mountains, serene as the stars, regular and beautiful in
our moods and ways as the forests and streams, exhilarate

and happy as the birds, why, then, we must live in self-suffi
cing obedience to law as they do, without greediness, enjoying
our destiny through the simple fulfilment of our normal func
tions. Gazing across the slopes of the meadow on the glassy
river set on fire by the low-hanging sun, lying in the clover-
field, coming through the waves of rye or between the stacks
of yellow corn, it is the very perniciousness of a selfish fancy
grown morbid to be for ever imagining more paradisal realms,
and pining for the heartless pomps of court and city. Ah !
why
" Thus dream of lands of gold and pearl,
Of loving knight and lady,
When farmer boy and barefoot girl
Are wandering there already " f
It is an ambitious longing for something beyond the healthy

level and round of our human lot that goads, the endless
unrest, and prompts the unfailing sigh. We must vanquish
this importunate and immoderate desire in contentment with
the elemental simplicities of nature and life, before we can
heave off the deadly incubus of depression. When the sul
tan of Persia acquires the robust and unsophisticated appetite
of Lycurgus or Agesilaus, he will equally relish a meal of
Spartan broth. In the mean time, although his couch sparkles
with imperial gems, and exhales the costliest perfumes, he
tosses on it, uneasy, languid, fretful, and life-weary.
The next direction to be given to the sufferer from indiffer
ence and tedium, is, that he strive to observe the scene of
existence more artistically, and to experience its contents
more earnestly, by viewing all under the impulse of a higher
and clearer purpose ; that is, that he order and pursue his life,
not at hap-hazard, but as a fine art. Nature and society seem
rigged with triviality, freighted with sameness, and becalmed
in a stagnant zone, only when we, reclined beneath an awning
of sluggishness, fail to perceive the sails flapping in the
breeze^ the ripples glistening in the sun, and the landmarks
scudding by. If we make the necessary exertion to rise up
VOL. LXXVIII. — 5TH 8. VOL. XVI. NO. III. 29
and look keenly forth, our listlessness will have gone in the
very effort. The rusty and dusty prizes hung around the
arena of our appointed career are burnished whenever we
gaze at them with an appreciative soul in our eyes. Nature,
in proportion as she is watched by a loving spirit through a
poetic eye, grows living, beautiful, precious, and inspiring.
And our whole life is in every respect both freshened and ag
grandized whenever it is studied as an art. It is essentially
an art, the highest and most inclusive of all arts. It is an
art of observation. It requires training, it requires consci
entious and affectionate watchfulness, to see with intellectual
mastery and assimilative feeling what passes before our own
eyes, and occurs within our own hearts, every day. Not one
in ten thousand does it ; and this is a chief reason why the
ruling strain of their days is a heavy drone. No careless
scanner will so behold and recognize tho mystery and beauty
of things as to feel perpetual wonder and love before them.
This needs a further art, an art of insight. Whoever success
fully practises this art discerns that really there is no monot
ony or tediousness anywhere, except in the blind and torpid
soul. Each departing scene is a picture colored and shaded
with desires and fears. Each advancing moment is a cup
spiced with hopes and risks. The observer who reads with
competent eye whatever concerns him, perceiving that every
"to-day is a king in disguise," unmasks their royalty as they
pass, and, journeying in their companionship, makes his expe
rience an imperial progress, free from vulgar degradation,
and quite aloof from ignoble hangers-on. The master of the
arts «f observation and insight, soon learning that immortal
youth is the basis of nature, and that fresh life is the law of
souls, sees his existence borne swiftly forwards, past inces
santly changing objects, amidst perpetually varied events,
beneath ethereal hues of alluring and pathetic evanescence.
Viewed with a wise and just perception, truly human life is
a gliding stream ; and his own individuality is the boat where-
from each person contemplates the visions that seem to come
and go as he really approaches and departs. All is quick,
novel, wondrous, exciting ; never stale and stupid.
" The scene is fair, the stream is strong ;

I sketch it as we float along :
Still as we go, the things I see,
E'en while I see them, cease to be ;
The angles shift, and with the boat
The whole perspective seems to float ;
Each painted height, each wavy line,
To new and other forms combine ;
Proportions change, and colors fade,
And all the landscape is remade ! "
How can anybody so give himself up to the fallacies of a
melancholy mind as to believe that this incessantly shifting
picture, this kaleidoscopic miracle of human life, is a worn-out
and insufferable old repetition?
Joyful and glorious life is not only an art of observation and
an art of insight : it is, furthermore, an art of associative
thought and sympathetic imagination. This is the nature and
function of romance, — a most important element in the health
and happiness of life. Romance, closely allied to religion in
essence and office, is the enrichment and heightening of life
by imaginative associations. Without this, every experience
is meagre, haggard, and weary. No experience limited to
present facts, or dominated by mere selfishness, can ever suf
fice to make us happy and contented for a long time. We
must lean on a rock which is higher than we, and re-enforce
ourselves with affiliated legions of conspiring aids. Our no
blest faculties are turned to one of their noblest uses when
we employ them to group the grandeurs of nature along our
petty ways, to add the swelling achievements, the victorious
anthems, the deep exultations, of universal humanity to the
insufficiency of our own poor deeds, feeble voices, and falter
ing joys. We are able thus, in a wondrous manner, to deepen
and enlarge our lives with the component elements of the
life of our whole race, past, present, future, until our personal
experience is actually fermented with the emprise of all ad
venturers, sweetened with the hopes of all friends, thrilled
with the triumphs of all heroes, perfected with the blissful
calm of all saints. However humble the lot and tame the
career of any one, he may instantly make them lofty and elec
trifying by suppressing his pride and envy, and identifying
his individual fortune with the collective destiny of his kind.

Let him think of the philosophers grappling with difficult
problems, the happy families rejoicing together, the prodigal
sons wandering in far climes, the nameless tragedies enacting
in many a place, the messages flashing along telegraphic
wires, the zones of sunrise and sunset for ever speeding
around the globe; the one followed by a girdle of merry
laborers filling the dawn with bustle, and the other by a girdle
of whispering lovers loitering in the shade, — and his human
heart will beat high, he will see their mysteries in his brain,
experience their pangs and pleasures in his soul, recognize
their stir in his muscles, feel their kisses warm on his lips ;
and an air of gladsome newness will invest all things with
worth and beauty. Man can avoid the monotonous burden of
a treadmill experience only by breaking away in thought and
action from the dull narrowness of a treadmill life ; and this
he may do by living in the whole life of humanity. He may
also do it by constantly making personal progress in knowl
edge, affection, faith, and power, through the cherished
impulsion of those thoughts which wing the soul for roofless
heights.
A corrective art of thought is the antidote of every de
pressing sophistry. Whatever heightens life in its functions,
or in its sense of functional power, cheers ; whatever lowers
it tends to produce melancholy. In rich and victorious souls,
poetry and faith are a twin-birth. Ideality is the supplement
to defective reality. Seems the world godless and gloomy ?
Conceive the perpetuity of inspiration, and it becomes a divine
transparency illuminated with the glow of intelligence, the
back-fires of divinity. In darkness and clullness rises the
distressing suspicion, that we are forsaken orphans pitilessly
left to our fate ? It vanishes before the warmth and comfort
of the thought of how the Lord, the Shepherd, leads his
flock into the pasture of the day with a crook of morning
light; and, when they tire, pins them in the fold of sleep with
the evening star. Contemplating exhibitions of meanness
and debasement, sickness, decay, oblivious imbecility, does
our admiration of human nature faint, and does our confidence
in eternal life expire ? A judicious reflection revives the

reverence and restores the faith by showing the sublimity of
man as seen when he treads on ignorance and conquers temp
tation, achieving truth and virtue ; when, a lonely spray of
immortality, in willing martyrdom for others, he dashes him
self against the adamantine masses of oppression ; when his
spiritual passion surges through the arteries of creation, and
he subjects the phases of the universe to the moods of his
fortune.
" What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis 1 whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand
like wonder-wounded hearers ? "
Should our toil and path appear low and unclean, our roof
and furniture rustic and plebeian, will not a little thought
teach us that every day we travel on our errands hemmed in
by galaxies, and every night lie down to slumber pavilioned
with eternity? And, as to cheap outfit and tiresome repeti
tion of steps, knows not the most destitute and shabby pedes
trian who thinks competently of the facts, that since, in his
annual journey around the ecliptic, he can neither set up any
waymarks nor fathom the wonder of the course or the terror
of the speed, the road never grows trite, but remains for ever
exciting and awful to him who understands the sublimity of
his chariot and riding, as, along the blue lane of space, be
tween precipitous banks of stars, he rolls to his fate?
Through this art of inspiration and aggrandizement, the
quiet life of many a private man of genius, waited on by
meditation and love, is crowded with internal incidents of
purer pomp and delight than all the idle pageants of kings.
Angels lackey his state, the most royal scenery of the uni
verse environs his toils and decks his dreams, and the very
music of God swells in his breast. Throned over that inward
empire of miod, more real than the realm of cloud and granite,
he wields the sceptre of thought ; and all is plastic beneath it.
The illimitable fingers of imagination mould the unresisting
material as he wills. In that soundless and lovely domain, the
stubborn crudities and deformities of the actual intrude not.
29*
All harshness and cruelty are far. There the beggar is a mil-
lionnaire, the dairy-maid a queen, the corporal an emperor, and
the man a god.
When weariness marries disgust, melancholy is the child
they bear ; and fallacies are the food on which its life is nour
ished. Whoever would starve or strangle this vampire must
either cut off its food by insight of truth, or choke out its life
by some exertion of enterprise. One indispensable require
ment is made of the despondent complainer before he can be
free from his misery; and that is, that he wake up, rally his
energies, and set before himself some kindling aim to be pur
sued. Making constant advances towards the boons that will
then beckon and fire his soul, he will escape that wearisome
experience which resembles the beat of a sentinel or of a pris
oner. The primal necessity is resolute exertion ; for, while
not all heaven can stop the tongue of the lazy and selfish
grumbler, a very small allowance of reward fills the earnest
worker with gratitude. Devotion to an end is the best in
spiration and joy of life, and the most lasting. The fountain
of a disinterested passion, once troubled by the descent of an
angel-vow pledging us to some noble design, is a perpetual
source of strength and blessedness thenceforward.
There is a religious element, a divine obligation, in this
strain of thought and effort. God loveth not only a cheerful
giver, but verily a cheerful liver too. A sound and wise man
is prevailingly happy and grateful, feels that he has no busi
ness to be sour and querulous, and to go whining through the
world as if the God-gift of existence were a penalty. Those
who feel differently are in a perverted state ; and their misery
originates at home, however much they charge it elsewhere.
For life, in flowing through us, takes the form, color, and taste
our being gives it. A certain preparation passed through the
glands of a serpent is deposited as poison in his fangs ; passed
through the organs of a bee, is dropped as honey in his hive.
Our experience is the elaborated product of our organism and
character. As we are, we live ; as we sow, we reap. Under
the rule of that infinite Force of the Universe whose name is
God, in that perfect concatenation of causes and effects which
is Providence, whatever is, is necessary ; and man has no

right to complain, but ought to take his part, and bear his
load, and fight his fight, and meet his fate, manfully, with good
pluck and good cheer.
An impressive lesson is conveyed in the old story of the
imperial epicure, who, yawning in agony of exhaustion, offered
by public proclamation a reward to the person who would
enable him to experience a new sensation. A universe of in
viting truth before him ; a world of sighing humanity around
him ; an invisible throng of dangers hovering over him ready
to snatch his life; far along the night, the constellations burn
ing like tapers in the silent halls of eternity, as if to draw the
exploring mind to solve the infinite mysteries of death and
fate, — and there he lolls on his luxurious couch, in a chamber
whose air is thick with perfumes, groaning in anguish of satia
tion, and offering a reward for a sensation ! What a spectacle
for men and angels ! Instead of sending the herald through
the streets, had he but risen up, and begun to search for truth,
to organize justice, to love his fellows, to relieve the miseries
of his people, and thus to set an example for the applauding
after-time to copy, he had acted wisely. In that case, all pos
terity would have turned with grateful veneration to do honor
to their ornament and benefactor ; but, as it is, contempt and
disgust hasten to drop the curtain over the jaded brute of
Rome.
Those depressed and torpid men, or sour and fretful men,
who, devoid of an unselfish ambition, think there is nothing
now left worth bestirring themselves for, independent of for
eign regards, need with some mixed stimulus of affection and
alarm to disturb the thickening life which unbelief and lazi
ness have drugged, anoint their eyes to see, penetrate the
mechanical commonplace of habit, and thus come into moving
contact with the deep realities of life, in order to perceive
that all the fault was their own, and not chargeable to their
times nor to their circumstances. Disheartened complainer !
the defect which you charge upon the contemporaneous his
tory that holds you, really lies in the exacerbating envy which
rots your fruit of life or turns it into apples of Sodom, — the
tepid debility which extracts all the ruddiness from ambition

and changes the joyous tension of muscularity into painful
languor. By one determined volition overcome the stifling
power of selfish indolence, by sympathy plunge into all his
tory as the inspired actor of it, by love summon up all beauty
as the first beholder of it, by imagination grasp all discovery
as the first achiever of it, by persistent reasoning master all
philosophy as the original thinker of it, by benevolent princi
ple engage in every good work as the disinterested servant of
it, by religious faith adore God and anticipate the world to
come as the born inheritor of them, — and you shall find your
self a new man, leading a new life, in a new world. If you
have ever felt existence as a weary burden, and wished for
death to rid you of its unwelcome cares, you shall know then
how much you were mistaken ; for —
" Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death.
'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant ;
'Tis life, not death, for which we pant ;
More life, and keener, that we want."
There is no lack of reason for making the exertion thus in

dicated : " Having waited a whole eternity to be born, have
we not now a whole eternity waiting to see what we will do
when born?" There is no want of awful and inspiring alter
natives, gulfs of horror, and heights of hope : the doom of
vicious defeat and suffering, and the prize of virtuous victory
and blessedness, are hung on our freedom, waiting to be
chosen and achieved. There is no deficiency of sympathetic
and helping hosts : do not throngs of celestial beings, crowd
ing the sightless air around, watch us with holy interest?
The sole defect is of a due sensibility to the realities of the
case, an adequate appreciation of how glad and sorrowful and
perilous and sublime a thing it is to be a man, to rejoice in
life, to love and be loved, to suffer, to be pardoned, to grow
wise and good and great, to die, to rise, and to be immortal.
The great body of mankind, being unstirred from within,
need a shock from without to startle them into waking pur
1865.] View of Life.. 345
poses. They need to have those faiths and desires which are
charged with the resurrection of the dead forcibly introduced
into their souls to propel them within a new sphere of expe
rience. The dumb son of the king of Lydia, when he saw,
during the sack of Sardis, a soldier ready to strike the king
upon the head with his cimeter, was so roused by fear and
tenderness for the life of his father, that, according to the
ancient legend, by a violent effort he broke the string of Jiis
tongue, and cried, "Soldier, spare the life of Croesus I" Let
the idlers who complain of the tameness of all things in these
modern days, by the sudden power of a regenerative resolve
break the cords of unbelief and sloth that bind them in torpor,
and bring their souls to a real appreciation of the motives and
possibilities of life, — wisdom, enterprise, hope, an" duty, —
and they shall find that infinite gratifications are not far from
any one of them. They shall see that the world is crowded
with privileges of ascending glory and deepening satisfaction.
They shall feel how steadily a healthy life, by the freshness
of its perpetual variety, flings refutation and contempt on the
torturing sophistries of a melancholy mind. Suicide is not
the genuine escape from- evil, but is the most fearfully baited
trap it sets. The true deliverance from the evils, both real
and imaginary, which beset us, is in the insight and inspira
tion imparted by a deeper contact with truth and nature,
society and God, detaching experience from the reflex self
and attaching it to divine objects. In rich and heroic souls,
the motives of life make a music under whose stimulus they
feel as if, before a gazing world, over a stairway covered with
cloth of gold, they were marching to the stars.
346 Gerald Griffin. [May,
Art. II.— GERALD GRIFFIN.
The Works of Gerald Griffin, in ten volumes. Montreal and New

York : D. & J. Sadlier & Co.
JVe take Gerald Griffin, a brilliant novelist and poet, for

the subject of our present article.
His parents belonged to respectable Roman-Catholic fami
lies in the south of Ireland. His father was a fairly educated
and intelligent man : his mother was a woman of talents and
of considerable reading. She was also a woman of strong
affection^ of deep sensibility, of earnest religious feeling, and
of great elevation of character. " She was," says her son,
the biographer of Gerald, "a person of exceedingly fine taste
on most subjects, particularly on literature, for which she had
a strong original turn, and which was indeed her passion."
Alluding to her sensibility, he observes, —
" This sensibility, the restless and inexhaustible fountain of so
much happiness and so much pain, she handed down to her son Ger
ald in all. its entireness. She was intimately acquainted with the best
models of English classical literature, took great delight in their study,
and always endeavored to cultivate a taste for them in her children.
Besides that sound religious instruction which she made secondary to
nothing, and which in her opinion was the foundation of every thing
good, it was her constant aim to infuse more strongly into their minds
that nobility of sentiment, and princely and honorable feeling in all
transactions with others, which are its necessary fruits, and which the
world itself, in its greatest faithlessness to religion, is compelled to
worship. She would frequently through the day, or in the evening,
ask us questions in history ; and these were generally such as tended
to strengthen our remembrance of the more important passages, or to
point out in any historical character those traits of moral beauty
that she admired. ' Gerald,' I heard her ask, ' what did Camillus
say to the schoolmaster of the Falerii ? ' Gerald instantly sat erect
in his chair, his countenance glowing with the indignation which such
an act of baseness inspired, and repeated with energy, ' Execrable
villain ! ' cried the noble Roman, ' offer thy abominable proposals to
1865.] Gerald Griffin. 347
creatures like thyself, and not to me ! "What though we be enemies

of your city, are there not natural ties that bind all mankind, which
should never be broken ? ' "
A generous Roman spirit, Christianized and softened, also

shows itself in her letters to her children and to others. Her
husband, Patrick Griffin, was an easy-going, cheerful, home-
loving man, with a tendency to oddity and humor. This
couple had many children ; and one of the younger was Ger
ald, who was born in the city of Limerick, Dec. 12, 1803. It
will be seen that he inherited from his parents the finely tem
pered and richly mixed nature, whioh is the soil of genius.
Gerald received a portion of his childish instruction from an
odd sort of pedagogue in Limerick, named Mac Eligot.
" My mother," writes the biographer, " went to the school with
the boys on the first day of their entrance. ' Mr. Mac Eligot,' said
she, ' you will oblige me very much by paying particular attention to
the boys' pronunciation, and making them perfect in their reading.'
He looked at her with astonishment. ' Madam,' said he, abruptly,
' you had better take your children home : I can have nothing to do
wtyh them.' She expressed some surprise. ' Perhaps, Mrs. Griffin,'
said he, after a pause, ' you are not aware that there are only three
persons in Ireland who know how to read.' — 'Three?' said she.
'Yes, madam, there are only three, — the Bishop of Killaloe, the
Arl of Clare, and your humble servant. Beading, madam, is a
natural gift, not an acquirement. If you choose to expect impossibili
ties, you had better take your children home.' "
This man was a true philosopher of the Dogberry order :

"To be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune; but to
write and read comes by nature." An amusing anecdote is
told of another teacher of Gerald's. " Mr. Donovan," said one
of the scholars, " how ought a person to pronounce the letter i
in Latin ? " — "If you intend to become a priest, Dick," said
the master, in reply, "you may as well call it ee; but, if not,
you may call it ee or i, — just as you fancy."
One way and another, at home and in school, Gerald
acquired a respectable education, including, if not a scholarly,
at least, a gentlemanly knowledge of classical literature.
Owing to the removal of the family from the city, the youth
ful lot of Gerald was to live among the lovely scenes of the
country near it, along the banks of the magnificent Shannon.
By the influence of these on his senses and his fancy, by
meditation and self-communion in the solitude of fields and
woods, or in the solemn stillness of grand old ruins, he had the
training which was best suited to his character and genius.
The influences on his mind, of natural beauty and of ancient
traditions, may be traced in all his writings, both of poetry
and of prose. He had equally a passion for nature and a pas
sion for the past. Earth, air, water, skies, suns, stars, " the
dread magnificence of heaven," held over him a genial sway :
so did the olden times of an olden race by myth, legend, and
heroic story. And this spirit of nature and of the past did
not fail him, even in the gloomy bareness of a London
garret : even there the divine vision of God's works was pres
ent to his imagination; and songs of national inspiration came
in sweet, sad music to his heart. Gerald, while very young,
began to understand his proper mental destiny, though he
lived to lament that he had ever given way to it. He would
not be a doctor, but a poet ; and so, while yet a mere boy, he
set about composing tragedies, ballads, songs, tales, and
sonnets.
The elder Mr. Griffin, though a worthy and industrious mas,
did not prosper in the business of a brewer in Limerick ; nor
does it appear that success attended his exertions in other
occupations. Accordingly, he, his wife, and a portion of their
family, emigrated to America, about the year 1820, and settled
in the county of Susquehanna, Penn., some hundred and forty
miles from the city of New York. Gerald was left to the care
of an elder brother, a physician, living and practising at a
short distance from Limerick. He first began in Limerick his
literary career by fugitive contributions to a newspaper, and,
for a short time, undertook vicariously its editorship. In
Limerick also he first made the acquaintance of Mr. Banim,
afterwards celebrated as author of the " Tales of the O'Hara
Family." But this local and provincial sphere Griffin felt to
be too narrow for his talents and ambition : so, a few weeks
before the close of his twentieth year, he found himself in

London, without friends, with little money, but with much
confidence. He had a manuscript tragedy which was to lay the
foundation of his fame and fortune ; and, when that was firmly
laid, he formed the heroic resolution to reform the stage, and,
artistically as well as morally, to bring about a revolution in
the opera. We heard lately of a zealous Christian who en
thusiastically declared, that, when he should go to the other
world, his determination was to labor to elevate souls to his
own level. We did not learn what he thought that level was
to be ; but, whatever he anticipated concerning it, the spiritual
Quixotism of nis infinite, eternal, and ghostly mission was not
wilder or bolder than the intellectual and sesthetic Quixotism
of poor Gerald, when he determined to raise the drama and
the opera of London to his own level. We have no means of
judging what the success of the good man alluded to may be
in the other world ; but we have Gerald's own honest and
laughable confession of the folly and the failure in this world
of his noble and disinterested plan. We say nothing on the
modesty or humility of either of these self-constituted re
formers. We only trust that our philanthropist of the next
world may not have to be so lamentably disappointed as
Gerald was in the stony-hearted world of London. Though
Gerald conquered at last in a struggle which was all but fatal,
he suffered in London miseries that are' almost incredible. To
this struggle we shall again return.
It is a circumstance worthy of mention, that Banim and
Griffin, strictly members outwardly of the Roman-Catholic
Church, began at one time to doubt the truth of Christianity.
Both, on studying the works of Paley, were not only confirmed
in the faith of Christianity, but became inwardly more devoted
Catholics. We do not attempt to account for this, which to
some may seem a paradox. We allude to it, in order to make
a simple remark. It has been the fashion of late to stigma
tize Paley as merely a utilitarian sensationalist and worldling;
but we think that many have gained moral and political
insight from his works, which they could never otherwise
have gained. Our own philosophy, intellectual and ethical, is
VOL. LXXVIII. — 5TH 8. VOL. XVI. NO. HI. 30
almost the opposite, in its principles, to that of Paley ; but we

honor the man who did, for the progress of civil and religious
liberty of his own day, a manly work ; who did it, too, in a
manly way, and in most manly English.
After Gerald Griffin had stamped his name in English liter
ature, he alternated for a while between Ireland and London ;
took a tour in Scotland, of which he kept an interesting journal,
and then returned home for life : but that was not for long.
Only a brief period lay now between him and the grave.
When he had attained to fame, and was surely on the way to
wealth, he at once and for ever turned from the literary life
in which he had so determinedly fought and so bravely con
quered. He became a monk among the Christian Brothers,
— an order dedicated to the education .of the poor, — a. voca
tion which, so long as life was left him, he fulfilled with exem
plary goodness and wisdom. This was not long. He died in
the monastery of the Christian Brothers, in Cork, on the 12th
of June, 1840, in the thirty-seventh year of his age. So lowly
did he think of himself as to his spiritual state, that he
shrank from entering into priestly orders. When he had
decided to live a monastic life, he regretted all the years he
had given to literature as wasted or worse than wasted. Had
he the power, he would have exterminated works in which
his genius lives for the honor of his own name and the credit
of his country ; also for harmless pleasure, even for the edifi
cation of countless thousands. He did destroy, before hia
friends could have had any suspicion of his intention, a large
quantity of manuscripts which may have contained works that
possibly were better and riper than any he had published.
This loss to literature his brotherly biographer very naturally
laments ; and, if he had had any knowledge of the author's
purpose, he would have done his utmost to prevent the loss.
A strangely romantic and poetic episode runs through the
last ten years of Gerald Griffin's life. Gerald Griffin, like
Charles Lamb, seemed to have had a special regard for the
Society of Friends. He became acquainted, in Limerick,
with a Mr. and Mrs. , who belonged to that religious
body. There sprang up between the couple and the poet the
strongest mutual attachment. The feelings of the poet towards

the lady, though evidently of reverential purity, were colored,
nay, beautified, by the difference of sex, and amounted to an
enthusiastic, an impassioned friendship. His letters to her are
very numerous, very eloquent, and often very elevated. His
last letter, presenting her with an old desk, on which all his
literary work had been accomplished, is tender, and musical
with pathos and affection. Shortly after he became a monk,
she called to see him. When her name was announced, he was
walking in the garden. He turned pale, hesitated, but at last,
though with strong emotion, refused to see her. A form of
the anecdote, which lurks in our memory, adds that, when this
message of denial was given to her, she burst into tears.
Some most affecting lines addressed to her were found, after
his death, among his papers.
Gerald Griffin was of the very best personal appearance.
The following passage, in which his brother, a physician,
describes a visit to him in London, will give a more truthful
and vivid impression of it than could any second-hand sum
mary of ours : —
" On my arrival in London from Edinburgh, in the month of Sep

tember, 1826, I found him occupying neatly furnished apartments in
Northumberland Street, Regent's Park. I had not seen him since he
left Adare, and was struck with the change in his appearance. All
color had left his cheek : he had grown very thin ; and there was a
sedate expression of countenance, unusual for one so young, and
which, in after-years, became habitual to him. It was far from being
so, however, at the time I speak of, and readily gave place to that
light and lively glance of his dark eye, that cheerfulness of manner
and observant humor, which, from his very infancy, had enlivened
our fireside circle at home. Although so pale and thin as I have
described him, his tall figure, expressive features, and his profusion of
dark hair, thrown back from a fine forehead, gave an impression of a
person remarkably handsome and interesting."
Our limits confine us to this meagre outline of Griffin's life.

The full biography is written by a fraternal hand, with such
affectionate and modest eloquence as to show, that the writer
352 Gerald Griffiri. [May,
was kindred in genius as well as in blood with the gifted bro

ther of whom he wrote. To that biography we refer our
readers; and we can promise them all the interest which the
struggles of a heroic literary experience, admirably recorded,
can impart.
We now offer some observations on Gerald Griffin's charac
ter, personal and literary. We do this, because we conceive
that some peculiarities in his character tended to increase his
difficulties in London, as these difficulties, in turn, tended to
bring out his character, and help us to understand it.
He was, in the first place, of a very reserved temper with
strangers. The English were wholly strange to him; and, of
all English, Londoners would be, to a temper such as this,
most forbidding : yet Gerald Griffin, while only a boy, plunged
into the crowded wilderness of London. And this reserve
would, at that period (1823), be rendered colder, more cau
tious, more sensitive, by the consciousness, that, as a Roman-
Catholic Irishman, his position would be regarded, politically
and socially, as one of inferiority. Whatever embarrasses our
selves embarrasses also those with whom we come into con
tact. Whatever tends to keep us' apart from others tends
equally to keep them apart from us, and the distance is thus
doubled. The reserved temper of Griffin, together with his
inexperience of the world, and particularly his ignorance of
English character, would, as we have said, naturally increase
all his difficulties in London. It was not likely that such a
youth would easily or readily conciliate publishers or mana
gers, who, though often servile to the successful, are as often
haughty to the untried, and account their independence impu
dence. Gerald wanted that pushing manner which has a cer
tain vulgar power in it, that frequently carries mediocrity
into notice, into a gainful notoriety, and a " Brummagem "
popularity. Neither had he that jovial buoyancy, which, by
a joke, story, or a laugh, sometimes wins favor from the most
selfish or the most worldly. Courteous, amiable, and by
nature gay and cheerful as Gerald was, he was, notwith
standing the amount of humor that was in his genius, no
laugher-at-large, and, in his own person, no laugh-maker.
A great force of purpose gave his character a tendency to

austerity ; but his stoicism was one of high principle, the
instinct of personal dignity softened by Christian feeling and
by gentlemanly grace.
This independent personality in Gerald Griffin, which
might, as we have supposed, embarrass his intercourse with
strangers, did so, as we are informed, with friends. He kept
his relatives in Ireland ignorant of his condition ; and he did
not inform those in America of his troubles, until he was well
over them. Not that he kept silent either. On the contrary,
like poor Chatterton, when his wretchedness was darkest, he
was writing the most hopeful letters. In these dismal circum
stances, he refused the generous offer of pecuniary assistance
from Mr. Banim, a fellow-countryman, a fellow-Catholic, a fel
low-author, and a most intimate friend. A kind acquaintance
of Griffin's, with whom he used to dine frequently, was obliged,
by difficulties in business, to reside within what are called
"The Rules," — a space of sanctuary allowed by the court
of Queen's Bench to a certain class of debtors. This affection
ate friend, at the risk of close imprisonment and heavy penal
ties, ventured to pass the forbidden bounds, and, sheltered by
darkness, made his way to Gerald's obscure lodgings. He
found him there, past midnight, hard at work : he had not a
single shilling left, and for three days he had not tasted food.
" Good God!" said the friend, " why did you not come to see
me ? " — " Oh ! " said Gerald, quietly, " you would not have me
throw myself upon a man who was himself in prison." ■ The
friend, however, saw that he had immediately all that his con
dition required. While Griffin was thus starving, he was
obliged to refuse invitations to luxurious dinners, and the
society of cultivated minds, because his clothes were ragged :
for the same reason, he had to skulk out of nights, in order to
take some exercise, and breathe fresh air. The letter in which
he afterwards describes these sufferings to his mother is one
of the most pathetic compositions to be found in the personal
histories of men of letters. These sufferings from bodily
want, exhausting toil, and an overtaxed mind, brought on a
dangerous illness, — nervous debility, and irregular action of
30*
the heart. It was only a sudden visit of his medical brother

that saved his life ; but, from the results of this illness, he
never entirely recovered.
Stoic though Gerald Griffin was, he did not neglect to seek
the aid of such influence as a high-minded man might honor
ably accept ; but disappointment, disgust, and failure were all
that his exertions brought him : at least, they brought him no
such success as would compensate for the pain and labor of
making them. So he determined to stand upon his own talents.
If they were not sufficient to maintain his claims, then his
claims had no real foundation. " It is odd ; but I have never
been successful, except where I depended entirely on my own
exertions." If these should not sustain him, he resolved to
abandon the struggle. He did not abandon the struggle, but
persevered with courage and determination. There was no
giving-in. " That horrid word 'failure,' " he exclaims. " No :
death first ! " He was no dreamer or visionary, but a hard
and honest worker. No man within a given time wrote more
than Griffin, or more variously: he was ready to do any repu
table work which was given him to do, and to do it well. He
had the most elevated ideas of literature, both as an art and
as a profession, as he had also of the dignity and duties of a
literary man ; it was genuine elevation, and modest because
genuine ; it was not the assumption of puffed-up self-conceit,
or the pomposity of flattered vanity. In Griffin's view, it was
noble to do work which it was honest and of good report to
do; and therefore he never shrank from the humblest tasks,
when higher ones came not in his way. He never failed in
confidence; but it was confidence founded in strength, — the
strength of Christian patience, of conscious genius, of a firm
will, of a determination not to be conquered ; and, after much
tribulation, he won no inglorious victory.
Perhaps no adventurer of letters ever endured more hard
ships in the same length of time, in London, than Gerald Grif
fin did, and endured them with less moral injury to his per
sonal or literary character. Griffin seems to have escaped all
the hurtful influences which pain, want, and uncertainty so
often and so fatally have upon character. He kept himself
free of all meanness, all coarseness, from low companionships,

from degrading and degraded habits, and came out of the trial
a young man with his home-born purity unsullied, a Chris
tian with his faith more confirmed, a gentleman unharmed in
his honor or refinement, and a writer who won success and the
public by his own independent genius, bearing his triumph
with true and graceful modesty. When we call to mind how
many able, brilliant, and even amiable men the literary life in
London has morally prostrated or destroyed, we cannot but
give high praise to Griffin, that he did not yield to tempta
tions before which strong men have fallen.
It would be interesting to compare fully Griffin's experi
ence in London with that of other literary adventurers who
had tried their fortune there before him ; but we must resist
the allurement. Johnson would come first to mind. Griffin,
as a youth, had the same courage which Johnson showed at
maturity : he held the literary vocation in as high esteem, and
followed it with the same affection and devotedness. Like
Goldsmith, he eschewed patrons, and hoped for nothing but
from the public and the publishers. He had not the open,
easy, careless good-nature of Goldsmith ; but neither had he
his imprudence and improvidence. He had a regard for his
personal dignity, in which Goldsmith was deficient ; and he
took care, as Goldsmith did not, to guard this dignity. Sav
age, Chatterton, and Dermody may suggest themselves to
many : but Savage was a charlatan ; Chatterton was a man of
genius by the gift of God, but chose to become an impostor
by the instigation of the Devil, and preferred infamy to fame.
He " perished in his prime " by a double suicide ; first, the sui
cide of his inner life, and, secondly, the suicide of his outward
life. Dermody was only a clever sot ; a pot-house poet. To
none of these has Griffin any moral relation : to Chatterton, he
was mentally related in the early unfolding of striking talents,
and incidentally in having come near to the chasm of despair,
into which Chatterton, being void of faith, took the fatal leap.
The biographer of Gerald Griffin compares his literary charac
ter with that of Crabbe, to the disadvantage of Crabbe. The
remarks about Crabbe we regard as hardly just or generous.
356 Oerald Griffin. [May,
Besides, they are unnecessary ; for there is no need that we

should accuse Crabbe of servility, in order that we should
glorify Griffin for independence. Both were true men, and
neither in worth nor fame does one stand in the other's way.
Does it not seem, however, as if the desperate struggles
of such remarkable persons would be a warning and a terror
to indigent young men against literary ambition ; at least,
against their plunging themselves with blind impetuosity
into the dark whirlpools of mighty cities ? But these young
men see, in the lottery of the game of literary ambition, only
the winners and the prizes. They think not of the losers
or of the lost. Lucian we believe it is who tells us of a
sailor, that, having escaped from shipwreck, went into
the temple of Neptune to make a votive offering. " Some
individuals," said the priest, " seem to scoff at the power of
Neptune ; but look around, and behold the numerous tributes
of those whom he has saved." —" But where," asked the sailor,
" are those whom he has drowned ? " And so, if some, after
London misery, have reached the glory of literary reward,
what conception can we form of the wretchedness of the
obscure thousands, who sank into its gloomy depths never to
be heard of more ? — many, indeed, self-deluded ; many vain,
ignorant, and presumptuous ; but also many of as true genius
as those who succeeded. Might not one suppose, that, before
entering such a career, a young man would say to himself,
" Where will it end ? " And, end where it may, does the gain
bear any proportion to the risk, while the chances of loss are
incalculable ; and loss itself is often deadly ? Have not men,
too, who gained all that genius could desire, confessed at last,
that, in substance, experience was much the same in literary
life as it is in common life ? Never was there a man more
covetous of literary distinction than Gerald Griffin ; and yet,
before he had reached half-\va}r to the eminence it was in his
power to attain, he wearied of the aspiration which had car
ried him so far. Notwithstanding, the charm will work ; and,
in order that some may rise into the open day of fame, thou
sands sink into the thick night of poverty and despair.
But is it not so in all nature ? The whole of life is risk ;
but risk does not therefore paralyze life ; because, through life,
hope ever goes along with danger. If danger deterred from
action, the world would soon be at an end ; it would have no
armies, no navies, no commerce, no travel, no explorings of
sea or land ; it would cease even to be peopled, for men would
not run the risk of establishing and supporting homes, or
women that of marriage and child-bearing. If Jove's brain
travailed with Minerva, if the mountain labored, as fable tells
us, with a mouse, so will brains, till the end of time, palpitate
with literary gestation, whether the result of parturition be
wisdom or folly, mice or Minervas.
We proceed to some remarks on Gerald Griffin's genius and
writings.
Griffin was certainly a man of genius ; a man having a cer
tain inborn aptitude, which is not the result of education and
industry. This sets him who has it apart, not only from ordi
nary, but also from merely able men. For the mysterious
something wherein this difference lies, we have no other name
than genius ; and, though it cannot be formally denned or ex
plained, its presence in any product of mind is recognized with
unfailing certainty. It became active in Griffin while he was
very young : indeed, when Griffin gave up literature, he was
still young, so that Griffin was always a young author ; and
yet we might say that he was always a ripe one. From the
first, he displayed a certain masculine vigor altogether differ
ent from the feebleness which sometimes characterizes the
compositions of young writers, who afterwards become re
markable for their strength. The early power of Griffin we
see in the fact, that his tragedy of " Gysippus " was written in
his twentieth year ; his romance of " The Collegians," in his
twenty-fifth. He had an inventive and bold imagination : to
this his power and variety in the creation of character bear
witness. He had great fulness of sensibility and fancy, as
we observe in the picturesqueness of his style, and in his
wealth of imagery. He delighted in outward nature, and is a
fine describer of it; but, like Sir Walter Scott, he never
describes for the sake of description, but always in connec
tion with human interest and incident. He excels in the
pathetic : but it is in passion that he has most power ; strong

natural passion, and such as it is in those individuals in whom
it is strongest and most natural, — individuals in the middle
and lower ranks of life, especially in the middle and lower
ranks of Irish life. It was in these ranks and in Irish life that
Griffin found the spirit and the substance of his characters.
He was a rapid and productive writer, and as much at home
in criticising as in creating. He passionately loved music,
and by instinct, taste, and knowledge, was an excellent critic
of it, as he was also of literature. His genius, too, was of the
most refined moral purity, without sermonizing or cant ; and
when we reflect that guilt and sin and passion, low characters,
vulgar life, and broad humor, are so constantly the subjects
with which it is concerned, this purity is no less remarkable
than it is admirable. Every such case elevates literature, and
makes it. the source of a new pleasure; for it practically
proves that the utmost freedom of genius may be exercised
without offending the most rigid or alarming the most sensi
tive.
The poems of Gerald Griffin fill one large thick volume of
his "works. Besides the tragedy of " Gysippus," they consist
mostly of lyrical pieces gathered out of his several fictions
through which they are interspersed. They are characterized
by sweetness, feeling, and fancy. We regard Griffin's lyrics
as his best poems, and his simple songs as his best lyrics. We
think that, had he chosen to write "Songs of Ireland" and
" Songsfor Ireland," though he might never have attained the
indescribable refinement of Moore, his songs would have had
in them more music of the heart, and more homely nationality.
Many of Griffin's songs have been popular ; often sung, and
often quoted, — such as, " 0 Times, Old Times;" "A place in
thy Memory, dearest;" "My Mary of the Curling Hair;"
" Gilli-Ma-Chree ; " and others. Here is a song which we
venture to quote ; and, in spite of its Irish phrases, the
most English ear cannot be dead to the spirit of its beauty.
It is pathetic and original : it does for the bride's young life
what " John Anderson, my Jo " does for the wifely faith
of age : it breathes the unsensual and unselfish affection of
woman's heart. Love is usually celebrated in song for pas

sion and for youth : Burns celebrates it for purity and old
age. In the one case, love looks to the future ; in the other,
it looks to the past : so, usually, the bride is made joyful in
giving her life to her husband ; in Griffin's song, she is made
sad in separating it from that of her old parents. The
thought is good and true and natural, — more exquisite even
than that of Burns ; for in his there is no future : but, in
Griffin's, the hope of the future is for a time lost in the duti
ful feelings of the past : —
I.
The mie-na-mallah * now is past,
O wirra-sthru ! O wirra-sthru ! t
And I must leave my home at last,.
O wirra-sthru ! O wirra-sthru !
I look into my father's eyes,
I hear my mother's parting sighs, —
Ah I to pine for other ties :
0 wirra-sthru ! O wirra-athru !
n.
This evening they must sit alone,
O wirra-sthru ! 0 wirra-sthru I
They'll talk of me when I am gone,
O wirra-sthru ! 0 wirra-sthru !
Who will cheer my weary sire,
When toil and care his heart shall tire 1
My chair is empty by the fire :
O wirra-sthru ! O wirra-Bthru !
in.
How sunny looks my pleasant home !
Those flowers for me shall never bloom,
I seek new friends, and I am told
That they are rich in land and gold !
Ah ! will they love me like the old?
* Honeymoon. t Similar to the English phrase, " Ah, the pity of it I'
IV.
Farewell, dear friends, we meet no more,
My husband's horse is at the door,
Ah, love ! ah, love ! be kind to me ;
For, by this breaking heart, you see
How dearly I have purchased thee !
Here is a lyric — The Bridal Wake — of so weird a pathos

as to remind one of Burger's genius.
The priest stood at the marriage board,

The marriage cake was made,
With meat the marriage chest was stored,
Decked was the marriage bed.
The old man sat beside the fire,
The mother sat by him,
The white bride was in gay attire ;
But her dark eye was dim.
Ululah! TJlulah!
The night falls quick, the sun is set :
Her lore is on the water yet.
II.
I saw a red cloud in the west,
Against the morning light :
Heaven shield the youth that she loves best
From evil chance to-night I
The door flings wide ; loud moans the gale ;
Wild fear her bosom fills ;
It is, it is the Banshee's wail
Over the darkened hills !
Ululah! Ululah!
The day is past ! the night is dark !
The waves are mounting round Ms bark !
in.
The guests sit round the bridal bed,
And break the bridal cake ;
But they sit by the dead man's head,
And hold his wedding wake.
1865.] Geraild Griffin. 361
The bride is praying in her room,

The place is silent all ! —
A fearful call ! a sudden doom !
Bridal and funeral !
Ululah! Ululah!
A youth to Kilfleheras' * ta'en
That never will return again.
To show how early and how vigorously the poetic faculty

became active in Gerald Griffin, we quote the following
sonnet, written when he was but seventeen, and also to
show how profoundly his mind was inspired with religious
thought : —
" I looked upon the dark and sullen sea

(Ivor whose slumbering wave the night's mists hung,
Till from the morn's gray breast a fresh wind sprung,
And sought its brightening bosom joyously :
Then fled the mists its quickening breath before ;
The glad sea rose to meet it ; and each wave,
Retiring from the sweet caress it gave,
Made summer-music to the listening shore.
So slept my soul, unmindful of thy reign;
But the sweet breath of thy celestial grace
Hath risen. Oh ! let its quickening spirit chase
From that dark seat, each mist and secret stain,
Till, as in yon clear water, mirrored fair,
Heaven sees its own calm hues reflected there."
Some two years after the author's death, " Gysippus " was
performed in Drury-lane Theatre, and was received with great
applause, — Macready acting the principal character. We
have no room for criticism : a few general words only can
we afford. As a poem, this play has been much admired ; and
it deserves admiration. We admire it much ourselves for its
generous and elevated sentiments, its dramatic style, with
its absence of long and formal speeches, with its dialogue,
sharp, natural, and rapid. We admire many of the situations
and incidents as striking and pathetic ; still, as a whole, we do
not think that it reaches those depths and mysteries of life
and passion, which it is the province of great tragedy to
* The name of a churchyard.

VOL. LXXVIII. — 5th s. VOL. XVI. no. in. 31
fathom and reveal. But, then, it is the tragedy of a boy ; and

who can tell what the boy might have become, had he devoted
his manhood to compositions for the stage ? As the fact stands,
we have Gerald Griffin's fullest power in his prose fictions.
Gerald Griffin is a delightful story-teller. The merest mat
ters of fact and the wildest legends are alike at his command;
and he tells with the same ease and the same fascinating inter
est a story of ghosts, fairies, witchcraft, or a story of guilt,
grief, passion. His stories are of great variety ; but they are
all characteristically Irish; and Ireland has no need to be
ashamed of them. The spirit of them is national ; but the
genius in them is individual : Gerald Griffin's own mark is on
them. Nor are they mere copies — as Crofton Croker's are
— of fireside stories which the people used to tell among
themselves, and tell them, too, much better than Croker has
told them. We are hardly surprised at Griffin's vexation when
finding himself placed by a writer in the " Literary Gazette "
by the side of Crofton Croker. " Only think," he exclaims,
"only think of being compared with Crofton Croker!"
Griffin's stories consist of three series, — "Holland-tide
Tales," " Tales of the Munster Festivals," and " Tales of the
Jury-room." " The Holland-tide Tales " are supposed to be
told by a group of persons met together for the sports of that
evening; those of the jury-room, by jurymen who cannot
agree upon a verdict, and who pass. the night pleasantly, af
ter a smuggled supper and mountain-dew, in telling stories.
There is no attempt at connecting the two stories in the
volume which bears the title of " Tales of the Munster Festi
vals." In the Holland-tide series, " The Barber of Bantry " is
a very exciting story of circumstantial evidence. A number of
events conspire to prove the barber to have been the murder
er of a man, who, with a large sum of money, took refuge in
his house in a dark and stormy night, and who was never seen
again. After many years, the barber is arrested on what seem
to be infallible proofs of his guilt.
" It will surprise you, Mr. Magistrate," he says on his examina
tion, " to learn that, notwithstanding all this weight of circumstance,
I am not guilty of the offence with which you charge me. When I
have proved my innocence, as I shall do, my case will furnish a strong

instance of the fallibility of any evidence that is indirect in a case
where human life is interested. All the circumstances are true, — my
extreme necessity ; his midnight visit to my house ; his disappear
ance on that night, accompanied with signs of violence ; my subse
quent increase of wealth ; and the seeming revelation of my waking
dream : and yet I am not guilty of this crime. If you will have
patience to Jisten, I will tell you how far my guilt extended and where
it stopped."
He then shows satisfactorily that he had nothing to do with
the murder. The danger of capital conviction against inno
cent men seems to have painfully affected Griffin's mind.
The impression was perhaps natural amidst the social circum
stances of Ireland, where disturbance and discontent have
been so permanent, and where the administration of law has
been often so hasty, so partial, and so passionate ; where, as
Lord Chancellor Redesdale averred, there was one law for the
rich, and another for the poor. This state of things Griffin has
illustrated in a story called " The Prophecy." — " Tracy's Am
bition," in " Tales of the Munster Festivals," is a powerful
and impassioned narrative: it displays sharp insight into
human nature and motives, and admirably exposes mean and
base character and conduct. Family pride js a frequent topic
with Griffin, and a peculiarly Irish form of it; in*which a
scoundrel glories in the contempt that his aristocratic rela
tives lavish on him. There is a character of this kind in
" The Half-Sir," and another in " The Rivals." " Drink, my
brother, drink," in the " Tales of the Jur}'-room," is a wild
story of crime and passion, solemn, terrible, and pathetic.
Gerald Griffin was the author of three romances, — "The
Collegians," "The Duke of Monmouth," and "The Invasion."
It is, however, " The Collegians " that has made Griffin most
widely popular, and upon which it is likely that his fame will
permanently rest.
This romance is founded on a real occurrence, the murder
of a young girl, Ellen Hanlon, by her seducer, John Scanlan,
a member of a respectable family, and his servant, Stephen
Sullivan. The servant was the actual butcher; but it was at
the imperative command of his master: and, in his confession

before execution, he revealed an incident, a most affecting
incident, which proved that humanity was not quite so dead
in the servant as it was in the master. Scanlan sent Sullivan
out in a boat with the girl to a desert place, soma distance
below the city of Limerick, where the Shannon is broad and
drearily lonely. Sullivan carried with him a musket, a rope,
and probably a stone: with the musket he was to batter his
victim to death, and with the rope and stone to sink her
corpse in the middle of the river. "The master remained
upon the strand. After the interval of an hour, the boat
returned, bearing back Ellen Hanlon unharmed. * I thought I
had made up my mind,' said the ruffian in his penitential declar
ation : ' I was just lifting the musket to dash her brains out ;
hut, when I looked in her innocent face, I had not the heart to do
it.' This excuse made no impression on the merciless mas
ter," The master, having plied Sullivan with whiskey, sent
him forth again ; and this time the bloody work was finished.
By a most surprising chain of circumstances, the guilty pair
were connected with their crime; and Griffin, who so strongly
objects to such kind of evidence, yet founds his story on it.
The execution of Scanlan was attended with most painful and
tragic circumstances. To the last moment, Scanlan denied
his guilt ; but, had there remained the slightest doubt, Sulli
van's subsequent confession must have effectually removed it.
The whole case is eloquently narrated in " Sheil's Sketches of
the Irish Bar," published some years ago in New York, amply
annotated by Dr. Shelton Mackenzie. Enough of the narra
tive to explain the story is given in an appendix to " The
Collegians," in Sadlier's edition. We had nearly forgotten to
mention that O'Connell was Scanlan's counsel. He says that
he knocked up the principal witness against him. " But all
would not do ; there were proofs enough besides to convict
him."
Of course, the real facts and personages are imaginatively
colored in the romance. Hardress Cregan is a very modified
John Scanlan, and Eily O'Connor is an idealized and purified
representative of Ellen Hanlon. In Danny Mann, the wicked
ness of Sullivan is made more hideous by the addition of

deformity. The rest of the many characters are original. As
a dramatic tale of passion, we hardly know another which so
quickly awakens interest, and which so intensely holds it to
the end. This absorbing interest even the mechanical joinery
of a playwright has not been able to weaken, in an adaptation
of the story for the stage. The story has unity, action, move
ment ; movement that like fate goes onward from the cheer
ful opening to the tragic close. The characters are numerous;
and each, high or low, serious or comic, is a distinct individual.
Hardress Cregan is very powerfully conceived, and the con
ception is carried out with consistency and force. High
genius was required to make a man like Hardress Cregan, so
inconsistent, preserve the unity of his character in the most
contradictory of his inconsistencies. It was an extraordinary
achievement to bring together in one individual qualities so
opposite, and yet to make the union accordant with the facts
of life and nature ; high talents and tastes with low conduct ;
courage with meanness ; generosity with selfishness ; obsti
nate wilfulness with feeble purpose; — a man having the
elements of strong affections, and yet perverse, capricious,
and unkind ; having no real object but his own indulgence ;
devoted for one hour, inconstant the next ; holding in jealous
esteem the demands of honor, yet violating the simplest prin
ciples of honesty, truth, friendship, and humanity, until, at
last, given over to a reprobate sense, dark with a self-blinded
conscience in his moral life, he becomes villain enough to
instigate his obedient slave to inflict cruel death on his loving
and confiding victim ; then he is cowardly enough basely to
deny his share in the horrible consummation. In this power
fully conceived character we see the havoc which passion,
severed from the divine part of humanity, and moved by the
sensual self, can work in the whole moral nature of an indi
vidual, and what misery and ruin it can bring on all that have
any intimate relations with him. The utter wretchedness of
Hardress Cregan's mind, as he approaches the crisis of his
fate ; his fitful, violent changes of mood and temper, amounting
almost to paroxysms, especially in his later interviews with his
31*
mother and Ann Chute, — show how well the author, both in
action and suffering, knew the elements of tragedy that lie
within the human heart.
Danny Mann, the athletic hump-backed servant, is as tragic
a character as his master, and as powerfully drawn. The
author is true to nature and art also in his female characters.
Ann Chute is a very brilliant creature ; but Eily O'Connor
rises into the very poetry of ideal girlhood : a sweeter, a more
beautiful, a more lovable feminine character, rendered imper
fect by the imprudence of the heart, it never entered into the
imagination of the poet to conceive. This character, and
many others in the story, give evidence that the author was
as able a master of the affections as of the passions. The
Daly Family, both in their joys and sorrows, might be placed
beside the " Primrose Family." They give occasion to very
touching pictures of domestic life. The Cregan Family, how
ever, consists of characters that are more individual, more
striking, and more original. The comic characters are all
very amusing in their humor, and very Irish. To point out
the number of brilliant descriptions, and of impressive scenes
scattered through the romance, would alone require an article
longer than this. The scene of the dying huntsman, who, in
giving the last " halloo " at the command of his drunken mas
ter, and at the desire of his drunken guests, gasps forth his
soul, is truly fearful, and borders on the horrible: so is the
chasing and cutting of Danny Mann by the intoxicated
squires. But the author wished to illustrate the coarse man
ners of the time ; and, for that purpose, he puts back the
period of the romance beyond the date of the real transac
tion on which it was founded. The closing interviews of Har-
dress with his mother are dismal and affecting, and the
night-scene with Danny Mann in prison is both solemn and
terrible. One scene previously in the story, in which Har-
dress, drunk himself, makes Danny drunk also, when both are
caught by Ann Chute in their maudlin frolics, has a Hogar-
thian force. He whom the interview of Eily with her uncle,
the priest, shortly before her murder, will not melt to pity,
would read all Shakspeare without a sigh, and must be poor
indeed in moral as well as imaginative destitution.
No one can fail to admire the skill by which so extraordi

nary a variety of materials as there is in this romance is fused
into a complete whole, and how every scene, character, and
description, incident, falls necessarily into the drama of the
story, — falls into it in the right time and place, and contri
butes each a needful share to the plot and to the catastrophe.
Still we might make objections ; we were not critics, if we
could not; but ours shall be short and few. We might
adduce instances of melodramatic exaggeration ; but allow
ance must be made for Gerald Griffin's youth. We think that
Ann Chute's saying to her lover a few days before she is to
be married to him, " What a dreadful death hanging must be !"
is an instance of this kind. Though ignorant that Hardress,
at the moment, was in mortal fear of such a death, the saying
is coarse from a lady, and rather weakens the force of tragic
impression. Many years ago, on first reading the romance,
we thought the saying coarse; and now we learn from the pub
lished correspondence in the biography, that Gerald's sister
found fault with something unladylike in Ann Chute's char
acter ; and we believe she must have had this expression in
her mind. We could point out other inconsistencies in Ann's
character. We object to the catastrophe. We cannot agree
that Hardress should get off with transportation, and respect
ably die of consumption at the end of the passage, while
Danny Mann, the less guilty culprit, is left for the gallows.
But Gerald says in a letter, " If I hang him, the public will
never forgive me." We regard this as a mistake, except, per
haps, in reference to the public of sentimental young ladies.
John Scanlan was hanged in fact, and so should his represent
ative, Hardress Cregan, have been hanged in fiction : then
poetical justice and practical justice would have corresponded.
The real execution, moreover, of Scanlan, was attended with
strange and melancholy circumstances, that made it solemnly
dramatic ; besides, the discrepancy between the fiction and
the fact weakens the catastrophe and injures the illusion.
This extraordinary romance, so dramatic, so full of life, so
crowded with characters, — this romance, that opens the in
most chambers of the human heart, and sounds the depths of
368 Problems in Language [May,
conscience and the passions, — had been written, as we have

mentioned, before the author completed his twenty-fifth year.
He began to print when he had only a volume and a half ready :
the printers overtook him in the middle of the third volume.
It was then a race from day to day between him and them to
the end ; and this hastily written last moiety of the third
volume is the finest portion of the book.
We have, in the course of this article, commended the
moral spirit of Gerald Griffin's writings. Our commendation
is deserved, and with pleasure we declare it. How often has
one to lament that he is compelled to admire grand intellectual
power, which only lowers or disheartens him, darkens his
spirit, or constrains his sympathies ! A sure test, it has been
often said, as to the good influence of a writer, is, that, when
we lay aside his book, we feel better in ourselves, and think
better of others: this test, we believe, Gerald Griffin can
safely stand.
Art. ni. — PROBLEMS IN LANGUAGE AND MYTHO

LOGY.
Lectures on the Science of Language, delivered at the Royal Institution

of Great Britain in February, March, April, and May, 1862. By
Max Muller, M.A. Second Series. New York. 1865.
The Science of Language is the latest born of the sciences.

Though philosophers, from Heraclitus to Home Tooke, have
meditated over the problems of human speech, or have inves
tigated its varied phenomena, their theories have been desti
tute alike of scientific precision and of methodical purpose.
Their speculations, however ingenious, have resembled the
groping of men in the dark, rather than the sure advance of
those who walk in the illumined paths of established truth.
And the huge, disorganized body of facts amassed by them,
though an indispensable basis for safe generalization, stood,
nevertheless, in the same relation to the Science of Language
1865.] And Mythology. 369
which the isolated discoveries of mediaeval alchemists bore to

the Science of Chemistry. The scientific treatment of the
phenomena of language began with the establishment of
the Aryan family of dialects by Schlegel and Bopp. Half a
century has scarcely passed away since that great achieve
ment, yet this brief period has witnessed the most splendid
victories of the new science, — the systematic decipherment
of inscriptions by Burnouf, Lassen, and Rawlinson ; the dis
covery of the real nature of terminations by Bopp, Humboldt,
and Garnett; and the morphological classification of languages
by Max Miiller. In the powerful hands of Mommsen and
Donaldson, the weapons of Philology have forced the gates of
the hitherto invulnerable castle of primeval history; while the
same science has furnished Grimm and Brdal with the key to
unlock the mystic chambers wherein have lain hidden, for
ages, the secrets of ancient mythology and religion. At the
same time, the exploration of languages has gone on with
ever-increasing rapidity; and each year a fresh accumulation
of facts forms a basis for the erection of new theories, or
affords a means of verification for those which have already
been constructed. So that, in spite of its youth and its im
perfections, the Science of Language may be seen to offer a-
scope for mental labor, and opportunities for mental achieve
ment, equal in extent and richness to those yielded by its
older sisters, Astronomy, Chemistry, and Geology.
Among those scholars whose labors have contributed to
impart a scientific character to the study of words, one of the
most eminent is Max Miiller. His " History of Sanskrit Litera
ture," and his excellent edition of the "Rig-Veda," have laid
the world under obligations to him ; but, apart from this, it
must never be forgotten that it is to him we owe a rational
method for classifying all possible languages. His method of
classification, founded on the degree of coalescence between
roots and their terminations, has opened a new era in philologi
cal studies. By means of this method, we are now enabled,
almost on inspection, to classify any language whatever. For,
given roots and terminations as the sole constituent parts of
words, there are but three ways in which it is possible for
them to be joined together. Either the root and the termina

tion may be simply juxtaposed, each retaining its own separate
life, as is the case in Chinese ; or one of them, losing its indi
viduality, may become the adjunct of the other, as is seen in
the Turanian dialects ; or both, becoming incapable of separate
existence, may be fused into one organic whole, which holds
true of the languages classed as Aryan and Semitic. And,
since every language must consist of roots (predicative roots)
and terminations (demonstrative roots), and can admit no
other element, it follows that every language must, in respect
to the degree of coalescence of these two elements, be ranked
in one of the three above-mentioned classes. By this dis
covery, Miiller has done for Philology that which Kepler did
for Astronomy. It only remains to consider the three classes
of languages as representing three distinct phases of dialectic
evolution; and this luminous principle not only shows us the
way to the law of linguistic growth, but it guides us back to
the infancy of human speech, and enables us to discern the
character of the earliest language used by men.
Miiller's method of classification is amply elucidated in the
first series of his lectures. In the volume now before us, he
'proceeds to discuss some other problems connected with the
science. The first six lectures treat of etymology, — the origin
and formation of " the sounds in which language is clothed,"
and "the laws which determine their growth and decay." The
six remaining lectures deal with " what may be called the soul,
or the inside of language ; examining the first conceptions
that claimed utterance, their combinations and ramifications,
their growth, their decay, and their resuscitation.". This
investigation includes the inquiry " into some of the funda
mental principles of Mythology, both ancient and modern,"
and the determination of the sway which language exercises
over thought.
Not without a protest, however, does Miiller allow himself
to make such a division of a subject which is in reality
one and inseparable. His opinion that the sound and the
thought, the body and the soul, of language are incapable
of being disjoined, and are inconceivable except as united,
is clearly and fully expressed. " Without speech, no reason ;

without reason, no speech," is the motto upon which, with
Schelling and Hegel, he rightly insists, as being the indis
pensable axiom of linguistic science. We have not space
here to examine the objections urged by Brown and Locke to
this doctrine, which, in our opinion, are sufficiently disposed
of in the work. But, although language and reason are logi
cally inseparable, though the Polynesians are not incorrect in
characterizing thinking as " speaking in the stomach," the
privilege is still claimed of separating the two in discussion ;
just as in geometry, for ease of treatment, we consider breadth
apart from thickness.
The doctrine that language and thought are inseparable
precludes the possibility of our entertaining the old notion,
that speech was invented, like the cotton-gin or the art of
printing ; that nouns, verbs, and prepositions were voted upon
by an assembly of primeval Bopps, and by them adopted as
vehicles for thought. This exploded hypothesis postulates for
the first human inhabitants of our planet that power of self-
conscious reflection which is only possible at an advanced
stage of civilization. It was necessary for men to think and
speak for centuries, before thought and speech could become
subjects for their consideration. But though to suppose that
language was ever thus invented is absurd, it does not follow
that it would now be impossible to construct a language capa
ble of satisfying, to some extent, the needs of thought. The
idea of a universal language which should answer the require
ments of science, and which should enable philosophers of all
nations to communicate with facility, was favorably enter
tained by no less a man than Leibnitz. And the project of
constructing such a language, advocated as it was by such
transcendent authority, was carried out at some length by
Bishop Wilkins, in 1668, in a curious work entitled, " The
Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Lan
guage." The manner in which Wilkins proceeds to create
his language is detailed by Miiller in a passage of great inter
est. That he succeeded in producing a new language fit to
express a vast number of ideas, and endowed with some flexi
bility, cannot be denied. That there never could be the

slightest advantage in using such a dialect, in preference to
those which have grown with the growth of humanity, will
become evident from the following considerations. All names
originally denoted some prominent attribute of the thing
named. Thus, the moon is the measurer, luna is the shiner,
stellai = sterula (Sanskrit staras, from stri, to strew) are the
strewers of light, wheat is the white plant, npipara are the for
ward* icalkers, meubles are things which are movable, and table
is that which stands. These few examples are enough to show
that the attributes unconsciously selected by the early fram-
ers of language were such as to appeal to the fancy rather than
to the judgment. The first speakers were not philosophers,
but poets. The name white plant was the ticket appended to
wheat while it was yet before the tribunal of imagination,
before it had passed on to be tried in the higher court of rea
son. With the growth of experience and knowledge, these
primitive names have come by association to connote deeper
attributes than those first denoted by them, until the connota
tions have, in most cases, thrust the original meaning from the
mind. We no longer think of wheat as the white plant, but as
a cereal; we do not class the moon among measurers or
shiners, but among the secondary members of the solar sys
tem; and, to our prosaic minds, an ox is less forcibly presented
as a forward walker than as a ruminating mammal. The pecu
liar advantage, then, of a philosophical language like that of
Wilkins, is that it employs only names which denote the essen
tial attributes of things ; so that, the name being pronounced,
the object is at once before us in its true relations to the rest
of the universe. . Such a language would doubtless be very
convenient; but it would obviously require omuiscience to
construct it. As long as our knowledge of the relations of
things is not absolutely perfect, our nomenclature must be
imperfect, and our artificial language will require remodelling
with every fresh discovery made in science. Our new names,
born of modern thought, will eventually become as inadequate
as those which trace their pedigree back to the dawn of
human fancy. An example of this is furnished by Wilkins
himself, who classifies vegetables into trees, herbs, and

shrubs ; and names them accordingly. His names are there
fore now no better than those which before existed ; while
they have this fatal defect, that, being destitute of ancestry,
they do not enable us to read the primitive thoughts of man
kind.
It is strange that Miiller, who so ably exhibits the inefficacy
of schemes like that of Wilkins, should nevertheless lend his
countenance to the proposed phonetic renovation of spelling,
whereby the orthography of words is to correspond with their
pronunciation. The objections to an arbitrary reform in spell
ing are similar to those which show the uselessness of
attempting to create a scientific language. Any such reform,
involving, as it must, the introduction of several new charac
ters besides the time-honored members of the alphabet, could
only be accepted under the influence of an overwhelming
sense of the benefits to be derived from its adoption. But
these benefits would be outweighed by attendant evils ; and
even such as they might be in themselves could never be
realized. Every language has many words which are alike to
the ear, but different to the eye. Sun and son, pair and pear,
mite and might, thyme and time, and in French, ver, vert, verre,
and vers, are examples which occur to every one ; and there
are many more. Phonetic spelling would destroy the only
element which differentiates these words. This would not be
the worst consequence of its introduction. There are, in
every word, letters which, like heraldic emblems, serve to
blazon forth its origin, and to proclaim its ancient powers.
How full of significance are the gh in daughter, laughter,
thought, and right ; the g in deign, feign, and reign; the b in
debt and doubt ; the I in alms I — telling us, as they do, of the
Sanskrit duhitri; the German lticheln, gedacht, and recht; the
Latin rectus, digno, Jingo, regno, debitum, dubitas; the Greek
eleemosyna. With the adoption of a phonetic spelling, these
historic lessons would be obliterated. These are evils far
outweighing any advantages which may be supposed to be
derivable i'rom a reformed orthography. Still more forcibly
does tins appear, when we reflect that, as pronunciation ever
vol. lxxviii. — 5th s. vol. xvi. no. m. 32
•
changes, our new spelling would need constant alteration; or,
if not altered, would become liable to the same objections
which are raised against the use of that orthography which
has grown up with language itself. All such schemes of
arbitrarily improving language, either in its form or in its
elements, are null and void in their very conception. Lan
guage is not made, but grows. It is not the creation of
individual genius, but the product of the common mind of
humanity.
Mliller's analysis of the alphabet, and his description of the
formation of sounds by the organs of the voice, are too tech
nical to be detailed here. The analysis is ably performed.
The discoveries of Ohm and Helmholtz in harmonics are
applied to the genesis of vocal sounds; and combined with the
physiological discoveries of Johannes Miiller, and the learning
furnished by the Greek grammarians and the Sanskrit Pr&tis-
akhyas, they explain the phenomena of utterance more clearly
than has ever been done before. Miiller divides letters, first,
according as they are formed, — of vocalized breath, as is the
case with vowels; of breath not vocalized, as is the case with
all the breathings ; or of articulate noise, as is the case
with the true consonants or checks : secondly, according as
they are formed with a wide opening of the chordoz vocales,
as hard or surd letters, or with a narrow opening of the
chorda vocales, as soft or sonant letters : and, thirdly, accord
ing to the different places in which they are formed ; " the
normal places being those marked by the contact between the
root of the tongue and the palate, the tip of the tongue and
the teeth, and the upper and lower lips, with their various
modifications."
After delineating the process whereby the alphabet is
evolved, Miiller goes on to point out the principal causes of
phonetic change. And here he is led to speak of the pro
cess termed by him " phonetic decay," which he has treated
with great fulness in his first series of lectures. It is well
known that the development of Latin into French and its
cognate dialects has been continuously marked by the drop
ping out of letters, and even of syllables ; from which has
•
resulted a great diminution in the length of words. Such
words as mater, magister, mensis, dicere, dodecim, redemptio,
spiritus, ecclesia, and solvere, have become mere, maitre, mois,
dire, douze, rancon, esprit, tglise, and sauver. As Trench
quaintly expresses it, " The French devours letters and syl
lables." But the same is true of Spanish, where doiia, mas,
and creer have come from domina, magis, and credere; and of
Italian, where oggi, vegliare, and verno are the modern repre
sentatives of hodie, vigilare, and hibcrnus ; and, indeed, of all
modern languages as compared with ancient. So the Anglo-
Saxon hafoc, hlaford, and Eoforivic, have become hawk, lord,
and York. This process of syllabic concentration is by Miil-
ler termed " phonetic decay," and is explained by him as the
result of muscular relaxation or " laziness." — " If the provin
cial of Gaul came to say pere instead of pater, it was simply
because he shrank from the trouble of lifting his tongue, and
pushing it against his teeth. So, in English, night requires
less expenditure of muscular energy than naght or nacht ;
and hence, as people always buy in the cheapest market, night
found more customers than the more expensive terms." This
explanation is substantially true ; but the censure involved in
the use of the term " laziness " implies very erroneous views
as to the nature of linguistic growth. We believe " phonetic
decay " to be one phase of that all-pervading process whereby
languages have risen, from the thin and meagre state repre
sented by Chinese, to the fulness and variety of Sanskrit,
Greek, and English. Shown at first in the blending of termi
nations with roots, it has continued to be manifest in the
elision of superfluous letters and the contraction of cumbrous
syllables. Miiller himself admits that most Greek and Latin
words are twice as long as they need be, and that fault can
not be found with modern nations for having simplified the
labor of speaking. That economy of nervous energy which
has been shown by Spencer to be the chief desideratum of
style, is paralleled by the economy of nerve-force aimed at in
the gradual concentration of the elements of words. Such
economy can with no more propriety be termed " laziness,"
than buying in the cheapest market can be called " stingi
ness." The latter habit prevents the dissipation of wealth,

and the former diminishes the amount of attention necessary
to be expended on mere enunciation.
Other causes of phonetic decay are indicated, which our
limited space forbids our noticing. An entire lecture is de
voted to the consideration of Grimm's Law, — " a law of great
importance and wide application, affecting nearly the whole
consonantal structure of the Aryan languages." In the
course of the discussion, our author calls attention to the cir
cumstance, that, while in Greek, piyos means oak, in Latin
and Gothic the corresponding words, fagus and boka, mean
beech ; and he proves the phonetic identity of the English
fir with the Latin quercus. Combining these scanty data
with Lyell's revelations as to the succession of fir, oak, and
beech periods in the primeval vegetation of Central Europe,
he proceeds to construct a brilliant theory for the determina
tion of a minimum date for the antiquity of the Aryan immi
gration into Europe. This minimum date is fixed at 2,000
B.C. A thorough acquaintance with Grimm's Law cannot be
too strongly recommended to the student of language; for
nothing is better calculated to check that reckless spirit of
etymology which is even now too prevalent, and which would
almost seem to justify the sarcastic remark of Voltaire, that
etymology is a science where vowels signify nothing at all,
and consonants very little. The most ludicrous example, in
our time, of a complete disregard for phonetic laws, is the at
tempt of Key to derive best from optumus. Optumus = opetu-
mus = petvmus = betest = best, is his extraordinary formula ;
the initial 0 being present, as Donaldson observes, merely to
furnish the astonished reader with the necessary exclamation.
Such rank luxuriance of the etymological fancy would be
impossible in one familiar with the fundamental laws of pho
netics.
Having disposed of the problems suggested by the consid
eration of sounds and words, Miiller goes on to treat of the
origin and nature of myths. This is the most able and inter
esting portion of the book. Each of the last four lectures is
in itself a treatise on mythology. Starting from the philo
logical basis laid down in his essay on " Comparative Mythol

ogy," our author here elaborately illustrates the physical
origin of many ancient myths. But, for the right understand
ing of Miiller's position as a mythologist, it will be necessary
to say a few words on the manner in which myths were
regarded previous to the present century.
The first attempts to subject the legends of gods and heroes
to a rational analysis and explanation were made in Greece.
By the common people of Athens and other Greek cities,
there is no doubt that the innumerable mythic stories of Zeus,
Dionysos, and Herakles, were accepted as literal facts. But
the philosophers soon rose to higher views. In a remarkable
passage, Xenophanes avows his disbelief of the popular the
ology, declaring that men seem to have made the gods in
their own image ;* and asserting that " God is one, the great
est among gods aud men ; neither in form nor in thought like
unto men." The same opinions were expressed by Heraclitus
and Pythagoras. Anaxagoras, for applying an allegorical in
terpretation to the myths, was thrown into prison. For a
similar reason, Protagoras was banished from Athens ; and
Socrates, though his scepticism was rarely expressed and by
no means obnoxious, was executed for blasphemy. The gigan
tic intellect of Êschylus was baffled in the attempt to thread
the intricate mazes of Homeric theology ; and the keen sensi
bilities of Pindar and Euripides refused to admit the truth of
representations incompatible with their more elevated notions
of morality and justice. In later times, the scepticism of
Plato was still more openly expressed ; and by Epicurus and
his Roman followers, the whole system of classic mythology
was contemptuously rejected as a mass of old wives' fables.
But the institutions of antiquity were not favorable to the
* 'Ateil Pporol ioKcovai fleouf ytytvrjoBai,

'nfv oQeripqv r'atadrimv tx"v Quvijv re icfiac re.
'AW elm ^fipiif y'lixov j}6cc ilt teovrec,
fj ypwjxu X"pcoai Kal ipya tOmv uircp uvdpff,
kcu Kt 0cuv lilac lypatjiov Knl aufiar' eiroiow
roiav0' olov irtp Kavrol defiac tlxov dfiolov,
Ittkol piv 6' hnotoi, flats M n flovolv iuola.
32*
dissemination of the views of the enlightened ; and there is

no reason to suppose that the progress of philosophic opinion
on the subject of the myths was at all shared by the mass of
uneducated men. On the contrary, the people still believed
in the myths as true accounts of supernatural facts. The
advent of Christianity produced no immediate change in this
respect. The early Christians fully believed in the existence
and exploits of Zeus, Poseidon, and the rest, but attributed to
them a diabolic instead of a divine nature ; just as, centuries
before, the Zoroastrians had transformed into demons the gods
of the Veda. The extent to which Christianity adopted the
mythology of classic antiquity is seldom sufficiently realized.
The converts to the new faith were not told, that the stories
in the belief of which they and their ancestors ha*d lived were
false in fact ; but that, being stories of devils, and not of gods,
they were therefore unworthy of reverence. The state of
feeling at that time was averse to scepticism. Each party
accepted the data of the other without hesitation, varying
only in their interpretations. It has long been known, that
Plotinus and Celsus, though bitter opponents of Christianity,
never thought of disputing the fact of the miracles ; a cir
cumstance which has been considered one of the chevaux de
baiaiUe of the Orthodox school of theologians, but which, on
close inspection, turns out to be as miserable a Rosinante as
ever was foaled, — simply proving that the men of the first
centuries were ready to believe any thing, whether sustained
by evidence or not. Be that as it may, the legends of Greece
were believed through a great part of the Middle Ages, and
supplied many tints for the mediaeval coloring of hell.
Dante's " Inferno " and the fourth canto of Tasso's " Gerusa-
lemme Liberata" remind us of the sixth book of the Êneid;
and this circumstance, though partly, is not entirely to be as
cribed to conscious imitation. Even the vulgar conception of
Satan, with the horns and hoofs of a goat, claims descent from
the classic representations of the sylvan god Pan. The Ref
ormation, in the sixteenth century, swept away most of the
Pagan elements of Christianity ; and, with the growth of mod
ern science, the increase of scepticism became so great, that,
in the last century, Semitic myths shared the fate of Hellenic,

and Lucretius and Lucian arose again in Diderot and Voltaire.
The rational interpretation of myths was again attempted, as
in ancient Greece; and, as there, three conflicting theories
were the result. The first theory, advocated by Aristotle and
the French materialists, supposed that myths, as well as reli
gious ceremonies, were invented by primeval lawgivers as a
means of keeping the people under control. This is now too
obviously absurd to need refutation. The second theory,
originated by Epicharmus and Empedocles, gave an allegori
cal interpretation to myths, and supposed them to contain
embedded relics of ancient and mysterious wisdom. Of a
similar nature are the attempts of many modern theologians
to trace the remnants of a primitive monotheistic revelation
through the legends of all countries. The third theory,
propounded by Euhemerus, and supported by Augustine,
Lactantius, and most modern writers, postulates for myths an
historical foundation, and sees in the gods and heroes of the
ancients merely eminent rulers and generals, who were wor
shipped after their death for the virtues and prowess displayed
by them while living. By these writers, “Jupiter is still
spoken of as a ruler of Crete, Hercules as a successful gener
al or knight-errant, Priam as an eastern king, and Achilles,
the son of Jupiter and Thetis, as a valiant champion in the
siege of Troy.” This has always been a favorite theory; but
it is a fatal objection to it, that it is incapable of verification.
Even if it were true that “Atlas, bearing heaven upon his
shoulders, was a king that studied astronomy with a globe in
his hand,” and that “the golden apples of the delightful gar
den of the Hesperides and their dragon were oranges watched
by mastiff dogs,” we could never know it to be true, owing to
the absence of any contemporary records of such facts. Be
sides, without dwelling on the trifling incongruity of putting
a globe into the hands of a pre-Homeric astronomer, what shall
we say when we find that the myth of Troy–long supposed
to be an historical account of affairs peculiarly Grecian, which
happened in the twelfth century before Christ—nevertheless
exists in all its essential elements in the Vedas, and therefore
must have been current before the dispersion of the Aryan

family ? Yet such is the case. And it affords a striking proof
of the futility of all attempts to construct history out of
myths, or out of any thing else except authentic records.
No rational theory of myths was possible, until the discov
ery of the Vedas enabled scholars to compare the myths of
Greece with those of ancient India. As the Sanskrit has in
most cases preserved its roots in a more primitive form than
the other Aryan languages, so in the " Rig-Veda" we find the
same mythic phraseology as in Homer and Hesiod, but in a
far more rudimentary and intelligible condition. Zeus, Eros,
Hermes, Helena, Ouranos, and Cerberus re-appear as Dyaus,
Arusha, Sarameias, Sarama, Varuna, and Sarvara ; but, instead
of completely developed personalities, they are presented to
us only as vague powers, with their nature and attributes
dimly defined, and their relations to each other fluctuating and
often contradictory. There is no Theogony, — no mythologic
system. The same pair of divinities appear now as father and
daughter, now as brother and sister, now as husband and
wife ; now they entirely lose their personality, and become un
differentiated Forces. In the Vedas, the early significance of
myths has not faded, but continually recurs to the mind of the
poet. In the Homeric poems, that significance is almost
entirely lost sight of, and its influence upon the poet is an
unconscious influence.
It is from the Vedas then, that, with the help furnished by
comparative philology, we must hope' to extract the true
meaning of ancient myths. And now every thing is easy.
The divinities of the Vedas almost always appear as personi
fications of the great phenomena of nature ; and this character
is also implied in their names. The name of Dyaus is derived
from the root dyu, the same root from which comes the verb
dyut, meaning to shine. Dyu, as a noun, means sky and day.
There is a passage in the " Rig-Veda," * where Dyaus is ad
dressed as the Sky, in company with Prithivi, the Earth, Agni
* "Dyabs pitar prithivi malar ifdhruk,

Agne bhriitar vasavali mriliita nah." — Rig-Veda, vi. 61, 5.
(Lat. ignis), Fire, and Vasus, the Bright Ones; and there are
many passages where the character of Dyaus as the personifi
cation of the sky, the sun, or the brightness of the day, is
very apparent. Here we have a key which will admit us to
some of the secrets of Greek mythology. So long as there
was for Zeus no better etymology than that which assigned it
to the root zen, to live, there was little hope of understanding
the nature of Zeus. But Zeus is now seen to be identical
with Dyaus, the bright sky, and we are thus enabled to under
stand Horace's expression, “sub Jove frigido,” “ and the
prayers of the Athenians, “Rain, rain, O dear Zeus ! on the
land of the Athenians, and on the fields.” + The root dyu is
again seen in Jupiter, which is identical with the Sanskrit
Dyaus pitar, or Dyaus the father. The same root can be fol
lowed into old German, where Zio is also the god of day: and
into Anglo-Saxon, where Tiwsdaeg, or the day of Zeus, is the
ancestral form of Tuesday. In Sanskrit, the root dyu assumes
the form div, whence devas, bright or divine, and the Lithua
nian diewas, Latin deus, and Greek theos, all meaning God.
Without the help of the Sanskrit root dyu combined with the
character assigned to Dyaus in the Vedas, we should be un
able to interpret any of the names belonging to the supreme
Aryan god, and equally unable to perceive his real nature.
The same solar character which belongs to Zeus may be .
discovered in Herakles, in Achilles, in Ouranos or Varuna,
and in Indra, the supreme deity of the Vedas, who usually
appears as the Sun. Countless examples might be added, all
going to show that the earliest conception of a divine Power,
nourishing man and sustaining the universe, was suggested
by the mighty Sun; who, as modern science has shown,t is
the originator of all life and motion upon the globe, and whom
the ancients delighted to believe the eternal source, not only
of “the golden light,” $ but of every thing that is bright, joy
* “Sotto aperto cielo.”—TAsso, viii. 26.
f "roov, toov, & ºtAe Zei, kara riºr dpoipac rºw 'A6maiov kai rāv tediov.
# TyNDALL: Heat considered as a Mode of Motion.
§ “Il Sol, dell’ aurea luce etermo fonte.” — TAsso: Gerusalemme Liberata,
xy, 47.
382 Problems in Language and Mythology. [May,
giving, and pure. Nearly all the myths of antiquity, whether

in the Veda, the Iliad, or the Edda, cluster around the Sun,
and from it derive their life-giving element. The dawn and
the sunset, the birth and death of the year, are the subjects
chiefly dwelt upon in the myths. But, of all this class of
natural phenomena, none has been so prolific in myths as the
Dawn. The breaking-forth of the light of day over the fields
of Aryana-vaedjo must have been hailed with strange delight
by the rustic Aryan, child upon earth as he was in his igno
rance of natural laws, and, childlike, hating and dreading the
darkness as the source of all that is evil and dangerous. The
myths of Sarama and the Panis, of Helena and Paris, of Or
pheus and Eurydice, of Jemshid and Zohak, of Zeus and the
Titans, of Indra and Vritras, of Balder, in the Scandinavian
Edda, and nearly all the myths of Herakles, were originally
myths of the Dawn. They were once felt to be such. But
with increasing refinement the work of personification became
more complete, moral attributes were grouped about the
mythic personages, and a differentiation arose between them
and the physical phenomena which they had once represented,
but which were now classed apart as under the dominion of
law. Thus the myths of antiquity grew from the shape in
which we find them in the " Rig-Veda" into the shape in which
they are found in the epics of Valmiki and Homer. Zeus,
Herakles, and Apollo, no longer thought of as vivified natural
forces, but endowed with thought, feeling, and intelligent ac
tion, became the dramatis personam of Euripides and JEschylus.
So the story of Urvasi, originally a dawn-myth, was wrought
by the genius of Kalidasa into one of the most exquisite
dramas in the literature of the world.
We have not space to proceed further with this subject ;
but we hope enough has been said to indicate its interest and
importance. It is only of late years that the rich harvest to
be obtained from mythological studies has been suspected.
Great light is often thrown upon early thought by the consid
eration of a single myth, such as that of Hercules and Cacus,
which, appearing in Italy as a mere local legend, shows itself
in Greece, India, and Germany as the symbolic representation
1865.] Free Labor in Louisiana. 383
of the victory of Day over "Night, of Summer over Winter,

and of Light over Darkness ; and which, re-appearing in Persia
under the form of the strife between the good and evil prin
ciples, Ormuzd and Ahriman, has passed into the theology of
Judea, and thus has affected the religious thought of the en
tire Christian world. The writings of Miiller and Brdal mark
the opening of a new era in the study of myths. And we
may reasonably hope, that ere long we shall be able to deal
with these fossil relics of ancient thought as successfully as
the geologist now deals with the stony texts which are scat
tered over the crust of the globe.
Aet. IV.— FREE LABOR IN LOUISIANA.
1. Annual Report of Thomas W. Conway, Superintendent Bureau of

Free Labor, Department of the Gulf, to Major-Oeneral Hwlburt
commanding, for the year 1864. New Orleans : Printed at the
" Times " Book and Job Office.
2. Report of the General Superintendent of Freedmen [Colonel John
Eaton, jun.\, Department of the Tennessee and State of Arkansas.
For 1864. Memphis, Tenn. : Published by permission, 1865.
3. The Reconstruction of States : Letter of Major - General Banks to
Senator Lane. New York : Harper and Brothers.
The great political question, and the* great social question

of the country at the present time, — Reconstruction, and the
Labor System, — both centre about the State of Louisiana,
and General Banks's administration there. No subjects can be
more vital than these, — the terms upon which the seceded
States are to come back into the Union, and the basis upon
which their industry is to be organized. Perhaps it is as well,
therefore, considering how hopelessly, and with what earnest
ness of conviction, statesmen were divided among themselves
upon the admission of members of Congress from Louisiana,
that the measure was at last laid over until another session
384 Free Labor in Louisiana. £May,
of Congress, when it can perhaps be taken up again with

more calmness, and with a better understanding of the points
in dispute.
The Labor System is still a question of immediate and
practical importance ; not the less by reason of the extent
to which it has been used by those who are friends of the
country, and friends of freedom, but not friends of the ad
ministration, as a ground for bitter attacks upon its honesty
and fidelity. No sooner had General Banks issued his regu
lations for the employment of the plantation laborers, than it
was pronounced, without hesitation, to be " a system of serf
dom " and " slavery under another form." These criticisms
were made upon it in advance of any actual trial of the sys
tem, and were supported merely by the interpretation placed
upon the words of General Banks's order, at a distance of two
thousand miles, by persons who knew nothing, from personal
observation, of the condition of things to which it was intended
to apply. This judgment, passed thus promptly and without
qualification, has been very generally accepted as a matter
of course ; and it is the prevailing opinion in England, as
sumed by writers of all varieties of sentiment, from the
" Times " to Mr. F. W. Newman, that General Banks has es
tablished, and President Lincoln acquiesced in, a system of
serfdom or praedial slavery in our South-western States.
The accusation made is as follows, in the words of Mr.
Wendell Phillips : * " General Banks's liberty for the negro is,
no right to fix his wages ; no right to choose his toil, practi
cally no right ; having once chosen his place, no right to quit
it; any difference between employed and employer tried by a
provost marshal, not a jury."
We do not appear here as the advocates of General Banks's
system. We gave our reasons, a year ago,f for considering it
inferior to Mr. Yeatman's system, which was adopted for the
districts about Vicksburg and Helena, and to that which ob
* Speech before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, Jan. 26, 1865. Antislavcry
Standard, Feb. 11, 1865.
t Christian Examiner, May, 1864.
1865.] Free, Labor in Louisiana, 885
tains at Port Royal ; and we are now of the same mind as

then. The question is not, whether the Louisiana system
is the best, or even whether it is good at all, but simply
whether it is unjust and oppressive. It was prejudged and
condemned without a trial. It is now proper to ask how it
has worked in practice.
A question to be settled at the outset is, whether there
should be any system at all ; whether labor ought not to be
left to take care of itself in the South, just as it does at the
North. For it is to be observed, that the criticisms in ques
tion, so far as they apply to a rate of wages being fixed, will
weigh against General Thomas's regulations at Vicksburg,
General Saxton's at Port Royal, and General Butler's at For
tress Monroe, as well as against General Banks's in. Louisiana.
If it is right to establish a rate of wages in one case, it is in
another ; if it is right to place the freed people under special
regulations in one district, it is in another. Indeed, as to the
complaint that the negroes are placed under special restric
tions, and treated as a class by themselves, we do not hesitate
to say, that this is rather a misfortune for the whites, than an
injustice to the blacks. The chances of war have driven them
alike from their homes, and cast them upon our charities, —
both classes, as a rule, ignorant, untrustworthy, lazy, and
shiftless. To those who have witnessed the abjectness and
inertness of the white refugees, it has seemed the one thing
needed for them, that they should be placed under some
strict regulations, which should train them in habits of regular
industry. The peculiar ground of hope for the negroes is,
that they are placed under such regulations, and acquiesce in
the necessity of labor. For this reason, General Banks's first
principle of compulsory labor, harsh as it appears, seems to
us sound and wise ; and we know it to be a fact, that, at other
points in the South, some of the most sincere and earnest
friends of the colored race have wished for its adoption. If
it was not applied to the whites as well, that was certainly
a mistake, and one the injurious consequences of which re
sulted chiefly to the whites themselves ; but it appears from
VOL. LXXVIII. — 5th S. VOL. XVI. NO. UL 33
386 Free Labor in Louisiana. [May,
the statement of General Bowen,* Provost Marshal General,

that " the law of labor was to be operative with the black as
with the white. Vagrancy was held to be a publio misde
meanor with the one race as with the other." We know
personally of white laborers being employed on plantations
in Arkansas ]at the same rates with colored ; but they were
more inefficient than the negroes.
Mr. Phillips's complaint, that differences between employer
and employed were to be settled by a provost marshal, not a
jury, has little weight. How else could they be tried, or the
judgments enforced, in a state of war ? How would the jury
be made up, — taken by lot from the plantation hands, who
have neither capacity nor experience in sifting the truth, and
whose whole life has been a systematic practice of evading
the truth, and cheating their masters? An excellent method
of trying cases was established at Port Royal, in the Planta
tion Commissions, which were boards of magistrates, com
posed of the superintendents of plantations. But this would
not have worked well except for the high character of that
class ; for they were themselves the employers, and would
seem thus unfitted for the task of sitting in judgment on the
employed. The result of their experience was, that it was
almost impossible to ascertain the truth from the testimony of
the negroes, — so ingrained were the habits of deception;
and, moreover, the judgments could be enforced only by ap
pealing to the military authorities. It should be remarked,
too, that, according to the terms of the order, these questions
are to be decided by the provost marshal only, " until other
tribunals are established."
Perhaps the oftenest repeated of all these charges is this,
that the freed slave is turned into an adscriptus gleboz, by
the regulation that " plantation hands will not be allowed to
pass from one place to another, except under such regulations
as may be established by the provost marshal of the parish."
The simple explanation of this — the explanation which oc
curred spontaneously to every one familiar with plantation
• Liberator, Feb. 24, 1886.

life within the lines of the army — is given by General Banks

himself, in his letter to Mr. Garrison, as follows:* "This
order was issued at the request of the medical director of the
department, and was necessary to prevent general contagion
from small-pox, — very destructive to the negroes, always,
and then especially so." At some places, where there was no
small-pox, this regulation was a dead letter. Of course,
strictly speaking, a despotic provost marshal had it in his
power at the end of the year to command all the negroes to
remain on the plantations where they were ; but, of course
also, if he had tried this, his place would speedily have been
made too hot for him. But Mr. Phillips's words are, " having
once chosen his place, no right to quit it." That is to say,
having once made a contract, no right to break it. Is this
unreasonable ? If I hire an Irishman for a year, has he a
right to stay with me through the winter at high wages, and
then go elsewhere to get still higher for the summer ?
Some plan, regulating the labor and wages of the freedmen,
is necessarily incident to a state of war ; and such a plan no
more deserves to be branded as " serfdom," than the rule of
military governors — which equally results from the dis
turbed condition of the community — should be called despot
ism. The social organization as well as the political institu
tions of the South has been shattered to pieces ; and, until
quiet and self-government are restored, industry, like State
and municipal action, must be controlled more or less by the
military authorities. But this condition of things is tempo
rary and exceptional ; and we should keep steadily in view,
that the day is not distant when the citizens will manage their
own affairs, and labor will regulate itself. It may be that
special regulations for the protection of plantation laborers
will be still needed, when all other branches of industry are
left to themselves; for agriculture has always been the dis
tinctive pursuit of the South, and the disorganization of
society has been, by consequence, more complete here than
elsewhere. If so, it will not be any so minute and rigid
• Liberator, Feb. 24, 1866.

388 Free Labor in Louisiana, [May,
set of rules as have been required during these troublous

times.
The Louisiana Labor System was promulgated by General
Banks, in his General Order, No. 23, Feb. 3, 1864. Its main
features have been sufficiently discussed above, except as
regards the rate and manner of payment of wages, the fea
ture which chiefly distinguished it from other systems. Un
der this system, the laborer receives food and clothing,
besides his monthly wages (eight dollars a month for a first-
class hand). Under Mr. Yeatman's system, adopted at about
the same time, for the plantations above Natchez, a higher
rate of monthly wages was paid (twenty-five dollars) ; and
the laborer bought his own food and clothing (furnished by
the employer at low rates). Under the Port-Royal system,
the laborer is generally paid by the job, the amount of his
wages depending upqn what he does, not upon the time spent
in doing it. These were the three systems of wages in oper
ation at the beginning of the year 1864; but, in March, the
Louisiana system, slightly modified, was extended by order of
General Thomas over the " Department of the Tennessee and
State of Arkansas " (of which Colonel Eaton is Superintend
ent), superseding Mr. Yeatman's system.
We are enabled, therefore, to judge of the merits of this
plan by its workings in different localities, and under various
managements. It labored, it is true, under peculiar disadvan
tages in Col. Eaton's department. The contracts having
been made under one set of regulations, which promised
first-class hands twenty-five dollars a month, it was hard to
persuade the laborers, that ten dollars a month, with food and
clothing, was an equivalent for this. Hence dissatisfaction
and loss of interest. But even if there had been no change
made, but the Louisiana rate had been established at the start,
this is certainly a less advantageous rate than the other.
Not because it is a lower rate. It is asserted by the planters,
— and apparently they are right in this, — that really, under
the high prices of goods which prevailed during the summer
and fall, they paid their laborers more than they would have
done if the rate had not been changed. However that may
be, it is certain, that, at the time the change was made, the
rise in prices had not taken place, and could not be foreseen ;
so that, to all intents and purposes, the effect of the change
was to lower the rate of wages. And this was even aggra
vated in this department by a later order, excusing the plant
ers from furnishing clothing to their hands, on the ground
that the high price of goods made it a hardship. As it
turned out, the crop was so complete a failure, that the profits
of the employers were, on the whole, fairly enough propor
tioned to the wages ; but, if the crop had been a success, we
should have seen the mortifying result of dnormous profits to
the planters, while the laborers received a scanty pittance.
It is not, however, for the absolute insufficiency of the
wages that we would criticise General Banks's plan, so much
as because it allows these wages to consist in part of food and
clothing. This is, in every respect, a mistake. It obliges the
frugal and careful to spend just as much for necessaries
as the extravagant, thus failing to encourage frugality and
economy. It gives a great opportunity for fraud in the qual
ity and quantity of the " healthy rations " and " comfortable
clothing." Above all, it gives the freedman no opportunity
to practise the habits belonging to his newly acquired free
dom, by making his own purchases. It is not well for these
people to be protected at every turn ; it is only by being
cheated for a while that they will learn to take care of their
own interests. General Banks criticises the rival plan, on the
ground that " the negroes feed and clothe themselves by an
enforced purchase from their employer, at ' the cost of articles
on the plantation.' I need not say, that, at such prices, their
pay will not subsist them." But surely, if General Banks's
provost marshals have the power to do any thing at all, they
will be able to prevent any abuse of this sort.
We think, therefore, that it was a grave mistake to extend
the Louisiana system over the upper valley of the Mississippi;
the more so, as a very essential feature of it — the appoint
ment of provost marshals to watch over its execution — was
in a considerable degree neglected. With laborers discour
aged by an apparent lowering of their wages, employers
33*
discouraged by the failure of their crops, and no adequate

supervision exercised over the relations between the two, it
is no wonder that the experiment in these regions — that is,
about Helena, Vicksburg, and Natchez — was a comparative
failure.
There is another objection which applies equally to both
plans. Wages by the month are not suited to the present
condition of these people. It is amply proved, at Port Royal
and elsewhere, that they will labor with increasing steadiness
and efficiency, if it is made distinct to their minds, that every
stroke of work adds to their wages speedily and surely. This
the job system, in use at Port Royal, does ; monthly wages do
not. The freedmen are not used to calculating so far ahead.
An immediate result weighs with them; a distant one has
very little influence. This is proved by the testimony of the
planters on the Mississippi (whose books we have examined),
that when it came cotton-picking time, and they paid by the
pound instead of the month, the amount of wages increased
very materially. But, during the greater part of the season,
the laborers saw no direct gain to themselves from their
labor ; and, as a natural and necessary consequence, they
were irregular, slack, and unfaithful. This evil was enhanced
in most cases by the great mistake, which was committed, of
leaving the settlement entirely until the end of the year.
Meanwhile, the laborers were furnished by their employers,
on credit, with every thing they desired ; and the conse
quence was, what with poor work and lavish expenditure,
that a large proportion of them ended the year in debt to
the employers, having overdrawn their accounts. From the
data we have been able to collect, we judge that at Helena
about one-fourth ended the year with absolutely nothing, ex
cept their clothing and other personal property; and one-half,
with only a trifling balance. At Vicksburg they seem to
have done better. That the remaining quarter had a tolerable
surplus, — in some cases a handsome sum, — is a proof that
it was possible, even under these disadvantageous circum
stances, for an industrious, thrifty, prudent person to earn a
good livelihood.
Indeed, considering the quality of the labor, we have no

doubt that it cost the employers more than it was worth.
Not only the laborers, but the non-laborers, — old, young, and
infirm, — all were supported by the planters ; and, although
failure to work forfeited the pay, it did not stop the rations.
Then, too, besides being inefficient and unskilful, the labor
was very irregular. We have been informed, that, on one
plantation in Arkansas, the best working month in the year
averaged only twelve and a half days to each hand ; and that
the value of the food, issued to all the people upon the planta
tion, was more than double that of the wages paid. At the
same time, the wages, when paid at all, were paid in full for
all the time which was professedly spent in work. There was
no inducement to work well, because the lazy received ex
actly the same wages as the active, provided only that the
same amount of time was nominally spent by each in the field.
One might accomplish twice as much as the other, but it made
no difference in his receipts. It is evident, therefore, that,
although the wages received by the laborers were small,
the amount paid out by the employers was relatively very
large.
We have spoken thus at length of the results of the labor
experiment in Colonel Eaton's department, because of its fail
ure here, — a result to be attributed partly to the unfortunate
manner of its introduction, partly to the lack of systematic
supervision, and partly from defects in the plan itself. It is
hard to say in whose hands its management was placed.
Colonel Eaton himself complains of the extent to which his
hands were tied ; and, for instance (p. 56), of the order by
which the issue of clothing to the laborers was discon
tinued; and we can only suppose, that he was thwarted
by higher authorities in the administration of his depart
ment. In Louisiana, on the other hand, we meet with none
of these external obstacles. The plan was established in
good season, and carried on without conflict of authority ;
provost marshals, indispensable to the successful working of
the system, were appointed in sufficient number, and with
adequate authority ; and whatever success, or want of success,
attended the experiment, may fairly be attributed to the

scheme itself. And there is satisfactory testimony to show,
that at any rate there was a reasonable degree of success.
Rev. E. M. Wheelock says,* " These people are quiet and
thrifty laborers, doing better as to wages than farm hands at the
North.f They are no longer branded, torn by the whip, mu
tilated and sold. The dark days are past. They have redress
for their grievances, pay for their services, and schools for
their children. They know that they are no longer chattels.
They have their homes, where they can earn their daily
bread. They have their families about them, whom no man
can divide or sell." .And Mr. John Hutchins writes: X "The
payment of the laborers, according to the terms of the order,
was promptly and rigidly enforced. In cases where the
planter or renter was unable to pay, the crops and property
* Liberator, March 8, 1865. The following order will show what Mr. Whee-
lock's opportunities for observation were : —
" Chaplain E. M. Wheelock is hereby detailed as one of the superintendents
of negro education and labor in this department.
" He will visit plantations and jails, and correct and report upon all irregulari
ties and abuses of the labor system coming under his notice. From time to
time, he will report to the general commanding. He will be obeyed and re
spected accordingly. N. P. Banks, if. G. C"
t We have no doubt of the correctness of this statement. Mr. Hutchins, in
the "Liberator" of March 17, states the wages as follows: —
" According to the above estimates, each first-class laborer received, under
this order, for wages, $96 ; for clothing, §36 ; for rations, $146 ; for medicines
and medical attendance, $5.60 ; for the privilege of laud, &c, for cultivation on
his own account, $30, — making the sum of $313.50 per year. This sum he was
to receive, whether the employer realized profits or sustained losses.
" There were in this order other privileges secured to the laborer, which I
have not included iu the above estimate. He was furnished quarters and fuel
without charge ; his children, under twelve years of age, were not obliged to
labor, and were furnished schooling without expense to him. It will be seen that
the risk was thrown entirely upon the employer, who should advance means to
work plantations."
Of course, this is the highest amount, — what a capable, steady laborer might
earn. We think, however, that the rations are reckoned too high, — forty cents
a day. Both at Vicksburg and Helena, thirty cents was the average. As will
be noticed, there was no rent to pay, no taxes, no schooling, and fuel cost
nothing.
J Liberator, March 17, 1865.
on plantations were seized by the provost marshal, and held

for the benefit of the laborers. In other cases, the capitalist,
who received and was interested in the crop, whatever his
contract was with the planter, was held responsible for the
payment of the laborers. I do not know of a single instance
where the laborers were not fully paid. . . . The freedmen
of Louisiana, at the close of the year 1864, were comfortably
clothed ; and many of them saved their wages, and had money
in their pockets : their children had the advantages of
schools, and made good progress in learning." And Mr. Con
way (p. 8) reports, that, "though the year has been marked by
unparalleled disaster and prostration to the agricultural inter
ests, there will not be more than one per cent of the planta
tions where payments will not be made and secured to the
freedmen. It appears certain, therefore, considering the fail
ure of the crops, that any faithful and capable laborer was
able to end the year with proportionally a much better result
than his employer.*
The result of our inquiries is, that the Louisiana Labor
System, without being all that could be desired, is not in
itself unfair or oppressive. It is open to criticism, not on the
ground of injustice, but for errors of judgment in certain fea
tures. Where it has been carried out with energy and good
faith, it has worked tolerably well. Where it has met with
obstructions, or has been managed badly, it has failed. It is
a system, however, which we do not conceive to be capable
* A charge frequently made is, that there have been abuaea of power on the
part of the employers, and undue corporal punishments. There certainly were
such in sonic instances, and it was partly with a view to prevent these that Mr.
Wheelock was appointed. He says : —
" These disorders and abuses were speedily reported to the commanding gen
eral, and as swiftly remedied. The prisoners unjustly held were released ; the
sinning overseer dismissed from any employment, or imprisoned ; the marshal
who had disgraced his uniform was removed ; and the offending planter heavily
fined, or even deprived of his plantation.
" Said the general to me, ' If any planter, after due warning, persists in mutiny
against these just restraints, I will remove his laborers, and strip his plantation
as bare as the palm of my hand.' This was done in more than one instance, and
with the best moral effect."
of the highest and truest success, because it allows no scope

to that personal ambition of the laboring man, which is his
only stimulus to rise. Under this system, it is not made to
appear for his interest to do his utmost, but to spare himself
all he can; and it is not peculiar to the freedmen of the
South, that they need the incitement of a definite personal
advantage in order to work with all their might.
In speculating upon the future of the freed people, we
strike at once upon two classes of false notions, which are so
wide-spread, and exercise so much influence, that we cannot
forbear briefly calling attention to them. These are the char
acter and capacity of the colored race, and the relation of
labor to capital ; and it is not too much to say, that, unless
more correct views come to prevail upon these points of prime
importance, we must anticipate disastrous consequences.
The peculiar difficulty, as to the first of these, arises from
the incapacity of most observers to draw a correct judgment
from the facts which they observe, unbiassed by preposses
sions or immediate interest. In this the friends of the colored
people are quite as much to blame as their enemies. One
class, worshippers of the " divine institution," and determined
to see nothing but failure in the new order of things, seem-to
rejoice over every fresh proof, that the negroes are a demoral
ized and worthless race, and assume, as a matter of course,
that they must eventually be brought back under some system
of slavery. To these are added many superficial philanthro
pists, who go among the freedmen with such exalted expect
ations, that they are soon driven by disgust into a violent
reaction, and join the party of their detractors. On the other
hand, the true friends of the race are often guilty of the op
posite fault, partly from an instinctive desire to look upon the
bright side, partly in consequence of the strong impression
made upon their minds by the tractability of the negroes, and
their eagerness to learn, — these characteristics outweighing
every thing that is unfavorable. It is hard to exaggerate the
harm that has been done to the cause by the unreasonable
and impossible standard thus set up. Even those who are at
first well disposed are sometimes permanently estranged from
* k
the colored people, by finding them to fall so far short of what

they had been led to expect.
The fact is, — and this must be the foundation of all phi
losophy upon the subject, — the negroes are just what we
should expect them to be after generations of slavery. If
they were not, as a rule, lazy, dishonest, and licentious, the
chief argument against slavery would lose its weight. For
the native Africans have not these vices, at least to this ex
tent. They form the best class of slaves, the most steady,
trusty, and moral. But it is impossible that slavery should
exist, and not corrupt all with whom it comes in contact. It
has had this effect upon the descendants of those Africans.
Treated like beasts, they become beasts. In all parts of the
South, we find encouraging indications that they have not
lost the power of rising again from their degradation. From
the children especially we have every thing to hope, through
the admirable schools that have been established ; and we
need not despair of the adults. But that these are at present
in a very low state, industrially and morally, — not so low as
the poor whites, to bo sure, but very low, — must be assumed
in all our discussions.
So much for the material with which labor is to be recon
structed. The other question, of the relation of the employer
to the employed, is in a sadly confused state, by reason of the
prevailing superficiality of thought in regard to these mat
ters. We do not suppose, that the necessary antagonism of
labor and capital would be assumed by democratic thinkers
in this country in any other relation of society than this ; but
as soon as it comes to considering the freed slave, in his new
relation as a hired laborer, the liveliest suspicions are aroused.
Whatever profit is made by the owner of the plantation, is
thought to be so much filched from the earnings of the labor-
era. Witness the violent and ignorant attacks made in the
newspapers, last year, upon a gentleman who has done more
than any other one man to advance the condition of the Port-
Royal negroes ; attacks based upon the simple fact, that, while
his employees were getting a higher rate of wages than any
396 Free Labor in Louisiana. Tâv,
other equally unskilled laborers in the world, * he himself had

made a handsome profit. The same story repeats itself East
and West, wherever the attempt is made to carry on any sys
tematic agriculture with free labor. Everywhere, unpractical
theorists have done their best to excite discontent among
the laborers, and spoil them with absurdly unreasonable ex
pectations; so that the wages they have demanded would
alone, in some cases, have more than covered the whole value
of the crop.
The argument upon this point is simple enough, and cannot
be controverted. This great mass of needy freedmen must
either be supported by charity, or work must be found for
them. Their necessities, as well as the general interests of
the community, demand the regular cultivation of the great
staples, — cotton and sugar. But this cannot be had without
capital, and capital will not come down from its safe Northern
investments, unless under the temptation of very high profits.
It is all very well to say, that this is grasping and illiberal.
The fact remains, — Northern capitalists will not assume the
enormous risks from brigandage, overflow, and the uncertain
ties attendant upon a new branch of business, unless the
chance of profit is made commensurate with the risk. The
question simply is, whether to allow them these rates of pro
fit, or to leave the negroes to struggle on by themselves,
without assistance, to produce such crops as we ourselves
saw, last year, disgracing the fields of Port Royal and the Mis
sissippi Valley. We feel sure, that it is much better for these
people to be employed by humane white persons, than by
those of their own color ; for, in the first place, there are
almost none of them who would not for a while be benefited
by the watchful supervision of a skilful agriculturist ; and,
in the next place, they are notoriously harsh and unreasonable
in their exactions as regards one another. It is much better
for each family to work by itself, than for a few colored men
to have the control of the others. A multiplication of small
* See second letter of E. S. Philbrick, in the Second Annual Report of the

New-England Freedmen's Aid Society.
freeholds, as speedily as is possible and judicious, is the true

policy.
It was from a recognition of this truth that such special
favors — too great, as we have already shown — were ex
tended to the planters last year. And perhaps it is pardon
able, seeing that the lessees of the plantations made so near a
failure last year, that the arrangements made this year in
Louisiana are only slightly modified from the former ones.
The rate of wages is somewhat higher, but the same system
has been continued. At Helena, however, in Arkansas, the
planters, thoroughly disgusted with last year's experience,
have hit upon what seems to us the most promising scheme
yet devised. They have divided their plantations into lots of
a suitable size, and sub-let them to the most capable of the
negroes, on shares. The planter agrees to advance all the
capital needed, — seed, teams, food, clothing, &c, — taking
his pay at the end of the year, the crop being equally divided.
Here is capital coming frankly forward, and entering into a
fair partnership with labor, — both parties understanding,
that what is for the interest of one is for the interest of the
other. The planter knows, that by liberal treatment he will
get a better crop; the tenant knows, that the harder he
works, the larger his share will be. This arrangement, how
ever, still leaves a number of negroes unprovided for, — the
mass of inefficient hands ; and these must still be employed,
as last year, by either whites or blacks, for monthly wages.
Another subject, upon which there has been great confu
sion of mind and endless debate, is the tenure of land. We
pass over the absurd assumption, often put forth, that the
freed people are by right the owners of the land upon which
they have toiled. It is the practical question, whether it is
wise to divide lands among them as a free gift, that we wish
to consider. We believe that no possession will benefit them
which they have not themselves earned. Do we not believe
the same for our children, that it is best for them to have to
make their own way in the world ? For the colored people,
as a race, this is a fundamental truth. They had to prove
their manhood as soldiers, before they could be welcomed as
VOL. LXXV1I1. — 5th s. vol. XVI. NO. HI. 34
brothers. If it bad not been for Port Hudson and Fort Wag
ner, we should hardly have heard such universal gratulations,
that it was colored troops that first entered Charleston and
Richmond. In the same way, they must earn the right to
possess land, by steady, thrifty industry. This is not incon
sistent with giving bounty lands to soldiers, — white and
black. That is a reward, — it is earned. But why should a
worthless vagrant, because he is a negro, receive the gift of
a farm, the value of which a hard-working farmer's son in New
England would think himself fortunate to acquire in ten
years ? Let the thing settle itself. We shall find out soon
who are fit to own land ; for these will buy it themselves, in
an open market, with money that they earned by their own
toil.
We are very far from desiring, in the unfavorable judgment
we have expressed, to underrate the capacities of the race, or
the actual attainments of some members of it. The colored
people themselves are not responsible for their present con
dition, and we need not be in any degree discouraged by
it. That slavery has reduced the mass of them so low,
does not weigh so much against them, as the fact tells in their
favor, that such men as Robert Small and Prince Rivers have
risen, in spite of all obstacles, to attest to the powers of the
race. And they are not rare exceptions. Neither would we
be understood as defending the Louisiana scheme of recon
struction, which is fallaciously joined with the labor system
in the popular estimation. Its military origin, which is fatal
to the genuineness of the State Government, is the true and
sufficient excuse for the system of plantation labor. This
was, as Mr. Wheelock says, " a temporary arrangement, re
newable from year to year, and intended to bridge over this
chaotic period of transition, which threatened to absorb the
colored race like a quicksand. By its terms, the planter, in
whose hands centred the entire agricultural wealth of the
State, obtained a single concession, — the labor needed to
carry on his plantation, pay his taxes, and secure his crop.
In all things else he was shorn of his ancient masterful privi
leges, and onerous duties laid upon him instead." And Gen
1865.] The Encyclical Letter. 399
eral Banks himself says, " It is not probable that it will be

necessary to continue the regulations long. It was required
chiefly in commencing work. When the habits of labor are
established, and the negroes know enough not to be cheated
out of their wages, it can be discontinued without trouble."
We will close by repeating emphatically, what has been
already insisted upon more than once in these pages, that, if
the freed people are treated for a while as a class by them
selves, it is because we find them as a class by themselves ;
and it is natural, and perhaps unavoidable, not to change this
too hastily ; and further, that no state of things can be con
sidered normal, or any thing but a temporary makeshift, which
recognizes any distinction of race. — any claim to the suffrage
and other rights of citizenship, but that of fitness for their
exercise.
Art. V.— THE ENCYCLICAL LETTER.
On the last anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims,

there was promulgated from Rome, in the encyclical letter of
Pope Pius the Ninth, a plain and authoritative declaration
of Roman-Catholic principles, which deeply concerns every
Christian nation, and most especially the United States.
To this letter is appended a catalogue of " the principal
errors of our time," consisting of eighty distinct propositions,
which are classified, and of which seven relate to pantheism
and absolute rationalism, seven to moderate rationalism, four
to indifferentism or toleration, thirty-seven to the Church and
her rights, nine to natural and Christian morals, ten to Chris
tian marriage, two to the civil power of the Pontiff, and four
to modern liberalism.
These documents are the most remarkable of this age,
whether they be regarded as defining the position of the
Church itself, or as the certificate of the world's progress.
We will, therefore, assume that our readers are familiar with
them ; and, as we wish to consider only the great question
400 The Encyclical Letter. [May,
they present, of the relation of Romanism to the republic,

'will merely refer to a few propositions which relate to civil
and political affairs.
It will be borne in mind, that the Pope denounces the fol
lowing as errors : —
1. In his letter, the opinion that liberty of conscience and of wor

ship is the right of every man, and that this right ought, in every
well-governed State, to be proclaimed and asserted by the law,
which he reminds his followers that one of his predecessors called
" an insanity."
2. (Error No. 15.) To hold " that every man is free to embrace
and profess the religion he shall believe true, guided by the light of
reason."
3. In his letter, he requires the priesthood to teach that " kingdoms
rest upon the foundation of the Catholic faith."
4. He there instructs them, that the Church ought " freely to exer
cise her influence, not only over individual men, but nations, peoples,
and sovereigns."
5. He declares it to be an error (No. 23) to deny that the Church
may " avail herself of force, or any direct or indirect temporal
power."
6. In his letter, he tells the bishops it is an error to think that
" Church and State ought to be separated."
7. He denounces it as an error (No. 42) to hold " that in any
conflict the civil law ought to prevail."
8. An error (No. 27), " that the ministers of the Church, and the
Soman Pontiff, ought to be absolutely excluded from all charge and
dominion over temporal affairs."
9. He tells them that the Church has " the power of defining
dogmatically, that the religion of the Catholic Church is the only
true religion."
10. (Error No. 21.) "That it is the duty of Government to
correct, by enacted penalties, the violators of the Roman-Catholic
religion."
11. He tells them, the notion, that " the most advantageous condi
tions of civil society require that popular schools, open without dis
tinction to all children of the people, and public establishments des
tined to teach young people letters and good discipline, arid to impart
to them education, should be freed from all ecclesiastical authority
and interference, and should be fully subjected to the civil and political
power for the teaching of matters and opinions common to the times,"
is wrong (error 47).
Let every true American citizen read and ponder this long
letter, with the long list of eightv opinions and doctrines
which are denounced by the apostolic voice as "heresies
and errors hostile to moral honesty," as having " frequently
stirred up terrible commotions," and " damaged both the
Christian and civil commonwealths." He may concede that
the Pope has a right to regulate his own conduct, and is a
good judge of the logic of the Church, and incline to concur
with his Holiness in his final specification, and to admit that
it is an error (No. 80) to say that " the Roman Pontiff can and
ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liber
alism, and modern civilization."
But he must be startled at the thirty-ninth item, which de
clares that it is an error to hold that " the State of a republic,
as being the source of all rights, imposes itself by its right,
which is not circumscribed by any limit." He will be alarmed
to learn, that the head of the Roman-Catholic Church declares
the fundamental principles of American society and govern
ment to be hostile " to the everlasting law of nature engraven
by God upon the hearts of all men, and to right reason."
Next after that dogma of civil and social science, that new
principle of philosophy embodied in the Confederate Consti
tution and arrayed in arms against the Government, that
" slavery is the corner-stone of the republic," this open
avowal of the ideas and aims of Roman Catholicism challenges
attention. The principles of that Church have indeed been
known to the world ; and it has required but little thought to
convince any one who could believe that they had not been
modified in the light of knowledge and civilization, that such
would be their practical and legitimate results. But how
many could believe that slavery would knowingly accept its
own conclusions? Would not the mass of men of this day
'have expected that the Church would, rather than adopt such
results as the Pope proclaims, be inclined to question the
34*
premises from' which he reaches them ? Such, however, is

the fiat of the apostolic head of a sect which numbers more
than a hundred and fifty millions of followers. Such, if the
Catholic Church be a unit, are the principles and purposes of
that vast body of men in the United States, composed largely
of foreign emigrants, and, by their sympathies and educa
tion, most likely to be un-American, which, though still but a
minority of the whole people, has yet become one of the
most extensive organizations that exist in the country.
Will American Catholics be loyal to their country, or true
to their faith? Is there, can there by possibility permanently
be, such a thing as fidelity to the Roman-Catholic Church,
combined with true allegiance to the Constitution of the
United States ? *
Whoever will careful!}'- study the letter and errors of which
we have given specimens must confess that it is impossible
to be a true American citizen, and a faithful Romanist, such
as the head of the Church requires. It is not to be denied,
that, by this authoritative exposition of the principles of the
Roman Pontiff, the Roman Church assumes an aggressive atti
tude ; and, just so fast and so far as she can obtain power in
this government, is pledged to wield it in her own service.
The fundamental principles of the Roman Church are destruc
tive of the fundamental principles of a democratic republican
government, subversive of all civil and religious liberty.
There has been a notion prevalent, that the doctrines which
are thus inculcated had become obsolete; that the Roman
Church had ceased to assert any rights, or to claim any do
* It is reported that the two highest Roman-Catholic authorities in this coun

try answer this question differently; the Archbishop of New York assuming
the highest Ultramontane ground, while the Archbishop of Baltimore claims that
the "republicanism" of the encyclical letter refers only to the revolutionary
theories of Europe, and has nothing to do with constitutional government here.
" There was a time," says Mazzini, " when the Popes were the depositaries and
guardians of the moral law. Believing in their mission of justice and liberty for
all, — intrepid against all who sought to violate their power, and ready to
suffer for their faith, which then was the faith of the peoples, — the Popes, from
the fifth to the thirteenth century, aided and promoted the progress which Pio
Nono now condemns."
minion, except in ecclesiastical affairs. But the circular of

the Pope so utterly explodes it, that it must be laid aside as
without any shadow of foundation.
There is a kindred idea, that there has been, and is, a sort
of division in the Romish Church, such as there is in most, if
not in all, other churches, between the conservatives and the
liberals, — those who. assert the dominion of the Church in
civil affairs, and those who claim for the Church no civil juris
diction whatever. But it must be borne in mind, that the
Catholic Church does not admit itself to be o sect of Christians.
It claims for itself infallibility. It asserts dogmatic authority.
Its own disciples are true believers ; all others, heretics. It
is therefore impossible, that there should be in the Church
Catholic (ex vi termini) that sort of division which exists
everywhere else in Christendom. By its own pretensions,
from the cardinal doctrines of its creed, the Roman Church
cannot exist with American institutions. If there be, if there
can be, an American church calling itself Catholic, it must re
nounce its allegiance to the Church of Rome, or it must be
false to its allegiance to the country. It must be the Protes
tant Catholic Cliurch. The Roman Church allows no liberty
of conscience, but asserts the power and the duty to enslave
the consciences of men and to control their civil conduct, to
regulate society, to rule over all governments. The first
Amendment of the Constitution of the United States expressly
forbids the creation of any religious establishment, or any law
interfering with the freedom of faith and worship. And all
the States agree in securing religious liberty.
It is not the Roman Catholics, then, who fear any encroach
ments on their rights. The Pope does not rally the Church
to pursue this policy, — which the world, or at least America,
thought was defeated two or three centuries ago, — in order to
protect its disciples in the exercise of their rights under Gov
ernment. This Government secures them as fully as it does
those of all men, and favors Roman Catholics as much as it
does any Christians. No: it is Americans who need to be
alarmed, or rather it is for American members of the Roman
Church to decide whether the claims of the Church must not
404 The Encyclical Letter. [ây,
be renounced. It is very clear that they must reject them, or

must renounce their allegiance as citizens. It is very clear,
that, if they obey the injunctions of the Pope, either Roman-
ism or the present form of Government must come to an end
on this continent. There may be a new form of Protestant
ism, a new sect and creed of American disciples of the Pope
as the head of the Catholic church, as one body of Christian
believers ; but such would in no such sense as the Church
claims be Roman Catholicity.
De Tocqueville, one of the most careful observers and best
critics of American institutions, himself a Catholic, frankly
declared his surprise at finding the Catholics of this country
the most republican and the most democratic class in the
Union. He sought to explain this anomaly by the fact, that
the Roman Church reduces all but the priests to a common
level ; and that the priesthood is, in the United States, entirely
separated from the Government. But he also confessed, with
equal frankness, that they were obliged to adopt republican
and democratic principles because of their social position and
their limited numbers ; and that they would support these
political doctrines " with less zeal, if they were rich and inde
pendent." " By the side of every religion," he says, " is to be
found a political opinion which is connected with it by affin
ity; and the human mind, if left to its own bent, will regulate
the temporal and spiritual institutions of society in a uniform
manner, and man will endeavor to harmonize earth with
heaven." It is very significant, that a Catholic admitting
this fact, and finding that the civil liberty of America sprung
from the democratic and republican religion of the settlers
who had shaken off the authority of the Pope, tells, as a re
markable circumstance, that a priest in America made a
prayer for the liberty of the Poles. That was more than
thirty years ago. The Catholics then numbered more than a
million. But truth and candor forced him to confess, that the
republicanism and democracy of Catholicism were not normal
results of principles, but unnatural opinions which they were
"obliged to adopt." The best that could be said was, that
the Catholics were poor, and supported the cause of free gov
ernment to secure to themselves a chance of taking part in

it : they were a minority, and stood for equal rights to secure
the exercise of their own. But what is to be the course of
things if the Roman Catholics of America become rich and
powerful ? What is to be their rule, if they ever become a
majority? What is the spirit of their efforts as a minority?
It is obvious, that all Roman Catholics of this country who
are true to their allegiance as citizens must really abjure and
renounce all ecclesiastical and civil supremacy ; must openly
and honestly refuse to follow the course pointed out by the
Pope, and be content with the same privileges which are en
joyed by the rest of our citizens, or else elect to make war
on free government. This arrogant assumption of supremacy
must be repudiated and rejected by those to whom it is ad
dressed ; or they must expect that claims so dangerous to
the peace, so destructive of the Government and social insti
tutions of America, will be resisted from the outset till the
end.
Moreover, not only does the Church assail the principle
of loyalty, but it seeks to band its disciples together as a fac
tion. Pledged to one end, which is not that of the Govern
ment, — pledged to make the Government itself, so soon as they
can get control of it, the instrument of enforcing their faith
and practice on the whole people, — do they not see in the
outset that they have no sort of claim to toleration if they are
ready to pledge themselves to allow none to others? Do
they not see that they must renounce this claim of the
Church, or assume an attitude more treasonable than that
which the slave-power occupied before the rebellion, and
without any of the reasons which that power had to urge in
its justification? Do they not see, that if they can attain to
power, as that faction aimed to do, they must pledge them
selves to a rule more despotic and terrible than that of sla
very would have been, as the eve of St. Bartholomew was
worse than the surrender of a fugitive slave ?
The natural result of this letter will be to drive the great
body of those who will think, to Protestantism. Men will
not so readily give up the privileges of government, edu
cation, property, civil rights and advantages. They wjll be

likely to elect the side of reason and common sense when
they know that it presents substantial benefits. The founders
of the American States strove to establish civil and religious
liberty together. Religious and political freedom were de
veloped, and grew together upon this continent, till the
people saw — and with one voice declared — that in them
were embodied the laws of political society. Organized in
our governments, they have, by their results, — in the unex
ampled material, intellectual, and religious growth and pros
perity of the country ; in the strength and stability of the
government; in the freedom of the citizen from burdens
and interference ; in combining with individual security and
personal immunity, and protection of the minutest rights, the
rule of power founded on justice, — shown that these laws
are true, as proved by their practical working. Accordingly,
the whole civilized world, even including the Roman Church
itself, has been greatly revolutionized.
At this day, the head of that Church once more raises the
standard, and rallies the Church to the support of the ideas of
the fifth and thirteenth centuries. He seeks to drag Christ
endom into the darkness of the darkest ages of history. It is
all very logical. A creed resting not on reason, but on
authority; a Church assuming to be the only Church, — to be
inspired, infallible ; a Bible for men not to read ; forms and
ceremonies not to be understood ; dogmatism in lieu of faith ;
enforced observances in place of true worship; ecclesiastic
absolutism; the enslavement of the soul, — these are con
sistent only with civil despotism. It is precisely as Vacherot
said : —
" The principle of Catholicism is not merely authority, for that it
has in common with all religions : it is authority over all, every
where, under all forms, extending to the minutest details of faith and
discipline ; it is the regulation of every undertaking, opposition to
human liberty carried to the extent of renouncing individuality. A
Catholic society is certainly capable of much chivalric, mystic, or
military excellence. But one thing it will always lack, — the capa
city of self-government. It may show prodigies of learning, devotion,
heroism : it will never show the world the spectacle of a people which
governs itself. As it has never known any password but order, if by
chance it get liberty, it will not know how to use it with dignity and
moderation. It will turn it to anarchy, and will forthwith throw it
beneath the feet of despotism. Catholicism and democracy are abso
lutely incompatible : it is an abuse of terms to speak of Catholic
democracy. You might as well speak of military democracy, or
democratic dictatorship."
In the trial of this issue, can the world rely on the intelli
gence and patriotism of the Roman Catholics of America ? or
is the Roman Church sure of her followers ? Is it true that
civil and religious liberty have, even in America, no exist
ence but in name, and for a time ? In the long and terrible
conflicts and convulsions into which the world has been
thrown by ecclesiastical strife and persecution, has no solid
ground been gained? Are there no principles of civil and
spiritual liberty which are no longer to be brought in question
in America? Have governments no legitimate authority, —
laws no real basis ?
Let it be borne in mind, too, that the Church of Rome, in
order to attain its end, aims a blow at the educational sys
tem of America. It is through the public schools that prep
aration for the duties of citizenship is acquired.
Now, the plan of the Pope is : 1. To insure, by every pos
sible influence of education, that all children of Catholics shall
be true to the service of the Church ; 2. To band all Catholics
together in their efforts to direct and get control in all civil
affairs; 3. Having got such control, to use the power to
enforce the civil as well as ecclesiastical dominion of the
Church. Witness the efforts in New-York city to pervert
the municipal revenues into sectarian endowments.
What all this means is now readily to be seen. Men can
understand the necessity for the English laws against Cath
olics ; for the very principles of Catholics involved tn*e sub
version of civil government. Whilst a minority, they are a
faction ; when a majority, a tyranny. Heresy is a high
crime; and, according to the old definition: " Hereticus est
qui dubitat de fide Catholicd et qui negligit servare ea, qua
Romana ecclesia statuit, seu servare decreverit."
We can understand, too, how it was that heretics were

doomed to be burned. The marvel is that the same influ
ences are at work that were the controlling ones when these
laws were enforced. It is in vain for the world to flatter
itself, that the civilization of this age, the intelligence of man
kind, or the general enlightenment of the race, will prevent
the same things now or hereafter. It is the avowed determin
ation of the Romish Church to propagate itself by force. It
must, then, use adequate force ; and that will include the
extremest punishments.
There is hope from civilization and intelligence in the
body of the Church itself, if anywhere. The Church anath
ematizes the greatest triumphs of human reason. The results
of science and philosophy it condemns as damnable errors.
The truths of reason, on which modern societies, states,
churches, civilization, stand, it denounces as heresies. Its
catalogue of errors embraces the great circle of modern
thought. It unblushingly avows itself the foe of progress,
liberalism, and modern civilization. Its hope of success,
then, is in the belief, that, in the war of opinions, error will
prevail over truth, ignorance over intelligence ; or that it
may succeed in enforcing itself on the world, in spite of all
reason and knowledge, by the unity and persistency of its
followers. It dares deliberately to declare itself to be a
deadly faction in every State and society.
It may find some strong allies in this new crusade. It
may find, even in this century, some elements favorable to its
ambitious designs.' But it will not find those elements and
allies whereby the Church of Rome once ruled the world,
and disposed of its thrones. It will find some formidable
opposition from the rulers of those empires in which it is the
prevailing creed. Even its worshippers there will tremble
at tyranny more terrible than that which they now endure.
The French emperor and the French people will join in ridi
culing such foolish assumptions. The masses of Europe,
which were once Catholic devotees, need no Luther to lead
them to renounce such absurdities. In America, the Church
will find the people, and probably a pretty formidable portion
1865.] The National Conference. 409
of its own worshippers, ready to declare this Letter and its

list of the world's errors, in the language of the Virginia Act
of 1785, a piece of " impious presumption of ecclesiastical
rulers, themselves but fallible and uninspired men;" and
that " civil rights have no dependence on our religious opin
ions, more than on our opinions on physics or geometry."
It is the creed of America, that " a flourishing civil state may
stand, and best be maintained, with full liberty of religious
concernment." In the good old words of the Puritans : —
" The free fruition of such liberties, immunities, and privileges as

humanity, civility, and Christianity call for as due to every man in
his place and proportion, without impeachment and infringement,
hath ever been and ever will be the tranquilitie and stabilitie of
churches and commonwealths ; and the deniall or deprivall thereof,
the disturbance, if not the ruin, of both."
Art. VI. — THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF UNITA

RIAN CHURCHES.
1. The Monthly Journal of the American Unitarian Association.

1864, 1865. January to April.
2. Call and Address issued by the Committee of „ Arrangements for the
National Convention of Unitarian Churches.
Fifty years ago, there were perhaps four churches in this

country willing to accept the name Unitarian. The name
belonged, indeed, to the religious history of Poland, where it
meant " tolerant." It had no connection, in its origin, with
a belief in the Unity or Trinity of the nature of God. It was a
foreign term to us, therefore, and came in upon us as unnatu
rally and with as much difficulty as would the term Donatist
or Waldensian, which had no essential connection with our
history.
In half a century, however, there has grown into existence
a very perfectly defined body of Christians, belonging to
vol. lxxviii. — 5th s. vol. XVI. NO. III. 35
410 The National Conference, [ây,
churches once of Episcopalian, or Presbyterian, or Quaker

organization, — mostly, however, of the Congregational ists of
New England, — who are known by the name of Unitarians,
whether they themselves take this name or decline it. This
body has never acknowledged its existence by any organic
act until this year. Its members have always been prone to
talk of it as our " denomination," having, indeed, as we have
often said, a curious passion for long words of Latin roots.
One and another journal has called itself its organ when it
seemed convenient, and then, under some other phase or
some other editor, has said it was nobody's organ. The
body, as a body, has never authorized any man, book, or
paper to be its organ. It has conducted a great many works
of Christian activity, in which it has received no assistance
from persons not of its communion. For instance, it created
the Theological School at Cambridge ; threw it open to the
Christian world ; educated there Episcopalian, Methodist,
Swedenborgian, and Orthodox ministers ; and never received
a penny for this school from anybody not distinctively a
Unitarian. In the same way it carries on Harvard College.
Nine-tenths of the endowments of this college have been
received from the benefactions of this body. But it has too
much sense and too much religion to limit the good of the
college to its own members. It appoints professors indif
ferently from men of every Christian body, — scatters its
scholarships indifferently among pupils of all Christian com
munions. It simply reserves for itself the privilege of fur
nishing all the funds. It divides, as it should do, the benefits
among all who will receive them.
A system as broad as this, resulting in operations of the
most unrestricted generosity, is the only system possible in a
truly Christian organization. The statements of the Founder
of our religion are perfectly definite on this point. Men are
to know his disciples by the love they bear to one another;
and there is no other test or shibboleth by which they can be
known. Indeed, when they carry by the side of that general
symbol any division color, State banner, county flag, or town
ship coat-of-arms, there is always danger that, in the meUe
1865.] of Unitarian Churches. 411
with the devil, this secondary and supplementary signal may

be mistaken for the general banner of the host. History is,
in fact, full of instances where people have become more
attached to some such local symbol of division than they have
been to the great token of universal brotherhood. That is,
however, properly not a Christian body or company which
puts any limit on its universal philanthropy. The moment a
set of people confine their gospel to the Jews or to the Gen
tiles, to the elect or to the reprobate, to black people, red
people, yellow people, mulattoes or whites, it ceases to be
the Christian gospel. The voice of the Christian gospel is,
" Come who will." It proclaims a free salvation by the grace
of God, and it proclaims it to everybody.
The Unitarian body has always held to this completely
catholic view. It is a much more catholic body than the
Church of Rome is. It holds that every person born within
reach of any Christian influence, is, so far forth, born into the
Church of Christ. It is glad to baptize all so born, in recog-'
nition of this truth. But, baptized or not, it claims them all
as so far fellow-Christians. It does not ask for profession of
faith : it is very glad if it gets confession of weakness. Nay,
if it cannot get that, it works on the self-satisfied Pharisee
who refuses to make it, in the hope and faith, that, by the
mighty power of Christian truth, he also can be brought
nearer the kingdom of God. Thus it knows no perfected
saints in North or South ; and it knows no absolute devils, —
not even in Andersonville or in Richmond. Its work of Chris
tian ministry is literally for all men.
It does not follow, however, that, while it works for all
men, it does not know who are its own members or who are
its allies. Because it does not build up a wall of separation
between its pickets and the world outside of them, it does
not follow that it cannot tell its own soldiers or their com
panies. Because it admits that there is good everywhere,
even in Boothia Felix, it does not follow that it considers
that Boothia Felix is as good a place to live in as is the tem
perate zone. Because it finds some good even in the service
at St. Peter's, it does not follow that it considers that that
412 The National Conference [May,
is the perfection of human worship. Because a company of

Christians make the whole world their field, it does not by
any means follow that they are indifferent to discipline. And
because they are generous to all, it does not follow that they
are indifferent to their own doctrine. Toleration is not indif
ference ; for persecution is not necessarily a sign of sincerity.
Nor again does it follow, — when a Unitarian expresses his
certainty that truth will everywhere triumph, because God
is, and because there are rays of God's light everywhere, —
that he means to enter into his rest, and leave God to work
his own victories. There is a doctrine of filtration, diffusion,
or endosmose, which states, that, if a drop of rose-water be
thrown into Boston harbor to-day, the fragrance of that drop
will be perceived on the banks of the Ganges, a hundred
thousand years hence, by any one who smells of the sacred
waters with organs sufficiently delicate. There might be a
system of religious endeavor, which should rely on a similar
principle in the spiritual world, to convey some faint mil
lesimal suspicion of the gospel pronounced in a Christian
pulpit to-day, to the consciences reigning at Danville or Ma
con or Montgomery, or whatever place shall be the throne of
despotism a thousand years hence, if despotism last so long.
But such a system would not be specially a Unitarian system.
It would not be a Christian system in any sense. For the
essence of Christianity, as far as action goes, consists in giv
ing and taking. What we take, we are to give. It ceases to
be good for any thing unless we give it. And so, in the con
crete expression of the Saviour regarding missionary work,
he bids us, explicitly, go out into all the world, and preach the
gospel to every creature.
With a very earnest sense of this Christian duty, the Uni
tarian body of America has addressed itself, in the last half-
century, to a good deal of work in the organization of its
missions. It has six missionary societies, — three belonging
to the States of Maine, New Hampshire, and New York, re
spectively ; and three, more general, which have the names
of the Evangelical Missionary Societyt the American Unita
rian Association, and the Western Conference, — the last
limited in its work to the Western States, the other two

having no limit but the world. It has two theological schools ;
one at Cambridge, and one at Meadville. It publishes three
newspapers and one monthly journal. No one of these small
organizations or journals has any sort of creed limiting the
convictions, or the expression of opinions, of those who have
them in charge, excepting as the name Christian limits them.
And of all of them the world is invited to get such benefit as
it can.
Yet this Unitarian body, thus willing to work in the Chris
tian subjugation of the world, has never had, till now, the
simplest methods for finding out what was its own strength.
The Unitarian Association is purely a missionary body. It
works in partibus infiddium; but it has no privileges but
those of a beggar, at home. It has no right to say what the
Unitarian churches of the country are ; nay, in strictness, it
does not even know. It prints every year a register of such,
churches, for what it may be worth ; not vouching for its
correctness, — sure, on the other hand, of its incorrectness.
These churches are in no way represented in its councils, ex
cept as individual members of them may be individual mem
bers of this private corporation. The Evangelical Missionary
Society is simply a close corporation, continued by the elec
tion of new members by those already existing. The West
ern Conference is organized on a more American system. Its
elasticity and vigor have shown for years the value of that
system. An election of responsible delegates from the
churches brings together a body of representatives, who can
themselves take counsel, with some shadow of authority, for
" the common defence and for the general welfare." But this
Conference has never united more than thirty churches ; and,
although a good example, has not met the necessities of the
isolated Unitarian churches of the rest of the land.
So little consciousness of its own power, therefore, had this
Unitarian body, that when, last December, the directors of the
Unitarian Association held a special meeting of that corpora
tion to provide for the immense enlargement of its work,
made possible under the new conditions of this country, it
35*
Avas with a certain timidity, and tone of apology, that the di

rectors proposed a special effort to raise twenty-five thousand
dollars for the service of the year. In point of fact, there had
been single years when that Association had received less
than seven thousand dollars for its missionary purposes, — a
sum too contemptible even for ridicule. We adduce these
figures here simply as an illustration of the ignorance of their
own strength as a religious body, which has for many years
characterized the Unitarians.
Such ignorance showed itself in other ways, more unfortu
nate in their results than was a failure to appropriate large
sums of money for the diffusion of truth. As this nebulous
body would not own that it had any nucleus, it was often
simply impossible for individuals or religious bodies to join
it. Orthodox journals of different types have often amused
themselves by showing that the growth of this body was very
slow, implying that few persons joined it. They would have
conferred a great favor on the independent religious thinkers
of America, by showing them how they could join the Unita
rian body in such a way as to receive sympathy from it, or
express interest in it ;—
" For thrice about its neck their arras they flung,
And, thrice deceived, on vain embraces hung ;
For thrice the flitting shadows slipped away
Like winds, or empty dreams that fly the day."
Of course, if an individual Episcopalian or Baptist lived in a

town where there was a Unitarian Church, he could become
a member of that church. But how, if he did not ? How, if
a Roman-Catholic priest, not living in such a town, became a
Unitarian? or an Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, or other Or
thodox minister? How, if a missionary to the heathen threw
up his charge, because he did not believe the theology of the
A. B. C. F. M. ? How, if a whole congregation of Christians
preferred to administer the sacraments, and conduct public
worship, without a creed rather than with one ? How, if the
minister of such a congregation recognized the Christian
communion of his Unitarian brethren in the ministry? These
are a few illustrations of real accessions to the force of the
Unitarian body, such as are taking place all the time ; but
there has been no method whatever, by which this body,
without a nucleus, should know that it had received such ac
cessions, should feel the new strength which every army feels
when it knows it is recruited, and that its necessary losses of
strength are made good tenfold by its accessions.
Nor is it only in its relations to Orthodoxy that the Unitarian
body, as we have ventured to call it, has suffered from its
want of a nucleus. Its members are in the closest religious
sympathy with all those religious bodies in America which
are popularly known as Liberal. Here is a very large constit
uency of people, with whom the Unitarians have every
reason for cultivating friendly relations. There are thirty
millions of people in the United States. All these people
have been, to a greater or less extent, under Christian influ
ence. So far forth, they are Christians on the Unitarian hy
pothesis. Of these people, three millions, in round numbers,
belong to the Catholic church ; a million and a half are Bap
tists ; five hundred thousand are Presbyterians, and five
hundred thousand more belong to other closely-knit Orthodox
sects who would not wish to co-operate with Unitarians in
any religious or philanthropic enterprise. But the other
twenty-four million people and more, belonging in part to the
Methodist, Universalist, Christian, Episcopal, and other reli
gious organizations which adopt a generous theory of the
Christian Church, — and in much greater number belonging
to no Church organization whatever, — are the natural allies
of the Unitarian body in any enterprise of philanthropy, edu
cation, or religion. Suppose it is desired to co-operate with
the organizations which represent either of these religious
bodies; suppose it is desirable to make a representation to
the Government of the country, or to the people of the land,
in reply to the effrontery of some shoddy " Christian Commis
sion;" suppose, for whatever cause, it is desirable for the
Unitarian body to say an honest word, or as a body to do an
honest thing, — who was to be its spokesman or its agent ?
The President of the Unitarian Association had no more au
thority to do it than the minister of any separate parish.
Suppose three or four of the religious communions which we

have named should rise to the height of founding together a
University in the West, or the South, on as generous a foun
dation as the Universities of Germany stand upon, — a
University in which professors of every sect might teach
what they had to teach, and pupils of every creed might
learn what they had wanted to learn. Suppose that, in such
a plan, the representatives of those bodies, dividing among
themselves the care of the foundation of such a University,
sought the representatives of the Unitarian body, to offer it a
share in the work, and the advantages of so grand a scheme.
They could not have made the proposal, because there was
nobody to make the proposal to. They would have found
plenty of active churches, plenty of active men, but nobody
who had any right to bear their proposal to the others, and
no possible convocation of the body, to which their proposal
could be addressed.
This nebulous condition of an active, enterprising body of
Christians, quite determined about their work, sympathizing
very heartily with each other, and, as we have said, knowing
very well who are their friends and allies, resulted naturally
enough from the circumstances of their history. There is no
necessity of inquiring as to its cause. It did no great harm,
as long as the Unitarian body was a circle of churches in or
near Massachusetts, virtually shut out from activity in the
rest of America, and providentially compelled, as it were, to
be satisfied with the work of elevating, as far as it could, the
civilization of the New-England States. There were always
many persons in the ministry of the body, who felt no incon
venience from such a condition of things. Strong men who
had around them hearty and united parishes had much more
than they could do at home. They had all the sympathy
they needed in the circle where they did their day's duty.
The rest of the world might call them Arminian or Meso-
potamian, Pelagian or Antinomian, heretic, schismatic, or
infidel, — they neither knew nor cared. If it did not call
them any thing at all, if it did not know of their existence,
they knew as little and cared as little. But the laymen of the
body, as it has proved, had a very different feeling. They

were proud of their denominational name : they were proud
of the status the Unitarian Church had earned for itself
where it was known ; and they meant that that name, and the
work which that Church had to do, should be carried farther.
And the younger members of the ministry, and the ministers
who came into it from the Roman Catholic, Episcopalian,
Methodist, Quaker, and Orthodox bodies, have shown for
many years, on all occasions, an undisguised wish that there
was somebody to welcome them when they came into the min
istry, — somebody to back them when they were in its hard
places, — somebody at least to suggest occupation in the work
of the ministry for the modest, — and somebody to fortify those
who stood in frontier or difficult positions. With the new
emergencies of the country, the views of the laymen of the
body, and of this very large majority of its ministers, of
course asserted themselves.' The body had work to do out
side of Massachusetts. Everybody who cares for any thing
beyond stones and bread has something to do, in uplifting
the barbarous nation which, by force of arms, we have just
now annexed to civilized America. It was idle to tell people
who were determined on such work, that the people who
needed to be healed must come to the first church in Ply
mouth, or the first church in Salem, or the first church in
Boston, or the first church in Roxbury, or to the churches of
New England generally. Though the gospel administered
in those churches were of the purest, the presumption that
the dying people of Savannah and Nashville and Memphis
would come there to drink of its streams, was too narrow to
satisfy the determination to carry Christian love and life out
into all the barbarous South, and into the new-born West. If
the war had taught the country nothing else, it had taught
us geography. And, learning that lesson, the Unitarian body
had determined, that it would give such vigor to all its enter-
'prises of civilization as should be worthy of its name, — if it
did no more.
It is to such a determination, arising from various causes
in the laity of the Unitarian body, and in large numbers of its
clergy, that the organization of the " National Conference of

Unitarian Churches" of America is due.
The incident which gave rise to the movement from which
this organization was formed is that to which we have already
alluded, — the call of a special meeting of the American Uni
tarian Association. This missionary society received in the
last year the contributions of only about fifty churches in the
Unitarian body, — not one-sixth of the body in numbers or
in pecuniary ability. But, even thus restricted, it was the
largest of the nine organizations for special purposes by
which this body of Christians, which had no centre, had at
tempted to do its duty. This society, in its report of last May,
had been obliged to confess, that it had collected, for its gen
eral missionary service of the preceding year, only six thou
sand eight hundred dollars. With the enlargement of work
offering itself in the army, and in the enfranchised States, it
had no materially enlarged funds'for the service of the year
which is now closing. Perfectly certain that the laity of the
Unitarian body had no wish or intention to avoid the duty
which devolves upon the whole Church in the new civiliza
tion of the South, the association called together this special
meeting of its members, to lay before them a statement of the
exigency, and of the measures proposed for meeting it. The
members of the association are — all persons who have sub
scribed one dollar within the year to its treasury, or, at any
period, have subscribed thirty dollars. It was not, as we
have said, in any way a representation of the Unitarian
churches, or, indeed, of the Unitarian community. When
this special meeting came together, the Executive Board pre
sented a very generous and far-seeing exposition of the work
which devolved on Unitarian Christians. An active and in
telligent friend of its movements presented a well-digested
history of its operations, and moved that twenty-five thousand
dollars be raised in the churches to carry out the plans of the
Board. It at once appeared that the meeting was not satis^
fied with so small an appropriation. On motion of a lay-
member, himself thoroughly acquainted with its method and
operations, the sum of one hundred thousand dollars was sub-
A fc
stituted for twenty-five thousand. As he justly said, for a

work of this kind, it is easier to raise one hundred thousand
dollars than it is to raise ten.
But, as the discussion of plans of work and methods of rais
ing money proceeded in this meeting, the difficulty of voting
any thing, or determining any thing in the unorganized Uni
tarian body, became painfully manifest. Who were the five
or six hundred people in that church ? and what did they rep
resent ? When they voted that one hundred thousand dollars
should be raised for missionary purposes, did they mean that
it should be raised among themselves ? or did they mean it
should be raised among the churches of which they were
members, or among the fifty churches who contributed to
the association last year, or among all the two hundred and
sixty-three churches of the Unitarian communion ? Of course,
they did not mean that anybody was to be forced to pay any
thing. But what was the moral weight of the vote? Clearly
this was severely limited when it had to be confessed, that
here was a vote cast in an open public meeting, where nobody
knew who voted, where nobody pledged himself even to" pay
a penny, where no one had a right to pledge any one else,
and, more than all, where no one even promised that he would
advise any one else to contribute.
In the midst of this very palpable exhibition of the quality
of the discipline of the levy with which it was proposed ttf
rout the forces of the Devil, a trustee of Antioch College rose
to speak. In a few very simple words, he showed that the
Unitarian body had no single duty before it so important as
the provision for the liberal education of the people of the
West. He showed that the plans thus far proposed made no
provision for that purpose ; that, if they were carried out with
out counsel with those who had the plans for Antioch College
in their hands, they would certainly overthrow those plans ;
and that the practical result of each set of efforts would prob
ably be the defeat of the other. In brief, he showed what
would happen when these unorganized levies which were to
beat the Devil were distracted by the attempt to fight with
out discipline on two different fields. To those people who
remembered, as he spoke, that, in fact, not two organizations,

but nine, within the Unitarian body, solicited their denomina
tional sympathy and assistance, in addition to the countless
commissions and agencies for philanthropy outside the denom
ination, which were steadily pressing their claim, the chaos of
such effort seemed indeed hopelessly confused.
It was at this juncture, and under the pressure of such dis
satisfaction, that Dr. Bellows, of New York, presented the
resolution from which the National Convention of last month
sprang. It is in the following words : —
" That a committee of ten persons, three ministers and seven lay
men, be appointed to call a convention, to consist of the pastor and
two delegates from each church or parish in the Unitarian denomina
tion, to meet in the city of New York, to consider the interests of our
cause, and to institute measures for its good."
This resolution was welcomed actually with enthusiasm.

It not only met the immediate necessity of the occasion, but
it met the eager want which the younger ministers of the
body had felt, which we have attempted to describe, and the
practical determination of the laymen who were present in
large numbers at this meeting, that this body should take
some place in the active work of the Christian Church worthy
of its principles and its prophecies. Dr. Bellows himself, in
Moving the resolution, said there was a prevalent impression
that the Unitarian body disliked organization. He did not
believe it was so unpractical ; but, for one, he was willing to
organize with any other man who would organize with him.
Such a declaration coming from a person who has held the
presidency of the Sanitary Commission, whose highly organ
ized work has been so efficient in the last four years, struck
the key-note for the rest of that meeting. It proved a meet
ing much more important than such mass-meetings generally
are. Those who met there dispersed with the feeling that
they had not only met the exigency which called them to
gether, but had at least prepared the way for the organization
of the Unitarian Church of America
This history of the convention which was called by this
meeting, and which sat in New York on the 5th and 6th of
April, is now before the public. It more than satisfied the
most auspicious hopes which were expressed in the meeting
which called it. If it did not satisfy all hopes which were
excited before it met, it was because, in the very wide discus
sions of the four months between, hopes sprang up more
sanguine than any that were entertained at first, and too san
guine to be made real in a moment. The convention has no
secret history. Every step that it has taken, and that it has
refused to take, have been canvassed most freely in the news
papers, and in various meetings of ministers, of committees,
and of the convention itself. What it has done is very simple.
The reasons for its refusal to do more are very simple, and its
history is very easily told.
Nobody, so far as we know, had any wish to state any creed
for the churches represented in the convention. They were
Congregational churches, each of which made its own creed
if it wanted one, and refused to make one if it did not want
one. There early expressed itself, however, in various quar
ters, a wish that some general definition of Christianity might
be made, on an occasion so fortunate, which should show,
not so much what these churches believed, as what all the
Christian world believed. It is so plain that the old creeds
of the Church occupy themselves with subjects about which
the Church at this very hour is very .indifferent, whether it
believes them or not, that it is a very tempting thing to try
to make the statement what is this alkahest or universal
solvent, with which we are all alike in aflSnity, and which
we call Christianity. Dr. Bellows proposed such a statement.
Mr. Frothingham made another, for the Liberal Church,
at the close of his striking sermon, which was first deliv
ered before the Ministerial Union in Boston ; and twenty or
thirty more, at least, were brought to the convention itself,
one of them in print. But none of these proposals for a defi
nition of a creed of the Church at large was received with
much favor in this discussion. The precise business in hand
was the organization of our branch of the Christian church ;
and any effort for any purpose, however curious or valuable,
VOL. LXXVIII. — 5TH 8. VOL. XVI. NO. III. 36
which did not distinctly appear to belong to this specific

object, was set aside.
We might add, that, in common use, the word " believe "
has got itself connected with the idea of intellectual process,
though it was certainly not with such an idea that it was used
by Paul or Jesus Christ. Now, the Unitarian body is almost
unanimously pledged to the statement, that religion is not
largely a matter of intellectual process, but is rather a matter
of Life, in which intellectual process has a very limited and
even an unimportant part. All the twenty or thirty creeds
that we saw, which were proposed for this convention's defi
nition of universal Christianity, recognized this subordinate
place of intellectual process in the religious life : but the
mere word " believe " seems to imply an intellectual process,
as language is commonly used ; and for this reason, among
others, as we suppose, all the statements of belief were with
drawn, or fell to the ground, without much discussion in print
or elsewhere.
So the creeds, symbols, rallying cries, and mottoes got set
on one or another side. As the discussions of the winter
went on, it was evident that the newly roused hope of organ
ization led many men to look farther than the organization of
the Unitarian body simply. The committee of arrangements,
consisting of three clergymen and seven laymen, proposed the
organization not simply of "the Unitarian" but of "the Lib
eral Church." They directed the three ministers in their
number to issue an Address to the churches. This Address
distinctly urges the breaking down sectarian lines : —
" And what a blessing for us as well as for themselves, if the nation
were enough at one in its faith, for Christians to withdraw their ener
gies from controversy, and the tactics of jealousy and mutual coun
teraction, their eyes from dividing walls and distinctive opinions, and
devote their united hearts and souls to the positive truth, the positive
faith, and the positive work of the gospel of Jesus Christ! We
know not what fruit and flowers our liberal faith would produce, were
it only nationalized ; living in the genial climate of public confidence,
and with the common people lending their ardent affections, and
bringing their great human instincts into its fold."
We state simply what appeared, not only in the preliminary

meetings of the committee, but in the convention itself, when
we say that these gentlemen, and, as we suppose, many others,
were forced to abandon with reluctance the hope of using
this occasion to embody with us other Liberal Christian
churches, of whatever creed, or of no creed, who were, how
ever, indifferent to the Unitarian name, or wholly unwilling
to assume it. But, before the convention met, that appeared
probable which, as soon as it met, was evident beyond por-
adventure, — that it would first take the step for which it
was distinctly called, solidly and carefully, before it entered
on the consideration of any next step. It was evident, that,
whatever might be the wishes of the ministers of the
Unitarian body as to alliance or fusion with other bodies
of Christians, the lay-delegates of the Unitarian churches
meant to organize the Unitarian body first, — before they lis
tened to any proposals for federal unions or consolidations
with other organizations. This statement w© consider neces
sary, by way of illustrating the second principal point of dis
cussion which has entered into the deliberations of the winter
on the question of organization.
The convention met in New York on the 5th of April. The
attendance was large and punctual beyond expectation, even
of the most sanguine friends of organization. It had been
hoped by some members of the committee of arrangements,
that one hundred churches might be represented ; but the
experience of the festival conventions of the Unitarians gave
no warrant for expecting more than a representation from
seventy-five churches. In fact, however, one hundred and
ninety-five were represented ; the whole number of churches
between Eastport and San Francisco being only two hundred
and sixty-three. The delegates were not volunteers: they
had been chosen for this specific purpose, at meetings of the
societies regularly called, and, in a uniform style of creden
tials, were
" authorized to speak and vote for the congregation (which
appointed them), in all subjects presented to the convention ; and to
make any provisions which they may think wise for future conven
tions, which shall receive reports from our churches, colleges, confer
ences, and other associations, and quicken, enlarge, and strengthen
the various activities of our local or general organizations."
Indeed nothing was needed beyond a careful survey of the

five or six hundred ministers and delegates, after they were
assembled, to show that here was a body of men very care
fully selected, and representing, with great weight of charac
ter, an important constituency. The committee of arrange
ments, acting in the spirit of their instructions, had gone
beyond the letter, in inviting delegations from the nine boards
which had in charge the enterprises of missions and of
instruction, in which the Unitarian body has engaged.
Before the convention met in form, at the request of this
committee of arrangements, Rev. J. F. Clarke, of the Church
of the Disciples, in Boston, preached a sermon at All Souls'
Church, in presence of an immense congregation, embracing,
probably, most of the members of the convention. This ser
mon will be remembered among the auspicious solemnities
of the occasion. Beginning with a description of that bold
" change of base " by which Paul and Barnabas cut loose from
the Jews and turned to the Gentiles, the sermon illustrated
the constant necessity by which the Church is compelled to
repeat that same process, as one or another institution
assumes to be the establishment, and cramps itself into the
rigidity of old Judaism, — so that successive Pauls, Luthers,
and We8le)'s have to cut loose, and found the liberal Church
again. They do this precisely because they are disciples of
Jesus, and because in that discipleship they are at work for
union and freedom. Under the inspiration of this sermon
the convention met the next day for its duties.
It was presided over by Governor Andrew, of the Church
of the Disciples, in Boston. Never was the important function
of parliamentary law more distinctly shown than in the steadi
ness and fairness with which he held the convention to its
work. In this he was largely assisted by the determination of
four-fifths of the delegates assembled there, to drive the work
of the convention steadfastly through. It was clear, from the
first, that here was a body of men largely versed in public

procedure. No new session of a State Legislature shows so
large a proportion of men who have engaged before in the
details of legislative life, as were present in this body. The
fact, which always appears in assemblies of ministers, that
while as a body they speak singularly well, they have not the
gift of brevity, was made of the less consequence here. The
laymen who spoke, spoke with brevity which more than coun
terbalanced clerical loquacity, — and spoke with pitiless point ;
and the convention, perfectly fair to every speaker, was deter
mined that no question should be k#pt on the carpet, simply
as the theme for eloquence. We recollect no instance where
the advocates and the enemies of a measure had not their fair
chance ; but then no favorite speaker was favorite enough for
another word, — the question was demanded always, and
almost unanimously insisted upon.
The convention, from the first, took its business in its own
hands. We are in a position to state, that none of its com
mittees, excepting that on its first organization, and that on
credentials, was even suggested before the convention met.
It named by acclamation six of the names on its most impor
tant committee, that on organization ; and, at its order, Gov
ernor Andrew, with great discretion and fairness, appointed
the other six. This committee of twelve, representing every
shade of opinion in the convention, agreed on a unanimous
report, which was accepted with very great unanimity after a
discussion in detail, — and defines the organization of the
" National Conference of Unitarian Churches."
This report provides for an annual convention, organized,
precisely like that which adopted it, by the choice of two
delegates from each church, who, with its pastor, shall repre
sent it in conference. That body, meeting annually, is the
organization ; a visible exponent of these Unitarian churches,
as they provide for the common defence and for the general
welfare. If the nine missionary bodies interfere with each
other, here is a tribunal of common appeal. If the body has
work in hand too great for any one of them, here is its cen
tral power to give energy to one or to all. If there is new
36*
426 T/ie National Conference [May,
duty to be undertaken for which none of them is prepared,

here is a representative council, whose advisory power will
certainly be very great, to provide the machinery which is
deficient. But, most important of all perhaps, here is the
solemn opportunity for a discussion and explanation between
one and another part of the country, of what the Church can,
and what it cannot, attempt. Here is, once a year, some sys
tem given to enterprises, which, if undertaken in a corner,
may die of isolation or want of air. Nor is it a trifling thing,
that, in such a convention, the body rises to a sense of its
own life, — feels its own* strength or its own weakness. At
New York it felt its strength, unquestionably. The energy
and determination of the convention was, we believe, a mat
ter of surprise to all its members.
Whatever the conference determines upon will be reported
back to the constituent churches by their delegates. Into
their action, of course, the conference cannot go. But it is
evident, that any broad or national plans agreed on by any
strong majority of such a conference will appeal with great
effect to the several churches whose delegates have taken
part in the discussions and in the votes. In the present
case, the work of the convention consisted chiefly in making
the plans for its successors. It also recommended an annual
subscription, by the churches, of one hundred thousand dol
lars to the purposes of the two larger missionary boards, —
the Unitarian Association and the Western Conference. The
general interest excited by the discussions of the winter had
shown, that the special meeting of the Unitarian Association
had not over-estimated the exigency, nor the willingness to
meet it. Of the one hundred thousand dollars then voted,
nearly eighty thousand dollars had been raised in four months
by fifty churches. The convention determined that this sum
should be annually raised, calling upon all the one hundred
and ninety-five churches represented to unite in raising it.
They voted, with equal unanimity, that the churches be ad
vised to fill up the endowment of one hundred thousand
dollars necessary for the re-establishment of Antioch College,
this summer. And they voted that twenty thousand dollars
be raised, to be devoted to the establishment of a weekly

journal.
This is to say, that the convention recommended to the
churches four distinct things to be done in the next twelve
months. It then continued its officers in place till their suc
cessors should be chosen, and appointed an executive coun
cil of five ministers and five laymen to direct the execution
of these four objects as the year goes on.
On none of these measures, so far as we are aware, did any
difficulty present itself. The imaginary impossibility qf or
ganizing Unitarians with a creed, or without one, vanished
away. It proved that, as represented here, the Unitarians
were a singularly practical body ; determined to have some
organization, equally determined to have no creed. It proved,
as we believe, that they were a body more closely united in
mutual regard and confidence than any other ecclesiastical
body in Christendom. As we understand it, this harmony
springs from their learning, more and more distinctly in
every crisis of their history, to hold by their Master's injunc
tion, that the love they bear to each other shall be the only
evidence of their discipleship. .
In the midst of this unanimity, two subjects appeared for
discussion, and were the only two which divided the conven
tion. Waiving all statement of the creed of Christendom,
and all statements of the dogmatic position of the churches
represented, the preamble to the constitution takes ground
within Christendom in these words : —
" Whereas the great opportunities and demands for Christian labor
and consecration, at this time, increase our sense of the obligation of
all disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ to prove 'their faith by self-
denial, and by the devotion of their lives and possessions to the
service of God and the building-up of the kingdom of his Son."
Exception was taken, with great care and earnestness, to

these words, on the ground that they involved a supposed
coquetry with Orthodoxy ; that they were understood in one
way in this convention, and in another way by Orthodox
believers ; that the word " Lord " in especial, is no longer
used in the Church in the sense in which Paul used it, but
carries with it to the popular ear the Old-Testament sense of
Jehovah ; and, in general, that the preamble was an attempt
to connect us with that base of Orthodoxy from which we
really and at heart cut away. It did not, it was said, show
any reason for our separate existence.
Kindred to this criticism was the wish expressed in many
quarters, that the organization contemplated might be a
wider organization than one of the two hundred and sixty-
three Unitarian churches of America, or of the churches
which should be added to them under that name. Let us
issue a call, it was said, to any Independent or to any Liberal
churches. Let us organize what the call of this convention
looked to, — " the Liberal Church of America."
This proposal failed, as we have intimated, and as we
believe, wholly from the determination of the lay-delegates
of the convention to do one thing at a time. You cannot
make the Constitution of Massachusetts and the Constitution
of the United States in the same room, on the same day, with
the same delegates. Massachusetts must be constituted and
organized first, and New York, and Pennsylvania each in it8
own way ; then it will be time for them to discuss some sys
tem of union which shall be for the common defence and the
general welfare of all. It is impossible for a set of squatters
in the mountains, who have no central or representative body
of their own, to make any proposals for union or nationality
to a Massachusetts, a New York, or a Pennsylvania, which
are already in good working order. As idle would it be for
these Unitarians, who have no nucleus, no representative, no
organ, no spokesman authorized to speak for them, to address
the Liberal bodies of the Church, or the Liberal Christians
of the land, with any hope of a respectful or practical answer.
Such was, whether right or wrong, the determination of the
convention. With that determination, acceding to the unani
mous report of its committee, it joined the refusal to change
their preamble. That preamble wholly escaped being a
creed, while it took ground, as we said, within Christen
dom. The complaint that it made advances to Orthodoxy
did not impress the convention. They knew that the days
of such advance were over for ever. They knew that Ortho
doxy was steadily advancing to us, and that the flirtation is
wholly on the other side. And, as every man in the conven
tion felt, that, in any just sense of words, Jesus Christ is
Lord and Leader of every enterprise which now helps God's
world along, the convention, more practical than speculative,
chose to say so.
And now the Convention is to be judged by its fruits. So
will the conference be judged into which it resolved itself.
If it can cast out the devils, it will be admitted, on all hands,
to be a Christian organization. If, it cannot, it is of no
consequence whether it cries " Lord, Lord," or refrains. If in
the eminently religious epoch in which we live, in which the
march of armies, the victories over traitors, and the death of
leaders, unite to make men rest in God, and trust in him ; if,
in such an epoch, this organization of the Unitarian body
enables it to work more actively in the humanities and chari
ties and other ministries of the hour ; if it take hold more
decidedly of the work of education in this land of black and
of white, by which alone is all prophecy to be fulfilled ; if it
cultivate closer and closer relations with all Christian men,
measuring their Christianity by its own most generous
standard ; if thus it do its part towards the establishment
of that true Catholic Church which is to unfold the life and
elevate the religion of free America, — then the arrange
ments which created such an organization will be forgotten
in its results. The anxieties which attend its birth will
vanish as it grows and prospers.
The times seem ripe for a new step in American life.
That new step must be taken under the auspices of religion.
It depends for all its successes on the closest sense of the
communion of God and man. It is only the Liberal Church
which can carry forth fully among all men the sentiment of
that communion. All other churches are paralyzed in the
thought that their reprobates have no claim to it. Foremost,
as we believe, among the Liberal churches is the place which
the Unitarian body holds, which now girds itself for new
430 The Nation's Triumph, [May,
endeavor. It has the future to educate. It ha9 a barbarous

land to civilize. It has the starving to feed. It has the
dejected white man to inspire. It has the freed black man to
train to freedom. It has all men, black and white, to lift up
to a higher sense of their own nature and a closer sense of
the love of God. Thus has it to work out the new civiliza
tion. If it succeeds, men will forget its methods in its vic
tory. If it fails, men will forget them in its failure. The
method in itself is nothing. But the Unitarian body were no
true branch of the vine, if it did not address itself with its
best energies to the great work that is to be done.
Art. VII. — THE NATION'S TRIUMPH, AND ITS SACRI

FICE.
" Thanks be to Almighty God for the great victory " are
the first words of official reply to the bulletin announcing the
surrender of the main army of the rebellion. These words
respond singularly to the temper of the public mind at the
announcement, which was not the temper of exultation, still
less of vindictive triumph, but rather of devout thankfulness
and joy at the great deliverance. It was fit that our deepest
emotion should be that of solemn awe in the presence of that
stupendous judgment of Almighty God which our nation had
just witnessed. Any phrase less solemn and dread seemed
unfit to tell of the series of great and terrible acts which
made up the history of that week. What we have believed
and wished and hoped so long, we know now. The strength
of the rebellion is crushed. The civil war is felt to be
virtually over. The same day which gave back to the
national forces the last great coast city of the rebellion,
witnessed the complete and final annihilation of tha.t army,
which, for four years, had held the approach to the rebel
capital so obstinately, so bravely, at a cost to the nation of
such wealth of treasure, and such seas of blood. How often
1865.] and its Sacrifice. 431
'we have brought up against that terrible barrier — how fear

fully to be baffled and repulsed ! Let the catalogue of names
tell, — names that meant so little to us four years ago, that
are full now of the most tragical and the most heroic memo
ries of our lives I Bull Run, the Chickahominy, Cedar Moun
tain, Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Mine Run,
the Wilderness campaign, and the long siege of Petersburg,
— these, with the obstinate struggles in the Valley of Vir
ginia, the glories and the griefs of Harper's Ferry, Winches
ter, and Cedar Creek, the great crowning days of Antietam
and Gettysburg, the episodes of the " Monitor " and " Merri-
mac," the loss and recovery of Norfolk, the first advance
through Baltimore, and the perilous defence of Washington,
— have made the chapters of that tragical story, the stages
of that difficult journey, which closes so triumphantly in the
fall of Richmond, the surrender of General Lee, and the cer
tainty of speedy peace. Thank God the struggle and the
sacrifice have not been in vain ! Thank God the cause for
which so many of our bravest and best have given up their
lives is so strong, so certain, so secure ! Not a blow has
failed, not a life has been thrown away, not an hour of sick
ness and agony has been endured in vain, when once we can
learn to read this story as it is written in the book of the .
divine purposes, and as the working-out of the Infinite Will.
These were the price the nation had to pay for its redemp
tion. The payment of it- was claimed, and it was cheerfully,
gladly, proudly paid from the heart's blood of thousands and
tens of thousands who gave themselves freely to the cause,
— paid from the heart's agony of thousands more, who have
laid the costliest treasure of their children's lives on the
altar of the country, and know now that the sacrifice has not
been in vain. And even if the bitter struggle and the dread
ful suffering were all to go over again, and we could weigh
against it, on one hand, the defeat, the shame, the loss, the
ruin with which our nation was threatened, or, on the other
hand, the magnificent and boundless hope to which this tri
umph opens the way, — there are hearts still so faithful and
so strong, that they would cry to God, Take all. 0 Father I if
.432 The Nation's Triumph, [May,
that must be the price ! Take our life, our children brave '
and beautiful, take the pride and joy of our hearts away, so
only that great deliverance shall be accomplished, and thy
holy will be done !
Perhaps, in all the stirring history of this eventful time,
the most striking thing has been its appeal to the religious
feeling of the people, and the response that has gone back
from the people's heart. We knew it was so with the hum
ble, devout, patriotic, everywhere. We knew it was so with
those who, with bitter prayers and tears of blood, had sur
rendered what was dearest to them in life as the price of this
great deliverance, — who had made it a sacrifice to God, and
blessed him now that he had accepted it. We knew it was
so with the millions of bondmen, ignorant, simple, and by
nature full of the fervor and passion of devotion, to whom, in
their simple faith, the President was an inspired Deliverer,
and- the conquering armies of the Union were the immediate
revelation of Messiah's kingdom. We knew it was so with
them. But when the crowd in the Merchants' Exchange
called on a clergyman for prayer to God as the fit expression
of the hour ; when the great multitude in Wall Street stood
with bowed head to join in the grand song of praise to " God
from whom all blessings flow," — then we saw that a deeper
chord had been struck, and a deeper life -wakened in the
heart of the nation, and that the great moral revolution
which it seems the providential end -and aim of this struggle
to accomplish had already begun to bring forth fruit.
A few dates will serve to illustrate the curious, almost
dramatic, completeness of the work of those April days. On
the first day of the month, the decisive blow was struck
which cut off the rebel right, and gave our forces possession
of the Southside Railroad. The next day, the line of fortifi
cations in front of Petersburg was stormed and occupied,
compelling the abandonment of the city and its entire de
fences. On Monday, the third, Richmond was occupied by
the Union armies, and the great prize of the campaign se
cured. On these two days also, Selma and Montgomery, the
only important nucleus of rebellion in the Gulf States, were
taken, and stripped of their warlike stores. On the sixth,

was the final great defeat of the Army of Northern Virginia ;
whose surrender on the ninth — Palm Sunday — was the
crowning triumph of the war, and the definite assurance of a
speedy and honorable peace. The same day gave into our
hands the last of the strong defences of Mobile, and so com
pleted our possession of every important seaport of the South.
Within three days later, Raleigh, Lynchburg, and the great
store of military supplies at Salisbury, were occupied by
three several Union armies advancing from east and west ;
and, on the thirteenth, the first decisive step was taken in the
policy which prepares for peace, by suspending recruiting
and the draft, and making a definite contraction of the scale
of military expenditure. The fourteenth — Good Friday —:
closed the record of these two eventful weeks with the cele
bration at Fort Sumter, the fourth anniversary of its surren
der; and the complete triumph of the national arms was
announced by the striking and somewhat theatrical symbol
of hoisting upon its staff the identical flag which had been
lowered in surrender to the first blow of the rebellion. And
so, except such stray gleanings as might be left in its wide
harvest^field, the task of war seemed to be done, and its
four years' terrible record to be closed. The " new era " of
peace and good-will had been announced by the President in
a speech on the evening of the eleventh, which was a plea
throughout for the most generous interpretation of the rights
and political privilege to be accorded to the disarmed and
submissive population of the seceded States. And this tem
per was shared, and this appeal responded to, eagerly and
warmly, by the mass of the Northern people, who only
needed the assurance that the nation was safe, to forget all
past wrongs and griefs in the elation of a new and generous
hope. As one evidence among many, we copy the following
words from the " Army and Navy Journal : " —
" Rejecting with derision the soft epithet ' erring brothers ' while
the war lasted, the North once more speaks of fraternal affection
with the South. It is eoger to fling away, in the very moment of
victory, its all-conquering weapons, that its embrace may be free,
vol. lxxviii. — 5th s. vol. xvi. no. in. 37
untrammelled, and hearty, for its vanquished adversary. It is not

idle vaporing, but strict and simple truth, to say that such a spirit of
affiliation, springing up so quickly at the end of a victorious war, is
utterly unparalleled in the world's history. Considering that ours has
been an intestine war, with father often arrayed against son, and
brother against brother ; considering that it was a rebellion against
lawful authority, which not only threatened to deprive the Union of
territory, property, and subjects, but to destroy its integrity, ruin its
safety for all time, make allegiance to its control a mockery, and, ere
long, to sap its entire life ; considering the bitterness with which it
has been waged, and the treasures, the desolation, and the precious
blood it has cost, — this instant desire of the North to welcome the
South once more into the Union reveals a more marvellous public
opinion than history has yet recorded. There is everywhere in the
North a disposition to forget its just threats of ' subjugation,' of
' burning the rebel cities to ashes, and sowing those ashes with salt,'
of visiting the terrible vengeance of bullet and scaffold in a final day
of reckoning. It is for the South only to say whether the blood shed
for four years shall not serve to cement this western brotherhood of
commonwealths into a closer contact than ever, and make our coun
try more thoroughly worthy of the name for four years ridiculed on
transatlantic shores, — the United States."
Such was the temper and the promise of the time. Alas !
how little we thought then, that the bright, clear day just
closing would begin the fresh page of that history by a deed
so horrible and dreary, by a stroke so heavy, struck at the
head of the nation, felt so keenly in the heart and conscience
of the people ! How little we thought that the first victim
to be offered for that peace and reconciliation we waited and
hoped for so eagerly was that one life on which, more than any
other at that hour, our best hope and expectation seemed to
rest ; that the coming Easter Sunday, which we had thought
of as the festival of our nation's renewed and better life,
should be saddened and bewildered by so deep a gloom, not
only of sorrow and lamentation for the crime just done, but
of a vague, wild dread as to what new forms of violence and
peril might be haunting the path of our coming destiny !
For we could not keep the thought of it clear of a certain
bewilderment and dread. In all the life-time of our nation,
there had been no crime like this, — a crime that, if repeated

and grown familiar here, aa it unhappily has been in other
lands and times, would make all free and orderly government
impossible, and would compel men, for very terror of disorder,
to take refuge in the terror of the sword. We had hoped
that this particular danger had passed away. Four years
ago, we knew that the steps of the President elect had been
watched and dogged on his way to the capital, and that the
wretched gang of assassins had been baffled only by vigi
lance, wariness, and prompt action of the officials who guarded
his life secure. Through those first months, and in the
strange and violent story of the following years, it seemed
almost as if a special miracle had been wrought to keep from
the hands of murderers a life on which so many and so infin
itely costly interests hung. And when, in spite of many of
his friends' remonstrances, the President had gone, like a
simple citizen, unarmed, almost unguarded, into Richmond,
the city where for four years had been the centre and
gathering - place of all the hate, defiance, insult, menace,
aimed against him, it would hardly have seemed strange if
some wild stroke of revenge, some stray shot, some desper
ate, sudden act, then and there, had cut short the life too
carelessly risked. How touching and how noble a thing it
was ; how fit to be the last journey upon earth of a brave,
honest, and perfectly single-hearted man ! That tall, awk
ward form, clad in plain, dark citizen's dress, in a city sur
rendered to the pomp and magnificence of war ; that homely,
kindly, fatherly face looking its frank good-will on the mixed,
strange, and doubtful population there ; the only personal
attendant his own little son, clinging to his father's hand ;
— the chief magistrate of a great and victorious nation, in
its hour of triumph, committing himself, so void of defence,
so free, to the risk of that strange journey ! A curious, and,
as we look at it now, a very touching symbol of the man. It
would hardly have seemed surprising then, and could hardly
have brought so great a shock of pain, if we had heard of
his assassination there. But at home, in the familiar city ;
cheerful and unsuspecting, in the company of his family ;
wounded in the house of his friends ; shot to death by a

cowardly bullet in the gay and open scene of public enter
tainment, — here was a blow that fell with a sharp and sud
den surprise ; here was a stroke of astonishment, as well as
grief, which still bewilders while it pains us, and troubles. us
with a vague dread of the future, even worse than grief or
anger at the past !
It is hard, at this time, to separate the resentment felt at
the insult thus offered to the majesty of the nation, and this
wanton invasion of its returning peace, from the personal
grief and honor felt for the memory of the man. To a very
remarkable degree, Mr. Lincoln had come to be the acknowl
edged and true representative man of the people. The cir
cumstances of his second nomination, and the result of the
last election, made, together, such a testimony as no other
public man in our generation has received. It had been
thirty-two years since a president had been re-elected to that
office ; and, in that instance, it was regard to those qualities
of a haughty, indomitable will and iron firmness, which put a
man outside and above the ranks of his fellow-citizens, and
make him the powerful chief of a party, — it was this, and the
service which General Jackson had rendered in stopping by
one stern act of vigor the threatened storm of revolution
then, that had replaced him in the seat of power. With
Mr. Lincoln, the feeling was very different. There seemed
rather a modesty and reserve, a vacillation and self-distrust,
which made him lean much on the judgments of other men,
and crave the support of finding the policy he desired al
ready anticipated in the feeling and wishes of the people.
Frankly and openly, he claimed to draw his inspirations from
the people, and to act less by any abstract opinion of his own
than by the desire, the thought, the degree of preparation, he
found already in the people. It would be hard to find the
instance of a public man in all history, who has appealed to
the public so constantly, so frankly, so confidentially; who
has been so scrupulous to set forth the reasons that guided
him, to allow for the objections that hindered him, to consult
all the symptoms in the popular mind; so anxious to get
whatever hint and guidance he might find there in perform

ing duties whose difficulties none could understand so well,
and whose reasons none could see so clearly, as he. Some
times this was very trying to the patience of the public, and
seemed very dangerous to the security of the nation. Often
and often, men have wished for an hour of Andrew Jackson's
iron will, or for the downright, bold, energetic, half-unscrupu
lous, but clear and consistent, determination of one or another
among our public men, to baffle the sophists, clear off the
mists, break through the obstacles, and overcome the imme
diate difficulties of the way, by one sharp, strong, sudden
stroke. But the ship wore on through the difficult and
dangerous channel. One point after another was passed with
safety. One rock after another, which she seemed almost
certain to strike, was avoided by a hairsbreadth, by some
dexterous shifting of the helm ; and we learned to trust,
almost without a question, in the wary, shrewd, timely skill
of the pilot, and to feel, with him at the wheel, a habit of
security, come what might. That cool sagacity, that indomi
table good-humor, has saved us we know not from what
miseries of fatal dissension and quarrel among our statesmen,
we know not from what perils of foreign quarrel, into which
the people's impatient temper might have betrayed us so
easily.
In itself, we hardly know whether to call it a merit or a
fault in a statesman, — this waiting for other men's opinions ;
this insisting on being not a leader, but a follower ; this
persisting to be in harmony with the average mind of the
country, and letting one's public acts reflect a public opinion
already formed. By men of a clear and positive turn of
mind, it has constantly been charged against Mr. Lincoln as a
serious and all but fatal error. It has even been said, that
the country has guided and ruled and sustained itself through
this war in spite of him ; that, with the misfortune of being
a man ignorant of history, and untrained in the world's expe
rience as taught through books, he had the misfortune also
of being a man without the clear and definite conviction so
important to a great and true leader at such a crisis. To a
37*
great extent, this was the feeling in the earlier part of his
presidency. It was a lack which there is reason to believe
that Mr. Lincoln himself felt very deeply, and even painfully.
We do not speak of it now as a discredit to him, but as one
embarrassment of his position which he had nobly overcome.
No doubt he had great reliance at bottom on that intuitive
and unconscious wisdom which is often clearest when there
is little or no help from books. No doubt he relied much on
that instinctive sagacity by which a man of the people knows
and feels when he is in true sympathy with the people.
What we have to see now, and acknowledge with deep
gratitude, is the patience, skill, and wisdom that have been
steadily developed under the difficult circumstances of these
years. In the truest and best sense, Mr. Lincoln has proved
himself a very great popular leader, a very wise head and
chief of a nation in great peril. In his way, — a way per
fectly original, and peculiar to himself, — he proves to have
been one of the marked men of our history, perhaps of the
world's history ; and, with these four years' experience of
his quality, probably there is not one man who could point
' with any confidence to any other man, and say that that man
would have been a safer guide, or have done the work of
saving the nation any better than he has done it.
There is one thing which has made this revolution we
have witnessed a very different matter from the ordinary
difficulties and struggles by which nations are tried. The
revolution to be wrought was not only a political, but a moral
revolution. It had all to be wrought out in the minds and
hearts of the people as we went along. And though an
intelligent people may travel fast at such a time, yet there is
danger, as in the march of a great army, that the van will get
out of communication with the rear, and so, great dangerous
spaces be left in the ranks. Then how. much this danger is
increased by the mere scale of things on which the work
must be done, — a country so vast in its- breadth from east to
west, from Atlantic to Pacific shore ; so sharply cut by belts
of climate and population as you pass from ,north to south;
a population so great and so changing, — the losses by war,
gigantic as they were, being more than made up by immigra

tion ; such multitudes of citizens of foreign birth, who had
no knowledge of our institutions, and little sympathy with
v s ; such sharp divisions on every point of public policy ;
such eager dissension and rivalry on all matters of humanity,
justice, and public right. Then this war was not a mere
rivalry of two great sections ; it was not a mere and simple
controversy to preserve the national existence and honor :
but it had sprung from the shock of moral controversies and
ideas. It involved a moral revolution in men's ways of
thinking and living. By the appointment of Providence, it
carried along with it one of the great social revolutions of all
history, — the emancipation of a race in bondage, a change
in the whole political, social, and economical condition of four
millions of a half-barbarian population. Only when we get a
little way off from this turbulent time, in the coming years of
quietness and peace, shall we begin to understand how vast
is the change we are even now passing through.
Perhaps no man ever felt with a keener and deeper sense
of personal responsibility his own position as chief and most
responsible actor in such a time. And what, next after the
profound and religious sense of duty which has moved him,
we have to admire in the late President, is the steady
patience with which he has set himself to study and under
stand the real facts of the time. He has not sought the
interpretation of them in books or theories ; but he has
studied the facts themselves at first hand, or as reflected in
the minds of the living actors in them. This enormous and
complicated case, involving the institutions, the hopes, the
future of a great nation, he has studied with the same care
ful, resolute, and patient attention which a lawyer gives to a
very intricate case in court. Such a case — so vast in its
interests, so complicated in its facts, so confused by the pas
sions and prejudices of its witnesses, so. august in the tribu
nal of its decision — was put into the hands of the shrewd,
patient, sagacious, and intelligent, but not over - learned,
country lawyer, to whom we committed it four years and a
half ago. And steadily, month by month, in the best judg
ment of the world, the nation has been justified in the confi
dence it twice reposed in him.
Had he the fault of over-leniency and careless trust? For
himself, it is too late to answer that question now. And yet
it is hard to see how any ordinary prudence of self-protection
would have saved him from a plot so deliberately laid and so
coolly executed. The murder of that Friday night stands as
one of the great crimes of history, — as a crime solitary and
unexampled yet in the life of our nation. But, in the particu
lar shape it took, it is hard to see how any greater political
severity, or any different dealing with armed and rebellious
populations over the border, would have been any defence.
It would appear that the danger had been just as great for
weeks back, — perhaps for months, — and was no more likely
to be shunned in one course of action than another. The one
unpardonable thing in the eye of the fanatics and assassins
who sought his life has been, that he was the successful head
of a nation victorious in its defence from treason. Doubtless
there are many at the South, desperate men, homeless, reck
less, ruined by the war, their towns and homes devastated by
fire, their property gone by pillage, the order of society in
which they had bound up their ambitious hope and pride
wrecked and overthrown in the storm of this great revolution.
Doubtless there are many such, ready for any crime, and hun
gry only for revenge against those they fancy the authors of
their ruin. We might have thought it less strange if the
President's life had fallen by the hand of such, rather than by
the dissolute and self-willed youth with whom murder was a
theatrical ambition and a melodramatic scene. Such crimes
are the natural progeny and the curse of war ; especially of
civil war, in which a man stakes not only some particular
interest or fancied honor of his nation, but his life, his home,
his property, his all. But it was not from such a source. It
was from the impotent, blind, fanatic hate which seeks only
vengeance on the head that has brought calamity and defeat
to its ambitions and its dreams. For the President there
would have been no escape by any excess of severity in deal
ing with a crushed and defeated population. And therefore
we remember, not in regret, but only with gratitude and

honor, the leniency and mercy which he was so anxious to
cherish as the heart of all his public, policy.
The tragedy of Good Friday has inaugurated a new era of
public feeling. A gloomier, sterner temper than has pos
sessed us in the darkest moments of the war pervades these
hours of returning and victorious peace. How different it
all was up to the time that deadly blow was struck, and how
eagerly the popular heart responded to the language of
mercy and good-will from the Chief Magistrate of the nation,
we have already seen. The contrast is strikingly told in
these words of a resolution passed at San Francisco: —
" Before his death, peace was possible. All the atmosphere was
filled with generous emotions and kind sympathy. Now, peace
means subjugation. God have mercy on the souls of the rebel
chiefs!"
We say nothing of the obvious injustice of holding a whole
class or population guilty of an act done by a single desperate
hand, or even of a plot which must have been shared by
many conspirators. Nor do we anticipate what terms of
peace are likely to be made or altered, now that the nation's
confidence has been so insulted and betrayed. But we note
the remarkable fact, that neither defeat, nor delay, nor all the
costs and sufferings of this four-years' war, have ever moved
the popular heart to so deep a resentment, or to a feeling so
near to vindictiveness and revenge. Nothing in these latter
days has been more striking than the prompt and eager
response to every word that has spoken of treason as a
crime, and has denounced the punishment due to those who
have assailed the nation's life. Secession and State rights
might have been a dangerous doctrine before ; but there was
at least charity for those who held it in sincerity, and a dis
position to forget and forgive what they had been madly led
to attempt in support of it. But now that heresy, if not
actually regarded as a crime, is looked on no longer as an
extenuation and defence of crime. There is even a feeling of
half satisfaction, that the rule which has passed from the
442 The Nation's Triumph, and its Sacrifice. [May,
merciful and cautious hand of the late President has passed

into the grasp of one who has experienced the tender mer
cies of secession at home, and whose deepest passion and
conviction are, that its power must be crushed utterly, and
its guilt avenged. These stern words of his, the most dis
tinct and definite since his coming into power, are as clear an
echo of the present feeling of the people, as the cautious,
scrupulous, and kindly language of his predecessor had
been: —
"Every era teaches its lesson. The times we live in are not
without instruction. The American people must be taught, if they
do not already feel, that treason is a crime, and must be punished ;
that the Government will not always bear with its enemies ; that it
is strong not only to protect, but to punish. When we turn to the
criminal code, and examine the catalogue of crimes, we there find
arson laid down as a crime, with its appropriate penalty. We find
there theft and robbery and murder given as crimes. And there,
too, we find the last and highest crime of treason with other and
inferior offences.
..." In our peaceful history, treason has been almost unknown.
The people must understand that it is the blackest of crimes, and
will be severely punished. I make this allusion not to excite the
already exasperated feelings of the public, but to point out the
principles of public justice which should guide our action at this
public juncture, and which accord with sound public morals. Let it
be engraven on every heart, that treason is a crime, and traitors shall
suffer its penalty.
..." I do not harbor bitter or revengeful feelings toward any.
In general terms, I would say that public morals and public opinion
should be established upon sure and inflexible principles of justice.
When the question of exercising mercy comes before me, it will be
considered calmly, judicially, remembering that I am the Executive
of the nation. I know that men love to have, their names spoken of
in connection with acts of mercy, and how easy it is to yield to this
impulse. But we must not forget, that what may be mercy to an
individual is cruelty to the State."
But we will trust that the sacrifice which the nation has
now made, no less than the triumph it has won, will have its
perfect work ; and that the cause of liberty and mercy, for
1865.] Review of Current Literature. 443
which the late beloved President was so willing to die, will

be fortified, and not defeated, by his death. We do not for
get, as he did not, that we are, we must be, one people, after
all ; that no policy is a true policy, no peace is a lasting
peace, which does not give all encouragement and hope to
the defeated, while resolute and stern in its dealing with
persistent and obstinate rebellion. It were doing him dis
honor, if, for the sake of revenging his death, we were to
cherish vengeance and hate against a people so darkly ignor
ant and so deeply cursed as that to whose malice and wrath
he fell a victim ; if we were to invite or encourage, by any
rash act or word of ours, that period of violence and revenge,
which in some countries has followed a period of war, — a
shadow of war, even more dark and dreadful than the sub
stance. Public justice must have its way ; but only that the
field may be more widely open for private charity, for gener
ous patriotism, and for Christian love.
Art. VIII. — REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.

THEOLOGY.
Twenty-five years ago, says Dr. Schenkel,* every thing promised

a healthy development of theological science. But the fresh activity
which characterized that period has lost itself in a stagnant pool.
The theological faculties are now, for the most part, scions of a dead
system ; and the men who were then young have placed themselves
under the curse of a tradition no better than that which the Redeemer
combated with his very blood. Yet the torpor of the teachers has
not been reflected by the laity. There has been constantly deepening
among them the desire for religious truth and Christian life ; and those
who now are working for inward and outward self-renewal know
well that this truth and life appeared in the person of Jesus Christ,
and that the people must ever draw, from their connection with him,
the fountain of their peculiar power and true elevation.
Dr. Schenkel h/is made the Gospels a study for a quarter of a cen
tury ; but he has published nothing with a view to satisfy the popular
craving for a scientific treatment of the sources of the life of Christ,
* Das Characterbild Jesu. Ein biblUcher Versueh von Dr. Daniel Schenkel.
444 Review of Current Literature. [Ma7,
on account of his " uncertainties and inward contests," which have

finally resulted in the two important opinions that lie at the foun
dation of this work. The first is, that the Gospel of John is not the
work of the apostle, but of one of his school ; and that it was written
between the years 110-120. This opinion, however, hovered before
the mind of the author at the beginning of the period above mentioned.
The second conclusion is, that the resemblances of the synoptics may
be explained by their common use of an original Gospel composed
at Rome by Mark for the heathen mission ; that a later hand has
thrown the primitive work of Mark into its present order, and made
considerable additions ; but that we yet possess in it the character of
Jesus reflected more clearly than in the others. A proof of the pri
ority and credibility of Mark is this : that his narratives are given
with greater liveliness and picturesqueness ; that the mythical in
troduction, the appearances of Christ after his resurrection, and the
ascensiou, are wanting ; and that it bears scarcely a trace of the so-
called " tendency-writing."
With these data, Dr. Schenkel draws a " Picture of the Character
of Christ," considered from a purely humanitarian point of view.
But it must be confessed, that the writer's use of his authorities is
somewhat capricious. For instance, while he assures us that Mark
is chronologically accurate, and, from being written nearer the scene
of the history, more trustworthy, he does not hesitate to weave into
his work incidents from the other Gospels, to prefer their arrange
ment, and even to ignore Mark whenever it suits his purpose. Again,
in one place he says, that " the fourth Gospel gives up completely the
historical ground, and places itself upon a merely speculative stand
point." In another, " the fourth Gospel is an actually historical
source for the representation of the character of Jesus, but in a
higher, spiritualistic sense of the word. Without this, the unfathoma
ble depth and the unattainable height would be wanting in the picture
of the Redeemer."
But though such a free use of the Gospels compels us to regard
the author as determined subjectively by his own feelings, and not by
sound principles of criticism, no one can fail to be pleased with the
admirable spirit with which Dr. Schenkel approaches his work, the
skill that he brings to bear, and the reverence that he displays in every
line for the person of Jesus. He does not, like Kenan, invade or de
preciate the moral character of Jesus. Nor does the boldness of his
criticisms give him any occasion to do so ; for, by rejecting miracles
and denying the historical claims of the fourth Gospel, he is relieved
from the necessity of accounting for narratives which he cannot con
sider as founded upon fact.
The devout tone that appears in the excellent introductory section,
on the " Personality of Christ, and its Representation^ up t,o the Pres
ent Time," is maintained throughout, and is of itself sufficient to at
tract all readers who are so far filled with the spirit of true religion
as to appreciate a pious utterance under whatever garb it may appear.
Another agreeable feature in the book is the author's knowledge of
1865.] Science and Philosophy. 445
the state of the modern mind, and his hearty sympathy with its needs
and aspirations. This is shown in the many practical lessons that he
draws from Christ's work and teachings. If we add to the preceding
recommendations simplicity and vigor of style, and Dr. Schenkel's
known ability, we have an assemblage of qualities which can hardly
fail to satisfy any expectations that may be raised. To confirm our
opinion, we subjoin a translation of the concluding paragraph of a
chapter on the Last Supper, in which somewhat novel views are ad
vanced : —
" If Jesus did not exclude from participation in the Last Supper him over
'whom he cried, ' Woe ! ' and concerning whom he wished that he had ' never
been born,' it certainly is not for us to drive from the table o'f the Lord those
whom we, in our narrow and short-sighted judgment, consider unworthy ; for
Jesus must have felt a deeper pang and a more grievous trouble in permitting
the betrayer to take part in the founding of the new covenant. If he over
came that pang, and bore that trouble, it must certainly have been with the
wish of preventing the Last Supper from ever becoming a mere ordinance.
He demanded from those who partook with him neither a special preparation
nor a preceding confession : unconditional freedom was allowed to all. Paul
took this view, when he said, ' Let every one try himself, and so let him eat
of the bread and drink of the cup ' (1 Cor. xi. 28). What would Jesus have
thought of those who consider agreement to a fixed dogmatic formula as an
indispensable condition of participation in this rite ? Never in his life had
Jesus Btood on so venerable a height as at the moment of the institution of
this ceremony. With a violent death before his eyes, anticipating neither
consolation nor help from his disciples, on account of the weakness of their
characters, without the prospect of the victory of his cause among men, with
his hopes and expectations driven back upon his heavenly Father, and the
truth and power lyihg at the centre of his life-work ; and then that lofty
repose, that quiet resignation, that tender patience with the man who was
plotting at that very moment deadly treason! But a short storm was about
to rise in this calmness of mind hitherto undisturbed."
SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY.
Dr. Winslow * endeavors to demonstrate what he appears to re

gard as an essentially new theory of the conformation of the earth's
surface, as against the views now generally held by scientific men.
" The object of the following discourses is to overthrow these opin
ions," — that is, those resting originally on Newton's theory of gravi
tation as controlling the shape of the earth, and built up by the pro
gress of geological discovery since, — " to place Geology beyond
theory, and to establish it, as a science, on solid foundations ; in a
word, to Americanize it." This somewhat ambitious object is sup
posed to be effected in this pamphlet, consisting of two addresses read
before the Boston Society of Natural History; the first in 1859, the
second in January of the current year ; and now " presented to schol-
* " The Cooling Globe ; or, the Mechanics of Geology." By C. F. Winslow,

M.D. pp. 63. Walker, Wise, & Co.
VOL. LXXTI1I. — 5TH S. VOL. XVI. NO. III. 38
446 Review of Current Literature. [May,
ars and thinkers, and intended to be permanent contributions to

knowledge."
The first proposition advanced, and the chief one, is that the globe,
at the beginning of organic existence on its surface, " was much
larger in all its diameters than now." How much larger, we are not
told ; not even approximately. " Many miles," we are told in one
place ; " one hundred or three hundred miles." we are rather vaguely
told to assume, in another place ; and still again, " very much greater ; "
if fifty miles in the carboniferous era, perhaps then two hundred or
three hundred at the very beginning of life. Such mere indefinite
guesses, supported too, so far as the discourses show, by no exact
data, cannot be accounted of much value as an addition to our knowl
edge.
But the fact assumed, as we are told, was first conjectured by Leib
nitz, and again maintained by Deluc, a century later. We may add,
that it is one of the most familiar ideas of all geologists, and does not
need any new advocate to urge its claims. In regard to the amount
of the shrinkage due to radiation, there would doubtless be much dif
ference of opinion, and few to agree with Dr. Winslow. Considering
that we know neither the length of time since organic existence began,
nor the degree of heat at which such existence could be sustained, it
is manifestly impossible to determine the question quantitatively.
But Dr. Winslow makes use of this supposed fact as an argument
for his next proposition, which is, in substance, that the inequalities
of the earth's surface are due to subsidences, and not to upheavals.
His collection of facts to confirm this view is interesting, though not
full or exact. Probably no well-informed geologist doubts that sub
sidence has played an important part in bringing about the present
shape of the earth's surface. But no well-informed geologist, we
think, will be ready to agree with Dr. Winslow, that the vast moun
tain chain, which stretches nearly the whole length of the American
continent, is simply a relic of the ancient surface, from which all the
rest of the continent has fallen away ; that the highest peaks of the
Andes represent what was once the bottom of the ocean ; and that, at
the same time, what is now the bottom of the Pacific was as much
higher than the Andes as now it is lower. This is simply theory run
wild. Processes are actually going on that illustrate the formation of
mountain peaks by elevation ; and there would be as much reason for
a spectator in the army of the Potomac to suppose that the pickets
represent what was formerly the main line, from which all but they
have fallen back, as to explain the relation of the mountain peaks to
the general continental levels in the same way. On the other hand,
that the relation of broad table-lands to lower plains is most naturally
recounted for by the subsidence of the lower, seems very reasonable,
in accordance with known facts, and equally so with familiar and
universally received geological data. The phenomena of subsidence
on a large scale are actually witnessed from year to year, not exactly
in Dr. Winslow's startling style of the sudden caving-in of the roofs
of vast subterranean voids, but more in accordance with the quiet
1865.] Science and Philosojihy. 447
disposition of nature in her important operations, and so as to account

for nil very extensive changes of level.
Dr. Winslow also uses the shrinking of the earth by radiation, as
an explanation of its well-known spheroidal form. Newton has in
deed demonstrated that the actual shape of the earth is that which a
liquid sphere would assume, having the earth's actual velocity of
axial rotation. We may add, too, that if a liquid is to play so im
portant a part in the terrestrial economy as that of water on our
planet, the latter must be shaped as the earth is ; for only by such a
shape is there a virtual level. If the earth were a perfect sphere,
rotating as now, all the ocean would be heaped up at its equatorial
region. The fact that the great body of water does reach, in one un
broken expanse, from pole to pole, shows that nature and mathematics
agree ; nnd that the shape of the earth is that which would be assumed
by a liquid globe having the same motion. We say " from pole to
pole," because the Antarctic continent does not affect the truth of the
symmetry of the earth's hemispheres in any such degree as to impair
either the accuracy of the statement of fact, or the mathematical rea
soning. But Dr. Winslow asserts, that the oblateness of the earth's
shape, or the flattening of the poles, is not the result of rotation, but
of the " fulling-in of surface somewhere." Sir Isaac Newton's theory
is " an error, and unworthy of further consideration among geolo
gists." The agreement of the earth's form with the deductions of
mathematicians " can only be accidental." An accident of a won
derful kind, let us admit.
Lastly, Dr. Winslow urges a more or less frequent change of the
earth's axis of rotation as the effect of the sudden subsidences which
play so large a part in his scheme, and as the explanation of the va
riations of climate indicated by the remains of past ages, such as the
drift and grooved rocks of the glacial period, and the remains of a
tropical fauna and flora in what are now polar regions. This is no
new hypothesis, nor do we find in these discourses any new grounds
for accepting it. A long series of geological studies, reaching a far
more exhaustive examination than has yet been effected of the depos
its which mark past eras, and of the range and relations to any sup
posed pole of the glacial indications, may, at some future time, give a
satisfactory solution of this question. We do not see that our knowl
edge on any of these points is essentially increased by these discourses.
They form an undoubtedly earnest and interesting resume of some geo
logical speculations and facts, but will hardly go far towards the end
suggested at the conclusion, namely, " to raise Geology to the high
rank it ought to occupy, and establish it upon solid foundations as an
exact science."
It was an ingenious idea of Mr. Eli Bowen, " Professor of Geol

ogy," — in what institution we are not informed, — that by cramming
into one duodecimo volume of four hundred and ninety-four pages all
his speculations upon Geology, Astronomy, Natural History, Biblical
Exegesis, and various other subjects, and labelling it " Coal, and Coal
H8 Review of Current Literature. [Ma)\
Oil," * he might not only turn the great .speculation of the day into
account as a stalking-horse for his pet theories, but make even the
mammon of unrighteousness do service in the imperilled cause of the
" Six Days of Creation " and the Noachian Deluge. So he has em
bellished the outside of the book with remarkable gilt figures, repre
senting a barrel of oil and a derrick, while the inside contains a few
pages upon the subject of Petroleum, as well as the Plesiosaurus, the
Old Red Sandstone, the Colonization of America by the Northmen,
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Glaciers, Mr. Pickwick, and
cognate topics, besides a good many extracts from " Paradise Lost."
Out of all this multiplicity of subjects, there is none which the au
thor dwells upon with such relish and complacency as Noah's Ark,
the capacity and practicability of which he defends with spirit against
" the characteristic special pleading" of Mr. Hugh Miller and others.
" The whole premises of these distinguished Christian-doubters," he
says, " can be demolished with a single word : if the flood was only
'partial, and confined (as they allege) to a small area, where was the
necessity of the ark ? Why could not God have removed Noah and
his family, and the animals of the earth, to the adjacent districts or
continents that remained unsubmerged? "— "I confess I have no respect
either for the learning or the religious integrity of such men." In
this heroic temper Mr. Bowen proceeds. He scorns to call to his
assistance any theory so akin to Darwinism as that the number of
species has increased since Noah's days " by climate, external circum
stances, and the controlling exigencies of necessity." — " We despise
any such pretexts or subterfuges, and should still rely on the abundant
capacities of the ark to accommodate them all, if the number of spe
cies were twice as great as is now claimed." Here, then, is his argu
ment : —
" A difficulty has been suggested as to how the animals came to Noah ;
but, if the other end of the proposition were presented, there would be no
difficulty at all. The animals did not come to Noah ; Noah went to them.
His orders were specific, and he obeyed them. But how? Did he or his
agents wander over the earth, armed with spears and lasso and traps to hunt
down and capture the animals? or, like a man of sense, taking a practical
view of the enterprise committed to him, did he merely seek the young of
each species, and arrange them in a general cosmopolitan menagerie, to be
trained to the voyage they were to undergo. We have no right to suppose
that Noah was an ignorant simple-minded old man ; on the contrary, he
was eminent for his wisdom and virtue. Being a man of practical sense,
therefore, his obvious policy was to obtain young animals : first, because
they would be more tractable ; second, because they would occupy less space
in the ark ; third, because they would not encumber the ark with brood ; and
fourth, because their powers of recuperation would afterward be superior to
those of adult animals ; and, fifth, because they would require less forage for
their keeping. Would not the cubs of the bear, the lion, the tiger, the cle-
* " Coal and Coal Oil ; or, the Geology of the Earth. Being a Popular De
scription of Minerals and Mineral Combustibles." By Eli Bowen, Professor of
Geology. Philadelphia : T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 306, Chestnut Street.
1865.] History and Biography. 449
phant, rhinoceros, the calves of the herd, the camels and horses, and the
young of all quadrupeds, answer his purpose better, in every point of view,
than the full-grown animals? Would snakes a week old not suffice as well
(or rather better) than boas and vipers twenty feet in length? Was it neces
sary to fill his ark with antiquated oxen and elephants and camels, that had
done service in the plough or the caravan ? Must he select poor old spavined
horses, toothless lions and tigers and bears, when the little cubs would best
correspond with the object of his mission ? The idea is too absurd to be
entertained."
So, after a declaration that " we cannot assume to understand the
real interior plan or structure of the ark," there follows an elaborate
description of its probable arrangement, — the stalls, the alleys, the
apartments, the ranges, and the nine feet remaining for the bird-cages,
after " allowing a height of eleven feet for all the stalls of the ani
mals." And thus are provided accommodations for 32,320 animals ;
" and yet not more than one-fortieth part of the tonnage capacity of
the ark is thus far occupied."
After this triumphant defence of the abused patriarch, our author
will certainly be judged to have earned a right to speak of Sir Charles
Lyell as follows : " It is absolutely sickening to me to dwell longer
on this branch of the subject ! I blush for the credulity and stupidity
of a world that can swallow such absurdities, when their sole object
and unavoidable tendency is to undermine, and bring into contempt, the
holy word of the great Jehovah ! But, alas ! ce monde est plein de
fous I " and so on.
We have spent more time upon this book than its importance would
warrant, because it is, unfortunately, an example of a style of discus
sion which has already brought too much discredit upon American
scholarship and science. Abuse is not argument ; assertion is not
argument ; appeal to vulgar prejudices is not argument. Neither
will any amount of raving about the authority of Scripture impugn
the reasoning of real geologists. We would respect the genuine re
ligious opinions and feelings of any one, however baseless and absurd
they may seem to us ; but a man who appears to think that religion
consists in blindly clinging to the letter of Scripture, and who is dis
honest enough to give a lying title to his book for the purpose of
making it sell, deserves no consideration.
We find but little addition to make to the views which we have

have already expressed at some length* regarding Mr. Ward's labor
of love in the biography of many of his contemporaries.f
In this fourth edition which Mr. Ward published just before his
death, last summer, he has somewhat enlarged the number of bio-
* Christian Examiner. Vol. xxxiii. p. 259.

t " The Journal and Letters of Samuel Curwen, an American in England,
from 1775 to 1788 ; with an Appendix of Biographical Sketches." By Geoeoe
Atkinson Ward. Fourth Edition.
38*
graphical notices. With just pride, he quotes a complimentary,

but very fair, allusion to Curwen's Diary, from Dickens's " Household
Words " of 1853. A London critic looked upon the toryism of the
Revolution more leniently than we have ever done ; and his expres
sions with regard to Judge Curwen's timidity were rather more mild
than our own were, or could have been expected to be.
A diary well kept in England through our Revolutionary war
would itself have a very curious interest to a people like ourselves,
who, till lately, were always asking, like the king of Dahomey, " what
they said of us in England." Indeed, as the " Household Words "
has shown, there is no diary of that time yet published, which gives us
so much which we want to know of the tone of society in many circles
in England, and of many matters quite outside of politics. Such are,
for instance, Wesley's preaching, the introduction of canal navigation,
or the beginnings of the steam-engine. The account of the Gordon
riots is an independent account by an eye-witness. Here come in Mr.
Thackeray's heroes, the same who crossed the path of Denis Duval ;
— Curwen went to see the Chevalier De la Motte hanged. Here is
the first notice which we remember in print of the successful instruc
tion of deaf mutes in intelligible articulation. This is a notice of the
Braidwoods' success at Edinburgh, which was called to Curwen's
attention as early as February, 1781. There are very curious descrip
tions of the distinguished men of the time, as this poor refugee saw
them through the various key-holes of an exile's life.
This is the sort of life which Mr. Jefferson Davis is to lead, — to
hang about one Leicester Square or another, and call it home ; to
be the centre of a group of refugees whose mutual bickerings will be
more bitter, and whose numbers will grow less and less as different
feuds divide them ; to be a lion for a few weeks in the London or
Paris which he selects for the Bastille of his life-long imprisonment,
and then, as the world gets a new wonder, to be forgotten even by
those who at first were curious to see the greatest of traitors ; to re
ceive for a few years the visits of one and another young Hotspur with
preposterous plans of some new rising of the States which are so glad
to get rid of him, — and then steadily and inexorably to be forgotten;
and to have to appease the passion for excitement by taking tea at
the Ranelagh or Vauxhall of the place, or going to see the execution
of its particular villain. This process of exile, this becoming small
by degrees and miserably less, till a man is forgotten by everybody
but her who has shared his ambition and his fall, is a more bitter
punishment than it would be to have a knot of prisoners staggering
out from starvation meet him in his flight, and wreak their vengeance
on him by swinging him in the fashion of his own country by a grape
vine up to the nearest " apple-tree." And every detail of this punish
ment may be studied in the picture of the exile of the tories of a
hundred years ago.
But their crime was not the same as his. Indeed, they were not
guilty of crime excepting in that view in which all weakuess is crime.
Samuel Curwen is the type of the men of whom we have too many,
18G5.] History and Biography. 451
who have no faith. And he is a very good illustration of the utter

want of power (imbecility the Latins called it ; they said such people
had no sticks), — the utter want of power of men who do not believe
in the people. Curwen was an amiable sort of man in his little way.
His nominative cases seem to have governed his verbs ; his wrist
bands seem to have been well starched and plaited, and all the minor
proprieties of a finite life to have been well observed with him. There
are sometimes whole centuries in which such men appear not to do
any great harm in the world, probably do none if we are kind enough
to forget the awful delay which comes in somewhere, because for their
life long they do no good. But, when there comes one of these hurri
canes, such as we are living in now, ships without good ground-tackle
are blown to sea very quick, and are very seldom heard of again.
And so poor Curwen — who had very great confidence in His Majesty's
commission, considerable confidence in the officers of his own court,
but, alas ! had none in the good sense, the courage, and the integrity of
ft people trained under the best social and religious systems the world
had tried — found there was no place for him in their agonies, and
had to betake himself, instead, to a refugee's life in coffee-houses, and
to going to tea-gardens and public hangings for the sake of getting rid
of his time.
Virtuous people are very apt to tell us, that, when we have written
any thing, we should lay it aside ten years until we print it. It is un
doubtedly true that such delay gives a full opportunity for correction,
and, as our modern Nestor says, " for leaving out all the fine pas
sages." But we have never seen the advantage of keeping a thing ten
years, if, at the end of the time, you choose to publish it without cor
recting it. Mr. Ward — who in many regards was the most loving
and faithful of editors, and worked away on his charming book as if
it were the only book in the world — seems to have loved his work
so well that he could not bear to reconsider it. Here is, for instance,
the original biography of Lord Cornwallis, as it re-appears in this
new edition : —
" Cornwallis, Charles, Marquis? Commander of the British Army in
America,'2 surrendered at Yorktown, Oct. 19, 1781 ; an event which brought
the war to a close.3 In 1790 he was Governor-General of India, and, by
his victories in the war with Tippoo Saib, acquired high reputation. 3 Again
was he appointed, in 1805, Governor of India ; where he died, at Ghazepore,
Oct. 5. He married, in 1768, Miss Jones, a lady of large fortune,4 who is
said to have died of a broken heart, in consequence of his engaging in the
American war. He published an answer to the ' Narrative of Sir Henry
Clinton.' 1783."
In this instance, since the last edition of Curwen's Life, the Letters
of Lord Cornwallis have been published, so that the old note on his
name might have been either corrected or omitted. But Mr. Ward
reproduces it without any change. Only four of the statements in it
are true. The other four, which we have marked in Italics, are decep
tive or wholly untrue. We have numbered them in copying them,
that we may add these notes : —
1 . Lord Cornwallis was Earl, when he commanded in America : he

was not made Marquis till 1792.
2. He never commanded the British army in America, but now
one, and now another, division of it. It was the Southern Division
which he commanded and surrendered.
3. These passages imply that he was appointed to India in 1790,
and again in 1805. In truth, he was appointed in 1786, having twice
before declined the appointment, and remained in India till 1793. He
was again appointed in 1805, so that verbally Mr. Ward's last state
ment is correct.
4. What a broken heart is, it is hard to say. Lady Cornwallis fell
ill during her husband's first visit to America. He returned home in
consequence. She died while he was in England, and it was in con
sequence of her death that he returned to America.
The " Historische Zeitschrift," * founded and edited by Heinrich

Von Sybel, is doubtless the ablest and most comprehensive journal
in the world devoted to the special department of knowledge which
its title indicates. Of Sybel himself we have already spoken, in
alluding to the work by which he established his reputation as one of
the foremost historians of Germany. And his later career in the
Parliament of Prussia is but adding another proof to many, that the
best scholar does not make the worst politician.
Issued quarterly, in numbers of about three hundred octavo pages
each, the work makes two volumes annually, each number contain
ing four articles, and a review of the historical literature of the pre
ceding year, — to us, in many respects, the most useful, indeed in
dispensable feature, not to be overrated for the thoroughness and
justness of its criticism, — distributed under various heads, such as
the History of the World, Ancient History, General History of the
Middle Age, German Provincial History, England, France, Italy,
America, &c. Of the character and extent of the historical research
of the year, one obtains therefore, in this way, a complete catalogue
and a careful analysis. Of many books the titles only are given ;
of those of greater worth and general interest, there are critical or
explanatory notices, upon which, in the main, entire reliance is to be
placed, contributed as they are by writers whose daily studies are di
rected to the subjects of the works they criticise. In the selection of
historical works for public libraries or for private use, it is a guide
at ouce practical and scientific.
The existence of such a journal is in some degree significant of the
exhaustive research and the deeper thought of the age. Le caractere
du xixe siecle, e'est la critique, says Kenan. In the vast domain of
material science there is recognized at last another kingdom, — man.
* Historische Zeitschrift. Herausgegeben von Heinrich von Sybel, o. 6.

Frofessor der Geschichte an der rheinischen Friedrich Willielm's Universitat
zu Bonn. Sechster Jahrgang, 1864. Miinehen : Literarisch-artistische Anstalt
der J. G. Cotta'schen Buchliandlung.
The masterpieces in historical composition which the Greeks left us,

lost to view in the centuries of ignorance which accompanied the
decline of the Roman Empire, shone forth again, with all their old
lustre, at the revival of learning in Italy. But it needed the long in
terval which separated the age of Constantine from that of Machia-
velli, to enable men to take that single step in the conception of the
true office of historical study which marks the modern time. To the
Greek mind, touched by that divine instinct which guides a race to
the extreme development in philosophy and art possible within the
limits of its civilization, there was in the study of history a certain
tragic element, a certain poetic inspiration. The myths they loved
to repeat, and the dramas they crowded to see, were to the Greeks
the expression, as it were, of this sentiment of communion between the
seen and the unseen, — of this craving to trace in earthly events the
presence of a divine intelligence. The idea of fate, mysterious, un
utterable, certain, which haunted the Greek philosophy, was but the
dim perception of historical sequence, — of the laws profound, harmo
nious, mystical, which underlie the world of matter and make the
world of thought. But the method of historical study, with a nation
so given to the beauty of form, could not be otherwise than objective.
The plastic mind of the Greek moulded a history as his hands fashioned
a stat ue, — full of beauty and of thought, but always a creation of art,
not a discovery of science. And the Greek method ruled the world
till the Christian ideal displaced it with the biblical traditions of Eu-
sebius and the theological conceits of Jerome.
Nothing, indeed, indicates better the ignorance and the apathy, the
dark, rude groping of the mediaeval time, than its narrow conception
of the character and uses of history. The teaching of Jerome, that in
the prophecy of Daniel are indicated four empires of the world, —
Assyrian, Median, Greek, and, lastly, the Roman, " which now pos
sesses the earth, and is to last to the end of the days," — oppressed the
world like a nightmare for a thousand years ; domineering even over
the better-instructed mind of Otto von Freysing, whose consolation,
however, it was, that the empire of Rome had passed into the hands
of the Germans. The childish fancy of the Middle Age, encouraged
by its controlling theological tendencies, that the history of the world
centred in that of the Hebrews as prophetic or preparatory of Chris
tianity which betokened the final consummation it was speedily to
witness, colors all its chronicles and confuses all its thought. It was
not till the appearance of the great Italian historians that this ecclesi
astical conceit was banished, and historical science, emancipated from
a corrupting bondage, was enabled to take a broader range. But
with the study of the ancient masterpieces came the zeal for imitation,
— the tendency to substitute art for science. From Machiavelli to
Macaulay, this slavish influence is found everywhere, to narrow and
lower the study of history, to separate it from learning, and to ally it
with rhetoric. Thus isolated and limited, its office misconceived, its
purpose degraded, it is not surprising to find it denied a place among
the sciences of which it is the grand head and synthesis. For to the
454: Review of Current Literature. [May,
study of it, properly understood, all knowledge contributes. The plan

of the universe, the Kosraos, which modern science is attempting
to construct, — as if outside of man there was a world not related to
him, apart from his life, passive, changeless, automatic, — this is the
task of history, — not art or fancy, but knowledge of the ages
which are gone, of the principles they reveal, if but a solitary truth
in a thousand years of crowded, tumultuous being ; gathering the re
sults of all observation, of the nature and age of the ground we tread,
of the number and splendor of the stars we 'gaze at, marshalling all
facts, grasping all laws.
Manifestly, if but slowly, the age is working out this final emanci
pation of historical study alike from the prejudices of ignorance and
the bigotry of dogmas, from materialism and from scepticism. With
that deep insight and in that philosophical spirit which characterize
their nation, the Germans have already indicated a livelier conception,
are already striving for a profouuder realization, of the modern idea
of history. Their many efforts to accomplish a universal history,
from the Chronicle of Carion, — substantially the work of Melanc-
thon, — or the Compendium of Johannes Sleidanus, to the last edition
of Miiller or Schlosser, are but the tokens of this craving to trace
the connection of human events, to ascertain or to demonstrate the
progress of mankind, clouded so often by the centuries it demands, and
the lives it consumes ; while in other countries also appears, here
and there, some solitary thinker, rending asunder the bond of habit,
as he catches a glimpse of newer ideas and of vaster fields. The phi
losophy of history is but history itself better understood, — something
more than, as Dionysius of Ualicarnassus was the first to say, phi
losophy teaching by examples.
It is too early, doubtless, to attempt to forecast the results of re
search, or even to suggest a theory as to the influence of external
causes, and the development of mental power. What is wanted is not
new speculations, but a new method, — a total alteration in the treat
ment of history, not chronicles, or displays of rhetoric, or dramatic
effect. The world is waiting for another Bacon and a second Or-
ganon. Yet that men should have clung so long to the old formulas
is not surprising, if we consider the vast masses of fact which another
method would compel them to re-arrange. It is a Herculean task,
but not beyond the strength of an age like ours, fitted alike by its
knowledge and freedom and faith to undertake it. Criticism of the
past is, to begin with, more than half its history. Among us, purified
by the trials of the times, taught by a terrible experience the hollow-
ness of material success unconsecrated by purer aims, the aspirations
of thinking men for a better interpretation of the past, for a newer
method, instinct with fresher life, can never be indifferent. For it is
for us, above all others, to recognize in history that divine intelli
gence, that saving power, that harmony of law, that freedom so mea
sureless, that progress so sure, through which alone can come the
reconciliation of philosophy and religion.
The criticisms of so able a scholar as Dollinger * upon the fables

which have crept into the history of the Church touching the exist
ence and character of several of its heads cannot fail to receive from
the few who care to make a thorough study of the subject the atten
tion which their independence deserves, if not the acquiescence which
their learning may command. The history of the Church was for a
long period the history not only of Rome but of the world. And as
the temporal possessions- of the Pope increased, and their temporal
power was strengthened, the temptation was inevitable to use their
spiritual weapons to fight their earthly battles. To lay bare, there
fore, the purposes for which fictions like those of the Donations of
Constantino and the Isidorian Decretuls were framed, as well as the
manner in which they were spread abroad, is one of the imperative
duties, as well as one of the difficult tasks of the historian. And no
Catholic writer is perhaps better fitted for the work than Dollinger,
uniting as he does the exhaustive industry of the German scholar to
the inquiring temper and reforming tendencies of the modern theolo
gian. The little book he has now published is the fruit of the studies
he has been prosecuting for a greater work upon the history of the
Papacy.
Although diverse in origin and character, the fables he explodes
have, nevertheless, had a considerable effect upon the opinions of the
Middle Age, upon its poetry and jurisprudence, as well as its theology.
But the only one of general interest to us, perhaps, is that which re
lates to the Papess Johanna, of whom we had occasion to speak in an
article in a former number.f The others involve, for the most part,
points of learning which it would carry us beyond our limits to explain
the bearing of.
Of the interpretation of Gfrorer, we have already given an account.
Dollinger's criticism upon it is very brief. It can excite only a smile,
he says, from every student of the Middle Age ; and, moreover, of
the purpose of Leo IV. to enter into more intimate relations than was
fitting with the Byzantines, there is no trace whatever in the records
of the time. It is a pure hypothesis of Gfrorer's, which again is used
by him to confirm his interpretation of the fable.
But all explanations hitherto made, fail from the fact that the fable
arose at a much later period, when the recollection of the events and
condition of the ninth and tenth centuries had for the most part faded
out. It may, perhaps, have existed in the popular tradition some
what earlier, but it was not till the middle of the thirteenth century
that it appeared in definite form ; a fact which the recent exploitation
of mediaeval manuscripts has put beyond doubt. It was thought, for
instance, that Marianus Scotus was the first who mentioned the fable ;
but in the Pertz collection of old texts, edited by Waltz, it appears
* Die Papst — Fabeln des Mittelaltars. Ein Beitrag zur Kirchengeschichte.

Von John. Jos. Ion v. Dollinger. Zweite unveriinderte Auflage. Miinchen :
1863. Literarisch-artiatische Anstalt der J. G. Cotta'schen Buchhandlung.
t See Christian Examiner for September, 1863.
that he knew nothing of it ; and so with several other texts. But it

would take too long to give the various steps by which Dollinger
reaches his conclusion. The fact which he claims to have established
is, that it was about the year 1240 or 1250 that the fable first ap
peared in historical writings, — the passage in Martintis Polonus,
which is generally cited to establish its earlier existence being proved
by Dollinger to be an interpolation.
But now, how to explain the origin of the fable ? Four things,
says Dollinger, combined to create it. First, the use of a chair with
out a seat to it, used in the consecration of the Pope ; second, a stone
with an inscription, which they took for a mural monument ; third,
a statue bearing the figure of a child, and clothed in a dress which
they took to be that of a woman, found on the same spot with the
stone ; and, fourth, the custom, on occasion of processions between
the Lateran and the Vatican, of avoiding a certain street.
The chair was selected from one of the ancient public baths of Borne
for the beauty of its color and form, and was used for the Popes to
rest on ; it was accidental that it lacked a seat; but the people, igno
rant of its origin, explained that fact by assuming that it was designed
for the examination necessary to prevent the repetition of the scandal
of a female Pope. The inscription on the stone was Pap. or Pare.
Pater Patrum, P. P. P, which they could only translate Parce Pater
Patrum, papissa; prodere partum. But it was probably nothing but a
relic of the old worship of Mithras, who bore the title of Pater Patrum,
erected by one Papirius, possibly, in token of some solemn service, at
his own expense : propria pecuniu posuii. The statue had a palm
branch in its hand, and probably represented a priest with one of the
boys who aided in the service in its arms, or else a pagan goddess ;
but the flowing garments and the figure of the boy, led the credulous
to imagine it to be a statue of a mother with her child. And, finally,
the street which they avoided in the processions, between the Lateran
and the Vatican, represented in the fable as being the one in which
the Papess had given birth to a child, was avoided simply on account
of its narrowness.
That the Papess was represented as English, may be explained,
perhaps, by the fact, that, at the time the fable appeared, there were
angry contentions between Innocent III. and King John, and Eng
land was looked upon as a power hostile to the Holy See ; hence the
added disgrace of her coming from England. And as to the other
version, that Mainz was her birth-place, it is to be recollected that the
fable arose at the period of the great struggles between the German
Empire and the Papacy, and that Mainz was the most important city
of the Germans. So that to represent her, as the latest versions did,
as born in Mainz, of English parents, was to combine all that was
scandalous. That she studied at Athens is to be explained by the
fact, that, in those days, there were only two ways of rising in the
world ; one by piety, the other by knowledge. They could not claim
much piety for their Papess, and so they made her learned, and rep
resented her as having studied at Athens ; for though for a thousand
years no one had gone there from the West for that purpose, the
popular belief was still strong, that nobody could be called educated
who had not been taught in its schools.
After this feat of interpretation, who is to gainsay Dollinger ?

A Hungarian scholar, after residing in Constantinople long enough
to acquire the Turkish language and be at home in Mohammedan
worship, undertakes to visit as a Dervish pilgrim the most barbarous,
unknown, and inaccessible portion of Central Asia ; and succeeds
entirely, though with the certainty of a horrible death if discovered,
and the hourly experience of suffering in every form.* The purpose
he announces is to settle, by a knowledge of the living languages, the
degree of affinity between the Hungarian and Turco-tartaric dialects ;
and so determine whether his native tongue sprang from the Finnish
or Tartaric branch of the Altaic.
In his perilous journeys, always in danger of being enslaved by
raving marauders, or torn to pieces by his companions as an impostor,
if discovered ; often, in danger of perishing by thirst, and of never
returning to Europe by failure of means ; constrained, too, to avoid
the appearance of a European inquisitiveness, and to forego many an
opportunity of noting down what he saw, — M. V&mbery has laid all
geographical students under the deepest obligations by a narrative
faithful, minute, crowded with incident and unsurpassed in interest.
As orders had been issued to prevent any Europeans from pene
trating this wretched country in disguise, and the Hungarian was
marked out from his Hadji companions by his fair complexion, he
was frequently suspected and narrowly watched ; so that his journal
has the excitement of a double peril : escaping the roving robbers
whose purpose was to catch slaves, the authorities under whose pro
tection he lived might feel bound to make a terrible example of the
disguised emissary of some foreign power. The monotonous dreari
ness of the country through which he travelled but a few miles a day,
the wretched and half-ruined condition of its principal towns, the dis
gusting history of its guerilla warfare, the utter barbarism of its
various tribes, needed this element of danger to sustain the reader's
interest. Besides this general conviction of the hopeless misery of a
vast section of Central Asia lying east of the Caspian Sea, M. Vam-
bery shows, that, while China has no influence whatever on its neigh
bor to the north-west, Russia is rapidly extending its trade and mak
ing its power felt among these fierce nomades ; so that there is no
" tent in all Central Asia where there is not some article of Russian
manufacture," while the other European governments are practically
unknown.
* Travels in Central Asia, from Teheran across the Turkoman Desert to

Khiva, Bokhara, and Samarcand. By Arminius Vamb£ry. London : Murray.
1864. New York : Harper & Brother. ,
TOL. LXXVTII. — 5TH 3. VOL. XVI. NO. III. 39
Mr. Bryant's introductory notice explains Mrs. Williams's posi

tion in China as the wife of the American Commissioner at Swatow,
and therefore favored with peculiar opportunities of information re
garding a Country daily coming into closer relations with our own.*
But " A Year in China" does not gratify at all one's desire for
increased acquaintance with the Celestial Empire. From ill health
perhaps, or from indisposition to this kind of knowledge, her book
leaves the vague impression of a mere passing glimpse at the sea
shore of a country whose interior she made no attempt to penetrate.
The intelligence we had gained at other hands seems to melt away in
hers. Chapter after chapter flows on pleasantly enough, showing (as
was very proper in the original form of letters to her mother) natural
timidity and nervous sensibility, but not evincing any desire to be
come acquainted with the resources of a vast empire, or unveil to us
its clouded future. A large part of the volume is taken up with her
voyage ; from which we learn, at the expense of some hours, that the
writer is subject to sea-sickness, dislikes storms, and feels the dreari
ness more than the beauty of the ocean. The only enemy she did
not dread, as often happens to apprehensive natures, overtook her in
the shape of the pirate " Florida." Her innocence is really amusing in
expecting that her rich Canton purchases would be spared by the Con
federate freebooters. Capt. Maffit did not put himself to the trouble
of chasing Yankee vessels for whole days, without expecting to be
paid by the fattest of the spoil. To have made the discrimination
she expected, between what belonged to the cargo and what to the
passengers, would have been very becoming in a war between two
civilized powers, but altogether inconsistent with the systematic
brutality to prisoners, the wanton destruction of private property,
the cold-blooded massacres of surrendered troops, practised by the
pretended chivalry of the South. Capt. Maffit seems to have been no
worse and no better than his fellows. He did his dirty work with
no needless harshness ; he robbed like a gentleman ; he stripped a
defenceless woman nearly to her skin with consummate politeness ;
he filled her ears with appalling tales bf the destitution in the Northern
States; and, when he parted with her, said, " God bless you" with
all the grace of his Methodist father.
MISCELLANEOUS.
The Governor of Massachusetts in recommending, and the Legis
lature in establishing, our Board of State Cliarities,f have added new
lustre to the Commonwealth, and afforded another proof, that in war
* A Year in China. By Mrs. H. Dwiqht Williams, with a note by W. C.

Bryant. New York : Hurd & Houghton. 1864.
t First Annual Report of the Board of State Charities ; to which are added
the Reports of the Secretary, and the General Agent of the Board. January,
1865. Boston : Wright & Potter, State Printers. Public Document, No. 19.
Special Report on Prisons and Prison Discipline, made under authority of the
Board of State Charities. By the Secretary of the Board. Boston : Wright &
Potter, State Printers. 1865. Senate, No. 74.
1865.] Miscellaneous. 459
all the thought?, arts, and aims of pence, are not to be forgotten.
The Board of State Charities was established in the session of 1863,
two years after the breaking-out of the rebellion. The powers of the
Board, as defined by law, are of three kinds, — of investigation and
supervision, of recommendation, and of execution. Our limits oblige
us to refer the reader to their reports for information regarding the
penal and charitable institutions under their care, contenting our
selves with the quotation of these principal recommendations : —
" I. That the State ought not to establish any more institutions to be ex
clusively supported from the public treasury ; but rather, when new necessities
arise, provide for them by assisting private charity, or the municipal organi
zations.
" II. That the institutions now existing ought to be made more uniform
in their management, more active in their co-operation, and more economical
in their system of purchases, and the whole detail of their financial transac
tions.
" III. That, in order to secure this end, they should be brought into closer
relations with a central Board of Control and Inspection, similar to that
established in New York, separate from the city government, for the man
agement of the public institutions of that city.
" IV. That there should be a separate Inspector, or Board of Inspectors,
for all the prisons of the Commonwealth, with power to effect economy in the
expenditures, and reform in the discipline thereof.
"V. That there should be provision made, for annual reports to the
Legislature, of the private and municipal institutions of charity and reform,
and an effort made to methodize the private as well as the public alms
giving."
The Board append a few special recommendations, which, we are
happy to add, will undoubtedly, with many other similar suggestions
hereafter, receive the favorable consideration of the Legislature.
The remainder of the first volume, published in the name of the
Board, is devoted to a very elaborate and truly excellent Report, by
Mr. Sanborn, their Secretary.
We pass it by, however, to dwell only upon the general conclusions
reached by the Secretary, in his own special and supplementary Re
port on prisons and discipline : —
I. Penal Discipline.
"(1.) The imprisonment of children under ten years of age should be
forbidden by statute ; and restraint and instruction in Reformatories be sub
stituted for it.
" (2.) The number of offences punished by fines should be diminished,'
and definite imprisonment for a longer or shorter period be substituted.
" (3.) Habitual offenders should receive sentences double or treble those
now given.
" (4.) Conditional remission of punishment for good conduct in prison
should be made more important, and regulated by a scale of marks similar
to those used in Ireland.
" (5.) There should be a better oversight of discharged convicts.
II. Prison Discipline.
" Perhaps the two last-named provisions should come under this head ; but
I wish to confine this strictly to the management of prisons.
460 Revieto of Current Literature. [Ma7i
"(1.) Separate prisons should be established for females, for boys, and
for incorrigible offenders.
" (2.) The number of our prisons should be reduced for the sake of econ
omy and efficiency; and they should all be placed under the oversight of a
single Board of Inspectors, or, better still, a single Inspector.
"(3.) Classification of the prisoners should be made on moral grounds;
and, while good conduct should promote a convict, ill conduct should degrade
his rank, and detain him longer in prison.
" (4.) Labor in our prisons should be systematized, and the convicts
should be allowed a slight interest in its profits.
" (5.) Instruction should be made much more thorough, and the office of
chaplain more important.
" (6.) The prison fare should be reduced to the lowest point consistent
with health, not so much for economy, as to allow room for additional rewards
to sincere penitence and good behavior.
" (7.) The prison officers should be selected with reference to the reform
ation of the prisoners ; and all who have forgotten, or have never learned,
that human nature within and without a prison is essentially the same, that
reformation is always possible, and that the mercy of God is not suspended
by a sentence of the court, should at once be discharged. If our prisons were
consolidated, it would be unnecessary to fill their places; for they are not very
numerous."
In connection with this topic, we would remark, that the second
volume of Miss Carpenter's work, " Our Convicts," has reached this
country, and has been freely used in the preparation of Mr. Sanborn's
excellent Report. We refer to his pages for a full sketch of the Irish
Penal System, to which Miss Carpenter chiefly devotes her last vol
ume.
One curious effect of the war is its influence on the current litera
ture of the day. While a master of his art, like Hawthorne, could
lend a romantic charm to the metaphysics of an old and broken flower
pot, the rank and file of pen-drivers are obliged to re-enforce the weak
ness of their treatment by the interest of their subject. The numerous
class of ephemeral writers, near the head of which Mr. Trowbridge
stands, have found in this war a great field for their labors.*
The scene of the book before us — which constitutes its most in
teresting feature, and the one most likely to attract the sympathies of
the reader — is laid in Tennessee. The time — the next strongest
point — is the winter of 1862-63. The burden of the story consists
of the wonderful fortunes of a young soldier, with accompanying epi
sodes and interludes ; and we are treated to a prodigality of marvellous
adventure and escape, which almost makes the head reel. Every
one, of course, is willing to allow the romancer a wide margin of glo
rious chances ; but the line of destiny sticks out painfully all through
the book, and no two of his figures, however far apart when they
started, or however deeply hidden in the woods, can help stumbling
upon each other if either of them is in need of a friend.
* The Three Scouts. By J. T. Trowbridoe, author of " Cudjo's Cave,"

" The Drummer Boy," etc. Boston : J. E. Tilton & Co. 1865.
The wit of " The Three Scouts " consists chiefly in the distorted
spelling of most of the conversations in it. When used to give a finish
to a humorous piece, this irregular spelling is not unpleasant ; but,
when it takes the place of humor or wit, the result is painful, espe
cially when drawn out unmercifully through three or four hundred
pages, and clumsily done, as in this book. There are no such delicate
touches in giving a peculiar diulect as we meet sometimes in Dr.
Holmes's writings, or as are found in the " Biglow Papers." Fellow
becomes " feller ; " hinder is " heuder ; " you, " ye," &c. ; and one or
two such spellings leaven a sentence. Although this book is full of
the most thrilling scenes, in all of which the characters discourse at
length, the tone of the whole is commonplace ; while the ingenuity dis
played in the lavish variety of incident is marred by the constant
recourse to a lucky meeting, with which our author usually flanks a
difficulty, and which, like an iron rod thrust through the story, con
nects, but stiffens it.

THEOLOGY.
A View of the Evidences of Christianity. In three parts. By William

Paley. With Annotations by Richard Whately. New York : James Miller.
8vo. pp. 407.
Morning Lectures. Twenty Discourses delivered before the Friends of
Progress in the City of New York, in the Winter and Spring of 1863. By
Andrew Jackson Davis. New York : C. M. Plumb & Co. 18mo. pp. 434.
Religious Duty. By Prances Power Cobbe. Boston : William V. Spen
cer. 12mo. pp. 326.
Annals of the American Unitarian Pulpit ; or, Commemorative Notices of

Distinguished Clergymen of the Unitarian Denomination in the United
States, from its Commencement to the Close of the Year 1855. With an
Historical Introduction. By William B. Sprague, D.D. New York : Robert
Carter & Brothers. 8vo. pp. 578.
Three Years jn the Army of the Potomac. By Henry N. Blake. Bos
ton : Lee & Shepard. 16mo. pp. 319.
History of the Romans under the Empire. By Charles Merivale. Vol.
VII. New York : D. Appleton & Co. 8vo. pp. 569. (The work, as now
completed, " embraces what may be loosely designated as the constitutional
period of the Roman monarchy, extending from the graceful primacy of Pom-
peius to the barbarian despotism of the son of Aurelius.")
History of Julius Caesar. Vol. I. New York : Harper & Brothers. 8vo.
pp. 463. (Louis Napoleon's History ; to be reviewed in July.)
Physical Geography of the Holy Land. By Edward Robinson. A Sup

plement to the late Author's " Biblical Researches in Palestine." Boston :
Crocker & Brewster. 8vo. pp. 399.
(
462 New Publications Received. [May.
Cape Cod. By Henry D. Thoreau. Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 24mo.

pp. 252.
Travels in Central Asia ; Being the Account of a Journey from Teheran
across the Turkoman Desert on the Eastern Shore of the Caspian to Khiva,
Bokhara, and Samarcand. Performed in the Year 1863. By Arminius
Vambe'ry, member of the Hungarian Academy of Pesth, by whom he was
sent on this scientific mission. New York : Harper & Brothers. 8vo. pp.
493. (See p. 457.)
NOVEL8 AND TALES.
Vanity Fair ; a Novel without a Hero. By William Makepeace Thack
eray. With illustrations by the Author. New York : Harper & Brothers.
18mo. 3 vols. pp. 350, 354, 346. (A very elegant library edition, tinted
paper.)
Too Strange not to be True. A Tale. By Lady Georgiana Fullerton.
Illustrations. New York : D. Appleton & Co. 8vo. pp. 276.
Tony Butler. New York : Harper and Brothers. 8vo. pp. 257.
Christian's Mistake. By the author of " John Halifax." New York : Har
per & Brothers. 12mo. pp. 260.
The Hillyars and the Burtons. A Story of Two Families. By Henry
Kingsley. Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 12mo. pp.419.
1 he Thinking Bayonet. By James K. Hosmer. Boston : Walker, Fuller,
& Co. 12mo. pp. 326.
Husbands and Homes. By Marion Harland. New York : Sheldon &
Co. 12mo. pp.390.
Luttrell of Arran. By Charles Lever, pp. 223.
Uncle Silas ; a Tale of Bertram Haugh. By J. S. Le Fanu. New York :
Harper & Brothers, pp. 159.
MISCELLANEOUS.
Remarks on the Sonnets of Shakspeare ; with the Sonnets. Showing that

they belong to the Hermetic class of writings, and explaining their general
meaning and purpose. By the author of " Christ the Spirit," &c. New
York : James Miller. 8vo. pp. 258.
.Method of Philological Study of the English Language. By Francis A.
Marsh. New York : Harper & Brothers. 16mo. pp.118.
Phrasis ; a Treatise on the History and Structure of the Different Lan
guages of the World, with a Comparative View of the Form of their Words
and the Style of their Expressions. By J. Wilson, A.M. Albany : J. Mun-
sall. 8vo. pp. 384.
A Book of Golden Deeds of all Times and all Lands : gathered and nar
rated by the author of "The Heir of Redclyffe." Cambridge: Sever &
Francis. 16mo. pp. 466. (Golden Treasury Series, precious in substance
and elegant in style.)
Kssuys. By ft. W. Emerson. First and Second Series, pp. 515.
Poems. By R. W. Emerson. Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 32mo. pp.
254. (Blue and gold.)
Derrick and Drill | or, An Insight into the Discovery, Development,
Present Condition, and Future Prospects of Petroleum. Arranged and edited
by the author of "Ten Acres Enough." New York: James Miller. lL'mo.
pp. 277.
Skirmishes and Sketches. By Gail Hamilton. Boston: Ticknor &
Fields. 18mo. pp. 447.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. By 0. W. Holmes. Boston f
Ticknor & Fields. 32mo. (Blue and gold.)
INDEX
CHRISTIAN EXAMINER,
NEW SERIES, VOL. XVI.
JANUARY TO MAY, 1865.
Anster's Faust, Part II., 141. Dahome, King of, 148.

Arkansas, War in, 136. Danes in Camp, 148.
Asia Minor (Parrot), 147. Democracy, Two theories of, 264.
Atheism, Last Phase of, 78 — Schopen Denmark, Invasion of, 810.
hauer, 79 — oriental philosophy, 81 Dominic and Francis, 58.
— Brahminism, 81-87 — Buddhism, Dreamthorp, 139.
83. Eighth of November, 107-126 — plots
Bowen, Coal and Coal Oil, 447. at the North, 111 — doctrine of State
Brahma, 81-87. Rights, 115 — the Chicago Platform,
Bruno, Giordano, 206-241 — early life, 119 — " Citizen Sovereignty," 120 —
207 — in England, 209 — in Ger assertion of national power, 123 —
many, 211 — before the Inquisition, legislation affecting slavery, 124.
213 — martyrdom, 215 — writings, Eliana, 152.
217 — philosophical problems, 219 — Encyclical Letter, The, 294, 399-409
God in Nature, 221 — idealism, 225 — how it affects Catholics in Ameri
— character, 227 — " Heroici Fu- ca, 402.
rori," Faust, Part II. (Anster), 141.
237. Felton, Letters from Europe, 146.
Buddha, 83. Francis, St. Assisi, 47-64 — his mar
Bushnell, Christ and his Salvation, 127. riage of Poverty, 51 — the leper-
Carpenter, Miss, " Our Convicts," 250. ritual, 52 — Friars Minores, 68 —
Catholic Church (New) Order of St. monastic rule, 65 — mission to the
Paul, 1-26 — its purpose, 3 — doc Sultan, 69 — visions, 61 — influence,
trine, 4 — style of preaching, 7 — 63.
sentiment, 11 — accordance with re Fourth of March, 274-286 — the con
publicanism, 16 — sermons, 286. trast, 274 — spirit of the war, 277 —
Catholicism and free government, 16- narrowing of the field, 278 — task of
22 — in America, 24 — ( See Encycli reconstruction, 280 — negro suflrage,
cal Letter). 282 — popular temper, 2§5.
Charities (State), 458. Franck, Etudes Orientales, 144.
China, Year in, 458. Free Labor in Louisiana, 383-399 —
" Citizen Sovereignty," 120. need of system, 386 — Banks's sys
Cobbe, Miss, Notes on Italy, 309. tem, 388 — question of wages, 890 —
Colani on Renan, 290. character of the negro, 896 — tenure
Confederate Secession (Marquess of of land, 397.
Lothian), 187. God, Idea of, 27 — name and idea, 198
Convicts and Prison Discipline, 250- -206.
260. Gray, David, Poems, 806.
Curwcn, Samuel, Journal and Letters, Griffin, Gerald, 346-368—his schooling,
449. 847 — life in London, 349 — temper,
464 Index.
852 — hardships, 364 — poems, 868 Papacy, Its oppression in Rome, 65 —

— tales 302 — The Collegians, 363. danger from it in America, 67.
Haret on Kenan, 289. Papacy Fables of the Middle Age, 465.
Hawaiian Islands (Anderson), 149. Perrot, Asia Minor, 147.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 89-106 — his Philology and Mythology, Problems
style, 90 — The Scarlet Letter, 93 of, 368-383.
— Blithedale Romance, 98 — Marble Preacher, Work and Method of, 167-
Faun, 99 — Dolliver Romance, 102 198 — emotional preaching, 160 —
— lack of national feeling, 105. true aim, 167 — address to reason,
Hecker, I. T. (Order of St. Paul), 1 — 173 — obstacles, 180— the pulpit and
his religious books, 11. the theatre, 186 — errors, 191 — ex
Historische Zeitschrift, 452. amples, 193 — summary, 197.
Hunt, Leigh, The Seer, 297. Prisons, Report on, 458.
Hymns of the Ages, 128. Renan Controversy in France, 288.
Ingelow, Jean, Studies for Stories, Reville on Renan, 292.
307. Saxe's Clever Stories, 151.
Innocent, III. and his age, 457. Schenkel's Life of Jesus, 443.
Jesuits, 75. Schopenhauer, 79.
Kay, Social Condition of England, 150. Smith (Alexander), Dreamthorp, 189.
Keith, Mrs. C. P., Memoir of, 162. Socialism in America, 9.
King Coal and King Cotton, 241-260. Spencer, Herbert, Essays, 141.
King, T. S., 45. State Rights, 116— do. by Tayler
Lamb, Miscellanies, 162. Lewis, 135.
Language and Mythology, Problems Stifter, Nachsommer, 808.
in, 386-383. Strauss's Life of Jesus, 286.
Laugel, Problems of Nature, 295. Sybel's Historische Zeitschrift, 452.
Lewis (Tayler), State Rights, 185. Three Scouts, 460.
Life, Morbid and Healthy View of, Transcendentalism as a Positive Faith,
313-345. 18.
Lincoln, President, 430 — his murder, Triumph and Sacrifice of the Nation,
on Good Friday, 440. 430.
Lothian, Marquess of, on Secession, Under the Ban, 64-78 — oppressions
137. of the papacy, 65 — its danger in
Louisiana, Free Labor in, 383-399. America, 67.
Machonochie, Capt., at Norfolk Island, Unitarian Churches, Conference of,
265. 409-480 — the Unitarian Association,
Maine on Ancient Law, 132. 413 — a centre needed, 415 — meet
Martin's History of France; Miss ing in Boston, 418 — New York
Booth's Translation, 301. Convention, 421 — organization, 425
Martineau, Miss, History of the Peace, — the Preamble, 427 — the result,
130 — her atheism, 203. 429.
Mttller (See Language, &c.), 868-383. Unity of the Spirit, 26-46— idea of
Mythology, modern explanation of, God, 27 — incarnation, 29 — worship,
877. 81 — inspiration, 86 — liberty and
Nachsommer (Stifter), 808. law, 39 — the future life, 42.
New England, Palfrey's History of, Vambery, Central Asia, 467.
260-273 — the true democracy, 264 War for the Union, 276.
— religious life, 269. Webster's Dictionary, 298.
Newman's Journey in Palestine, 145. Winslow, C. F., The Cooling Globe,
Palfrey, History of New England, 260. 445.
Boston : Printed by John Wilaon & Son.

THE /.3 3)
CHRISTIAN EXAMINER,
VOLUME LXXIX.
FIFTH SERIES, VOLUM E XVII.
JULY, SEPTEMBER, November, 1865.
“Porrosi sapientia Deus est, . . . . verus philosophus est amator Dei.”—St. Acoustism.
B O S T ON :
WALKER, FULLER, & CO., 245, WashingtoN STREET,

F O R THE PRO PRI ET OR S.
LONDON: WHITFIELD, GREEN, & SON, 178, STRAND.

1865.
º
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by

walker, FULLER, AND company,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
C.A. M. B. R. I D G E :
PRINTED BY John wilson AND sons.

C O N T E N T S.
ART. No.
o. C
CCL.
PAGE
I. The DRIFT PERIon IN THEology . . . . . . . . . 1

II. The AMERICAN UNITARIAN Pulpit . . . . . . 27
III. HoRACE MANN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
IV. Forsyth's Cicero . . . . . . . . . . . 57

W. THE Ideal CHURCH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
WI. HEDGE's REAsoN IN RELIGION . . . . . . . . . . . 84
VII. ThonBAU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
VIII. The New NATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

IX. Review of CURRENT LITERATURE. . . . - - 136
Theology. Bruston's Étude Critique sur l'Évangile selon St. Jean,

136. Bost's Le Protestantisme Libéral, 136. Leighton's Les
sons from the World of Matter and the World of Man, 137. —
History and Politics. Napoleon's History of Julius Caesar, 139.
Woolsey's Introduction to the Study of International Law, 142.
—Criticism. Meyer's Beiträge zur Feststellung, 143. Alford's
Queen's English, 146. — Geography and Travels. Baine's South
west Africa, 149. Grout's Zulu Land, 149. Grant's Walk
across Africa, 150. Burton's Nile Basin, 151. Kremer's
Aegypten, 152. Thackeray's Vanity Fair, 154.
New PUBLICATIONs RECEIVED . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
No. CCLI.
I. THEISM AND CHRISTIANITY . . . . . . . . . . . 157

II. LYMAN BEECHER . . . . . - - - - - - - - - - 175
III. JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
IV. RADICALISM AND CoNservatis M. . . . . . . . . . 211
W. South CARolina, one of THE UNITED STATEs . . . . . 226
VI. HoRAce MANN AND ANTIoch College . . . . . . . . 252
VII. SPENCER's SocIAL STATICs . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
IV. CONTENTS.
Art- Page
VIII. State Crimes, and their Penalty 282
IX. Review of Current Literature 294
Theology. Frances Power Cobbe's Religious Duty, 294. Meri-
vule's Conversion of the Roman Empire, 295. — History and
Politics. Newman's English Institutions and their most neces
sary Reforms, 297.
No. CCLII.
I. Mill's Review of Hamilton 301
II. Palorave's Arabia 327
III. Dr. Newman's Apologia 343
IV. Pioneers of France in the New World 364
V. English Colleges and Schools 373
VI. The President's Reconstruction 408
VII. Review of Current Literature 422
Theology. Friedreich's Astrology of the Reformation, 422. War
ren's Systematische Theologie, 424. — History and Politics.
Ampere's Rome, 425. The Militia of the United States, 428. —
Criticism. Botta's Dante, 430. Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies,
431. Arnold's Essays in Criticism, 433. Newman's Homeric
Translations, 434. Earl of Derby's Iliad of Homer, 435.
Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, 436. Gems from Tenny
son, 436.
INDEX 439
THE
CHRISTIAN EXAMINER.
JULY, 1865.
Art. I. — THE DRIFT PERIOD IN THEOLOGY.
1. The Religious Demands of the Age. By Frances Power Cobbe.

Boston : Walker, Fuller, & Co.
2. Broken Lights; or, Inquiry into the Present Condition and Future
Prospects of Religious Faith. By the same Author. London :
Triibner & Co.
3. Thoughts in Aid of Faith, gathered chiefly from Recent Works in
Philosophy and Theology. By Sara S. Hennel. London :
George Manwaring.
Geologists tell us of the Drift period in the formation of the

earth's crust, — a period very indefinite in extent, though
distinctly enough marked as to character. When it began
cannot be told ; when it will end cannot be told : but the
importance of it is conceded to be immense. Some of
the most marked features of the globe are traceable to it,
and the way in which they were effected is even now visible
broadly on the face of the planet. The sands of the desert,
driven in vast masses before the powerful winds, have, in
the course of ages, grooved or levelled large portions of the
crust of the globe. Rivers have carried the uplands to the
lowlands, and have cast mountains into the sea, as they rolled
through thousands of miles of territory. Glaciers have taken
rocks on tbeir icy bosoms, and borne them far away to distant
regions ; effecting changes that, until recently, baffled the
VOL. I.XXIX. — 5th S. VOL. XVII. MO. I. 1
2 The Drift Period in Theology. [July,
cunning of scientific men. The flow and refluence of mighty

ocean-tides, the advance and retreat of tremendous floods,
the movements of sea margins, — all going forward through
myriads of years, — wrought their wonders of destruction and
construction silently and slowly, to the amazement of modern
men. The marks of their action differ much in different
parts of the globe, as the materials on which they worked
differed ; but the general characteristics are the same every
where. They all indicate the action of drift, not the action
of volcano.
In this respect, as in so many others, there is a close
analogy between the intellectual and the physical creation.
There is a Drift period in the geological history of the
mind. There is a Drift period in the soul. We are in
the midst of such a period now : we have always been in the
midst of such a period ; but now the signs of it are more
conspicuous than they have been hitherto. In past epochs,
the volcanic agency has been prominent. There have been
great eruptions of hot, passionate thought, in which the
under-world was belched out in huge volumes of liquid fire ;
the burning torrents of lava were poured over the culti
vated fields of peaceful speculation, and the villages where
tranquil people lived in the olden memory and faith were
consumed. Men like Abelard, Wiclif, Savonarola, Hubs,
Luther, and their precursors, contemporaries, and successors,
were the .(Etna, the Vesuvius, the Hecla, or Stromboli of the
religious world. They were vent-holes for the hidden fires.
The changes they wrought were of the nature of revolutions.
They modified the surface of the theological world by a sud
den shock in the course of a few years. Through them
ideas burst violently through the crust of the ecclesiastical
and metaphysical world, and tossed the creeds of men about
in wild confusion. They made around themselves first a
desolation, then a garden. But the alterations which they
produced were, after all, more conspicuous than radical. The
mightiest changes were not of their effecting.
The volcanic period in thought seems to have ended. The
drift period has come in. Quiet movements have succeeded
1865.] Tlie Drift Period in Theology. 3
to violent eruptions. Changes come evenly, tranquilly, slow

ly ; but they come powerfully, and with uninterrupted action.
The intellectual period we allude to betrays its character by
signs which cannot be misunderstood, and which are too
palpable to be overlooked. It is remarkable, in the first
place, that the intellectual, or, if we please to call it so, the
spiritual movement of our generation is universal; not limited
to particular countries, not confined in special channels, but
covering the whole surface of the civilized globe. It is
visible in both hemispheres. Europe and America equally
manifest it. No matter where one may be, — in the United
States, in England, in France, in Austria, Italy, Russia, Spain,
— even, as Miss Cobbe tells us, in the oriental world of
Brahminism and Islam, — the silent changes go on with the
same character and intent. The same forces are impelling in
the same direction. There is a wonderful omnipresence of
ideas, — a startling ubiquity of thought and experience. The
same questions are asked, and the same answers are given to
them, at nearly the same instant, in all the parts of the globe
where men think. The mass moves.
The movement is not confined to any religious party. We
often speak of the liberal school in theology. But every
church has its liberal school. Every creed has its body of
liberal interpreters. Every sect has its dissenters. Unita-
rianism, at the late convention in New York, looked very
compact and stationary. The one hundred and ninety-five
churches set their faces firmly against any innovation in
thought or in phrase, liberalism was solemnly frowned down,
and the movement party was somewhat ungently repudiated.
But the individual members of the convention felt hurt when
this was said ; declared that it was not true ; insisted that
the meetings had been misunderstood ; that the whole spirit
of the occasion was progressive and forward-looking. There
appeared to be no movement in the mass ; but the particles
were all astir. The body was full of unrest, and was uncon
sciously drifting towards the very liberalism it abhorred.
Every sect in Protestantism has its two schools, — its old
and its new school : they cannot separate ; and the new
46-4 Index.
352 — hardships, 354 — poems, 358 Papacy, Its oppression in Rome, 65 —

— tales 362— The Collegians, 363. danger from it in America, 67.
Haret on Kenan, 289. Papacy Fables of the Middle Age, 455.
Hawaiian Islands (Anderson), 149. Perrot, Asia Minor, 147.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 89-106 — his Philology and Mythology, Problems
style, 90 — The Scarlet Letter, 98 of, 368-383.
— Blithedale Romance, 98 — Marble Preacher, Work and Method of, 167-
Faun, 99 — Dolliver Romance, 102 198 — emotional preaching, 160 —
— lack of national feeling, 105. true aim, 167 — address to reason,
Hecker, I. T. (Order of St. Paul), 1 — 173 — obstacles, 180 — thepulpitand
his religious books, 11. the theatre, 186 — errors, 191 — ex
Historische Zeitschrift, 462. amples, 193 — summary, 197.
Hunt, Leigh, The Seer, 297. Prisons, Report on, 458.
Hymns of the Ages, 128. Renan Controversy in France, 288.
Ingelow, Jean, Studies for Stories, Reville on Renan, 292.
307. Saxe's Clever Stories, 151.
Innocent, III. and his age, 457. Schenkel's Life of Jesus, 443.
Jesuits, 75. Schopenhauer, 79.
Kay, Social Condition of England, 150. Smith (Alexander), Dreamthorp, 139.
Keith, Mrs. C. P., Memoir of, 152. Socialism in America, 9.
King Coal and King Cotton, 241-250. Spencer, Herbert, Essays, 141.
King, T. S., 45. State Rights, 115— do. by Tayler
Lamb, Miscellanies, 152. Lewis, 135.
Language and Mythology, Problems Stifter, Nachsommer, 308.
in, 386-383. Strauss's Life of Jesus, 286.
Laugel, Problems of Nature, 295. Sybel's Historische Zeitschrift, 452.
Lewis (Tayler), State Rights, 185. Three Scouts, 460.
Life, Morbid and Healthy View of, Transcendentalism as a Positive Faith,
813-345. 18.
Lincoln, President, 430 — his murder, Triumph and Sacrifice of the Nation,
on Good Friday, 440. 430.
Lothian, Marquess of, on Secession, Under the Ban, 64-78 — oppressions
137. of the papacy, 65 — its danger in
Louisiana, Free Labor in, 383-399. America, 67.
Machonochie, Capt., at Norfolk Island, ' Unitarian Churches, Conference of,
255. 409-480 — the Unitarian Association,
Maine on Ancient Law, 182. 413 — a centre needed, 415 — meet-
Martin's History of France ; Miss ing in Boston, 418 — New York
Booth's Translation, 301. Convention, 421 — organization, 425
Martineau, Miss, History of the Peace, — the Preamble, 427 — the result,
130 — her atheism, 208. 429.
Miiller (See Language, &c), 368-383. Unity of the Spirit, 26-46— idea of
Mythology, modern explanation of, God, 27 — incarnation, 29 — worship,
877. 81 — inspiration, 35 — liberty and
Nachsommer (Stifter), 308. law, 39 — the future life, 42.
New England, Palfrey's History of, Vambery, Central Asia, 467.
260-273 — the true democracy, 264 War for the Union, 276.
— religious life, 269. Webster's Dictionary, 298.
Newman's Journey in Palestine, 145. Winslow, C. F., The Cooling Globe,
Palfrey, History of New England, 260. 445.
Boston : Printed by John Wilson & Son.

THE Jdf)
CHRISTIAN EXAMINER.
VOLUME LXXIX.
FIFTH SERIES, VOLUME XVII.
July, September, November, 1865.
4' Porro si mpientia Deus eat, .... Terns philosophuj est amator Dei." — St. AcousTm.
BOSTON:
WALKER, FULLER, & CO., 245, Washington Street,
FOB THE PROPRIETORS.
LONDON: WHITFIELD, GREEN, & SON, 178, Stmkd.
1865.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by
WALKER, FULLER, AND COMPANY,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
CAMBRIDGE:
PRINTED BT JOHN WILSON AND SONS.

CONTENTS.
No. CCL.
Abt. Page
L The Drift Period in Theology 1
II. The American Unitarian Pulpit 27
HI. Horace Mann 45
IV. Forsyth's Cicero 57
V. The Ideal Church 67
VI. Hedge's Reason in Religion 84
VII. Thoreau 96
VIII. The New Nation 118
IX. Review op Current Literature . . 136
Theology. Bruston's Ktude Critique sur l'fivangile selon St. Jean,
136. Bost's Le Protestantisme Liberal, 136. Leighton's Les
sons from the World of Matter and the World of Man, 137. —
History and Polities. Napoleon's History of Julius Ctesar, 139.
Woolsey's Introduction to the Study of International Law, 142.
— Criticism. Meyer's Beitrage zur Feststellung, 143. Alford's
Queen's English, 146. — Geography and Travels. B nine's South
west Africa, 149. Grout's Zulu Land, 149. Grant's Walk
across Africa, 150. Burton's Nile Basin, 151. Kremer's
Aegypten, 152. Thackeray's Vanity Fair, 154.
No. CCLI.
I. Theism and Christianity 157
IL Lyman Beecher 175
HI. James Clarence Mangan 200
rv. Radicalism and Conservatism 211
V. South Carolina, one of the United States 226
VI. Horace Mann and Antioch College 252
VII. Spencer's Social Statics 265
IV CONTENTS.
Art. pAOK
VIIL State Crimes, and their Penalty 282
IX. Review of Current Literature 294
Theology. France* Power Cobbe's Religious Duty, 294. Meri-
vale's Conversion of the Roman Empire, 295. — History and
Politics. Newman's English Institutions and their most neces
sary Reforms, 297.
No. CCLII.
I. Mill's Review of Hamilton 301

II. Palgrave's Arabia 327
III. Dr. Newman's Apologia 343
IV. Pioneers of France in the New World 364
V. English Colleges and Schools 373
VI. The President's Reconstruction 408
VII. Review of Current Literature 422
Theology. Friedrich's Astrology of the Reformation, 422. War
ren's Systematische Theologie, 424. — History and Politics.
Ampere's Rome, 425. The Militia of the United States, 428. —
Criticism. Botta's Dante, 430. Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies,
431. Arnold's Essays in Criticism, 433. Newman's Homeric
Translations, 434. Earl of Derby's Iliad of Homer, 435.
Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, 436. Gems from Tenny
son, 436.
INDEX 439
THE
CHRISTIAN EXAMINER.
JULY, 1865.
Art. I. — THE DRIFT PERIOD IN THEOLOGY.
1. The Religious Demands of the Age. By Frakces Power Cobbe.

Boston : Walker, Fuller, & Co.
2. Broken Lights; or, Inquiry into the Present Condition and Future
Prospects of Religious Faith. By the same Author. Loudon :
Trubner & Co.
3. Thoughts in Aid of Faith, gathered chiefly from Recent Works in
Philosophy and Theology. By Sara S. Hennel. London :
George Manwaring.
Geologists tell us of the Drift period in the formation of the

earth's crust, — a period very indefinite in extent, though
distinctly enough marked as to character. When it began
cannot be told ; when it will end cannot be told : but the
importance of it is conceded to be immense. Some of
the most marked features of the globe are traceable to it,
and the way in which they were effected is even now visible
broadly on the face of the planet. The sands of the desert,
driven in vast masses before the powerful winds, have, in
the course of ages, grooved or levelled large portions of the
crust of the globe. Rivers have carried the uplands to the
lowlands, and have cast mountains into the sea, as they rolled
through thousands of miles of territory. Glaciers have taken
rocks on their icy bosoms, and borne them far away to distant
regions; effecting changes that, until recently, baffled the
VOL. I.XXIX. — 5th 8. VOL. XVII. WO. I. 1
cunning of scientific men. The flow and refluence of mighty

ocean-tides, the advance and retreat of tremendous floods,
the movements of sea margins, — all going forward through
myriads of years, — wrought their wonders of destruction and
construction silently and slowly, to the amazement of modern
men. The marks of their action differ much in different
parts of the globe, as the materials on which they worked
differed ; but the general characteristics are the same every
where. They all indicate the action of drift, not the action
of volcano.
In this respect, as in so many others, there is a close
analogy between the intellectual and the physical creation.
There is a Drift period in the geological history of the
mind. There is a Drift period in the soul. We are in
the midst of such a period now : we have always been in the
midst of such a period ; but now the signs of it are more
conspicuous than they have been hitherto. In past epochs,
the volcanic agency has been prominent. There have been
great eruptions of hot, passionate thought, in which the
under-world was belched out in huge volumes of liquid fire ;
the burning torrents of lava were poured over the culti
vated fields of peaceful speculation, and the villages where
tranquil people lived in the olden memory and faith were
consumed. Men like Abelard, Wiclif, Savonarola, Huss,
Luther, and their precursors, contemporaries, and successors,
were the ./Etna, the Vesuvius, the Hecla, or Stromboli of the
religious world. They were vent-holes for the hidden fires.
The changes they wrought were of the nature of revolutions.
They modified the surface of the theological. world by a sud
den shock in the course of a few years. Through them
ideas burst violently through the crust of the ecclesiastical
and metaphysical world, and tossed the creeds of men about
in wild confusion. They made around themselves first a
desolation, then a garden. But the alterations which they
produced were, after all, more conspicuous than radical. The
mightiest changes were not of their effecting.
The volcanic period in thought seems to have ended. The
drift period has come in. Quiet movements have succeeded
1865.] Tlie Drift Period in Theology. 3
to violent eruptions. Changes come evenly, tranquilly, slow

ly ; but they come powerfully, and with uninterrupted action.
The intellectual period we allude to betrays its character by
signs which cannot be misunderstood, and which are too
palpable to be overlooked. It is remarkable, in the first
place, that the intellectual, or, if we please to call it so, the
spiritual movement of our generation is universal; not limited
to particular countries, not confined in special channels, but
covering the whole surface of the civilized globe. It is
visible in both hemispheres. Europe and America equally
manifest it. No matter where one may be, — in the United
States, in England, in France, in Austria, Italy, Russia, Spain,
— even, as Miss Cobbe tells us, in the oriental world of
Brahminism and Islam, — the silent changes go on with the
same character and intent. The same forces are impelling in
the same direction. There is a wonderful omnipresence of
ideas, — a startling ubiquity of thought and experience. The
same questions are asked, and the same answers are given to
them, at nearly the same instant, in all the parts of the globe
where men think. The mass moves.
The movement is not confined to any religious party. We
often speak of the liberal school in theology. But every
church has its liberal school. Every creed has its body of
liberal interpreters. Every sect has its dissenters. Unita-
rianism, at the late convention in New York, looked very
compact and stationary. The one hundred and ninety-five
churches set their faces firmly against any innovation in
thought or in phrase, liberalism was solemnly frowned down,
and the movement party was somewhat ungently repudiated.
But the individual members of the convention felt hurt when
this was said ; declared that it was not true ; insisted that
the meetings had been misunderstood ; that the whole spirit
of the occasion was progressive and forward-looking. There
appeared to be no movement in the mass ; but the particles
were all astir. The body was full of unrest, and was uncon
sciously drifting towards the very liberalism it abhorred.
Every sect in Protestantism has its two schools, — its old
and its new school : they cannot separate ; and the new
school predicts the destiny of the old. The definitions must

be defined, and those definitions must be defined again ; and
each definition places the truth in a position different from
the last. Ideas detach themselves from their local connec
tions. Doctrines slip from their moorings, and float quietly
to other landing-places. Words and phrases get loosened
from their associations, and lodged in the neighborhood of
other thoughts. Creeds insensibly become transported from
one region of the mind to another ; — from understanding to
imagination, from reason to prejudice, from faith to fancy;
and take on very different hues as they pass through the
several phases of their progress. The same doctrines are
maintained, if we may credit the forms of speech ; but they
change color and texture as much as an iceberg does in
passing from arctic to tropical seas. How does the Trinity
look in the zone of philosophical speculation which it has at
present reached ? Does modern sentiment produce no effect
on the dogma of total depravity ? Has the mental friction
of the last half-century modified in no degree the shape of the
conception of the Christ? Does the Bible read the same by
the light of our skies as it did while it lay open under the
cloudy heavens of the dark ages ? Men, afloat on their ark
of theology, fancy the shores rushing past them, as they lie
stationary on the stream of Truth ; but the stationary thing is
the shore. It is they that move.
In a recent article, we spoke of the Roman Church as
drifting with the rest on the bosom of " thought's coursing
stream," and as confessing, through her own sins, the fetal
power of the movement that bore on in the direction whither
the spirit of the age is driving. An anonymous reviewer
thought it worth his while to combat that, and protested
earnestly against the charge that the Roman Church shared
in the instability of the rest of Christendom. But protest is
not argument, nor is assertion evidence, nor are insinuations
proof. Solemn prediction of the danger of following certain
courses are, as we all know, very feeble guarantees that the
" certain courses " are not pursued by those who make
the predictions. The writer failed to meet our points : he
1865.] The Drift Period in Theology. 5
did not so much as approach our positions. He convinced us,

indeed, that the Church stood, in one respect, where it had
stood of old ; that it was as perverse as ever in making asser
tions against Protestantism, and as stubborn as ever in over
looking any assertions made against itself. If there are such
things as facts, and if facts are of validity in the history of the
Roman Church as well as elsewhere, it is true, that even that
massive and immense organization feels the force of the drift
movement to which European thought is yielding. We think
we are not mistaken in affirming, that there is a Catholic party
in England which makes endeavor to reconcile the dogmas of
the Church with the philosophy of the nineteenth century.
We believe that this party had an organ, entitled " The Home
and Foreign Review," and that this organ declared the opin
ions of the new Catholic Church.
Of the Roman Church in France, George Sand, in the
preface to " Mademoiselle La Quintinie," says, " This new
Church, whose countless ramifications run all over and
through France, stifling and gagging the simple who stand
in its way, — marching, singing, praying, mocking, insulting,
— does not know what it believes, perhaps believes nothing.
Ask it if it believes in the necessity of industrial progress ;
ask what it thinks of the benefits of science, of family rights,
and so forth, — it will appear at once remarkably tolerant.
For this new Church is, in spite of every thing, bound to
human progress by habit, by affection, and, above all, by
interest. It should live and flourish by enlarging its sphere,
and making ample provision for its material well-being. You
need not expect Christian renunciation from it, or Catholic
austerity, or the resignation of things earthly, or the com
plete denial of self prescribed by the primitive Church."
In America, the Paulist Fathers give their annual volume
of sermons to a Protestant publisher, and tell the world, in
their pages, that Christians may be saved out of the Catholic
Church ; that voluntary sin alone damns ; that the New-
Testament descriptions of hell are figurative ; and that there
is no such place as heaven.
In fact, to say that any portion of the religious world in
l*
6 The Drift Period in Tlieology. [July,
Europe or America stands unaffected by the movement of the

times is equivalent to saying, that that portion of the religious
world has lost its vitality. For the whole intelligence of
Europe and America is sliding. It is not in any one depart
ment of mental activity that the advance is apparent : it
is in every department. And all the departments are run
together. The layers are superimposed, and overlap. The
geological peculiarities are intermingled. Every feature of
soil and climate is found everywhere. We find saurian and
mastodon far away from their natural regions, and we dis
cover marine shells far inland. There is a very promiscuous
shifting and shuffling of products. We may pick up our
specimens at random, and they tell us the whole history of
the period to which they belong. Open a work of fiction,
and there is the last heresy in religion. Turn over the pages
of a scientific treatise, and you speedily come across the
latest discovery in theology. Take up a volume of poetry,
and imbedded in the lines will be discovered fragments of
metaphysical speculation, bits of spiritual philosophy, the
newest flora of ecclesiasticism. Peruse a scientific essay, and
the rocks there will be found scratched by the dogmas that
have passed that way ; and, between the stones, the delicate
fibres of some leaf of mysticism may be detected. Whatever
field one explores, he explores all fields ; for the elements are
so interspersed that they cannot be separated.
It is another characteristic of our theological period, that
the movement goes on under the action of general forces,
working with spontaneous and unpremeditated power. The
advance is made as of itself, with a seemingly blind and unin
telligent impetus ; slow and clumsy, but irresistible. There
are no leaders who gather disciples from schools, organize
opinions, and direct thought in specific channels. The masses
carry the teachers, rather than the teachers the masses. The
great minds are collectors and distributors more than origi
nators, interpreters more than discoverers, expositors more
than creators. Martineau is a great mind, but he has no
school : he either gives eloquent expression to thoughts which
have been long entertained by spiritual minds ; or he gives
1865.] Tlie Drift Period in Tlieology. 7
brilliant exposition of ideas native to some foreign clime, and

not yet domesticated in England. Parker looked more like a
leader than any other in this country. But Parker was no
original creator of opinion. We see now that his great
influence was due to his powerful personality quite as much
as to his ideas ; that he founded no school ; that, after all, he
did little more than give mighty voice to thoughts and sen
timents which had long been seething in the popular heart.
He was one of the bowlders borne on the glacier's bosom,
not the glacier itself. He moved with the current, and in
the same precise direction as all the rest. The Broad-Church-
of-England men, Maurice, Jowett, Stanley, Williams, and the
rest, are reporters, not creators. They indicate the depth
and width of the stream ; but they do not start it, nor do they
turn it far aside. Herbert Spencer is an expositor, a won
derful expositor to be sure ; still an expositor of the ideas
of a large class of scientific men who have been studying
and speculating for years. We have no Abelards or Luthers
to-day, who initiate new and startling movements, break out
upon the world with grand jets of genius, and congregate
men around themselves and around their system. The impel
ling forces are universal, not individual ; as, in a period of
such general movement, we should expect that they would be.
Stuart Mill is disposed to complain of this : he thinks it a sad
omen for the future, that great individualities no more stand
out conspicuous above the multitude, educating, swaying, and
governing them. But this is one of the features of the
period, and as such it is to be accepted as good. We take
his word, however, in evidence merely of the fact that it is
so ; that we are in a drift, and not in a volcanic epoch.
Thinkers move with the mass, and in consequence of its
moving. The method of the divine grace may be defined as
a transpiration, as distinguished from the method of inspira
tion which other ages illustrated.
The grand movements of modern thought in religion, as in
every thing else, are started by the action of universal forces.
One of these, not the principal one by any means, though in
time it may become so, is popular education. The instruction
of large bodies of the people in letters, the training of the

mental powers even to a low average of discipline, the open
ing of science and literature and practical knowledge to even
an ordinary degree, effects a change in the whole intellectual
and spiritual attitude of the people which cannot be over
estimated. Nothing less than a new world is opened, and
the whole mind awakes to the admiration of its beauty and the
exploration of its wonder. A knowledge of the alphabet
shakes prejudice to its foundations, and. undermines all theol
ogy. It is not so much that people doubt and deny, as that
they lose their interest, and forget. The older thoughts are
not repudiated : they are outgrown. Instituted ideas are not
discarded : they are set adrift. The book, the magazine, the
pamphlet,, the newspaper, are all so many levers which the
mind, instructed in the alphabet, uses to pry dogmas from
their resting-place, and unseat the mighty masses of creed
which have lain for centuries, like portions of the mind's
primeval structure, on the surface of intelligence. There is
no intention to disturb or dislocate the existing order, on the
part of the world's educators. They may purpose something
exactly the reverse of that. Their motive in educating the
people may be to make them conservative of established
thoughts. But the effect is always unsettling. The mind
cannot move without moving whatever lies on the surface of
the mind.
A more powerful disorganizer than education is the active
intelligence which is generated by universal industry. Noth
ing quickens the intellectual faculties like the work that calls
on them, and uses them. An industrial age, in which all men
must earn their own livelihood, and in which all men of
genius, talent, perseverance, may become distinguished, will
inevitably be an age of inquiry, of experiment, of inventive
resource, and quickness of self-reliance and self-assertion ; and
these qualities will not be limited to any sphere. The mind
that thinks for itself will think for itself on all subjects. The
will that asserts its own independence will assert its inde
pendence in every sphere. The reason that moves freely
amid sensuous objects will soon insist on moving freely amid
supersensuous objects ; and one kind of authority will be as

easily dislodged as another. No aggressive temper need
come in. As the tide of intelligence rises, Church and Creed
will be lifted from the Eock of Ages, whereon they seemed to
repose, and will begin to float lightly down stream. Facilities
of communication assist this tendency of general intelligence.
The railway, the cheap postal system, the frequent lines of
steamships from place to place, rapid regulations of trade,
local and national exehanges, the electric telegraph, are so
many conductors by which these funds of intelligence are
equalized and distributed, and the great stream of thought
widened.
With these grand agencies, local agencies conspire. The
central stream has tributaries. In Germany, the political
system that prevailed drove men of large capacity for thought
into the fields df speculative inquiry, abstruse philosophy,
criticism. The consequence was that an immense force of
intellect was brought to bear directly on the Scriptures of the
Old and New Testaments. The industry, patience, research,
sagacity, genius, that in other countries are turned to practi
cal affairs, spent themselves in historical and literary investi
gations. Eichhorn, De Wette, Paulus, Strauss, Schwegler,
Baur, and the rest, put their shoulders against Church, Creed,
Bible, and pushed them out into the current of general
thought. They started with no purpose of unsettling the
traditions of Christendom. They did not deliberately medi
tate the loosening of any bonds or associations. Their work
was done because it was the only work they were permitted
to do. They did it to save their sanity ; and they were
rather disturbed than otherwise when it came to them, that
they were detaching any portion of the common people from
their landmarks of faith. The state of society in Germany is
responsible for " The Life of Jesus," " The Post-apostolic
Age," the " Theologische Jahrbiicher." But the movement
now started went on till it affected the whole intellectual
world, and heaved the old Bible everywhere from its place
in the regards of thoughtful men.
In France, the scientific spirit spread through all depart
ments of literature, and produced a school of rationalism

peculiar to the genius of the French people. Entirely differ
ent from that of Germany, more plain, practical, realistic, but
even more fatal than that to the stability of ecclesiastical
and dogmatical traditions, M. Renan had no purpose to set
forth a new view of Jesus, or a new theory of the composi
tion of the New Testament. Nothing was further from his
mind than the idea of putting himself in opposition to the
religious authorities. He was a student of the Oriental lan
guages and literatures, — a scientific student. The course of
his studies led him to the New Testament, and he wrote
his " Vie de J6sus." Under the pressure of literary neces
sity, under the destiny of the French mind, he was almost
as much surprised, apparently, at finding himself writing it as
others were to finding it written. The " Strasburg school "
is equally a child of the region and the qentury. It could
have had no other parentage, and it was necessary that it
should be born in its time.
In England, a great middle class — active, intelligent, in
quiring, reading, thinking — arose, felt the limitations of the
national Church and Creed pressing against them at several
points, became restive under the imposed authority, broke
away in different forms of dissent, started native schools of
speculation, — " Secularism," " Rationalism," — and set the
popular English mind afloat on a sea of opinions over which
the winds of political and social agitation were continually
blowing. At the same time, a class of professional scholars,
fellows of the universities, having nothing to do but read and
criticise, reproduced the scholarship and criticism of Ger
many in certain " Essays and Reviews," and launched the
Church on the tides of popular thought and life. The
" Broad Church " of England is simply the Church afloat on
the times, and drifting with the currents of the working
intellect of the age. It is the Church dragged into the
stream of modern history, modern reform, modern science,
modern practical experience. It is the Church unmoored
from the safe shores of the Past, and borne no man can
say whither.
In America, the unrestrained liberty of the people in all

the departments of life, their complete emancipation from
establishments and traditions, their entire absorption in prac
tical pursuits, their general and eager intelligence, their
daring enterprise, their inexhaustible impulse, their fertility,
their self-reliance, have wrought an insensible change in all
habits of mind, usage, and feeling. Nothing can stand still in
the powerful current of their common energy. Disintegra
tion goes forward everywhere. The people are not unre-
ligious ; on the contrary, they are " very religious : " but
they are always desiring " some new thing." The word
" progress " is continually on their lips. They move all over.
While the feet run, the soul runs also. They carry their
houses with them. The Americans are driven by the Spirit,
and go whither they know not. They are, under Providence,
men of destiny, hardly knowing what they mean, what they
wish, what they believe, or what they worship. They drift in
masses, the sport, apparently, of the winds which blow where
they list. They are irresponsible for their creed. They
" believe as they go along ; " and they go along so fast that it
is not easy at any moment to say, " Lo here !" or " Lo there ! "
The masses distance the leaders. The teachers toil on after
pupils. The guides follow, and bring up the rear. Nobody
can talk fast enough to say what is in the people's mind.
They feel further than he sees. The great elements of
influence travel and impel more rapidly than individual
thinkers can march. Trained, cultivated, and careful thought
must act the part of conservative. The minds that go in
advance of the great public, and seem to guide it, are minds
that are more sensitive than the rest to the finer currents of
thought that permeate and control the century ; minds more
readily detached from their old connections, more responsive
to breaths of air, and more nimble in following out the direc
tion that is appointed.
Besides such general influences as we have mentioned,
incidental and special influences come in. We will say noth
ing about the antislavery movement, the effect of which has
been so apparent in modifying the theological opinions, and
breaking up the ecclesiastical relations, of great multitudes

of the people. It is now clearly understood, at least by all
readers of the " Examiner," that the rushing of the mighty
wind of moral reform into the hot vacuum of the South has
made dogmas and opinions swirl about fearfully, and has driven
crowds away from stationary and stubborn establishments.
Orthodoxy has had no more formidable foe than reform, which,
at the start, was fully Orthodox itself. The earthquake that
shook the Church was an agitation which hoped to make the
Church Christian. More potent in its disintegrating power
than reform, was the phenomenon called " Spiritualism." The
effect of this phenomenon was amazing. It generated cur
rents of air which swept the land like a tornado, carrying all
before them. Never did such vast and radical results pro
ceed from ' a cause apparently so slight. The theological
atmosphere was seemingly still. The communions were un
broken. The sects maintained their integrity. The people
looked stupidly acquiescent in the doctrines that were taught
them by their clergy. No signs forboded a slide. Unitarian-
ism and Universalism were unpopular. Disbelief was un
popular. The religious life of the masses presented an
exception to all their other life. Intellect, feeling, con
science, faith, hope, love, were active in every field save that
of the spirit. The soul was lethargic. No new ideas on spirit
ual things were in vogue. All on a sudden the " rappings "
are heard, tables begin to tip, mahogany vibrates, and one
whole side of the calm mountain of the common mind comes
down in fierce avalanche, and rushes across the continent,
depopulating churches, desolating homes of faith, scattering
communions, burying shrines, and covering the fair gardens
of religion with heaps of ruin. There seemed no very visi
ble connection here between cause and effect ; but the
rationale of the movement is, after all, obvious enough.
The spiritual calmness we have described above as existing
in the churches existed only in appearance. The churches
were undermined by indifference, doubt, and silent disbelief-
Great bodies of the popular intelligence were ready to be
come dislodged from the accepted faith, and waited but the
jostle which should effect the dislodgement. A new growth

of opinion, almost a new philosophy of divine and human
things, had been coming up beneath the existing habits of
thought, till those habits were scarcely more than a crust
over the fresh earth, and very little disturbance was neces
sary to remove it. The rappings and tippings furnished
the needful occasion, and started the mass. The popular
mind, always credulous*, and inclined to superstition, always
craving the supernatural, jumped at the inference that a
spiritual agency was at work ; that intelligences of another
sphere had found access to this, had instituted means of com
munication with mortals, had torn away the veil, had broken
down the partition, and made the next world and this world
one.
The fact, imaginary or otherwise, the inference, just or not,
moved the received theology to its foundations, unseated
every dogma, made the churches tremble, and set the creeds
driving headlong down stream. For the establishment of
communication between this world and the next contradicted
at once the Orthodox assumption, that those worlds were
separated by an impassable gulf; that probation ended with
this term of being, and that retribution began with the open
ing of the other ; that this world was one of trial, and the
other was a world of doom. Both worlds ran together.
Both lives ran together. The thread of existence was not
snapped by the grave. Death made no break. Existence
simply went on in another sphere ; and progress, develop
ment, was its law. Thought, affection, sentiment, remained
unimpaired. Consciousness was not suspended. Vital ties
were not weakened. There was a family in heaven and in
earth. Of course, hell was abolished. Eternal punishment
was abolished. Punishment, in the vulgar sense of retribu
tive suffering, was abolished. This world and its relations
were legitimated at once. The Devil was cast out of it.
The curse was removed. "What became now of the depravity
of human nature ? What became of the atoning sacrifice ?
What became of the deity of Christ? What became of the
sacraments, and other appliances for securing the salvation
VOL. LXXIX. — 5m 8. VOL. XVII. NO. I. 2
of souls? What became of the priesthood? Clearly every

dogma had received a shock. The cords of tradition were
all cut at a stroke : the axe was laid at the root of the tree,
and down it came. No matter what the spirits revealed, or
whether they revealed any thing. The communication might
be important or unimportant, wise or foolish. It made no
difference. The spirits were there, in that room ; not shut
up in an inaccessible heaven or in an inaccessible hell. They
were there ; there was no gulf between. The illusion of ages
was dispelled in an instant; and the popular mind broke
away from its ancient beliefs, or carried its ancient beliefs
with it into new climates, where the substance of them was
decomposed by the light and air. The effect which Spiritual
ism has produced on the spiritual life of America cannot be
exaggerated in language. It is very indefinite ; but it is
very profound. It has caused a stir and ferment in the whole
religious mind. Believers in Spiritualism are found in all
sects; but, wherever they are, the position of the sect is
totally changed. A new view of truth prevails. Dogmas
are set in a novel light, and theology is found many leagues
removed from its ancient localities.
If we inquire for definite and positive results, it must be
confessed that they are hard to find. The Drift period
exhibits the process of becoming. The products will appear
by and by. Spiritualism has done much to clear away the
old theologies, and make an open field for speculation. It
has not only covered the intellectual plain with ruins, but it
has succeeded to a great degree in removing the ruins it has
made. It has set the mind free, as well as laid a course for
it to travel over. Spiritualists are open to new ideas, are
eager for them, are sure they can be attained. Their preju
dices are gone, their connections are dissolved, their memo
ries are dissipated. If the movement had done nothing more
than give the intellect, the faith, the hope of man, a fair
opportunity to revise their records, recover their breath, and
re-adjust their relations with the Infinite, it would have con
ferred an inestimable benefit on us. If it had given us no
new ideas, but only demolished old ones more effectually than
any other agency had done, we should be grateful to it for

evermore. When we consider the spirit in which it has done
this, — the spirit of aspiration and glad courage, — we are
sure that it has more than justified its existence.
How far it has succeeded in doing more than this will be a
debated point. Spiritualists have no accepted creed, though
their unisons of faith are neither few nor unimportant. The
several schools that exist indicate pretty plainly the different
estimates of value that are put on the movement by its friends ;
but they do not indicate any radical discrepancy in doctrines.
Some prize their belief for the opportunity it gives them of
keeping up intercourse with their departed. It is a source
of consolation in loneliness and sorrow, a guarantee of life
beyond the grave, a pledge of perpetuity for their personal
affections and their social relations, a comforting assurance of
the vitality of their organic feelings, and the nearness of the
spiritual sphere. Others, less interested in this aspect of
the faith, look for revelations of truth from the spiritual world;
take down communications from the spirits on questions of
social, moral, and philosophical interest ; and hope to publish
a complete system of knowledge dictated by the sages of all
time. Others, again, satiated with the first of these satisfac
tions, and hopeless, perhaps, of attaining much from the
second process, content themselves with developing the gen
eral ideas suggested by the movement. They devote them
selves to the study of the laws of order, harmony, and
progress in the Avorld of matter and of mind. These dif
ferent schools pursue very different methods, and interest
themselves in very different lines of thought ; but they
do not necessarily differ. They may hold a great variety
of beliefs ; and yet their beliefs, so far as they go, may
coalesce.
In 1856, a patient believer in the revelations from the
other world made what he considered a fair digest of the
principal doctrines put forth in ninety-nine one-hundredths
of the communications of trustworthy spirits throughout the
country. This summary was contained in seven very general
articles : —
1. There is one only God, an infinite Spirit and the Father

of spirits, loving all, and unceasingly promoting their good.
2. All human beings are, as internally constituted, spirits,
who, after death, continue their distinct, conscious spiritual
identity; having bodies, forms, and properties as obviously
cognizable to each other and distinguishable from each other
as those in the flesh.
3. All human beings possess certain qualities, partly con
stitutional, partly incidental, and partly acquired, which, for
the time being, determine their real character, and the degree
of their approach to the divine standard of perfection. And
the sphere in which a person happens to be at death is the
sphere he enters the moment he resumes his consciousness
in the spirit-world. He takes up the next life where he
drops this.
4. There are seven spheres, inferior to the celestial ; and
each sphere has several degrees. Man is by nature capable
of progress, from lower to higher spheres, under certain
moral and spiritual laws. Death does not change a man's
character, nor the sphere to which he belongs, nor his capa
bility to make progress, nor the laws under which progress is
effected. No man who leaves this world passes into a worse
state on entering the next. If there is any change, it is for
the better. There is no state of unmitigated, hopeless
misery. The lowest enjoy their existence, such as it is,
though they are wretched in comparison with the pure spirits
of the celestial circles. And no one, however low and inac
tive, will fail at last to be attracted upwards by God, the
angels, and all the higher spirits ; passing from one degree to
another, and from one sphere to another, till the heavenly
mansion is reached, though ages on ages elapse before that
end is accomplished.
5. Spirits in the higher spheres are employed in three
kinds of exercise : 1st, In worship and aspiration, in seeking a
more perfect knowledge of God, and a closer communication
with him by faith and spiritual intuition. 2d, In study, medi
tation, contemplation of truth, and acquisition of knowledge
on all subjects. 3d, In aiding the progress of spirits in the
1865.] • The Drift Period in Theology. 17
lower spheres and on the earth. Spirits in any circle can

descend into all inferior circles, but can only by special per
mission ascend to higher spheres until they are qualified by
their spiritual progress.
6. Mankind, as the offspring of a common Father, are one
family of brothers and sisters. Their duty is to love God with
all their heart, and each the other as himself. The good
of each is the good of all, and the good of all is the good of
each. All tyranny and oppression are sinful. So is all war,
violence, and vengeance. So is intemperance, debauchery,
and incontinence. So is falsehood, covetousness, fraud, ex
tortion. So is all pride and assumption, all bigotry, perse
cution, and sectarian bitterness. The good spirits are all
reformers and regenerators of the earth, reconcilers, pro
moters of harmony, vindicators of the great principles of
truth, purity, wisdom, justice, and love.
7. Every person is accountable for himself, with supreme
reverence for God and his moral perfections, following his
own highest convictions of truth and duty. He must try all
spirits and their communications; all pretended prophets,
philosophers, and teachers ; all profession and assumption
whatsoever. The minds of moral agents should be swayed
by reason, — the suasion of wisdom and truth.
We find nothing new or startling or profound in this sum
mary of doctrines. They have all been in the world before,
largely entertained and professed by people who lived before
Spiritualism was heard of. Some of them were in possession
of certain sects-, not large or widely known. Some of them
clung to the name and school of Swedenborg. Some of
them were the natural heritage of spiritually-minded men
and women, and had been held by such time out of mind.
Some of them were products of the life of the age, — crea
tions of the modern genius and modes of experience. The
movement known as Spiritualism did not start them into
being : it started them from the corners where they had lain
bound and embedded, and set them drifting among the peo
ple, in the sea of whose affluent sentimentality they now float
prodigious. We read, some time since, a very bulky octavo
2*
18 The Drift Period in Theology. . [July,
volume, whose seven hundred closely-printed pages purported

to contain the teachings of a grand association of the sages
and philosophers departed, who had combined for the pur
pose of instructing the world in a complete body of essential
truths. We found in the book nothing but the cheapest
commonplaces of the transcendental philosophy and of mod
ern naturalism, diluted in an ocean of the most brackish and
unpalatable English. So far as we have discovered, the
spirits echo the ordinary voices of the flesh. Lord Bacon
answers for the truth of the nebular hypothesis, and com
mends the “Vestiges of Creation; ” and other authorities
countenance emanation-theories which the disciples of Pan
theism have been familiar with for ages.
We have been speaking of Spiritualism merely as a source
of revelation. We pass no judgment here on its claim to hold
open intercourse with intelligences in another condition of
being. That claim may or may not be conceded. The
significance of it, if conceded to the human intellect, we hold
to be exceedingly small. If no vital and original truth is
communicated by the spirits, the mind will be little inter
ested in knowing that intercourse with the spirits is open.
It is something, indeed, to have bridged over the gulf which
separated this life from the next, and to have deluged the
popular mind with ideas which have been confined to the
higher intelligences of men before. For this result we may
give it our thanks. But, as a fountain of original revela
tions, it is not exceedingly precious.
If we can find no final results in Spiritualism, we certainly
shall find none elsewhere. All Christendom and extra-Chris
tendom is in a state of flux. There is not a doctrine that is a
finality, or any thing like it. Not a definition defines. The
ice is all broken up. The sand-fields are all flying in the air.
It is not certain that the most ancient axioms are fixed in
their places, or that primitive truths hold their own, immov
able amid the convulsions that disturb the foundations of
thought. We cannot say that the mountains themselves will
not be dissolved, the Rock of Ages overflowed, and the
shores of eternity's sea be moved from their everlasting mar
1865.] . The Drift Period in Theology. 19
gins. The age must settle before the residuum of credence

can be discovered.
In a Drift period it will be useless to search for final results.
But we may look for tendencies. We cannot tell where
things have stopped; but we can tell in what direction they
are moving. Yet here again we must confine ourselves to
generalities, and not be too positive in regard to details. Theo.
dore Parker used to say, that Theism was destined to be the
religion of the next thousand years; and it is the hope of his
disciple, Miss Frances Cobbe, “that the truth of Theism will
gradually permeate the thoughts of the age, leavening them
by degrees.” We cannot, for ourselves, indulge in any such
brilliant anticipation. To us, Theism seems not only far off,
but aside from the road. We have not reached it, and we
are not going thither. Theism demands too much intellectual
power and too much intellectual culture to satisfy the re
ligious wants of any very large number of people in this or
in any generation likely soon to come. It is the religious
belief of the pure reason; and how many live in the region
of pure reason, or ever ascend into it? How many are able
to dwell in the atmosphere of serene ideas, or even to breathe
in it for many moments at a time 2 How many know that
there is such an atmosphere? But the Theist must be more
than a thinker: he must be a man who is satisfied with
thoughts, and feels a crying need of nothing else; he must be
a passionless man, and passionless men are rare. He must
be a man with whom ideas fill the place of images, dreams,
fancies, superstitions; with whom thinking is a substitute for
longing, loving, adoring, supplicating, confessing; who has no
tumults of emotion, no agonies of feeling, no convulsions of
conscience, and no agitations of soul. The multitude will
always crave a religion, and Theism is only a faith, – faith of
the calm and thoughtful few, not of the passionate many.
The multitude will have symbols, rites, sacraments, a cultus
and a priesthood. Theism rejects them, because they imply
a necessity of reconciliation between man and God. The
multitude will yield to the impulse of prayer, Theism cannot:
it can aspire, but it cannot implore; for prayer implies that
20 The Drift Peiiod in Theology. [July,
the Will to whom it is addressed can be moved and changed

by expressions of human desire. The multitude will have
stated and formal worship : and, under Theism, stated and
formal worship tends of necessity to decline; for, in its view
and under its influence, all life becomes worshipful, all service
is divine, the distinction between sacred and secular is abol
ished, all days are holy days, and all work is holy work.
Theism establishes a sublime and majestic monotony through
out the universe. Fancy is allowed no room for play in the
immense spaces between the worlds. The central Being
blots out subordinate divinities as the sun blots out the stars.
The silent laws sweep on from end to end of the world ; and
secondary causes, solemn or sportive, but always human and
attractive, make haste to slip out of the way. Jacob's ladder,
on which the spirits ascend and descend, is taken down ; and
men must watch, wait, and labor under the cold light of the
one great Eye. The multitude cannot bear this. They want
sign and miracle and angel-forms; skies full of guardian
spirits; helpers, inspirers, comforters in the air. There is no
intimation at present that this ancient want is diminishing.
Spiritualism has revived under more modern shape the daemon-
ology and angelology of the Roman Church : it has set up the
Jacob's ladder again, which Rationalism ' had pulled down,
and has re-established communication with beings in another
sphere. For this the millions love it, and cling to it, and give
up their old religion for it. Faith in the supernatural has
changed its base, but it has not lost its charm ; and it will hold
the world spell-bound for many and many an age to come.
Philosophers may be multiplying, and, as they multiply,
Theism will be their faith; but this generation must pass
before they will represent any considerable number of man
kind.
If the tendency of the present period of speculation is not
towards Theism, still less is it towards Atheism. The number
of blank atheists, the number of people who believe in no
controlling will or law or intelligence or force, in no personal
or impersonal Cause, we are persuaded is diminishing steadily
and rapidly. "We. are born loyal." Men will neither be
1865.] The Drift Period in TJicology. 21
defrauded nor bullied out of their belief in God. If all the

knowledges were to combine to prove that there was and
could be no God, their fancy would straightway invent one ;
and the writer of the knowledges would be the most quick
witted in invention. In former times, science was " atheistic,"
because it overturned the idols that men worshipped, and
showed that they were logs of wood or blocks of stone, bun
dles of paper or masks of pasteboard. The Bible-God of the
theologians fell ; the creed-God fell ; the altar-God fell ;
the church-God fell ; the Jupiter and Apollo and Diana of
Christendom came down in dust and noise, and men shud
dered. But modern science reinstates the Supreme Deity,
by revealing order, harmony, law, growth, progress, develop
ment, intention, use, beauty, in every department of the
world. Wherever there is cause and effect, there is the liv
ing God ; and science demonstrates the working of cause and
effect to the utter and final confusion of the old Atheism,
'which took refuge in the numberless hiding-places of chance.
The modern tendency is to believe in too much God rather
than in too little ; and science is answerable for the tendency.
Theologians are trying with desperate toil to stake out the
limitations of law, and to fence in some little nook where
they could allow men to disport themselves without being
overlooked by Deity. Atheism, indeed I We believe, that,
were the race to be polled this moment, there would be found
more intelligent, rational believers in God than ever were
suspected of being in existence before.
The tendency of modern speculation is rather towards an
undefined Pantheism. From every quarter the voices that
come to us speak of lawas originating, directing, controlling.
Even the English mind would fain be pantheistical if it could ;
and would succeed in becoming so but for the adamantine stub
bornness of the English individuality, which stands out against
all invasion even of the Supreme, and cannot lose itself even
in the ocean of the Infinite. The Englishman is constitution
ally a Theist. The European mind, on the contrary, is satu
rated with pantheistic sentiment and thought. So is the
American. In fact, Deity has become so immense in our view,
so illimitable, so all-pervading ; it lias so mingled its life with

that of the world ; so identified its will with the forces of the
universe ; so associated its being with the elements of human
existence; so completely taken up into itself the interests,
thoughts, endeavors of society ; so insinuated its energy into
all the forms of active influence, — that it is difficult to give it
individuality or personality in the ordinary sense, and too
late to snatch any portion of our individuality from its pos
session. The multitude, feeling Eternal Arms about them, and
the breath of all-pervading Spirit in their very souls, can do
nothing but resign themselves to the absorbing influence.
Pantheism is the fascinating element in Swedenborg, in Spirit
ualism, in Transcendentalism, in the new forms of Chris
tianity. Theodore Parker was as much Pantheist as Theist.
He would have been wholly Pantheist, if his adamantine per
sonality had not brought his speculation to terms whenever it
threatened to carry him off his feet.
Pantheism falls in with and encourages the vague, vast
longing and aspiration of our time. It does not confine like
Theism, nor chill like Atheism. It is warm, nebulous, expan
sive, with a rich, inexhaustible atmosphere. It is at once
mighty and mild, terrible and tender. It is a philosophy, a
faith, and a religion. It fills the mind with awe and mystery.
It excites the imagination with conceptions of the super
natural, with vague, shadowy images of power. It admits of
an infinitely varied symbolism, borrowed from nature, all
whose forms are emblematical of spirit. It awakens adora
tion, homage, worship; it suggests prostration, self-humilia
tion, self-abasement, self-denial, and sacrifice, absorption in the
Supreme.* It is infinitely soft, tender, and gracious, rich in
consolations, opulent in patience and hope and childlike trust.
* " I accept the charge of pantheism," says Professor Hedge, " not in the
cheerless, impious sense of a God all world, and a world instead of God, but in
the true and primary sense of a world all God ; i.e., a God co-present to all his
works, pervading and embracing all, — a God, in apostolic phrase, ' in whom and
through whom are all things.' If this is pantheism, it is the pantheism which
has ever been the doctrine of the deepest piety ; it is the pantheism professed by
devout men in every age of the world." — Reason in Religion, p. 81.
Interpreted by it, the creeds of the world, which Rationalism

had deprived of their significance, have a deep and wonderful
import. Fall, redemption, incarnation, sacrifice, faith, atone
ment, endless bliss, and perdition, clothe themselves with
majesty once more. The doctrine of inspiration assumes a
noble character. There is no rite, ceremony, or observance
of the Church that does not, when tended by it, shine with a
new beauty, and attract by a new fascination. The Pan
theists of Germany — Strauss, for instance, in the closing
chapter of the " Life of Jesus ; " Baur, in his " Doctrine of
Trinity " — reinstate the popular theology, under the form
of symbolism, with an unction that is worthy of the elect.
Philosophy and faith meet on this ground, and kiss each
other. Sage and devotee alike are satisfied. One may be
whichever he chooses, a Mystic or a Rationalist, and be either
honestly. He may be Catholic of the Roman Church, or
Protestant of the liberal school. Champions of fate and free
will need not quarrel ; for to be free under laws of nature is
to be bound, and to be bound by the laws of spirit is to be
free. The wilful is fated; the servant is delivered. The
doctrine lends itself to every spiritual exigency, offers a solu
tion for every spiritual problem, and opens a path by which
all can travel to the realms of light.
The grinding movement of the great wave of thought, as
it is driven on over all surfaces, has a grand levelling and
obliterating effect. Artificial lines are rubbed out, local pecu
liarities are effaced, and certain broad marks alone remain to
indicate the character of the action which has been at work.
The word " sect " is unpopular. The thing " sectarianism "
is more unpopular still, and must defend itself as it can
against the hostile regards of modern men. Ideas are more
respected than opinions. Truths command more interest than
doctrines. People look for principles that reconcile rather
than for dogmas that divide, and go hunting everywhere
for the long parallel or concentric lines that indicate, the
track of an intellectual impulse. Discussions turn less on
incidental than on radical points. The ground of unity, —
where is that ? men ask : how do thoughts stand related to
one another ? and where" is the trace of connection ? for

somewhere a connection there must be. However various,
divergent, and apparently opposite the effects may be, there
is a cause for them all, and one cause, if we will take pains
to find it. This is, perhaps, the most encouraging single sign
of our epoch. We all know that we are moving, and that
we are moving together under the same general impulse.
We are all prepared, too, for changes ; and for changes that
may assimilate us very nearly with forms of thought which
now seem strange and unattractive. Hence a diminution of
bigotry ; hence a decrease of jealousy, distrust, suspicion,
apprehension, and fear; hence an increase of hope, and a
feeling of expectation, even in troubled times, which will
outlive feeling a multitude of disappointments. We are sure,
on all sides, that —
" If- our bark sink, 'tis to another sea."
We have no fear that the pantheistic tendencies of modern

thought will weaken the foundations of ethical principle
among the masses of the people or in individual lives. It has
been made abundantly clear, by studies on Buddhism and
Brahminism, that pantheistic ideas may consist with personal
and social morals of a very noble order. In spite of the rest
lessness, the lawlessness, the license, the tameless audacity of
the American mind, the rage for innovation, and the impa
tience of custom, there are good reasons for believing that
moral ideas are gradually purifying themselves ; and that the
standards of moral conduct are insensibly conforming to
rational rules. It would be interesting to compare the ethical
dicta of our shifting period with those of former stationary
epochs, and trace the influence of the respective ages on
each. We have no time for that here ; but we affirm our
belief that the advantage, in point of elevation and justice,
would be with ours.
Mi^s Cobbe declares the fundamental canons of the faith of
the future to be obviously these three great principles : The
absolute goodness of God ; The final salvation of every
created soul ; The divine authority of conscience. The last
1865.] Tlie Drift Period in Tlieology. 25
article we should modify materially in statement, and perhaps

in meaning. If Miss Cobbe intends to say, that men are
coming more and more to believe in the divine authority of
the moral sense of mankind when opposed to the arbitrary
ethics of a special people or epoch, or theory of religion, we
assent most cordially to her position. The tendency is to
place natural sentiments before artificial codes, and to apply
the sound common sense of the healthy heart to all moral
problems whatsover. But if Miss Cobbe intends to say, that
the divine authority of the individual conscience is to be
respected henceforth more than heretofore, we demur. It is
an illustration of the universal basis on which truths are set
tling, that the verdicts of the individual conscience are yield
ing steadily to the convictions of the general conscience,
and that these consult the constitutional Laws by which
society is regulated. Not the sentiment of justice in the indi
vidual heart, not the sentiment of justice in the heart of a
particular community, but the law and fact of justice, by
which the relations of men with one another are kept peace
ful, orderly, secure, and sweet, will, we are persuaded, dictate
what shall and what shall not be accepted against all codes,
sacred and secular, — against all prejudices, institutions, and
traditions. The private conscience is capricious ; the gen
eral conscience of a period may be inconstant and treacher
ous : but the constitution of society, and the obligations to
preserve it, remain unchanged ; and social science reveals
to us what this constitution demands. The tendency here,
then, is, we should say, to substitute moral science for moral
passion and prejudice.
The phrase, " salvation of every human soul," may convey
a just thought, if we are predicting the phase of eschato-
logical belief which is to succeed the dogmas of Orthodoxy.
But we doubt if it describes quite accurately the mode in
which the future-destiny question will be held in the coming
time. Instead of the words " salvation of the soul," men
'will use the words, " perfection of the individual man ; " and,
instead of arbitrary grace as the means by which that can be
secured, they will substitute growth, progress, development,
VOL. LXXIX. — 5tH 8. VOL. XVII. NO. I. 8
expansion, culture. The problem of immortality, and of

blessedness after death, will be taken out of the " religious "
sphere, and committed to the care of natural reason, which,
on grounds suggested by knowledge, experience, hope, and
aspiration, will assure the indestructibleness of personality,
and the necessity of completion in spiritual attainment. The
perpetuity of influence, the imperishableness of moral forces,
the persistency of causes, will be the assurance of immor
tality ; and the steady advance of mankind, individually and
collectively, under the law of progression, will be a sufficient
pledge that the immortality will be a noble boon, worthy of
giver and receiver.
The tendency is already, and will be more and more, to
abandon theological methods in the treatment of moral and
spiritual, even of theological and Christological subjects ; to
dispense with theological phrases, and approach all topics
from the scientific point. From the known, inferences will be
drawn to the unknown. Literature will apply its laws to the
Bible. Human nature will give the key to the character of
Jesus. Creation will explain the Creator. The order, har
mony, and beneficence of the physical and social world will
be demonstrated in a way that none can dispute ; and all con
troversy about the divine attributes will become obsolete.
The signs all point to grander beliefs than we have had
hitherto, and to nobler foundations for belief. Orbs of the
first magnitude are evolving themselves from the star-dust.
The Drift period is, under some aspects, confusing and sad.
We see the pulverizing of systems, the grinding-down of
credences, the dispersion of communions, the overriding and
crushing of precious landmarks. Individual influence seems
to be of no avail. The rudder is without a steadying hand:
the compass is broken. The human intellect drives on
blindly, recklessly, with no purpose to go hither or thither,
and in imminent danger of rushing on destruction. But
there is always this comfort to cleave to. They that drift are
borne on the broad providential currents which set towards '
the infinite sea. No meddlesome oarsman tries to pull against
the stream. No self-sufficient steersman keeps perversely to
1865.] TJie American Unitarian Pulpit. 27
a zigzag course. No wilful commander attempts to set at

defiance the laws of wind and wave. The movement is
slow, without pride or pomp ; the track is devious, but the
freighted mind keeps by necessity to the deepest current ; it
avoids the rocks by the instinct which compels it to observe
the tidal flow ; and, wherever it may come to land, it is sure
not to come to wreck by the way.
Art. II. — THE AMERICAN UNITARIAN PULPIT.
Annals of the American Unitarian Pulpit ; or, Commemorative No

tices of Distinguished Clergymen of the Unitarian Denomination
in the United States, from its Commencement to the Close of the
Year Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-five. With an Historical Intro
duction. By "William B. Spragl"e, D.D. New York : Robert
Carter & Brothers, 530, Broadway, pp. xxv., 578.
Two circumstances combine with the late Convention to win

attention to the Unitarian denominational history. The first
of these is the fact, that we are now completing the first half-
century since the denomination in America was known as
Unitarian. The article in the "Panoplist" of June, 1815,
reviewing the recent reprint of Belsham's "American Unita-
rianism," which had been published in London in 1812, made
a great excitement in New England, especially in Massachu
setts ; and at once scandalized the liberal churches by the
charges of infidelity made against them, and alarmed the
Orthodox at the spread of deadly heresy among their neigh
bors and themselves. Dr. Channing's Letter to Rev. Samuel
C. Thacher, dated June 20, 1815, was an indignant protest
against the aspersions of the " Panoplist," and is regarded by
no less an authority than Andrews Norton as virtually accept
ing the name " Unitarian," and founding the denomination as
a distinct body. Whatever the exact time when the liberal
clergy were called by this name, there can be no doubt that
28 T7te American Unitarian, Puljrit. [July,
the article in the " Panoplist " and the Letter of Channing to
Thacher mark the origin of the Unitarian controversy proper,
in this country, and the open drawing of the lines of separa
tion between the Trinitarian and Unitarian churches. So it
appears that we are now closing the first half-century of the
denomination as avowedly Unitarian in this country.
This fact, however, is attended and illustrated by another
of great significance, — the ample testimony given by Dr.
Sprague's "Annals " of the existence and influence of Unita
rian views, for a century and a half, in New England. If we
take the ministry of Rev. Ebenezer Gay, who was ordained at
Hingham in 1717, as the starting-point, according to the
authority of the " Annals," the Unitarian denomination is
now closing the third half-century of its history in America.
But, important as names are, they are not the main facts in
the history of opinions. Dr. Sprague gives us ample proof
that Unitariauism has virtually existed almost from the begin
ning of New-England colonies ; and he finds it hard, in some
cases, to fix the exact line of division between Unitarians and
Trinitarians. We doubt very much whether Drs. Bezaleel
Howard, Hezekiah Packard, and Jeremy Belknap, would be
now excommunicated from any moderate Orthodox Church ;
and we do not know of any Unitarian Church, however ex
treme, that would be willing to listen to the doctrines of
Joseph Priestley in its regular ministrations. The charm
of Dr. Sprague's volume, however, lies not mainly in its con
troversial niceties or polemic details, but in its truthful narra
tive, impartial temper, and entirely kindly and candid spirit.
We know not where to find a book of ecclesiastical sketches
so wholly unobjectionable, and withal so very interesting.
The writer's aim evidently is to gather laboriously, arrange
carefully, and state concisely the important facts in the life
and labors of the eighty Unitarian clergymen under consid
eration, and to throw upon this narrative the various and
interesting lights that are given by letters of their friends or
relatives. Thus the several chapters have the rare com
bination of historical point and biographical attraction. We
find all the data that we ^need in the narrative, and all the
1865.] The American Unitarian Pulpit. 29
charm that personal affection can lend or ask in the supple

mentary illustrations. None but a Christian gentleman could
achieve such a success. If the author's mind were not
wholly truthful and charitable, it would be impossible for him,
on grounds of mere policy, to resist the temptation to color.
events and opinions according to his own prejudices ; and in
all cases of doubt or difference, imply, if he did not state, his
own convictions or preference. We are truly grateful to Dr.
Sprague for the impartial and wholly Christian tone- of this
volume ; and we thank him not only for ourselves, but in the
name of the sainted dead whose worth he has so faithfully
recorded in a form so substantial and enduring. He has
given the elder Unitarian clergy a place in the record of the
Church Universal such as partisan hands, however loving,
could not secure for them.
Some of the sketches are almost full enough to rank as
biographies. Among the most satisfactory, we place those of
West, of New Bedford; Kirkland, Buckminster, and Channing.
We could desire more fulness and point in the notices of
Mayhew, the Wares, Norton, and Greenwood ; but the limits
of the book were of necessity fixed, and very generous
measure is given on the whole : nor must we forget, that the
very men who represent critical phases of thought are the
most difficult to treat impartially. A full article on Andrews
Norton, for instance, could not be made out merely of the
facts of that recluse and devoted scholar's life ; while to
treat of his relation to American philosophy and religion
might not add as much interest to the book as it would add
perplexity to the writer. It might be equally embarrassing
to present fully the precise character of the evangelical
service of Henry Ware, jun., and his relation to the old Ortho
doxy and the . new latitude. Greenwood's ritual tendencies,
and their bearing on the ancient Puritanism and the rising ec-
clesiasticism, might open difficult questions, and occupy space
otherwise appropriated. The volume is true to its title,
" Annals," and keeps its promise as the chronicle of the years
as they pass, and of life in its obvious developments, without
rising into that more ambitious study which binds years into
&*
30 77/e American Unitarian Pulpit. [July,
ages, and gives the history of the ideas and powers that rule
the destiny of men and constitute the kingdom of God. We
at first were a little impatient of the practical, little specula
tive turn of the author, and desired more light on the stand
point, training, and mental affinities of the men treated of;
but, on second thought, we acquiesced in the author's policy,
and commended him for his wisdom in giving such truths as
readers could at once understand and accept, and in leaving
further philosophizing to thinkers and writers favored with
more leisure and a more open arena.
We confess, that it seems strange to us not to see some
names on this list which we have usually ranked among the
Unitarian fathers, and which are generally ranked among our
liberal leaders, — such as Colman and other early ministers of
Brattle-street Church, who virtually founded Boston liberalism
in 1698, and the famous Dr. Osgood, of Medford, whose fame
is in all our churches. But these men did not call themselves
Unitarians or Arians, and accepted the doctrine of the Trinity
in the form thought orthodox by their contemporaries. We
do not surrender these, however, from the ranks of the liberal
clergy ; and, so far as they contended for religious liberty
against the old Puritan exclusiveness, we hold them in equal
affection with those who came out in name from the old Puri
tan discipline and creed. Nay, so far as they manifested a
generous catholicity, and resisted the disposition to preserve
Christian character by a harsh dogmatic standard, we like
them better than the class of nominal liberals who have held
the so-called liberal view's in an illiberal temper, and brought
to the new theology the intolerant spirit of the old confes
sion.
Considering the historical position and influence of the
Unitarian clergy in America, we cannot but notice, first of all,
their peculiar civic and social relations. The Unitarian de
nomination has appeared in America, especially in its early
stages, more as a social class or congenial community than as
a theological sect or definite Church. It consisted mainly of
the liberal minds within the Congregational churches of New
England, and especially of Massachusetts, who could not sub
mit to the rigid discipline and exacting creeds of the old

Puritans, and who, at the same time, had strong Christian
principles and a very high sense of their personal responsi
bility. They meant to stay within the Church : but they were
determined to keep their liberty of thought and action ; and,
long before they were designated by any denominational
name, they were a marked and powerful body of liberals, who
possessed a large share of the wealth, culture, civic influence,
and social distinction of the community. Nominally, they are
usually regarded as having had their first marked triumph in
the election of Henry Ware to the Professorship of Theology
in Harvard College ; but, virtually, they carried the day more
than a century before in the defeat of the Mathers, and the
ascendency of the Brattles, Willard, and Leverett, in the ad
ministration of Harvard College. We do not say that the
founders of Brattle-street Church, who led the protest against
the old Puritan exclusiveness, and so powerfully controlled
the Cambridge school, were Unitarians ; but they headed the
social and intellectual tendency that developed itself in Uni-
tarianism. Their first move was towards liberty of con
science as against the prescription of severe doctrinal tests
and relations of experience in order to admission to the
Lord's Supper. That such assertion of liberty usually goes
with Arminian views of moral agency, no student of ecclesi
astical history will need to be told. It is clear that, as soon
as every serious believer in the Christian religion is free to
approach the Lord's table upon making his desire known, the
view will prevail that he has freedom of will enough to come
within the means of divine grace, and need not wait for any
startling experience or irresistible call. The sensitive point
among the liberal Christians in the eighteenth century seems
to have been more in practical liberty than in speculative
doctrine. Their Arminianism was a practical protest, before
it was a metaphysical theory. The coming of Whitefield
intensified the protest by making the demand for striking con
versions and obtrusions of personal experience more aggres
sive; and stout old Dr. Gay, who heads Dr. Sprague's " Annals
of the Unitarian Clergy," was apparently more vehemently
32 The American Unitarian Pulpit. [July,
exercised by that great revivalist's disturbance of the decent

quietude of the regular church methods, and the preference
of strange emotions over calm obedience, than by any of the
speculative tenets of the new experimental theology.
Clearly, the liberalism of Massachusetts, in the eighteenth
century, was more the calm, independent spirit and practical
habit of a cultivated and influential class of society than a
sharply defined doctrine. We make a great mistake if we
put out of sight the characteristic life of the liberal commu
nity, and judge of its power by theological opinions alone.
The lay and clerical leaders did not wish to go out of the
old churches, or to have any peculiar mark set upon them.
They wished to do their work, and educate their children, and
worship God after the way of their fathers, in the institutions
that had come down to them, with the least possible interfer
ence from spiritual dictators. Their leaders, indeed, did not
lack polemic ability, and struck heavy blows at the old and
the new champions of Calvinism; yet the polemic aspect
of the body is its least conspicuous aspect. The leading
secular and intellectual power of the community was in the
liberal ranks. When we read the notices of such men as
Chauncy, Mayhew, Eliot, Lathrop, and other leaders of the
Boston liberal churches, we must remember that they were
the mouth-pieces of the ruling social orders, and their contro
versial labors were a small part of their influence. Very
probable it is, that secular dignity preponderated over doc
trinal zeal, and especially over church caste, in many of the
magnates of the liberal Arminian and Arian body. In that
transition period in which the body passed from its first
stage of mild Orthodoxy into the second stage of avowed
liberal Christianity, it evidently carried with it the aristocracy
of the community, and especially of Boston and the leading
towns of the neighborhood.
Buckminster is to be regarded as the conspicuous repre
sentative of this transition stage in the history of the Unita
rian bgdy. He was less conspicuous as an Arminian or Arian,
or Unitarian, than as a liberal Christian, his favorite phrase.
We look in vain for any sharply defined ideas to account for
this great influence. He did not claim to belong to or to

found any sect; and there is little if any thing in his sermons
that might not have been preached by Paley or Sidney Smith,
or any mild theologian of the Church of England. He was
master, indeed, of a charming style, and of a learning quite
affluent after the standard of the day ; but he was not so
rich in philosophical ideas and spiritual insight as in evangeli
cal fervor and rhetorical grace. His sermons charm, but do
not so much impress or instruct us. In their estimate of the
nature and work of Christ, the power of the Holy Spirit, and
the office of the Church, they would fail to satisfy many of
the earnest and pious Unitarians of our day. His wonderful
power over the people is to be accounted for by his personal
piety, his rare eloquence, rich culture, and not least by his
being the mouth-piece of a refined and dominant class, who
led public opinion, and rejoiced in the classic tastes and learn
ing that were rising into sway. It was the day of the
" Renaissance " of New England. Buckminster, Everett, and
their gifted peers and followers, inaugurated the new age of
classicism that seemed destined to displace the hard old
Puritan scholasticism. It would be a great mistake to esti
mate their significance merely or mainly by their doctrines,
when they were little desirous of assuming any polemic name,
and thought more of winning honors from universities at
home and abroad than of building up a new sect or revolu
tionizing the creeds and churches qf the land. A poor idea
would be given of their position and influence by separating
their speculative teaching or characteristic doctrine from their
personal talents and culture and social relations. Think of a
man of common gifts, without social fellowship, depending
mainly upon the doctrinal views of Buckminster's excellent
sermons to produce, in a strange and perhaps hostile commu
nity, any thing like the effect produced by that pure and
devoted spirit among a people prepared by the habits and cul
ture, and even the pride, of nearly two centuries of historical
antecedents, and by afl the charming enthusiasm of the rising
school of letters, to appreciate and believe them ! Yet this is
precisely the mistake that has often been committed. More
than one earnest young man has been amazed and heart
broken to find, that the mild liberalism of early Unitarianism
does not take root in new and strange soil at the West or
South, or even in the Middle States, as it did in its own
native ground, under such continuous tillage in such well-
guarded enclosures. Even in the New-England States, out of
Massachusetts, the social conditions did not favor the Unita
rian cause. In Connecticut, for example, the views that were
so early set forth by Sherman and Abbot have found little
response, perhaps partly from the rise of a more liberal type
of Congregational Orthodoxy there, and partly from the early
adhesion of the Arminian party and a large part of the con
servative wealth and culture to the Episcopal Church.
Channing, although belonging to the same favored class as
Buckminster, marks a new era in the popular position of Uni
tarians. He was the leader of the more democratic and ideal
school of Unitarians. Much as he inclined to aristocracy, by
taste, position, and training, he is virtually the head of the
party of progress and reform; implicitly, though not explicitly,
the father of Unitarian rationalism in America. It requires
the observation and insight of a contemporary to understand
and state fully the relation of Channing to the elder Boston
clergy, and especially to the classic school and conservative
caste of Buckminster and his admirers. We have seen proofs
of a certain difference (we will not say hostility) between the
two classes* even before Channing offended the old conserva
tives by his antislavery movement. But it is evident, from
the whole nature and culture of the two noble leaders, that
their tendencies were widely different. Buckminster was the
conservative liberal churchman of the old regime, and as little
prone to radicalism as any bishop in the parliament of Eng
land. No English churchman could have berated Milton's
radicalism more stoutly than he did in his famous Phi-Beta-
Kappa oration. Here is a specimen of this onslaught on the
blind old patriot whom Channing eulogizes : —
" The life of Milton, however, is a memorable instance of the tem

porary degradation of learning. For notwithstanding the sublime
fiction of Gray, that the loss of his sight was occasioned by the
brightness of his celestial senses, it is, alas ! nothing but a fiction.
Those fine orbs were quenched in the service of a vulgar and usurp
ing faction ; and, had they not been ' closed in endless night,' the
world perhaps would have wanted the ' Paradise Lost,' and that
master-spirit of England have been wasted in more praises of Crom
well and more ribaldry against Salmasius."
Nothing could be more in the face of Channing's por
traiture of Milton than this, or more opposed to his whole
attitude towards modern reform. In fact, few if any living
English writers could now speak of Milton and Cromwell
with the contempt that the pet of Boston conservatism spoke
at Cambridge on the 31st of August, 1809. Yet both Chan-
ning and Buckminster were perhaps equally opposed to the
radicalism of the eighteenth century, especially that of the
French revolutionary school ; and it is surely one of the ad
vantages of the political Federalism of the early Unitarians,
that they had no affinity with the materialism and infidelity
of the French and English radicals. We apparently owe to
Channing, more than to any other man, the rescue of Unitari-
anism from the keeping of a somewhat aristocratic caste, and
opening its spirit and truth to the mind and heart of the
people.
How far he went in this positive purpose, we cannot exactly
say ; but it is evident, that he was more and more inclined,
during the latter years, to confide in the thought and move
ments of the progressive party outside the Orthodox Church,
than in any new ecclesiasticism or any renovation of the old
creeds and discipline. We could wish that he had had more
social fellowship in his teaching as well as his habit, and
given the power of genial sympathy to the noble ideas which
are identified with his name. His delicate health, as well as
his temperament, undoubtedly kept him more aloof from the
people than his convictions warranted. If so honored and cher
ished a friend as Dr. Dewey could write of his natural reserve
as in the admirable letter on page 372 of the " Annals," we
must not wonder or complain that we sometimes desired more
of the electricity of hearty companionship than he usually gave.
Yet he was always kindly and encouraging. No young man

surely ever failed to find ready hearing and kind and cheering
counsel from him. We regard him as marking the third
period in the social history of Unitarianism in this country.
Whilst the old Arminian Arians, such as Gay, Chauncy, and
Belknap, were a powerful social order of liberalized Ortho
doxy, and Buckminster and his school headed the community
of classic humanists with high aristocratic prestige, Channing
led on the new order of progressive Unitarians. Within his
Arian theology and conservative affinities, he bore the seeds
of all the new ideas that have given such life, and at times
threatened such mischief, to the Unitarian body.
Yet, even while speaking of Channing's influence, we can
not leave wholly out of account the local and personal influ
ences that gave such power to his ministry. In Boston he
held a position that enabled him to state boldly views of doc
trine and duty, which, in a community with different antece
dents, would have fallen to the ground without notice, or been
rejected with horror. They who expected to see at once, in
New York and Baltimore, the same response to his radical
Unitarian preaching as in Boston, found themselves signally
mistaken; so true it is, that antecedent training and local
associations prepare the soil for the seed. Only when these
new times have educated new ideas and associations have we
seen the old barriers removed. The downfall of slavery and
the rise of more generous views of human nature have given
the name and thought of. Channing welcome throughout the
land. Wise will his followers be if they know how to use
the opportunity, and present liberal religion with the power
and constancy of organic institutions, and with the persuasion
of social sympathy.
When we look through these " Annals " of Unitarian Clergy
men, and ask for a distinct statement of their specific doc
trines, we are not surprised at meeting with difficulty. There
is no exact statement of belief upon which they all agree ;
and, what is more, the leading minds never meant that there
should be such a statement. They never wished to make a
new and exclusive creed, after being so tormented by the old
one. In this they were undoubtedly right, and their followers

will be wise if they do likewise. At the same time, there is
a certain animus to the whole Unitarian body that gives it
historical unity. It is the religious life of an earnest, intelli
gent, liberal community, in different stages of development,
undertaking to interpret itself into conscious thought. It has
always affirmed the unity of God, the supremacy of the
Father, the freedom and moral worth of man, the divine mis
sion of Christ, the universality of the offer of salvation.
American Unitarianism has, in respect to moral freedom and
the relations of the soul and the body, been free from the
errors of its English namesake. The school of Priestley and
Belsham has found little response here; and that little has died
out in spite of the predictions of the " Panoplist " fifty years
ago. Even our radicals, instead of taking after Priestley and
Belsham, have been more of the school of George Fox, and
have sometimes distanced orthodox revivalism in earnestness
and efficiency.
We may as well acknowledge openly, that Unitarianism
never was and never meant to be in America a sect in the
usual sense, and is perhaps further from it now than ever,
since the promised organization of its churches will be likely
to substitute a practical for a speculative union, and allow and
encourage various thinkers to work together under a gener
ous standard of liberty and union. This book records a
range of opinion that gives historic dignity to the most
generous charity. We are not certain that all the preachers
named in Dr. Sprague's volume are* Unitarians in the sense of
being Antitrinitarians, so various are their views and so rich
in lessons of tolerance. Such men as Belknap and John
Eliot rejected the Athanasian scheme of the Trinity, and
accepted the " indwelling scheme," as it was called, without
assailing the Trinitarian theology as such. They could speak
of God as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost ; and so also can a
portion of our living Unitarians. Prominent scholars among
them, and, we think, manfully and wisely, refuse to be called
Antitrinitarians, and regard themselves as true to their Uni
tarian name if they reject all Polytheism or Tritheism, and
VOI,. LXXIX. — 5th"s. VOI.. XVII. NO. I. 4
accept no doctrine of the plurality of persons in the Godhead

that is inconsistent with his unity. We are not alarmed, that
a portion of the Unitarian clergy prefer Athanasius to
Arius, and regard the great Alexandrian champion as effectu
ally demolishing the virtual polytheism of Arius, and setting
forth a Trinity of divine powers or manifestations, which is the
effective evolution, or the differentiating and integrating, of
the unity of the Divine Being. This idea has been expressed
by leading Unitarians here and in England, and has been set
forth in our own columns ; yet the authors have not lost caste
with their brethren, nor are they likely to lose it.
Whilst the historical roll of Unitarian clergymen proves
thus that they have wished to keep a liberal spirit towards
their Trinitarian neighbors, and not sacrifice their proper
catholicity to Antitrinitarian prejudice, it proves equally
that they have not been willing to shut out of their fellowship
the new and somewhat radical elements of Christian thought.
The fathers, whose lives Dr. Sprague has recorded, were not
tried by novel speculations precisely as their children of the
present generation have been. These " Annals," which stop
with the year 1855, do not include any of the transcendental
theologians who have figured in the new school of Unitarians ;
yet, in their day, they were obliged to maintain their tolera
tion, in the face of great provocations, of the views of the
authority of the Scriptures, and of the nature of Jesus Christ,
that were held even by such able and eminent spirits. An
drews Norton and his school were apparently quite as great
an offence to the old Unitarians of the Arian order, as the
more ultra views of Theodore Parker and his clique have
been to the existing community of conservative Unitarians.
Norton was far too destructive for Channing's mind, and
avows that he met with decided coldness and opposition from
him. Yet the Norton iconoclasts were not thrust out of fel
lowship. Great good has come from many of their interpret
ations of Scripture, not by any means unmixed with evil
from their unphilosophical, and sometimes unspiritual and
generally unideal, theory of religion. It is well that equal
toleration has been extended to the transcendental wing of the
I860.] The American Unitarian Pulpit. 39
Unitarian body ; and no mistake could be more fatal than that

of thrusting out, by a sweeping ban of excommunication, the
large and living class of men who have built their faith
upon the indwelling God, affirmed the constancy of inspira
tion from the spirit, and the authority of intuition as the
interpreter of the Divine Mind. The historical school has
undoubtedly much grievance to complain of at the hands of
the transcendental school. The fair-minded champions of the
positive revelation in Scripture, and the divine manifestation
in history, have shown with great conclusiveness, that, if God
is with us now, he has been with our fathers; and, if we would
know him truly, we must study his entire revelation to our
race, and believe, that, to the chosen ages of our race, as to
gifted minds of our own age, there have been especial gifts
of illumination and grace. In the study of nature, we keep
the historical method in our new science, and teach the prin
ciple of the correlation and conservation of forces. Why not
apply the same principle to moral and spiritual forces, and
believe that in life, as in nature, all existing forms of power
may be traced to opening SBons of the race, and the new type
that began with the creative act of God has been afterwards
evolved in the regular order of history? We may justly
reject as folly the individualism that looks to its own instincts
for absolute truth, and slights the revelations of God in his
tory. Nothing can be more unphilosophical, as well as un-
amiable, than the egotism and scorn with which upstarts put
themselves wholly upon their own intuitions in religion, and
set aside the convictions and usagers that affirm and repeat the
communication of God with mankind.
But why wonder at the excesses of the new school, when
we remember their grounds of provocation and the onesided-
ness that is so characteristic of our poor human nature ? We
certainly can remember times in which we, who have since
learned what seems to us a broader and deeper wisdom,
were provoked by the prevalence of a belief that seemed to
regard revelation and inspiration wholly as facts of the past,
and to resolve religion solely into the scholarly interpretation
of words that were once vouched for by miracles. Religion
40 TJie American Unitarian Pulpit. [July,
was made wholly scholastic and documentary, as if God once

spoke to men, but had for ages ceased to speak ; and his Word
had surrendered its eternal prerogative to the words of the
sacred books. This has never been the faith of the living
Church, — never been the faith of the vital Unitarian clergy;
yet public teaching once looked in that direction, and had a
narrowness that called forth the transcendental protest. That
protest did not come very conspicuously in the writings of
the fathers who died before 1855, and who are noticed in
these "Annals." Many of them indeed imply it; and the whole
Channing School is less a clique of doctrinaires than it is a
band of champions of the human mind against all forms of
oppression and exclusiveness. We do not regret the rise
of New-England Transcendentalism, little as we like any isms,
and wish it were more thorough-going and consistent and
constructive, instead of being so partial and destructive.
Let the new school not only affirm the intuitions of their indi
vidual reason, but look for the eternal light, the absolute
word, that is the just object of intuition. Let them not only
affirm the agency of the human will, but the reality of the
divine will or the Holy Spirit, in which the human will has its
true breath. Let them not only see God in nature, but in
history and in the immortal kingdom of God's children, or the
Ghurch. Let the new seekers carry out their principle thus,
and they will be good Christians instead of harsh egotists,
and will do much to enlarge and exalt the faith and charity of
the brotherhood.
In recording the impression which these " Annals " have
made upon us, we may be excused for going a little further
into the science of religious history than would seem to be
long to a review of lives so inviting in personal portraitures
and lessons. But why not own the fact that we have here
the precious sketches of some of the most advanced and inde
pendent body of Christian thinkers in America since the
beginnings of our American Church, and are enabled thus to
see the drift of religious opinion from the time when the old
colonial tradition began to show the action of the new condi
tions and tendencies ? May we not discern in the Puritan
churches, from the beginning, a certain want which to this

day their disciples have been trying to meet? It has been
acknowledged and accounted for in various ways, but has not
been ascribed as freely and fully as should be to leading his
torical causes. What is more evident than that the Christian
religion, alike in its own truth and in the dispositions of .the
people who first accepted it and made the original Christen
dom, presents two chief elements, — the one more Semitic,
the other more European or Indo-Germanic ? The Semitic
mind rested mainly in God, the Creator, as dwelling above
creation, and as communicating his will by specific messages,
with especial signs and wonders, and had an aversion to all
beliefs and usages that tended to bring him down among
men. The European or Indo-Germanic mind rejoiced to be
lieve in the indwelling of God in nature and man ; it tended
to multiply legends of his incarnations, and was in danger of
losing man and nature in the almighty presence or presences,
that is, in utter pantheism. The Mediaeval Church carried
this tendency so far as to crush human life under those
ghostly powers that claimed to incarnate God, and make the
confessional his oracle and the bread of the altar his actual
being. The modern age tried to throw off this weight, and
in various ways. Rome, in the Renaissance, went back to
Greek Humanism, and tried to shake off the terrific might of
her priestly Buddhism by the arts of Phidias and Apelles, and
the elegance and wit of Plato and Cicero. The Reformation
struck more at the root of the mediaeval superstition. Ger
many and England succeeded in dismissing the ancient
priestly despotism, without giving up the idea of the incarna
tion upon which it had grown up. The Puritans went, in
some respects, too far in their protest; and our American Con-
gregationalists — noble examples, as they were, of European
character, especially of Germanic independence — began in
a very thorough-going war with the European elements in
Christianity, and a surrender of faith, with little reserve, into
the keeping of the Semitic standards. The Old Testament
became the great authority ; and, in the interpretation of the
New Testament, the Gospel of John, with its glorious doc
4*
42 TJie American Unitarian Pulpit. [July*
trine of the Word of God manifest in man, and Christ as the

bread of life, was lost sight of in the Epistles of Paul and
their Old-Testament bearings. The Puritan Congregation-
alists fell back upon the Levitical law. While they, of course,
did not reject the incarnation, they interpreted it chiefly in
relation to the expiatory death of Christ ; thus slighting his
chief work as the living atonement, and moreover tending to
exaggerate the distinctive personality of the Son or Word by
presenting him more as a victim to the Father's justice than
a manifestation of the Father's love.
The idea of sin and the legal penalty of sin were the domin
ant idea of the Puritans ; and the great Catholic faith that
God came to be one with man, not merely to give an offering
for sin, but to complete his original work, and crown his crea
ture with the perfect presence, was too little pronounced.
The great jubilant hymns of the incarnation, such as the
" Te Deum " and " Gloria in Excelsis," were set aside ; and
penitential dirges took their place. Their children saw the
error ; and New-England Orthodoxy has, for over a century,
been trying to regain its Christian birthright of joy, — not
without considerable success.
Of course, the liberal Congregationalists felt the want, and,
in their way, tried to meet it. They repudiated or ignored
the Puritan ideas of total depravity, original sin, expiatory-
atonement, and irresistible grace, and sought to meet the
Levitical narrowness of the reigning creed by following in
the track of the old prophets. They looked not to the law
and the priests, but to the law and the prophets. The liberal
fathers tended to regard religion mainly as revealed law,
through chosen messengers backed by signs and wonders.
They were more an historical than experimental school, and
were rather disposed to regard God as having of old revealed
himself to men than as ever revealing himself. Their Arianism
and Arminianism were, in one respect, proofs of this tenden
cy, and signs of their unwillingness to believe that God him
self was directly one with man in Christ, and seeks to repeat
that union in every believer by his spirit. The re-action must
come ; the European mind within us must have its free play.
It did come, and is coming. For over a half-century, our

liberal minds have been feeling their way towards a more
profound and living sense of historical and vital Christianity,
and a more genial and devout conviction of God's indwelling
Word and Spirit. The historical school of theologians, in
spite of its occasional antagonism, has been manifesting grow
ing affinities with the transcendental school; and the Broad-
Church leaders, who rest their faith upon God in Christ,
regard the historical incarnation, not as the monstrous inter
ruption of the providential order, but as its rational consum
mation and the regular fulfilment of the plans of the Creator
for the perfection of his creatures. They regard the Holy
Spirit as the continual witness of the incarnation, and as the
continuity of its power in every faithful soul. They are not
discouraged by the extravagances of the transcendental
school, and are no more discouraged by the presumption that
claims for every man the power to know, by intuition, the
indwelling God, than they were by the old Orthodoxy that
denied to men any inspiration outside of the rigid letter of
Scripture.
Thoughtful Unitarians may take some comfort from the
very excesses of the champions of the doctrine of the divine
immanence, as leading to more sober and rational views ; and,
if some of our new lights seem to be very near to the Bud
dhist Pantheism, it is to be hoped, that they will take the old
road out of that darkness, and accept the true idea of incarna
tion, which affirms the indwelling God, and yet saves the per
sonal life and immortality of the individual soul. With us, in
signal cases, the great work of early Christianity has been
repeated ; and our finest and strongest minds owe their faith
and experience to a generous union of the European and
Semitic elements under conditions so peculiar and precious.
Without using any scholastic language, or venturing upon
any ambitious speculations, the solid sense of the Unitarian
denomination has adopted the broad policy, and has at once
retained its historical root, and given free scope to the new
growth. It has followed the method of God and Nature, and
been willing to evolve all its principles and powers fully, and
44 TJie American Unitarian Pulpit. [July,
allow true life to integrate apparent diversities. The Unita

rian denomination is thus showing itself to be a truly liberal
Christian body. In spite of a name which is often regarded
as narrow and sectarian, it will hold more and more generous
relations with the Church Universal without begging favor
from the old Orthodoxy, or lowering its tone to win adherents
from the new radicalism. It is to be hoped, that its leaders
will not be content with any easy acquiescence in old sys
tems, and, alike in their approachings and their protests, will
preserve all the freedom and variety and inspiration to which
God has called them. We do not see why there are not en
couraging grounds for a marked awakening of thought and
action in the body, now that so many old walls are broken
down, the new and old elements move so freely together, and
the whole nation is so ready to accept their views of man's
dignity, and to recognize them as having done at least their
share in the redemption of the country.
The times and these " Annals " bring before us all the
fathers of the Unitarian faith ; and who does not feel, that
the eighty men whose lives are here brought before us have
left truths and influences that have been working mightily in
the convictions and purposes that have given the Church its
inspiration, and the nation its triumph ? With them before us,
we shall not be in danger of losing either our freedom or our
faith. Let these precious historic powers, that are so mighty
in our letters, education, art, science, and religion, keep
and combine their forces, and help us in assimilating the new
elements of our civic and religious life ; and the God of our
fathers will be sure to be the God of the children, and the
new age will be mature fruit of the age that we are beginning
to call the past. Even their old antagonists we may learn to
interpret more charitably in our larger fellowship ; and, with
so thorough a Christian scholar and gentleman as Dr. Sprague
for our guide, we shall not find it impossible to see new
affinities between the two sections of the old Congregational
body, and renew the ancient fellowship of good-will, if we may
not restore the old order of association.
1865.] Horace Mann. 45
Art. III.— HOKACE MANN.
Life of Horace Mann. By his Wife. -Boston : "Walker, Fuller, & Co.
1865. pp. 602.
To a thoroughly successful biography, one of two quite

opposite" conditions is indispensable, — the biographer must
either have been in intimate personal relations with the sub
ject of his biography, or have known him solely through the
medium of other minds.
The advantage of the first condition is in the ability it
affords to present and interpret the external life and acts by
a private knowledge of the internal life and character ; thus
often harmonizing apparent contradictions, and explaining
many circumstances and transactions otherwise inexplicable.
A biography constructed under the second condition, while it
will lack this valuable element, and be wanting in the warmth
and lifelikeness of its portraiture, is likely to be free from
prejudice and personal bias, and to be more judicial in its
summings-up of character or performance.
The result under the first condition is similar to the effect
of a carefully modulated light on a picture : it brings out all
the evident beauties, and suggests others not so evident ; it
diminishes faults, not by concealing them, but by making
them foils to excellences. The second condition is as if the
same picture were placed out of doors in the full glare of
the unsparing sunlight : not only are its defects and beauties
brought out with equal distinctness, but it is robbed of its
perspective, and made to betray by the evident marks of the
brush, that it is only a picture after all. Any third condition
of partial acquaintance, eked out by the record of others, will
most likely combine in its results the infelicities, and not the
advantages, of the other two: as if, to continue the figure,
the painting were badly hung, — losing, on the one hand, the
advantages of a modulated light; and, on the other, that of
perfect illumination.
46 Horace Mann. [July,
The life of Horace Mann was one especially requiring the

former style of treatment. A man of strong nature, quick
perceptions, decided convictions, indomitable will, tenacity of
purpose ; a man impatient of half-measures, scorning all com
promise with expediency, so identifying his opponent with
what he believed to be the errors espoused by him, as to give
to every controversy the complexion and tone of a personal
contest, — it was particularly needful that we should be car
ried below the surface of fact into the current of motive and
principle, of general habit and private thought, that prejudice
might be dispelled, and justice done.
That the biographer has felt this is apparent from such pas
sages as the following : —
" When his is called a ' rugged nature,' because he could not tem
porize, and because he made great requisitions of men upon whom
were laid great duties, I see only his demand for perfection in others
as well as in himself ; and no man ever made greater requisitions of
self. He could forget his own interests when he worked for great
causes ; and he sometimes wished others, who had not his moral
strength, to do likewise. But the very requisition often evolved self-
respect to such a degree as to bring forth the power to do the duty, as
many a man who has come under his influence can testify ; and what
greater honor can we do to our fellow-man than to expect of him the
very highest of which he is capable ? It is true of him, that he had
not much charity for those who sinned against the light; but it is
equally true, that his tenderness for the ignorant and the oppressed
was never found wanting, and that the first motion of repentance in
the erring melted his heart at once. Love of man was so essentially
the impelling power in him, that it cost him no effort to exercise it ;
but he had no self-appreciation which made him feel that he could do
what others could not, if they would."
Mr. Mann's active life divides itself into three distinct

periods. As Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Educa
tion, as Representative in Congress, and as President of
Antioch College, he was called to the discharge of duties
more diverse and onerous than often fall to the lot of one
man ; and these duties were discharged with a painstaking
fidelity and self-sacrifice, an almost reckless indifference to
present reputation or personal comfort, an intelligence,

sagacity, and ripeness of wisdom which entitle him to the
gratitude and admiration of posterity.
Those familiar with the common-school system of Massa
chusetts in its existing condition only, will be amazed, not
alone at its low estate when Mr. Mann commenced his labors in
this field, but yet more at the state of public opinion thereon.
When, in November, 1837, the Secretary, in his lecturing
tour, reached Salem, —
" A friend who was present at this convention says it was remark
able to see the apathy with which it opened. One gentleman, who
made one of the first speeches, questioned the expediency of endeavor
ing to get the educated classes to patronize public schools. . . .
" Another gentleman said he thought, that, preliminary to all things
else, the Secretary should go round the State, and pass a day in every
public school in it, and then make a report of their condition.
" After several sapient speeches like this had been made, Mr. Mann
rose, and said, that, if the gentleman who made the last proposition
would take the trouble to do a short sum in arithmetic, he would find
that it would take sixteen years for the Secretary to do this work, if
he never intermitted one day. A general stir in the assembly inti
mated, that suddenly the immensity of the work to be done struck
their minds for the first time."
It would be easy to fill pages with similar extracts from

Mr. Mann's Journal or letters, showing either the deadening
torpor on the subject of education with which the Secretary
had to contend, or the active and often virulent partisan or
theological opposition to his plans, and indeed to the whole
conception and theory of the Board of Education as consti
tuted.
In the Journal, under date of Sept. 15, 1840, we find: —
" "Wellfleet ! a miserable, contemptible, deplorable convention.

This morning, on arriving, I found that not the slightest thing had
been done by way of arrangement ; absolutely nothing. To-morrow
I will shake the dust from off my feet in regard to this place. Thus
far I have found things in a deplorable condition in this county. How
will it be ten years hence ? Such a state of things was not to be an
48 Horace Mann. [July*
ticipatcd anywhere in Massachusetts. But I see every day how much

is to be done. On Wednesday, the 16th, I came, through Eastham,
Orleans, and Brewster, to Dennis. Visited several schools and school-
houses, and found both schools and schoolhouses very miserable."
Again, the locality being Pittsfield : —

" Oct. 2. The day of shame is over. At ten o'clock, the time
appointed for the convention, not an individual had come into the
place. At half-past eleven, eight or ten made their appearance from
other towns, who, with about a dozen on the spot, constituted the
convention. This afternoon, I lectured to about a dozen women and
some hundred men ; and, immediately after I got through, the com
pany dispersed like a flock of birds that have been shot into."
Five years later, Mr. Mann had appointed a Teachers' Insti

tute at the same place.
" When he arrived in Pittsfield, and entered the schoolroom
assigned for the purpose (all the common schools were in vacation),
at seven in the morning, to make arrangements, he found the room
had been left unswept, and had not been put in order for his reception.
A hundred pupils, the teachers of schools, were expected at nine
o'clock. Governor Briggs, then actual Executive of the State, who
felt great interest in Mr. Mann's plans, and had accompanied him to
the schoolhouse, borrowed brooms in a neighboring house ; and the
two gentlemen swept and dusted the room, and had all things in order
at the appointed hour."
The Journal from which these extracts are made was per
severed in many years. It is a record of facts of inestimable
value, not only as illustrating Mr. Mann's life, but as shedding
much light upon our general educational and national affairs,
during the whole period which it covers. It is of yet greater
importance as illustrating the interior structure of Mr. Mann's
mind and heart, the motives which actuated him, the hopes
and fears, the incentives and discouragements which in turn
had dominion over him. No more triumphant vindication can
be made or is needed of the sincerity and disinterestedness of
his labors, or of his essential humanity, kindness of heart,
affectionateness, and consideration for the rights and opinions
of others. Mr. Mann has been accused of hardness, of bitter
ness and rancor, of an unscrupulous and remorseless temper

in pursuing his opponents. It has been said, that he so iden
tified abstract right with his conception of the right in specific
cases, as to regard opposition to his views as hostility to
established and immutable principles ; and resisted such oppo
sition accordingly. That he had all the ardor of an intense
nature, and a highly sensitive, nervous organization, is doubt
less true. That, plunging into whatever enterprise for the
time engaged him, with an enthusiasm and devotion which
knew no limits of effort, either in attaining information or
working out results, short of utter exhaustion of the subject
or of himself, or both, he was impatient of the shallow criti
cisms which questioned his conclusions, or impugned his
motives, or resisted his innovations, and used his remarkable
powers of satire and personal denunciation in defence of
what he believed right and true, is beyond question. But no
candid person can read this Diary and private correspond
ence, revealing as it does the inner workings of his mind,
betraying his underlying motives, reasons, plans, and desires,
and displaying all the minutice of fact, circumstance, condi
tion, and obstacles, impossible to be known at the time by
others than himself, but which so manifestly colored and
controlled all his actions, without a constantly increasing
respect and admiration.
On the 1st of May, 1843, Mr. Mann sailed for Europe to
visit European schools. The educational results of this tour
were wrought into his Seventh Annual Report. As he
remarks in a letter to Mr. George Combe, —
" My Report caused a great stir among the Boston teachers : I
mean those of the grammar schools. The very things in the Report
which made it acceptable to others made it hateful to them. The
general reader was delighted with the idea of intelligent, gentlemanly
teachers ; of. a mind-expanding education ; of children governed by
moral means. The leading men among the Boston grammar-school
masters saw their own condemnation in this description of their
European contemporaries, and resolved, as a matter of self-preserva
tion, to keep out the infection of so fatal an example as was afforded
by the Prussian schools. The better members dissuaded, remon-
vol. lxxix. — 5th s. vol. xtii. no. i. 6
50 Horace Mann. [July*
strated, resisted ; but they are combined together, and feel that in
union is their only strength. The evil spirit prevailed. A commit
tee was appointed to consider my Report. A part of the labor fell
into the worst hands. After working at the task all summer, they
sent forth, on the 1st of September, a pamphlet of a hundred and
fifty-four pages, which I send you, and leave you to judge of its char
acter. I was then just finishing my Annual Abstract, a copy of
'which I send you, and which I commend to your attention for its
extraordinary merits. As soon as the preparation of the Abstract
was complete, which was my recreation during the hot days of sum
mer, I wrote a ' Reply to the Boston Masters.' "
This was the inception of the well-known contest, of which

many interesting particulars appear in succeeding pages of
the Life.
Mr. Mann was almost unequalled in his capacity for unre
mitting labor. He could " toil terribly." Says his biogra
pher, —
" During all his educational life, Mr. Mann had never allowed
himself one day of pure recreation. If he made a visit to a friend,
some educational errand was sure to lie in ambush, or some plea to
be entered for the furtherance of his cherished plans. He had not
the art of lying fallow, and thus gathering new strength for labor.
His loye of children was the only natural outlet for his native hilarity ;
and this blessed resource was all that saved him when the outside
world seemed bent upon harassing him. He never could turn his
back upon them : others had to defend him from their loving inroads,
hunt them in his study, and pick them off his writing-desk, and out
of the back of his chair, where they would be found perched."
Of Mr. Mann's career in Congress, to which he was
nominated in March and elected in April, 1848, as the imme
diate successor of John Quincy Adams, we shall say little.
The principal points of interest in that career are well
known ; the Webster controversy, the contests on the Texas
boundary, the Wilmot proviso, and the Fugitive-slave Bill,
being the most prominent. Of the letters written at that
time, we are told : —
" Many remarks upon Mr. Webster are published in these letters,
because the spirit in which Mr. Mann held up his testimony against
him is often misrepresented. In his subsequent life, he often said,

that, if he had never done any thing else purely for the love of truth
and his country, the course he had pursued in regard to Mr. Webster
had the sanction of his later conscience and judgment ; that he acted
consciously against his own immediate interests ; and that society
would finally justify him, though he never expected justice from the
men who followed so closely in Mr. "Webster's footsteps in sacrificing
the cause of freedom and truth for party, or political or personal con
siderations.
" On the day when he left home to take his first letter against Mr.
Webster to the printer, he said, ' I am going to do the most reckless
thing, on my own account, which I have ever done, in publishing this
letter. A thousand of the most prominent men in Massachusetts
will never speak to me again. But I must do it ; and I shall proba
bly follow it up with more.' "
It is instructive and encouraging to read the record of this

Congress, so apparently given over to the very spirit of
darkness, passing act after act, which, to the small band of
loyal antislavery men, seemed to " put back the cause of free
dom half a century," and contrast it with the record of the
Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Congresses, just closed, and
which has been so admirably summed up by Senator Wilson.
While Mr. Mann was performing his duties in Congress
with his accustomed zeal and devotion, he was not unmindful
of his first love. For a season he retained the duties of his
Secretaryship, and was in constant correspondence with
teachers and others on educational matters ; occasionally
delivering lectures before associations of young men, which
gained for him the warmest encomiums of friends and stran
gers.
As early as May, 1852, overtures were made to him with
reference to the Presidency of Antioch College ; and, on the
15th of September following, he was chosen President of that
Institution ; being the same day also nominated for Governor
of Massachusetts, by a convention of the " Free Democracy,"
assembled at Lowell.
It is impossible to approach this period of Mr. Mann's life
without sadness and pain. The sacrifice of personal comfort,
and of the society of cherished friends; disappointment in the

condition of matters at his new field of labor ; discouraging
apathy among the responsible friends of the college; personal
opposition from some of the officers of the institution ; the
almost incredibly low tone of society, and the vulgar, not to
say boorish, habits and manners of many of those with whom
he was thrown in daily contact; and, finally, the deplorable
financial failure of the enterprise, just when all the other
obstacles were nearly surmounted, — form a burden of discour
agements, painful even to read of, disheartening to the most
sanguine and buoyant temperament, insupportable by any
one of Mr. Mann's organization. It is no wonder he sank
under it.
We make a few brief extracts from this part of the
biography, to illustrate the various drawbacks under which
the enterprise was prosecuted : —
" The ambitious brick towers of Antioch College were the first
objects to be seen on approaching the spot, and its unfinished aspect
was symbolical of the unripe condition of all its affairs. . . . The
stumps of the trees still remained standing at the very threshold of
the college. . . . No house had been built for his accommodation,
as had been promised ; nor had he received any intimation of the
fact. No provision had even been made for a temporary residence of
ten persons. ... It was long before the college-building was put
into comfortable order. It was a year before any provision was made
to furnish fresh water to the students, who were obliged to walk a
quarter of a mile with their pitchers to procure a draught of the clear
article. . . . Many cold weeks elasped, after the opening of the col
lege, on the 5th of October, before the stoves arrived which were to
warm either the main college-building, or the close dormitories of the
students (ventilation having been entirely ignored in the structure).
. . . Mr. Mann persisted in presiding over the common table, hoping
by his presence to give a better tone to the manners of the young
people, which, by all indications, would otherwise have disfigured the
establishment. . . . His presence insured order and decency at the
public tables ; and for this end he continued to deprive himself and
family, for the first year, of the luxury of any private life, a measure
of which he might have enjoyed through the privilege of a private
table. •
" But he could not prevent the Ohio pigs from walking through the
dining-room, as there were no fences around the college-buildings, no
doors to the hall, and no appointed homes for the animals. Water
stood over shoes between the main college-building and the dining-
hall (where there is a covered arcade in the picture), so deep that
boards floated on it. . . . The disaffection of the superintendent still
delayed the building of the college-manse ; and his uncomfortable
quarters, the self-denial he practised about personal comforts (for only
in the privacy of his own bed-chamber would he partake of a little
food that he could digest, furtively prepared in an inconvenient man
ner), the absorption of every moment of his time (for no waking hour
was his owu), and the anxiety he began to feel lest the institution
would become bankrupt, proved too much for Mr. Mann ; and,
towards the end of the first year, he was laid upon a bed of suffering,
from which only his iron resolution finally roused him. . . . The
seats at the tables were round, four-legged stools ; and Mr. Mann
would not have a chair for himself, even after some ladies of the
teaching corps ventured upon that innovation for their own accommo
dation, and at their own expense. . . . Many laughable incidents
growing out of the primitive simplicity of log-cabin life at the West,
made the Eastern residents in this hitherto uncultured region realize
the difference between the two states of society. Mr. Mann, in his
Western lecturing tours, had often slept in the one apartment of a
log-cabin (the owner worth, perhaps, a hundred thousand dollars), in
which a row of beds were turned down at night to accommodate the
household, guest, and all : therefore he was not alarmed when a very
demure young lady — not particularly young, but a student of the
college — came to make the request that she might make up a bed on
the floor of her apartment for her brother-in-law, who had come to
visit her."
The theological composition of the Board of Managers

added to his embarrassment : —
" The body of the Christian denomination was represented by men
of limited education and narrow views, but a little in advance of the
general ignorance, and who cared more for the advancement of their
sect than for the advancement of learning and virtue. Mr. Mann
accepted ignorance as one of the evils he must necessarily combat.
He did not despise it : he only pitied it, and bent eyery energy to re
moving it. But he had no respect for bigotry."
6*
The low state of morality among the students was a source

of infinite anxiety to Mr. Mann ; and his labors in public and
private, to elevate and strengthen the moral sense of his
young friends, could only have been performed by one who
felt deeply his personal accountability for every moment of
his time : —
" Many a student was dismissed from his institution for the vice
of persistent lying, — not always publicly, but winnowed out through
private admonition to friends ; for that was the most hopeless form of
youthful vice in his eyes, and he did not think it right to allow its
contaminating influence in such a community. Our national vice of
intemperance he treated like a physician, and shared with his students
the vigils held over the few cases that came to an alarming crisis in
the institution."
The financial condition of the college, meanwhile, was
deplorable ; and the various letters of Mr. Mann show how
heavily the burden of this perplexity pressed upon him. In
a letter of Oct. 16, 1857, he remarks, —
" There must be some reason that draws so many students here,
notwithstanding the horrid pecuniary death we have been dying for
four years, and notwithstanding every student who came was not with,
out some reason to believe that the college would tumble down on his
head. ... I am living on short allowance ; have not had a cent from
the college for a year and a half ; and it costs me about two thousand
dollars a year to keep up my ' public house.' "
The " reason " referred to, it is not difficult to surmise.
Indeed, the insight afforded by these letters into the working
condition of the institution is convincing as to its admirable
management. Never was so great a success coupled with so
mortifying and disgraceful a failure.
The following extract from a letter to Rev. S. J. May,
Feb. 27, 1858, is in pleasant contrast to the condition of things
a few years before, and indicates the effect of Mr. Mann's
paternal watchfulness and care: —
" On the east side of our grounds, and immediately adjoining them,
is a farm of four hundred acres, with garden, vineyard, and orchard
of twenty or thirty in addition. On the north-west, Judge Mills has
a large flower and fruit garden. On the south-west, a hundred and
fifty rods from our doors, a Frenchman raises choice fruits for the
market. Not one of these for two years has lost an apple or peach or
gcape. . . . Our dormitory, nearly filled with male students, has no
tutor or proctor or overseer. In study-hours, it is as quiet as your
house. We have no rowdyism, no drinking of intoxicating liquors,
no gambling or card-playing ; and we have nearly succeeded, notwith
standing the inveteracy of these habits at the West, in exorcising pro
fanity and tobacco."
The pecuniary failure of the college seems to have been
inevitable from the beginning. In a letter dated Aug. 18,
1858, Mr. Mann writes : —
" The college was bankrupt on the day it opened, — miserably
bankrupt : but its moneyed accounts had been kept in such a manner,
that the fact of its utter bankruptcy was not then known, and could
not be to any but its agent ; and, if he knew it, he kept it to himself.
" The scholarship system, as here undertaken, was a ruinous and
suicidal system. It undertook to give a college education perpetually,
without interruption, for six dollars a year ! The children learning
A B C in this town have paid that sum per quarter since I have been
here.
" Now, the college being bankrupt, secretly so, when it was opened,
and the scholarships being too few in number to bear one-half its
expenses, the trustees administered it for four years, hoping that dona
tions, &c, would rescue it, but running in debt all the time. At last,
all plans for its relief having failed, and the public having lost all
confidence in its pecuniary management, so that all donations ceased,
there seemed to be no alternative but to assign the property for the
payment of its debts."
Mr. Mann's fatal illness fell upon him immediately after the
extraordinary labors incident to the graduation of the class
of '59. The memoir closes with his Baccalaureate Address of
1859. It is full of the author's felicity and fertility of illus
tration, and his brilliant antithesis. Some lines might be
quoted as epigrams : for instance, that describing an unworthy
member of the legal profession as " a pettifogger, a chicaner, a
picaroon, — one whose study and life it is to throw the cloak
of truth over the body of a lie;" and this, "The United
States are mighty, but they are not almighty." We copy the
concluding words of solemn and genuinely religious ap

peal : —
" Tou are in the kingdom of a Divine Majesty who governs Iris
realms according to law. By his laws, it is no more certain that fire
will consume, or that water will drown, than that sin will damn.
Nor is it more sure that flame will mount, or the magnetic needle
point to the pole, than it is that a righteous man will ascend along a
path of honor to glory and beatitude. These laws of God pervade
all things, and they operate with omnipotenTitrrce: Our free" agency
consists merely in the choice we make to put ourselves under the
action of one or another of these laws. Then the law seizes us, and
sweeps us upward or downward with resistless power. If you stand
on the great table-land of North America, you can launch your boat
on the head-waters of the Columbia, or the Mackenzie, or the St.
Lawrence, or the Mississippi ; but the boat, once launched, will be
borne towards the selected one of the four points of the compass, and
from all the others. If you place your bark in the Gulf Stream, it
will bear you northward, and not southward ; or though that stream
is as large as three thousand Mississippis, yet you can steer your bark
across it, and pass into the region of the variable or the trade winds
beyond, to be borne by them.
" If you seek suicide from a precipice, you have only to lose your
balance over its edge, and gravitation takes care of the rest. So you
have only to set your head right by knowledge, and your heart right
by obedience, and forces stronger than streams or winds or gravita
tion will bear you up to celestial blesseduess, Elijah-like, by means as
visible and palpable as though they were horses of fire and chariots
of fire.
" Take heed to this, therefore, that the law of God is the supreme
law. The judge may condemn an innocent man ; but posterity will
condemn the judge."
It may be that the volume from which we have so freely
quoted will not convert the numerous educational or political
opponents of Mr. Mann into admirers and friends. But they
cannot fail to do very much towards placing in its just and true
light before the world a life which, for untiring service in the
cause of human elevation and advancement, for unswerving
devotion to truth, justice, and righteousness, and for utter
disregard of personal considerations in the pursuit of duty, —
is among the finest examples in our history.
1865.] Forsyth's Cicero. 57
Art. IV.— FORSYTH'S CICERO.
Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero. By William FoRsrrn, M.A., Q.C.,

Author of " Hbriensius," " Napoleon at St. Helena, and Sir
Hudson Lowe," " History of Trial by Jury," &c, and late Fellow
of Trinity College, Cambridge. In two vols. With Illustrations.
New York : Charles Scribner & Co., 1865.
The biographers of Cicero may be divided into two classes,

according as they have aspired to exhibit the perfection or to
expose the defects of his character. Mr. Forsyth endeavors
to reconcile the contradictions of both classes, and, unbiassed
by a theory, accepting the facts of his history as they present
themselves, to depict the orator and the man alike in his little
ness and his greatness. And though he has produced in
many respects an interesting book, however much it may be
lacking in that fulness of detail and that vivid portraiture
which are so necessary in a great historical work, yet, in a
critical point of view, his success has not been great. If his
work has the merits, it has also the defects, of brevity. If it
may claim to be occupied exclusively with the personage it
portrays, it suffers, nevertheless, from the want of that back
ground in the circumstances and condition of the times with
out which an ancient writer or statesman must always remain
to us but a shadowy form, or at best a marble figure.
Given his letters and diaries, it is comparatively easy to
record the life of a modern writer. His words and his works
speak for him ; but then, on the other hand, it is harder to
determine his place in literature, to estimate his influence
as transitory or permanent, to judge much or at all of the
degree to which posterity will accept our applause or remem
ber our blame. But when two thousand years are gone,
when the civilization he helped to mould, and the religion he
attempted to explain, have passed away with the very race to
which he belonged, the statesman stands in an altered rela
tion. If he is remembered at all, it is because he was pre
58 Forsyth's Cicero. [July,
eminent in his day in illustrating the splendor or in shaping

the career of his nation and his age. It is not merely his
own independent merits, but his connection with the history
of his time, which interest us. The poets, indeed, and his
torians, we value for the beauty or the importance of their
works. But the orator and statesman and general cannot be
separated from the people they lead, are one with the move
ments they stimulate or control.
Mr. Forsyth devotes his book almost wholly to a sketch of
Cicero's political career, to the causes he defended and the
orations he spoke. There is indeed an effort, and it is claimed
to be one of the objects of the book, to exhibit him in the
privacy of domestic life, to portray the " gentleman " and the
father ; but there is little allusion to that other claim which
Cicero has upon our regard as a man of letters, no analysis of
his literary merits, and no representation of his philosophical
position. In this respect, therefore, we think the book defect
ive.- It is, however, juster than Middleton's Life ; and, for
popular use, availing itself as it does of the researches of
later scholars, especially of the exhaustive learning of Dru-
mann, it is both trustworthy and entertaining. And we are
glad to feel assured, by the enterprise of the American pub
lishers in reprinting it in bo exquisite a manner, that the
interest of our people in the great men and the famous ages
of antiquity is in no wise abated ; but that we are wise enough
to be ever willing to learn the lesson which is taught by the
greatest of the old republics in its fall, to the greatest of
the new in its rise.
Without question, the age of Cicero was one of the most
dramatic, as it was one of the most important, in the
history of Rome. In the year in which he was born,
the war with Jugurtha was ended by Marius, and the
jealousies out of which sprang the civil wars that decided
the fate of Rome began their deadly work. From beginning
to end, his life was a tragedy. Bred in all the traditions of
the Republic, proud of its glories, anxious for its safety, he
lived to witness both the disappointment of his ambition and
the overthrow of his country. It was but eight months
before his death that he uttered those words, in one of his

orations against Antony, which may be taken at once as the
explanation of his career and the confirmation of his glory, —
" Such is my fate, — I cannot conquer without the Republic,
nor be conquered except with it." Yet nothing surprises us
so much in the contemplation of his life as his utter inability
to apprehend the real condition of the Roman people, and the
inevitable tendencies of the Roman government. Caesar did
not create the empire : the need of empire created Caesar.
It is impossible to read the accounts which have survived
of the profound corruption of the age, of the rapid rise of the
factions which drenched the Roman streets with blood, and
the terrible nature of the vices which filled the Roman palaces
with horrors, without a feeling of relief as one passes from
the anarchy of the Republic to the order of the Empire.
The wonder, rather, is that civil society itself could endure
the burden of this general profligacy and this wild ambition.
But that a man like Cicero, who had studied in the schools of
Greek philosophy, and been taught the secrets of Roman
statemanship, should have failed to appreciate the altered
relations with the world into which conquest and wealth and
luxury had brought the Roman people, is a fact of sad and
singular significance. In a rude way, Polybius had indicated,
almost a century before, the centralizing office and the exalted
destiny of Rome, in its relations with the countries about the
Mediterranean, and in its influence upon the general condi
tion of the world. But Cicero seems never to have got
beyond the ancient traditions. He saw in the Roman Repub
lic a vast power, in the city of Rome an august and per
manent theatre, for the acquisition and the display of honors.
He was ever looking back. In the midst of terrible convul
sions, when there was no longer a question whether there
should be a Republic, but only who should be the despot,
Cicero, returning from his Cilician province, hovered on the
outskirts of Rome, and wandered up and down the country
with his laurelled lictors, vainly seeking the honors of a tri
umph, at that moment so pitiable a spectacle, so contemptible
a shadow of the old greatness and glory of Rome.
60 Forsyth's Cicero. [July*
A persuasive orator and a brilliant writer, Cicero was want

ing in the qualities which go to make up the statesman, —
that rarest of all characters on the stage of human history.
He lacked foresight and judgment, not of individual character
and particular acts, but of the spirit of the age and the tend
ency of events. The example of the past was ever before
him. He could not see that the past was gone irrevocably
with the ancient loyalty and virtue. Never sure that he was
right, he lacked the firmness to adhere to the course he had
once taken. In the closing period, indeed, of his career, in
his terrible denunciations of Antony, and his adherence to
the cause of the Senate, he showed a moral courage and a
strength of will great enough to redeem many errors and to
excuse much adulation. But for the rest, all through his life,
— more thoroughly known to us from the correspondence
which has been so amply preserved, than that of any other
statesman or writer of antiquity, — his weakness and vanity
and irresolution are everywhere apparent and everywhere
painful. " He bore none of his calamities as a man should,"
said Livy, " except his death."
With a vigorous understanding and a good memory, he had
also that vivid imagination which lends so great a charm to
eloquence. Instar sui generis, it is difficult to compare him
either with ancient or modern orators. No one has disputed
his claim to be the greatest wit of antiquity ; and there was
a freshness in his thought and style which we should hardly
expect in our day from an overworked advocate or the har-
rassed leader of a party. But, as he says himself in the Tus-
culan Disputations, it is with the mind as with the soil, — the
most fruitful must be cultivated, otherwise it will produce
nothing. And he never forgot the boast of Solon, that he
grew old in daily learning; or the precept of Aristotle, that
as the horse is made for running or the ox for ploughing,
so man is created, as it were a mortal god, for activity and
knowledge. As Pliny said of him, he was indeed a light in
the field of learning ; and the laurel he really won was worth
more than the triumphs he sighed for, by as much as it is
nobler to extend the circle of intellectual activity than the
bounds of an empire. And if, as Plato said, and he was fond

of repeating, one bond binds together all knowledge, Cicero,
more than any of the ancients, had exhausted, at least in am
bition, all branches of study : to use his own words, "he wrote
more books than others could read." What the elder Scipio
Africanus said of himself was true of Cicero : he was never
less idle than during his leisure, and never less alone than
when solitary. It is common to charge him with selfishness ;
but, for our part, we can find but little of that weakness in
him. His nature was too much Greek and too little Roman
to live for himself. Though he must have read in Euripides
how the poet hated the wise man who was not wise for his
own benefit, he acted rather upon the precept of Plato, that
we are not to live for ourselves, but for our country and our
friends.
But, with his immense mental activity and his commanding
fame, there were two things which neutralized his great power.
He hated war : nothing, as Pliny said, was more repugnant
to him ; and he could not in the least understand the future.
It was said of his prophecies in the civil wars, that the con
trary of what he had predicted almost always occurred. Un
like Caesar, therefore, comprehending neither the present nor
the future, he had no practical influence upon the course of
events. Seeking the causes of the political decline, not in the
general corruption, but in the ambition of single men ; blind
to the fact that it was not the popular or patrician party that
sought for mastery, but Caesar and Pompey, — he clamored for
the execution of the criminal, in order, by so extirpating the
crime, to secure the Constitution and save the State. Cati
line was killed, but the ferment was worse than before.
Caesar perished, but slavery lived. The remembrance of the
Gracchi, of Sulpicius and Marius and Sulla, made Cicero
none the wiser. He was never weary of preaching death to
usurpers, and never weary of exulting in their fall, though he
saw that tyranny survived the tyrants ; that whosoever con
quered, the Republic was dead.
Yet, in considering the life of Cicero, while we cannot but
pity him for his delusion, we are also not to forget the condi-
VOL. XXXIX. — 6lH 8. VOL. XVII. NO. I. 6
tion of the age in which he lived, when every Roman legate

felt himself above monarchs, and even Cato found it not out of
place that a city like Antioch should greet him as king ; his
disgust being only that they intended the same honor for a
freedman of Pompey. Nor are we to forget the fact, that, if
worse than Sulla, Ca?sar could affirm that one might do vio
lence to the law in order to assure his supremacy ; and yet if
even Caesar, with his vast genius for affairs, with his steady
reliance upon his genius and his destiny, " the greatest name
in history," as Mr. Merivale claims, could not find his way out
of that terrible labyrinth of political contradictions and moral
death in which the Republic was breathing out its life, it was
not likely that any one else could find it ; — if Caesar, more
over, could declare to the assembled senate that the immor
tality of the soul was a vain chimera, yet could crawl up the
steps of the Capitoline Temple on his knees, to appease the
Nemesis which frowns upon earthly prosperity, there was not
much to be hoped for the superstition of the masses, when
religion had so wholly died out of the hearts of their leaders.
Notwithstanding his political ambition and his philosophical
tendencies, it was to the character of a perfect orator that
Cicero mainly aspired ; for in oratory — triumphant at last
over that relentless prejudice which, in the midst of the Punic
wars, dictated a decree expelling all philosophers and rhetori
cians from the city — was found not merely the best avenue
to the great distinctions of the State, but to that power over
men which was as the water of life to the thirsty Roman soul.
Taught by the best teachers of his age, — by Scaevola, in that
stern science of jurisprudence whose original records were
but the simple laws of the Twelve Tables, which, with regard
to the source and principles of equity, as he himself makes
Cra8sus say in the De Oratore, were worth more than the
libraries of all the philosophers ; so well by the poet Archias
in belles lettres, that, if he had not been called to other tasks by
his restless ambition and the exigencies of the times, pos
terity might have compared him with Virgil ; by Phaedrus
and Philo and Diodotus in the doctrines of the Epicureans and
the Academy and the Porch, — there is a touching beauty
I865.] Forsyth's Cicer.o. 63
and nobility in the fervor and courage with which, at the age
of twenty-six, reckless of danger, with no presentiment as
yet of the bloody experience that was to come, he leaped from
the ranks to challenge Sulla himself to combat as it were,
in the cause of Roscius, the mere defending of whom was itself
an accusation of the dictator. And from this first youthful
success, all through that long train of orations which followed
the accusation of Verres, — which have remained to this day
almost unrivalled monuments of eloquence, — the controlling
purpose of his life was to obtain oratorical success : but, to
obtain it, let us always generously remember in spite of his
vanity and pride, in the cause of justice against despotism, of
learning against superstition, of morality and honor against
barbarism and corruption, as ready to grapple with Horten-
sius, when no one else dared to dispute that great orator's
title of King of the Forum, as he was to brave the Scipios
and the Metelli, though backed by a swollen and defiant
aristocracy ; ever bold enough to laugh at the menaces, and
ever pure enough to scorn the bribes, of cities and provinces
and kingdoms, bidding for existence at the hands of the
Roman rabble. He had seen Marius enter upon his seventh
consulship, and had witnessed the bloody proscriptions of
Sulla : at the battle of Mitylene he had detected the rising
genius of Caesar, and watched the unfolding of the talent of
Pompey in the war against the Cilician pirates. But there
was nothing in all the terrors of the time which he was not
willing to face, — the whirlwind that was gathering over the
State, the rushing tides of corruption that were sweeping
away all private virtue, — if so be he might uphold that sacred
inheritance, the accumulated treasure of nearly seven hun
dred years of conquest and rule, that ark of the constitution
in which were garnered the liberties of Rome. It was for
this purpose and with this hope, not as has been so unjustly
charged in order to make his oratorical genius subservient to
his political ambition, that he came forward to recommend
Pompey for the conduct of the war against Mithridates, — that
veteran chief who for twenty years had set at defiance the
whole power of Rome, and defeated army after army of its
64 Forsyth's Cicero. [July*
best legions, men who had marched under the eagles of Marius
against the Cimbri, and fought the Samnites under Sulla.
But the time soon came when dispassionate reasoning and
polished wit were powerless ; when a fiercer invective and a
louder tone were wanted to make the orator heeded amidst
the roar of the multitude that surged so madly up against the
rostra. Beneath all the luxury of the nobles, and all the tur
bulence of the people, lurked the terrible elements of revo
lution and ruin. The lighter graces of his earlier efforts
disappeared; and when the chief conspirator — so well de
scribed in the brief words of Sallust, " Magna vi et animi et
corporis, sed ingenio malo pravoque . . . alieni appetens, sui
profusus, ardens in cupiditatibus, satis eloquentiae, sapientiaB
parum " — fell fighting for his crime, he insisted, with a vehe
mence that amazes us upon the sacrifice of his associates, — a
sacrifice required by every consideration that bound a Roman
to defend his country; by the faith that animated the Decii, and
kept Cocles at his post on the Sublician bridge ; by the honor
that sent Regulus back to Carthage ; and by the justice that
in the dictatorship of Cincinnatus plunged the sword of Ser-
vilius into the body of Spurius Abala. Yet Pompey spoke no
more than the truth when he paid him the compliment of say
ing, that he should have conquered Mithridates in vain if
Cicero had not preserved the Capitol for his triumph. It can
hardty be doubted now, however, that Caesar— obedient to the
principle which Cicero himself so well lays down in the De
Officiis, " Sic multa quae honesta naturS, videntur esse, tem-
poribus fiunt non honesta " — took a wiser because calmer view
of the question in all its bearings. The laws of the Romans
were never sanguinary. The bloody code of Lycurgus was
repugnant to their nature. The prerogatives of a Roman
citizen were equally his pride and his protection ; and those
prerogatives seemed incomplete till' guaranteed by immunity
from capital punishment save in extreme cases, and those only
to be determined by the voice of the people. Exile was the
severest punishment that could be inflicted upon a Roman
citizen. Cicero himself, when evil fell upon him, so sadly for
getting at once his philosophy and his manhood, preferred
death at Rome to existence in Macedonia.
Of his love of virtue, and his devotion to truth, no one who

has made a thorough study of his life will ever doubt. That
withering invective against Vatinius in which abuse is shorn
of its grossness by taking the form of ridicule ; that satire,
more dreaded than personal insult, which made even Lentulus
and Cethegus quail ; that bold vindication of Milo, when the
ground was slippery under his feet with the blood of thirty
years of proscription, and the swords of Pompey gleamed in
his eyes ; the sturdy defence of Ligarius, which made even
Caesar's countenance change, as he presided at the trial, and
his limbs tremble, and the papers drop from his hands, while
Cicero's vivid picture of the horrors of Pharsalia recalled to
the dictator's mind the scene of one of his bloodiest triumphs,
— could have sprung only from the inteoise convictions of a
righteous soul. It was this earnestness, not bought with
a price, but spontaneous and genuine, which acquitted Mu-
raena, though impeached by the greatest lawyer of the time,
and in the oration for Archias pleaded the cause of letters
with a grace that was itself the most convincing argument ;
making every one feel, from that day to this, how the triumphs
of the mind are more glorious than those of arms, in that the
former make the memory of the latter eternal, — in that
the life of the past is in the remembrance of the living. And,
though in his outbursts against Catiline and Antony he
lowered his notions of senatorial dignity to a level with his
rage, we can never forget the patriotism so ardent and so per
sistent that pleads in excuse for all his vacillation, and, disarm
ing malevolence, mingles reverence for intellect with sympa
thy with virtue.
In his philosophical writings there is observable also the
same honesty and the same unwearied zeal to lift his country
men from their4 material pursuits to purer contemplations.
He grasps the practical maxims of the Epicureans and Peri
patetics and Stoics with the same sagacity that fathomed the
devices of Catiline. It was the aim of much of the Greek
thought to take man out of the world ; it was Cicero's to
regulate his life in it. Caring nothing for systems, which
were ephemeral, he made no attempt to adjust the operations
6*
of nature to his own theories of its origin. He was assiduous,

indeed, to traverse the whole field of philosophy ; but it was
in the true Roman spirit of tolerating all sects and belonging
to none.
It was a sage remark of Plato, which Cicero must have
pondered, that he who can overtake wisdom and attain a right
sense of things, though extreme old age should overtake him
first, is a happy man. Late in life, when reason as well as
experience had in a measure failed, he seems to have aban
doned the liberal principles of the Old Academy, which taught
the certainty of knowledge, for the sceptical tenets of the
New, which taught its absolute uncertainty ; but, though he
saw in general the futility of dogmas ; that, if the problem of
nature were not inexplicable, so many centuries of toil must
have contributed something to its solution, — still there were
obvious deductions of experience and reason in which no scep
ticism ever shook his faith. The being of God, and the im
mortality of the soul, — its separate existence after death in a
state of happiness or misery, — were quite as present verities
to him, when, at his Cuman villa overlooking the harbor of
Misenum and the shores of Baiae, he speculated upon the
nature of good and evil, as when, in the last sad hours of his
eventful life, betrayed and hunted down by a wretch whose
life he had saved, he stretched out his neck on the strand
at Formiae to the assassins of Antony. The three great
sects of Greece, whence all philosophy came, represented
to him the irresistible conclusions of the human mind, how
ever much encompassed with error, rather than any distinct
or logical systems ; but, driven from dogmatism and scep
ticism alike by the mutability and the permanence of nature
and experience, he was constrained to take refuge in
probability, which, if it did no more, at leâst did away all
presumption derived from nature against the existence of
God : and if Christianity, as has been maintained, is but a
sanction of the results to which the experience of man in vir
tue will lead him, assuredly we may claim for Cicero a place
among the purest and best of men.
1865.] The Ideal Church. 67
Art. V. — THE IDEAL CHURCH.
Among all current objects of attack and defence, none perhaps

awaken more strenuous antagonisms than those points of reli
gious administration which are comparatively static in their
character and operation. The fixity of doctrine and the per
severance of institutions provoke at once the zeal of those to
whom change means progress, and of those to whom it im
plies deterioration. The Church is upheld here, denounced
there, equally with a religious intention. To one, it is the
symbol of superstition ; to another, of enlightenment. To this
man, it means slavery and tyranny ; to that man, it intends
protection and deliverance. It is now a refuge, now a prison.
But where opposite parties, with equal piety and sincerity of
purpose, attack and defend the same thing, we may be sure
that there must be a misunderstanding on one side, if not on
both. Proximate objects may not only seem, but be, good for
one person, and hurtful for another. But the ideal objects of
the race represent what must seem good to all, in proportion
to their powers of discernment. When these, therefore, are
sincerely decried, it is reasonable for us to believe that they
are sincerely misunderstood.
When the man of progress affirms that the Church is a nui
sance, he merely considers it as an unchristian and irreligious
institution. The Romanist, the Episcopalian, shut up the
Church within their own limits. The Dissenting sects, per
haps, do the same. But liberal thought and religion are
bound to do better than this. These, in the little that is
accomplished, must take account of the great things at
tempted. From the poverty and partiality of the Church
actual, they must rise to the consideration of the Church
ideal, which is the true complement and explanation of the
real. It is with a view to such consideration that the sug
gestions following are offered.
First, the mediating or reconciling function of the Church.
The complexities of thought in all departments increase
68 Tlie Meal Church. [July,
so rapidly with the extension of culture, and the adoption

of every point recognized as sound suggests so many
possible directions into which opinion and effort may run,
that statements have to be examined, reviewed, and re
cast, and all the ideal fabrics of science and of society need
continual repair and occasional remodelling. For, while we
have but one foundation and one material for these ideal
structures, the progress of minds already active, and the con
version of inert into energetic natures consequent upon the
spread of education and its onward movement, continually
enlarge at once the resources and the requisitions of the
human mind, and require continual adjustments of the one
to the other. The inconstancy of human expression and opin
ion does not intrinsically affect the cardinal points upon which
the persuasions of the race rest. Opinion is but the chan
ging form of this persuasion, whose spirit does not change.
But the war of opinions does react upon the energy and
moral inspiration of the individuals professing and defending
them. Endless question brings doubt and disturbance. It
therefore becomes necessary that points of reconcilement
should be established, and that the separations of unavoidable
difference and dissent should be finally included in the classi
fication of a supreme and victorious harmony. The separa
tions and differences of men, their errors, passions, and
illusions, are too valuable in the dynamic economy of history
to admit of other than partial and temporary meetings and
adjustments. The actual segregation of human minds, pur
suits, and occupations, is indispensable to the co-operation and
efficiency of the race. Equally indispensable is a final unity
of interest and accountability. The administration of this
unity is the office of the Church.
That we must regard the authority and the direction of
morals as a unity will be clear to all who have given the sub
ject thought. And this unity of emanation causes, in its effi
ciency, a corresponding unity of reception. The Church
receptive represents this second or resultant unity. The
Church preceptive represents the primal unity. The Church,
in its totality, lies within and without the region of interest
and opinion, in which no two men, active or passive, have

absolutely the same attitude and object. The Church precep
tive lies within it ; her mission, doctrine, and object being a
single one. The Church receptive lies beyond in its action,
whose results are all capable of harmonization. But its faith
lies or reaches within the region of dispute. The mystical
bond of charity, which is the true spiritual sense of that
which is beyond bodily sense, gives man this perception of
the one divine from which results the ultimate oneness of the
human. So much for the status, or habitual and necessary
position, of the Church.
An intelligent recognition of the two great correlative
aspects of truth gives us the exceptional souls dedicated to
the culture of wisdom and piety. From the firs^named of
these classes the outer circle, or Church receptive, is continu
ally recruited. From the last-named, the Church preceptive
draws her saints and apostles. Between the two, the heathen
or alien region of personal object and activity is subject to
continual diminution ; and a slow process of Christianization
goes on, which gradually reclaims the extra-moral region of
mankind, giving to activity a new sanction, and to delight
a serene and eternal steadfastness. So the world all lies
between the centre and circumference of the Church; and the
change from an unconscious and inert, to a voluntary and
energetic membership, constitutes the whole truth of a reli
gious, as distinguished from an irreligious, experience.
Into this Church we are all born ; some of us in one way,
some in another. To create it forms no part of our office
or duty on earth. Its laws are eternal ; its necessities are
inevitable. The. greatest human intellect cannot modify
either the one or the other. But we can appreciate its laws,
and justify its necessities ; and, as far as we do so, we have
an intellectual part in the government of the world, and a
sympathetic part in its experience. But to these are our
offices limited. We can change no law, annul no result.
Bodies of men come together to create a Church, to make a
creed, a discipline of duty for themselves. There is no need
of this, and no room for it. Church, creed, and duty already
70 The Ideal Church. [July,
exist. Our true business is to find out where they are and
what they demand. Religion, therefore, is not an invention,
but a discovery.
We have said that religion is a discovery, not an invention.
This only with regard to its obligations. These are not arbi
trary, and are of no private interpretation. Without a fixed
standard of duty, social and personal, the coming-together of
men upon any ground whatever would be a moral Babel.
But the religious principle, in its efficiency, is a creative one.
The religion of each man, therefore, to be genuine, must have
in it something original and individual, not necessarily in doc
trine, but in experience. And the freedom and permission of
this experience is the only source from which the p6verty
of creeds can be filled up. For the Church preceptive can
only give a man the tools wherewith to build a religious life.
If he fail to build it, he, not the Church, is responsible. No
creed, whether burthened with dialectic subtilties, or strait-
ened by intellectual simplifications, can do more than acquaint
man with the highest recorded experience and intuition of
the race. The experience and intuition which constitute
personal religion must be built by him on the basis which
these supply. Those, therefore, who complain most bitterly
of the deficiencies of systems of belief and of religious
instruction in general, have left out of sight the work which
the individual himself must supply, and which, like the
processes of natural life, must be performed bv each for him
self.
We know indeed that the middle region of opinion has
been made to stand for the true sanctuary of the Church.
Upon this ground the passions of men have> attacked the con
sciences of their fellow-men. Blind themselves to the inner
light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,
they have been the leaders of those as blind as themselves.
The true insight which really links together the divine and
human has been contraband to their rule. But their rule has,
after all, been a temporal, not a spiritual one. The limits and
dogmas of their special Church have been swallowed up in
the mighty sweep and comprehension of the true Church.
They might build as high, and dig as deep, and fence off as
straitty, as they would ; the great centre, which is God, the
great circumference, which is man's recognition of Him, did
not change. The largest and mightiest organization the
world has ever seen may say, " There is but one Church, and
I am that Church." But the true Church rebukes her
through an hundred babes and sucklings of smaller dimen
sions. Everywhere is divine comfort, divine duty, divine
hope. Everywhere are men striving to honor the truth and
to help their fellow-men. And the true mother of souls
replies to her ambitious daughter, " There is but one Church :
it is enough for thee that thou art in it."
The true Church, then, is at once intra and extra-theologi
cal. Its true office is neither to intensify nor to eradicate the
differences of human thought, action, and intention ; but to
maintain a primal and a final unity beyond them all, whose
acknowledgment is the morality, and whose sway is the
moralization, of the human race.
The Ordinances of this Church necessarily take prece
dence of the separate prescriptions of sects and denomina
tions. In order that each of us may fill the sphere of bis
task and labor, it is necesssary that he should limit his imme
diate interest to the matter in hand. Your zeal for this
society or that, your co-operation in this scheme, your sup
port of this representative or advocate, is an artifice of
nature which for the time cuts you off from the generalities
of philosophical thought or moral consideration. But when
'do you enter the sanctuary of religion ? When are you
actively and consciously in the Church ? Not when you are
occupied with A's zealotism or B's latitudinarianism. It is
not while you are making an ingenious heaven and hell of
your own, fenced with curious intellectual devices for exclud
ing this man, and imprisoning that. It is when you let all
this drop, — your own sins and those of others, — and turn to
a far-reaching fact, which these cannot darken ; when the
peace and power of this contemplation make you believe in
the value of life, the dignity of conscience, and the efficiency
of conviction ; when the newly created worth and sacredness
in your own person make you aware of a similar worth and

sacredness as ideally existing in the persons of others.
Then, for the time being, you are in the Church; and so far as
the efforts of your active life are regulated by the influence
of those considerations, in so far you are acting and living in
the Church.
Hence we see why the mere discussion, adoption, and rejec
tion of opinions produces so little religious life, adds so little
to the moral power of the race. The fact that such a one is
wrong does not put you in the right. The narrowness of his
creed does not widen your heart. The satisfaction that you
take in contrasting the supposed justice of your views with
the supposed insufficiency of his is not a religious one. If
you wish to be in the Church, you had better not try to put
him out of it, since the first consequence of your true mem
bership will be your recognition of his. Nor will it do for
you to seize upon certain points of opinion, miscalled articles
of faith, and impose them either upon his recognition or upon
his repudiation. In the religionary dogmatism of mankind,
many things arc assigned to the jurisdiction of faith which
lie strictly within the province of opinion. All circumstances
established by evidence must be matters of opinion. It
is every man's right and duty to weigh and decide these for
himself. If he allow another man or set of men to decide
them for him, he only adopts the opinions of others, in accord
ance with a secondary opinion of his own. He will deal with
this class of facts according to his intelligence and opportun
ity, for neither of which he is responsible. They have not in
themselves power either to advance or retard the process of
his redemption from the absolute dominion of nature, and the
slavery of self. The power they have rests in their symbol
ical and sympathetic relation to religious truth ; and this is an
important, but not a primal power. But religious truths are
truths of reflection and of\consciousness. They have their
slow development in the region of human society. All their
steps prove to be necessary and sacred. Wisdom is justified
of all her children, — of her babes as well as of her full-grown
men. These truths elevate, enlarge, and enlighten opinion.
But they distance man's power of conception and of expres

sion too far to be adequately embodied in any thing that he
can utter or formulate. Their true embodiment will be found
in the sincerity of zeal, the disinterestedness of effort, and
the perseverance of hope and endeavor. Even these give
the ideal truth a very imperfect illustration.
The religious progress of the day proves to be more effi
ciently represented by the party dismissing traditional author
ity, than by that retaining it. The advance of human
intelligence in our time sees clearly that the conception of
the divine lies entirely beyond the question of the so-called
" supernatural." The divine is not historical, but intuitive ;
not demonstrated, but discovered. The unity and height of
persuasion by which a man builds out of human materials a
life of transcendent purity, piety, and power, is a divine fact.
But it is a fact of moral efficiency and of personal inspiration.
The literalness of the truth of conscience ; the simplicity of
the real values of life, and their surpassing delight; the
power of the human to apprehend standards of excellence far
beyond its experience, and to work after them; the capacity
and dignity of the weak as well as of flie strong, — these con
siderations were united in the splendors of Christianity.
They are beyond the resources of worship and the formulas
of doctrine. A life of patient, useful Christian days is evi
dence that the individual believed them. To give them full
expression and illustration was a task beyond his human
powers, and one never appointed him. «'
While the true progress of faith is from the temporary and
special, towards the substantial and eternal, one thing is to be
remembered ; viz., that the reality and exigency of this faith .
should leave us little time and energy to spare in attacking
the limitations of others. If we would show what religion is,
we must not waste too much of our power in showing what it
is not. Nor must we overlook the appropriateness of symbols
to truths that philosophy cannot formulate, nor language
express. The ideal philosophy, the only one of the present
day that will stand the test of time, acknowledges the sub
stantial justice of the modes of thought which created such
VOL. r.xxix. — 5th 8. VOL. XVII. NO. I. 7
74 Tlw Ideal Church. [July,
landmarks, while it removes the rubbish of their material

interpretation and slavish enforcement. True religion, in the
least cultured individual, brings that which is wiser and freer
than these, the mere bandages and envelopes of experience.
But, while there is religion in going beyond myths and sym
bols, to their meaning, we shall not necessarily find it in their
mere intellectual disproof and dismissal, especially where this
is imbittered by contempt and uncharity towards those who
still hold them. Such contempt and uncharity do not lie
within the scope of the true Church, either in its preceptive
or in its receptive function. To reform institutions, we must
first understand them. He who has never seized the delicate
sense, the moral truth, and spiritual justice veiled in the
hitherto popular theology, is not in a position to put any
thing better in its place. As a proof of this, we may assert,
that, in the denomination which admits the most liberal con
struction of religious dogmas, those most distinguished by
eflicient zeal have usually made the whole circuit of the
Christian faith, beginning at the literal and arriving at
the spiritual interpretation. " First that which is natural,
and afterward that which is spiritual." We have all a reli
gious as well as a physical childhood to pass through. Bap
tism comes before communion, and we must enter as infants
where we hope to abide as men.
In order that those who come after us shall inherit our pro
gress as well as our starting point, it becomes us to ask
what the true attitude of faith should be, for them and for
us. We need not fear to affirm, that it will be an attitude
intent, humble, and receptive, — intent upon the ever-new
. revelation of what each day leaves little understood, recep
tive of its great lessons, humble before the magnitudes of
duty and of possibility in which we fail, yet towards which is
the only outlook of the soul, shrouded and prisoned else in
the fallacies of self and of sense. This attitude will.leave us
little polemic bitterness towards others. Their shortcoming
and ours will not seem so very different, when measured by
the absolute standard which forms the culmination of our
moral and religious thought. St. Paul's " more excellent
way " of charity leads us towards this recognition of the

Supreme which makes men brothers in weakness as well as in
strength, fellows in infirmity as well as in capacity. It is on
this ground that the saint can sit down with the bandit, that
the Saviour's feet can be washed and anointed by the woman
of sin.
It is not erroneously charged upon the denomination to
which we have referred, that its work has hitherto been more
critical than creative ; that it has shown itself better trained
in the outward gymnastic of argument than in the inward
exercise of devotion. A new period is, however, dawning
upon its responsibilities. While no human organization can
hope to be free from human imperfection, it is not the less
bound to deserve, in as great a measure as possible, the
epithets of Liberal and of Christian. It is no part of our
present purpose to attempt an exhaustive definition of these
two terms, nor is it necessary or wise to record any such de
finition as adequate and final. The growth of culture and the
accumulations of experience cast a changing light upon our
mental obligations, and a creed which is liberal to-day may
be narrow and intolerant to-morrow. The form, therefore, of
what is liberal and Christian is continually undergoing modi
fications, whose growth is insensible, and whose culminations
are sudden. But the spirit of what is liberal and Christian
does not change. It was the same in the days of Jesus, of
Paul, of Dante, of Luther, and in our own time. And as all
forms and opinions have made a wide circuit since the begin
nings of Christianity, it will be safe to conclude that the spirit
of the liberal Christian Church lies not so much in what we
believe, as in the manner in which we believe it. Where
faith is fervent, people are always much more absorbed in the
substance of belief than concerned with its formulas. And
where social culture is not retarded and perverted by politi
cal ends, the believing man seeks to extend to others the
divine peace which he himself enjoys. If his neighbors are
poor, he is beneficent ; if they are malignant, he is mag
nanimous ; if they are inordinate and luxurious, he is moder
ate. And, though he may have little familiarity with those
about him, he will in the end prove, like the leaven hid in the
meal, to have 'exercised a subtile influence over them, to have
wrought a noiseless metamorphosis. And this, though he may
have been taught to believe that those who differ from him in
the letter of their creed cannot share the benefits of his faith.
His intellectual limitations may shut out those wide views of
human fallibility which make all opinions secondary ; leaving
zeal, service, and sincerity as the true tests of a man's reli
giousness. His judgment may be compelled to condemn
those who differ from him ; but his heart will not repudiate
them, and his concern for them will be constant and benevo
lent.
It cannot be necessary for us in the present day to stand
and say. that a man is not saved by the form of what he
believes. The dominant religious sense of the community no
longer sanctions the transfer to the Divine of passions and
modes of thought and of action which belong to humanity.
It is more important for us to assert, that neither is a man
saved by what he disbelieves. When you have unmade the
intellectual foundation of a hundred creeds, you have made
no Church for yourself. When your newer or nicer logic
has overturned the fallacies of no matter what councils or
canons, you have yet not given man a guide for faith or an
example for life. If you try to do this, you will find that the
ground of religious experience lies beyond the shortcomings
of other men, and your own. No fault of yours need deprive
you of the comfort of recognizing an eternal standard of per
fection which is always present for your study and endeavor ;
and no fault of theirs absolves you from the necessity of
measuring your own thoughts and efforts by that standard.
He who is religious believes in the efficiency of faith. He
knows error to be as inevitable to himself as to others. But
he knows that the results of faith are so much greater than
the hindrances of error, that he seeks, in the culture of the
one, the true and only remedy against the incursions of the
other.
This two-fold recognition of the fallibility of human
thought, and of the infallibility of moral instinct, will not allow
any party of men to assume a certain set of opinions, asserta-

tory or negatory, and to insist that religions progress lies
inevitably in the direction of those opinions. If such opinions
are the best one can arrive at, and if he have stated and sup
ported them with all the power and honesty of his nature, he
has done a creditable work, and has lent one individual's
assistance to the world's progress. Fortius progress* is for
warded only by genuine activity. It is the real movement of
mind alone that stirs and stimulates the inert masses, led by
sympathy, and insisting always that you should touch, if you
would teach them. But, when you have rendered this serv
ice, it is not at all certain that the direction of your efforts
was, singly and in itself, the true and ultimate direction of
progress. In order to know this, you must know something
more. The world's progress is a very complex matter ; and
your settlement of its direction is at best but a subjective
one, binding to yourself, but not incumbent on others. In
fact, this attempt to enforce upon the community conclusions
satisfactory to yourself, aud this want of perception of the
inevitable limits in the final virtue and justice of .any one
direction, is in our day the cause of much that is fantastic, and
inconsistent with the harmonious evolution of society.
Individual minds are much like the energized broomstick of
Goethe's fable, which, having been ordered to bring water
to wash the floor, brings enough to drench the house and
those in it. Many a student can give the watchword of action
to his energies ; but only the master knows the word of recall.
Many know how to begin : few know where to leave off.
Two eminent Americans of the present day may exemplify
for us these antithetical differences. One of these, Mr. Sum
ner, at the commencement of his humanitarian career, looked
around him for an object, and was at fault. Like most young
philanthropists, he began with a purely critical and negative
mode of action ; attacking the shortcomings of society in its
military rdgime ; upholding the ideal duties of peace and non-
resistance ; and shivering more than one lance against the im
perfections of prison discipline. These works proved to have
7*
little objective justification ; but the honesty and energy, the

moral and mental resources, made evident by them, soon won
the sympathies of the public. Mr. Sumner was promoted
from a fanciful to a substantial sphere of action, and in the
death-grapple of his country with slavery did eminent serv
ice ; filling up the imaginative sketch of his youth with
years of solid achievement. Mr. Phillips, on the other hand,
was sooner fortunate in finding a beast to bestride, and
vaulted with one leap into the saddle of a great and practical
reform. But, that reform once handsomely under way, he
shows an indiscriminate love of the steeple-chase, which will
bring him in contact with more than one windmill. He at
tacks vital and trivial questions with the same zeal and with
the same ability ; is as eloquent in defence of a sophism as of
a truth. The only lesson we wish at present to draw from his
course is a practical one, — that of the limitations of direction
necessary to social uses. The tool that undermines and re
moves a nuisance, in the undiscriminating continuance of its
office, will make its mark upon institutions most useful and
venerable. What we want here is the master wisdom, which
with a new word imposes a new task and a new direction.
This self-critical power is not often found in the man. To
enforce it is one of the lessons of the Church.
Sincere advocates of progress who rail at the intrinsic im
perfections of the visible Church, and exclaim at the largeness
of the territory she still leaves unreclaimed, forget that the
Church is, like the State, a representative institution. It is
an ideal creation, that proves to be justified by a real neces
sity. Divine perfection is the object of its pursuit, never of
its attainment. The eternal steadfastness "of the object con
soles the perpetual deficiency in its accomplishment. But
this is not a failure, since the effort towards the divine proves
to be the real source of moral power in man ; as the unsatis
fied effort of the earth towards the sun enters into the dynamic
conditions of its real and legitimate movement. The doctrine
of the Church represents the highest religious conscious
ness of man: its practice represents the average faith and
virtue of the masses. It were vain and absurd to ask, that

either the one or the other of these should be conclusive and
perfect. This would be to shut the doors upon progress at
once. Yet progress in- the Church is a greater fact than
progress out of it. Besides standing for the best attainable
discipline and doctrine, the Church stands for the unattain
able glory, not to be spurned either in doctrine or in disci
pline, which offers its immortal prize for the study of the
race.
The Church actual, in the sum of its representation, cannot
go beyond the standpoint of its constituency. Nor can the
Church ideal wholly impart the secret of its virtue to any one
man, class, age, or period. So, what we commonly call the
Church will necessarily represent the ignorance as well
as the knowledge of mankind, — their superstition as well as
their illumination. This proves nothing against the validity
of its office, which rests, not upon the perfection of its attain
ment, but upon that of its ultimate object.
Of Greek art, Immanuel Kant says, " The age, as well as
the people, in which the quick impulse to legalized sociality,
through which a people forms a lasting commonwealth, had
to struggle with the great difficulties surrounding the hard
problem, how to combine freedom and equality with a con
straint more esteemed and obeyed through duty than #
through fear. Such an age and such a people were obliged
first to discover the art of the reciprocal impartment of the
ideas of the most cultured to the ruder portion of the com
munity ; the toning-down of the extension and refinement of
the first to the natural simplicity and originality of the last.
In this way only bould they discover that medium between
the higher culture and self-sufficing nature, which constitutes
the true standard for taste, as a universal human sense."
This average of Greek art is also the average of Christian
faith. The true mission of the Church in all ages is to find
this common ground between the highest and the lowest
moral culture-, between the subtlest and the simplest spirit
uality. For religion is not a science, since its fundamental
truths neither ask nor admit exact demonstration. It is the

Êsthetic of morals, made up of Art and of Nature, founded
upon the evolutions of the Law ; but reaching also to that im
penetrable secret of individual action and delight which tran
scends all the rules of the understanding and the reasons of
experience. It is thus obligation and freedom, inherence in
the body corporate, and transcendence in the soul individual.
It is at once the largest and the loftiest efficiency of that sym
pathy, in virtue of which the advance and the rear-guard of
the human army march to one music, and acknowledge one
discipline. The most eminent natures only discern its rea
sons ; but the most ordinary ones acknowledge its justifi
cation.
The condition from which human society starts is one of
universal antagonism, implied or overt. If human beings can
be supposed to exist together at a period previous to the
development of moral consciousness, they must exist either as
declared foes and rivals in all personal objects, or in those
forms of suppressed enmity which give us the relations of
master and slave, in all their modifications and varieties. Of
course, the existence of such a state of things in its entire-
ness is a merely suppositious fact, unestablished, so far as
we know, by historical observation. But the elements of this
^ primitive barbarism are so held in solution in the constitution
of the race, that their presence, under circumstances unfavor
able to civilization, is easily recognized. New societies ex
hibit these traits on a large scale : ill-trained individuals
show the same phenomena in their singleness. American
civilization — with all its wealth and luxury, with all its
study and ambition — has in its phenomena \nuch of this bar
barism. The universal " every one for himself; " the defec
tive perception of family and social obligation ; the surly or
humorous protest under which service is rendered, — these
are conditions which antedate a true and thorough civilization.
Carry this state of things a little further, and the child be
comes the enemy of the mother; the sick and'infirm, of the
robust and healthful. All who need help are the enemies of
those able to afford it. The want of a standard betrays peo

ple into the most disgusting arrogance and disheartening
stupidity. Society will be nothing better than a mob, con
tinually bound over to keep the peace on grounds of personal
convenience'.
To this state of things the Church presents the true an
tithesis and antidote. It begins by acknowledging a standard
before which all men are imperfect, and by adopting an object
to whose attainment all men are singly inadequate. It marks
the perception of a common good far higher and more stable
than any individual advantage can claim to be. The imper
fection of each now becomes an element of good and of
pleasure. An aesthetic commerce of gifts now rises up.
The interchange of thought, the refutation of error, occupy
the restless energy of the human mind. A way is found in
which all can work together. This co-operation is built upon
the sense of a transcendent unity in which the differences of
thought converge, and of an efficient unity in which the dif
ferences of interest are reconciled. In this point of view, the
Church must come before the State, since the Church alone
makes the State possible. Self-government is a moral before
it becomes a political feature. Unless the individual can
check the absoluteness of his personal desires by some stand
ard of duty and self-restraint, his power to control the ad
ministration of public affairs will be of little avail, either for
the State or for himself. He who will not govern himself by
reason will be governed by another through the medium of
his own passions. And to teach this intimate and initial form
of self-government, upon which all others rest, is the busi
ness of the Church.
The means by which the Church proceeds to effect this are
twofold. A part consists in defining and applying the moral
law, in its critical aspect towards the passions of men. This
does one-half of the work. Another instrumentality is a
continual appeal to the highest aesthetic sense of man, which
points to the conservation of nature, and holds the stormy
forces of individuality bound and united in the silken leash of
a high and ever-ascending delight. The application of the

moral measure alone brings discouragement or self-glorifica
tion, according to the character of the person. Administered
alone, it will be apt to run into a routine of observances and
abstinences, at once mechanical and arbitrary. ' The world
has seen this more than once. The religious dogmatism of
the Pharisees, of the Romanists, and of the Puritans, were all
alike formal and unspiritual. It is the addition of the element
of pleasure, in its purest form, that gives the human soul its
truly devout aspect. To receive so large a joy in proportion
to so small a merit, and to enter upon an ever-increasing joy
with an ever-easier performance, — this is so great a boon
as to leave the soul dumb with gratitude before its unknown
Benefactor. Its first attitude is one of passive recipiency;
its second, one of energetic impartment. For this joy can
only be maintained by unceasing activity. And the medium
of this activity is sympathy.
In speaking of the representative function of the Church,
we touched a theme whose roots lie deep in nature. So much
in human life is representative, and the thing represented is
often found in such wide separation of time and place from
the symbol that stands for it, that all institutions, and even the
common usages of society, often present us with an imme
diate falsehood, while still standing for a remote truth. The
sceptics of institutions are those who, penetrating the mask
of usage, and finding the unsanctioned features of the face
beneath, do not look further, — persuaded that the truth is
somewhere, and more zealous to encounter her than to
unmask her counterfeit. To those who have a steadfast per
ception of the values of life, these deceptions mark only the
poverty of the human resources already realized in the view
of objects of transcendent scope and virtue. This poverty is
rather a pathetic than an outrageous circumstance, and draws
more largely on the compassion of the wise than on their vin-
dictiveness. To fill up the measure of this lesser desert by
greater sincerity and earnestness is the true task which the
unavoidable shams of life impose. If the poor human heart
1865.] Tlie Ideal Church. 83
knows that there is a substantial good somewhere, do not up

braid it too severely for not knowing where it is. Many an
abode of luxury has not the true wealth of solvency ; many
a brilliant reputation is empty of true desert. Skill is mis
taken for art, tact for genius, facility for inspiration, intol
erance for virtue, superstition for piety. But the homage
which the human heart renders is to the truth of these
things, whose existence it does not doubt, although it may
misplace them. •
As the different parts, so the sum of what is venerable in
human character and effort is recognized to exist by the
unanimous sense of the race. And, with our usage to a local
habitation and a name, it is very natural that we should place
it here or there, according to the differences of our tastes or
circumstances. So with the Church, we should be glad to
define its limits with a creed, and to shut up its power within
an institution. This creed, this institution, represents for us
an abiding fact, and our steadfast faith in it. But we forget
that we bring the Church within the church walls when we
come in, and take it out when we go out. And, wherever we
go, we carry so much of the Church about with us. And so
the Church exists only formally in its representation, but sub
stantially in the conscience and consciousness of mankind.
Great Mother of souls ; great unity which we try to include
in our little lives, but which includes us in its grand eternity !
Rome, Geneva, England, and New England have tried to rep
resent thee, and have honored themselves in nothing so much
as in this endeavor. Thou art, — in this they are not mis
taken ; but thou art not within the limits in which they have
striven to place thee, any more than the true Athens lies
within the scene-painter's presentment of streets and houses.
Thou art otherwise. They contain not thee, but thou con-
tainest them. All sincere faith lays hold upon thee : all true
effort expresses thee. But that faith and that effort are hap
piest which admit the largest communion, the widest co-opera
tion. For in thy love and wisdom, in thy provision and in
thine ordinance, nothing less than the whole human race is
included.
84 Hedge's Reason in Religion. [July*
Art. VI. — HEDGE'S REASON EST RELIGION.
Reason in Religion. By Frederic Henry Hedge. " Keine ver-

trautcre Gabe vermag der Mensch dera Menschen anzubieten als
was er im Innersten des Gemiithes zu sich selbst geredet hat." —
Schleiermacher. Boston : Walker, Fuller, & Co.
The armor in which religion has been clad, the war-footing

on which, for four years past, we have been forced to put our
Christianity, seems to have revived the image of the Church
militant in those aggressions upon superstition and sin which
are made without carnal weapons. The cry now is for organi
zation and drill. From our ecclesiastical generals comes the
word of command to march in a body against the hosts of
error. We are told we have ammunition of truth enough;
and the only business now is to apply it to the wide regions
of ignorance, and through all the moral wastes of battle.
The recent convention has this import, — that it is a roll-call
or reveille to muster the troops, and so momentous in this
light as to be held by some almost as the sacred image that
fell down from Jupiter, which it is profanity for any criticism
to touch. It is even suggested, that the common belief, the
average opinions in which clergy and laity can agree by a
sort of compromise or verbal conformity, will suffice for all
our operations.
This spirit of union for philanthropic ends we hail and
bless, and by all means in our power propose, not to hinder,
but help. We would only suggest the vital part in its suc
cess which the Christian teacher as well as the executive
officer must play. A just word in a fresh statement carries
further than any gun. That is a false antagonism by which
doers and thinkers are set against one another. Who is it
that does ? " He prays who labors," says the Latin proverb.
But who labors? He that travels round, is conspicuous at
public meetings, his voice heard in every stir of the public
mind, his name printed in every issue of the press ? Yes, if
1865. J Hedge's Reason in, Religion. 85
it be a humane or patriotic errand on which he goes, to spread

light and comfort, may he have speed of God. But not he
alone, or most effectually, compasses the end. At the head of
all benevolence as well as knowledge stands the seer of truth
and good. The seer is always a sayer, and the sayer a doer,
provided the seeing and saying be real and sincere. It is as
true as ever, that, " where there is no vision, the people
perish ; " while the converse of the proposition holds equally,
that the visionary, as he is called, feeds them from what he
beholds as with bread of life. Not only, as Goethe says, does
action narrow : it also often lowers, lets policy and worldly
ambition creep in, and tempts the performer to sacrifice his
purity that he may carry his point. So, on the other hand,
thought not only widens, but raises ; and just in proportion
as we are bent to further any busybody undertaking, and dis
tracted with its details, we need the calm surveyor to adjust
our lines, and remind us of our drift. Besides, it is a quite
incorrect notion of truth to imagine it can be gathered like
fruit, accumulated in a lump, borne about in a spiritual knap
sack, or divided like a loaf or any merchandise among all that
may come for a share. Truth is a living thing, whose essence
is caught only in our ever-fresh sight. Like the old manna, it
spoils by lying on the ground. It cannot be laid up in store.
It will not keep in our cellar. It is a spirit that floats, the
bride of the soul, before our watch. If the soul slumber, it
is gone. The quiet and lowly student that waits and looks
patiently out of the windows of the morning, thal^ he may
catch new glimpses to quicken and gladden all the workers'
hearts and hands below, discharges an office which no other
surpasses in the common concern. He is a doer too, if doing
is stillest but most intense activity of heart and brain. What
was the doing of Jesus himself? Less in the works he did
with his hands, gracious as they were, than in the words he
spoke, — from what vital and matchless intercourse with God,
for the condition of utterances which lose nought by transla
tion into all tongues, and whose significance thousands of
years and changes of custom cannot exhaust !
VOL. I.XXIX. —5th S. VOL. XVII. NO. I. 8
86 Hedge's Reason in Religion. [July,
For the observer of spiritual objects, then, as well as for the

enactor of principles, we may be allowed to put in a plea, and
to maintain that the man in the observatory, no less than he
in the field, has his lawful post. In an exigency, he may rush
down from his instruments to the fray, like the noble, lamented
Mitchell to the right side, or the otherwise deplored Maury to
the wrong one. But, spite of strife and death, the telescope
must be tended, and the celestial discoveries announced. Nay,
on vision, seeing the thing as it is, the most practical utilities
first of all and immediately depend. The geologist must
decide the actual or improvable properties of the soil, or the
localities and leads of mineral treasure, ere the farmer or pro
spector can arrive at his utmost thrift. He finds in this State
of Massachusetts, for instance, a bed of emery, and straight
way the importation of the costly material shall be stopped by
the native supply. We know that, in war itself, the bloody
engagement is not half the hinge on which the decision turns.
Grant and Sherman, we say, have fought for us. Very little,
if any, gross fighting have they personally done. By their
thought and strategy they have pre-arranged and foreseen
conflict and victory. The struggle of hundreds of thousands
of combatants has been determined in their brain. In that
wonderful invisible theatre was rehearsed what afterwards
befell. There Vicksburg was reduced, and Richmond be
sieged, long before the beleaguering troops arrived at the
trenches, or the sorely pressed foe held out the white capitu
lating flag. There the old western base was left, commu
nications cut, the long hundreds of miles in imagination
traversed, the Atlantic shore felt as a rest, and every artery
of hostile supply severed for the rebellion to bleed to death,
ere at the drum-tap the veteran soldiers, now covered with
their commander in a common glory, took with their waving
banners one eastward step. Organization is needful ; the or-
ganific, self-organizing power, indispensable.
These illustrations are adduced, to show not only the law
fulness, but lofty height, of the religious student's function.
"We require his help to restore and regenerate the creeds and
forms which will else sink into sectarian tyranny, and the
1865.] Hedge's Reason in Religion. 87
mere mechanics of worship. Complaint is made of a want of

interest in ordinances, as those of Baptism and the Supper ;
and they are urged upon us as having intrinsic virtue and
obligation. But what is it to trust to their material quality
but a sort of idolatry ? They are falsified, and for every
good purpose destroyed, when made for young or old the
foundation of the convictions which 5t is their only use to
express, and which they can express only so far as they are
instantly and ever anew enlivened by their administration.
A ritual can serve the soul, not as a faucet turned by a priest's
hand, but only as it is made natural by the feeling of the mo
ment, flexible to the want of every new occasion, and held in
solution by the pious sentiment of the breast. The spirit of
Christ, which is the spirit of God, must precede and pervade
all services and exercises to preserve in them either enliven
ing efficacy or a genuine sanctity. Let us thank God, that,
amid divisions of the land, through the tumult and turmoil of
civil war, and among all disputes with foreign nations, while
every maxim of domestic rule, military procedure, and inter
national liability and law, has been called in question, one
sacred image — North and South, East and West, from America
to Europe, betwixt rival denominations, and on every civilized
shore — has remained unhurt in the reverence and love of
men. The robe of the Crucified was, indeed, rent for chance
distribution at the casting of the soldiers' lots ; but how busy
the generations of all tribes and kindreds have been to weave
its cruelly parted fragments again together ! The Saviour's
body was torn ; but how well the wounds have been knit and
healed in the tender care all time has had of them I The
spirit of the Lord is not only one, but all-uniting.
It is the peculiar prerogative of religious scholarship to
pass upon all that is documentary in the evidence, or personal
in the authority held by Christianity in its embrace. What-
ever is external must submit to its decree. It seeks a ground
so broad as to comprehend even the claim of the individual
Jesus to our faith and obedience. We must either follow him
blindly, or see why we follow him, and to what end ; and the
assumption, prior to all intellectual judgment, of a lordship
for him which is not only leadership but deity, surrenders the
very influence it would seem to maintain. Only when we are
persuaded of its rightfulness does any sway become mighty,
as our consent is necessarily co-ordinate with all mental con
trol.
We need not say, therefore, with what pleasure we greet
any new attempt, such*as we consider the present volume to
be, to establish in reason the title to our continued honor of
the religion we profess. Dr. Hedge's " Reason in Religion "
is a rich supply to our ideal want. Never was a book whose
title was better justified by its contents. Of reason and reli
gion in equal proportions, and harmonious relations, it is com
pact. All the great questions of theology are treated in it
with a grasp of intellect, wisdom of judgment, soundness of
moral sense, thoroughness of learning, and clearness from
qgftarian prejudice, which we know not in what volume
besides, of recent publication, on the same themes, to find so
well combined. We are alike struck with the grandeur of
the topics and the greatness of their handling. God, in his
hiding and showing of himself, his sovereignty and mercy,
the virtue of prayer, the mystery of evil and of the chief and
special evil of iniquity, the fear of death and hope of immor
tality, the common cause of reason and faith, the personality
of Christ, miracles, the spirit's revelation and the letter con
taining it, atonement, salvation, predestination, judgment, the
Greek and Jewish types, and the moral ideal, — all these,
preceded by two profound discussions of " Being and See
ing," and the " Natural and Supernatural," are the fundament
al matters which in these pages reward the attention they
task. The reader, with this author, must fain be a thinker.
Yet needless obscurity there is none. The depths of every
particular subject are unveiled as far as lucid conceptions and
the sunlight of thought can reach. Metaphysics, which have
been called a refuge for second-rate minds, are here at once
clear of mist and free from barren ingenuity. The philo
sophy of Dr. Hedge is no finer in its leafing, than sweet and
abundant in its fruit. This fig-tree will disappoint no hungry
traveller by whom it is sought for nourishment or shade. •
Might we venture to characterize the genius, of which this

production is full, we should call it that of the scholar. All
the mental faculties, in exquisite refinement of perfect train
ing, are here. But the understanding, art, fancy, imagina
tion, analytic and still more synthetic ability, are applied
to no new problems. They rather grapple with those that
have long engaged the attention of mankind. Dr. Hedge
feels the. breath of God in all History. He owns his pre
sence in the Church. He is a critic, but a constructor more.
If he does not inspire, he informs. He is affirmative,
and never in the least a denying spirit. In his composition
is no touch of that diabolic temper so common, but only
divine magnanimity. This Unitarian chief in theology is of
an undenominational soul. Trinitarian, Universalist, and
Roman Catholic will nowhere than from his pen find justice
more exact, or appreciation more generous, of the providen
tial meaning of their various movements, and the dogmas or
rites for which they stand. Indeed all the schools and parties
of the past, in this Rhadamanthine hall, have their several
merits or faults adjudged with an impartiality as conscien
tious as if living figures, and not shadows of things that have
been, were in presence of the court. The rare learning,
which is not only of facts, but thoughts and systems of the
universe, runs through our writer's periods, it were hard to
say whether, in its vast tide, with more might or ease. The
significance of what has been, in action or speculation, is ever
in his view. He surveys with reverence both the intellectual
and circumstantial annals of the race, in which, united, he
seeks to penetrate the benignant design. This course of
things we live in, to the superficial eye so aimless, is to his
gaze stamped with Almighty purpose in every part; and he
would as soon fancy the Atlantic or Alps an accident, as the
floods of passion or upheavals of opinion that have furrowed
and moulded the moral sphere. Augustine and Athanasius,
Plato and Moses, Christ and Paul, represent to him activities
as authentic, and of more consequence, than the processes
of water or fire that have determined the circulation or
8«
shaped the vertebral column of the globe. If it be the

naturalist's province to inform us how glaciers arid earth
quakes have ridged and rounded the planet, it is this
spiritualist's function to account for the present condition of
the human mind by the working of supernatural forces and
laws ; and a better authority or more satisfactory guide, in
this line of investigation, our land or age does not present.
The style answers in gravity to the work. It does not
flame or flow. It is built. But with architecture how splen
did, foundations how solid, beams and rafters how trusty, and
rooms how ample, the edifice ascends I Though seldom
impassioned, a tender heart throbs through these transparent
lines. As the softest grass is found on the mountain-side,
peaks of not infrequent Sublimity are neighbored by succu
lent growth of sentiment in these better creations. But the
main impression is — plenty of space, unbounded hospitality
in the structure, which our master-workman occupies while
he rears. We can get into no small place in this house. His
folding-doors swing open to entertain the largest company.
At an extension-table his guests sit, and there are always
chairs for more. " And yet there is room " should be his
motto, expressive of the feeling we have as we contemplate
whatever is unconfined, like the starry heavens, and conclude
there will be no lack of accommodation for the myriads of
souls we hope will survive.
We speak of the positive traits in our author, more than
the negative, which we should not care to define, even if
they did not fade away before the lustre of his actual -claims.
Of the two elements of momentum, doubtless he has less
velocity than weight. His blood is temperate, and seldom
on fire. In his coolly classic pulse is no fever. Of exag
geration or wilful eloquence no particle can we detect, of
affectation or pretension not a jot. When the popular ora
tor's glow is over and his sweat wiped off, we have to abate
the rage into which, as we say, he has worked himself up.
The statements of Dr. Hedge expose themselves to no such
deductions. There is a voice in them always of nature and
truth. A singular sincerity of intellectual conscience denotes

his positions. He would be ashamed of over-emphasis or
empty logic as a sin. It was once said of a senseless talker,
that he was as hollow as a quill. In this discourser of ours,
there is hardly husk or rind enough to hold the meat and
kernel. We never have to take him with a grain of salt.
The true savor is in the dish already, and has not to be
added. If his style is no river, it is because it is too broad
to rush. If he does not kindle, he sustains. Failing to
excite, he gives us the peace better than any stir. Yet one,
that can distinguish enthusiasm from gesticulation and rhetor
ical trick, will discover no defect of healthy warmth in his
manner, which any throb of weak fanaticism appears never
for a moment to have disturbed. By nature and culture our
author is equally possessed of the spirit, and self-possessed.
A Webster-like poise is in this churchman, though the states
man's was in a lower realm. The antinomies of fact and
principle, ideas and institutions, business and the inner life,
history and prophecy, earth and heaven, are steadily and
uniformly reconciled in his musing mind.
We must praise this twofold power, this honest and con
sistent duplicity. The coinage of truth is doubly stamped on
its diverse sides. If one face bear fresh emblems of ever-
living things, the other is inscribed with an old establishment
and a date. On the issue from our author's precious mint we
read intuition and tradition too. He is not less ready to receive
what any one may bring from the mount of vision because
he himself stands in the pulpit of instruction. He vindicates
the function of teacher as well as seer. But no private
whims can expect to pass for insights with this judge, who
prefers a good outsight to a spurious apocalypse. Our cant
term, of genius, he will restrict from the wide assumption or
application it may have in the reckoning of the juvenile mind.
With him all fancies of pretended originality fade before the
" Reason in Religion" of which he is the unsurpassed advo
cate. The title has in it something subtile, as though point
ing to that immense reality of being which no reason in us
fathoms or includes, but we can only bend to in awe, as we

seek it with love. If he sometimes seems to speak of special
dispensations, of Christianity itself as intervening or inter
polated in the universal order, rather than unfolding in it,
and no more distinct from it than a blossom from the. stem on
which it is held, we attribute this to the lowly wonder with
which, even in him, intellect is ever chastened and subdued.
Amazement transcends science. Far as our perception may
reach, it will never sound to the bottom our own constitution,
far less the constitution of things.
We refer our readers to the book itself for vindication of
what thus in general we have said. But some extracts we
must fain make. From the " Cause of Reason the Cause of
Faith," we take a passage : —
" Rationalism is regarded as in principle unbelief, in practice sacri
lege. This abuse of the term, and consequent disgust to the thing, is
partly due to the old association of the word with a class of theolo
gians now extinct, and whose methods and conclusions rational criti
cism itself disavows. But the misapplication of a principle does not
invalidate the principle itself, nor ought the mistakes of a Paulus or a
Strauss to discourage the application of reason to religion. Ration
alism means that, and nothing more. Reason may err in some of its
conclusions ; but reason is none the less the supreme arbiter in theol
ogy. Its errors can be consistently refuted by Protestants, only on
rationalistic grounds. Only the Romanist can with consistency speak
of rationalism in the way of reproach. Protestantism assumes the
application of reason to religion as the basis of its ecclesiastical life.
Whoever calls that principle in question, whoever finds or intends
reproach in the word Rationalism, abandons the Protestant ground,
and confesses himself in spirit and temper a Romanist. Whoever
allows that principle at all, and allows it in himself, must allow it in
others, and allow it without stint, while even rejecting the conclu
sions of those who adopt it. Reason or Rome, — there is no middle
ground." ""
From the essay on " Miracles : " —
" There may be errors respecting the nature of the light, and false
theories there may be concerning its source ; but what of that ? As
tronomy may be mistaken in some of its calculations : is the sun, on

that account, less glorious or less dear ? I need no astronomy to tell
me what a blessing it is. And suppose we have not, in these biogra
phies, unmixed historical truth ; that some errors and misstatements
have crept into the records, — is the character of Christ, on that
account, less noble, or his word less divine ? The question is not
whether Jesus said precisely this, or did precisely that, in each par
ticular case ; but whether Christianity, on the whole, is divine, —
whether this light, which for so many ages has irradiated the world,
and given us such guidance as we have had in spiritual things, is
God's truth, — a ray of heaven conducting to endless day, or a meteor
born of the night, and misleading the blind. And this is not a ques
tion of logic, but a question of experience, which every soul must
answer for itself. Christianity is not a matter of records and parch
ments, but a light and a life : which, if a man has it not, no logic
can reason into him ; and which, if a man has it, no logic can reason
out of him. Nay, if you could prove that this record which we have
of the sayings and doings of Jesus is a fable and a myth, even then
you would not have destroyed Christianity. In that case, I should
say, Whether fable or fact, the mind that could conceive and give to
the world such a portrait as that of the Christ, is itself the Christ.
The product of that mind would still be the wisdom and the power of
God. Suppose you could prove that no such person as Michael
Angelo ever existed ; that the name is not historic, but mythic ; the
tradition we have of him a fable, — the Church of St. Peter's would
still be the wonder of the world, and the mind that planned it a mas
ter mind. However we may speculate concerning its origin, the
Christian Church, — that stupendous fabric of which St. Peter's is a
feeble type, that august temple in which so many ages have knelt
and prayed, — stands, and will stand, in spite of criticism. Christi
anity is : it is a fixed fact, — a part of the round world. And when
I consider what it is, and what it has been ; how many millions of
believing souls have found peace ip its doctrine, and freedom in its
spirit ; to how many it has been their guide in life, and their stay in
death ; and how it has changed the face of the world, — it seems to
me a small thing, in view of all this power and glory, to quarrel
about the record, aud fight against miracles, with this miracle of all
time staring us in the face."
From the " Revelation of the Spirit : " —
" Pray for the Spirit ; for who in this world can do without it, —
without its impulse, without its leaven, without its restraining and
sustaining power ? It has been affirmed that civilization and the
progress of society are wholly and purely an intellectual product.
To assert this is to forget the gift of God, and what it is that keeps
the human heart from dying out, and all the powers from perishing
through utter corruption. It is not our laws and our courts, not
well-balanced constitutions and social devices, not science and steam
and electro-magnetism, — not these alone that have brought us thus
far, and made this world what it is ; but beneath all these, and above
them alf, a divine impulse, never wanting to the race of men ; a
divine Spirit for ever haunting them with those two radical and uni
versal ideas, — truth aud duty, without whose penetrating and creat
ive power not one stone would ever have been laid upon another of all
our cities, no tree ever felled, no human implement fashioned for its
work. And, if God should now withdraw his Spirit, this proud civil
ization, with its gorgeous palaces and solemn temples ; this shining
and sounding culture, with its traffic and its arts, its stately conven
tions, and fair humanities, — would tumble and dissolve ; the wild
beasts that are caged in these human frames, now awed and tamed by
the presence of that Spirit, would creep forth, and rend, and devour ;
and the civilized earth revert to chaos and night."
From " The Spirit in the Letter : " —

" The letter killcth in sacraments and rites, where rigid convention
alism precludes spontaneity, or where a low utility assumes to be the
measure of sanctities, or where the symbol becomes a fetish ; or
where the ordinance is viewed as compulsory observance, instead of
a free communication or free-will offering. Why sprinkle water on a
baby's forehead in any other name, utility asks, than that of personal
cleanliness, — in any other way than that of physical ablution ?
Why, indeed, if those sprinkled drops are all that baptism means to
you ? If you see in baptism nothing but ritual water, it is a dead
and deadening formality. But fill your mind with the awful truth,
that the infant, born this day into this phenomenal and vanishing
world, as one of its phenomena and passages, rising like a bubble on
the great world-stream to fill a place among the shows of time, and
to act a part in its processes, is also a child and heir of eternity,
and is born, at one and the same moment with its time-birth, into a
world of spirits that is real and eternal, a family of God, transcending

the home-circle, and yet including it ; a kingdom of God, transcend
ing and including civil society ; a universe of God, transcending and
including the mundane sphere, and connecting this breathing crea
ture of to-day, this palpitating human animal, with the farthest star
that looks down on its cradle, with the Church of the first-born in the
infancy of time and the Church of the last-born in time's complete
ness, and with God, the Judge of all, and the Mediator of his love,
and which knows the life just east on this shore, and claims it as its
own, and yearns toward it out of all its heavens ; — consider this, and
you will see that some open and solemn recognition of this fact is no
vain ceremony, but a just and becoming acknowledgment of the im
age of God bound up in that form, of the immortal destiny bound up
in that life. And if water, the most universal of tangible creations,
and therefore fit type- of universality, is the given and accepted sym
bol of all this in your sphere and time, then should the water be
sacred in your eyes that bathes a baby's forehead in the rite of bap
tism, administered in the name of the Father, the head of this spirit
ual All ; the Son, the connecting link between him and it ; the Spirit,
its universal bond. And then is infant baptism not the mere dash of
water on the brow : it is the solemn recognition of a new advent, the
auspicious presentation of the new-comer to the general and august
assembly of his spiritual home."
So let this new piece or continuation both of the letter and

spirit of our faith, which contains many like these cited speci
mens, go forth with our blessing on the way of its own bene
diction. It cannot fail to shed light on the darkness, still so
thick in the world, of fear and doubt and death : for it is a
luminous body ; no accidental reflector of chance rays, as are
many books, like mirrors fetched swinging through the streets,
but having light in itself. May the true and ripe scholar,
the bright lines of whose long study it shows, have the
reward of labor he will most prize, — to clear from cloud the
path of duty and destiny for his fellow-men !
96 Tlioreau. [July,
Art. VII. — THOREAU.
1. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers ; 2. Walden ; or,

Life in the Woods ; 3. Excursions in Field and Forest ; i. The
Maine Woods ; 5. Cape Cod. By Henry D. Tiiorf.au. Bos
ton : Ticknor & Co.
Upon the tablet which friendship and delicate appreciation

have raised to exhibit their record of Thoreau's genius, there
is still space where a classmate's pen may leave some slight
impressions, without claiming either advantage or authority
to do so beyond a late but ever-deepening" regard. This bids
the thoughts return and drop themselves for .holding-ground
into some recollections of his collegiate career.
He would smile to overhear that word applied to the
reserve and unaptness of his college life. He was not sig
nalized by a plentiful distribution of the parts and honors
which fall to the successful student. The writer remembers
that a speech which was made at a highly inflammatory meet
ing in Dr. Beck's recitation room, during the Christopher
Dunkin Rebellion, claimed, in allusion to Dunkin's arbitrary
marking, that " our offence was rank." It certainly was not
Thoreau's offence ; and many of the rest of us shared, in this
respect, his blamelessness. We could sympathize with his
tranquil indifference to college honors, but we did not suspect
the fine genius that was developing under that impassive
demeanor. Of his private tastes there is little of conse
quence to recall, excepting that he was devoted to the old
English literature, and had a good many volumes of the poetry
from Gower and Chaucer down through the era of* Elizabeth.
In this mine he worked with a quiet enthusiasm, diverting to
it hours that should have sparkled with emulation in the
divisions where other genius stood that never lived, like his,
to ripen. For this was the class of C. S. Wheeler, of Hil-
dreth, Hayward, Eustis ; scholars and poets all, to whom the
sky stretched a too eager diploma.
1865.] Thoreau. 97
We owe to those studies not named in the programme, the

commencement of a quaint and simple style, and a flavor of
old thinking, which appears through all the works of Thoreau.
His earliest masters were thus the least artificial of the minds
which have drawn from the well of undefiled English. And
the phrase " mother-tongue " was cherished by him, and
gained his early homage. He did not care for the modern
languages ; nor was he ever seriously attracted, by the litera
ture which they express, to lay aside his English worthies.
His mind was in native harmony with them, and it sometimes
produces modern speculation in sentences and fragments of
speech and turns of phrase that make you wonder if old Sir
Thomas Brown, or Owen Feltham, or Norris, were lodging
for awhile with him in their progress upon some transmigrat
ing tour. We wonder if he alludes to the University when
he says that he has heard of " a Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge." Heard of it, but not personally ac
quainted with it. For, though he was careful not to miss a
recitation, it is plain that he was not present at it, but was
already like the man he mentions, who, " in some spring of
his life, saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought,
goes to grass like a horse, and leaves all his harness behind in
the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge, sometimes, — Go to grass." So many
of us said most fervently, but not because we had attached
ourselves to his shyness in order to saunter with him into the
Great Fields of thought, where " a man's ignorance sometimes
is not only useful, but beautiful."
But he passed for nothing, it is suspected, with most of us;
for he was cold and unimpressible. The touch of his hand
was moist and indifferent, as if he had taken up something
when he saw your hand coming, and caught your grasp upon
it. How the prominent, gray-blue eyes seemed to rove down
the path, just in advance of his feet, as his grave Indian stride
carried him down to University Hall ! This down-looking
habit was Chaucer's also, who walked as if a great deal of
surmising went on between the earth and him.
vol. uXre. — 5tii 8. VOL. XVII. SO. I. 9
98 Thoreau. [July,
" And on tlie ground, which is my mother's gate,

I knocke with my staff early and late,
And say to her, ' Leve mother, let me in.' "
But Chaucer's heart sent brisk blood to and fro beneath that
modest look, and his poetry is more teeming with the nature
of men and women than with that of the air and earth.
Thoreau was nourished by its simplicity, but not fanned by
its passion. He was colder, but more resolute, and would
have gone to prison and starvation for the sake of his opinions,
where Chaucer weakly compromised to preserve freedom and
comfort. The vivid human life in the Elizabethan writers did
not wake a corresponding genius in Thoreau : he seemed to
be feeding only upon their raciness and Saxon vigor, upon
the clearly phrased and unaffected sentiment. The rest of
the leaf never bore the marks of any hunger.
He did not care for people ; his classmates seamed very
remote. This reverie hung always about him, and not so
loosely as the odd garments which the pious household care
furnished. Thought had not yet awakened his countenance ;
it was serene, but rather dull, rather plodding. The lips
were not yet firm ; there was almost a look of smug satisfac
tion lurking round their corners. It is plain now that he was
preparing to hold his future views with great setness, and
personal appreciation of their importance. The nose was
prominent, but its curve fell forward without firmness over
the upper lip ; and we remember him as looking very much
like some Egyptian sculptures of faces, large-featured, but
brooding, immobile, fixed in a mystic egotism. Yet his eyes
were sometimes searching, as if he had dropped, or expected
to find, something. It was the look of Nature's own child
learning to detect her wayside secrets ; and those eyes have '
stocked his books with subtile traits of animate and inanimate
creation which had escaped less patient observers. For he
saw more upon the ground than anybody suspected to be there.
His eyes slipped into every tuft of meadow or beach grass,
and went winding in and out of the thickest undergrowth,
like some slim, silent, cunning animal. They were amphib
ious besides, and slid under fishes' eggs and into their nests
1865.] Thoreau. 99
. at the pond's bottom, to rifle all their contents. Mr. Emerson

has noticed "that Thoreau could always find an Indian arrow
head in places that had been ploughed over and ransacked
for years. " There is one," he would say, kicking it up with
his foot. In fact, his eyes seldom left the ground, even in his
most earnest conversation with you, if you can call earnest a
tone and manner that was very confident, as of an opinion
that had formed from granitic sediment, but also very level
and unflushed with feeling. The Sphinx might have become
passionate and exalted as soon.
In later years his chin and mouth grew firmer as his reso
lute and audacious opinions developed, the curves of the
lips lost their flabbiness, the eyes twinkled with the latent
humor of his criticisms of society. Still the countenance
was unruffled : it seemed to lie deep, like a mountain tarn,
with cool, still nature all around. There was not a line upon
it expressive of ambition or discontent : the affectional emo
tions had never fretted at it. He went about, like a priest of
Buddha who expects to arrive soon at the summit of a life
of contemplation, where the divine absorbs the human. All
his intellectual activity was of the spontaneous, open-air kind,
which keeps the forehead smooth. His thoughts grew with
all the rest of nature, and passively took their chance of
summer and winter, pause and germination : no more forced
than pine-cones ; fragrant, but not perfumed, owing nothing
to special efforts of art. His extremest and most grotesque
opinion had never been under glass. It all grew like the
bolls on forest-trees, and the deviations from stem-like or
sweeping forms. No man was ever such a placid thinker. It
was because his thinking was observation isolated from all the
' temptations of society, from the artificial exigencies of litera
ture, from the conventional sequence. Its truthfulness was not
logically attained, but insensibly imbibed, during wood-chop
ping, fishing, and scenting through the woods and fields. So
that the smoothness and plumpness of a child were spread
over his deepest places.
His simple life, so free from the vexations that belong to
the most ordinary provision for the day, and from the wear
100 TJioreau. [July,
and tear of habits helped his countenance to preserve this .

complacency. He had instincts, but no habits ; and they wore
him no more than they do the beaver and the blue-jay.
Among them we include his rare intuitive sensibility for
moral truth and for the fitness of things. For, although he
lived so closely to the ground, he could still say, " My desire
for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my
head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and
constant. The highest that we can attain to it is not knowl
edge, but sympathy with intelligence." But this intuition
came up, like grass in spring, with no effort that is traceable,
or that registers itself anywhere except in the things grown.
You would look in vain for the age of his thoughts upon his
face.
Now, it is no wonder that he kept himself aloof from us in
college ; for he was already living on some Walden Pond,
where he had run up a temporary shanty in the depths of his
reserve. He built it better afterwards, but no nearer to men.
Did anybody ever tempt him down to Snow's, with the offer
of an unlimited molluscous entertainment? The naturalist
was not yet enough awakened to lead him to ruin a midnight
stomach for the sake of the constitution of an oyster. Who
ever saw him sailing out of Willard's long entry upon that airy
smack which students not intended for the pulpit launched
from port-wine sangarees? We are confident that he never
discovered the back-parlor aperture through which our finite
thirst communicated with its spiritual source. So that his
observing faculty must, after all, be charged with limitations.
We say, our thirst, but would not be understood to include
those who were destined for the ministry, as no clergyman in
the embryonic state was ever known to visit Willard's. But
Thoreau was always indisposed to call at the ordinary
places for his spiritual refreshment ; and he went farther
than most persons when apparently he did not go so far.
He soon discovered that all sectarian and denominational
styles of thinking had their Willard within economical dis-
tauce ; but the respective taps did not suit his country
palate. He was in his cups when he was out of doors, where
1865.] Thareau. 101
his lips fastened to the far horizon, and he tossed off the whole
costly vintage that mantled in the great circumference.
But he had no animal spirits for our sport or mischief.
We cannot recollect what became of him during the scenes of
the Dunkin Rebellion. He must have slipped off into some
" cool retreat or mossy cell." We are half inclined to sup
pose that the tumult startled him into some metamorphose,
that corresponded to a yearning in him of some natural kind,
whereby he secured a temporary evasion till peace was
restored. He may also, in this interim of qualified humanity,
have established an understanding with the mute cunning of
nature, which appeared afterwards in his surprising recogni
tion of the ways of squirrels, birds, and fishes. It is certainly
quite as possible that man should take off his mind, and drop
into the medium of animal intelligence, as that Swedenborg,
Dr. Channing, and other spirits of just men made perfect,
should strip off the senses and conditions of their sphere, to
come dabbling about in the atmosphere of earth among men's
thoughts. However this may be, Thoreau disappeared while
our young absurdity held its orgies, stripping shutters from
the lower windows of the buildings, dismantling recitation
rooms, greeting tutors and professors with a frenzied and
groundless indignation which we symbolized by kindling
the spoils of sacked premises upon the steps. It probably
occurred to him that fools might rush in where angels were
not in the habit of going. We recollect that he declined to
accompany .several fools of this description, who rushed late,
all in a fine condition of contempt, with Corybantic gestures,
into morning prayers, — a college exercise which we are con
fident was never attended by the angels.
It is true he says, " Give me for my friends and neighbors
wild men, not tame ones ; " and a little after, in the same
essay, " I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken
before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men
themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they
become submissive members of society." But, in fact, there
is nothing so conventional as the mischief of a boy who is
grown large enough to light bonfires, and run up a bill for
9*
102 Thoreau. [July,
" special repairs," and not yet large enough to include in

such a bill his own disposition to " haze " his comrades and
to have his fits of anarchy. Rebellion is " but a faint symbol
of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet."
There was no conceit of superior tendencies and exclusive
tastes which prevented him from coming into closer contact
with individuals. But it was not shyness alone which re
strained him, nor the reticence of an extremely modest tem
perament. For he was complacent ; his reserve was always
satisfactory to himself. Something in his still latent and
brooding genius was sufficiently attractive to make his wit
" home-keeping ; " and it very early occurred to him, that he
should not better his fortunes by familiarity with other minds.
This complacency, which lay quite deep over his youthful
features, was the key to that defect of sympathy which led to
defects of expression, and to unbalanced statements of his
thought. It had all the effect of the seclusion that some men
inflict upon themselves, when from conceit or disappointment
they restrict the compass of their life to islands in the great
expanse, and become reduced at last, after nibbling every
thing within the reach of their tether, to simple rumination,
and incessant returns of the same cud to the tongue. This,
and not listlessness, nor indolence, nor absolute incapacity for
any professional pursuit, led him to the banks of Walden
Pond, where his cottage, sheltering a self-reliant and homely
life, seemed like something secreted by a quite natural and
inevitable constitution. You might as well quarrel with the
self-sufficiency of a perfect day of Nature, which makes no
effort- to conciliate, as with this primitive disposition of his.
The critic need not feel bound to call it a vice of temper be
cause it nourished faults. He should, on the contrary, accept
it as he sees that it secured the rare and positive charac
teristics which make Thoreau's books so full of new life, of
charms unborrowed from the resources of society, of sug
gestions lent by the invisible beauty to a temperate and
cleanly soul. A greater deference to his neighborhood would
have impaired the peculiar genius which we ought to delight
to recognize as fresh from a divine inspiration, filled with
1865.] Thoreau. 103
possibilities like an untutored America, as it hints at im

provement in its very defects, and is fortunately guarded
by its own disability. It was perfectly satisfied with its
own ungraciousness, because that was essential to its pri
vate business. Another genius might need to touch human
life at many points ; to feel the wholesome shocks ; to draw
off the subtile nourishment which the great mass generates
and comprises ; to take in the reward for parting with some
efHuence : but this would have been fatal to Thoreau. It
would have cured his faultp and weakened his genius. He
would have gained friends within the world, and lost his
friends behind it.
It is very plain, that, however much he may have suffered
for want of human sympathy, and the correction of the man
ners of a fine circle, his complacency turned the pain to him
self into opportunity for his thought. He could meditate
well upon friendship ; but he soon learned to do without
friends. Occasionally, as in " Concord and Merrimac," pp.
273-302, he seems to be yearning for intercourse with worthy
and noble mates ; but he is merely describing his own ideals.
These peers whom he stands ready to love, to share his in
tegrity with them, his sense of all beautiful and manly things,
to suffer their heroic criticism, and to cure them with a sur
gery as prompt, are only the offspring of his solitary pen. He
would care less to make an effort to discover and come to an
understanding with such candidates for friendship after his
deliberate description of them. After the trouble of conceiv
ing them, they would not be worth the trouble of know
ing. His imagination enjoyed itself so well, that it dreaded
to be interrupted, perhaps to be deceived, by people pre
tending to be its counterparts. They excited his jealousy, as
though they had come to survey and stake out his Walden
privilege, with a view to an air-line railroad through his front
door. He had long ago escaped from all this bustle and
obtrusion : not only tricky and conventional people, shallow
neighbors, impertinent with the success of their professions
and handicrafts, mere talkers and jugglers, had been left out
side the wood, but his superiors also; for they could never
104 Tlioreau. [July*
satisfy his requisitions at a moment's notice, and they were

so human as to drop away sometimes from his inexorable
thought. •
His Friend is simply his own meditation of an elevated,
pure, and reticent behavior. He will do little and risk little
to find it incorporated, and is content to keep out of the way
of affectation. What is simply human never becomes any
relief or luxury to him, compared with his own surmises :
whenever he projects them upon the farmer, the teamster,
the lock-tender, the fisherman, upo.n the men at cattle-show or
muster, you think he has shaken hands and is pleasantly sur
prised to find that God has been so well employed. But it is
all his own cleverness, and the men are Btill lay-figures. It
is the enthusiasm of a reserve which men are not competent
to break. So that, whenever he shows regard for humble
life, it is not as life, but as unconventionality.
But is this a fault to quarrel with ? It is rather a charac
teristic to define, and keep in its providential connection with
his genius. He is not inhuman, and never indulges in con
tempt. Sometimes he appears to pretend that the apple is a
great deal more divine than the farmer who raised it ; and, if
you believed his talk, the " dry wit of decayed cranberry
vines" is better than a night with all the guests of the Sym
posium. He lacks geniality for every thing but Nature ; but
he truly despises nothing that is not guilty of deceit or vol
untary connivance with social frauds. Will you mend his
genius for Nature by forcing him to cultivate mankind ?
Can you afford to subject this originality to your experi
ments ? And is it so plenty in every township that you can
declare you will have none of it, unless it is willing to accom
modate your style ? Agassiz, instead of observing and chro
nicling, might as well fly into a passion with the innocent
shortcomings of his natural creatures.
And notice, too, that if Thoreau cannot quote with a per
sonality of feeling, like Theodore Parker's, the famous nihil,
humani a me alienum, the very complacency of his severe ideal
saves him from conceding too much out of sympathy with
human weakness. He came to destroy customs of living, not
1865.] Thoreau. 105
to fulfil them : at least, he is willing to mnke a personal ex

ample of the possibility of living without compliances that
are more costly to the conscience than to .the purse. The
pleasantest family circle cannot tempt him to manifest regard
for the American thriftiness that is so full of pretence. And
his earliest temper is shown in extreme protest against the
comforts and habits of the town. He would fain convince
people, that, instead of living, they are merely implicated in a
life-long struggle to save their furniture, pay rent for garrets
littered with cast-off conveniences, and keep a best room for
no eye on earth to see, no human presence to enjoy. He will
escape to some place whence he can show how living can be
reduced to its minimum ; not reflecting, in his first contempt
for our habits of self-embarrassment, that his example bids
every head of a family take to the woods, there to solve life's
problem by arresting life. But New-England enterprise does
not affect him ; its roads do not pierce nor bridge his com
placent economy. The cost of civilization, in human feeling,
in wasteful processes, and in hypocrisy, piques him into pro
nouncing it a disease.
There is no selfishness in this ; he is not avoiding trouble,
but hoping not to increase the trouble that already exists in
the world. He must preserve the chastity of his imagination,
if he dies of starvation ; and will be a little pinched and bony,
with a touch of tartness, rather than be dissolute. When his
friend seeks him in Concord jail, whither the tax-gatherer has
taken the body of this recusant, and addresses him, " Thoreau,
why are you here ? " he receives for reply, " Why are you not
here also?" No personal inconvenience can deter him from
making a logical application of his principles. Trade, gov
ernment, and civil life, seem to be extortionate processes for
getting the most for your money ; and he is clearly of the
opinion of Publius Syrus, who anticipated Proudhon's famous
maxim, " La proprittd c'est vol," when he wrote, " Lucrum
sine damno alterius fieri non potest."
He once asked the writer, with that deliberation from
which there seemed as little escape as from the pressure of
the atmosphere, " Have you ever yet in preaching been so
106 Thoreau. [July,
fortunate as to say any thing ? " Tenderness for the future

barrel, which was then a fine plump keg, betrayed us into
declaring confidently that we had. " Then your preaching
days are over. Can you bear to say it again ? You can
never open your mouth again for love or money."
" But certainly," he is shrewd enough to write, " there are
modes by which a man may put bread into his mouth, which
will not prejudice him as a companion and neighbor." The
only mode, however, which he can invent, ignores compan
ionship and neighborhood : he begins by withdrawing his
bravery from temptation, and then estimates the insignifi
cance of the cost. Once, when he felt lonesome in his Wal-
den cottage, he doubted " if the near neighborhood of man
was not essential to a serene and healthy life." But he soon
recovered from this mood, which was as foreign to him as
invalidism to the osprey ; and the true bias and purport of his
whole life is betrayed in the method of his restoration to
complacency.
" In the . midst of a gentle rain, while these thoughts prevailed, I
was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature,
in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight
around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at
once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advan
tages of human neighborhood insignificant ; and I have never thought
of them since. Every little pine-needle expanded and swelled with
sympathy, and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of
the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we
are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest
of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I
thought no place could ever be strange to me again."
Here is a vein as old as the Scriptures which record the
reveries of pure souls. The infinite presence cannot thus
befriend the selfish and shirking temperament. So was Tho
reau called and set apart for his fine observation of the nat
ural world, and to reclaim its most neglected provinces for
the indwelling love and beauty of the God who adopted him
also in the wood. The calling of Jonathan Edwards was not
more full of sweet and quiet rapture. How fortunate that
1865.] Thoreau. 107
the metaphysics of river and meadow furnished Thoreau with

a body of divinity to enforce the sinlessness of Nature and
refute the wrath of God !
So there appears, in these five volumes of rare truthfulness
of observation, and doubtless still more clearly in the exten
sive manuscript notes of his daily foraging of Nature, a
providence, which ought to protect him from the complaint
that he was not somebody else. No man ever lived who paid
more ardent and unselfish attention to his business. If pure
minds are sent into the world upon errands, with strict injunc.
tion not to stray by other paths, Thoreau certainly was one
of these elect; and we ought to admire how the native dis
position lost its faultiness in ministering to his work. The
limitation protected the opportunity. A great deal of criti
cism is inspired by inability to perceive the function and
predestined quality of the man who passes in review. It only
succeeds in explaining the difference between him and the
critic. Such a decided fact as a man of genius is, ought to be
gratefully accepted and interpreted ; and the best effort of
criticism should be to show how his inspiration justifies itself
against every thing but meanness and affectation. " I would
not question Nature, and I would rather have him as he was,
than as I would have him."
We cannot, therefore, subscribe to the regret that is ex
pressed in the inimitable biographical sketch, introductory to
the volume of " Excursions : " the writer there says, " I so
much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I can
not help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition.
Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was
the captain of a huckleberry party." But what if the berries
that filled his pail were of a kind never picked before, from
a stock not previously discovered in our pastures, staining
his hands and pages with the blood that circulates behind the
earth, that puts forth, indeed, the earth itself as a berry on
the tree Igdrasil. That kind of engineering tunnels the dark
ness which we call the visible world, and lets us through into
a more lively continent than this graded and turnpiked one.
Thoreau was " born for great enterprise and for command,"
108 Thoreau. [July,
to civilize Mature with the highest intuitions of the mind,

which show her simplicity to restless and artificial men ; thus
framing a treaty of amity and commerce by which new ad
vantages for the finite are gathered from the infinite, and one
system of law is extended over both spheres. His books are
full of these unexpected coincidences, which reveal the regu
larity and beauty of creation : from a twig or a leaf, his ad
venturous spirit, " o'er-festooning every interval," swings
across, and fastens the first rope of a bridge that shall become
solid for a million feet. These hints of the divine intention,
of the tolerance and impartiality that fill all animated forms
with one kind spirit ; this unerring scent that finds footsteps
where no microscope could gather one, and refers all their
stratagems to a single Presence, that barely escapes his im
petuous instinct, and cannot cover up its tracks so fast as he
pursues ; this knowledge of the habits, graces, and shifts of
all wild creatures, which humanizes them by the curious an
alogies it suggests, so that we adopt them into the family, and
they pay their board by helping our perception of order
and symmetry, as we find it in the succession of forest-trees,
and in that of races, in the development of wild fruits and
crabbed stocks, in the relations of fauna and flora, in the
graces of spring days, till all of us, birds, men, beasts, and
blossoms, seem to breathe in unison that One Intelligence,
whose moment is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, —
this was the enterprise of Thoreau ; and all developments of
his energy, or new command gained over his gifts, would
have perfected, and not changed, the nature of his employ
ment. It was the only way he had, or ever could acquire, for
serving politics, society, and the religious life.
For no writer of the present day is more religious ; that is
to say, no one more profoundly penetrated with the redeem
ing power of simple integrity, and the spiritualizing effect of
a personal consciousness of God. It is in the interest of holi
ness that he speaks slightingly of Scripture and its holy men.
" Keep your Christ," he says ; " but let me have my Buddha,
and leave me alone with him." He catches up this Buddha
for a chance defence against the conventional Christ of Dem
1865.] Thoreau. 109
ocrats, slaveholders, sharpers in trade and in society, literal

theologians, and over-pious laymen. Why should there be
any difficulty in detecting the irony of such pages as p. 72 in
" Concord and Merrimack " ?
" I trust that some may be as near and dear to Buddha or Christ
or Swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches. It is
necessary not to be Christian, to appreciate the beauty and signifi
cance of the life of Christ. I know that some will have hard thoughts
of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha : yet I
am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than
my Buddha ; for the love is the main thing, and I like him too. Why
need Christians be still intolerant and superstitious? The simple-
minded sailors were unwilling to cast overboard .Jonah at his own
request."
Compare them, with the fine statements upon pp. 141,146,

where his good sense and moral discrimination appear. Con
trasting Christianity with the Orientalists, who weje " so infi
nitely wise, yet infinitely stagnant," he proceeds : —
" In that same Asia, but in the western part of it, appeared a
youth, wholly unforetold by them, — not being absorbed into Brahma,
but bringing Brahma down to earth and mankind ; in whom Brahma
had awaked from his long sleep, and exerted himself, and the day
began, — a new orator. The Brahman had never thought to be a
brother of mankind as well as a child of God."
The New Testament " never reflects but it repents. There is no
poetry in it, we may say, nothing regarded in the light of pure
beauty, but moral truth is its object. All mortals are convicted by its
conscience."
The well-disposed reader will find a truly spiritual doctrine

amid the contempt for religions on page 82 : —
"A man's real faith is never contained in his creed, nor is his
creed an article of his faith. The last is never adopted. This it is
that permits him to smile ever, and to live even as bravely as he does.
And yet he clings anxiously to his creed as to a straw, thinking that
that does him good service because his sheet-anchor does not drag.
" In most men's religion, the ligature, which should be its umbili-
vol. i.xxix. — 5th s. vol. xvii. ko. i. 10
110 Thoreau. [July,
cal cord connecting them with divinity, is rather like that thread
which the accomplices of Cylon held in their hands when they went
abroad from the temple of Minerva ; the other end being attached to
the statue of the goddess. But frequently, as in their case, the thread
breaks, being stretched, and they are left without an asylum."
The most deferential allusion to the stock subjects of enlight
ened theologians is not so refreshing as some of his startling
sentences that hide moral earnestness and reverence in their
whim. " Where is the man who is guilty of direct and per
sonal insolence to Ilim that made him ? Yet there are certain
current expressions of blasphemous modes of viewing things,
as, frequently, when we say, ' He is doing a good busi
ness,' — more profane than cursing and swearing. There
is sin and death in such words. Let not the children hear
them." His most trying paradoxes are conceived in a spirit
of veneration for everlasting laws. The meat is worth a little
struggle with the husk; for, as he says of himself, " they will
complain, too, that you are hard. 0 ye that would have the
cocoa-nut wrong side outwards ! when next I weep 1 will let
you know."
But he will be rightly understood only by reference to his
books, and not to separate pages ; for his whole mental dispo
sition was religious. He is not content to make little port
able statements, after the manner of sermonizers, who dis
charge themselves by clauses of their weekly accumulation
of awe and hope, and then are laid up, like the gymnotus, for
repairs. But every page is firmly built upon moral earnest
ness and regard for the unseen powers. He is a spiritual
writer in the sense of worshipping the presence of infinite
consistency and beauty ; yet he always behaves as if his re
ligion was " nothing to speak of." He often quarrels with
the technicalities of church-goers, and is more petulant than
he need be, lest you should suspect him of hypocrisy. After
reading the earliest English translations of Eastern scriptures,
as Colebrooke's, and perhaps some fragments in the French,
he recommends them to the people, because his sense of just
ice is hurt at the exclusive and ignorant fotichism which is
paid to the Old and New Testaments. He cannot have the
1865.] Thoreau. Ill
notion of supplanting them; but he longs to have all men

recognize the continuous inspiration of the Spirit through all
climes and ages. He does not undertake to patronize the
Bible, and says few good words for it ; but his books are
fountains of sincerity and moral sweetness, such as the Bible
emphasizes, and they always worship " in spirit and in truth."
The truth is very prominent; truth of private demeanor, of
public ethics, of sumptuary law, of moral anticipation ; truth
of sky, of cloud, of forest, — the sharpest observation, the most
uncompromising criticism, the very soul of honor, and of
high regard for the purity that looks on God. Nothing in
these books can destroy their healthy influence : the over
drawn passages of social corruption, the testy humor, the
apparent irreverence, the vexatious paradoxes, the superflu
ous disdain, appear like tan-spots on a cheek that is all frank
ness and delicacy, whose bloom and smile extort forgiveness
for them. We cannot, at present, recall a religious treatise
that is better ventilated with the sun and air of heaven.
What an easy task it would be for a lively and not entirely
scrupulous pen to ridicule his notions, and raise such a cloud
of ink in the clear medium as entirely to obscure his true and
noble traits. To hear, for instance, his requisition on mankind,
" Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand " I
We suspect that his observations upon Conscience can be
misunderstood sooner than appreciated. Find them upon
pp. 78-79 of " Concord and Merrimack ; " but notice that the
key to tune those ragged, half-strung verses, is the quaint
sentence, " Men have a singular desire to be good, without
being good for any thing, because, perchance, they think
vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end."
Toward the close of his life, he was visited by one of those
dealers in ready-made clothing, who advertise to get any soul
prepared at a moment's notice for a sudden trip. Complete
outfits, including " a change," and patent fire-proof, aro fur
nished at the very bedside, or place of embarkation, of the
most "shiftless spirits. " Henry, have you made your peace
with God?" To which our slop-dealer received the somewhat
noticeable reply, " I have never quarrelled with him." We
112 Tkoreau. [July,
fancy the rapid and complete abdication of the cheap-clothing

business in the presence of such forethought.
A friend of the family was very anxious to know how he
stood affected towards Christ, and he told her that a snow
storm was more to him than Christ. So he got rid of these
cankers that came round to infest his soul's blossoming time.
Readers ought not to bring a lack of religion to the dealing
with his answers.
His spiritual life was not deficient in soundness because it
stood unrelated to conventional names and observances. Let
it be known by the fruits of integrity, high-mindedness, and
purity, which cluster on the pages of these volumes; by the
cold and stern yet salutary ideals of behavior in all the hu
man relations ; by his sense of dependence upon the invisible
life, and absolute surrender to its dictates.
" Walden," and " A Week on the Concord and Merrimack,"
are most full of direct discussions upon ethical and religions
subjects ; but they are in the protesting and unsympathetic
vein. " Cape Cod " shows his sensibility for human moods
and emotions, and sometimes surprises the reader with a
wealth which he had not credited to this sturdy refuser of all
ordinary taxes. The more minute and satisfactory his observ
ation of Nature became, the more gently his spirit learned
to share the yearnings in each of us " of some natural kind."
How solemn and tender is the figure of the sunken anchors !
— " Cape Cod" pp. 149, 150, — notwithstanding its slight rust
of iron)', and the homely close. And throughout this volume,
wherever he comes into contact with fragments of ship
wrecks, whether by the seas or fates ; with peculiar isolations
of life ; with the odd, stunted, and grotesque specimens which
the tide itself seems to deposit and nourish upon that long
spit of sand, — his humor is just touched with tenderness
" beyond the reach of art," and he betrays that the great under
tow sweeps outward from his spirit also to the deep. This
is the most human of all his writings. And, at the same time,
his own humanity becomes identified with the scene in a way
that cannot be mistaken for conceit. The beach becomes the
wave-rolled floor of his privacy to walk upon : the light-house
1865.] Thoreau. 113
is enflamed at evening with his sympathetic thought. He

pleases himself, as he lies awake underneath the lamp-cham
ber of the Highland light, with spinning the yarns of all sea
ward vessels towards a centre, which was his temporary
couch ; may we not say rather, his unperturbed and friendly
heart ?
With this gradual mellowing of his genius, there came also
an increase of substance and richness to his style. Wherever
" Walden " philosophizes, it is thin, and refuses to be consecu
tively read. The little short sentences soon fatigue, as when
one tries a rail-track by stepping from sleeper to sleeper.
The paragraphs have no flow : the thought is not yet informed
with rhythm. The darling economy of which he writes has
penetrated to the style. Proverbs enough there are : as,
" None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin," and, " He
was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap," — meaning that
it is better for a man not to encumber himself with his bag
gage and fixtures, and will apply to thoughts as well; " Rescue
the drowning, and tie your shoe-strings," that is, make little
fuss with your philanthropies ; " Only that day "dawns to
which we are awake." There are numbers of bright little
clauses, happy touches of color or wit : as, " The haze, the
sun's dust of travel ; " he describes lecturing against the use
of tobacco " as a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers
have to pay;" — "I say, beware of all enterprises that require
new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes ; " — " It
is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his
hands on himself in the dark;" when he finds that he must
depend upon mankind to the extent of borrowing an axe, he
pays well for it in this, — " It is difficult to begin without bor
rowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to
permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enter
prise ; " he thus reduces irksome and expensive living to
plain prose, " It makes but little difference whether you are
committed to a farm or the county jail;" the stream of time
is shallow, " I would drink deeper ; fish in the sky, whose
bottom is pebbly with stars;" if a man is really alive, he is not
out of danger of dying, so that he need not try to shield
10*
114 Thoreau. [July,
himself, — "A man sits as many risks as he runs." In the

paper on " Autumnal Tints," if he would get a favorable posi
tion for viewing a maple-tree, he turns his head slightly,
" emptying out some of its earthiness." But we become em
barrassed by the plenteousness of these specimens, many of
which are untransferable, as they lie in words and phrases,
pollen in the bottom of his sentences.
When his pen begins to describe, the style grows genial
and flowing, as if Nature's rhythm were at the desk. There
is not room for specimens of his descriptions of scenery ; of
the morning and evening moods of Nature ; of the sounds
of the wind, the habits of squirrels, pigeons, foxes, muskrats,
and fishes. See, for instance, Spaulding's Farm, in " Excur
sions," p. 207 ; the Red-Maple Swamp, p. 231 ; the night-
hawk, in "Walden," p. 172 ; the partridge, p. 243 ; the ant-bat
tle, p. 246 ; the loon, p. 251 ; the squirrels, p. 294 ; the wasp in
October, when, says Thoreau, " I warmed myself by the still
glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter,
had left ; " the subtile pages on Sounds, pp. 134, 135 ; the squir
rels in " Concord and Merrimack," p. 206 ; the pigeons, p. 233 ;
the bittern, p. 250 ; the wind, p. 349 ; the delightful humor in
the picture of the soldier going to muster, p. 330. Such things
cannot be surpassed. ' They are minute in observation, fresh
in sentiment, and completely penetrated by the imagination.
The reader will see in them how Thoreau's personal life held
all Nature's symbolism in solution, and his thought drips with
it. His mind is not merely pantheistic ; say, rather, it is
Nature herself, in a self-conscious mood, becoming aware of
her effects.
Of all his books, " Cape Cod " has the most finished and
sustained style. With the exception of some papers in " Ex
cursions," the reader will find that here the pages bear him
best, without consciousness of effort. The chapters were
probably written in different years, some earlier, some later;
but they make us regret that he did not visit sea-side locali
ties more often, — for the ocean lifts his pen better than the
forest, — though he doubtless felt more at home in the latter,
and more in harmony with the broad complacent meadow and
1865.] Thoreau. 115
the placid lapse of streams. He went into the woods, because

he " wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential
facts of life." Pan's mysterious piping drew him still deeper
into solitude, by the paths of streams and the tracks of the
fox and partridge, where the beach-sounds in the pine-tree
might remind him of Glaucus without swelling into envy for
his enterprise. But it is plain, that, after salt water had once
run up and lapped his feet, not all the epithets in Homer
could pacify the hunger of this new sensation. He was power
fully attracted : the movement and unbounded freedom, the
contrasts of strength and gentleness in the horizon filled with
the downright sincerity that he prized, braced him like the
high living of camps and explorations, and gave to his pulse
an activity which he refused to derive from towns and busi
ness. But his observation is as sympathetic here as on the
shore of Walden Pond ; dealing, that is, not with general de
scription of objects, or careful arrangement of their traits,
but seizing their individuality, and transferring it with a
touch of the precisest color into a sentence. Thus objects,
instead of mutely falling into their natural place, aspire to
interest us through something in the imagination that is kin
dred ; and the whole scene becomes peopled instead of classi
fied. The floating body of a woman, with her cap blown
back, one of the relics of the Cohasset shipwreck, teaches him
that " the beauty of the shore itself was wrecked for many a
lonely walker there, until he could perceive, at lastj how its
beauty was enhanced by wrecks like this, and it acquired
thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still." The thorn-apple,
that is found on all strands of the ocean, " suggests not
merely commerce, but its attendant vices, as if its fibres were
the stuff of which pirates spin their yarns." An island " had
got the very form of a ripple;" the sea nibbles voraciously
at the Continent, " the tawny rocks, like lions couchant, defy
ing the ocean ; " the windmills of the salt-works " looked
loose and slightly locomotive, like huge wounded birds, trail
ing a wing or a leg ; " the wind seems " to blow not so much
as the exciting cause, as from sympathy with the already
agitated ocean ; " and the breakers " looked like droves of a
116 Thoreau. [July,
thousand wild horses of Neptune, rushing to the shore ; " the

wrecker's face was " like an old sail endowed with life, a
hanging-cliff of weather-beaten flesh ; " he seemed to be " as
indifferent as a clam, — like a sea-clam with hat on and legs,
that was out walking the strand ; " notice how the kelp is
described on p. 60 — the sun-squall, and the note of the mack
erel-gull, " the dreary peep of the piping plover," whoso
young are "mere pinches of down on two legs;" and our
literature cannot show a racier and more genial picture than
the chapter called " The Wellfleet Oysterman." The sea
plays with the land, " holding a sand-bar in its mouth awhile
before it swallows it, as a cat plays with a mouse ; but the
fatal gripe is sure to come at last." The three or four hun
dred sail of the mackerel fleet hovered about the two lights
of the Cape, "like moths round a candle, and at this distance
they looked fair and white, as if they had not yet flown into
the light ; but nearer at hand, afterwards, we saw how some
had formerly singed their wings and bodies." He paints
the color of the sand, the weather-streaks upon the ocean, the
" autumn rug " of the bay and huckleberry, the lichened
boards of houses, and the fish-flakes, and the green in the
comb of a wave. All the local history and topography is well
interwoven with great skill to enhance the human and per
sonal impression of these scenes. The bleak sand-elbow of
Massachusetts had been unpromising from the days of Thor-
fin ; waiting, evidently, till the arrival of this " Thor-eau "
made promising, and handsome performing, too, worth the
while, for his»sake who was next of kin.
The reader of Thoreau's verses will be likely to declare
that all the poetry has been absorbed by the prose. Yet the
judgment will not be entirely safe. Only two or three pieces
— those commencing " My life is like a stroll upon a beach ; "
" 'Tis sweet to hear of heroes dead ; " " My love must be as
free," — can boast of melody and a completed form ; but scat
tered verses yield great subtilty of thought, and tender and
sweet expressions. We recollect, that when the " Dial " was
the butt of all the nibless pens in Boston, and the style of Mr.
Emerson gave the criticisms that quoted it for ridicule all
1865.] Thoreau. 117
their flavor, the reigning fashion included Thoreau's verses,

and an fofltoroc yl\oc, like that of the gods at Vulcan's limping,
went up over his ragged and halting lines. They are cer
tainly very crude, seldom touched with the bloom of beauty,
and full of verdant confidence in the reader's tolerance of
their youth. But his imagination sometimes descends in their
midst, and a line or a phrase blazes like a drop that has
caught the sun ; or suddenly his far thought strikes full upon
the rows of common window glass, and they all reflect the
honor.
A great deal of this poetry is gnomic, and the thrifty wis
dom predominates. But there are many delicate lines about
birds, the distant hills, the woodman's " early scout, his emis
sary, smoke ; " trees stand in the clear sunset horizon, —
" as the vessels in a haven
Await the morning breeze ; "
and let the reader turn in confidence to "Walden," p. 271.
So let him undaunted look up in " Concord and Merrimack,"
pp. 183, 255, 274, 300, and 403, which is better than the same
vein in George Herbert. Indeed, the frank and unpretending
nobleness of his verses often recalls the minor poets of the
Elizabethan times. It is a pity that their slovenly habit had
not been reformed.
But let these books, with all their faults of temperament
and execution, be not slow in recommending their health and
calmness to the young men and women, who retain, with in
tegrity, that contempt for worldly fashions and corrupt opin
ions of the Church and State, which the Republic hopes to
nourish for her service and renown. Let them learn to love
this sincere and truly religious life, which, both in what it
did, and what it refrained to do, has a stimulus for all who
long to keep themselves unspotted from the world.
" 'Tis sweet to hear of heroes dead,
To know them still alive ;
But sweeter if wo earn their bread,
And in us they survive.
Our life should feed the springs of fame
With a perennial wave,
As ocean feeds the babbling founts
Which find in it their grave."
118 The New Nation. [July,
Art. VIII. — THE NEW NATION.
1. Documents of the Loyal Publication Society. New York.

2. What ought to be done with the Freedmen and with the Rebels f A
Sermon. By Rev. Henry M. Dexter. Boston : Nichols &
Noyes. ,
3. The Criminal, the Crime, the Penalty. A Sermon. By Rev.
George H. Hepworth. Boston ; Walker, Fuller, & Co.
4. Report of a Meeting held at Faneuil Hall, Boston, June 21, 1865,
to Consider the Method of Reconstruction in the Rebel States.
The return of peace — that day waited for so long with

eager, and by many with almost despairing, expectation — was
greeted when it came with no loud rejoicing, with no festival
or illumination, not even with any formal announcement that
the era of armed strife was closed. Quietly and without
parade, with only here and there some slight formal recogni
tion of the magnificent service they have done, our disbanded
soldiers are returning to their homes. The necessary re
action comes upon the public mind. The hush of weariness,
or, it may be, of anxiety and care, checks the eager triumph,
and forbids the tumultuous joy.
" Not with Te Deums loud, and high Hosannas,
Greet we the awful victory we have won ;
But with our arms reversed and lowered banners
We stand, — our work is done.
Thy work is done, God, terrible and just,

Who laidst upon our hands and hearts this task ;
And, kneeling with our foreheads in the dust,
We venture peace to ask ! "
A proclamation, announcing the reduction of the army, and

the discontinuing of the blockade ; a notification to foreign
powers, that the formal recognition of belligerency must
cease ; an executive order, terminating the military restric
tions upon trade ; a declaration, that, with the current month,
' the Southern ports are freely open to the world's commerce,
— these, with the news how, one after another, the paltry
1865.] Tlie Return of Peace. 119
remaining forces of the rebellion have surrendered ; and the

splendid military pageant in Washington, whither the grand
sweep of the campaign had brought the armies of East and
West into the blaze of one gorgeous holiday, — were the
steps and the announcements of that change the spring
months had brought. In this quiet and business-like comple
tion of its great task, our Government has been able to keep
consistently and proudly true to its theory of the war when
it first began, — that it was simply the exercise of executive
authority to control " combinations too powerful to be sup
pressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by
the powers vested in the marshals by law." We are not
aware of any act or word, by which, fairly construed, it has
admitted itself to be dealing with any thing except a pro
longed insurrection, or a gigantic mob. Looking back on four
years of an armed struggle matched by nothing since the
great European war which closed fifty years ago, it still
insists on its claim, — that its opponents have never been law
ful belligerents, in the proper sense of the term ; and proceeds
to try them severally before its civil courts, as guilty of defin
ite offences against the penal statutes of the State. This
attitude of the Administration — which it has distinctly re
fused to relinquish, or even to allow in controversy, in every
phase of the doubtful contest, and which it does not qualify
now, even by so much as a formal declaration that peace is
restored and victory won — is a plainer evidence than any
demonstrative triumph, of that consciousness of power, that
intense pride and vigor of national life, which is the first fruit
of the late war.
The return of peace is received everywhere soberly and
thoughtfully. It could not be otherwise ; for it brings us
directly upon the consideration of very serious questions,
which time would have opened at any rate, which war has
only hurried in their date, or altered in the shape they wear.
And, besides these, it opens other questions, — how to punish
the gravest political crime through the ordinary tribunals ;
and how, soonest, surest, and safest, to restore citizenship and
all civil rights to populations that have forfeited them in the
madness of rebellion, or been stripped of them in the terrors

of misrule. We are brought face to face with the conditions
under which the Republic is to enter upon another term of
its existence, and the new nation must be constructed out
of the materials so shattered and jarred by the earthquake of
civil war.
' The result, looked at onty from our point of view, might
seem to justify all that buoyant and sanguine confidence with
which we have looked forward to it from the first. The vic
tory leaves nothing to mar its thoroughness ; and it is won on
a field as conspicuous as were the early humiliation and de
feat. The nation has fully vindicated its position before the
world. There can be no possible challenge of its right here
after, no repetition of the affronts that stung four years ago.
For the first time, it knows its military strength. Proudly
— not, we trust, boastfully or aggressively — it bears the
stained and torn banners of those terrible campaigns. The
full flush and throb of this new consciousness it felt, on that
one gorgeous holiday, when " the triumphal procession rolled
through the broad avenues of the capital of this Republic,
for twelve hours, a hundred and fifty thousand strong, and
thirty miles, at least, in length," in the homeward march of
the armies of the Potomac and the Mississippi. Those armies,
no longer a drain upon the nation's resources, are already ab
sorbed back into the ordinary veins and channels of its life.
The latent strength that was in the democracy has revealed
itself for once; and we know it now, as we could never have
suspected it before.
So, too, with a certain religious fervor and intensity of that
faith in republican liberty, whose reality, indeed, all thoughtful
men had known, as one of the great forces that move man
kind, but whose formidable and appalling strength could not
have been understood without this last extreme test of it. A
faith none the less strong, because till now latent, and only
half-conscious of itself; but now far more clear, intelligent,
and self-consistent. The nation has been schooled under ter
rible chastisements in the doctrine of liberty. Under sharp
compulsion, it has had to unlearn the errors and ignorances of
1865.] The Nation's Victory. 121
the past. The uneasy sense of some hostile and wrong thing
harbored within itself, which has given us a divided con
science heretofore, has been purged away by fire. Our dem
ocratic theory is at length brought into harmony with itself.
It means hereafter, what it never did before, equal rights
and universal freedom. The formal provisions of the Consti
tution are interpreted to conform with the " glittering gener
alities " of the Declaration. And, as an element of national
unity, vigor, and strength, it is impossible to exaggerate the
value of the clearness, precision, and harmony, which have
been given to that faith in human liberty on which our politi
cal structure rests.
And, along with this, the nation has established, for the
first time, a strict and firm gradation of its powers. The
authority and majesty of the Union, our only security against
everlasting jealousies and feuds, are secure, we may trust,
once for all. The cause of public order is in the keeping of a
strong, unchallenged central Government. The doctrine of
secession, the threat of disunion, which have been the stand
ing weakness of our politics for fifty years, and the occasion
of almost all our humiliation and shame, have been thoroughly
laid to rest in the grave dug for them by the ambition of their
defenders. A class aristocracy sustained by brute force in
its most gross and brutal form — a class so wanton and inso
lent in prosperity, so profligate in power, so cruel to des
peration in its failure and defeat — has persisted in opposing
every overture of amity and conciliation, persisted in holding
to the chance of a barren independence to be got by war,
until it is annihilated with a destruction sudden, awful, and
complete, such as we can recall no other instance of in his
tory, unless it be the ruin of the profligate nobility of France
in the revolution of seventy-five years ago. That great dan
ger and dread no longer exists in the heart of our free com
monwealth of States.
Among the problems settled for us by these years of war,
we must also reckon that which seeks a stable basis for the
• industry and the currency of the country. Each of these by
VOL. LXXIX. —5TH 8. VOL. XVII. NO. I. 11
itself had offered a task too hard for our average party politics
of expediency. The old controversies of bank and tariff are
effectually laid to rest, for one generation at least. The war
has taken them up together, and compelled each of them to
help in the solution of the other. To a degree which could
not possibly have been hoped, or even thought, the industrial
resources of the nation have been developed to keep pace
with the enormous drains upon its strength: so that the re
turn of peace finds us with better cultivated farms and more
prosperous workshops ; with arts, manufactures, and mines
far more productive than at any former period ; with more
healthy and prudent habits of business dealing, and a lessening
of the vast inflation of private credit; with a Government loan
lightly borne, and easily absorbed among the people, to as
high an amount as thirty and even forty millions in a single
day ; above all, with a*national system of currency we should
never have had, unless forced on us by the exigencies of the
war, resting on the public good faith and credit, and relieving
half the old annoyances of conveyance and exchange. So
that the public debt — vast as it is, unless we reckon it in
comparison with the resources which are to cover it — serves
its temporary uses, as a new pledge of loyalty, and as a cum
brous but very serviceable balance-wheel to steady the great
machine of industry. And some, misled by the real ease with
which the weight of it is borne in its universal distribution,
have even revived the monstrous fallacy, that it is so much
clear addition to the nation's wealth.
Such, if we look at it from one side, is the condition in
which peace finds us, — a condition of unity and vigor, of
prosperity, confidence, and conscious strength, which we have
never enjoyed before ; relieved from the one great spell,
the terror of disunion and civil war, that has always been the
thick cloud in our horizon. It is the full and perfect realizing
of all we have ever claimed or hoped as the result of a suc
cessful struggle ; that which we knew was within our reach
on the condition only, that the people should be true to itself.
And now, to look a little at the other side. It is one conse
quence of peace, that, along with the jurisdiction, it restores
1865.] Temper of the South. 123
to the nation the responsible control of nearly half its own

geographical area, — alienated by that fierce feud, with the
passions and bruises of the contest all fresh upon it. " Our
Government ! we have no Government," is the language of
some who have submitted to the force of arms ; " you must
govern us as you can." Sullen, defiant, and bitterly resentful,
we must expect to find the temper of large sections and
classes in the South offering a problem of administration
hardly less difficult than that which has made the calamity of
Russian Poland, or British India. A mere reign of military
force would be no solution such as the genius of our country
craves, or the conscience of our people would permit. Al
most any profligacy of political compact and connivance we
might expect, rather than any long persistence in the costs
and corruption of military rule. The task is not merely, or
even mainly, to rule a conquered district in the name of order ;
it is, how to reconcile and educate it in the name of liberty.
Any experiment is urged, that has a hope of showing how a
return to self-government there may be possible, speedy,
and safe. Four or five of the seceded States are already on
the road to reconstruction under the auspices of the central
power at Washington. Hardly any political danger would
appear to be so much dreaded as an indefinite protraction of
a military protectorate.
But how soon, in fact, can that government of the armed
hand cease ? How soon can we be assured, that the restor
ing of political privilege will be accepted in good faith,
and not for malice and revenge? How soon will an idle and
fierce aristocracy of planters, or a more idle and fierce pro
letariat of mean whites, accept the conditions of an industrial
and free civilization, which they have all along insulted and
mocked, and which has but now scourged them into a submis
sion as hateful as it is treacherous and unstable? We speak
of that part of the population, larger or smaller, still rebel
lious at heart ; not forgetting the increasing number who
accept the altered condition of things with the honest inten
tion to abide by it, and make the best of it. These are still,
we fear, a small minority, at least in the planting States. We
hear of some in Alabama, that they consent to the doom of

actual starvation, in sheer sullenness of despair, rather than
the ignominy of earning their daily bread. We hear of others
who visit their cowardly vengeance on the wretched negroes,
as the source of their troubles and the authors of their defeat,
in brutal maiming and mutilation of them, and in hunting
them to death ; so that their last state is worse than their first.
And how far can we begin to see the germ of something bet
ter ? From a private letter dated Charleston, June 4, we take
the following : —
" Charleston has undergone a great change since we came here (in
April). Then, nobody was to be seen in the streets; no goods to
speak of in the stores : it was a gloomy, deserted city. Now, the
streets are crowded, and with a better class of people : gray-backs
swarm ; I think there must be more rebel than Union soldiers in the
city. The shops on King Street present a gay and attractive appear
ance. Business is reviving, and with it, I hope, the destitution in the
city will be lessened. I am told, however, that the suffering is on
the increase, and it must be so with those who have no business, and
who had at first only a little property on which to live. That is gone,
and there is nothing for them now but charity or starvation. . . .
" I hear reports of various sorts from the interior of the State. In
some places, slavery is existing in its fullest form ; indeed, with extra
severity, owing to the uneasiness of the negroes. In self-defence (or,
rather, defence of the system), the planters often shoot them down
with very little provocation. But, wherever they are near any of our
troops, especially if the officers are of the right stamp, the planters
come in with more or less willingness, and make contracts with their
hands ; giving them, generally, half of the crop, besides supporting
them through the season. This I think very reasonable, or rather
liberal. There are some other places which are abandoned by the
masters, and carried on by the people on their own account. Accord
ing to their own statements, they have in large crops, which are doing
well. In some such instances, the owners have come back, taken the
oath, and then made a contract for half the crop : it seems unjust to
the negroes ; but of course every thing depends on the final action of
Government about the lands. In still other districts, there is almost
anarchy, with bands of guerillas shooting down negroes, and over
awing the community. Near Georgetown, matters were in a very
1865.] Destruction of Property. 125
bad condition, until at last the negroes organized to retaliate, caught

the ringleader, took him into the woods, and shot him. Since then,
there has been peace, and the region is comparatively safe."
Such are the conditions, as to temper and circumstance,
under which the problem of self-government has to be met in
large portions of the South. And these are aggravated by
the inevitable results of a war in which property and mastery
have perished in one ruin. When the boast is made, that, in
spite of all the waste and cost and havoc of war, the signs of
wealth and luxury are more abundant than ever, the answer
of political economy is plain, — that abundance here must be
made up by compulsory thrift, that is, extreme destitution,
somewhere else. Waste and wealth do not naturally go to
gether; and the gains of war are dearly balanced by its
penury and loss. It needs no statistics to tell the inevitable
misery that has fallen upon wide regions of the South, —
a misery how bitterly aggravated by that wide sweep of
desolation which marked the track of the Georgia and Caro
lina campaign ! Already we hear the horrible story of literal
starvation prevailing in extensive districts. And but for the
return of peace in season to secure the late planting of food-
crops, the tale of wretchedness must have equalled the too
familiar stories of Ireland and Hindostan. In Georgia it has
been estimated, that, in round numbers, five-sixths of the
entire property of the State, exclusive of land and slaves,
has perished in the war.* We have no calculations, in equal
* In actual figures thus : —
Property s&red. Property lost.
Slaves (462.198, by the census of 1860) $271,620,405
Merchandise 13,531,687
Money and solvent debts §10,000,000 86,124,701
Capital in manufactures 1,000,000 3,428,132
Shipping and tonnage 631,732
Household furniture 2,125,045
Land (average per acre -$4.43) . . . 149,547,880
Bank capital 12,479,111
Railroads 9,000,000 9,000,000
§172,304,657 $396,184,036
See a valuable sermon, by the Rev. Charles Lowe, in the " Christian Register"
for June 10, 1865.
IV
detail, for other portions of the South; but the state of things
here shown must stand for the general result in all.
No doubt this present desolation will be compensated by a
larger and a healthier growth in coming years, as immigration
has its perfect work, and the conditions of free labor come to
be established. But, for the present, it stands not merely for
so much actual destruction and poverty, but for the smothered
resentment, the bitterness of heart, the hopelessness, the sul
len despair, which are apt to follow all great strokes of loss,
especially loss by human violence, and in the re-action from
eager hope and desperate endeavor.* And it greatly imbit-
ters and complicates the task our Government has to meet.
It is impossible to think without a certain misgiving and .
dread of the prospects of the emancipated race, — at the
mercy, as practically they must be, of men who will be apt to
recognize so much only of their change of state, that it has
dissolved the old order without founding any new. Hints we
have had of the vindictive hostility their old masters will be
* What war must be when brought to one's own home and neighborhood is
told in such little homely incidents as these, which must have grown too familiar,
written by an eye-witness, who was also a soldier in the ranks : —
" On the piazza about the poor-house, sat the inmates, — a bowed old man
amid a group of squalid children, barefooted, bareheaded, anxious, weeping.
He was the grandparent. The father was in the rebel army, somewhere : the
mother sat rocking, with an infant in her arms, thin and sickly. The house and
the yard were full of straggling soldiers. The garden had been rifled of every
vegetable which could be eaten, and what was left was trampled down. The
cow in the wretched shed had been shot, a little meat cut from the carcass, and
the rest left to waste. The guns of the men were cracking about the yard, and
every fowl was being killed. A number of men were coming out of the door
with haversacks full of meal. The whole substance of these poor people was
being devoured. As I came up, a drunken soldier had just torn the brooch
away which the woman with the child in her arms wore at her neck, — a cheap
thing, which, however, had attracted his drunken greed ; and (I can hardly bear to
write the terribly ruffianly thing) he was rudely taking from one of her ears the
earring, making the blood flow in his heedless brutality. I rushed upon him, and
saved her further pain ; and, the officer in command of the guard being close at
hand, we had the fellow arrested. We tried to restore order ; but, while we were
there, flames burst out from the barn, which speedily caught the house : and the
guard passed on, leaving the old man, the woman, and the company of little chil
dren, shelterless and foodless, looking in tears upon their blazing home. My
heart bled for them so ! Yet I could do nothing. We were pursuing the enemy.
Duty forced me forward." — The Thinking Bayonet, p. 161.
1865.] Condition of the Blacks. 127
apt to make them feel ; and it is no wonder, that, in their sup

plication to the Government at Washington, they represent
their present condition as far less tolerable than the former
bondage. We have already spoken, more than once, of the
success which has attended the experiments at free labor and
social order among the freedmen, where there have been tol
erable fairness and good sense in the way they have been
dealt with. They may be considered to have fully settled
the question as to the capacity of the black race for self-sup
port, and their general willingness to work ; their capacity,
also, for a good degree of local self-government. And, where
they can remain unmolested by themselves, or under the im
mediate protection of the national power, — as in the Sea-
island plantations assigned to them by General Sherman, —
we imagine that the day of anxiety about them is past. But
those so situated are a little margin of that broad, dark belt
of population, — a hundred thousand, perhaps, in all. And, for
every one under these circumstances of safety, there must be
at least twenty or thirty whose only hope lies in the better
temper, the restored civil order, and the powerful hand of
national authority. Even if political power were given to
them at once without reserve, we might yet ask of what avail
it would be to masses of men so densely ignorant, so slavishly
timid, so abjectly superstitious, as they or most of them have
always shown themselves in the presence of the master-race.
We learned something four years ago of the respect paid to
political forms and suffrage rights in those districts of the
South. Even where white Unionists, whose rights of citizen
ship had never been challenged, were in a clear majority, as
in Eastern Tennessee, we saw something of the tender mer
cies of their political opponents, — the hangings and house-
burnings, and the reign of terror at the polls. And, if all
political rights were granted, we apprehend that it would be
with more of fear than hope, that the emancipated slaves
would seek to protect their personal rights by voting in mass
against their former masters, — even if they should not, as Mr.
Botts declares, vote in a mass at the bidding of their former
masters. Whatever reasons of abstract justice, whatever con
128 Tlie New Nation. [July,
siderations of self-protection, may require that suffrage be

given to blacks and whites on equal terms, it will be many
years, we fear, before it can be looked to as any sensible relief
to the dangers and uncertainties of the actual situation.
Yet the question is one which must be met ; and circum
stances have made it just now the most prominent one of all
before the public mind. For ourselves, we have been con
tent with asserting hitherto what seems the plain demand of
justice and expediency alike, — that all distinctions of color
should be utterly unknown to the law ; that, whatever condi
tions of citizenship require to be laid down, they should be
clear of the great wrong of conforming to lines of race and
caste, — clear of the deeper baseness of surrendering a popu
lation more loyal, more industrious, more orderly, than the
great majority of the whites, and not inferior in intelligence
to large numbers of them, to the despotic control of those who
have every evil passion to gratify in taking revengo upon
them, and every evil motive for desiring to bring back on
them the bitterness of their former bondage. The case be
fore the average conscience of mankind, before the bar of
common prudence, and especially as it appeals to the honor
of our own Government and nation, seems perfectly clear.
Yet there are some considerations not so plain, which we
must take account of, if we would see what the real working
conditions of it are.
In the first place, by what tribunal shall the question be
properly determined? To this question, the late action of
the Administration touching North Carolina and Mississippi
appears to answer : — The tribunal shall be the loyal white citi
zens of the States seeking restoration to their political
rights.* Personally, as it is understood, the President and
his advisers strongly desire that the decision shall be in favor
* The precise terms of the President's proclamation in inviting a convention

of the loyalists of North Carolina are these : " No person shall be qualified as an
elector, or shall be eligible as a member of such convention, unless he shall pre
viously have taken and subscribed the oath of amnesty as set forth in the Presi
dent's proclamation, May 29, 1865, and is a voter qualified as prescribed by the Con
stitution and Laws of the State of North Carolina in force immediately before the 20M
day of May, 1861, the date of the so-called ordinance of secession."
1865.] Negro Suffrage. 129
of granting the suffrage to all duly qualified persons, blacks

and whites alike. But they do not hold themselves compe
tent to decide the question in advance. At least, the oppor
tunity of deciding shall be left to the white loyal citizens first.
If they determine it in the way which seems to us safest and
best, it is plain how incomparably greater the moral value of
the decision will be, than if it were forced on them prelimin
ary to any action of their own. If they determine it by old
prejudice and exclusion, at least the way is open to a reversal
of the judgment. There can be no doubt, that the original
right of the decision, by all our political precedents and theo
ries, lies with the people of the States themselves, as defined
in State organizations already existing. It is not by virtue
of ordinary political justice, but (if at all) in virtue of a high
necessity of State, that the nation may rightly overrule their
judgment. That the nation may claim and exercise this
right, we have not a moment's doubt. That it ought to ex
ercise it at need, in a case like this, where such eminent juris
diction may be the only thing to prevent intolerable injustice,
and infinite misrule, seems too plain to be easily disputed.
But the action of the Government — in which all members of
the Administration are understood to be agreed — is probably
on the right and safe ground, that the interposition of the
national will, to dictate or control, should be, not the previous
condition, but the last resort.
And again : negro suffrage in the reconstructed States is
advocated, as we understand it, on two grounds quite distinct,
— as to which there should be some clearer explanation be
fore a final verdict. That it is necessary, in order to secure,
first, protection to the blacks themselves, and, next, loyalty
and good order in the States, all its advocates are agreed.
But there are some who defend it on the broad ground of
universal suffrage as an abstract right ; at any rate, as the
highest political expediency. They claim that the ballot in a
republic is the natural and the chief protection against class
oppression, the right and only practicable way of giving every
man the weight of his own personality, in ordaining the law
under which every man must live. And they urge, besides,
that unlimited suffrage is a great conservative power; that it

is in the interest of intelligence and order. Political respon
sibility is the best educator. Give a man the ballot, and at
once it becomes the interest of every other man that he
should be fit to use it. The mere appeal to him by rival par
tisans compels him to think and judge in some measure for
himself. He finds his voice is worth something ; and he be
gins to ponder on which side it shall be cast. Besides, it is a
defence against mob violence ; for what a mass of men can
secure at the polls, being a majority, why should they fight
for in the streets ? or, being a minority, they are at least
warned in advance of the uselessness of fighting. All
these arguments, it is claimed, apply to the lowest, the poor
est, the most ignorant, with quite as much force as to the
more educated classes. And, with a generous boldness, it is
urged, that the really conservative, safe, and right way will
be, to invite absolutely every grown man, not debarred by
crime, to share the full privilege of citizenship, — at least, to
.give his voice to the ratifying and sanction of the organic
law.
We do not dispute, that this frank and bold theory of the
radical democracy may yet prove the only practicable solu
tion to the question in debate. Sometimes a daring that
seems even desperate has a fascination that wins its way
where prudence fails, and proves, after all, a better prudence.
But it is impossible for any one who has ever thought of po
litical power, not merely as a right but as a trust, not to be
staggered and confounded at the thing here proposed. There
is no need of drawing distinctions of color in this matter among
the lower populations of the South. Surely, no more hopeless
subjects of such political experimenting could be found any
where, than the " sand-hillers," the " clay-eaters," the " snuff-
dippers," and those, by whatever other cant and degrading
terms they may be known, who make the lowest tier of the
poor whites in the planting States. It is enough, on the
other hand, to cite the testimony of those who have associated
much with the emancipated blacks during the last year or
two, and have found in Charleston or in Savannah the first
1865.] Representation. 131
specimens of them capable of comprehending the most ele

mentary political idea; or of those who have studied deeply
the natural history of races, and who tell us of the belt of
absolute pagan barbarism that spreads back from the gulf-
shore along the hot lowlands dense with tropic life. With
the real facts before us, we shall perhaps find a summary
judgment less easy than we had thought. Meanwhile, those
are doing most to relieve the difficulty, who are actually
doing their part, whether by instruction, charity, or business
enterprise, to secure for the scarce-emancipated blacks those
conditions of intelligence and virtue and independence which
must, after all, be at the bottom of any political privilege
worth having.
The "New-York Times" points out, as characteristic of the
Southern loyalists, an equal hostility to those who brought on
the rebellion, and to the political equality of the blacks.*
As the President has just declared to the South -Carolina
delegation, he " intends to exert the power and influence of
the Government to place in power the popular heart of this
nation." He " does not want the late slaveholders to control
the negro vote against white men. Let each State judge of
the depository of its own political power."
There is one very practical consideration bearing on this
* As the most authentic expression of Southern loyal feeling on this subject,

we copy the following sentences, addressed to the negro population, from the
recent proclamation of Governor Holden to the people of North Carolina : —
" Providence has willed that the very means adopted to render your servitude
perpetual should be his instruments for releasing you from bondage. It now
remains for you, aided as you will be by the superior intelligence of the white race,
and cheered by the sympathies of all good people, to decide whether the freedom
thus suddenly bestowed upon you will be a blessing to you or a source of injury.
Your race has been depressed by your condition of slavery, and by the legislation
of your former masters, for two hundred years. It is not to be expected, that
you can comprehend and appreciate, as they should be comprehended and appre
ciated by a self-governing people, the wise provisions and limitations of consti
tutions and laws ; or that you can have that knowledge of public affairs which is
necessary to qualify you to discharge all the duties of the citizen. No people has
ever yet bounded at once into the full enjoyment of the right of self-government.
But you are free, in common with all our people ; and you have the same right,
regulated by law, that others have to enter upon the pursuit of prosperity and
happiness."
matter. The emancipation of four million slaves, by removing

the three-fifths' restriction, adds to the Southern States a rep
resentative population equal to that of all Massachusetts and
New Hampshire, — an addition, say, of thirteen to their dele
gation in the Lower House at Washington, or of ten from the
States below the southern boundary of Virginia. And, if
these States choose to assert their loyalty on the terms now
offered, it is not easy to see what is to prevent their appear
ing in full force in next winter's Congress. Already it is
stated, that the legislature of Virginia is controlled by men
who were in open rebellion within two months. And, unless
the most intelligent observers have been deceived, the temper
of the controlling class in those States is any thing but loyal.
Of course they will be eager to regain the privilege of politi
cal power, heretofore so dearly prized and so unscrupulously
used. And what new sectional policy may they possibly de
vise to be carried out by party coalitions, as in the former
years? Will it be the restoring of slavery, perhaps under
some new guise of labor-contracts and protection ? Will it be
the expulsion or systematic depression of the freedmen by
some new " black code " ? Will it be to repudiate the public
debt, — a debt of honor to us, but of shame to them, and a
standing monument of defeat? These are among the ques
tions which the time brings ominously near. If it were only
the practice of self-government at home, few, we apprehend,
would insist on perpetual disfranchisement as the penalty of
treason. But reconstruction means not only privilege and
right, it means also power. The interests and the honor of
the nation are just as much at stake now as they have been
at any time during the last four years ; and they are to be
defended now against just as unscrupulous and vindictive
enemies. The nation has in its hands at this moment a power
which it may have parted with for ever, within six months
hence, unless its statesmanship is as bold and wary as its
generalship has been. If an immediate settlement must be
bad at any rate, universal suffrage and equal citizenship are
conditions on which it is the nation's right to insist, in that
" republican form of government " which it is the pation'a
1865.] Amnesty. 133
duty to " guarantee to every State " restored. In the closing

words of Mr. Dana's magnificent speech at Faneuil Hall,
"Let the States make their own Constitutions; but the Con
stitutions must be satisfactory to the Republic ; and, by a
power which, I think, is beyond question, the Republic holds
them in the grasp of war, until they have made such constitu
tions."
As to civil immunities and rights, without doubt they will
be restored as fast as the machinery to secure them can be
put in play. The proclamation of amnesty (May 29) recites
a formidable list of exceptions, reserving the penalties for
treason to no less than fourteen distinct classes of persons,
who must enter special applications for pardon. But this list
includes the military crimes of desertion, and violation of the
soldier^ oath. It includes the violation of public honor and
faith, in the betrayal of official trust. It also includes those
crimes which are against every code, — such as murder and
pillage, — which have made so large and terrible a feature in
the recent war. And it implies a settled purpose to destroy
utterly that political oligarchy, or landed aristocracy, whose
property-interests have been identified with the rebellion, by
excepting the holders of estates of more than twenty thousand
dollars. As to the technical offence of treason, where it can
possibly be construed into mere fidelity to a false and danger
ous theory of State rights, we all know that it will be dealt
with in the extreme of lenity. A " proscription " such as
some affect to dread, no one seriously either fears or hopes.
The one fit and inevitable punishment of treason in a republic
is the blasting of its ambition and the failure of its schemes ;
as that of rebellion and civil war is the utter desolation and
penury they have brought. But there are crimes great and
terrible, which stand out in a sort of lurid relief on the dark
background of war, — bright with excessive dark; and it is
by their complicity with these that the guilt of men will be
judged, and their sentences pronounced. The brutal perse
cution of loyalists in Northern Georgia and Eastern Tennes
see ; the massacres of Forts Pillow and Wagner, and the
sack of Lawrence ; the plots, so nearly successful, to burn
VOL. LXXIX. — 5th S. VOL. XVII. NO. I. 12
the great cities of the North, and to poison them with yellow
fever ; the contemplated, and all but effected, horrors of tbe
north-western conspiracy ; the deliberate and intentional
starving of prisoners of war, to a number which has been
stated as high as sixty-four thousand, as the readiest means
to deplete the northern armies ; and, finally, the assassina
tion of the President by one last, despairing blow of malice
and revenge, — these added together make an accumulation
of atrocity ample to employ all the severities of our courts.
The new reign of peace will be inaugurated by no political
executions. But these are crimes against humanity itself, not
specifically against the State. As the responsible author and
voucher of them, — not as chief of a political conspiracy or
head of a rival confederation, — the public conscience has
settled to the deliberate conviction, that the life of Jgfferson
Davis is a just and necessary forfeit to the law. And to his
wretched accomplices, no more mercy can or need be shown,
than to criminals of that grade anywhere. The most dis
tinctly treasonable act of all — contending in arms against
the nation's life, aggravated by previous desertion and be
trayal of her service, — has already been practically par
doned by the grant of military parole ; and no one, surely,
expects to see any Confederate officer, as such, put on trial
for his life. Disfranchisement or exile may be insisted on, in
particular cases ; but it will be purely on considerations of
public safety, not in the hope of adding any thing to the igno
miny and the warning there must always be in a baffled con
spiracy against the liberties of the State.
We have dwelt, perhaps overmuch, on the antagonisms
which are the inevitable heritage of war, and tbe sharp em
barrassment of peace. But we should do wrong not to
acknowledge that large faith in liberty and human right,
which is at the heart of our existence as a nation ; the over
throw of many a barrier which has held the sections in ignor
ant hostility hitherto ; the striking tokens of what the most
careless can scarce fail to recognize as a special Providence
in the critical moments of our struggle, auguring great
hope in the future of our Republic. That faith, with the
1865.] Tlie New Nation. 135
»
new interpretation of Christianity which it inspires, we be
lieve has a natural fitness to our age and race. We will not
doubt that it has its mission to fulfil among our hitherto
estranged fellow-countrymen. For the first time, the road has
been opened for it ; and it goes forth, with its symbol in our
starry flag, no longer a timid and apologetic, but a strong and
conquering, faith. And many agencies will work with it, to
humanize and heal. The fertile breadths of Southern terri
tory offer the most tempting field to colonizing industry. The
tides of commercial and friendly intercourse begin to ebb and
flow. The nation's resources of humanity and justice, of
moral courage and intellectual skill, will be enough — as its
resources of field, flood, mine, plantation, and trade, will be
enough — to meet the new burdens and discharge the new
obligations of the time.
NOTE.
t
Since the above was in type, we have received a letter from Charles
ton, date of June 17, from what we regard as a most trustworthy
source, and copy a few words : —
" I wish, before Mr. Phillips and Mr. Beeeher argue any further
about immediate universal suffrage, they would spend a month at
Captain John Tripp's, and talk politics with Wnkazeer, Gabriel, or
even Paris. ' The most intelligent negroes here do not wish it. Mr. C.
said to me only this morning, that if we could only have a military
government long enough, and the schools kept up, that was all they
needed, and they would take the suffrage when it came. As for
reconstruction, there are no elements here whatever, white or black ; for
the whites are disloyal, the blacks ignorant, — with some exceptions
in both cases. But things are working fast with both classes. The
negroes are getting educated, and the whites are becoming loyal, as
interests and associations bind them to the Union. Already Mr. B.
and Mr. M. declare in favor of colored (educated) suffrage."
136 Review of Current Literature. [July,
Art. IX. — REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.

THEOLOGY.
M. Biu'ston has done good service in the cause of biblical criticism,
by translating from the large work of the German, Bleek, the very
able, ingenious, and exhaustive discussion of the authenticity of the
Gospel of St. John.* The great fault of the discussion, indeed, is
that it is so ingenious. The exceeding acuteness of the argument
awakens the suspicion that it is not altogether sound. We naturally
doubt, where so much special pleading is used. It is not probable
that those who have come to believe that John is the author of the
Apocalypse will be convinced, by this " Critical Study," that he is also
the author of the Gospel. Yet the most sturdy opponents of the pre
valent opinion concerning the authorship of the Gospel wrill find it
very hard to set aside the reasons here given for maintaining that
opinion. If the argument is not conclusive, it establishes at least a
strong presumption that the Gospel came from John, the com
panion of Jesus, and that the Church tradition is trustworthy. This
opinion, nevertheless, is not defended in the interest of Orthodoxy, or
because it is not safe to let it go : not for the sake of defending any
doctrine, or of maintaining the integrity of the New-Testament
canon ; but in inferest only of the truth, and in the temper of true
criticism. Admissions are made in the " Study" quite as damaging
to Orthodoxy as any denial of John's authorship could be. The
writer is quite willing to allow, that, in reporting the language of
Jesus, John gives in his own words what the great Teacher seems
to be saying, — in words probably different from those which Jesus
actually used. He admits that John used existing traditions in the
compilation of his narrative, and did not depend wholly on his own
memory ; that he selected from a mass of material, omitting such as
would not serve his purpose. He finds, of course, that the last chnp-
ter of the Gospel was the work of a different hand, though he denies
that it was much later in time. He agrees with the liberal critics,
that the motive of the Gospel was rather polemic than didactic ; that
it was, in some sense, the work of a partisan. The party against
which the statement was urged was not Gnostic, not heretical, but
was the party holding to the Jewish ideas of John the Baptist.
John's Gospel had no special relation with the Synoptic Gospels, and
is not to be taken as worth more or less than these.
We have not found the argument of Liberal Christianity against

Orthodoxy better stated in a compact form, than in the small volume
of the Pastor Bost,f a conspicuous member of that school of thinkers
* fttude Critique sur l'£vnngile scion Saint Jean. Traduit de l'AUcmand, par
Ch. Bruston. Paris, Meymeis. 1804. 8vo. pp. 69.
t Le Protestnntisme Liberal. Par M. le Pasteur Th. Bobt. Paris : Bail-
liere. 1805. 12mo. pp. xiii., 217.
in the French Protestant Church, of which Colani and Coqnerel are

the acknowledged heads. In successive chapters, Bost answers the
questions now at issue between parties in that Church, — the ques
tion of the Supernatural ; of Free Will ; of Sin, in its nature, its
origin, and its effects ; of Salvation and its methods. His statement
of the Orthodox position is at once clear, candid, and wholly free
from any wish to make this seem more fulse or more narrow than it
is. Bost is a rationalist, decided and pronounced, in his theological
theory ; but his objection to miracle is not so much that it is impossi
ble or incredible, as that it is unnecessary in proof of ideas, or in
demonstration of duty, — unnecessary for all the higher ends of a
spiritual faith. There are some views in the book which seem to us
not to be correct ; T)ut, as an exposition of the weakness and the error
of Orthodoxy, it is able, fresh, and original. Yet the author does not
wish to be regarded as a critic merely. He pleads manfully for the
superior worth and power of liberal religion as a practical system,
and maintains its efficiency against the stricter creed-systems. He
sees the only sure future for the Church in a free faith.
In that great congregation which for thirteen years gathered

together every Sunday morning, first in the Melodeon, and afterwards
in the larger Music Hall, to listen to the sermons and the prayers of
Theodore Parker, there were always two busy pencils keeping pace,
through prayer and sermon, with the tongue of the preacher, and pre
serving his words, with a devotion which few men have ever inspired,
against the day when his voice should be no longer heard. That day,
alas ! came only too soon ; and, through the dreadful days of the great
civil war which he was the first to foresee, his people have listened in
vain for that voice, once so strong and so true, whether to warn or
counsel, to denounce or comfort, — that voice which was never raised
to defend any base or mean thing, and was never silent when any good
cause needed an advocate.
From his phonographic notes thus collected, Mr. Leighton has now
printed a compilation of extracts,* which, while open perhaps in a
more than ordinary degree to the common objections to books of
" Elegant Extracts," will serve, nevertheless, more than one good
purpose. No sermons were ever less ambitious than those of Mr.
Parker ; yet one unacquainted with his method might possibly receive
a contrary impression from a reading of this volume, in which the
passages, rarely more than two or three pages long, and utterly dis
connected with each other, are, unavoidably for the most part, those
in which a novel or strikjgg thought is expressed in peculiarly elo
quent language. But any impression of this kind would pretty
certainly be corrected by the reading of any single sermon in a com
plete form ; and we hope that this book may serve as a whetstone to
* Lessons from the World of Matter and the World of Man. By Theodore
Parker. Selected from Notes of Unpublished Sermons, by Rufus L. Leigh-
ton. Boston : C. W. Slack. 1865.
12*
sharpen the appetite of the public for the collected edition of Mr.
Parker's works which may be expected to appear by and by.
This volume contains little theology, but much religion ; and the
passages appear to have been collated with a view to display, as far
as possible, the happy and joyous tone which was characteristic of
Mr. Parker. The goodness of God, the boundlessness of his love,
the perfection of his providence, the beauty of the world, the grandeur
of human nature, the joys of religion, — these are the themes.
" Bejoice I rejoice!" is the burden of every page; and when we
remember what sermons they were of which these passages formed
a part, and with what an ease and naturalness, even in the most
abstruse discussions of disputed questions in theology or politics «r
social science, he reached here and there on every hand for the most
familiar and alluring illustrations and arguments, brightening a dull
theme with the light of every man's experience, we are amazed at
the contrast between all this wealth, and the poverty of the preaching
which is listened to under the pulpits of Christendom. " I once
heard," says Mr. Emerson, " a preacher who sorely tempted me to
say I would go to church no more. . . . He had lived in vain. He
had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married
or in love, had been commended or cheated or chagrined. . . . Not
one fact in all his experience had he yet imported into his doctrine.
This man had ploughed and planted and talked and bought and sold ;
he had read books ; he had eaten and drunken ; his head aches, his
heart throbs, he smiles and suffers : yet was there not a surmise, a
hint in all the discourse that he had ever lived at all. . . . The true
preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his
life, — life passed through the fire of thought." How well Mr.
Parker's preaching bore this test we need not say.
This little book, if it can but secure such a circulation as it
deserves, will help the larger work of Mr. "Weiss in reforming the
popular impression in regard to Mr. Parker and his teachings, and
opening the eyes of the people to the contemptible spite, and the yet
more contemptible falsehood, by which this great man has been
cheated of his just fame and influence. It is not two years since,
in a little town in New Hampshire, we strolled one Sunday into an
Orthodox church, and were suddenly startled in the midst of a dull
enough sermon by hearing his name boldly pronounced, to give
emphasis to the statement, that there exists " a class of unbelievers
who meet the sublime declaration of David, that the heavens declare
the glory of God, with the assertion that they declare no other glory
than that of Kepler and Newton. Such—sheer, blank atheism as
this may be doubted by some ; yet the remembrance of Theodore
Parker, and of the multitude who accept his teachings, should con
vince us that it does exist." We took occasion the next day, much
to his surprise, to ask the reverend gentleman what grounds he had
for making such a statement as that to a little congregation of unlet
tered persons who knew nothing of Mr. Parker, and looked to their
minister for all their knowledge on such subjects. Had he ever
heard Mr. Parker preach ? — No. Or pray ? — No : he could not
say he had. Or read any of his works? — Yes: he had read some
of his essays, and some extracts from his writings in Dr. Bushnell's
" Nature and the Supernatural," which, by the way, he should be
glad to lend us. Also he had once heard Mr. Parker deliver a
lecture on the Progress of the Human Race towards Perfection,
from which he gathered, that the lecturer thought the progress of
mankind was due, for the most part, to their own efforts and experi
ments, and not in any considerable degree to God's assistance. And
on such grounds as these he felt competent to stand up before his little
congregation, and denounce as an atheist the man who could utter,
out of a heart overflowing with love and reverence, such words as
these : —
" This is the sum of my story, the result of my philosophy, — that there
is an Infinite God, perfectly powerful, with no limitation of power; perfectly
wise, knowing every thing, the meanest and the vastest, at the first as at the
end; perfectly just, giving to every soul what is promised in its nature;
perfectly loving and perfectly holy. The worship of the Infinite God, the
consciousness of his presence in our hearts, — that is the sublimest triumph,
the dearest joy, the delightfullest of all human delights. Beginning here, it
brightens and brightens like the dawn of the day, until it comes unto perfect
brightness, and the face of the Father gleams on the forehead of the Son.
p. 339.
It is recorded of Favorinus, a quaint old writer, much in favor

with Hadrian, that, when arguing once with his imperial master, to
the surprise of the bystanders he yielded readily the point in dispute ;
and, when asked why he did so, answered, that it was ill arguing with
the master of thirty legions. In accepting the imperial author's invi
tation to discuss freely his life of Caesar,* we fancy that the critics of
France must have felt a similar embarrassment.
In this country, however, no such difficulty exists. It is not less
our privilege than our duty, to say that the work is a failure, regarded
either as a scholarly investigation of Roman history, or as a philoso
phical analysis of a remarkable character. Nearly two-thirds of the
first volume, which is all that has thus far appeared, is taken up with
a tedious sketch of Roman history before the time of Caesar ; well
enough if not too diffuse for an encyclopedia, but without evidence,
that we can discover, of original criticism as to the character of the
Roman polity, and without so much as the suggestion of a new
theory as to the sources of the Roman power, — too short if it is
meant for a profound examination of the spirit of Roman institutions,
and too long if it is meant for nothing more than an analysis of the
Roman organization. That the kings disappeared because their mis
sion was accomplished, and that that mission was probably the intro
duction of civilization itfto Italy from Greece, no one, perhaps, will
be inclined to doubt. But, at the same time, nothing could bo less
satisfactory to the student, who, having left behind him his text-books
of antiquity, seeks in the pages of this acute observer of men, and of
* History of Julius Caesar. Vol. i. New York : Harper & Brothers. 1865.
140 Review of Current Literature. [JvJyi
the working of human institutions, how it really came to pass, that,

at about the same time, Athens and Rome, the two most famous
cities of antiquity, changed the basis of the right of suffrage from
birth to fortune. When you say that Roman society was founded
upon respect for family, for property, and for religion ; that the gov
ernment was founded upon election and its policy upon conquest, —
you write compactly, and deal with great results ; and when you add,
that the aristocracy used the people's hatred of tyrants as the chief
instrument of their own aggrandizement, you indulge in a common
place which is not without its excuse. Undoubtedly it was charac
teristic of the Roman institutions to form men apt for all functions,
that thus the best soldiers in war should be the best rulers in
peace ; but how came it to pass, that, when so trained, unconsciously
to themselves and all the world, they became in general the worst
enemies of the Republic, and, at the bitter end, the real betrayers of
the Empire ? How came it to pass, that, with the best practical prin
ciples of government, with the noblest sentiments of honor, and the
most persevering faith in religion, the Roman state drifted, silently
but surely, all through its most splendid successes, into that fatal gulf
of civil strife, in which at last perished the hopes of liberty in the
ancient world ?
That is the question which haunts us as we read the story
of Rome, suggesting the most solemn lessons and the most distressing
doubts, — a question which Gibbon, with his philosophhical scepti
cism and his spiritual blindness, has, after all, done nothing to
answer, except so far as to clear away the rubbish of ages, and let
the awful drama rehearse itself before us, — a question, indeed,
which, as history is usually written, we should hardly expect the
historian to answer ; for it goes behind facts into that uncertain region
of moral causes which no dogmas can reach, and no statements com
prehend.
But it is the question which Napoleon presses upon us with singu
lar emphasis in the work to which we now allude. His whole
structure of the character of Caesar, so to speak, rests upon the
assumption that he alone could see the fatal result of the corruption,
moral and political, which had eaten out the life of the Republic ;
and that, forecasting as nobody else could the inevitable course of
events, he was justified by his genius and by fate in anticipating the
catastrophe ; in seizing with one bold movement the reins of power,
which were falling from hands that were too weak, into those that
were too wicked to hold them. His argument assumes, that the ele
ments of dissolution were too strong to be any longer resisted in a
lawful way by constitutional means ; and we admit, that to grant the
facts is to justify Caesar. But when he goes further, and undertakes,
as it is undoubtedly the purpose of the book to do, to establish a
parallel between Caesar and Bonaparte ; and, because Rome was so
corrupt as to need a despot, to maintain that France was so likewise,
to such degree indeed that the first empire was a condition of its
existence ; and that, moreover, for half a century, it continued so
corrupt that the second empire was a boon which the people should
18G5.] History and Politics. 141
have been only too glad to receive at his hands, — it seems to us that
he makes an unfair use of the past, in order to insult, the present.
As an historical vindication, therefore, of the firs* Bonaparte, who
had a right to break the laws " when society was hurrying on to its
ruin, and a desperate remedy was indispensable for its salvation ; "
and, by consequence, of the second Bonaparte, who had a right to
break the laws also " when the government, supported by the mass of
the people, had become the organ of its interests and their hopes,"
— the book has the character of a political pamphlet; and as such it
will not fail to be judged, and judged severely. For, granting that
the elements of dissolution in Roman society were electoral corruption,
and the laws of high treason, — which furnished to arbitrary power
afterwards uuder the emperors one of its deadliest weapons, — the
agrarian laws and slavery and debts (for, as the citizens made war
at their own expense, they were always in debt), what possible
resemblance have these causes of decline to the condition of society
in France, when purged by the fires of the Revolution, or taught by
fifty years of increasing enlightenment how to use the liberty it had
bought, after so many horrors, with so much blood ? Surely the
Emper r owes to the country, which otherwise, on his own theory, he
libels by the mere fact of his rule, to explain clearly the nature and
source of the corruption of which the Imperial dynasty is the only
remedy. Rome may have been bad enough iu the first century before
Christ, to need a Caesar, — we are inclined, indeed, from our own
study of that age, to think it was; but that, in the nineteenth century
after Chirst, France must take refuge from ruin in the arms of a
Bonaparte, seems to us a playful satire upon the progress of mankind
hardly to have been expected from so serious a person as the nephew
of the man of destiny.
The last fifteen years of Cresar's life remain to be told in the
second volume ; and we trust it will appear in that, how, in the empire
of his ideas after his death, in the final triumph of his principles and
his system, we are to recognize in Caesar the true sign of greatness.
It is true, that neither the murder of Caesar, nor the captivity of
Bonaparte, were able to check the tendencies of Rome towards des
potism, or of France towards freedom. It is true, that Brutus, by
slaying Caesar, did nothing to prevent the reign of Augustus, while he
rendered possible that of Nero ; and it is true, likewise, that the
ostracism of Bonaparte by confederated Europe did not prevent
the resuscitation of his empire. But it is false alike to the truths of
history and the teachings of philosophy, to represent the struggles
of Caesar and Bonaparte for power as popular causes surviving the
league that, under the mask of liberty, sought to overthrow them.
Neither Bonaparte nor Caesar was a man of ideas in the usual mean
ing of that phrase. Their policy was conquest : their end was
power. Born out of the seething elements, the one of corruption,
the other of revolution, it was impossible for them to separate them
selves from that taint of selfishness which for them meant existence.
When Bonaparte swept over Italy, and invaded Russia, and ravaged
Spain, and upset kingdoms in Germany, what idea could have lain at
the bottom of his wild career but the greed of power ? That he was
an instrument in the hands of Providence, working out great results
of beneficence to- mankind, is the view which we may take ; just as
in the rush of the whirlwind and the tumult of the earthquake, we
recognize an ultimate purpose of good : but it was not the view
which Bonaparte himself could have taken. Not that he meant harm
to anybody : on the contrary, he preferred to benefit rather than injure
mankind ; but first, and last, and above all things, he preferred to
establish and benefit himself. Caesar's ambition seems in some
respects purer. Rome was in the full swing of conquest. To bring
the civilized world under its sway was its legitimate occupation.
But what had Bonaparte to do in Russia ? Both were men of vast
activity and genius, called into being, as it were, for a special purpose.
But as for principles or a system, neither had any, except despotism ;
and despotism is wholly a personal matter. There is nothing in it to
survive the despot, except the example ; and that was fruitful enough
in woe, we all know, to Rome, and might be so to France if the
empire were an idea, as Louis Napoleon so persistently strives to
represent it, and not an ephemeral fact, as France and Europe so
stubbornly insist upon regarding it.
Mr. Woolsey's exposition of the law of nations* was written, as

the author states in his preface, for the purpose of supplying a practi
cal want which he felt while engaged in teaching that subject ; the
want, that is, of a compendious treatise intended not for lawyers, but
for young students of political and moral science. It is, therefore, not
merely a statement, necessarily brief, of the actual condition of the law
of nations ; but may claim, to a certain extent, the character of an
ethical work, in so far as it attempts to compare that law with the
general principles of justice established among the most civilized
nations.
In a well-written introductory chapter, the author defines the
grounds and sources of international law, and briefly sketches its his
torical growth from the first vague indications of its existence among
the ancient nations to the consciousness of its necessity in the mediae
val age, and the fuller development of its principles in modern times.
In the two parts into which the work is divided, the author then pro
ceeds to treat, in the first, of the general faculties or powers of States
and their relations of peace, together with the rights and moral
claims, the obligations and duties, which have their operation in a state
of peace ; and therein he discusses the following topics : The rights
and obligations of States as independent sovereignties ; the rights of
property, and rights over territory, belonging to States ; the rights
and duties of intercourse between nations, with the relations of for
eigners within the territory to the State; the forms and agents of
* Introduction to the Study of International Law ; designed as an Aid in

Teaching, and in Historical Studies. By Theodore D. Woolsev, President of
Yale College. Second edition, revised and enlarged. New York: Charles
Scribner & Co. 1864.
1865.] Criticism. 143
intercourse between the States themselves ; and, lastly, the right of

contract or of treaties. In the second part, the author considers the
relations arising from a state of war, first, as affecting the belliger
ents themselves ; and, secondly, as bearing on the rights and obliga
tions of neutrals. Upon the latter points, which have been of such
great interest to this country, we do not find the discussion so exhaus
tive, nor, we may add, so suggestive, as we desired. But, in all other
respects, Mr. Woolsey is to be commended for the industry and care
with which he has made his compilation.
This is not an original and profound treatise, to take its place with
the writings of Grotius and Vattel and Wheaton and Lawrence. It
was not meant to be. But it is an excellent guide, .nevertheless, for
the general reader as well as for students, and cannot fail to do a
good part in popularizing the elements of the science it discusses, —
a science, in which, above all others that touch upon juridical rela
tions, the freest scope is left to the operation of the general principles
of justice and the common sense of mankind. And in this country,
where the people are supposed to do their own thinking, and decide
upon their own wars, and make their own peace, international law is
a subject which cannot be made too clear to the average intelligence
of the people. As a responsible member of the body politic, every
educated person, as Mr. Woolsey well remarks, ought to become
acquainted with it. In the case of the "Alabama," for instauce, —
environed as the question is with feelings of irritation which artful
devices on either side might kindle into a terrible flame, but which at
bottom is a mere case in international law, to be settled after fair dis
cussion, and in a dispassionate temper, — how very necessary that the
general mind should be freed from the prejudices of passion, and
enabled to consider it in its proper light ; not as an occasion for war
between two of the most powerful and most civilized nations of the
earth, — a war which might well make us despair of civilization
itself, — but as an opportunity for the vindication of reason as the
arbiter of national quarrels, and an illustration to all nations of
the progress and success of enlightened democracy ! To this benefi
cent work of popular education, Mr. Woolsey has contributed not a
little in this present volume, to the merits of which we are glad to
bear our cordial testimony.
CRITICISM.
To no poet, perhaps, since the world began, has there been paid so
universal, heartfelt tribute of love and gratitude as that which broke
forth from the German people upon Schiller's hundredth birthday,
the 10th of November, 1859 ;* for to no poet, perhaps, since the world
began, has it been given to exert so immediate and deep-reaching an
influence upon his people, — to none to represent, in his life and striv
ing, the ideal of his nation ; to be at once reformer and prophet. Born
* Beitrage zur Foststellung, Verbesserung und Verwahrung des Schiller'-

schen Textes. Von Prof. Dr. Joachim Meyer. [1859 and I860.]
of the people, partaker of their trials and grief, yet rising ever above
them ; taking life, with all its sorrow, and making of it a consoling
opportunity ; resolutely refusing to acknowledge the shadows and the
clouds which haunt it, but ever seeing the good and beautiful in it ;
unconquerable in hope, — thus Schiller lived his life on earth ; for his
nation a beloved leader, for the world evermore a luminary name.
Every memorial of him has been carefully treasured. The record
of his days is complete. We doubt if any new fact of importance
will ever be added to it ; yet to no other German writer has it hap
pened, it is said, to leave his writings infested with so many errors, —
the result, in great part, of the too careless supervision of Korner.
Since 1844, however, especially through the critical investigation of
Dr. Joachim Meyer,* great progress has been made in renioviug these
imperfections. It is to his investigations that we owe the edition
(said to be the best) published in 1860. Schiller left no collected
edition of his writings : his premature death prevented his putting the
last hand to his works. There appeared, however, during his life, a
collected edition of his smaller prose works, and a collection of his
poems up to 1803. After his death, his dramas were published under
the title, "Theater von Schiller" (1805-1807). The first regular
collected edition was prepared by Korner (1812-15). It has been
the basis of all subsequent editions up to 1840; but it was neither
complete nor correct. The manuscripts of the poet, the periodicals
and almanacs in which his poems first appeared, were by no means
exhausted. The " Nachtrage" of Boas, the " Supplemente " of Hoff-
meister, the explanatory labors of Viehoff, have supplied many omis
sions and corrections. Several poems, also, whose genuineness has
been doubted, are shown by Meyer to have been incontestably Schil
ler's. He has also restored to its place among Schiller's poems the
beautiful October poem of 1788, not hitherto received into Schiller's
works.
The Schiller-cultus, as the Germans term it, has no parallel, per
haps, with any poet among any nation. With us, the great masters
of speech have hardly been recognized till they and their age have
faded into history. Schiller, on the contrary, was the outgrowth of
his time, which found in him voice and utterance. The nation took
him at once to its heart. One memorable result of the celebration of
the 10th of November, 1859, was the establishment of the Schiller
Institute, for the support of indigent authors or their orphaned fami
lies. There is a similar institution in London, founded in 1790, called
the Royal Literary Fund, which distributes relief through a commit
tee, without divulging names. At the annual dinner in 1822, Chat
eaubriand said that he had reason to know something of the value of
the society ; for, in the time of the French Revolution, it had aided a
poor refugee, who had returned to represent his country in England.
That man was himself. For many years there has been a similar
society in Paris, called the Societe de Gens des Lettres. On the 10th of
November, 1860, the superintendent of the German society, Dr. Din-
gelstedt, of Weimar, rendered his first yearly account of its condition
and working. The contributions which flowed in, from the stimulus
given by the poet's hundredth birthday, amounted to about 852,000.

There are twenty branch institutes ; four of which, to aid those at
Weimar, Munich, Frankfort, and Liibeck, have received from their
governments corporate rights. The interest only of the capital is to
be spent. An article in the charter of the Institute prohibits the giv
ing of the names of persons who receive aid, or any intimation what
ever as to their identity ; while it leaves the recipients free to declare,
if they choose, that they have been thus assisted.
It is an institution of piety and humanity, they say, as yet in its
earliest beginning. As the years roll on, they bring to the German
nation two days to be remembered, — that on which Schiller was born,
and that on which he died. On these days they ask for offerings,
which shall testify at once to the pervading influence of the Schiller-
eultus, and to its fruitful results for good among the German people.
In the address upon Schiller, however, which Jacob Grimm deliv
ered on the 10th of November, 1859, before the Academy of Sciences
of Berlin, and which that learned bod)- has thought worthy of a place
in their published Transactions, that curious grammatical inquirer
inveighs against this desecration of so illustrious a name by connecting
it with an institution of charity for the relief of mediocre writers, —
for Diehterlinye, whom one should rather discourage than recognize.
Rising talents, he affirms, need no such aid. Every rich gift endows
itself in these days. Let them rather spend the money they will
gather, in visible works of art, which shall mark the birthplace and
the footsteps of Schiller with gleams of joy for ever. If to encourage
letters is to endow idleness, doubtless we should agree with Jacob
Grimm. But to help on those who give their lives to help on man
kind is an effort not unworthy of the patronage of so great a name
even as that of Schiller. If aid of this sort had not come often and
plentifully to him, Germany might have lacked a leader, and the
world been poorer by many thoughts.
We pay more heed to Herr Grimm when he instructs us in other
things. The new French translation of Schiller, he says, executed
under the superintendence of Regnier, who possesses a critical ac
quaintance not only with modern but with Old German literature, is
for the most part to be commended. Goethe and Schiller were in
the habit of working over their poems many times. Their texts are
often as various as in Middle High-German poems, and the new read
ing is not always to be preferred to the old. But the great obstacle
to the thorough renovation of the text is the monopoly which the
publisher of Schiller (Barou Cotta) still has in his works. The long
connection of both poets with a permanent and enterprising' house
was of great service to them, — indeed a desirable thing; but the
lapse of time has changed it into an annoyance to the nation. No
body disputes the right of an author to the fruit of his labors during
his life, or of his heirs after his death. But as no author can foresee
the extent of his popularity, so, in the agreement between Goethe or
Schiller and their publishers, it cannot be supposed that either party
anticipated or provided for the unheard-of demand for their writings,
vol. i.xxix. — 5th s. vol. xvii. no. i. 18
146 Review of Current Literature. [July*
which has existed in Germany for the last half century. The objec
tion which Grimm makes to such monopoly, so long as it stands in
the way, as in this instance it seems to do, of the application of inde
pendent criticism, and of new editions embodying the results of that
criticism in text or arrangement, is very proper. But, for our part,
we do not see why he who builds a house should have a longer tenure
of it, in himself and his heirs, than he who builds a history, provided
the right of the public to the use and improvement of the property be
properly guarded.
Grimm admits the propriety of a limitation for a certain period, but
complains, that, in the case of these great writers, the time has been
too much extended by special privileges. Upon that point he fur
nishes some curious information. By a Prussian Cabinet-order of
Feb. 8, 1826, the copyright in Schiller's works was extended for
twenty-five years. A decree of the Confederation of 23d November,
1838, granted the privilege of exclusive publication to Schiller's heirs
for twenty years. When the latter period was on the point of termin
ation, the heirs solicited an extension of it to 1878 ; and in 1854 the
Prussian' government proposed to the Chambers a special law for that
purpose, which was to override the general legislation upon the sub
ject. The Chambers declined to pass it. Thereupon appeared, on
the 6th of November, 1856, a decree of the Confederation, according
to which the copyright privilege was to continue till 1867, in favor of
all authors who deceased before the 9th of November, 1827 (the
date of a former decree of the Confederation). Schiller's works,
therefore, as well as Goethe's, without eujoying special privileges,
although they were the occasion of the passing of the law, will become
common property on the 10th of November, 1867 ; yet not in all
Germany, since in Saxony, the seat of the publishing business, there
exists a law, passed in 1844, which secures the copyright privilege for
thirty years to the works of those authors who died before the 1st of
January, 1844 ; that is to say, till 1874. At the end of the year
1867, therefore, there will be a wretched condition of things, if Saxony
upholds within its territory the copyrights iu works of authors such
as Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, &c, which, in the rest of Germany, are
the property of the public.
In a language like the English, so much governed by custom, and

so little by rule, there is, of course, a wide field for discussion of the
propriety of phrases, and for difference in the choice of words. One
is hardly aware, indeed, how capricious often is the use of our lan
guage, till he has looked at a list of words and phrases like those
collected at random by the Dean of Canterbury * as being objection
able in point of vulgarity or grammar. The Dean's little book, how
ever, though full of suggestions, is far from being conclusive. He is
much inferior to Trench in philosophical analysis and grammatical
* The Queen 's English : Stray Notes on Speaking and Spelling. By Henry
Alfoed, D.D., Bean of Canterbury. London : Strahan & Co. Cambridge :
Deighton, Bell, & Co. 1864.
keenness. His criticism is for the most part shallow. He is more

useful when he puts questions than when he answers them. Of
course, as an Englishman and a clergyman, he cannot be expected to
allude to this country otherwise than with an arrogance only sur
passed by his ignorance.
The Dean complains that it is a common trick on this side of the
Atlantic to write honor, &c, instead of honour, " as part of a move
ment to reduce our spelling to a uniform rule, as opposed to usage,"
thus obliterating all traces of the historical formation of words ; since
we get honor not directly from the Latin honor (spelled in exactly the
same way), but from the French honneur. Certainly, the Church of
England is in no danger if it do but have men enough of this sort to
defend it. Think of the audacity of the railway porter who could
speak of this dignitary as " the old party in a shovel." " Control,
however, never acquired a right to be spelt with a ' u.' It comes from
the French ' controle,' i.e., contre-role ; and the original meaning is
still found in the name controller, when applied to finance, i.e., an
officer whose duty it is to keep a counter-role or check on the accounts
of others," — not to be spelt comptroller therefore.
The following criticism is too important not to be quoted : —
" Which of these two is right ? — the Misses Brown, or the Miss Browns ?
For the former it may be said, that Brown is the name of the whole species,
and that the young ladies, being individuals of that species, are Misses ;
for the latter, that, each of the young ladies being Miss Brown, the whole
taken together, or any two or more, are Miss Browns. So that either way is
justifiable. Usage is all but universal in favor of the latter in conversation.
We may say we met the Miss Browns, not the Misses Brown. But we can
hardly justify this, our colloquial^practice, if we bring in Mrs. Brown, and say
we met Mrs. and the Miss Browns. For by enumerating thus, first the indi
vidual, and then the species, we bind ourselves to the former way of spelling.
The sentence as I have last given it is inaccurate, because it really says that
we met Mrs. and the Miss Browns; i.e., one Mrs. and one celebrated Miss,
rejoicing in the name of, not Brown, but Browns. If we had wished to keep
to the ordinary colloquial usage in this case also, we ought to have said that
we met Mrs. Brown and the Miss Browns."
The plural of attorney and money is attorneys, moneys, just as
the plural of key is not kies, but keys. The word means takes a
plural or singular verb according as the mode of action is singular or
plural. " The best means is," and " the latest news is," are right if
you refer only to one mode of action or one piece of news. Sani
tary and sanatory are different words. Then Sanitary means apper
taining to health; sanatory means appertaining to healing or curing.
" The town is in such a bad sanitary condition that some sanatory
measures must be undertaken." In alluding to the mistakes in news
papers, the Dean says he read somewhere, that somebody might be
immersed in a heavy fine, — the word meant, of course, being amerced.
He is rigid in requiring the h in humble to be aspirated, and thinks
it very funny " that an American friend of ours ventured to tell us
candidly, that we spoke English with a strong English accent."
Pronouncing duty, &c, dooty is an offensive vulgarism. These
kind of things instead of this kind may be incorrect, but is inevita
ble. This much, that much, as measures of quantity may not be

elegant, but they are correct ; thus much is better. Replace has come
to signify just the opposite of its real meaning. " Lord Derby was
replaced by Lord Palmerston, means to us was succeeded by, &c. ; to
our grandfathers it would have signified that Lord Palmerston put
Lord Derby in again. The usage is borrowed from the French word
remplacer, i.e. remplir la place. Nothing can well be worse in gram
mar than a superior man, an inferior person. Talented, also, is as bad
as possible ; and so is moneyed, which is generally made worse by
being spelt monied. Subjective and objective are terms as correct as
they are indispensable.
The following note was written after a tithe dinner in Devonshire :
" Mr. T. presents his compliments to Mr. H., and I have got a hat
that is not his, and if he have got a hat that is not yours, no doubt
they are the expectant ones."
Being written, instead of in process of writing, is bad because
written is a past participle ; but it is in such general use that we can
do nothing more than avoid it. To put an adverb between the prepo
sition to and the verb, as, " to scientifically illustrate," is a practice
that cannot be reprobated too severely. Different to instead offrom is
against all reason and analogy. " Few ladies, except her Majesty,"
instead of besides her Majesty, is a common blunder. For what is
her Majesty excepted from ? a. few ladies f Mutual means reciprocal ;
" a mutual friend of husband and wife is sheer nonsense. Riding in
a carriage, instead of driving, may be defended from the Bible."
" He that setteth not by himself" (Ps. xx. 42 in the Prayer-book ver
sion), i.e. is not self-conceited, setteth not store by himself, as we say
even than. I have heard a parish clerk pronounce these last words,
he that sitteth not by himself, in allusion I suppose to the squire's
pew." Found, a gold locket, &c. ; the owner may have the same by
applying &c, is a frequent error.
One of the great sources of the deterioration of the language is to
be found in the newspapers. A man is always an individual, or
a person, or a parly ; a woman is a female, or, if unmarried, a young
person; a child is a juvenile, children are the rising generation. If
you call a woman a female, why not call a man a male f A man
going home is always an individual proceeding to his residence. We
never eat ; we partake. There is no such thing as a place ; it is
a locality. Nothing is placed; it is located. Most of the people in
the place is a vulgarism to those who can write the majority of the
residents in the locality. We do not show feeling, we evince it. We
do not ask ; we conceive a desire. We do not thank a man ; we
evince gratitude. We never begin any thing ; we commence. If the
newspaper men want to say that a man spent his money till he was
ruined, they say, his unprecedented extravagance eventuated in the total
dispersion of his property. We speak of a man as of the Hebrew
persuasion, why not describe a man of color as of the negro persua
sion? Men do not break their legs no w-a-days, they sustain a frac
ture, — and so on to the end of the chapter, as he will learn who
readeth.
Not only lias Africa risen into note as the hunting-ground of

Europe but the gainful eyes of English commerce are fastened upon
its exhaustless stores of ivory; and the artist, sated with familiar
scenes, is penetrating the interior to obtain new studies for his adven
turous pencil. An Australian explorer, the artist of Dr. Living
stone's expedition, Mr. Thomas Baines,* besides some valuable maps,
furnished a large amount of curious and instructive sketches of the
natives, the animals, the scenery of the Damara land, a dozen degrees
north of the Cape of Good Hope. For those acquainted with the
rapidly increasing literature of this no longer unknown land, his book
contains nothing very novel ; though its author has enriched the Eng
lish museums with many new specimens of insects and plants, as con
stant attention was given to hunting up curiosities in every department
of natural history ; and, but for the disaster which befell his expedi
tion, few travellers would have done more than this unpretending
sketcher to throw Africa open to the view of the untravelled world.
Evidently, we have had no more honest story of hardy adventure in
this savage land ; none more free from the desire of making the nar
rative a romance and its author a hero by impossible achievements
and incredible hardships, than this " South-west Africa." Mr. Baines's
failure was unavoidable. In the fever-region, he and his ivory-hun
ter companion, Campbell, are taken down by disease just as they
seemed to have accomplished their object, — the Zambesi river, by
which he would have crossed the continent, and secured an easy pas
sage back to the Cape. His narrative snaps off suddenly, like one of
Mr. Emerson's lectures ; leaving the reader to conjecture what he
must have suffered by famine, fever, the murder of his attendants, the
defeat of his well-planned expedition. Another chapter, explaining
what his father only alludes to in the preface, would have added inter
est to the story and made a suitable peroration. His absence from
England, we hope, means that he is engaged in new explorations, not
that sickness has prostrated his vigorous frame, or failure crushed his
adventurous spirit.
The people who could make a biblical critic and a resolute heretic
out of a dignitary of the conservative English Church must be an
interesting people. Mr. Grout f does not seem, like Bishop Colenso,
to have found flaws in the arithmetic of Scripture from the suggestive
* Explorations of South-west Africa: an account of a journey in 1801 and

1862, from Wawisch Bay on the Western Coast to Lake Ngami and the Victoria
Falls. By Thomas Baines. Longman : London. 1864.
t Zulu Land ; or, Life among the Zulu Kafirs of Natal and Zulu Land, South
Africa, with Map and Illustrations, largely from original Photographs. By Rev.
Lewi9 Grout, for fifteen years Missionary of the American Board in South
Africa. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Publication Committee. 1864- 12mo. pp.
861.
13*
questions of his Zulu hearers ; yet he has given us a book about them
in which there is no tone or flavor of Orthodoxy. The Presbyterian
Committee have done excellent service in allowing their types and
their name to so charitable a statement, not only of these heathen, but
of the work which the missionaries of many sects are doing among
them. Mr. Grout, if not an elegant writer, is at any rate earnest
and clear. He has given a very fair picture of the land, the scenery,
the productions, the fauna and flora, the races of men the kings and
the people, of that South-African shore, so tempting to Christian
effort. We may question the accuracy of his historical sketch, —
which ascends beyond Herodotus to the story in the Pentateuch, — and
may find inadequate what he says about the Zulu language. But we
are glad to know, that what he saw in fifteen years' residence of the
ways and the spirit of the people gave him full confidence that they
can be civilized and Christianized. He did not become persuaded that
polygamy was a necessity or a divine rule for these savages, or find
it desirable to substitute the customs of Israel for the more decent
Christian custom, in order to win their hearts. Mr. Grout's book
about the Zulus is wise, entertaining, and very good in its spirit.
A very valuable part of the lamented Speke's work, already noticed

in this Review, was contributed by his fellow-traveller, Graut.* At
the request of Capt. Speke, he wrote out, however, a full journal
of the domestic scenes during their perilous two years' expedition.
Many of the details are trifling ; there is a sad monotony of suffering,
and a little varied succession of petty impositions ; every native chief
seemed to have conspired to strip his distinguished visitors of every
article of value ; indeed, until they reached the boats upon -the Nile
in waiting to supply their wants, life itself hardly seemed safe. Capt.
Grant's repeated sickness obliged his friend to leave him sometimes
for months ; his native guards were cowardly, grasping, superstitious,
and ever ready to desert ; there was little of that success in hunting
which throws such interest into narratives like Du Chaillu's : but
every statement one feels to be truthful ; all the descriptions are
entirely lifelike : though Grant obtained no view of the famous lake
believed to be the true source of the Nile, all his accounts confirm
faith in the more celebrated traveller to whose memory he has devoted
his book. Some excuse for the insatiable rapacity of the African
kings is given by the fact, that their people were regularly robbed,
and their houses burned, by the Englishman's satellites, and gratui
tous injuries inflicted which in other countries would have been retali
ated by life-long imprisonment. While, in some cases, the natives w-ere
simple enough to return even the rags which the strangers had thrown
away on their march, Grant has to confess, that, where his men had
been generously fed, they sometimes left the hospitable village in ruins ;
paying nothing for the plundered goats, and not respecting the defence
less women around them. Capt. Grant's modest story proves remark-
* A Walk across Africa. By Capt. J. A. Grant. William Blackwood.

Edinburgh and London. 1864.
able qualities of endurance, wonderful self-command, entire fearless

ness, and a persistent purpose of making himself loved, rather than
feared, by these inaccessible children of the desert. So that, though
he speaks of several Christian missions as fruitless in the countries
through which he passed, he cannot have failed to give a favorable
impression of a religion illustrated in his daily life by so much that
was beautiful and heroic.
"The Nile Basin"* is a sad book. At the moment when Capt.
Speke lost his life by the merest accident, he was about to defend his
discovery of the source of the Nile in public debate with Capt. Bur
ton, once a fellow-traveller, now a bitter opponent. Unmoved by
this great calamity, acknowledging that the deceased discoverer had
made known to the world three hundred and fifty geographical miles
in Central Africa, Capt. Burton and his unscrupulous ally endeavor
to show, that the grand problem of geography is as much unsolved as
ever ; that Capt. Speke saw too little of the pretended Lake Nyanza
to form any positive conclusion ; that his own sketch-maps were
altered repeatedly after his return, contradict what Capt. Burton dis
covered, and violate such established principles as that no large river
finds its source in a lake. His co-laborer, the author of a geographi
cal survey of Africa, Mr. M'Queen, goes much farther; makes gross
charges against Speke's morals ; accuses him of cruel injustice to
Consul 'Pethuick ; ridicules many of his statements ; proves that the
vision of a profitable trade with such distant, degraded, treacherous
savages must be dismissed at once, because the population every
where are miserable, enslaved, and absorbed in murderous wars ;
because there are no easy means of communication ; because the
natives are indisposed to continuous labor ; and because the cost of
conveyance to the seashore far exceeds the value of any product like
cotton.
As Capt. Speke no longer lives to verify his statements or vindicate
his character, he may suffer for a while in popular favor, though by
universal confession a person, of rare energy, perseverance, and cour
age ; but after careful reading of all that has been written on the
subject, and with the admission that his single lake may prove to be
two, or even a chain of lakes, as was believed three thousand years
ago, we have no doubt that he saw exactly what he describes, a large
body of water from which the White Nile flowed. With more time
and less peril, he would have perfected his discovery so as not to need
re-adjustment in England ; but it was not possible for him to make
thorough explorations : popular as he was among the natives, ac
quainted with their language, and fitted to their climate, even he often
held his life at their mercy, and could not have advanced, sometimes,
but with the certainty of throwing it away.
Of German theories touching ancient Egypt, and of French disqui-
* The Nile Basin. A Memoir read before the Royal Geographical Society. By
Richard V. Burton. Part II. James M'Queen's Review of Capt. Speke's
Discovery of the Source of the Nile. London : Tujsley Brothers. 1804.
152 Revieiv of Current Literature. [July,
•
sitions upon the school of Alexandria, we have had for the last thirty
or forty years not too much, yet a good deal. But of modern Egypt,
in its social transformation under Mohammed-Ali, from the barbarous
oppression of the Mamelukes into the best ordered and most promis
ing of the countries that own the religion of the Prophet, we have
had, with one or two brilliant exceptions, nothing of scientific value
or general interest. That part, indeed, of the great work of the
French Expedition, which is entitled " L'Etat Moderne," contains
many important contributions to our knowledge of the later condition
of the country, of which, indeed, it may be said to be the basis ; while
Lane's accurate pictures of the manners and customs of the modern
Egyptians, though confined almost wholly to the Mohammedan soci
ety of Cairo, and the spirited descriptions of Perkesch-Osten and Par-
they, together with the tedious details of Wilkinson, and the poetic
narratives of Curtis and the St. Johns, present us with sufficient ma
terial to form an excellent notion of the external appearance of the
country and the people. Russegger also has explored the geology,
and Forskal and Delile the flora, of the Nile basin, with intelligible
results. And Meugin and Hamont have related the political history
of the country. But a thorough and comprehensive statement, em
bracing the latest investigations into the resources of Egypt, was still
wanting. It is that warit which the work under noted * has done
much to supply. The physical structure of the country, and the char
acter of its people as moulded by centuries of various and often
tumultuous history ; its agriculture and political institutions ; its
social conditions and commerce and public works ; and, lastly, its lit
erature, what there is of it, —7 are treated with great clearness and
brevity, though exhaustively: while the author's acquaintance with
Arabic, and his long residence in the East, give a value to his work
which we should never think of attributing to the jaunty speculations
of the English tourists, who go up and down the Nile in such mono
tonously jolly ignorance of every thing but the necessities of their own
comfort.
The little boys in tattered cotton shirts for their only garment, who
belabor and direct the asses one rides in Cairo, will often utter among
other things, as any one who has heard them will remember, the words
" Je weled," — meaning substantially, " Go it, young one." But an
Italian tourist, taking them, from the sound or otherwise, to signify
" Diavoletti," informs his countrymen, when writing to them of his
Egyptian experience, that they alluded to the demoniacal intelligence
which these little creatures evidently possessed. And that is the way
the East is too often interpreted to us. It is all the more important,
therefore, that a work like Kremer's, containing the results of his own
personal observation and investigation, whether in his own special
study of philosophy, or in the wider field of political administration
and natural resources, should not be confounded with those ephemeral
* Aegypteu . Forschungen fiber Land und Volk wahrend eines zehnjahri-

gen Autenthalts. Von Alfred Von Kremer. Nebst eine Karte von Aegypten.
[2 vols.] Leipzig : F.A. Brockhaus. 1863.
books which are every year thrust upon the public by the numberless
scribblers whom the easy facilities of travel now so readily enable to
reach the Mohammedan shores of the Mediterranean. It is to be
regretted, however, we may add, that the valuable statistical tables
with which the work is crowded, do not come down later than the
year 1861 ; since which time the cultivation of cotton has received
such enormous stimulus in Egypt, from the failure of this country to
supply the world's demand.
In the primeval ages, it is affirmed by the Vienna botanist, Unger,
that Egypt was covered with forests and shrubs ; but, since the period
of authentic history, it has been known only as a rich agricultural
land, — a present from the Nile, indeed, as Herodotus said, — the
home of a strange civilization so well preserved as to present the ear
liest monumental history, and to exhibit, asBunsen claims, the middle
age of mankind ; in later times, at once the safest and most congenial
refuge for the scholars of Greece, and the most abundant granary for
the rabble of Rome. But since Amr-Ibn-el 'As'i with his desert
Arab hordes, swept down upon it in the seventh century, a long
night of darkness and misery settled down upon Egypt, and shut it
out almost from the sight of Europe, till, early in the present cen
tury, the genius of Mohammed-Ali, the peasant-boy of Roumelia,
scattered the darkness that had engulfed it, and, with an originality
which he only can understand who understands the Moslem character,
lifted it again into the light of the modern world. For the regenera
tion of Egypt dates from the massacre of the Mamelukes in the Citadel
at Cairo, — a cruel and sanguinary measure indeed, but not more
cruel or sanguinary, and a good deal more necessary, than the exter
mination of the Cuuaunites.
Although still nominally tributary to the Porte, Egypt is in reality
an independent country ; and of all Oriental countries — for it must
at present come under that designation — the most interesting as pre
senting the best illustration of what may be accomplished by European
enlightenment in face of the stolidity and fanaticism of Islam ; and
as proving in the end, we cannot but think, in spite of the efforts of
English diplomacy to bolster up the decaying organization of the Ot
toman Empire, the utter inconsistency of the religion of Mohammed
with that intellectual and moral progress which is the distinct and
conscious aim of Europe. More than that, however, Egypt attracts
us now by another consideration. That great canal, which, from the
days of Sesostris, or at least of Neeho, to the invasion of the Arabs,
mingled the waters of the Red Sea with those of the Mediterranean
and the Nile, is presently to be opened again ; and the commerce
which now finds its way round the Cape of Good Hope to the ports of
Europe is to be restored to its primitive channel up the Red Sea and
across the Isthmus of Suez. And, though our author is kind enough
to spare us the usual political speculations as to the result of this great
change upon the relations of the countries it most directly affects, it
is obvious, that through it Egypt will once more assume a command
ing position by thus becoming the gateway of the East ; while
its extraordinary fertility, also, under the application of European
skill anil capital, must make in itself, so near the producing centres of
Europe, a country of great importance. In ancient times, Alexan
dria was the commercial centre of three continents, and second only
to Rome in size. It would be a curious repetition of the parallels of
history, if it were now to emulate its former greatness.
MISCELLANEOUS.
We have, at length, in the three volumes recently issued by the
Harpers,* the beginning of an elegant edition of an author whose
works have received hitherto but shabby treatment at the hands of
American publishers, though their circulation has perhaps been wider
in this country than in Great Britain. The volumes before us are
certainly very beautiful ; and the reader into whose hands they may
fall, however familiar he may already be with the course of the
famous history, will hardly resist the allurement of the fair pages and
the tasteful binding so far as not to go through with it once more,
even from beginning to end.
And, iudeed, few more fascinating novels were ever written. All
Thackeray is in it, — all the acrid, remorseless sarcasm, all the rollick
ing fun, all the easy banter, all the wonderful flow of slang, of which
no gentleman was ever perhaps a more thorough master. This was
his first great work ; written while yet he had his reputation to make,
and which at once made his reputation. There is no carelessness in
it : every scene is elaborated to the last degree of minuteness ; and the
result is an effect of perfect ease, such as none but a master can hope
to attain. And the strangest feature of the whole book is the keen
relish which the writer evidently has for his work. Never was such
an odious company gathered together ; never such a coil of swindling,
hypocrisy, intrigue, and unmitigated folly unrelieved except by the
tireless devotion of poor Dobbin to the flattest of Amelias : and yet
Thackeray not only revels himself among this tas tThommes perdus
de dettes et de crimes, but makes us enjoy it almost as much as he.
What other writer could, out of such materials, make any but the most
disagreeable of books ? To us, no one mark of Thackeray's genius
is more striking than this, — that, in "Vanity Fair" as in his other
novels, but more in this than in the others, we read from end to end
this most dismal of histories, surrounded by scamps of every descrip
tion, by schemers, rakes, misers, cowards, and fools ; annoyed, pro
testing, provoked, but fascinated. Only Dobbin's foolish fidelity
redeems the wretched story, as Colonel Newcome's foolish fondness
redeems another, hardly less wretched. Had Thackeray then never
seen a good man who was not a fool, or a bright woman who was dis
reputable ? we ask ourselves in disgust ; and then we shut up the book,
and go away with tears in our eyes for the devotion of Dobbin and
the Colonel, and not without a considerable liking for Mrs. Rawdon
Crowley nee Sharp.
In our praise of the beauty of this edition, we ought to make a
* Vanity Fair. By William Makepeace Thackeray. New York : Har

per & Brothers. 3 vols.
single reservation. The illustrations are disgracefully bad. Thacke

ray was not remarkable for his skill in drawing ; but his sketches were
occasionally very full of humorous expression. The drawings of (he
Messrs. Harper are reduced in size from the original wood-cuts ; and,
while in the process the drawing is by no means improved, every
trace of expression is carefully eliminated. The unhappy man who
executed the picture of Dobbin lying under a tree, in the tifth chapter,
must have been filled with remorse when he came to discover that he
had made a dreadful caricature of the only virtuous man in the book.
We recommend the publishers in the succeeding volumes to either
pay more attention to the execution of the illustrations, or omit them
altogether.

THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS.
The Church of the First Three Centuries ; or, Notices of the Lives and
Opinions of the Early Fathers, with special reference to the Doctrine of the
Trinity, illustrating its Late Origin and Gradual Formation. By Alvan
Lamson, D.D. Second edition, revised and enlarged. Boston: Walker, Ful
ler, & Co. 8vo. pp. 410.
The Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson. Second Series. Boston :
Ticknor & Fields, pp. 332.
A Commentary on the Lord's Prayer. By W. Denton. Edited and
enlarged by H. J. Fox. New York : Carlton &"Porter. 24mo. pp. 20S.
Hallowed Songs ; a Collection of the most popular Hymns and Tunes.
New York : Carlton & Porter. (Containing 400 hymns, and nearly as many
tunes, well selected, and in a form extremely convenient for use).
Hours among the Gospels ; or, Wayside Truths from the Life of our
Lord. By N. C. Burt, D.D. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 12mo.
pp. 215.
Christianity and Statesmanship, with Kindred Topics. By William Hague,
D.D. New edition. Boston: Gould & Lincoln. 12mo. pp.414.
The Verdict of Reason upon the Question of the Future Punishment of
those who die Impenitent. By Henry Martyn Dexter. Boston : Nichols &
Noyes. pp. 157.
History of Congregationalism from about A.D. 250 to the Present Time ;
in continuation of the Account of the Origin and Earliest History of this
System of Church Polity contained in " A View of Congregationalism." By
George Punchard. Second edition, rewritten and greatly enlarged. New
York : Hurd & Houghton. 12mo. 2 vols. pp. 562, 519.
Our Country ; its Trial and its Triumph. A Series of Discourses suggested
by the varying Events of the War for the Union. By George Peck. New
York : Carlton & Porter, pp. 300.
Historical View of the American Revolution. By George Washington
Greene. Boston : Ticknor & Fields, pp. 459.
History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth.
By James Antony Froude. New York : Charles Scribner & Co. Vols. I., II.
pp. 447, 501. (To be reviewed.)
Canada ; its Defences, Condition, and Resources. By W. Howard Russell.
Boston : Burnham. pp. 310.
156 New Publications Received. [July.
A Smaller History of Rome, from the Earliest Times to the Establishment

of the Empire. By William Smith. With a Continuation to A.D. 476.
By Eugene Lawrence. New York : Harper & Brothers. 24mo. pp. 365.
SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY.
A Treatise on Astronomy. By Elias Loomis. New York : Harper &
Brothers. 8vo. pp. 338.
Annual of Scientific Discovery; or, Year-Book of Facts in Science and
Art for 1865. Edited by David A. Wells. Boston : Gould. & Lincoln,
pp. 355.
A View at the Foundations ; or, First Causes of Character, as operative
before Birth from Hereditary and Spiritual Sources. By Woodbury M. Fer-
nald. Boston : William V. Spencer, pp. 210.
Know the Truth ; a Critique on the Hamiltonian Theory of Limitation,
including Seven Strictures on the Theories of Rev. Henry L. Mansel, and
Mr. Herbert Spencer. By Jesse H. Jones. New York : Hurd & Houghton,
pp. 225.
CRITICISM, ETC.
Essays in Criticism. By Matthew Arnold. Boston : Ticknor & Fields.
12mo. pp. 506.
Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice. A reply to Matthew
Arnold, Esq. By Francis W. Newman, a Translator of the Iliad. London :
Williams & Norgate. 8vo. pp. 104.
The Iliad of Homer, rendered into English Blank Verse, by Edward, Earl
of Derby. New York : Charles Scribner & Co. 2 vols. (To be reviewed.)
NOVELS AND TALES.
At Anchor ; a Story of our Civil War. By an American. New York :
D. Appleton & Co. pp.311.
Kate Kennedy ; A Son of the Soil ; Miss Mackenzie, by Anthony Trol-
lope ; Qn Guard, by Annie Thomas ; Theo. Leigh, by the Same. New
York : Harper & Brothers.
Beatrice. By Julia Kavanagh. New York : D. Appleton & Co. pp.
520.
The Ideal Attained ; being the Story of two Steadfast Souls, and how they
won their Happiness, and lost it not. By Eliza W. Farnham. New York :
C. M. Plumb & Co. 8vo. pp. 510.
The Clever Woman of the Family. By the author of " The Heir of Red-
clyffe." New York : D. Appleton & Co. 8vo. pp. 233.
The Gayworthys ; a Story of Threads and Thrums. By the author of
" Faith Gartney's Girlhood." Boston : Loring. pp. 399.
The Young Lieutenant ; or, the Adventures of an Army Officer. A Story
of the Great Rebellion. By William T. Adams. Boston : Lee & Shepard.
8vo. pp. 383.
MISCELLANEOUS.
Companion Poets for the People. 1. Household Poems, by H. W. Long
fellow ; 2. Songs for all Seasons, by Alfred Tennyson. Boston : Ticknor &
Fields. I Ohio. pp. 96.
Hasty Recognition of Rebel Belligerency, and our Right to complain of
it. By George Bemis. Boston : A. Williams & Co. 8vo. pp. 57.
The President's Words ; a Selection of Passages from the Speeches, Ad
dresses, and Letters of Abraham Lincoln. Boston : Walker, Fuller, & Co.
pp. 186.
THE
CHRISTIAN EXAMINER.
SEPTEMBER, 1865.
Art. I. — THEISM AND CHRISTIANITY.
The " Christian Examiner " has already given its word of
welcome and praise to the recent volume by Dr. Hedge, en
titled " Reason in Religion." In prefacing onr present argu
ment with a few remarks upon the theory of religious belief
contained in it, we desire to re-affirm, cordially, the general
judgment there expressed. It is a work of great and perma
nent value. The essays which compose it possess qualities
which are rarely united, — deep thoughtfulness and artistic
beauty, solidity of substance and elegance of finish. The
style is admirable, and, by an unsurpassed mastery of words
and felicity of illustration, fascinates and perpetually delights
the reader. Great thoughts are frequently condensed with
epigrammatic terseness to the ultimate limit of compressibil
ity, and thus rendered " portable property," —jewels which
will be heirlooms to posterity. The essays are enriched, but
not encumbered, by the deep and varied scholarship for which
Dr. Hedge enjoys so high a reputation. The treatment of
special topics, while combining originality of conception with
very striking forms of presentation, exhibits likewise what is
of vastly greater moment than these, — a rare depth of reli
gious feeling and experience, and a truth of spiritual insight
which sometimes soars to genuine inspiration. Throughout
VOL. LXXIX. — &IH S. VOL. XVII. MO. II. 14
158 Tlieism and Christianity. [Sept.
the entire work, there breathes a spirit of intense earnestness,

loyalty to conviction, reverence for God, and charity for man,
which appeals irresistibly to the reader's best sympathies, and
touches the secret springs of aspiration and worship. A
soul hungry for truth and life will find rich pasturage in its
pages.
But, however valuable they may be in their insulation, the
general plan and structure of the work entitle us to expect
something more than a series of religious essays. It is
presented in a form which warrants a demand for organic
unity : its title, divisions, and subdivisions, excite the expect
ation of a certain theological coherence, and justify the
inquiry, whether there exists a universally dominant principle
which controls and vitalizes the whole. Yet, viewed as a
religious philosophy, or an attempt to organize rational reli
gion, we find grave deficiencies, both in general scope and
special execution. Its logic is sometimes so exceedingly
loose as to permit point-blank contradictions, even in the
same sentence.* Its breadth of survey and precision of
statement are unequal to its depth of insight. Its specula
tive value is inferior to its spiritual uses. It very imper
fectly carries out the application of reason to religion. On
those great radical questions, the answer to which determines
the answer to all others, a vagueness and vacillation exist,
which seriously impair its value, in the eyes of scientific criti
cism, as a contribution to philosophical theology.
A most important question, considered as a problem for
reason to solve, is this : On what side of our nature do we
come into contact with the spiritual world ? by what faculty
* For instance, on p. 218, we find it stated, that " Christian Churches, as

organized bodies of believers, must stand or fall with the Christian confession, —
that is, the confession of Christ as divinely human Master and Head." Here we
have, as the "Christian confession," three distinct articles or propositions, —
Christ is divine, Christ is human, Christ is Master and Head of the Church.
Yet, on p. 221, it is said : " Catholicism does not consist in uniformity of arti
cles, but in unity of spirit, — not in a common exposition, but a common con
fession and mutual good-will." Here uniformity of articles is affirmed and
denied in the same sentence, as the essence of Catholicism ; for, as we have just
seen, the " common confession " is " uniformity of articles."
1865.] Theism and Christianity. 159
do we apprehend the great truths of religion ? This question

lies at the very threshold of inquiry ; yet Dr. Hedge gives
no explicit answer to it, or rather it seems impossible to
reconcile his conflicting answers. It is true, his negative
position is clear, and consistently maintained : the under
standing is declared incompetent to " discover and establish
the truths of religion" (p. 12). "There is no way to God
through the understanding, which knows only to arrange and
elaborate what the senses supply " (p. 36). " Truths of this
order [i. e., the spiritual order] are apprehended by some
other faculty than the sensuous understanding. The Holy
Spirit is the teacher here" (p. 287). And this negative
position, repeatedly affirmed in other passages, is, we believe,
nowhere contradicted. But when we attempt to discover his
positive position, and determine what this " other faculty " is,
we are perplexed by discordant statements.
" Subjectively, then, the Holy Spirit is to be considered a divine
instinct in man ; a special faculty, differing from reason and under
standing, and the other faculties of the mind, in this, that it always
speaks with authority" (p. 291).
In this passage, the Holy Spirit seems to be regarded as a

human faculty, cognizant by itself of divine things, and dis
tinct equally from reason and from understanding. Yet in
the following passage it seems to be regarded as God's spirit
ual influence, determining reason itself to the perception of
spiritual truth : —
" The Spirit acts on the reason and on the will. It inspires the
knowledge of moral and spiritual truths, and it quickens the moral
and spiritual life. "We are influenced by it in our perceptions and in
our practice" (p. 286).
With regard to the religious function of reason, the passage

last cited appears to show that it is an intuitive faculty cog
nizant of God ; as, likewise, the following : " All that reason
teaches of God is expressed in the saying, ' God is Law ' "
(p. 123). But, on the other hand, certain passages seem to
show that reason teaches nothing whatever of God.
160 Theism and Christianity. [Sept.
" It is my belief, that reason, in its own original capacity and func
tion, has no knowledge of spiritual truth, not even of the first and
fundamental truth of religion, — the being of God." " The office of
reason in religion is not discovery, but verification and purification "
(pp. 208, 209).
Again : " The only effectual knowledge of God is the
private experience of the individual soul " (p. 67). Yet, only
a few pages before, it is said : " The mass of mankind must
receive their religion at second-hand, and must receive it on
historical authority " (p. 64). The history of Methodism ap
parently proves, that no appeal is so powerful with the com
mon people as the appeal to their " private experience."
However this may be, a second-hand religion is good for no
thing; in fact, the very phrase is a contradiction in terms.
Greek mythology tells of three ancient sisters called Phor-
cydes or Grairo, who had but one eye among them, and were
wont to pass it from hand to hand for alternate use. Some
such hypothesis with regard to the " mass of mankind " is
necessary, in order to reconcile these two passages ; but we
are loath to believe that mankind are afflicted with such a
paucity of eyes.
With regard to the " intuition of God," we have the follow
ing inconsistent statements : —
" The knowledge of God is not a conclusion of the understanding,
but an intuition of the moral sense" (p. 66).
" Nor are any of the primary and fundamental truths of religion
original perceptions of the mind" (p. 207).
An intuition of the moral sense is surely an original per
ception of the mind ; and the knowledge of God is surely a
primary and fundamental truth of religion. If so, no contra
diction could be more explicit.
Lastly, faith is propounded as the faculty which knows
God.
" Of God we know nothing except by hypothesis or faith, and can
apprehend nothing except by illustration" (p. 240).
But hypothesis is supposition, faith is belief; their appar-
ent identification obscures the meaning intended to be con

veyed. The difference between a guess and a conviction is
immeasurable.
From statements so inconsistent, successively presenting
the Holy Spirit, reason, the moral sense, and faith, as the
faculty of spiritual vision, and yet leaving these in a relation
of mutual opposition or indeterminateness, no coherent or
positive doctrine can be elicited. We do not mention these
contradictions in any hostile or cavilling spirit; they must
thrust themselves upon the notice of every attentive reader
who seeks to master and digest the substance of what he
reads. They force the conclusion, that philosophical preci
sion of thought must be incompatible with statements so im
precise, and that the important question, " How do we know
religious truth?" has been insufficiently considered by the
author of " Reason in Religion."
But the most important, because the most fundamental, of
all questions of religious philosophy, and a question which
must be answered satisfactorily to the most enlightened
thought of the times, is treated with equal irresolution and
inconsistency by Dr. Hedge. The question is this, — How
shall we distinguish between religious truth and error ? is
our criterion subjective or objective ? does the last appeal lie
to a court internal or external ? This is the great religious
question of the age : it confronts every honest thinker, and
must be met with an honest answer. It is a question of
method, and takes precedence of all questions of particular
doctrines or results. It is the old antagonism between reason
and authority, which must be reconciled before a theology, or
philosophy of religion, is possible. And how is it met by Dr.
Hedge ?
The title of his volume seems to indicate a distinct and
decisive reply, and encourages the hope that his great
and acknowledged ability will be found the champion of rea
son. Nor is this hope disappointed when we open the vol
ume, and read the magnificent chapter on " The Cause of
Reason the Cause of Faith." Here are a few of its noble
utterances.
14*
" In every clear conflict between reason and authority, the genius
of Christianity inclines to the rational side" (p. 198).
" Reason may err in some of its conclusions ; but reason is none
the less the supreme arbiter in theology. . . . Reason or Rome, —
there is no middle ground" (p. 199).
" If, on the other hand, the Protestant principle is true, — if we
believe in it and profess it, — then, in Christ's name, let us stand by it
manfully, and follow iu boldly, and confide in it frankly, and not be
scared by a name, nor wish to scare others. . . . There is nothing
for it but to hold on, — if we admit the principle at all, to stand by
it manfully, to acquiesce in all its legitimate applications, to let full
daylight in on our beliefs, to follow trustingly where reason leads,
to accept the results of competent, honest criticism, and whatever un
biassed and conscientious investigation shall approve" (pp. 199, 200).
Brave, noble words ! Every heart baptized with the love
of truth beats a deep Amen. That trumpet gives no uncer
tain sound. Further, observe how Dr. Hedge himself ap
plies the principle he so eloquently defends : —
" The authority of Scripture is incomplete without the assent of
reason ; and, in things doubtful and insusceptible of demonstration,
authority can mean nothing more than the strong presumption in
favor of a view or a fact from the providential position and inspira
tion of the writer" (p. 201).
" The application of this great principle to Scripture is obvious;
and the bibliolatry which refuses so to apply it ... is not of the
nature of faith, but of fetichism. This sluggish acquiescence in
something external, this slavish reliance on a letter, an institution, on
the ' says, so ' of an individual, is precisely the state of mind to which
the name and credit of faith are commonly assigned. This is the
kind of faith which the Church of Rome demands and fosters"
(p. 203).
Is it not almost incredible, that the same hand which penned
those stalwart words should also pen such as these? —
" We need the sign, — external, supreme authority. "We need the
ultimate appeal of a given word to make our Christianity something
more than a system of philosophy " (p. 456).
If, as Dr. Hedge asserts, " reason is the supreme arbiter in
theology," then it cannot be true, as he also asserts, that we
1865.] Tlieism and Christianity. 163
must have an " external, supreme authority," — "the ultimate

appeal of a given word." It is humiliating to see a great and
inspiring truth thus mocked and buffeted, tossed to and fro
like a shuttlecock between the battledoors of affirmation and
negation.
The denial of the supremacy of reason in religion is in
corporated into the ground-plan of the work, in singular
contravention of its pervading spirit. We find a marked dis
tinction made between " Religion in the Bounds of Theism,"
and "Rational Christianity," — these being the titles of the
two books into which the volume is divided. But, if we seek
the ground and justification of this distinction, we seek in
vain. There is no explicit statement of it anywhere given ;
and the general scope and tenor of the work are clearly
against it. The prevailing tone is unmistakably, if not uni
formly or consistently, opposed to external authority ; and yet
the distinction is based on its implied acceptance. Under
new names, we have merely the old distinction between
natural and revealed religion, as derived respectively from
Nature and the Bible, natural reason and supernatural revela
tion. This we can understand. A theology which builds
upon "external, supreme authority" must admit a province of
religion into which reason may not enter, a province in which
reason has no rights that theology is bound to respect.
Theology cannot concede to reason the right of " verifica
tion ; " for external revelation, if supreme, cannot require the
indorsement or approbation of an inferior. Neither can
theology concede to reason the right of veto or " purifica
tion ; " for that would be a still greater subordination of
revelation to reason. The distinction demands the absolute
exclusion of reason from the province of revelation ; it should
demarcate with mathematical exactitude Theism from Chris
tianity. But the epithet " rational " is then misused ; " super-
rational" (or irrational) would alone be approximate. The
division of religion into Theism and Rational Christianity
breaks down the very distinction on which the division itself
is based. Moreover, Dr. Hedge assuredly has no right to
make such a division ; for he explicitly denies the possibility
of a natural religion, and teaches that all religion is re

vealed. " It is time this phantasm of a ' natural religion '
were exploded " (p. 341). " All religion that is true is re
vealed religion " (p. 209). From the standpoint that " rea
son is the supreme arbiter in theology," the distinction
between Theism and Christianity disappears, and all true reli
gion is seen to be at once rational and revealed. Revelation
is no longer limited to the Bible, but becomes the totality of
God's manifestations, — the objective truth presented by
God; while reason (both intuitive and discursive) becomes
the subjective faculty by which man apprehends it. But
since all revelation is made to reason, and reason is its su
preme, internal interpreter and judge, all revelation is truly
said to be " in man and through man " (p. 67). Hence we
conclude, that the influence of the old distinction between
reason and revelation as co-ordinate sources of religion, appears
to have led Dr. Hedge to the twofold division of his work;
while the influence of the truth, that religion has its one
source in reason apprehending revelation appears in the no
menclature of the parts. But such a confusion of incompat
ible ideas seriously interferes with the philosophical value of
the work. The true relation of Theism to Christianity, as
we conceive it, will be set forth in the remainder of this
article.
The one great postulate of reason, however exercised, is
the unity of the universe, the mutual harmony of all facta
and truths. Adaptation and law lie at the very bottom of all
existence. Every apparent discord and fortuity must be
merely on the surface of things, and ultimately resolvable
into the underlying and eternally self-concordant Law. This
cannot be proved without a begging of the question, nor
doubted without the suicide of intelligence : hence it must
be taken as axiomatic, and is perhaps all that the immortal
Leibnitz really meant by his principle of Sufficient Reason.
Now, man is by nature a worshipping or religious being : the
tendency to worship is a permanent and universal element of
his constitution. If the above postulate be admitted, this
fact points to the existence of an Object to whom the soul's
worship is due in the nature of things : if the universe be a

self-consistent whole, and perfect in all its adaptations, then
the religious tendency is not an aimless instinct leading no-
whither, but a prophetic impulse guiding to the centre of all
Being. In other words, if reason is possible, religion is
rational.
Now the possibility and rationality of religion imply the
objective personality of the object of worship, or, what is
the same thing, oneness of nature in the worshipper and the
Worshipped. The lowest form of fetichism ascribes personal
attributes to its idol or stone ; the highest form of mono
theism still ascribes personal attributes to God. No thing,
no impersonal entity, can rationally be the object of worship
or pra}'er, which, as Dr. Hedge truly says, is " the one uni
versal thing in religion" (p. 99).' And the personality must
be objective, that is, not a pantheistic personality first attain
ing self-consciousness in the breast of the worshipper; for
prayer to one's self, or to the race, or to. the unconscious All,
would be an absurdity or offence against reason. The only
object of a rational worship must be a Person. Moreover,
personality, being to reason an ultimate and unanalyzable
idea, must be supposed to be eternally and necessarily the
same in its essence ; whence follows the generic identity of
all personalities, or the principle that all personal beings
must be supposed to possess intrinsically a common nature.
From the first faint glimmerings of personality in the animal
creation, through the ascending scale of men, angels, arch
angels, and whatever superior existences overtop these, up
to the awful and inscrutable Source of all, the centre of
conscious being is the undivided and indivisible self. From
the tiny ephemeron that seems almost a mathematical point,
up to that eternal Infinite " whose centre is everywhere, and
whose circumference is nowhere," the hierarchy of existence
is a Ptolemaic system of concentric spheres ; and the outer
for ever includes the inner. Narrow as is the human, it
is yet concentrio with the divine. Whatever transcendent
attributes belong to God. and with insufferable radiance
shield from profane inspection the eternal mystery of the I AM,
still Keligion must believe them compatible with the wis

dom, power, and goodness, without which he is no God to
her. The human, to the poor extent of its tether, coincides
with the divine : God's goodness, justice, love, are identical
in nature with ours ; and on no other supposition will an
honest man call them by those names. Dr. Hansel teaches a
Divine Morality, an occulta justitia, which he concedes to be
irreconcilable with human ethics. For our own part, we
echo from the soul those homely and rugged words of John
Stuart Mill, which, with Bishop Thirlwall, we cannot read
" without being thrilled with a sense of the ethical sub
lime:" — " I will call no person good, who is not what I mean
when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures ; and, if such
a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell
I will go."
Rational religion, then, depends on this supreme condi
tion, — oneness of nature in worshipper and Worshipped. It
might perhaps, in one view, be defined as the right relation
between finite persons and the Infinite Person. To state this
principle antithetically, religion presupposes the Finite Divini
ty of man, and the Infinite Humanity of God.
Is this doctrine a derogation from the supernal majesty of
God? When Spinoza's Substance, Fichte's Moral Order, or
Spencer's Force, shall yield a truer and sublimer idea than
infinite holiness, wisdom, power, and love, then, but not till
then, will the thought of God's infinite manlikeness be
eclipsed. Auguste Comte was groping after this thought
when he set up his abstraction of humanity as the Supreme
Being.
Here also is found the spiritual content of the dogma of
the God-man ; though not precisely as Dr. Hedge explains
it, — " that God and man are one ; that human nature is in
real communion with the divine " (p. 238). The doctrine is
deeper than that ; it signifies more than a simple communion :
it symbolizes absolute unity of nature, without which com
munion would be impossible. The Christ, or the ideal man,
is a twofold revelation of God as he is, and man as he ought
to be ; and therein lies the deepest meaning of that sublime
claim, " I and my Father are one."
1865.] TJieism and Christianity. 167
Now, in this great principle of the finite divinity of man,

and the infinite humanity of God, is contained implicitly the
whole of Theism or rational religion. This is the general
method of Reason in Religion, — by ideal manhood to interpret
and apprehend the real Godhead. By the consistent and
fearless application of this method, a complete theology may
be reared on the basis of the soul. Private experience and
individual consciousness, the Scriptures of creation and of
literature, the facts of history, and the whole circle of the
sciences, become data for the soul's analysis, and thus alone
have theological worth or value. Here we have a basis as
eternal as man himself, which will defy for ever the assaults
of iconoclasm. All products of human thought and life be
come thus legitimate revealers of human nature, which alone
is the immediate revealer of God. Here we have firm
ground to stand upon, a sure method to work by, a compre
hensive and far-reaching principle to unify and organize
results. Theology must build on anthropology, the science
of God on the science of Man. Individualism fails, because
it mistakes the peculiar for the universal : without the ma
crocosm, the microcosm is a blank. The idiosyncrasies of
individuals must be eliminated, and theology built up on the
universal human nature which remains.
The first great fact of the soul is life. Do what it will, it
must think, feel, act; and its thinking, feeling, and acting are
the expression of its interior, mysterious self. Forms may
vary ; but all forms are self-utterances, self-manifestations.
Unmanifested soul, like matter stripped of all its qualities,
would be pure and undetermined being ; and that, as Hegel
truly taught, is pure nothing. The soul which shall stand
as type of humanity must be eloquent in this speech of self-
enunciation : its activities must all flow from a potent will,
energizing uniformly from high motives, and for beneficent
ends. To live is to manifest the self, the nature of the self
being revealed in the character of the manifestation : the
suppression of manifestation would be simply cessation of
life. It is this truth which underlies Cousin's doctrine of
the necessary causation of the Deity, — a doctrine which
is true in substance, and false only in form of statement,

Sir William Hamilton refuted it by misconceiving, and hence
misrepresenting it. If God lives, he must be eternally ac
tive; and activity is all which Philo or Cousin meant by
causation or creation: the divine activity must have love
for its source, law for its channel, beneficence for its end.
Thus, both in God and man, love is the regnant motive
whose supremacy constitutes holiness.
Now, the totality of God's expressions of himself, whether
uttered in nature, history, or the soul, becomes, with refer
ence to man and all created intelligences, revelation, — which
thus appears as a perpetual and universal, not an evanescent
and local, fact. Every work and act reveals him, and, rightly
understood, is an effluence of infinite love. And since love
kindles love, revelation creates a response in the human soul,
which is religion. Revelation is the unveiling of the Divine
to the human; religion is the gravitation of the human to the
Divine. The one is the man-ward activity of God; the other,
the God-ward activity of man. Love prompts both move.
ments, and is, as it were, the propelling force. Sundered by
the awful disparity of their being as God and man, they are
brought together in the unity of love as Father and Child.
Revelation and religion are thus one in their source, and one
in their end: they spring from love, and ultimate in loye.
Thus all that Theism demands is faith in the human soul
as the reflex of God, and obedience to the laws which the
soul reveals. From its cardinal principle of the oneness of
nature in God and man, it at once deduces every religious
truth the human heart holds dear, - the reality and univer.
sality of Divine. Providence, the inspiration of the Holy
Spirit, the immortality of the soul, the divineness of duty,
the hideousness of sin, free grace on repentance, the exora
bility of God. All these, and more, flow directly from the
simple truth, spiritually understood, that “God made man in
his own image.” Theism builds on no dry formulas or phi
losophies, no “Evidences” or “Hermeneutics:” its divinest
Scriptures are pure, heroic, holy lives. It simply says, “All
that man at his best can be, that God is, and infinitely more.
First find him in the soul, and then you shall find him every
where." Recognizing history as the joint product of God
and man, it beholds the Divine in all localities and epochs ;
it harvests religion in all ages and climes, but reaps its
wealthiest crops in the most fertile fields. It is reason com
prehending life, and discovering God in all human knowledge
and experience ; it is the soul conscious of the Over-Soul,
and drawn skyward by the gravitation of love. As feeling
and living, Theism is the real in all religions ; as thought, it
is the true in all theologies. To condense it into an intellec
tual symbol, Theism is the recognition of One Infinite and
Immanent Personality as the ground and origin of all finite
existence, and his manifestations in space and time as his
perpetual and universal Word ; of all spiritual beings as one
in nature with the Infinite Personality, and of the human
soul as thus the supreme word addressed to itself, the key to
all other words ; of love as the normal relation and ground of
unity among all spiritual beings, moving the Infinite Father
to revelation, and the finite child to religion.
This, then, is Theism ; and what is Christianity ?
Christianity is the Theism of Christ, — the religion by which
he lived and died. Jesus is the purest, the typical Theist.
The religion which underlay his wonderful life, and made
him what he was ; the religion which pervaded his con
sciousness, filled him with God, saved him from sin, inspired
him to be the most profoundly earnest of philanthropists, the
most intensely positive of reformers, the most beautifully
devout of worshippers, the wisest of teachers, and the sub-
limest of prophets ; the religion which made him a fountain
of inspiration to every age, and transfigured him with the
splendor of ideal manhood, — this is Christianity, and this
alone. Jesus is the extreme type of radicalism in religion.
He quietly set his foot on the authority of priesthoods, docu
ments, institutions : he cared nothing for the prestige of
great names ; and, by appealing directly from tradition to
reason, from Moses to the soul, ploughed up the very roots of
the Hebrew organic law. No revolution in the world's
history was ever so radical as that which Jesus initiated.
VOL. LXXIX. — 5tH 8. VOL. XVII. NO. II. 16
Everywhere he assumes the cardinal Theistic principle from

which all religion flows, — the oneness of the Divine and
human. Almost his only argument is that from man to God.
" If ye, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your
children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven
give good things to them that ask him?" The parable of
the Prodigal Son is a still more striking instance of his faith
in this principle. He built his own theology on his own
intuitions of truth, holiness, and God; and he bade his disci
ples do the same. " Yea, and why even of yourselves judge
ye not what is right ? " Could there be a more explicit
indorsement of rationalism than that? Jesus believed in
rationalism; and they are most truly his imitators who go
and do likewise. Like David, and all other sincere Theists,
Jesus was most reverent, constant, and fervent in prayer, and
thus refutes the shallow and wicked sneer, that " Theists
cannot pray." The religion which was the secret of his tran-
scendently beautiful spirit; which consisted only of simple
and eternal truth lovingly received into his heart, and faith
fully realized in his life ; which owned no source of spiritual
power and holiness save communion with the in-dwelling
God, and no authority save that of his own divinely human
soul, — that alone is Christianity, and that alone is Theism;
for pure Christianity and pure Theism are absolutely identi
cal. Bibliologies and Christologies are no part of Christiani
ty. These may be true or false ; but they make no essential
part of that religion of which the Christ is simply the
supreme type and illustration.
As history, the records of the life of Jesus cannot be shield
ed from historic criticism, which must have unquestioned
right to doubt, to sift, to reject, to accept, to apply its scien
tific and philosophic canons without let or hindrance. Even
if the specific events and details of his life should be all
relegated to the domain of the mythic, and proved to be the
product of idealizing imaginations, — which is improbable, —
the foundations of Christianity would not be touched ; for
these are eternal truths, not historic facts. The historic
Christ, even, would not be disproved ; for the one invincible
proof of the historic Christ is the fact of Christianity in the

world. The fountain cannot rise above its source. The
spirit and life from which the records flow must have been at
least as lofty as they. The impress of a wonderful life is
stamped on the four Gospels; and that life, instead of being
less than its recorded minutiae, by every rational principle
must be supposed to be greater, — greater in its interior
divineness, if less in its exterior adornments. But to bind
up the uncertain annals of the life with the eternal truths
which were its secret and source, and then to baptize the
twain with the one name of Christianity, is to lash together a
corpse and a living body. The attempt simply imperils the
perpetuity of Christianity in human hearts. If Christianity
is to endure for ever as the absolute religion of all ages,
it must be as pure and unadulterated Theism, dissociated
from the non-essential, and bearing the name of Christ be
cause he stands forth among men as its ideal representative
and historic embodiment, — the finite man who best images
the Infinite God, and thus exhibits most perfectly the essen
tial oneness of the human and the Divine.
Theism, therefore, first reveals on rational grounds the
inestimable value of the historic Christ, and elevates him to
the high pedestal from which he is degraded by the popular
theologies. If held to be more than man, or endowed with
superhuman attributes, he ceases to be a revelation of God,
because he then needs to be himself revealed. If proclaimed
to be an authoritative Master, at whose feet reason must ex
tinguish her torch, and listen blindly and submissively in the
dark, he ceases to be a revelation of man ; for he then claims
an illumination inexplicable and unattainable by man as man,
and profanes humanity by enslaving reason. But if, human
purely in birth, endowment, and character, Jesus, neverthe
less, most perfectly reveals God as he is, and man as he ought
to be, then he is a revelation of surpassing power and worth,
and legitimately becomes the profoundest study of all time.
His authority is not over the reason, but over the heart : he
wins, influences, and attracts, by a holiness and love which
must be seen to be truly felt. He comes to us, not as an ac
172 Theism, and Christianity. [Sept.
credited ambassador or official representative of God, bearing

despatches from the King of Heaven, indorsed on parchment
and sealed with the royal signet-ring, but rather as a minia
ture of the Heavenly Father, from whose eyes shines forth
an inexpressibly tender love, and in the awful beauty of
whose features we trace a certain resemblance to ourselves,
which gives us faith in our own divine sonship.
The revelation of God in Christ, which Theism alone rec
onciles with human reason and universal cosmical laws, is no
miracle at all, but rather the most supremely natural of all
things ; for it simply illustrates in its highest intensity a
natural likeness between God and unperverted man. Instead
of a message to the intellect which can be formulated in words
as authoritative instruction, it is a Divine verisimilitude ap
pealing to the heart and' the conscience, and manifesting its
power as an undefinable but regenerating spiritual influence.
On purely theistic grounds, the invaluableness of the life of
Jesus to the race and the individual becomes more profoundly
evident than on supernaturalistic grounds : it is no longer a
perplexing anomaly, baffling all attempts at comprehension,
but simply the most luminous illustration of a universal law.
There is a dreary mechanism in the idea of a supernatural
messenger from God, whose embassy is authenticated by mir
acles as credentials, and thus addressed to the intellect, the
sole judge of credentials and proofs ; there is religions power
in the idea of a great soul whose message is himself, rather
than his words, and who proves his divineness by his irresist
ible sway over the conscience and the affections. Theism
shakes off the incubus of this mechanism, and seizes the
spiritual meaning of a revelation which it discovers to be
inexhaustible. It conceives that the knowledge of human
nature is the least inadequate knowledge of God; and that
this must be studied in all its historic developments, which
are evolutions of human possibilities. Thus Theism finds
on rational grounds a worth in the Bible and the Christ to
which tradition is blind : as the high-water mark of human
aspirations, inspirations, and religious life, they are invaluable
to every human soul. They know nothing of Theism who ac
cuse Theists of irreverence for Jesus, contempt for the Bible,

or misappreciation of their message to man. Theists reserve
their irreverence for the superstition which adores the
shadow and deserts the substance : they believe that spiritual
Christianity is simply pure Theism, and as such will infallibly
cast off in due time the transient, the irrelevant, and the cor
rupting.
Disguise it as we may, Christianity is effecting a radical
" change of base " in these latter days. The spirit of the
age is a little too strong for human manipulations: attempts
to control it only re-illustrate the truth of the old story of
King Canute and the sea. The authority of the Bible, as the
ultimate ground of religious belief, is absolutely destroyed
for modern thought ; and another must be found, for religion
is indestructible. Outward authority, superior to reason, is a
dream of the dark ages ; and infallible authority, whether
outward or inward, is only a factitious want of superstition.
The soul was not meant to run on inevitable railroad tracks.
The liability to err is a part of its constitution, and a part of
the plan of God's providence. The soul itself, taken in its
nature, history, development, and prophetic latencies, is the
only possible basis of a rational theology. Jesus spoke "with
authority," — the authority of an illumined soul trusting itself
as a word of God; and when, in later times, Christianity
slipped its moorings, and anchored to the Church, the Bible,
or to Jesus himself, it forgot its own inherited law, and made
a fatal " change of base " which modern Theism is destined
to reverse and rectify.
In taking the soul itself as the ultimate ground of religion
and court of appeal, Theism but returns to the Christianity
of Jesus himself, and of every other pure and devout Theist ;
it but reforms a corruption of the historical Church. Thus
built on the eternal rock, what has religion to fear from the
assaults of false criticism, science, or philosophy ? They can
but shiver their Damascus blades against the everlasting
granite. On the soul alone can be reared a theology rational
alike in its basis, its method, and its results. Mankind needs
this rational theology, which, like a powerful engine, shall
16*
174 Theism, and Christianity. [Sept.
crush the quartz of history, and sift out from the debris the
gold of universal truth. We cannot quench our spiritual
thirst with the dry sand of facts. The visions of the poet are
a thousand-fold truer than the uncertain chronicles of the his
torian, or the dreary figures of the statistician. Mere events,
facts, are dead: they were true once; but when we say, "They
have happened," their truth vanishes into the omnivorous
jaws of the past. What we want is something that is always
true, — as true now as two thousand years ago. We want
truth that can survive the disintegrations of time, the loss or
corruption of manuscripts, the sharp tooth of oblivion, the
corroding touch of suspicion. The soul is an ancient palimp
sest, from which you have but to erase the trivialities of su
perstition and the ugly blots of sin, in order to discover, in
the chirography of a Divine Penman, the great truths of love,
duty, immortality, God. These are the same yesterday, to
day, and for ever, and burn in our hearts with the fire of eter
nal youth. These are religion, Theism, Christianity, or what
you will, — quite independent of the records of antiquity,
altogether unpropped by human affidavits. The barren crags
of fact will do for the soul to be born on; but, when the
young eagle is fledged, it must trust to the pure atmosphere
of the universal and eternal to support its pinions in a God-
ward flight. The transient is of importance only as envelop
ing the permanent. Great thoughts are few, their embodi
ments many: he is wise who disregards the shifting, and
clings to the immutable. Theism is simply Christianity
emancipated from the false, the trivial, the non-essential, the
temporary, the accidental : to set them in antithesis or dis
tinction is to misconceive them. Unless Christianity can bo
rid of the barnacles which foul the hull of the noble ship,
Rational Religion must take passage in some other craft, and
sail the great ocean of time under another flag than that
which now gladdens her eyes.
1865.] Lyman Beecher. 175
Art. II. — LYMAN BEECHER.

Autobiography, Correspondence, &c, of Lyman Beecher, D.D. Ed
ited by Charles Beecher. With illustrations. In two volumes.
12mo. pp. 563, 587. New York : Harper & Brothers. 1864.
It seems to have been decided that every thing relating to
the Beecher family, both in life and in record, should be
strikingly characteristic, if not unique. The memorial which
the surviving members of it have contributed, to extend
more widely and to perpetuate the well-deserved repute of
their honored father, is, in some respects, an exaggeration
of the peculiarities which distinguish them. As a tribute of
their own affection, and as a setting-forth of their own rea
sons for regarding him as one of the most marked and ser
viceable men in his time and calling, the volumes before us
may be received with entire approbation. We are led to ad
mire the perfect simplicity and frankness of their tone and
contents. They are eminently honest and trustworthy ; free
from all attempts at dressing up, explaining away, or apolo
gizing for either the homely or the grotesque matters which
abundantly strew their pages. The whole man whom they
portray and disclose to us wins our warm love and our full
respect. He was a noble specimen of a man, and would have
been such in any sphere or calling in life. Sincere and sound
to the very core of his heart ; unselfish, devoted, earnest in
purpose, and entire in his consecration of heart, time, and
ability, to the best service of others in the widest range
through which he could exercise great gifts, — he was a model
Christian minister and pastor. His home, with his family
around him, — and such a family, — must have been a scene
where enjoyment and improvement wrought the warp and
woof of life into the noblest fabric possible, amid the contin
gencies of an earthly existence. His children would have
been justified in contributing to his honored and revered
memory the daintiest and most elaborate garland which their
gratitude and imagination could fashion. But in perfect har
176 Lyman Beecher. [Sept.
mony with the almost rude simplicity and the ruggedness of

his own development and manifestation, they have dispensed
with all art and ingenuity in their portraiture, giving us no
polished marble work, but the image of a true and good
Christian man.
Yet, by any reasonable standard for the construction of a
biographical work, or the fair presentation of a subject of
various and many-sided interests, the " Autobiography of Dr.
Beecher " is provokingly unsatisfactory. It is a stone wall
without pointing or mortar, constructed without the use of
plumb or level, and after the most slovenly pattern of New-
England irregularity and convenience, of materials lying
handy and most available. We have fragments ; incongruous
and undigested materials and incomplete narrations ; subjects
of intense interest opened, and then shut down ; fine pictures
partially touched and unframed, and frames sometimes with
out pictures in them. Under the frequent heading of " Cor
respondence," the editor gives us often only one side, —
whether it be the letters from his father, or the letters to
him ; the whole point and much of the interest of which
are lost, just as the utility of one blade of a pair of scissors
would be qualified for lack of the other, and of the screw which
should unite them. What a confused and incoherent sketch
is that given in these pages of Dr. Beecher's trial for heresy,
and, in general, of the rupture between the Old-school and
the New-school Presbyterians ! Personal variances are inti
mated, and scraps of hard accusation and severe invective
between theological opponents are culled out, which the
reader might suppose would have required at least an edi
torial arbitration. But the flash is all we see : the report and
the effect of the discharge fail us. If this were the memoir
of a politician, there are matters on one page which would
give us reasonable expectation of the choice of " seconds,"
and of arrangements for a duel, as we turned over the leaf.
The Doctor is found to threaten certain shakings, knockings-
down, and wringings of the neck, to such as boasted of
being better Calvinists than himself; but they all seem to
escape unharmed. Meanwhile, the Doctor himself is made
sometimes to appear as an overgrown boy, — and, in some of

the finest and most engaging aspects and qualities, he really
was that up to the date of his declining vigor, — so defiant
is his resolve, so effervescing his pluck. Guileless, single-
hearted, self-sacrificing, unwearied, and devoutly trustful of
Providence through all his life, we cannot conceive that he
could ever have had a real enemy, or that he could have
fallen short of being one of the very few of " happy men."
Having no personal acquaintance, or but the slightest, with
this grand specimen of the old-fashioned New-England Ortho
dox minister, — who was old when we were young, — we still
have a few memories of him, which are in keeping with what
has charmed us most in the delineations drawn of him by his
children. His son describes, of course from his own point
of view, the phenomena of his appearance and his work, when,
in Boston, and in the neighboring towns, he undertook his
crusade against Unitarianism. The report of him in the
circle around us was that of a preacher who said strong and
funny things ; and whose audiences might be divided into a
portion agonized by intense inward alarms, and a portion
who were on the watch for the amusing or the ludicrous.
One of his daughters, in a charming chapter of reminiscences
of him at this period, revives and justifies our imperfect con
ception of him. He would pour forth at times the most terrific
and harrowing extempore expositions of doctrine, and doubt
less sent hundreds of his more susceptible hearers to sleep
less pillows, to agonize over the terrors of hell. Mrs. Stowe
now lifts the curtain on his own home scene, where, in order
to work off through his muscles his nervous excitement be
fore going to bed, he would put his own children into a roar
of glee, by scraping some old tune with its ditty on his fiddle,
as, for instance, " Go to the devil, and shake yourself," varied
by a snatch, as a rare treat for the youngsters, at the double-
shuffle, danced with " stocking feet," as once barefooted on
the barn floor of his childhood. Would that we could have a
good engraving of that scene in this illustrated Autobiogra
phy ! It would be a fit companion for another that might
be drawn from Dr. Channing's account in his Newport ser
mon, of his unsophisticated surprise at the excellent appetite

for a good dinner which followed, in the good old time, the
delivering and the listening to a high-flavored Calvinistic dis
course. If some of those convicted by Dr. Beecher's stern
preaching or exhorting could have peeped out from their
direful chambers into that home scene, they might at least
have shortened the period of their deliverance into a state of
grace. We can readily call back the wiry, firm-set preacher,
as, with a roguish or mirthful glistening in one side of his eye,
he threw up his spectacles, and launched some sly stroke.
Tet he was, eminently, one of the most sincere of men, and
never trespassed, in his most jocose moods, on the regions of
excess of any sort ; least of all, in a way to bring under doubt
his profound and habitual spirit of reverence, or his hearty
conviction of the truth of what he taught.
We have a delightful reminiscence of him in a most genial
mood at the commencement at Amherst College, in 1843.
Among the " parts," or exercises of members of the graduat
ing class, was one in which some half-dozen youths, dressed
in character, and with a lively dialogue, appeared as ante
diluvians, restored to the light of modern days. Noah him
self was among them, in soiled and antiquated clothing, with
a most venerable hat stuck over with dried beetles and bugs,
and acting out and talking out to perfection the character of
a sort of human troglodyte disentombed from the rocks.
There was rich humor in the matter, and certain broad,
almost irreverent joking, which might seem hardly acceptable
to the prevailing tone of the company, or consistent with the
spirit of the place. Nevertheless, while there were a few
grave faces among the dignitaries, the audience generally
smiled or roared with delight. Yet the most rollicking and
entranced of the listening spectators, evidently entering with
his whole heart and soul into the funny travesty, was the
good Dr. Beecher. Sitting near to him on the platform, it
was a perfect feast to us to watch his entire giving-up of
himself to a real boyish merriment. He laughed all over,
even down to his boots ; and no one could look at him with
out a sure inference that he was a man of a sunny soul and
of a pure heart. No hard sinner, no real bigot, could possi

bly have laughed as he did.
Soon afterwards, a very trivial incident presented him to
us as a man of a shrewd caution, and of a certain Franklinian
discretion learned by the practice of a rigid economy. We
happened to be passing together on board a steamboat at
noonday, bound to New York. The officious colored waiters
accosted the passengers, as usual, with offers to take and look
after their articles of luggage, coats, umbrellas, &c, with a
view to the fee which would accompany a re-delivery. One
of them importunately made up to the good doctor, with the
proffer, " Mister, shall I look after your baggage ? " The
doctor, looking calmly set upon his purpose and ability to
take care of himself and what little belonged to him, holding
firmly in his grasp a small valise, replied, " No, no : I have
nothing but this valise to look after now. If I let you have
it, I shall have to look after you too."
Our last sight and hearing of the doctor was at a funeral
service in a private house, where he attended as a friend of
the family, and where it was our duty to officiate. The
service was a reading of a few passages of Scripture from a
small pocket volume, and an extempore prayer. The doctor's
deafness prevented his hearing a single word : but the sight
of the little book, evidently not the Bible, misled him into
imagining that it was some sort of a liturgical device ; and,
knowing the minister to be of " the standing Congregational
order," though of the heretical wing, at the close of the
service he abruptly asked, " What do you use that Episcopal
stuff for?"
The ill-digested and fragmentary, but still very interesting
and instructive matter, expanded over the pages of the
volumes before us, does but fill out and fill up the outline
conceptions which we had formed of Dr. Beecher from these
chance exhibitions of his personality. Though his life was
varied in scene and companionship, it was all spent within
a limited range of thought and interests. Notwithstanding
these were of the highest concern, it is easy to see how his
restriction to them repressed the development of his full
nature.
There is no office or calling in the communities of Protes

tant Christendom that has been held under so great a variety
of conditions, personal and local, as that of the ministry.
From tho lordly splendors and the certified independence of a
metropolitan position, we may trace its official representatives
to individuals, who, even in the devouter of our own New-
England towns, simply and virtually stood at the head of the
list of parish paupers in the precincts where they labored.
Dr. Sprague's admirably conceived and faithfully wrought
series of volumes on the "American Pulpit," so instructive
from many other points of view, is not the least so in showing
what a variety of talents and persistent labors has been
consecrated in the humblest villages by men living on the
merest pittance, and receiving that rather in the form of a
charity than as wages for service. If a minister, like the
famous Mr. Howe of Hopkinton, prospered beyond the stan
dard, by working a farm, or by a thrifty marriage, his people
might grudge him his salary, or expect him to give them a
weekly lunch in the parsonage, " at nooning," on Sundays.
Yet, after all, there has been an immense amount of happi
ness in New-England parsonages ; and the children reared in
them have been the great and the good, not unfrequently the
rich and the munificent, to whom our own community, and
those which it has colonized, are indebted for high and be
nevolent services, the impulse to which may be traced to the
dust of some saintly man or woman, sleeping without even
the memorial of a slab of slate-stone, beneath the sand and
mullein stalks of a rough New-England burial-ground. The
late revered and beloved Chief-justice Shaw was the son of a
poor country minister. He was one of the most punctilioua
and conscientious officers of very many of our religious and
benevolent societies. Those who have shared such trusts
with him remember how he was overpowered by tenderness
arid tears at any reminder of the hardships of ministerial
life, and of the straits of widowhood and orphanage.
Dr. Beecher filled the office of a pastor successively over
four parishes, which represented four very distinct phases
and sets of conditions of the ministerial life. They differed
in all other respects, and agreed only in giving him an insuffi

cient support. He really lived more honestly and undis-
guisedly that " Life of Trust " in Providence to meet his
wants, and to sustain his benevolent enterprises, than did
George Miiller, whose "Narrative" — simply a piece of of
fensive cant, as it came from his own hands — is a pious fraud
in the form in which it has been palmed on the credulity of
our " religious community."
The raciest and most charming portion of the work before
us is that which, beginning with the childhood and education
of its subject, settles him in his first parish at East Hampton.
A rude and straitened, but still one can see, an enjoyable and
productive style of life, was experienced by him here. And
that sweet and noble partner of all his cares — we must say
literally, the better half of him in mind, faculty, resource, and
effectiveness — would have made any home and any lot a
pleasant one. Miss Mitford's " Village " gives us nothing more
quaint or delectable than are some of the touches which we
find here ; as, for instance, the description of Mrs. Beecher's
home-made and home-painted carpet. We may say much the
same of the domestic and ministerial relations covering his
second pastorate in Litchfield. The removal was, in some re
spects, like the exchange from a primitive to a cultivated state
of life, but, we presume, more to the seeming than to the
reality. Many of us have some knowledge of the more famous
and populous towns in the interior of New England, where
Orthodoxy holds sway ; and we can allow for the fancy color
ings which they sometimes have in the description. Rich
country storekeepers, even judges at the head of provincial
law-schools, learned maiden ladies at the head of renowned
seminaries, and the pupils of both sexes which these institu
tions would gather, are the glory of very many other places
besides Litchfield. Having been observers of real life in
some scenes combining these elements with a population
mainly given to farming and the mechanic arts, we are always
interested in reading about them in our ecclesiastical and
biographical revelations of their interiors.
That Christian modification of heathenism which is called
VOL. LXXIX. — 5TH 8. VOL. XVII. NO. II. 16
182 Lyman Beeclier. [Sept.
" Calvinism " has had the fairest possible trial in such places,
and under all favorable conditions. Dr. Beecher's Life adds
another to the already numerous volumes, a digest of which,
some years hence, will furnish one of the most instructive
chapters in a philosophy of religion. His flock at East
Hampton was comparatively a rude one. That at Litchfield
was, like the community in which it was gathered, in a transi
tion state from its old traditionalisms to the various forms of
modern liberalism. There were men and women in it who
were readers, and more who were thinkers. The social rela
tions of the people were of a nature to allow of that intimate
acquaintance with each other's domestic and private affairs,
and of that mutual oversight and criticism, which minister to
an excellent friendliness, when not passing the bounds of
consideration and courtesy. There were notables in Litch
field, representing some of the highest stations in military,
civil, congressional, and judicial service.
The chief man of the town was Judge Reeve, one of those
invaluable friends of a country minister, who, while holding
the highest esteem of a community for personal qualities and
attainments, are, at the same time, the whole-hearted, confiden
tial, and judicious intimates and co-laborers of the pastor. Dr.
Beecher used to rely much on the good judge, in the conduct
of revivals, and in the direction of the awakened. Why
should a slight misgiving rise in our minds as we read,
touching the fulness and acumen of the judge's professional
qualities ? We must confess, that it springs from a general
embarrassment, which we have often experienced, in wonder
ing how a truly judicial mind can accept " the Governmental
Theory of the Doctrine of the Atonement."
An Episcopal Church and Society divided with Dr. Beech
er's congregation those who gathered for worship on Sun
days. The old Puritan " standing order " was failing in
social position and supremacy. There are many hints given
in these pages, that the worldlings and the irreligious, as well
as those who had made up their minds that they never could
be, or never would be, " converted," availed themselves of
this Episcopal place of refuge ; while Episcopacy, in turn,
availed itself of them as voters and as agitators against the

exclusive, but then threatened and resisted, prerogative of
the old Orthodoxy. How significant and suggestive of much
else is the incident, naively related, that the governor of the
State, residing at Litchfield, and balancing for " the Church,"
the judge at the meeting-house, gave over, his intention to
make a party for Dr. Beecher, as his neighbors were doing,
because he did not like to have the offices of worship intro
duced at the close of such a social merry-making !
The main interest of Dr. Beecher's life and labors in all his
pastorates was the promotion and conduct of religious revi
vals, — those periodical seasons of intense excitement, when,
by continuous and concentrated effort on his own part, aided,
if desirable, by some able brother, and by the help of the
sympathetic sensibilities of the people, the- minister seeks to
increase the number of professed and actual Christians in his
fold. As the irresistible changes of opinion and the modifica
tion of religious methods are tending to render revival meas
ures obsolete, at least in our more intelligent and cultivated
communities, they will soon be known in their old type,
chiefly as incidents in our ecclesiastical history. Dr. Beech
er had no superior in zeal and power in the conduct of a
revival. His whole-souled belief in the effectiveness of such
agencies, and in the fitness of Christian truths and influences
to promote them, made him ever an unwearied and hopeful
laborer in them ; and his own solid discretion and shrewd
judgment secured him against the extravagancies of many of
his brethren. The Nile does not more intensely feel and
yield to the impulse to its periodical swell of waters pouring
out in an inundation, than did Dr. Beecher quicken all his
energies of mind and heart, soul and body, for a revival. He
found a most inviting, and yet a hard field at East Hampton.
His experience there, and in his other parishes, puts the
crowning testimony to a largely illustrated truth of experi
ence, that there is no form or dispensation of religion more
effective in towns and villages for revival excitements, or
more ineffective in the same for steady, sustained, and health
ful influence, than the old Orthodoxy. The accounts which
we read in these volumes are essentially the same story

that has been told, over and over again, in every town of
New England. A period, described as one of apathy, dul-
ness, and stupidity, is recognized in the Church, and, for a
time, quietly submitted to. The members of the Church,
who had been quickened and rescued by preceding revivals,
share fully with the unconverted in this deplorable stagna
tion of the power of vital piety. The technical description
of the experience is, as a time when the Holy Spirit is with
held or withdrawn from the Church. God and man — by a
consent and co-operation, the exact order and terms of which
have never been satisfactorily set forth — engage themselves to
the holy task of breaking this dull repose, and of stirring the
stagnant waters, that the stream of life may flow again. The
phenomena of a revival have many points of analogy with
those of an epidemic, especially as requiring the two condi
tions, susceptibility in the human subject, and positive exter
nal influence carrying with it a disposing agency. Dr.
Beecher's strong good sense, and spirit of independence and
originality, prevented his being so rigidly mechanical, so
confident in, and wedded to, the same routine methods of
disease, treatment, and cure, as were his brethren generally.
But still the traditions and the usages of the system under
which he had been brought up, held him, for the most part,
under their sway. In later life he admitted that he should
not pursue the same method, or expect the same results, as
he had relied upon and required of the subjects of his zeal.
He was forced, indeed, to make a signal exception in the case
of one of his own daughters, — a true child of her father, —
to regard her as truly converted, and to admit her to full
communion, though she obstinately resisted, not only the
efforts of her family, but even her own desire and consenting
sense of obligation, to pass through the established stages of
conviction and experience. The doctor suffered heavy des
pondency and anguish as his children were growing to matu
rity, that not one of them could be regarded by him as " a
subject of renewing grace." One cannot but hope, and even
believe, that the following agonizing passage in one of his
1865.] Lyman Bcecher. 185
letters to a son of his was written, in part at least, in com

pulsory allegiance to his creed, rather than as the calm and
full conviction of his heart : —
" But while I am as successful as most ministers in bringing the

sons and daughters of others to Christ, my heart sinks within me at
the thought, that every one of my own dear children are [is] without
God in the world, and without Christ, and without hope. I have no
child prepared to die ; and, however cheering their prospects for time
may be, how can I but weep in secret places, when I realize that
their whole eternal existence is every moment liable to become an
existence of unchangeable sinfulness and woe?" Vol. i. p. 390.
He lived to enjoy the full, pure happiness, and it was the

crowning joy of his childlike and grateful heart, of knowing
that all his numerous children, spared to grow up, reached
his own standard of personal piety. True, they have since
been known to a large community, — which divides among
them its highest respect -and gratitude for great abilities
nobly used, — as having all together common heresies, and
each of them a pet heresy besides. But the Orthodox fold,
to which more or less loosely they all cling, is too proud of
even their nominal allegiance to bring discipline to bear
upon them.
The revelations of family life, and of household incident
and training, throughout the volumes, are entertaining and
suggestive ; showing a well-ordered home, presided over by
faithful kindness, skilled in frugality and economy, yet blessed
with a rude luxury in all substantial comforts. The mother
of those many children of his who are best known as such,
was the grace of that home ; and well may her children speak
and write of her with a loving and revering tenderness.
In every family so large in numbers, and so vitalized with
animal as well as intellectual vigor, there will generally be
a member, whose character will concentrate the anxieties,
or whose luckless haps will be continually engaging the sym
pathies, of all the rest. The doctor was spared that bitterest
of all the woes of a godly father, — a vicious son. But
" Charley " seems to have been the unfortunate one. Within
16*
the compass of a few pages, we read of him as suffering from

a gash over each of his eyes, a repetition of the same experi
ence over one of them, a broken leg, a pitchfork run into his
foot, and a nail thrust into his foot and knee, — all besides
grievous and alarming sickness. The father was the com
panion of the children in nutting and fishing parties ; and, as
the boys grew older, they discussed theology with him while
at work on the wood-pile. The ancestral test of physical
strength in the family seems to have been sundry feats per
formed with a barrel of cider ; but hard farm-work presented
alternative tests as the Temperance reform advanced. Family
worship, however, with hearty song and spontaneous devo
tion, was the all-reconciling, all-harmonizing spell for that
household. The meed of praise is given to one of the chil
dren, for having faithfully read "a long" chapter in the Bi
ble. Little did the worthy editor who divided the Scriptures,
with such a hap-hazard unreason, into the larger and smaller
slices and crumbs, realize that he was helping thus to furnish
one standard for measuring the religious docility of children.
In accordance with his theory of experimental religion,
Dr. Beecher seems to have been satisfied with its ordinary
manifestations and influence among the young members of
his family ; and the painful anxiety about them, to which
reference has been made, oppressed him only when, in turn,
they reached the age at which, in conformity with that theo
ry, the crisis of a full conversion should be realized. He
applied to them, as rigidly as to all the other subjects of his
devoted zeal, the strictest conditions and exactions of that
crisis. A periodical revival he must have ; and he thought
he knew in which of the series his own home should furnish
a joyful participant. His shrewdness manifests itself in some
incidental utterances, which express his experience on the
whole subject. He writes to a son, that it is " never worth
while to chase a revival after it has gone by," but " to pre
pare the way for another onset, as soon as new material shall
rise up, which will not be long." He discovered, also, " that
some persons had too much, and some too little intellect to
be converted easily." We wonder, however, that he should
have been satisfied with stating, without explaining, the

striking fact to which he thus refers, in a letter to a daugh
ter : —
"Look at the revivals which are filling our land with salvation :
they do not prevail in England. In this country, they are confined
almost exclusively to the New-England manner of exhibiting the
truth. Mr. Newton himself said, in a letter to a New-England
divine, ' I know not how it is ; but we are obliged to be content with
catching, now and then, a fish with a hook, while you in New Eng
land, like the apostles of old, drag to shore your seines full.' "
Good Mr. Newton probably was not aware how much labor
and misgiving were afterwards spent by these New-England
fishers, in a sorting-out of the contents of their nets, and
that they generally found it necessary to give back a certain
portion of them to the sea again.
In his parish on Long Island, Dr. Beecher was the sole
religious teacher. As such, he was called to encounter there
an experience which could at best have been but slightly
modified by the semi-liberal place of refuge afforded to the
people of Litchfield by the Episcopal Church. He had to
contend with a class of strong-willed, independent, and some
times clear-headed men, in hamlet, town, and village, who
resolutely withstood an Orthodox indoctrination, whom revi
vals very rarely influenced for good, but very often for harm,
and individuals among whom were generally grievous thorns
to the peace of a country minister. Such persons were found
in all the regions of New England. They had begun to appear,
even in the first generation born from the colonists on its
soil. In the interval between the close of the last, and the
beginning of the present century, that class of men, the views
entertained by them, and the antagonistic position which
they assumed, were recognized by the religious portion of
each community as representing a most malignant influence.
The circulating of Paine's writings, and the services which
he had rendered to the cause of political freedom, had made
him almost an idol among farmers and mechanics of a bolder
tone of mind ; and many such found, in his way of treating
some of the subjects incidentally or vitally connected with

religion, only an utterance of the workings of their own
thoughts. The hard and repulsive tone and ministrations of
Calvinism, at a period when it had many intimations that it
was losing its hold upon faith and reverence, helped to con
firm the same tendencies to indifference or. hostility to
wards the only method in which religion was then dispensed.
Some of the disaffected were grave, upright, industrious,
and naturally devout men. Some of them were scoffers, and
every way reckless. Many of them — the best of them — kept
their doubts and struggles to themselves, for the sake of do
mestic peace ; and acquiesced, apparently, in what they did
not care openly to oppose at the cost of personal odium and
social proscription. Occasionally, not infrequently, there
would be one of this class superior in every respect of mind
and character to his minister; and when driven to bay by
petty annoyances aided often by female deaconing, he might
become a powerful agent of mischief. Those of them whose
scepticism was combined with open irreverence and immo
rality were too often made by the minister to represent the
whole class of persons to whom his ministry was utterly
ineffectual, and of whom he would allow himself to speak in
severity and contempt, as infidels or enemies of religion. In
the mass, they certainly were hard material for him to work
upon ; and he was generally left to the dilemma of choosing
between a neglect of them, which would trouble his own con
science, or a remonstrance with them, which kept open danger
ous questions, and seldom resulted in assuring his own peace,
or extending his influence for good. Perfect freedom of in
quiry and' thought, under the strong impulse of an honest
craving for faith, if it did not conduct to an acceptance of the
Orthodox creed, was pronounced to be one of the most subtle
and alarming tokens of heart-depravity. There being no
more liberal or rational dispensation of religion within reach,
it was not strange that a repressed religious indifference
should often pass into declared hostility to the influence of
ministers. When, as was rarely realized, a minister drew in
as a converted sinner one who had been known either as an
unbeliever or a scoffer, the process and method and effect of

the change would be keenly inquired into by neighbors, who
would have their own ways of testing each case on its own
merits. Where the standard of piety was so technically de
fined, and so mechanically adjusted, those who failed of it in
degree failed utterly. In their sicknesses, and on occasions
of family bereavement, the unconverted and their friends had
often to meet a most annoying discipline. It is curious to
observe, from what aged witnesses and traditions and eccle
siastical memorials have reported to us of these parish expe
riences under the Orthodox regimen, that some of the clear
headed men of independent and self-poised spirit in our
country towns anticipated, in a rude way, the views and opin
ions about the Bible, and the philosophy of religion, which
have been more systematically reached and indubitably con
firmed by the results of the most scholarly thinking, research,
and criticism. Men who were buried as infidels, with cold
and grim funeral rites, would stand now as prophets of highest
truth.
The harrowing personal experience of Miss Catharine B.
Beecher, which is given in these volumes, and, still more, her
own vehement protests in the books which she has published
against the Calvinistic method of religious education, re
mind us, that not only men, but women, were among the
most terrible victims, when they failed of being the converts
of " Orthodoxy." The dealing with the intensified inner con
flicts of a deep and earnest nature in a woman, when all the
vast themes of religion were tumultuously presenting them
selves under an interval of excitement, and the great crisis
of the soul's eternal destiny was indicated as present, — was
a task which often fell to the least qualified, the most unfit
ting, and sometimes the most unworthy ministrations, in a
revival. It is terrible to think what dire experiences have
thus been realized by some of the gentlest, the finest, and the
most conscientious spirits, in whom a delicate scruple, or a
faint self-distrust, was a heavier burden than is a breach of all
the ten commandments on the conscience of some hard sin
ners. This exacting responsibility would often fall to, or be
assumed by, some minister of a rough, coarse nature; a clod

hopper from the fields or from a workshop, half humanized
by the discipline of a country college ; with an iron creed ;
with conceit, prejudice, and bigotry, — all intensified by the
demands made upon his unsympathizing and rude skill. His
pride would be stirred to meet the subtle wiles of Satan ; and
the more shrinking and refined the spirit with which he was
dealing, the more stiffly and dogmatically would he prescribe
his professional recipes, and repeat over and over his revival
formulas. There were female saints developed in the Ortho
dox communion, in spite of all this ; but we believe, that,
among the remnant left as the unconverted, a skilful gleaner,
in search of a true, high-souled, noble-hearted and devout
wife, would have met with as rich success as he would have
had among the very elect of the fold.
If space and inclination favored, we might remark at length
upon the representation which Mr. Beecher has given of the
spirit and details of his father's ministry in Boston, to which
he was summoned as the most hopeful assailant and the vir
tual extinguisher of Unitarianism. There is claimed for him
a most skilful warfare, and a nearly complete triumph. There
is no question, that he did a great, and, in many respects, a
good work here. So good a man as he was, with such purity
and singleness of purpose, such lofty aims, and such an unflag
ging persistency in labor, would do good anywhere ; and he
found here most favorable material for the exercise of his zeal
and benevolence. Coming to this city when it was just ex
panding by new enterprise ; when a fresh influx of population
was crowding into it and into its suburbs from the country ;
and when the tide of prosperity, worldliness, and sin, was
rising strong within it, — he had a noble field for his efforts,
independently of his assumed championship of old Orthodoxy
against Unitarianism. And, by the way, we must say, that
" Unitarianism " represented to him a bugbear ; and that
more than half the blows which he struck against it struck
wide of it, not a few of them falling on his own citadel. We
say, too, frankly, and in perfect good nature and kindliness
towards the editor of this Autobiography, and notwithstand
ing hia exultant representations of his father's success, that

the good doctor wrought Unitarianism no discomfiture, did
it no harm, effected no diminution of its real fellowship, but, in
fact, assured its position, theoretically and practically, to its
advocates and disciples. True, Unitarianism has ostensibly
met with a relative loss here in Boston. But that loss has
not accrued to the gain of Orthodoxy. There is also less of
some other good things in Boston besides of Unitarianism,
which other good things lost, the Orthodox, equally with us,
deplore.
Dr. Beecher was the prime and most effective instrument
in forming and organizing many new Orthodox churches in
Boston and the vicinity ; and their membership embraced a
considerable number of persons whom he drew to him from
a more or less nominal or apparent connection with and mem
bership of so-called Unitarian Societies. Out of these " con
verts," too, he made some of his most earnest and efficient
co-laborers. But were they Unitarians, in the full, thorough,
intelligent meaning of the term? We say, No. And we say
it deliberately. It never came within our knowledge, that a
single person, man or woman, who had grasped and held the
substantial matter of the Unitarian system, who was rooted and
grounded in its scriptural and philosophical expositions, has
renounced it for the sake of accepting the Calvinistic system.
There may have been numberless seeming exceptions, and
here and there a single self-avowed exception to the truth
and sweep of this statement. We can only say, that no real
exception to it ever came within our personal knowledge.
There are, indeed, masses of persons who will submit to be
ticketed and labelled, and to have their labels shifted with all
the facility with which the vials in an apothecary's shop are
thus dealt by, and with as hard and mysterious names.
There were attendants on our Unitarian churches, mem
bers of their families, clerks and servants in their employ,
who were no more Unitarians than were the babes in the
nurseries. Among these were many whose religious life
had never been quickened ; many who had never seriously
thought on religion ; others who had given it only a mechau
ical and formal recognition ; and others still, whose measure

of intellectual capacity, whose social disadvantages, whose
craving for religious sympathy of a particular sort, or whose
temperament, needing external friction to keep up vital
warmth, furnished, exactly and abundantly, the material for
Orthodox revival influences.
Dr. Beecher did not go deep enough to reach the sound
ings to which the Unitarians had sunk their plummets. His
work was to them simply superficial. They believed that
the bottom had dropped out of his system, and that he did
not even attempt to replace it, taking for granted that he had
a base still. The issue opened between him and Unitarian-
ism involved matters of fact and matters of opinion. His
fundamental views about the Bible, and about the philosophy
of things humau and divine, were utterly discordant with
those held by Unitarians ; and he did not even essay the work
of going down to the real fundamentals. His daughter tells
us, as his writings show, that he drew his arguments of doc
trine and appeal from the literal statements made on any
page and in any part of the Bible, " without the shadow of a
doubt, that we do have in our English translation the authori
tative, inspired declarations of God." His daughter's admis
sion is a candid one ; and it is none too frank a statement of
the Doctor's bibliolatry. But what a stupendous assumption
it involves I Unitarians know that it is false. If we may make
the assertion, not as a piece of boastful or arrogant self-con
ceit, but in the interest of what we fully believe to be the
truth, we will find confidence to say this ; namely, that Uni-
tarianism drew off the strongest and healthiest elements of
the old Orthodox fold, and Orthodoxy in its zeal and method
of reprisals reclaimed only the weakest and loosest elements of
the Unitarian fold. There is no restoration of the old life
and vigor of Calvinism, possible under the conditions of
knowledge and faith in our times. Its premises are hope
lessly discredited : its foundations have decayed. The quali
fying, restraining, and corrective influences which formerly
prevented its doing more harm than good in its best days,
have gradually modified, and have at length antiquated it.
In fact, the reader of the volumes before us is made to

yield his most cordial and loving admiration to Dr. Beecher
on this very ground, that evidently the most earnest effort of
his mind and spirit was all along given to an attempt so to
modify and rectify the Calvinistic system, that it might be
offered, without apology, to " reasonable men." He felt, that,
in the form in which he first received it, it could not be so
offered. The hitch in Calvinism which he worked upon all
his life presented itself in this puzzle of the creed, — that
men were perfectly furnished for obeying the will of God,
and exposed to eternal torments for not obeying ; while, at the
same time, a special influence of the Holy Spirit — to which
they had no claim, but on which they must, nevertheless, en
tirely rely — was essential to make them not able, but willing,
to obey.* Well might the good and faithful servant of his
Master — him of the light yoke and easy burden — work on
that problem. His comfortable belief, that the Father in hea
ven agreed with him, that there was reason for a re-adjust
ment of the tenets of Orthodoxy just at that time, was,
doubtless, very encouraging to him. Thus he writes to Dr.
Tyler : " I believe that God has seen reasons for having the
system of Calvinism re-examined and discussed." Our belief
goes farther than that.
The venerable and esteemed Dr. Pond, of the Theological
Seminary in Bangor, in a letter to Dr. Beecher, makes a
humorous confession of the skill and diligence necessary to
the re-adjustment of Calvinism to the passing times. He
writes, " The business of instructing in theology is very
much to my taste. I have one difficulty, however, which I
will state. I early wrote out a course of theological lectures,
hoping that they would stand by me from year to year ; but
I find, on recurring to them, that they do not keep well. They
need re-writing almost every year. If you can suggest a
remedy for so great an evil, I shall be very much obliged."
* Miss C. E. Beecher, in her book on the Religious Training of Children,

quotes the following statement of this Calvinistic puzzle : —
" You never can be saved without repentance ; you can repent if you choose :
but it is absolutely certain that you never unit choose, unless God makes you."
vol. lxxix. — 6th s. vol. XVII. NO. II. 17
It was Dr. Beecher's complacent conviction, all through his

life, that his own inner questionings, and the aim of his modi
fying theories, related, strictly and only, to a more correct
philosophical apprehension and statement of the related fun
damentals of Calvinism. That system charged upon all born
of woman a native culpability or ill-desert. How was this
culpability which preceded choice to be made consistent with
the freedom of the will ? Calvinism ascribed to men an im
paired ability for obeying the will of God, with no diminu
tion of responsibility to render such obedience. It was while
Dr. Beecher was engaged in Boston, in his crusade against
Unitarianism, that he was put upon his own self-defence by
jealous brethren in Connecticut and at Andover, for his
espousal of the heresies of the New-school Orthodoxy. .The
quarrel was a sharp one. It followed him to the "West, when
he assumed his office in Lane Seminary ; and, while resulting
in establishing in Connecticut the East-Windsor Seminary
under Dr. Tyler, in opposition to the New-Haven School un
der Dr. Taylor, it brought about the rupture in the Pres
byterian Church. Of the spirit with which the strife was
conducted, we have a painful exposure in the following testi
mony of a son of Dr. Beecher : —
" Though I freely forgive, and pray for, the authors of the wrong,
yet I must say, that, for a combination of meanness and guilt, and
demoralizing power in equal degrees of intensity, I have never known
any thing to exceed the conspiracy in New England, and in the Pres
byterian Church, to crush, by open falsehood and by secret whisper
ings, my father, and others whom they have in vain tried to silence
by argument, or to condemn in the courts of the Church." — Vol. ii.
p. 406-7.
The editor of these volumes, probably taking for granted

that the majority of those who would be most interested in
their perusal would be well informed on the subject from
other sources, has not allowed himself sufficient length and
fulness of statement, in his presentation of the rupture in the
Presbyterian body, to make the account even intelligible to
readers who lack such information. The rupture, certainly,
was in the interest of liberality and reason, though only a

very moderate advance was claimed or contested. The fact
has been curiously and richly illustrated in the heretical de
velopments of opinion among all Christian sects, — that, when
any bolder or more restless spirit feels the constraint of the
formulas or standards of his fellowship, he will be content
with a very slight modification of them on the side of laxity.
If he is put on his self-defence by his more Orthodox breth
ren, and made to feel the penalty of theological factiousness,
he will generally find his temper and his time so severely
taxed to vindicate the measure of liberty which he has
asserted for himself, that he will not be likely to advance far
ther in the direction of heresy. Then the weakness and the
difficulty of his position will attach, not to the defence of his
modicum of heresy, be it more or less, but to the concessions
which he makes to his opponents, in professing to hold with
them the authority of their standards, and to agree with them
— as most probably he does not — " for substance of faith."
Dr. Taylor and Dr. Beecher, as heading the New-school
party, a championcy into which they were forced, but which
they did not assume, had been exceedingly annoyed by the
charge laid at their door in the Unitarian controversy, — that
they were themselves heretics to their own Calvinistic stand
ards. The exigencies of their position under this imputation
stirred their pride, and stiffened their purpose against allow
ing any more ground for the charge than was absolutely
'unavoidable. When, therefore, they found themselves chal
lenged vigorously by their own brethren, hit in front and
rear, they, of course, determined to keep within as close
quarters as possible. Probably there were in Dr. Beecher
himself the germs of all those specific and multiform heresies
which have been developed in ramified directions by three
of bis sons and two of his daughters. But he was content to
be the sturdy trunk, rooted for a firm hold, and drawing up
vigorous sap, leaving the branches to choose their own direc
tion of expansion.
The Galvinistic standards were understood to advance two
propositions bearing on the subject-matter of the issue be
tween the New and the Old Schools : first, the freedom of the
human will, to the extent of restricting accountability entirely
to the voluntary transgression of known law ; and, second, the
innate ill-desert, sin, or culpability of every child born of
woman. The confession affirms, that " God hath endued the
will of man with that natural liberty that it is neither forced,
nor by any absolute necessity of nature determined to good
or evil." And this seemingly frank statement is balanced by
this other, that "man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath
wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompany
ing salvation : so, as a natural man, being altogether averse
from that which is good, and dead in sin, is not able, by his
own strength, to convert himself, or prepare himself there
unto." The difficulty was to adjust into consistency these
two propositions. The man is yet to be born who can do
that ; and, when he is born, he will have to bring into being
with him a system of logic unlike any the world has ever yet
found applicable to either mathematical or speculative prob
lems. The real old-fashioned Calvinism, or Augustinianism,
hood-winked those who might have been puzzled by this
problem, by a cunning play upon the difference between man
and men. God had never created but one single man, namely,
Adam. All his posterity existed in posse in his loins, like a
nest of Dutch boxes ; and were all stained, as by an ill color
striking through them from the outside one. The one man
whom God made was a free agent. All subsequently devel
oped — but not then created — men had lost something which
Adam had. What was it they had lost ? Old Calvinism was
decided and plain-spoken on this point. Men had lost every
thing. Humanity was a complete and hopeless wreck ; and
the fires of hell were all aglow, at best, only banked up, ages
and ages before the birth of the successive generations of
men who were to be the sure victims of them. It was diffi
cult to decide by Calvinism who was the father of men. It
was only certain that God was not, and the paternity lay in
doubt between Adam and the Devil. One thing, however,
was certain, as the confession averred, that men were desti-
titute from their birth of all " ability of will," and were
cursed with a natural aversion for all spiritual good. But

Calvinism had somehow come to recognize, that God was the
Father of men, and that he dealt with them as if he were
indeed their Father ; and therefore modern Calvinists were
concerned to show how Calvinism consisted with fatherly
and filial relations between men and God. Every child was
born with an innate culpability: " ill-desert," as the gentle
phrase is, "is innate;" and yet culpability can exist only
where there is freedom of will. Both the Old and the New
School were resolved upon holding to the former proposition ;
and so they tried their skill and ingenuity in playing tricks
with the latter. The one party maintained, that, though the
will was free by creation, [by the creation of whom ?] its
freedom was forfeited by the Fall ; i.e., all men are born free
agents, but lost their freedom before they were born. The
other party maintained, that there was no such real, positive
loss of freedom by the Fall, but only an acquired moral inabil
ity, amounting, at worst, to an aversion to good ; an unwill
ingness, indeed, to will to be good. The one party aflinned,
straight out and unflinchingly, that men could not do any
thing right if they wished to do it. The other party insisted,
very gingerly, that men would not do any thing right, though
they had perfect ability to do it. The struggle was like that
in a tussle between two combatants in pugilism, one of whom-
tries directly to lay his opponent flat on his back,, while his
adversary seeks to hit him " in the wind ; " acting on the rea
sonable probability, that, if so " hit," he will be likely to fall
in the above-mentioned position.
Among the questions which keenly tried the wits of the
scholastics in the interests of Nominalism and Realism in the
Middle Age — and to as good purposes as many of our modern
debates — was the following : In whom vests the right of
property to the shadow cast by a jackass, as he stands upon
the ground? in the man who owns the jackass, or in the man
who owns the ground on which the shadow falls ? The only
full decision of the question could be found in the seizure, by
one party, of the contested prize ; so that he might add the
right of possession to the claim. It is clear, that the owner
17*
198 Lyman Beccher. [Sept.
of the jackass had the advantage here ; though the owner of

the ground might insist, that, as a condition of holding it, he
must keep moving.
Had it been possible for the disputants in the ranks of Cal
vinism to have kept their temper during their strife, as the
volumes before us show most signally that they did not, it
might not have been unpleasant or unedifying to re-read the
controversy. But many of those who engaged in it on either
side were men of narrow spirits, having recourse to petty
intrigue and backbiting. The worst of them are buried now.
Dr. Beecher bore his part in the strife, so far as we can
infer from the record, and as the nobility of his character
would assure us, with thorough integrity and manliness. In
deed, his real dignity and elevation of soul seem to have been
drawn out more conspicuously under the slanderous persecu
tion to which he was subjected, than by the ordinary experi
ence of the common tenor of his life. We could wish that he
might either have anticipated, or have had a lengthened life
to have dealt with, the fundamental questions which vex our
age. He was not a scholar, nor a philosopher, nor a man of
the largest outlook, nor of penetrating vision. But he had
clear common sense, much acumen, thorough fearlessness of
spirit; and he was a hospitable entertainer of progressive
•ideas, even of those which concern the substance and the
development of religion. He gave himself wholly to the
working-out of what he regarded as a rectified philosophy of
the old statements and tenets of Calvinism. The labor did
not pay. It was on antiquated and musty material. All the
men of mark and power now nominally ranked in the old fel
lowship are known to be heretics. They may insist upon
their reception of the old formulas, yet it is because of some
thing which they can make those formulas mean, or consist
with ; but not because they hold livingly, in their hearts and
minds, what those formulas were designed to emphasize by
the ancient believers who fashioned them. Any one of a
dozen of the characteristic facts of life and experience and
positive knowledge, which mark our own age, would hope
lessly discredit and discomfit the fundamentals of Calvinism.
The Bible is not the book which Calvinism represents it to

be, and once heartily believed it to be. The way of dealing
with the Bible, which would draw Calvinism and authenti
cate Calvinism from it and by it, is now known not to be
the honest or intelligent way of dealing with it. The phe
nomena of infancy, and of the first developments of character
in Christian households, were the severest perplexities under
which Dr. Beecher attempted a re-adjustment of the tenets
of the system which he accepted. He did not venture upon
the broader fields of the philosophy of human nature, even
to the extent to which his daughter has, with an able pen,
traversed some of them. Dr. Chalmers set himself with much
of his zeal, and with all his rhetoric, to attempt a reconcilia
tion between the dogmas of Calviuism, and the inferences
drawu from the revelations made by the telescope, of the mul
titude of worlds to be cared for by God, and of the multitude
of souls upon them — if they are inhabited by intelligent beings
who have sinned — to be reconciled in the one only way, —
by the offer of an infinite sacrifice. But the extent and char
acter and other phenomena of population of this single globe
offer facts and raise questions which utterly confound Calvin
ism. Calvinism evidently never contemplated the actual
phenomena of what it called Heathenism. It was wrought
out and formulized under wholly different views and aspects
of things human and divine, than are now most positively cer
tified to the average intelligence of our time.
Dr. Beecher seems to have been wholly oblivious, or
even happily unconscious, of all the results of the sub-soil
ploughing which has penetrated far beneath the surface-fields
which lie tilled, hoping to get from them their old crops.
Not a single intimation do we gather from all his writings of
any apprehension on his part of the real drift of the age which
presented unmistakable tokens of itself all around him. He
could take the crude material offered to him in the piously
inclined young men to whom the zeal and charity of the East
had opened a Theological Seminary in the West, with free
maintenance and education ; and he, with his colleagues,
could train them by the literalisms of the old, unquestioned
200 James Clarence Mangan. [Sept.
formulas of Bible and creed. He could quicken them into

rivalry with the youths whom the Roman Church was training
by a similar though different process, for " the evangeliza
tion " of the Great Valley 6f oar land. But when the scholars
of Lane Seminary set up for a company of antislavery Pro
testants and champions, in vain did the professors set up
their discipline. The Seminary halls were vacated, and the
cage was emptied. Dr. Beecher had one son, whose bold
speculations led him, though happily not past the reclaiming,
into godless realms. There are thousands of our youth who
are daring the same ventures now. But Calvinism will never
bring them back.
After a period of faithful and fruitful labor at the West, the
venerable man, drawing reverence and love wherever he
went, returned for a while to Boston, and thence removed to
Brooklyn, where he died in his eighty-eighth year.
Art. III.— JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN.
Poems by James Clarence Mangan. With a Biographical Introduc

tion, by John Mitchell. New York : P. M. Haverty. 1859.
The volume which gives the subject to this article is one of

the saddest in the history of literature, which it was ever our
fortune to meet, even among the dark pages of the lives of
those " who learn in suffering."
We shall first give a brief sketch of the life of the unhappy
being called James Clarence Mangan, and afterward offer a
few remarks with specimens of his poems. The only record,
' except a very brief notice in Daly's " Poets and Poetry of
Munster," which we find, is the sketch in the volume before
us, where the illustrious exile, now in Fortress Monroe, ex
patiates upon his own wrongs and the tyranny of the Saxon
oppressor, in the style of which we had such choice speci
mens, for the last four years, in the columns of the " Richmond
1865.] James Clarence Mangan. 201
Enquirer." Unfortunately, Mangan, a dreamer of dreams,

had altogether too little knowledge of the world to penetrate
the bombast and futility of the schemes of the young Ireland-
ers ; and, without doubt, his regard- for Mitchell was only as
the noisiest and most prominent seemed to his dimmed eyes
the greatest. His letter to Mitchell, when the latter was
under prosecution, was honorable to his feelings, if not to his
discernment ; and we must remember, that many others were
under the same generous delusion at the time.
James Clarence Mangan was born in 1803, in an obscure
hamlet called Shanagolden, in Limerick County, Ireland. Of
his parents, it is only known, that his father, James Mangan,
was a grocer, unfortunate in business ; and that he died while
his son was yet young. His mother, whose maiden name
was Catherine Smith, removed, after the death of her hus
band, to the place of her nativity, Dublin, and lived in what
would here be called abject poverty, but which the " deeper
deep " of utter destitution and starvation of Irish poverty
leaves several degrees higher in the scale of society. Of the
early life of Mangan, no tangible record remains, save that he
attended school, for a short time, in an obscure alley of Dub
lin, known as Derby Square ; and that, for seven years or
more, he was a copying clerk in a scrivener's office, earning
just shillings, enough to support the mother and sister de
pendent on him. The office, or the name of his master, is not
known ; but he ever after, when mentioning the life he then
led, expressed the utmost sense of loathing and detestation,
which his gentle nature would allow. After he left the scriv
ener's office, there is a gap of several years in the record of
his life, in which it is not known how he lived and fared.
The story is, that by some chance, and the privilege of his
acquirements, — when or how got, with his means and his
life, is beyond conjecture, — he was admitted to the society of
a family far above him in wealth and station, in which there
were three highly accomplished and beautiful sisters: with
one of these, Frances , encouraged or not, he had the
presumption to fall in love. By the rude shock by which his
tender spirit was awakened from his dream, his whole soul
was unhinged. He fled to opium and whiskey for relief, and,

as we have said, for several years hid himself from the eyes
of all his friends. During this time, it is not probable that
he was absent from Dublin. Indeed, it may be doubted,
whether he ever saw more of a mountain than the Wicklow
Hills, or knew the features of his native land, save in the
pictures of Maclise. During all this time, he was sunk in
helpless debauchery and degradation, in the lowest slums of
Dublin, in the companionship of the vilest of the human spe
cies. Scarcely a sentient or responsible being, he was as
isolated from humanity, as if on a desert island. Like that
soul which,
" Inwrapt tenfold in slothful shame,
Lay there exiled from eternal God,
Lost to her place and name,"
the history of literature records no sadder fall or more inno

cent degradation. When he re-appeared, he was twenty-
seven years of age, and as old in appearance as if forty.
The clear blue eyes, and features of peculiar delicacy,
which had distinguished his youth, remained ; but his coun
tenance was pallid and worn, like that of a corpse, and his
hair prematurely white, presenting almost a bleached ap
pearance.
At this time he commenced his connection with literature,
by contributing short pieces, chiefly translations from the
German and Irish, to an obscure magazine in Dublin. His
compensation was hardly sufficient to supply his daily allow
ance of opium ; but his pieces, by their peculiar qualities,
attracted the attention of several literary men in Dublin,
among them Dr. Anster, author of " Xeniola," and one of the
innumerable translations of " Faust," Petrie and Dr. Todd,
librarian of Trinity College. He was sought out, and by
their aid employment was found for him, in the preparation of
a new catalogue for the magnificent library of the College.
He was thus enabled to procure a comfortable subsistence for
his mother and sister, and opium for himself. The following
sketch of his personal appearance at that time is given by his
biographer : —
" Being in the College Library, and having occasion for a book in
that gloomy apartment known as the ' Fagel Library,' which is in
the innermost recess of the stately building, an acquaintance pointed
out to me a figure perched on the top of. a ladder, with the whispered
information that the figure was Clarence Mangan. It was an un
earthly and ghostly figure, in a brown garment, — the same garment,
to all appearance, that lasted till the day of his death. The blanched
hair was totally unkempt, the corpse-like; features still as marble ; a
large book was in his arms, and all his soul was in the book. I had
never heard of Clarence Mangan before, and knew not for what he
was celebrated, whether as a magician, a poet, or a murderer ; yet
took a volume and spread it on a table, not to read, but with pretence
of reading, to gaze on the spectral creature upon the ladder."
The story of the remaining years of his life may be briefly

told. He contributed to various magazines, including the
''' Dublin University," poems and translations, giving as the lat
ter some of his own grotesque yet beautiful utterances. His
contributions also occasionally appeared in the columns of the
"Nation," — although his personal connection with the mem
bers of the Young-Ireland party was of the smallest, — where
they shine like arabesque silver ornaments on the broad, green
fustian banner of the " Regenerators." He had but one whom
he called friend, Joseph Brennan, to whom he addressed one
of his most touching poems, and who, shortly after the death of
Mangan, removed to this country, settled in New Orleans,
where he became an editor of the " New Orleans Delta,"
and died less than six years ago. Dr. Anster, Petrie, and
others, endeavored to no purpose to reclaim Mangan, or estab
lish some personal intercourse with him. He had become the
slave of opium, and at times would disappear for weeks, avoid
ing all decent society, and holding drunken orgies in the
lowest pothouses, in the company of beggars and ragamuffins,
being occasionally found senseless in the gutters, and carried
to the station-house. His appearance, after emerging from
these sloughs of periodical debauch, was more like a ghost
than a human being. At last the end came. After he had
been missing for some time, word was brought to his friends,
that he was lying ill in an obscure house in Bride Street.
He was removed, at bis own request, to the Meath Hospital,

where, after lingering seven days, he died, June 13th, 1849.
At his last hour, he received the consolations of the Catholic
religion, although he had not for a long time had any practi
cal relations with that Church.
Such is the brief record of the life of one who most assur
edly was in the world, but not of it. He hardly seems like
a human creature, so weird, forlorn, and miserable is the
whole story of his existence. It is doubtful whether he was
ever raised to the height of which stronger natures are capa
ble, even in the factitious heaven of opium, or was more than
enveloped in a sort of Elfin land, where it is not day, but
merely absence of night. His soul appears to have been
without the knowledge of gladness, as flowers are white that
have grown up in a cellar without sunlight.
With a person and mind so constituted, it would, of course,
be in vain to look for any reflection or portraiture of national
life or character in the volume before us. Mangan was in
no sense, save birth, an Irish poet. The Burns, the Beran-
ger, the Whittier of Ireland, is yet to appear. Perhaps the
nearest approach at present is Mr. William Allingham, who is
almost the only one that has appreciated the deficiency, or
attempted faithfully to represent the character and scenery
of Ireland in Irish idiomatic poetry. Beyond a doubt,
" Lovely Mary Donnelly " and " The Girl's Lamentation " are
two of the finest lyrics of modern times. They are full of
local coloring and national idioms ; in fact, are almost cantos
of the old ballads, " Shule Aroon," and the like. But these
are but the beginning of a promise, which we hope Mr.
Allingham may live to fulfil, to rehabilitate and vivify with
new life the fast^vanishing minstrelsy of his native country ;
to gather, polish, and string together the pearls into a chaplet
that shall adorn the fame which his own original genius has
already won. He may be proud to know, that his songs are
printed on the half-penny broadsheet, and sold and sung all
over his country. Thomas Davis, had he lived, and got cured
of his " regeneration," would probably have ripened and
sweetened into a truly national poet. As it is, — although his
1865.] James Clarence Manga*. 205
poems contain here and there a scattered " wood-note 'wild,"

amid the rumble and blaze and noise, — he died too soon to be
entitled to an enduring fame as an Irish poet. Gerald Grif
fin's verses, though sweet and tender, are at best feeble, and
too much tainted with the " Keepsake " and " Annual " style
to reach the heart of the Irish peasant. John Banim has left
one poem, " Soggarth Aroon," which would alone bo sufficient
to stamp his name as one of the most forcible delineators of
Irish life : it is full of power and pathos ; a literal transcript
of truth in the vividest and most idiomatic words. His other
poems are much inferior. Samuel Ferguson, author of that
noble ballad, "The Forging of the Anchor," which made such
a sensation years ago, and seemed to give announcement of a
new poet, has been content to be merely a lawyer, and in
dulge in literature only as a recreation. He is by far the
best translator of the ancient Irish poetry. His poems have
been collected recently, for the first time,* although in
over-fastidiousness he has excluded many ; and we can sin
cerely recommend their perusal to all lovers of poetry, or
students of Irish character. Lover and Lever are not to be
named as Irish poets. Moore is also out of the question.
Aubrey De Vere is cold and rhetorical. Neither are any of
the younger fry of the young Irelanders worth naming, al
though there is occasionally a piece worthy of preservation,
amid the rant and fustian about the "sunburst" and "phoe
nix," and other strange cattle. In respect to the preserva
tion of her ancient ballads and poetry, as in many another,
Ireland has been singularly unfortunate : with airs of the most
wild and plaintive beauty, equal, and in many respects supe
rior, to those of Scotland, — every one of which undoubtedly
had words attached, — there is very little remaining save the
music, which can now never be lost. The poetry, which was
handed down from mouth to mouth, has almost entirely per
ished, with the extinction of Erse as a dialect, almost in our
own day. The few scattered fragments that have been pre-
* Lays of the Western Gael, and other Poems. By Samuel Ferguson. Bell
t Daldy, London. 1865.
VOL. LXZIX. — 5tH 8. VOL. XVII. SO. II. 18
served, even in the clumsy translation that most of them have

received, show what a treasure has been irrecoverably lost.
Mangan translated a number of.pieces from the Erse, prob
ably because they were better suited to the demands of the
Irish market at that time than the German, but without any
of heartiness or feeling necessary : singular to say, he did not
even understand the language that he ventured to transcribe,
being furnished with a literal prose translation of the words,
by a friendly co-laborer in the library. Mangan's transla
tions, although they reflect almost literally the intensely real
istic expressions and allegorical repetitions of the originals,
are almost entirely destitute of their sweetness and tender
pathos, which Ferguson s0 clearly reproduces : they are too
much like the literal versifying of a schoolboy's task, as thus
in the old tale of " The Forgotten Wedding Day," or " Rory
and Darborgilla : " —
" Enow ye the tale of the Prince of Oriel,

Of Rory last of his line of Kings ?
I pen it here as a sad memorial
Of how much woe reckless folly brings."
But hear ye further ! When Cairtre's daughter.

Saw what a fate had o'ertaen her Brave,
Her eyes became as twin founts of water,
Her heart again ns a darker grave."
This is scarcely an improvement on the literal prose transla

tion. How differently Ferguson would have mellowed the
sad sweetness of the original into his numbers may be seen
in the " Lament of Deirdre for the Sons of Usnach." Or per
haps the best example of the difference in their styles might
be " The Fair Hills of Ireland," which was translated by both.
But, passing by these as unworthy of the skill and taste of
the translator, and the spirit of his subjects, we come to the
translations of the German, which form the bulk of the volume.
These again are very unequal, as was to have been expected
from so much task-work ; but among them are some of the
finest gems of poetry, that seem to have almost received
additional lustre from their setting in a new language. The
very measure and melody of Ludwig Tieck's " Herbstlied "

are thus marvellously transferred.: —
•
" A little bird flew through the dell ;
And, where the failing sunbeams fell,
He warbled thus his wondrous lay :
' Adieu ! adieu ! I go away :
Far, far
Must I voyage ere the twilight star.'
It pierced me through, the song he sang,

With many a sweet and bitter pang :
For wounding joy, delicious pain,
My bosom swelled and sank again.
( Heart ! heart I
Is it drunk with bliss or woe thou art f
Then, when I saw the drifted leaves,

I said, ' Already Autumn grieves.'
To sunnier skies the swallow hies :
• So Love departs and Longing flies,
Far, far
Where the Radiant and the Beauteous are.
But soon the sun shone out anew,

And back the little flutterer flew :
He saw my grief, he saw my tears,
And 8ang, ' Love knows no Winter years.'
No ! no !
While it lives, its breath is Summer's glow ! "
The translations include specimens from the whole range

of modern German poetry, with one exception and a singular
one, — that of Heine, none of whose poems appear: yet it
would seem, that the melancholy madness, and despairing,
bitter mirth of his lyrical drops of gall, would have been in
perfect unison with the spirit of Mangan. Perhaps their
highly concentrated essence and perfect finish deterred, or
their edges, too sharp for his own heart, forbade them to be
meddled with in the way of task-work. Not only do we find
here the higher names in German poetry, but some that do not
rank above the common herd in their own country ; as, for
instance, many of " raw-head-and-bloody-bones " sentimentali
ties of the once popular Swabian school of minor poetry, — Dr.
Justinus Kerner and the like, representing the " Mysteries of
Udolpho" and " Castle Spectre " school of English literature.

These, in many instances, are so transfigured and beautified,
that the original authors would find it difficult to recognize
their offspring. In fact, Mangan by no means considered
himself bound to give a literal version in cases like these,
often changing the whole structure, melody, and purport of
his subject ; so that little remained save the title, or interpo
lating his own fancies, when and where he pleased: this,
which would be sacrilege in the case of Goethe and Schiller,
is easily pardoned as regards the works of authors that have
been justly consigned to almost total oblivion. The following
little gem, from Kerner, deserves the credit of an original
poem : —
THE POET'S CONSOLATION.
" What though no maiden's tears ever be shed

O'er my clay bed,
Yet will the generous Night never refuse
To weep its dews.
And though no friendly hand garland the cross

Above my moss, •
Still will the dear, dear moon tenderly shine
Down on that sign.
And if the saunterer by songlessly pass

Through the long grass,
There will the noontide bee pleasantly hum,
And the warm winds come.
Yes — you at least, ye dells, meadows, and streams,

Stars and moonbeams,
Will think on him whose weak, meritless lays
Teemed with your praise."
That he understood the true value of such maudlin sentiment

alists may be seen by an extract from one of his own poems,
to which it is time we now turned : —
" Did I paint a fifth of what I feel,

Oh, how plaintive you would ween I was !
.But I won't, albeit I have a deal
More to wail about than Kerner has I
Kerner's tears are wept for withered flowers,

Mine for withered hopes : my scroll of woe
Dates, alas ! from youth's deserted bowers
Twenty golden years ago !
Yet may Deutschland's bardlings flourish long !
Me, I tweak no beak among them ; hawks
Must not pounce on hawks : besides in song
I could once beat all of them by chalks.
Though you find me, as I near my goal,
Sentimentalizing like Rousseau,
Oh, I had a grand Byronian soul
Twenty golden years ago !
Tick-tick, tick-tick ! — not a sound save Time's,
• And the wind-gust as it drives the rain :
Tortured torturer of reluctant rhymes,
Go to bed, and rest thy aching brain !
Sleep no more the dupe of hope and schemes ;
Soon thou sleepest where the thistles blow :
Curious anticlimax to thy dreams
Twenty golden years ago."
The translations included in the volume under the head of

Persian, Ottoman, Coptic, are undoubtedly his own. On one
occasion, being asked how he could credit such gems to
" Hafiz, replied that Hafiz paid better than, Mangan, and that
any one could see that the}T were only half his. His profes
sedly original poems are very few in number, comprising less
than thirty pages of this volume ; but in them he poured out
his soul as man has seldom done, and on them must his claim
to be considered a poet rest. It must not be forgotten in the
contemplation of these, that the man was a wreck, body and
mind, a once stout-built argosy, but utterly and hopelessly
wrecked; that he pursued poetry, — translating we mean, —
which gave him command of rhyme, only as a means of bread.
These are not the theatrical morbidezza of a Byron or a Poe,
but, like the lamentations of the lonely Job, only the irrepres
sible moans of his own soul. He reports the horrors and
visions that lie in the world of his experience of sorrow, with
a realistic intenseness of expression that Browning could
alone rival, with a wonderful skill of melody, and capricious
variety of rhyme, peculiar to himself, and occasionally flashing
into an expression of living fire, as of the hypocrites, who —
18*
" Would look in God's face

With a lie in their eyes."
A specimen, by no means the best, but characteristic in
every point, will give a better idea of the qualities of his
poetry than the most labored analysis, and also serve as an
autobiography of the life, which we have endeavored to
sketch. It is entitled " The Nameless One ; " and with it we
shall close our brief record.
" Roll forth, my song, like the rolling rirer
That sweeps along to the mighty sea :
God will inspire me while I deliver
My soul of thee !
Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening
Amid the last homes of youth and eld,
That there was one once, whose veins ran lightning
Mo eye beheld.
Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour ;
How shone for him, through his griefs and gloom,
Mo star of all, Heaven sends to light our
Path to the tomb.
Roll on, my song ; and to after-ages
Tell how, disdaining all earth can give, ,
He would have taught men, from Wisdom's pages,
The way to live.
And tell how, trampled, derided, hated,
And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong,
He fled for shelter to God, who mated
His soul with song :
With song which alway, sublime or vapid,
Flowed like a rill in the morning beam ;
Perchance not deep, but intense and rapid, —
A mountain stream.
Tell how this Nameless, condemned for years long
To herd with demons from hell beneath,
Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long
For even death.
Go on to tell how, with genius wasted,
Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love,
With spirit shipwrecked, and young hopes blasted,
He still, still strove ;
Till, spent with toil, dreeing death for others,
And some whose hands should have wrought for him
(If children live not for sires and mothers),
His mind grew dim.
1865.] Radicalism and Conservatism. 211
And he fell far through that pit abysmal,

The gulf and grave of Maguire and Burns,
And pawned his soul for the devil's dismal
Stock of returns :
And yet redeemed it in days of darkness,
And shapes and signs of the final wrath ;
When Death, in hideous and ghastly starkness,
Stood on his path.
And tell how now, amid reck and sorrow
And want and sickness and houseless nights,
He bides in calmness the silent morrow,
That no ray lights.
And lives he still then >. Yes ! Old and hoary
At thirty-nine, from despair and woe,
He lives, enduring what future story
Will never know.
Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble,
Deep in your bosoms ! There let him dwell !
He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble.
Here and in hell."
Art. IV. — RADICALISM AND CONSERVATISM.
An Address to the Graduating Class at the Cambridge Divinity School,

delivered July 17, 1865. By Orviule Dewey, D.D.
"Prove all things: hold fast that which is good." — 1 Thess. v. 21.
Radicalism and Conservatism : these topics are sufficiently

indicated by the text, and they will be the subject of my dis
course this evening.
" Prove all things." That is, analyze, assay them, as men
do coin, to see whether it is pure gold. In other words,
search all things ; go to the bottom, to the roots, of things ;
go down to first principles ; go to the foundations of truth : do
not take things upon trust ; do not accept what is propounded
to you, whether from pulpit or professor's chair, simply because
it is propounded : but understand, know, prove things to be
true for yourselves : that is Radicalism. But, having reached
212 Radicalism and Consenatism. [Sept.
the best conclusion you can, having found what is good, keep,
conserve, hold fast to it; keep an unswerving loyalty to it, —
to the sovereignty of your convictions, to the right principle,
in conduct, to the good law in society ; hold on to it with a
firm hand : that is Conservatism.
This distinction marks two characters or tendencies of
mind ; and, I think, of all minds. The one inquires, the other
accepts. The one says, Why ? Why this dogma, custom, law,
institution, method of education, method of religious culture?
It is not enough that it finds things taught, enjoined, ordained :
it goes behind all that, and asks for the reasons and grounds of
them. The other takes things as it finds them, and thinks
of nothing but using and supporting them. The same differ
ence may be seen in children : the parent knows it. Some
are always asking questions, asking for reasons. They say,
Why is this, or that? why must I do, or not do, this or that ?
I think it is natural to all children's minds to do so, though in
some it is more marked than in others. But, if the disposition
is repelled, the want unsatisfied; if, to the perpetual " Why? ''
the answer is, " Because it is so," or, " Because you must,"
then you are likely soon to have, before you a conservative
little child, — not the most promising form of character for
the future. And yet, I think it is the character of most men.
But in speaking of grown-up men, in speaking of sects and
parties, it would be unfair to apply the words " Radical " and
" Conservative," in the extreme sense. This is often done,
because men's opponents describe and denominate them, — not
they themselves. It is singular, that the word " Radical,"
which, according to etymology, ought to mean simply going
down to the roots of things, and therefore the most deep-
founded principle, has come to mean the tearing-up of things
by the roots. And because it is thus, the Conservative repre
sents his opponent as a rash, reckless, unscrupulous innovator.
On the other hand, the Radical retorts by defining the Con
servative as a timid, selfish, obstinate defender of every thing
old and established, — the enemy of all progress. " Fanatic "
and "fogy" are the terms they apply to one another. Now, if
this is right on one side, it is right on the other. But both
1865.] Radicalism and Conseiratism. 213
deny it, and justly deny it. Extremists there may be in both
parties ; but extremists are not the body of any party, any
more than exceptions are the body of any rule.
When Paul said, "Prove all things: hold fast that which is
good," it is evident that he did not conceive that he was
requiring things incompatible with each other ; and now I
maintain, that the qualities in question are not so, by any fair
and reasonable definition; that they are but opposite poles
of the same harmonious world of thought ; that they are not
necessarily opposed to each other, in any sense that implicates
the integrity or conscience of the contending parties, or that
should make them violent opponents.
Nay, the same man may be both radical and conservative ;
and every healthful mind has both elements in it, — convic
tions, i.e., springing from roots within, guarded at the same
time in their growth without, — original principles on the one
hand, and careful and even distrustful applications of them
on the other. Such a mind has ever a debate with itself:
but it is a friendly debate ; and why may it not be so with
communities, with parties ? Why may not a man contend, as
he does with himself, so with others, in a thoughtful, consid
erate, and candid frame of spirit ?
But I say a man may and should have in him both tenden
cies. Thus, there can be no more radical position than his
who founds his religion, his philosophy, and all his deepest
thinking, upon -intuitions, upon original grounds of reasoning
in his own nature. But may not this man be, at the same
time, a Conservative ? Why, he may be conservative, and in
flexibly conservative, in holding on to these very intuitions.
Woe to him if he does not ! He loses every thing if he lets
go that firm hold : his anchor does not take ground ; and he
must float upon the sea, a helpless wreck in religion or
philosophy.
Radicalism lies in principles; Conservatism, in the applica
tion of them. A man may be thoroughly radical in his prin
ciples with regard to religion and philosophy, with regard to
liberty and slavery, with regard to society and government ;
and yet he may be very considerate, cautious, and conserva
214 Radicalism and Conservatism. [Sept.
tive -about the application of principles. And there is always

danger to be guarded against, in both tendencies. He who
contentedly accepts things as he finds them — monarchy,
aristocracy, law, Church-order, social ethics, prevailing opin
ion — is liable to become stiff, unyielding, unprogressive ; and
strong in what is established and respectable, to be hard,
intolerant, and obstinate against all proposals of change and
improvement. While, on the other hand, the abstract theo
rist, it may well be feared, though he begins right, may
not end right; digging into the grounds of things, he may
stop there ; he may end in an extreme individualism, and, in
stead of being a broad and liberal thinker, he may be a mere
come-outer; he may sink into his solitary intuitional hole,
sucking in the cold and proud fancies of his own brain, suf
ficed and saturated with himself, rather than plant the health
ful tree of faith, which shall rise up into the air, and draw
sustenance from the living world, and catch light and reve
lation from the skies. Or else quitting the privacy of his
thought, and applying his views to society, — most radicals are
reformers too; and it is not uncommon to find a man who de
mands that his peculiarity shall be a generality for every body
else, — applying his views, I say, to society, the innovating
theorist may reject too much, pull down too much ; and, caring
for nothing but his own pet idea, may be willing to make a
wreck of society, government, religion, in a fanatical revolt
against every thing that is established. But still I maintain,
that a man may be, in the just sense of the words, at once
radical and conservative ; a*nd that no other man is a thor
oughly and soundly wise man.
Or if the question be, as it is in this matter, between the
old and the new, — between what the past has done for us,
and what the future invites us to do, — what wise man thinks
of discarding the claims of either? The past has nourished
us, fashioned us, made us what we are. No past civilization
or culture, and we had been heathen and barbarians. The
past is venerable with the weight of years and ages. To ig
nore or scorn it, is as if one scorned or ignored his father.
To think of cutting loose from it, is as if one proposed to cut
off his youth from his childhood, or his manhood from his
youth ; or to cut off the flowing river from the head-springs
and fountain-lakes that feed it. But to think of stopping all
growth and progress, of shutting out from religion or science
all new or better views ; to say that youth is not to expand
into manhood, or that the river is not to flow on, and fertilize
new fields, — is an equal folly on the other hand.
But now the main and practical question is, Can these two
elements not only co-exist, but co-operate ? Can they do this
in society, in legislation, in polity, in religion? Can they do
so in our own religious body ?
First, Can they do so among ourselves? We have lately
organized ourselves for work, not as a sect, but as a religious
body ; aiming, in common with other Churches, to do our part
in promoting the common religious weal of our country and
the world. Is there any thing in our differences to prevent
our carrying out the plan successfully? Is there any thing
to prevent our taking friendly hands, and -heartily working
together? I think there is not. We have in our body what
are called Radicals and Conservatives ; the left wing and the
right wing. The one builds its religion more upon intuitions,
upon original data in the soul ; the other, more upon outward
authority, upon positive and inspired teachings. Now it is
true, that if any one held his intuitions to be of such exclusive
value that he would believe in nothing else, — neither in
Christianity nor Church, neither in God nor immortality, —
those of a different faith, or rather, who have any faith at all,
could not join with him nor work with him. But this is far
enough from being the condition of things with us. We all
believe in God. We all revere Jesus Christ. We all value
Christianity and the Church. But we do not all construe the
Gospel in the same way. Some of us believe that Jesus
wrought miracles ; others do not. Some of us believe that
the four Gospels are thoughout a reliable historical record;
others doubt or deny it. But both draw from them the pre
cious nurture of the highest life, — the great lessons of actual
life. Must the agreement go for nothing, and the difference
for every thing, — breaking off all communion, all co-operation?
I do not think so. I believe we may be all united, notwith

standing our differences, in one brotherhood of respect, of
Christian affection, of mutual help, and help to every good
word and work.
Nay, for myself, and so far as the Church is concerned, —
the Church, i.e., as a body of persons united simply for wor
ship and fellowship, — I should be willing still more to broaden
the ground. If there were a Church, gathered from all sects,
— each member consenting to sink his peculiarities out of
sight for the sake of a common worship, of a devout and
humble approach to the Infinite Father, — much as I like my
own communion, I should be inclined to join that Church
Universal. If, in a population of two or three thousand peo
ple, there were, as is usual with us in this country, four or
five Churches, when but one or two could be well supported ;
if there were a Baptist and Methodist and Episcopal and
Universalist and Unitarian Church in such a township, all
struggling to live, and their ministers finding, for their part,
that they could not live, were leaving their posts every two
or three years, till, in the rural districts, the profession had
become almost nomadic ; in such circumstances I would
rather take the Sears Liturgy, — which, be it observed, does
not recognize the modern doctrine of the Trinity, — and so
worship with my fellow-Christians in one Church, built for
all.
It is true, that a Church in this view is a different thing
from an association, whose object it is to send out books, tracts,
and preachers, to build up the cause of religion. As there is
some diversity of views among us, not with regard to vital
religion, but with regard to its philosophy and its records, the
question is, whether this diversity can be either ignored, or
suffered freely to express itself in the books, tracts, and preach
ers that are sent forth. If we think it cannot, then we cannot
unite in this work. If we think it can, then we can unite.
The late Convention in New York must have thought so, else
it could not have proceeded at all in the work it has under
taken; else it would not have accepted large contributions
from Churches marked by every shade of difference. For my
own part, I am satisfied in this respect with the catholic

ground on which it placed itself. My only doubt would be,
whether it was catholic enough in another respect. That is
to say, I was glad that the members of the Convention, not
withstanding their differences in opinion, could agree to work
together; but then it is obvious, as a matter of justice and
fairness to one another, that the platform which they laid
down should be one on which they all could satisfactorily
stand. For the one party to say, because it was strong, " We
will have this plank, whether you like it or not," did not seem
to be fair dealing; and although the other party agreed to
accept it, rather than break the platform in pieces, it did not
seem to be right that they should be pushed so hard.
To be sure, it appeared to me surprising, that they should
think the concession, on their part, so great a one. To their
own reverential feeling towards the common Master and his
teaching, I cannot believe that the phrases, " The Lord Jesus
Christ," and "Building up of his kingdom," taken in their
simple sense, free from others' constructions, could be any seri
ous offence. And what if others did accept those words in a
superstitious sense, or they thought so : they did not. On the
other hand, the simple name, Jesus Christ, Master and Lord
as he is in the realm of our spiritual life, embosoms and em
bodies a sanctity and venerableness to which no prefix could
add any thing; and I should have been content to let it stand
in its simple grandeur. ,
As to the difference between what are called the conser
vative and radical portions of our body, if any one thinks it
essential, — vital to Christianity, — he should not belong to
the American Unitarian Conference ; he should not consent,
being of the one party or the other, to receive help, aid,
money, from those whom he deems alien to the essential faith
of the Gospel. If I saw Christian men on the one side in this
question, and unchristian men on the other, I could not con
sent to any union between them, in such a work as the spread
of truth and religion.' But I must confess, on the contrary,
that I see as good men, men as full of the spirit of Christianity,
on one side as the other.
VOL. LXXIX. — &TH S. VOL. XVII. SO. II. 19
SI 8 Radicalism and Conservatism. [Sept.
I know that I am speaking on a subject on which there is

much conservative anxiety in many minds among us. The
rush of the conservative vote in the late Convention was proof
of it. There is a fear among us that every thing in our reli
gious body is running out into individuality, into dispersion,
into nothing ; and that the same fatal tendency is showing
itself in all religious bodies. I cannot sympathize with this
fear. I believe that this running-out, as they call it, — i.e.,
this free and varied movement, — is the natural tendency of
thought, and that it will vindicate itself as right and good.
If men think, they must think diversely : thought will struggle
with thought, and the result will be something better than
universal acquiescence.
And it will be stronger too, in its power to spread and pre
vail. Truth unchained, not bound fast in a creed ; truth
marching over the earth, not entrenched in a Church camp;
truth in dispersion, not in concentration, — this is our election.
There is a force in cohesion ; but there is a greater in diffu
sion. The sun, by its attractive force, draws and holds the
planets in their courses. But, according to the recent doctrine
of the Correlation of forces, or Conservation of force, the heat
that streams from the sun becomes, when it strikes the sur
rounding orbs, a form of power: it is positive, mechanic force,
manifest in all the constructions of vegetable and animal life ;
it builds the trees, the groves, the forests ; it covers all the
worlds with verdure and flowers. The sun does not go out
into nothing by diffusion; but it goes out into every thing
that we call life and power.
But to return to the point which I am considering in this
discourse: From there being these two necessary, but not
necessarily irreconcilable nor mutually destructive opposites,
in all thought, I have contended for catholicity, for toleration,
in religion. I wish now to carry the plea into a wider appli
cation; that is to say, from our religious to our political and
social differences. The application is practical : it concerns
our duties. I am not going beyond the proper province of the
pulpit ; and I think that the pulpit, that the preacher, is espe
cially bound to take account of it. It deeply concerns us all'
as citizens of this country, and it concerns us as citizens of

the great modern Commonwealth of civilized nations. * For
all the tendencies of. human thought are now rushing, as
never before, to this issue between Radicalism and Conserva
tism ; between the interests of the many and of the few ;
between peoples and aristocracies ; between slaves and mas
ters ; between the low and the high, in all communities ; be
tween humanity, and every power that denies its claims.
And the question is, Are we to debate these matters with
calmness, candor, and patience, or with selfish hate and factious
violence ? Are we to debate them with reason and tem
perate speech, or are we to debate them with war and blood
shed?
When this dreadful war began, now just ended, firmly be
lieving that it could come to but one issue, I felt that when it
should be ended; when this nation should set out on a new
career ; when it should have established, among the nations,
its claim to stand up for the rights of the many against all
birthright prerogatives of the few, then there would be a call
upon all thoughtful and patriotic moralists, philosophers, and
preachers among us, to speak such words of wisdom and warn
ing, such words about obedience and law and suffrage and
government, as they had never spoken before. And now I
believe that the time has come for them to speak.
When all government is in the hands of hereditary rulers,
or emanates from thein, the people are not to blame for the
'wrongs or abuses of which it is guilty. But we have taken
into our own charge that awful depository of power. We are
directly, personally, every one of us, responsible for the exer
cise of it. And if we continue to be, as we have been, insen
sible to the magnitude of this trust ; if we proudly claim to
be free citizen electors, without thoughtfully and conscien
tiously fulfilling the duties of electors; if we vote factiously,
or will not vote at all, because the poll is a disagreeable place
to go to ; if beneath the majestic frame of a free, representa
tive government, the only thought of our citizens is to play
out their little game of private ambition, of money-getting
and pleasure-seeking, only freer than other peoples to be more
selfish and self-willed ; if the arena dedicated to sacred free

dom* is given over to violent and unscrupulous party contests ;
if demagogues are to be our great men, and the wise and
thoughtful are to shrink back, or to be pushed back by the
crowd, — then official dignity and morality will continue to run
down as they have done ; our general government will become,
what some of our city governments already are, — you know
what that is; and the time may come when majorities will be
more oppressive than despots, and we shall be ready to flee
from the many-headed monster, as did the Roman republic, to
the one-man power.
There is always danger of losing the sense of personal re
sponsibility, in our connection with great organizations. As
corporations are said to have no souls, so those who deal with
them often act as if they had no souls. The failure of hon
esty or principle, or of any positive duty towards a neighbor,
is quite otherwise reckoned with, when it relates to a bank
or to a railroad corporation ; still more to a government or to
a nation. His debt, an honest man will pay strictly and in
full ; his tax, perhaps, he will withhold or lessen, or get rid
of as much as he can. This way of thinking is the ruin of
political morality ; and, if unchecked, will be the ruin of the
Republic.
For ruin is still possible, though we stand so strong now.
Bravely and well we have vindicated the national sover
eignty : now we have to take up again the great problem, not
yet solved, whether a free people will govern themselves-
wisely and well ; whether we have, or are to have, enough
intelligence and virtue for this stupendous achievement, —
far the grandest, I believe, ever seen on earth. All the men
in this country, honestly and heartily working to that end,
cannot do more than achieve it. We have fought the battle
with armed hosts, and have gained the victory. We are now
to fight a longer, harder, and more perilous battle, with our
selves ; with our selfishness, greed, and private ambition ;
with ignorance, with national vanity, with arrogant boasting ;
with vice and moral sloth and enervating luxury; with the law
lessness of men, and the madness of parties ; with all the evils
which may grow out, at once, from unprecedented abundance

of means and unprecedented freedom of action, to choke and
blight all private virtue and all public prosperity.
What is to help us in this perilous conflict? Not arms nor
armies, not guns nor battlements, but intelligence, sobriety,
modesty, moderation, and obedience. And I say now, mod*
eration and obedience.
Moderation, I mean, in our political and social controversies.
Men do not truly see and fairly judge their opponents. Rad
icalism and Conservatism do not ; for these are the reign
ing elements in all popular questions, — Democrat and Feder
alist, Whig and Tory, Republican and Monarchist, Antislavery
and Proslavery, stand precisely upon those grounds. The
former stand upon natural right ; the latter, upon vested right
or established usage. I do not deny that the opposition is
serious and important ; but I say that it need not be preju
diced, passionate, and abusive. When it is so, then follows
unhealthy agitation, electioneering intrigue, bribery and cor
ruption, mutual hate, or bloody war.
Radicalism and Conservatism, pushed to bloody arbitra
ment, — this was the awful war that we have just gone
through : with regard to political principles, Radicalism at
the South, and Conservatism at the North ; with regard to
slavery, Conservatism at the South, and Radicalism at the
North. This was at the bottom of the horrible war of the
French Revolution. This may bring on wars of opinion,
'scarcely less horrible, in England, and all over Europe. Is
civilization to find out no better way to discuss and settle
such questions, than by violence and blood?
Let it not disturb any of my hearers, that I bring these un
usual terms into the pulpit. They must be heard — they or
their equivalents — in the pulpit. We cannot stand upon
pulpit etiquette when such vital matters are at stake; and
there are no words more vital to human welfare and duty*
than these words, " Radical " and " Conservative ; " written
often in mutual hate and scorn, steeped in the sweat and
tears" and blood of men, pronounced over desolate homes
and desolated countries. Behold all the accumulated woes and
19*
horrors of a French revolution or of an American rebellion I

No tongue can tell what they have been. And, when it is asked
what it all means, the answer is, The fight of opinions, —
yes, of radical and conservative opinions, — hath done this !
The question between Radicalism and Conservatism is
a wedge that is to be driven deeper into the solid mass of
human interests, both in the present and the coming time,
than any other that I know. This nation is now entering
upon debates to adjust the claims between natural justice to
the African man, and the laws affecting his civic and social
position ; between the functions of the States, and of the Gen
eral Government ; between the just punishment of treason,
and the conservative wisdom that will not let it go too far. Is
it not possible to bring something of moderation into these
debates, to avoid opprobrious and scurrilous personalities,
to avoid appeals to passion and violence?
Is civilization, I repeat, never to find out any better way ?
Cannot something of thoughtful sobriety moderate our old
party animosities? If both sides, in all such questions, have
claims to be considered ; if both sides do actually exist, and
patiently reason together in the same man, and must, if he be
a wise man, why may they not in different minds ? Why may
they not in different countries, in different sects, in different
systems of education or social science ? Why not, in the nat
ural controversy between Europe and America ; between
Monarchy and Republic ; between Churchman and Dissenter ;
between Romanist and Protestant; between the right wing
and the left wing, in every debate ? I welcome, — if I am not
a prejudiced and unreasonable person, — I welcome a fair and
friendly antagonist. I welcome an honest and candid rea-
soner, who takes side against me, in an argument. I can meet
with no man that can do me so much good. I desire truly to
make up the issue with him, and thoroughly to try it. Coun
sel do so with counsel, in a case at law. Why may not nations,
communities, sects, and political parties do so ?
One word more I must say, and that is upon obedience, —
the great conservative principle that lies at the foundation of
States. In inquiring and determining what shall be obeyed,
let the radical principle have place and free play ; let there
be full and free investigation into the grounds and reasons of
all political institutions. But when they are established, un
less they are consolidated into an intolerable despotism ; when
a people has framed the best institutions that it can, — then let
there be a devoted obedience to the Law, to the Constitu
tion, to the Government. Especially in a Republic like ours,
it is a matter of the most pressing necessity, that every man
determine honestly to serve the State, in every function of
citizenship, — as elector, juror, sheriff, magistrate, judge, and
governor, — yes, and soldier.
I know that saying all this may seem to be to very little
purpose ; that it may seem like throwing a dart into the air.
But I will throw that dart. I think we should all begin to do
this work, each one in his own sphere, however small ; that
all thoughtful men, and especially all public men, should begin,
from this time forth, to speak and reiterate words of whole
some counsel and warning, upon the duties and dangers that
press upon us ; and, above all, that all preachers should do it.
What might not the whole body of clergy in this country do,
if, getting rid of the notion that preaching has nothing to do
but with doctrine and church-going, or with the religious life
in its common rounds, they would press upon the people, from
time to time, the specific duties they owe to one another, and
to the common weal, in watching, guarding, and building up
the great and holy State ?
And surely I need not say, that, in the terrible crisis of the
last four years, we have most solemn admonition.
In the Southern rebellion, we have witnessed the most awful
explosion of disobedient self-will that the world ever saw.
This self-will, I think, was nurtured by the slave system. I
am certain, that it never could have reared its monstrous head
among the intelligent and law-abiding people of the North.
But we have still enough to learn of this great fidelity to
the Law and Constitution, this great fidelity to our country.
For citizenship in this country, let it be emphatically said,
must be a different thing from what it is in any other country.
We have a new lesson to learn, a new part to act. It is
not fidelity to the law alone, but fidelity in every way to the
common weal, that is required of us. This is the special point,
I think, that is to be pressed upon our people. We are living
a new civic life. Under despotic forms, the people have little
to do with the Government: here, we have every thing to
do. There, obedience is compelled ; here it must be volun
tary and devoted : and it must be obedience to duty, in every
function imposed upon us by the State.
And when was any people ever more fearfully taught the
lesson ? Disobedience has covered the land with all these
horrors ! Lawless passion, infuriated by resistance to its will,
pushed to madness because denied the spread of that hateful
system of slavery which had nursed it, has struck at the na
tion's heart ; levied war ; launched pirate ships upon the
sea; instigated robber raids upon our borders; desolated fair
regions with fire and blood ; and, with yet more horrible
atrocity, starved prisoners to death by tens of thousands;
plotted the burning of our Northern cities, or the spread of
pestilence in them ; and, at length, as the end and consumma
tion of its fell hate, has struck down, with the assassin's blow,
the noblest man of us all.
0 Lincoln ! martyred for fidelity to thy country ; en
tombed in a nation's tears : 0 spirits of our sons and bro
thers, who have been slain on a hundred battle-fields ! — from
your bloody shrouds, from your sleeping dust, let the great
adjuration come to this people, to be a united, loyal, and obe
dient people ! In the homes to which a victorious soldiery is
returning, many of them, too, shattered in health or maimed
for life ; and in the homes, alas ! to which none shall ever
return, — let the solemn resolve sink down, never to treat
lightly, never to abuse, never to neglect the heritage so
dearly bought.
Gentlemen of the Graduating Class, — If it were proper for
me to address any words to you directly, in close, I think the
subject of this discourse would furnish me with sufficient occa
sion. But the way in which it applies, especially to thinking
men, whose professional business it will be to think and teach,
is so obvious, that it can scarcely be necessary to dwell upon it
Radical, in the sense in which I have defined the word, you

must be. There is nothing so fatal in this vocation as to take
a stereotyped religion, and mechanically to preach it. It must
be the religion of a man's inmost life that he preaches, or he
had better preach nothing. There is a spiritual radicalism, if
I may so call it, which, as a habit of thought and feeling, is
the only defence against our greatest peril, — the spirit of
routine. I do not like to call that a defence, which is the
very life of religion in us. But so I am sure it is, that, if ever
the preacher finds reiteration threatening to bring dulness
into his religious themes, then he should pause, and settle
himself anew upon the very foundations of his deepest life ;
then, instead of rushing to meetings, or running after litur
gies, or betaking himself to books of devotion, or even to
prayers first, let him sink into the bosom of his own experi
ence ; let him resolve the matters of spiritual concernment,
the greatest or the least of them, in the depth of his soul; and
from thence will spring prayer and life and power, — eloquence
and joy and gladness in his work. And conservative also must
you be, if you are to be wise men, or safe and sound teachers
of the people ; conservative of the original principles of truth
in human nature ; conservative of the everlasting sanctities of
religion and virtue ; conservative of the spirit and law and
love of Jesus Christ ; conservative of all the institutions
and usages that support the welfare and prosperity of the
Republic and the Church.
To this field of thought and action, — of thought and action
so inspired and guarded, — I bid you, young gentlemen, hear
tily welcome. I welcome you to its studies and to its cares,
to its prayer and labor. I welcome you to the brotherhood
of Christian teachers, to the communion of the churches, to
the sacred and tender relations that await you as preachers and
pastors. I welcome you to the fulfillment of the ardent hopes
with which you have been studying these many years. May
they be more than fulfilled to you I And I trust they will be.
One who is about retiring from the work, and who, with what
ever short-comings, has found it the most intense and delight
ful employment of all his faculties, gives you this welcome
and greeting, and heartily bids you " God speed."
226 South Carolina, one of the United States. [Sept.
Art. V. — SOUTH CAROLINA, ONE OF THE UNITED

STATES.
1. Universal Suffrage, and Complete Equality in Citizenship, the Safe

guards of Democratic Institutions ; shown in Discourses by Henry
Ward Beecher, Andrew Johnson, and Wendell Phillips.
Boston : Press of Geo. C. Rand & Avery, 3, Cornhill. 1865.
2. Manifesto of the Citizens of Abbeville District, South Carolina,
June 21, 1865.
3. Address of the Citizens of Boston, assembled at Faneuil Hall, June
21, 1865.*
"What constitutes a State?" The answer to this query,

varying in different ages, is something of an index to the
character of political thought in each age. In antiquity, the
State was the city, t6A^. This term carried with it no notion
of territory outside the city limits, except it was subject ter
ritory. The essential idea underlying the institution is that
of political organization ; and this idea enters into our defini
tion of the State, as that portion of it which we have inherited
from the ancients. In the Middle Age the prominent concep
tion is that of sovereignty. The term was a new one, and it
follows that the thing designated by it was not an altogether
familiar one. The paramount authority of the baron, balanced
by the reciprocal tie of allegiance, was a different thing from
the brute force of an oriental despotism, or the "primus inter
"pares " of a Roman magistrate. Very soon the mediaeval
State becomes distinctly territorial ; it is identified with the
land over which its sway extends, and every tract, however
narrow, must form an integral part of some political organi
zation. These three essential ideas — organization, sover
eignty, and territory — together make up the inherited and
accepted definition of the State.
Our age is not yet satisfied, but searches further, and de-
* The writer of the present article has been, for the larger part of the last two
years, a resident of the South ; and his observations are dated from Charleston,
S.C.
1865.] South Carolina, one of the United States. 227
mands to know where the sovereignty belongs. Not to the

baron, is the answer, as in the Middle Age ; not to any ruler
by divine right, — but to the people. From this answer follows
an idea, which, more than almost any other, is significant of
the political tendencies of the present day. The people are
sovereign ; but who are the people ? In the stormy turmoil
of European political movements, there is one prevailing pur
pose clearly discerned. Everywhere we find an effort to
determine, by investigation into the origin of peoples, and
their character and associations, precisely how far the natural
limits of each State extend, and who they are that constitute
what may be called a political family. Communities arbitra
rily tied together by the ambition of rulers or the intrigues
of diplomacy, but at heart aliens to each other, are struggling
to free themselves from distasteful connections, and to follow
the laws of natural affinity, the promptings of natural, affec
tion. Therefore, to the great traditionary principle, that the
State is an organization, attached to a definite territory, and
endowed with a sovereignty which resides in its people, the
nineteenth century adds the requirement, that the " people "
shall themselves be a natural unit, homogeneous and distinct,
— that is, a nationality.
Nationality is, by the side of democracy, the governing po
litical thought of the nineteenth century. We see Holstein
annexed to Germany, and Savoy to France. Thessaly is de
manded for Greece, Rome and Venice for Italy. Pan-slavism
is groping in the dark for a national life. The kingdom
of Italy is nearly complete. Scandinavia and Germany are
both longing for unity. The independent confederation of
the Danubian principalities is one of the dreams of statesmen,
which events may soon hurry upon us. Nay, in our great
rebellion, the mad cry of the South was, " Are we not aliens ;
cavaliers and puritans, of different blood and different nature ?"
While the North calmly replied, " Are we not kindred ; of one
blood and one faith? Do not nature and necessity make us
one nation?"
States, like constitutions, must not be arbitrarily shaped out
of chance materials, but must have a vital principle of their
own ; and each community must have a sense of unity, of per

sonality, and of mature power. A city or a canton battling
from its birth with aggressive tyrannies or fierce rivals grows
into political manhood and political thought both at once, and
develops an appropriate organization by the time it becomes
maturely conscious of the need of one. This is accomplished
by the moulding of events. But our American method has
been to reverse this process, and hasten political organization
before there exists any social community prepared to receive
it. Narrow, almost uninhabited, strips, just conquered from the
wilds, are endowed with self-government, and welcomed into
our sisterhood of States, often with indecent haste, to gain
some political end. And, to-day, we are impatient to recon
struct the seceded States, before they have recovered from
the anarchy into which their own acts have brought them,
and before they understand their new relations. The inhab
itants of South Carolina do not at present form a people ; they
are a mass of individuals. Society there is disorganized. The
citizens must rally from the shock of war, and the ruin of their
fortunes ; they must become imbued with the spirit of the
national life, before they will be ready to form a true State.
And this will be best done under a temporary military rule.
We would not undervalue the influence of State action, of the
organization itself, in bringing about this result. As soon as
the times are ripe for it, civil institutions will be of the great
est service in developing a true State sentiment. But, at
present, delay seems to be the all-important principle. For
elements of reconstruction do not exist ; the materials are
heterogeneous and hostile.
In the first place, there are the genuine Unionists, few in
number among the whites, but of an intense and bitter loyalty.
The people of the North, in their safe homes, do not know
what an earnestness of conviction and strength of purpose it
demanded, to stand up against a despotism of public opinion,
of which they have seen no example, amid all the discourage
ments of the war. We call popular opinion tyrannical at the
North, sometimes, and we are apt to fancy it peculiar to de
mocracies; but members of the proudest houses in the haughty
aristocracy of Charleston qnailed and humbled themselves

before the peremptory commands of their order. And when
a little band has kept its faith through four such years, meet
ing in secret, and paying their homage to the loved flag at
the risk of their lives, can we wonder that they loath treason,
and would visit traitors with stern and swift retribution?
Citizens of Massachusetts have no right to feel one throb of
vindictive passion ; or, if any, it is only they who in their own
person, or that of some near friend, have suffered the tortures
of Belle Isle, Florence, or Andersonville. But a loyalist of
Tennessee or Missouri may be pardoned if he passes, in inten
sity of hatred, even beyond the bounds of just vengeance.
Of the blacks, who form a majority of the loyalists, we shall
speak below.
The second class is larger, and is daily increasing in num
bers.* It consists of those who, seeing that the rebellion has
* The rapidity of the change, and its satisfactory nature, may be shown by
a comparison of the following extracts from the papers. At a public meeting
held at Orangeburg, June 12, the following preamble and resolution were
adopted : —
" Whereas, it is held by the Government of the United States that the Ordi
nance of Secession, adopted by a Convention of the people of South Carolina, on
the 20th day of December, 1860, was and is null, void, and inoperative, and that
the Federal Union remained of full force, and unaffected save by actual resistance
to its authority ;
" And whereas, all such resistance on the part of the people of South Carolina
has now wholly ceased and been abandoned, and it would seem to follow, that
the State, still in the Federal Union, and offering no resistance to its authority,
need no longer be deprived of the benefits of Civil Government, so important to
the interests of the great body of her people. Therefore,
" Resolved, That, under the circumstances above set forth, a committee of
be appointed by the Chairman of this meeting to draft and report a petition to the
President of the United States, praying that the functions of Civil Government,
now suspended, may be permitted to be resumed in the State of South Caro
lina."
On the 3d of July, Mr. Orr (formerly member of Congress) spoke to the fol
lowing effect at Anderson : —
" That we had met for the purpose of taking our position as members of the
United States ; that we had pursued a course adverse to its Government, and had
found ourselves, by the fortunes of war and circumstances, to be necessitated to
be again subjected to its laws ; and our duty, as good citizens, was to bow and
acquiesce in the decree. That it should be no half-handed acquiescence, but that
we should now give the Government our full and hearty support; and, as citizens,
VOL. LZXIZ. — 5th 8. VOL. XVII. HO. II. 20
failed, tired of fighting, and convinced that further fighting

would be useless, take the oath of allegiance in good faith,
and without reservation ; not repenting perhaps of the past,
but perfectly sincere as to the future. These men will make
good citizens, and, at an earlier period than we are apt to
think, will be a majority of the citizens. The rapidity with
which, under the healthy influences of trade, free speech, free
labor, and intercourse with Northerners, they actually change
their views as to secession and slavery, and become loyal, not
merely in name and in act, but at heart, is most gratifying.
They acknowledge that slavery is at an end ; and most of them
say, frankly, that they are not sorry, and that both themselves
and the State will be no losers by it. If planters, they readily
and cheerfully make contracts with their former slaves, and
try honestly to live up to them.
There still remains a body of citizens who do not, and
never will, accept the new order of things in good faith.
They acknowledge that for the present the slaves are free
from their control, and enter into contracts with them,
because the military authorities require them to do so.
They take the oath with their lips, because they must do
this or starve, and will keep it as long as our troops remain
in their neighborhood. Indeed, to do them justice, there is
probably no disposition among them to make any further
resistance, and there would be no outbreaks, even if the troops
were withdrawn. But, as towards the freedmen, they cannot
be trusted. They make it no secret, that they expect Con
gress still to restore slavery, or at least make emancipation
gradual ; and meanwhile they submit reluctantly to what they
consider a temporary inconvenience, and give grudgingly just
so much as they have no power to refuse. So long as this class
of men form a majority of the qualified voters of the State, as
they have done until recently, and perhaps do still, there can
be no safety in restoring civil rule. But the conversions from
conform ourselves to the laws and regulations adopted for the government of the
people."
The Abbeville Manifesto, which we have placed at the head of our article, is
in the same temper and tone.
them are many and rapid. The intelligent citizens are very
fast awaking to a consciousness of the folly of rebellion ; and,
what is better still, they are beginning to see what a horrible
delusion they have been under all this while, and what a
brutal institution they have been cherishing. Within a very
few years we believe that there will be hardly any thinking
man in South Carolina, who will not be amazed and humiliated
to recollect the fatuity with which his State gloried in that
which was her chief shame. As for the purely selfish,
coarse, unintellectual class of planters, many of whom can
neither read nor write, and whose god is money, they will
never learn. The generation must die out, and give place
to a better.
There is neither sense nor justice, when we are speaking
of the people of a State, in utterly ignoring the majority of
its inhabitants, on the ground of a distinction which has
nothing to do with political capacity, but is the outgrowth
of the evil institution which has just been destroyed. This
seems self-evident. We are no believers in an inalienable
right of all men to the suffrage. Nobody has a right to it,
who does not know how to use it, and will not use it honestly ;
and we are as fixedly opposed to extending the elective
franchise at once to the mass of the negroes, as we are to
bestowing the same high privilege upon raw foreigners, or the
brutish hordes in the dens of our great cities. Our New-
England theory lays it down as the duty of the State to
establish such educational institutions as will qualify every
citizen to be a voter, and, as soon as he is qualified, to make
him one. But we should very much dread, in re-establishing
civil institutions in the Southern States, to see the ignorant
blacks, who would form a majority in some of them, endowed
thus with controlling power. To refuse to extend the suffrage
to them on the ground that they are black is an outrage upon
humanity and common sense ; to refuse it to such of them as
are ignorant — and to such whites, as well — is the simple
dictate of statesmanship and common prudence. There are
hundreds of colored men in every considerable town of the
South, and even scattered through the plantations, who are
232 South Carolina, one oj the United States. [Sept.
as well acquainted with political questions as the majority of

the whites ; and these ought by all means to be allowed to
vote. But most of the field hands have no political ideas at
all. If you put a ballot into their hands, it will not be they
that vote, — it will be some demagogue, who votes through
them.
We must own to no little amazement at the turn the dis
cussion upon this question has taken of late in the North.
We had supposed that there was no lesson this nation had
learned more surely, and at higher cost, than that the rale of
ignorant masses is ruinous. We had supposed, that, if there
was one thiDg upon which New England had made up its
mind, it was upon education as the only safeguard of demo
cracy. We had supposed it was proved, that the South had
ruled the nation by means of the ignorant districts of the
North, and only by these; and that it was the uprising of
the intelligent democracy of the North which overthrew
this oligarchy. We had supposed, that, when Massachu
setts excluded from the suffrage all who could not read
and write, she did it on principle, and with a definite pur
pose.
But it seems we were mistaken ; and it is deemed safer to
put political power into the hands of the ignorant negro of
Carolina and Georgia, than the ignorant Irishman of Massa
chusetts. We are told that immediate, unlimited, universal
suffrage is the only safe and consistent principle. Nay, so
eager are some of the advocates of this measure, that we
have even met with grave arguments to show, that, on the
whole, the uninstructed, unsophisticated masses make better
citizens than those more enlightened. Really, the eulogies
of ignorance which we meet with in some of the newspapers
are among the marvels of literature.*
We do not regard this as any thing more than a passing
furor. Perhaps by the time these pages are in print, the
* A correspondent of the " Commonwealth " writes, that " a man can be un
learned and moral at the same time, but he cannot be ignorant and moral." This
observation contains a profound truth. Now, the plantation negroes are, as a
rule, very ignorant and very immoral.
1865.] South Carolina, one ofthe United States. 233
popular mind will have returned to reason. Still, we think

it well to point out a few of the fallacies that beset the
subject.
It is not true in any broad sense, that the ballot educates.
Municipal self-government, such as exists in our New-England
towns, is the most perfect form of democracy, and the most
efficient of educating institutions. Democracy of this kind
elevates and instructs. But to put a ballot into a man's hand,
and tell him to drop it into a box, — this calls for neither
knowledge nor character on his part. The intelligent exer
cise of the elective franchise supposes a man to be already
educated. Voting — unless it is a mere farce, performed at
the dictate of some leader, as it is in all ignorant communities
— is the result of thought and discussion. In our town-
meetings we have this discussion : the people take part in it,
speak or listen, are instructed, and make up their minds upon
the question at issue ; the vote at the end merely records the
result to which they come. Where, on the other hand, there
is no such open debate, but all that the citizen is called upon
to do is to vote, there is no education except in the previous '
preparation, — in newspapers, speeches, and the other accom
paniments of a popular canvass. And, until a community is
already educated, the ballot is worse than useless, — it is like
an edged tool in a child's hand. The colored people need to
be educated before receiving the election franchise : first, by
schools; then, by genuine municipal institutions, — the most
essential, but the most difficult to provide. At some points
in the negro colonies, — as Mitchelville, Skiddaway, and Is
land No. 63, — these have already been established, with
gratifying results ; and we look upon the extension of them
as the most important thing that can be done for the advance
ment, not only of the colored race, but of democratic princi
ples and habits throughout the South.
Neither is it true that the ballot is a sure safeguard against
oppression, nor even that it will certainly act in that direction.
The ballot is a powerful weapon in the hands of one who
knows how to use it ; but an unskilful person is as likely to
20*
turn it to his own harm as his own good. It gave America

the beneficient rule of Abraham Lincoln ; it placed France
nnder the despotism of Louis Napoleon.* That pro-slavery
journal was not altogether unreasonable, which advocated
the suffrage for the blacks, on the ground that it would be the
surest means of keeping political power in the hands of their
old masters. As a rule, we feel no apprehension of this result ;
but there is no manner of doubt, that, in many cases, it would
work in this way. Cowardice always goes with ignorance ;
and, even granting that the negroes were always able to tell
who are their true friends, they are so easily persuaded and
intimidated that there would be great danger of their votes
being controlled by those nearest to them and most constantly
in contact with them. Moreover, in perhaps the majority of
instances, there has existed a real mutual attachment between
the slaves and their masters. One rarely hears the freedmen
complain of their former treatment ; and, on the other hand,
their life since they were freed has been such a hard one, —
bo full of disappointment, privation, and abuse, — that it would
not be strange if many of them sighed for the flesh-pots of
Egypt. It is certain that golden visions were held before
their eyes, which have never been realized; and that some
of them have experienced from the " Yankees " insults and
outrages wholly new to them.f It is only pro-slavery North
erners and " poor whites " who hate the negroes. Now, as
fast as they become enlightened, and learn to judge of
cause and effect in political matters, the freedmen will "be
* " The artisan class from 1840 to 1846 gave their effort to sustain the Corn
Laws ; the peasants also, if they had the vote, would probably use it against
themselves. To give voting-power to ignorant masses, accustomed to abject
obedience, is surely no polical panacea." — " English Institutions," by F. W. New
man", p. 12. It would almost seem as if Mr. Newman wrote these striking words
with reference to the great question now under debate in this country.
t The writer has talked with a freedman in Charleston, who inherited from his
master a house, and piece of land, with a considerable sum of money. He hap
pened to be visiting upon a plantation near Columbia, when General Sherman's
army passed through, and says that the " Yankee soldiers " hung him three
times to make him confess where the owner of the plantation had hidden his
silver, — which he did not know.
able to combine effectually for their own protection ; until

then, they are quite as likely to combine for their own destruc
tion, under the lead of their worst enemies. Do any of us
doubt that the combinations of the Irish voters in defence of
slavery have really stood in the way of their own best
interests ?
It is not true that the negro, if he receives the ballot, will
always vote right. Those who make this assertion forget that
there can ever be any question at issue but the present one.
Of course, if they were to vote to-day, they would vote for
Union and emancipation. But both these questions are
already decided, — they are never to come before them;
and it is a serious matter of doubt whether the negroes would,
as a general thing, vote right on all the questions that are to
come up within a twelvemonth. It is certain that ignorant
men, when they act in masses, do it under the lead of some
one who knows more than they themselves do; and it is
equally certain, that, as a general thing, they follow the lead
of demagogues rather than of statesmen. It is not perhaps
so well known, but it is no less true, that such demagogues
are already at work in the South, and that the minds of the
freedmen are already sadly bewildered as to the great social
questions that concern them. Probably half of the negroes
of South Carolina believe that the land rightfully belongs to
them ; some of them believe, that, having worked all their
lives for nothing, they are entitled to be supported in future ;
many believe, that they are the only loyalists in the South,
and that they are to be its rulers, to the exclusion of the
whites ; and nearly all, in making contracts for labor, would
be disposed to demand higher wages than any planter can
reasonably afford to pay. These notions have been put into
their heads by sentimentalists and demagogues, and they are
plausibly defended by reason of the element of truth that
there is in most of them : can it be doubted, if the negroes
had the right to vote, that they would elect to office men
who thus flatter and mislead them, in preference to those who
give them sober counsel?
It is not true, that, if we let this occasion slip, their chances
of obtaining the suffrage are gone for ever. We are not blind
to the importance of making use of the power which we now
have in our hands, before it escapes from us ; but we would
use it to gain a real advantage, not a measure so doubtful as
this. We would not willingly suffer the re-establishment of
civil authority, until the civil and political equality of the
races is secured. But even if we fail in this, and a prema
ture reconstruction takes place, we should not for that reason
despair of eventual success ; nor indeed should we deem it, on
the whole, an unwholesome discipline for the colored people
to be obliged to wait and struggle a while longer for their
full rights. But we believe that freedom, by its natural work
ings, will necessarily and speedily bring after it all that we
desire. It has already secured one inestimable right, — the
acknowledgment that negroes are American citizens ; and this
carries with it the right to testify in Federal courts. Already,
in Charleston, the testimony of colored persons has been re
ceived against United-States officers, much to the consterna
tion of the whites ; and what is permitted in national courts
cannot long be prevented in State courts. If the right to
vote in national elections were once granted, it would soon
be followed by the right to vote in State elections. So, too,
the organization of the militia is entirely in the hands of Con
gress ; and, at this day, the freedmen of South Carolina have
the same right to be enrolled in the militia that their masters
have. And, if it is urged that the disqualifications that ne
groes are under in certain Northern States are an indication of
what we might expect in the South, we will say that these dis
qualifications are simply the result of the political power of
the institution of slavery. With the destruction of the insti
tution, its power is gone ; and the whole train of abuses that
sprang out of it will speedily follow.
It is not true that an educational test will bear proportion
ally hard upon the colored people. The mass of the whites,
throughout the Southern States, are as ignorant as the blacks ;
and, at the present time, it is not the whites, but the blacks,
that are learning. By the time that civil institutions can be
established, — certainly as soon as they ought to be, — there
will be a sufficient number of colored people qualified for the

suffrage to make themselves felt as an element of power.
Indeed, for this purpose there are enough now ; for, be it
observed, it is not necessary for their protection that they
should form the preponderating power in the State, but only
that they should be numerous enough to take a position for
themselves, and demand respect. Once get the edge of the
wedge in, and the work is done. When it is seen that intel
ligence carries with it political power, these people will have a
direct incentive to self-culture, which, at present, does not
exist; and, if it is made impossible for the ruling class to
exclude any who are qualified, new applicants will throng in
year after year, until the vast majority of the colored people
— all who are good for any thing — will be endowed with the
suffrage.
' This leads us, indeed, to a consideration of great import
ance, but which is frequently overlooked in this connection.
It is trite enough to say, that no nation will ever be good for
much, which does not make itself; and that no possession will
do us much good, which we do not earn by hard labor. But
this is precisely what we are prone to forget in the case of
the colored people. They did not free themselves, — we freed
them. Except for the few colored regiments that have dis
tinguished themselves in battle, it is not too much to say, that
the popular mind — we do not say thinkers and philanthro
pists, but the common people — would never have believed
that the race deserved freedom. It had come to them, with
out any effort of their own, as the result of our fighting.
They had not earned it for themselves ; but their heroic
deeds proved that they could have earned it for themselves,
and all were satisfied. Now that they are free, comes the
further demand for political rights. Shall this, too, be con
ferred upon them as a boon, or shall we wait, and let them
earn it? In point of fact, they are too much disposed to ex
pect it as a matter of course, and to intermit their efforts for
self-culture. Adult schools among the freedmen are, as a
rule, failures. Some strong inducement, like the promise of
the suffrage, is needed to stimulate them to attend regularly
and study faithfully.* Let us say to them of the suffrage,

" This is yours, — but first you must earn it by industry, in
telligence, and morality."
This is no idle counsel. We cannot shut our eyes to the
fact that emancipation is still an experiment. We believe,
without any question, that it is to be a successful experiment;
but, strong as our faith may be, the world is not yet con
vinced, nor is it right that it should be. It cannot take it on
trust, that these half-civilized people will, all of a sudden, be
come good citizens, — still less, intelligent voters. It is due
to the white citizens of the South, it is due to the cause of
free institutions all over the world, most of all it is due to the
colored people themselves, that they should not be intrusted
with a mighty power until they have shown themselves fit for
it. We, democrats, do not claim that democracy is good for
all people, — Esquimaux and Hottentots as well as Anglo-
Saxons. And it is a serious reflection, that, if the power is
once conferred, it can with difficulty be taken away, however
scandalously it may be abused.
A chief source of fallacious reasoning upon both sides of
this subject is an ambiguity that exists in the word equality.
The advocate of slavery asks, " Is the negro equal to the
white man ? " And we answer, " We do not know nor care.
That is a matter of fact, to be decided only by a comparison
of individuals. All we claim is, that he is a man, and is thus
entitled to equality before human law." — "But," he asks
again, " will you marry a negro?" — " That," we reply, " has
nothing to do with the question. Equality may be social,
civil, or political. With social equality the law has nothing
to do ; that will be determined by events. Civil and politi
cal equality, on the other hand, are the common right of all
men." — " Then," interrupts the champion of universal suf
frage, " if all men are politically equal, you have no right to
deny to any the elective franchise." Neither do we. We
would simply require that every one should make himself com
* The writer made an attempt, in Charleston, to instruct a class of adults in the
simple principles of the American government. They began well, but the exper
iment soon fell through from a lack of persistent interest on their part.
petent. A man disqualifies himself by crime ; why not by

ignorance ? It is only civil rights to which we can lay claim as
a matter of course, and by virtue of humanity. It is in these
that freedom really consists : it is the possession of these that
makes a man or a woman a citizen. If any person is forbid
den to hold property, to marry, to testify in court, to bring a
suit, — that person is not free. All these rights are essential
ones. But political fights are necessary only as a guaranty
and safeguard for these. They are not mere individual rights,
like these, but invest the holder of them with power over the
lives and fortunes of his fellow-citizens. We know what has
always resulted, in times past, from power placed in the
hands of ignorant and vicious masses ; and we have no desire
to see the experiment tried anew in any section of our
Union.
What we must secure is, that the newly acquired freedom
of the colored people shall not be endangered by unfriendly
legislation, as has lately been the case in Tennessee. To
insure this, we would not lay special stress upon the ballot,
even for the most intelligent among them, but would make
every effort to carry an amendment to the Constitution, for
bidding any discrimination on account of race or color. The
true principle is not " negro suffrage," but equality of race.
If it is not thought advisable to wait for an amendment of the
Constitution, we hold that Congress has a right to require this
of the rebel States, as a condition of their resuming their
places in the Union. Or we could wish that President John
son had thought himself warranted in declaring that all intel
ligent citizens, of whatever color, should be entitled to take
part in the reconstruction. But it certainly would have been
a much more arbitrary exercise of power on his part, thus to
widen the basis of suffrage, than it was to exclude the noto
riously disloyal from the polls. As Republicans, we should
be slow to censure him for abstaining from an act which was
wholly outside of his legitimate authority, and which would
indeed have been strictly a usurpation of the highest functions
of sovereignty. However brought about, this equality before
he law is the indispensable condition of any permanent ar
rangement. The suffrage can be established afterwards, on a

just and satisfactory basis, upon this principle.
A chief reason for preferring an amendment of the Consti
tution to either of the other methods is, that we should thus
secure a principle which would be of equal force in all parts
of the Union, — in Illinois and Connecticut, as well as in Ala
bama and Florida. We should clear our own skirts first of
all complicity with this wrong. There would be complaint at
the South, and with much justice, if a rule were imposed
upon them which was not also observed at the North. This
alteration of the Constitution, or one which should either lay
down a rule of suffrage in national elections, or give Congress
the power to establish such a rule, would be manifestly just
and proper, and would, we believe, recommend itself as such
to the good sense of the Southern people ; while a law made
to apply to them alone would naturally be regarded by them
as intrusive and oppressive. If the safety of the nation
should demand it, let all such considerations give way. But
believing, as we do, that very much depends upon gaining the
good-will and co-operation of all classes at the South, we are
in favor of a broad and generous principle which could be
made acceptable to them, rather than of a special rule which
would cover the ground only of the present emergency. We
should, moreover, be careful to maintain the true principles
of our political system. Now that we have put down the
heresy of State supremacy, we are in danger of running into
the opposite extreme of centralization. Let us never forget,
that the doctrine of " State Rights," correctly understood,
is simply a development of the democratic idea.
There is an argument, advanced by many persons, to the
effect, that all men, as men, have an inborn right to take
part in the organization of any new government (such as
it is claimed that these are), whatever be the rights ac
corded to them in the administration of the government when
in regular operation under its Constitution. If this argument
is rendered complete by being made to include women, who
have precisely the same natural rights as men, and who are
citizens as well as men, we will listen to it. At present it has
no logical value.
In thus taking ground against what appears to be a favorite

measure of the North, we are far from shutting our eyes to
the dangers that menace us on the restoration of these States
to their political rights. It is not that we overlook the peril,
but that we do not believe that the measure proposed would
prove a protection. It is a departure from well-established
principles of government, for the sake of obtaining a doubtful
and temporary good.
Wise and cautious statesmanship, and a firm adherence to
true principles, are required to conduct the State safely
through these critical times, — not the crude, tumultuous bal
loting of plantation negroes. The one self-evident principle
should seem to be this, — that no reconstruction can be genu
ine and successful, until the inhabitants of the State form, so
to speak, a community; until, as Governor Andrew says, " the
loyal sentiment has time to concentrate." And we see no
reason for being seriously apprehensive upon the subject.
President Johnson has shown that he understands the problem
before him ; he has given us good reason to feel confidence in
the uprightness of his intentions towards the freedmen ; he
has not yet suffered the reins of government to slip out of his
hands, nor do we believe that he intends to lose them. Sup
posing that it were entirely safe and practicable to re-establish
civil government at once in these States, it would be the
grandest triumph we have yet achieved, and the completest
justification of our course in suppressing the rebellion ; and
no person at the North but will rejoice when genuine self-
government shall exist throughout the South. It is well that
it should go widely forth as the sentiment and will of the
American people, that all races shall be equal before the law.
It is not well, however, neither is it the sentiment of our
people, that ignorance is as good a foundation for political
institutions as intelligence.
A measure less persistently urged at present than indis
criminate negro suffrage, but still a favorite in many quarters,
is confiscation. Confiscation failed signally as an engine of
war ; it will fail as surely, and no less signally, as a means of
peace. If the mere threat of it excited those against whom it
VOL. LXZIX. — 6TH 9. VOL. XVII. HO. II. 21
was aimed to more powerful and desperate measures, to carry

it actually into effect would drive them into perpetual hostility.
These people, whether we like it or not, are to be citizens of
this State, — perhaps disfranchised, but still citizens. They
are an element in its future population. If ever we are to
have peace, order, and prosperity within its borders, such a
policy must be pursued as will gradually revive among them
the long-vanished sentiment of loyalty and love for their whole
country. Unless this is accomplished within a reasonable pe
riod, we have failed ; and, instead of a harmonious Republic,
bequeath to our children a hotrbed of discord. We do not
sympathize with that intolerant spirit which confounds firm
ness with severity, gloats over the distress of the Southern
people, and insists upon the extremest penalties of the letter
of the law* We may recognize in this distress and ruin which
have come upon a whole community, the slow but sure retri
bution which visits a career of crime. But enough punish
ment has been inflicted already ; and we would not by a word
add unnecessarily to the weight of adversity which crushes
the people of the South. A policy which metes out strict
justice to whites and blacks, yet tempers that justice with
mercy, and tries to smooth the ungrateful path back to alle
giance, will surely be rewarded by a speedier and completer
restoration of harmony.
Another thing we should remember, — that they have suf
fered wrongs and indignities which should bring a blush to
the cheek of every honest man. If a South Carolinian ever
speaks with bitterness, it is not because his State has been
brought to subjection after a long contest, or his lands confis
cated for treason. That was the fortune of war, and he knew
it. It was the fortune of war too, that when our army occu
pied a town, it seized whatever was needed for its support.
Nobody complains of this. But it is very different, when he
tells you of the squad of soldiers that drove up to his house,
and carted away his furniture ; of the gentlemen who picked
out the choicest books from his library ; of his watch rudely
demanded from him ; the rings torn from his wife's fingers ;
articles from his daughter's wardrobe carried off in a soldier's
knapsack ; his parlor ornaments wantonly smashed to pieces ;

his house burnt because he declined to take the oath. No
doubt our military commanders have, as a rule, intended to
govern justly and humanely ; and it is a fact, that, as soon as
military government was fairly organized, these outrages,
as well as the abuse of the negroes, ceased for the most part :
but the intervening time, whether through weakness or indif
ference, was crowded with deeds the recital of which will be
a lasting disgrace to our history. And, we must own, even
since the establishment of regular military government, the
seizures of cotton and of furniture, and the thousand petty
exactions of officers " dressed with a little brief authority,"
have exasperated and alienated men who were inclined to be
well disposed, and make one almost long for a civil govern
ment, even at the risk of peace. A rare opportunity to win
over a subjugated people by a temperate, just, and firm admin
istration ; by counselling and fostering a spirit of harmony
between the different races and classes of the community ; and
by showing in our conduct that we did not forget that the
situation might have been reversed, — was scornfully thrown
away ; and now months must do what weeks might have
done.
We must remember, too, that they do not yet see that they
have committed a crime. They are not yet convinced that
either slavery or secession was wrong. They were as sincere
in their faith as we in ours. They have been taught these
heresies as unquestioned articles of faith. The sophistries
by which they are defended have formed a part of the educa
tion of every young man, and are commonplaces throughout
the community. Loyalty to the nation hardly existed in
South Carolina. For her there was no nation, — or none but
herself. And if, blinded with this fanaticism, puffed up with
arrogance, vindictively and passionately, they have brought
destruction upon themselves and almost upon us, we should
not rudely repulse them when, weary of fighting, they come
to us saying that, whether they have been right or wrong,
they wish now, at any rate, to live in peace under the terms
that we impose. Hedge political privilege about with aa
many guarantees as need be ; disqualify from political power

for as long a time as need be, — this may be necessary for our
security ; but let it end here.
We speak thus strongly, because we are mortified at the
revengeful spirit manifested in the North since the close of
the war ; all the more humiliating because there was so little
of it before. It is not merely to promote good feeling, that
we urge a lenient and conciliatory policy in civil matters
towards the South, but because we are convinced that there
is an element here which will eventually be of real value in
the State. When we say that these men have the faults of an
aristocracy, we must not forget that they have its virtues
also. There is excellent material here, — vigor, manliness,
ability, self-respect, and culture. No State has had a larger
number of statesmen of national reputation than South Caro
lina. It is the only State in the South, that has produced a
literature ; a literature in its infancy, to be sure, bearing too
distinctly the marks of conscious effort, as if they said to them
selves that a literature was a good thing to have, and there
fore they would have one, — still a literature not to be
despised. In one branch, indeed, — political science, — it is
not surpassed in ability by any section of the country. South
Carolina produced an original school of political writers, and
an original system of political thought. It was a false system,
as we believe, unchristian and sophistical ; but daring, and
very able. It boldly took up arms against the spirit of the
age, declared that South Carolina alone, in all the world, had
founded her institutions on a true principle, and defied the
world to battle on the issue. It was this political literature, —
Calhoun, and his eloquent, enthusiastic, and conscientious
followers, — that plunged the nation into a war which was
strictly a contest between these ideas and those of the no less
eloquent, enthusiastic, and conscientious school of political
thought in Massachusetts. Nor must it be imagined, that the
philosophy of these men was all wrong. Some of the most
valuable contributions to political science have been made by
Mr. Calhoun and his disciples.
As to other branches of literature, it could not be expected,
where all independent thought upon the most important sub

jects was forbidden, that real originality should exist. When
the community set itself against the spirit of the age in one
thing, it was not likely it would be with the age in others.
Its culture was very genial and elegant, but rather founded
upon admiration for the past, than appreciation of the present.
The great lights of former ages it knew and reverenced : the
present age it knew and cared very little about. As a con
sequence, the world out of South Carolina cared very little
for it. When Mr. Simms published a novel, or Mr. Grayson,
Mr. Hayne, or Mr. Timrod a volume of poems, we knew before
hand, that they said nothing that would help us in the great,
earnest questions that were working in our minds, and we
passed them carelessly by. We use the past tense here, be
cause the thing is of the past. This genial, cultivated, hospi
table aristocracy, is gone for ever, — it is a solemn fact, and
of vital moment, — swept out of existence because it was
based on injustice. Three years ago,* we declared that on
this depended the future welfare of the South ; and now it
has come to pass. In its place we are to have democracy,
with its characteristic faults and virtues ; but, let us hope,
with some of the fine materials of the old structure built into
the new.
The character of these materials, as elements in the future,
has been well tested. These men who come back from Lee's
and Johnston's armies to find their homes desolated, and star
vation staring them in the face, and who turn their hands at
once to the hoe, the axe, the pen, or whatever else will gain
them bread ; these proud ladies, who are prouder than ever
to wear homespun, and eat corn pone, and abstain from tea,
sweeping their own rooms, and washing their own clothes ;
these girls, nurtured in luxury, but now reduced to teach col
ored schools, or take in sewing, — privations cheerfully and
gaily borne, — all these are having in this an education which
they needed, and from which, we have faith to believe, they
will not be slow to profit.
* Christian Examiner, November, 1862.

21*
246 South Carolina, one of the United Suites. [Sept.
It is the young people that we hope most from. They have

adapted themselves to their chauged circumstances in a spirit
that deserves all praise, and gives great encouragement
for the future. As to their parents, the change is harder for
them. And even if they acquiesced as readily as we might
desire, their old habits and associations will stand in the way of
their being very active in the work of re-organization. A dis
tinguishing characteristic of Southern society is an incapacity
for co-operative energy, or lack of what we call public spirit.
De Tocqueville's analysis of the functions of Association under
a democracy is familiar. In an aristocratic State, like South
Carolina, this was almost entirely wanting. The oligarchy
acted as a unit, under the influence of class feelings, and in
the interest of their class : the rest of the inhabitants did not
act at all, — except to vote as they were told. Therefore,
while individuality, in matters not political, was well devel
oped, public spirit did not exist. A painful illustration of this
is to be found in the utter helplessness of the Charleston peo
ple at the present day, in the presence of the appalling mass
of poverty suddenly come into existence there. They have
never been in the habit of bestowing any extensive or sys
tematic relief upon the poor (they had, to be sure, a theory
that under slavery there was no poor class) ; and now that a
great work is before them, they find themselves unable to
manage it.
Another obstacle to a satisfactory solution of the problem
is the absence of municipal organizations co-extensive with
the territory. The resemblance, which has been so often
traced, of the Southern institutions to the feudal system, is
especially true in this respect. Only the towns — and these
at very distant intervals from one another — possess muni
cipal self-government. The chief part of the territory is
simply governed at will by independent " barons," under the
general superintendence of the State. Southern statisticians
boasted of the freedom of their section from crimes. Of
course, — because every planter had the powers of a magistrate
as towards his slaves ; his court — not a court of record —
taking cognizance of all common offences, without appeal:
none of these appear in the statistics. Now, the relation

between master and slave being once destroyed, and this
jurisdiction necessarily falling with it, there is nothing to
take its place. If all national and State authority were over
thrown in Massachusetts, the town governments would still
subsist, and would maintain order throughout her borders.
But when the Confederate Government perished, and the
authority of Governor Magrath was pronounced null, nothing
but anarchy could exist, until the United-States forces ap
peared to take the place of authority which had ceased.
The two things that the South most needs, therefore, — next
to loyalty and education, — are habits of association, and muni
cipal governments. The first of these will, no doubt, be soon
developed in the new order of society ; for the second, we
must wait. Some system of municipal democracy, commen
surate with the territory of the State, is imperatively needed,
for the sake of tranquillity, and for the education of the masses
in political knowledge, as well as for the efficient administra
tion of local affairs. We have no doubt that the need will
produce the thing. Under the Southern system heretofore,
any such institution would have been useless, for the want
of citizens to put it in operation. But now that thousands of
colored men are citizens, and soon to be voters ; now that
emigrants from the North and from Europe are about to flock
in ; now that freedom, trade, and internal improvements are
to produce a more compact population, and towns are to
spring up, with trade to supply wants that have never existed
until now, — we need not fear, when this new life is working
throughout the South, but that some form of local democracy
will be developed, adapted to meet its peculiar wants.
On this point, we desire to make a suggestion which we
think of importance. We have denied above, that the ballot
is an educating power. Municipal institutions, on the other
hand, when actually administered by the citizens themselves,
as in the New-England towns, and not left to elected officers,
as in chartered city governments, are the most powerful
means of education that we possess. As applied to these,
the argument that the possession of the elective franchise
will educate the voter in practical politics is perfectly sound.

In genuine municipalities, democratically conducted, we are
in favor of a suffrage as universal as is practicable. What
little inconveniences may result from this in practice will be
more than balanced by the degree in which it will work for
the elevation of the masses.
The question is often asked, whether the negro will work
without the constraint of slavery ; and, as it is asked in good
faith, it deserves a respectful answer.
In the first place, the Africans differ from most barbarian
races in this ; that, when stolen from their homes, and put
upon a plantation, they are, as a rule, faithful, industrious and
well-behaved laborers. The Indian would die under this
treatment: the negro quickly accommodates himself to it.
In the next place, now that they are freed, they all expect
to work. For a short time, as has been often remarked, they
fancy they are to live without labor ; but this delusion very
speedily passes away under the pressure of necessity. They
will not work for certain people, nor in certain ways. They
do not know how to work like freemen ; but according to their
own standard, — that to which they have become accustomed in
slavery, — they do work, and work well. Towards no class of
people is it more unjust to apply our standard of performance
instead of their own. It is disingenuous on the part of their
enemies ; and for us who wish them well, and hope much from
them, we shall surely be disappointed if we expect them —
for the present at least — to do the work of Northern farmers.
It is all we have a right to expect, if this generation becomes
self-supporting. If they do this, and are thus no burden to
society, it is nobody's business but their own, whether they
do more or not. There must, at any rate, be one of two
inducements to labor. They are not used to acting with
reference to a distant and uncertain reward ; and, if they are
employed to cultivate the crops of others, the terms of wages
and times of payment must be so arranged as to bring it home
distinctly to their minds, that, the harder they work, the larger
will be their recompense. If this is done, working for wages
is probably the most' advantageous arrangement for them at
present ; for their modes of labor are so slovenly and unskilful

that they really need a white man of the right sort to super
intend and direct their operations. Inasmuch, however, as
such white men are rare, and there is real danger of fraud
and abuse, probably the true policy is to encourage them
to acquire small freeholds as rapidly as possible, and trust to
circumstances to give them the industrial education they
so much need. We would not have these freeholds given to
them outright. Let them earn them, and pay for them at a
fair price. Their manhood requires that they should owe
their possessions to their own exertions ; and there will be
land enough in the market before long, and at low enough
rates.
For the planting interest through the State has received a
shock from which it can never recover. The planters have
always, as a class, lived beyond their means. Their habits of
living have been extravagant, their management unsystematic
and wasteful. As a rule, they have spent their income before
they have received it, drawing upon their factors freely for
all the money they wanted, on the faith of their next crop,
and never making a square settlement of accounts ; the factor
knowing, of course, that his advances were secured by the
land and slaves. To such a class as this, four years' suspen
sion of the crop, four years of expenses balanced by no in
come, are utter ruin. And even those who kept their heads
above water, and were growing rich — as indeed nearly all
were in name, by the increase of their negroes — are hardly
better off than the others at present ; for their accumulated
wealth either consisted in slaves, or was invested in the Con
federate loan, — both kinds of property utterly worthless now.
It would seem, therefore, certain that the lands in the South
will very extensively change hands. Those best off will have
to sell half their estates, in order to obtain the means to carry
on the remainder.
It is important for the future welfare of the State, that, in
this sweeping transfer of landed property, a system of farms
should take the place of the plantation system. Already this
change has taken place in some degree in the upper districts
of the State. The cultivation of cotton, except in small quan

tities for home use, having been forbidden by the Confederate
Government, the result has been, that the owners of small
plantations have found themselves living so much more com
fortably and independently than ever before, growing their
own food, and wearing their own homespun, that they do not
care to go back to the old method of producing only for sale,
and buying all their necessaries. Of course, the home manu
facture of cloth will soon be superseded by the cheaper pro
duction of large establishments. But, in future, it is likely
that cotton will be only one among the crops of the farmer, —
the crop to which he will look for his ready money; while
he will depend upon his farm for his corn, potatoes, bacon and
fruit.
To the small farmer these upper districts of South Carolina
offer an inviting field. Nearly all the crops and fruits of the
North can be grown there to good advantage. By the side
of wheat, corn and potatoes, he has his fields of cotton, upland
rice, and sweet potatoes : in addition to apples, peaches and
plums, there are figs and pomegranates ; and no portion of the
country is, we believe, finer for grapes. The air is healthy
and invigorating, and one suffers hardly more from heat than
at the North. And, if a few weeks at midsummer are too in
tensely hot for continuous labor, there is no part of the winter
in which work need be suspended. A man can spend as
many days of the year in hard labor in South Carolina as in
Massachusetts.
In the low country, as it is called, it is different. In time,
perhaps, the miasmatic swamps of this section will be drained,
and the country rendered healthy; but, for the present, it
would seem as if there were only two alternatives, — large
plantations, and small negro freeholds. Probably both of these
will exist side by side, as certainly seems preferable, and
there are some localities in which white farmers, even from
the North, can cultivate long-staple cotton with their own
hands. With respect to the other great staple, rice, the fore
bodings of the South Carolinians are most gloomy. No white
man can live, they say, on the rice plantations ; but the sys
1865.] South Carolina, one o/the United States. 251
tem of cultivation is so scientific, and necessarily conducted

on so large a scale, that the large plantations must be kept
up, or the crop will fail. At the same time, the labor is so
hard and disagreeable, that the colored people, the only per
sons who can live upon them, will refuse to remain. These
are the reasons alleged ; and time only can show how far they
are correct. For ourselves, we have entire faith in compe
tition, as the great influence which is to make men out of the
slaves ; and we have no doubt that high wages will always
command labor enough. The staple is too valuable : a monop
oly of the best rice in the market is a source of wealth not
to be lightly thrown away.
Through much toil and suffering, through the most fearful
ravages of war, and the wholesale impoverishment of her citi
zens, with diminished population, diminished wealth, and in the
humiliation of an insufferable pride, South Carolina commences
her new career as one of the United States. She has learned
a bitter lesson. She has been forced to recant her favorite
doctrine of State Eights, to surrender her favorite institution
of slavery, and to return to the sisterhood that she once
spurned. We believe she will take the lesson to heart, and
will act in good faith ; so that a heartier Union than has ever
existed heretofore will spring out of these dissensions. If
there was any one sentiment that at first spurred her on to
war, it was contempt for the Yankees. That is all over now,
— forgotten in a gallant contest of four years ; and a friendly
intercourse is going on such as has never taken place before.
We have great faith in the healing power of Time, and look
to see this intercourse continue and increase, until we have
once again the cordial feeling that existed when South Caro
lina gave her vote for John Adams, and Massachusetts hers
for Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.
252 Horace Mann and. Antioch College. [Sept.
Art. VI. — HORACE MANN AND ANTIOCH COLLEGE.
There is a certain timeliness in the publication of the memoir

Mrs. Mann has recently given to the world. War gives place
to the works of peace : Massachusetts plants the statue of the
educator in front of her State House ; and a circular from
the West announces the re-animation of that institution Mr.
Mann gave his life to establish.
The stirring pages of the book itself must impress upon all
readers the rapidity with which our history is making, and
the dependence of that history on the work done by schools
and churches among the common people, especially at the
West. When we read to-day those letters from Washington,
written fifteen years ago, full of the Wilmot Proviso, the 7th
of March Speech, the Fugitive-slave Bill, and they bring
back to our spirits that cloud' of apprehension so oppressive
then, we lift our eyes with a sort of incredulous joy to see
half a million emancipators marching home from the South,
the light of victory striking along the glad faces they turn
northward, their banners, as they pass through Washington,
saluting the statue of Liberty that crowns the dome of the
Capitol.
Mr. Mann indeed foresaw the strife. He wrote, " I think
part of the South will rebel : " and again, " Dark clouds over
hang the future ; and that is not all, they are full of lightning."
But did he foresee such a strife and such a victory ? Could
he, with all his faith in man, have believed that, where he
was then defending Drayton and Sayres, we should to-day
have our Freedmen's Bureau, and be debating the question of
the freedman's ballot ? As we look back and around, we may
well perceive, that the web of history does not lose its bril
liancy as time unrolls it, but that life is to-day so condensed
and rapid as to blunt all the sensibilities that perceive it ; and
that, as Mr. Mann said then, " We are yet too near to take a
view of the Olympian vastness of these events."
1865.] Horace Mann and Antioch College. 253
But no reader can fail to see, that, though he was so pain

fully alive to every movement at Washington, he yet felt the
true contest and arena to be in the homes of the people, in the
States and Territories themselves. He saw the fact, so prom
inent for four years past, that our national officers are not
rulers but servants, following, rather than leading, the public
sentiment ; President and Congress being but the executive
arm and vocal tongue of the great popular sensorium lying
behind them both. Prohibitory clauses in the new constitu
tions of Oregon and California ; antislavery tracts sent out to
New Mexico, and printed both in English and Spanish (see
Life, p. 294), — were better than any words or efforts in Wash
ington ; and all his life in Congress but confirmed his judg
ment as to the importance of that educational work from which
he came, and to which he returned. He saw, — it was patent
in those days to eyes less penetrating than his, — that, if a
good man in the capital could mould public sentiment for
good, a bad man, an ambitious man, could mould it for evil ;
he felt that we must rest, not on the precarious virtue of
leaders in Washington, — where we have many Pierces and
Buchanans to one Lincoln, — but on the aggregate virtue
and good sense of the home-keeping millions, — the true rulers
in the Republic.
With that frankness which makes the book so charming,
Mrs. Mann has told us (p. 403) of the deep emotion with
which he severed his relations with New England, on turning
his face toward the West. He was indeed leaving " the scenes
not only of honest triumph, but of much wounded feeling."
He was turning away with a great hope, but also with a cer
tain disappointment in his heart. The most sensitive public
man of his time, so conscious of the hallowed nature of his
own purposes that he felt personal defeat to be the defeat of
righteousness, any failure was to him far more bitter than
death. But when was defeat itself so consecrated as when he
turned from one scene of conflict to another, — from the field
to the arena, from disappointment to martyrdom ?
When Mr. Mann went to Ohio, in 1853, he hoped to plant a
great Normal School there in the heart of the country. Ohio
vol. lxxix. — 5tii 8. VOL. XVII. NO. II. 22
254 Horace Mann, and Antioch College. [Sept.
had risen, in fifty years, to be the third in population of the

federate sisterhood. Illinois, which now stands next to her,
if indeed she have not already crowded her out of her place,
was then the eighth State below ; for that was twelve years
ago, and twelve years do the work of a full generation in the
West. That midland was just then entering on its period of
most astounding development. California's gold had begun
to stimulate all internal improvements. Railroads were every
where knitting their prolific iron net ; and the farms, finding
an outlet for the wealth that gorged them, were opening their
incredible stores. Nothing better evinces the growth of that
region, than its addition of transportation facilities during the
decade then begun. Ohio had then but five hundred miles of
railway, where she has three thousand now ; Indiana had but
two hundred, where she now has two thousand ; Illinois had
a hundred and ten, where she has three thousand to-day ; and
there was then but one line of communication between the
great lakes and the great rivers, where now those lines strike
the Ohio in eight places, and the Mississippi in ten.
Though the census of 1860 had not then made its astonish
ing revelations as to that garden-land lying about the junction
of the great rivers, and nobody knew how rapidly the seat of
empire was shifting itself into those valleys, Mr. Mann saw
what a power would be wielded by him who could make any
impress on that nascent civilization. His zeal did not need the
announcement of the census, that those States trebled their
taxable wealth, and added sixty per cent to their population,
in ten years. He felt, that, for the well-being of mankind, the
power developing there must be consecrated ; and he would
have appreciated Mr. Roebuck's frank confession to his con
stituents.
In his letters to Mr. Fay (Life, pp. 365-370), he mentions
the unsectarian character of the college, and the admission of
women to all its privileges, as the features which drew him
to this particular institution. There was no occasion for his
avowing the fact, that he hoped to make the college embody
his own spirit; to make it, not only the teacher of the teach
ers, so correcting that ignorance in the West which many
ridiculed but few strove to enlighten, but also the home, not
so much of science as of virtue, of exemplary life, and the
fortress of a cheerful and untrammelled faith.
The lecture-room had brought him face to face with the
best elements of the Western masses ; face to face also with
the fact that here were thousands hungering for the speech of
men whom, almost everywhere in our country, church and
school put under ban, — men like Emerson, Parker, Chapin,
King, and Mr. Mann himself, who would not be permitted to
hold a professorship in any Western college, and who had no
means but the lecture-desk of coming in personal contact with
the people. What was true then is true now. Colleges there
are indeed in the West, — Ohio has some thirty of them, —
with endowments adequate to their opportunity. But their
general educational function is subordinated to some sectarian
use. They are the engines of an advancing civilization only
as its wheels grind in Presbyterian or Baptist ruts. And they
are stunted and malformed by a species of denominational
breeding in-and-in. Originating amidst a comparatively illit
erate ministry, the stream cannot rise higher than its source.
The project is inaugurated, the funds raised, by ministers who
illustrate, as well as feel, the popular need of education, but
who themselves must furnish forth the Board of Instruction.
One, less ignorant or more influential than the rest, is dubbed
D.D., and set up as president of the new " University; " and,
thereafter, the grade of the school is fixed. The people, in
all honesty, believe these men the finest scholars on the Con
tinent, — for have they not their own word for it? and any
proposals for improvement are regarded as in very bad taste,
being virtually open or covert assaults on these eminent
men, the fathers of the denomination.
No one can have lived in the West without witnessing the
process here described. New-England schoolboys could not
credit the ignorance of some eminent ecclesiastics and college
officers there ; an ignorance not merely as to language, making
them literally unable to read a page of any tongue other than
English, but as to the simplest facts of natural science, and
best known events or characters of history. The writer met,
256 Horace Mann and Antioch College. [Sept.
within a year, a most estimable bishop, who for forty years

has been doing an apostle's work just south of the Ohio, who
asked, in all simplicity, how geologists know that the world
is more than six thousand years old, — and asked again, when
General Wadsworth's then recent death was mentioned, " Was
that the poet Wordsworth, sir?"
Of course it is the praise of these men that, despite their
limitations, they have made themselves ministers of life to
that people. The labors of such as these have christianized
those semi-barbarous communities, and prepared the way for
the coming civilization. But their field was the camp-meet
ing, not the college ; and, as they begin their regenerating
work there by bringing the sinner " under conviction of sin,"
they need now the presence of true culture and scholarship
to beget, in these many colleges, the conviction of ignorance.
The professors at Harvard College teach not only there,
but in every college and High School in New England as well,
stimulating all by the high standard of Cambridge. But, in
the West, there is a fatal disparity between the grade of the
colleges and that of the public schools. The schools being
free, while the colleges are sectarian, they take rank much
more nearly with kindred institutions here, and find them
selves kept down by the colleges, rather than lifted up. It
is impossible that the High Schools in all these rapidly multi
plying cities should import their teachers from New England,
and equally impossible for them to be supplied from Western
colleges without being degraded. Hence, as Mr. Mann had
furnished, in his Massachusetts work, ideas and examples for
all the common schools in our country, he needed to do a
similar service for the Western colleges, that the schools
might do their work unhindered.
He had thus a multiform purpose and a manifold influence
there. And he exiled himself to the West with the hope of
planting there in the heart of the country, hard by the foun
tains of future political power, an institution which should
not only accord to woman her right to an equal share in the
world's educational beneficence, but should welcome those of
every faith and color ; should work as the instrument, not of a
sect, but of a civilization ; should send out from its prepara

tory department teachers trained as the Normal Schools of
Massachusetts train them ; should maintain, in the college
proper, a standard of scholarship then unknown at the West;
and, more than all, should watch with all its eyes, and mould
with all its influences, the moral life of its pupils, — making
virtue no subordinate thing, but the one central object of the
teacher's endeavor ; thus showing an example seen nowhere
else on earth. This was the great characteristic of Antioch
College. Horace Mann would not increase the intellectual
power of an immoral youth. It seemed to him like arming
a madman. He required a quick conscience, a consecrated
will, from every pupil of his charge. He tolerated neither
vice nor moral indifference. And he felt it far more his duty
to labor and watch for a pupil's moral development than to
educe mental power, or bestow scholarly accomplishment.
The college took indeed a foremost place in scholarship in
the West. Taking thither New-England teachers, methods,
and standards, testing every step by severe written examina
tions, it maintained, under both its presidents, a grade sur
prisingly high. The want of previous training kept most of
its students in the preparatory department ; but the ripe age
and mental maturity of those who entered college, enabled
them to make attainments in many branches beyond those
reached by the younger pupils of Eastern institutions. This
maturity of judgment and character is evinced by that extract
from one of the Commencement parts, given at page 454 of the
Life ; as well as by a paper from the same pen, and by another
written by one of the lady pupils, published at New Haven,
in the " University Quarterly " for January and April, 1860.
But all that was subordinate, in Mr. Mann's thought, to the
vital phenomena, the moral purpose and aspiration of his
pupils. Not the increase of power, but the consecration of
it, was dearest to his heart. No prioress ever watched her
novices with more prayerful vigils. His greatest joy was in
their well-doing; his most mortifying pain, in their unworthi-
ness. Who that ever witnessed it can forget the impres-
siveness of the scene, or his attitude and expression, so benign
22*
arid fatherly, when, at the close of morning prayers, before

dismissing them to their daily toil, he paused, while the hush
of expectation made the chapel breathless, and gave some
little anecdote or incident sure to sink deep into those hearts,
stamping ineffaceably there its lesson of the blessedness of
obedience, the beauty of holiness ? As he spoke, the cloak he
wore seemed like a Roman toga round him; and he looked
the incarnation of manliness, — like a senator of Rome's best
days.
And who could make folly so ridiculous, or vice so hateful,
as he ? Small chance was there to make a college hero of the
offender once subjected to his excoriation. Though the power
of his sarcasm was so tremendous, and though the smoking of
a cigar was a grave offence in his eyes, it was rare that any
popular re-action in the school interposed itself to lighten his
stroke. For his pupils always perceived the kindly purpose,
the fatherly affection and care, which prompted him. They
felt that he suffered more than the offender. They got no
impression of undue severity or vindictiveness. If he seemed
to them to magnify small offences, they knew that he was re
sisting the beginnings of evil, as the watchman on the levee
does not wait till a district is devastated, but assails the first
percolation of the flood through its sandy wall. It is to be
noted, in this connection, that what little college vice he had
to deal with (that which he would call " unsanctified fun,"
" where it isn't fun for both sides,") was the infection, direct
or indirect, of other schools. Boys from other Western col
leges, where rowdyism is part of" college life," or from New-
England academies, into which our college vice strikes down,
felt themselves defrauded of their rights, and robbed of some
proper scholastic enjoyment, if forbidden to inundate the beds
of sleeping freshmen, or to play Samson with the college
gates. But Mr. Mann's ridicule made it expensive fun : his
wit was irresistible, and his severe rebuke was like one's
vision of the day of judgment.
But the general impression of his ministry there was one
of cheerfulness and joy. His delight was to show the folly of
vice, that the offender is more fool than knave ; and some
witty anecdote or pithy saying, easily kept in memory, was

his favorite weapon. He felt safe, when vice was made ridic
ulous. Nor was any thing more gratifying to him, than to
make the offender convict or punish himself. On one occa
sion, a student, dissatisfied with the diet in college commons,
unceremoniously tossed a certain dish out of the window.
When summoned to Mr. Mann's house, he was taken to the
table, and led to praise the corresponding article there ; but
what was his confusion on being told, that this was the very
dish he before condemned, the aggrieved steward having sent
it over for the president's inspection !
Mr. Mann's mirthfulness, and love of fun, — traits quite lost
sight of by those who picture him with the frown of contest
on his face, — made sunshine about him at home, in the faculty-
meeting, in his recitation-room. His laugh was like that of a
child. His fund of witty or humorous stories seemed inex
haustible. His enjoyment of nature's sights and sounds was
of primitive freshness. His resilient temperament retained
all its spring to the last, manifesting " vitality enough to make
a college thrive in Sahara," as Starr King well says, recog
nizing a nature as sunshiny as his own, albeit with an added
grandeur of storm. Never were such severity of moral judg
ment, and intensity of personal endeavor, brightened by such
incessant cheerfulness. The cloud that seemed to many so
grim and menacing, lighted only by fitful bolts, had another
side, where the illuminating sunshine poured brilliance,
warmth, and softness, over all its billowy breadth and
height.
Mr. Mann drew to himself the most enthusiastic and de
voted love of his pupils. His influence at Antioch was like
that of Arnold at Rugby. It was not scholastic, nor through
judicious regulations. It was personal. He became himself
the inspiration of those gathered before him. This may not
have been his wish. He felt, with many to-day, that we must
lean on persons less, and principles more. He strove to im
press the great lessons of law, reward, retribution. But his
pupils, following a true instinct, perhaps building better than
they knew, felt that love and reverence — the great forces in
life — regard not principles but persons, care for law only as it
reveals the law-giver, the source of power ; and so, while
heeding his exhortation, were influenced far more by his per
sonal presence, which moulded their carriage, their tones,
their spirits, stamping their innermost being with his image.
They clung not to his teaching, but to him : remembered his
principles only as he incarnated and illustrated them ; and
thus gave him that highest ministry of those who engraft
others with their own life. But is not this the highest minis
try of all ? Life is one great web of personal relations. Prin
ciples guide, but they cannot impel. Hope and fear cannot
do the work of love and reverence. The latter look only
toward persons : they contemplate recognition and response ;
and they are the great forces without which we toil in vain
to influence human nature for good. " It takes a great-souled
man to move the masses, even to a cleaner sty." And what
do we care for law, for the power of God, save, at the prompt
ing of a self-interest more or less refined, to keep ourselves in
or out of the path in which his power is moving? We hunger
for the great Personality which stands back of law, — the In-
spirer of life, the object of our mightiest affections.
Mr. Mann was of a supremely religious nature. The great
organized doubt of " positivism " never seemed to touch him.
He was reverent, and full of faith. But he stood at enormous
disadvantage at Antioch, in sharing with thousands to-day a
religious faith which has not yet taken form or polity ; and as
having, for the direct constituency of the college, a people
strictly evangelical in their religious views, feelings, and
methods. True, he never stated his theological opinions to
his pupils, in public or private. He gave no weight to such
opinions, as compared with habits of daily obedience. Nothing
could be more ludicrous to him, than the question asked at
one of the Christian conferences, " Whether the religious
teachings at the college did not tend to make the students
live pure and virtuous lives, and do good to their fellow-men,
rather than to love God, through faith in Jesus Christ, as
applied by the Holy Spirit?" (Life, p. 538.) But the ques
tion had graver significance than he ever admitted : it touched
1865.] Horace Mann, and Antioch College. 261
a difference which underlay all the troubles at Antioch Col

lege, and cost him fearful trials, even the sacrifice of his life.
There has been great misapprehension as to the attitude
held by the Christian Denomination, and their conduct towards
Antioch College. It is only fair to consider it from their point
of view. They founded the school because they felt their
own ignorance, and desired to possess within themselves such
institutions as all other denominations possess, to educate
their young people, and especially to train young men for their
pulpits. They desired and sought a school which should be
unsectarian only in so far as they themselves are so. They
had no thought of a school which should not be strictly evan
gelical ; which should not expect revivals in winter, as regu
larly as vacations in summer. They were founding a school
for their own denominational purposes, which should aid civi
lization through their sect; they expected to see their own
ministers and young people, as soon as possible, the sole teach
ers in it ; to see a theological school connected with it ; to
see it thus as strictly a denominational organ as one of their
own newspapers. Their want of scholarly men compelled
them either to start the school on a grade fatally low, or to
look outside their own borders for a leader and head ; and, in
choosing the latter alternative, they showed a good sense and
good feeling worthy of all praise.
But, in choosing Mr. Mann, they made as grave a mistake as
he did in accepting their invitation. Dazzled by his brilliant
reputation and great power, rejoiced at his endorsement of
their sentiments, fired with the hope of powerfully re-enforcing
their denominational strength through him, they failed to see
that he, in all good faith, was accepting their unsectarian
pledges and battle-cries in a sense utterly hateful to them, —
he meaning freedom within the bar of conscience only, or at
least within that of unchallenged private interpretation ; they
meaning freedom within the bar of the infallible Book, and
that too under a set of opinions not avowed or formally stated,
but perfectly well understood. They desired the school to
aid civilization by serving their sect; he desired it to aid their
sect only as it served civilization. He and they were thus,
at the outset, in feeling and purpose fatally at variance. If

he had his wish, they must fail of theirs ; and he probably
never would have set foot within those walls, had he known
how their meaning of the words " Christian character" differed
from his.
In Christology, they were for the most part Arians, denying
alike the humanity and the supreme divinity of Jesus; and,
in their religious methods and ideals, their views of conver
sion, salvation, and Christian character, they bore more resem
blance to the Methodists than to any body of people with
whom Mr. Mann had been wont to worship. They have in
deed so little denominational coherence and uniformity, that
there are many, especially in New England and New York, to
whom these remarks do not apply ; and, throughout the body,
there are men of genuine liberality, breadth of view, hearti
ness of feeling, and great force of character. But that mis
conception, on their part, of Mr. Mann's theological status, and
his misconception of the ground and nature of their liberality,
worked mischief with their relation and with Antioch College.
It was too much to ask of them to change their whole denom
inational character, accepting an ideal and a method foreign
to all their habits and thoughts. It was too much to ask
of them to give a cordial support to a college which seemed to
them to be robbing them of their young men altogether, in
stead of training them for the denominational work. And,
under the circumstances, we claim that they manifested com
mendable forbearance and charitableness, and should not suffer
in the estimation of those considering them from without.
With no experience in such enterprises, with no organic
unity, it was natural that they should miscalculate, and finan
cially go to the wall, and that they should be greatly dis
couraged by such a misadventure. It was natural then,
that the great sensible body, perceiving this, and that they
were theologically on the wrong tack, should keep a grieved
silence, the best men withdrawing from the scene, while
the poorest, the most narrow and captious, should take
up their complaints, assail Mr. Mann, and thus bring odium
on themselves, and, most unjustly, on the body they so unwor
thily represented. But all this, and all talk of broken faith,
pledges unredeemed, boasts of liberty made ridiculous by
illiberality, — which, if true of the few, is false of the many, —
should not blind the eye to that great misconception which
arose naturally, and, wjthout involving unworthy motives or
dealing on the part of anybody, made success with the original
undertaking an impossibility.
And wo may be sure of this, — that Mr. Mann's memory is
nowhere more reverently cherished than amongst brethren of
the Christian Denomination to-day. There was, despite all
difference, a vital adoption of him into fellowship. He has
become a part of their denominational history. Their young
people, who saw his face at Antioch, who are counted by hun
dreds, and scattered through all the States, cherish it as their
most precious reminiscence. And the best men in the body
feel that, if Antioch, in origin and idea, was theirs, not alone
her failure, but her glory and success, are also theirs. Theirs
too must be her future glory and success. If they maintain
other schools, — and they should have one in every State, —
the teachers of them will be graduates of Antioch, their pupils
will always look toward Antioch, and she will hold the place
of the mother-institution over them all. Whatever anybody
may purpose or wish, this will be found inevitable. And her
influence will continually raise the grade of their pulpit min
istrations and intellectual life, and bring them to a truer free
dom than they have ever known.
It must greatly comfort all friends of Horace Mann, that
Antioch is to have a future. His martyrdom is to bring forth
other fruit besides its quickening of individual devotion and
hope. Antioch was an educational Gettysburg. The sacri
fices and struggles there made the spot sacred to liberty,
ground to be hallowed by fit monument for ever, not to be sur
rendered to any unworthy tread. It was a painful scene, —
his struggle there with ignorance, with bigotry, with preju
dice of creed and caste, with financial complications, and the
personal hate of disappointed, petty ambition. It was a pain
ful, though glorious sight, — his six years' struggle with those
foes, before whom he would not yield an inch, nor quit the
field, nor spare himself any personal exposure, any care of

watching, or wearing labor of detail, maintaining his regal
attitude till he fell. When he fell, it seemed as though his
life were thrown away. But the great sacrifice is doubly
redeemed from barrenness, if his hopes are now fulfilled in
the institution, and it is made a centre of New-England influ
ence there for ever.
It has a natural constituency, such as no other college can
appeal to. Its classes always contained representatives from
all sections of the country, and all ranks in society. There
were young men and women from the South, bringing their-
prejudices with them. There were women from New Eng
land, going thither to secure a privilege, or a right, denied
them here. There were husbands and wives entering school
together, in one or two cases graduating side by side. There
were the children of families which removed thither from
distant States, that they might educate their sons and daugh
ters together, and under the restraints of home. There were
the sons of wealth, sent thither by anxious parents as to a
city of refuge ; and the aspiring children of poverty able to
attend where subsistence was inexpensive, and where the
college bills were less than forty dollars a year. And, better
than all, there were representatives of that wronged race, to
whose education the whole North must now turn its hand, —
the colored loyalists of the South. All this constituency
remains, scattered throughout the country, and growing with
its growth. The newly issued circular of the Trustee Board
intimates no change in any of the great features of the school.
And, if the present hopes of many come to fruit, Antioch has
a future greater than the expectation of her warmest friends,
under a president of whom any college in America would be
proud. Rising to greet the new light of peace, keeping all
that was good in her past, and having triumphed over what
was evil, she enters on a future whose promise of beneficence
we contemplate with joy and pride.
1865.] Spencer's Social Statics. 265
Ajbt. Vn. — SPENCER'S SOCIAL STATICS.
Social Statics ; or, the Conditions essential to Human Happiness speci

fied, and the first of them developed. By Heebert Spencer. New
York : D. Appleton & Co. 1865.
Mb. Herbert Spencer is a clear reasoner. He writes good

English ; and, for an Englishman, he is brave in following
out an idea to its consequences, and accepting the legitimate
results of his own principles. These mental and moral quali
ties are enough to give the collection of his rather hasty
reviews a good deal of deserved popularity. That popularity
will be rather increased than lessened by the republication of
" Social Statics."
It is, however, rather a pity, if you can help it, to rake out
a book fifteen years old, and reprint it, when those fifteen
years have all been engaged in experiments and discussions
upon the subject involved. Excepting books of pure specu
lation or of high genius, every generation has to write its
own books ; and there are indeed many books of pure specu
lation and high genius which do not deserve to outlive the
generation of men in which they were born. There is noth
ing in " Social Statics " to make it one of the exceptions.
Counting a generation at thirty-three years then, fifteen
thirty-thirds of this book, at the least, have to be floated up by
what is left. The illustrations borrowed from English politics
and English scandal of 1848 and 1849, are not very piquant
now, and, being mostly forgotten in themselves, do not illus
trate a great deal. And so the author has to explain, in a
prefatory note, that the book must not be taken as a literal
expression of his present views. All we have got, therefore,
is an authoritative document as to what Mr. Spencer thought
in December, 1850. He does not think the same things
now. Thus " the bases of morality," as explained here, " are
but adumbrations of what he holds to be the truth now."
" They form but a moiety of the groundwork of a scientific
VOL. LXXIX. — 6lH 8. VOL. XVII. HO. II. 23
266 Spencer's Social Statics. [Sept.
system of ethics:" — " The chapters on the rights of women

and on the rights of children " need qualification, and so on.
Such large retractations as these lead one to wonder a little
why the book is reprinted at all. But there is left, undoubt
edly, a theory of society ; and this is so boldly put, and so
distinctly explained, as to be worth study.
In an introductory notice, which explains by extracts from
a pamphlet of Mr. Spencer's the odd accident by which the
very inadequate name of " Social Statics " happened to be
given to this book, he says himself, very happily, that his aim
is not the increase of authoritative control over citizens, but
the decrease of it. " A more pronounced individualism, in
stead of a more pronounced nationalism, is the ideal of this
treatise." — " Society," he holds, " is to be re-organized only
by the accumulated effects of habit upon character." That
is, as men become better, society will have less and less to do
with controlling them ; and, when all is well, there will be no
government at all. This is the central theory of the book.
In plan, it is divided into five parts. The first annihilates
the doctrine of expediency, as held by Bentham ; and, with
great distinctness of statement and illustration, substantiates
the existence, and asserts the province, of the moral sense.
The second part, defining morality first, argues the steady
evanescence of evil from the world ; and then claims that the
divine idea, or the creative purpose, is the greatest happiness
of men. This need not be the immediate aim of man, how
ever. The fatal error of the expediency philosophers has
been to suppose that it is. Man's business is to ascertain the
conditions by conforming to which the greatest happiness of
the race will ultimately be obtained. As the social state
exists in spite of us, these conditions are stated thus : First
and all-essential, Justice ; supplementary to this, Negative
Beneficence, or abstaining from injuring others; secondary to
this, among sympathetic beings, there must be positive benev
olence ; and, lastly, under these limitations, each individual
" shall perform those acts required to fill up the measure of
his own private happiness," or, as the gentle reader would
be more apt to say, "shall do as he likes."
From these foundations there is wrought out, by different

processes, in the next part, the " first principle " of the book,
which is, that —
" Every man has freedom to do all he wills, provided ho
infringe not the equal freedom of any other man."
Any qualifications of this principle, however necessary,
must remain for private and individual application, and can
not be recognized in the just regulation of a community.
This principle is then applied to the rights of life and per
sonal liberty, the right to the use of the earth, the right
of property, the right of property in ideas, the right of prop
erty in character, the right of exchange, the right of free
speech, the rights of women and children, and some further
rights.
The next part applies the general principle to political
rights, — as the duty of the State, and the limit of that duty;
to national education, and similar offices which have been
assumed by organized governments. The last part is a sum
mary of conclusions.
Scattered among these discussions, there are some fine
passages of eloquence and beauty on the possible charm of
human society. There is an exquisite and very valuable
statement 'of man's sympathy with other men, as supplying
much of the working power of man's life. The greatest
mutual dependence is held up as one of the triumphs which
we shall attain in the perfect world. Yet this greatest mutual
dependence is to be joined with the highest individuation.
By the highest individuation is meant the most perfect sepa
ration of each man, as an atom or unit, from all other men.
And, as the undercurrent of the whole book, it is clear
enough that, for all the rhetoric about sympathy, Mr. Spencer
considers society as a sad bore after all. He repeats with
enthusiasm a fancy of Coleridge's, that the true idea of life
is a tendency to individuation ; and undertakes, in a specific
illustration, to show, that from the sponges to the Alcyonidce,
from these to the Corallids, and from these higher yet, the
lowest of animals ascend as they gain more individuality and
more. He thus, consciously or unconsciously, argues that
268 Spencer'* Social Statics. [Sept.
the hnman race will attain its perfection when the individual
men and women are most widely separated ; that Simon
Stylites and Alexander Selkirk are thus far the most success
ful men, and Robinson Crusoe, till he was cursed by Friday's
arrival, the most successful idea of manhood ; indeed, that
solitary confinement for life, as occasionally ordered for the
most depraved of criminals, really gives to them, after lives
of worthlessness, one happy dream of the ultimate perfec
tion of mankind.
The true theory of the human race is precisely opposed to
this. Fichte states it very precisely, where he says the
human race is the individual, of which separate men and
women are the several necessary organs, each necessary,
even essential, to the welfare of all the others. St. Paul had
stated it better, in some memoranda of his, made centuries
before.
Because Mr. Spencer's book works out with great gallantry
and precision the unsocial view of society, it has a decided
interest for people who believe with us, that man is a grega
rious animal ; that the existence of a family is not an accid
ent, but a result of the creative design ; that society has an
organic life, all its own, and is not a mere heap of separate
individual lives ; and that government always has a divine
element in it, and in the end will be thoroughly divine, or the
kingdom of heaven.
We do not propose, in the few pages we can assign to this
history of what Mr. Spencer thought in 1850, to follow this
contrast in the speculative discussion of ihe theory of indi
viduation. We shall merely trace it in one or two of the
brilliant illustrations where Mr. Spencer carries his theory
into practice.
First of all, as we have intimated, before Mr. Spencer was

a philosopher, he was an Englishman. And, though he is per
haps the very boldest of English speculators, there is always
the very drollest reference to English customs and precedents,
as if, " of course, you know," there were no others worth con
sidering in the world. The Americans are justly thought to
hold a good opinion of themselves ; yet we remember no

American writer of philosophy, who would venture on a state
ment so charmingly cool as this : —
" The English national character, as contrasted with that of other
races, will supply a further illustration. We are universally distin
guished for our jealous love of freedom; for the firm maintenance of
our rights. At the same time, we are not less distinguished for the
greater equity of our general conduct."
Starting on as comfortable a theory as this, Mr. Spencer

illustrates the practices of government purely from those of
England. His allusion to administration in other countries
are always inadequate, often mistaken. Now the English
administration, however good it may be thought, — and he
certainly thinks it very poor, — is simply the administration
of an oligarchy. Claim, if you please, that the members of
that oligarchy are saints, still they are an oligarchy, — a hand
ful of men governing a much larger number. When Mr.
Spencer, then, in discussing the interference of Government
witli the management of affairs, as of lighthouses, post-offices,
banking or trade, clinches his argument by showing how the
English Government has failed, he only proves what all
the world outside of England knew very well before, that the
English Government is a very imperfect one, and that Eng
land is not very fortunate in her system. To show that
Parliament has legislated ill for silk-weavers or cotton-spinners,
is only to show that an assembly elected mostly by landed pro
prietors, educated to preserve game and write Latin verses,
cannot and will not understand rightly the interests of manu
factures. But how if you enlarge the constituency of that
legislature ? How if you open the lines of promotion, so that
every living man votes, and every living man is a candidate
for your Parliament? Then, in the long run, you will have
legislative bodies which will embrace men of very wide expe
rience, of very curious information, and who will respect the
knowledge of experts about their own affairs to the very
fullest. On the other hand, each interest will be quite jealous
enough of favors or advantages extended to others. Such a
23*
legislature is every legislature of every free American State.

Unquestionably they make blunders. But a blunder hardly
survives the first year of its trial. As unquestionably, such
assemblies hit upon and carry out very complex systems for
the development of industry and the extension of the rights
of men, which never had been theoretically stated; which
are due wholly to the successive experiments, even to the
successive blunders, of successive legislatures; and which
do practically enlarge the domain of human intelligence, and
subdue the world. It is worth the while of real statesmen
to examine such systems.
Take, as an illustration, what is known in the Northern
States of America as the “General Incorporation Law.” To
enable small capitalists to combine their resources, and to
work with them as efficiently as a large capitalist could do
alone, is a great practical question. It is especially so, in
a country where there are but few large capitalists. It is a
question discussed, ad nauseam, in the books. It is a question
which has been discussed in its applications to manufactures,
to mining, to navigation, to education, to every human inter
est, indeed, in every legislature in America. Unnumbered
experiments have been tried upon it. We do not pretend to
say that it is yet settled. But we do say, that the General
Incorporation Statute, first tried in the State of Connecticut,
wrought out there in very curious detail, till that State
proved it had hit on a working system, and then adopted, in
principle, by almost all the neighboring States,—contains the
elements of success. It is a step which will not be retraced.
It satisfies everybody. So far as it goes, it gives greater
opportunities than were possible before for man's triumph
over inanimate nature, which is one great part of the busi
ness man was put into the world to do. Still further, this
system is a system which could not have been tried without
a Government to try it. It could not have been tried merely
by the voluntary agreement of certain men to try it. The
State, as an individual power, had to say, at a certain fixed
time, “This experiment shall be tried, under such and such
conditions, in order that we may all see whether, under such
conditions, capital will be most freely employed and industry

most surely rewarded." To say that the British Parliament
has never hit on any such plan, or has never succeeded in
any such details, is simply to say, what Mr. Spencer proves
very perfectly, that the British Parliament does not well
understand the business of internal administration.
We make this reference first to Mr. Spencer's English
short-sightedness, because it is perhaps, at bottom, the origin
of his contempt for government, and of his theory of individ
uation. For it does happen, even with wise men and with
theorists, that some early prejudice must take the credit of
the birth of their whole theoretical system. Mr. Spencer's
theory is, that " government is essentially immoral. Is it not
the offspring of evil, bearing about it all the marks of its
parentage ? Does it not exist because crime exists ? " To
both these questions, anybody who has seen government
born, as an American settler does, says, " No." The repres
sion of crime is only a very small part of the duty of govern
ment or of its business. It is hard to separate the proceedings
of one man from the work of the State, of which he is not an
atom, but an organized member. But let us attempt this in
Mr. Spencer's fashion. Let us suppose a being from another
land, if necessary from another world, dropped down in
America. He takes a wild piece of the world to subdue it.
What are his relations to Government ? He has no relations
with it, but that the Government of the country has sent
intelligent surveyors into that region before him, who have
marked off the land into sections of one hundred and sixty
acres; and this Pole, or Hungarian, or inhabitant of the
planet Mars, may enter on any one of them, build any house,
castle, or shanty, he pleases, try any experiment in agricul
ture he chooses, and, by virtue of that preliminary survey,
he will be protected in his castle or in his experiments
against all the world who may try to dispossess him, while
he is trying the experiments, or living in the castle. There
is no crime here. There is no repression of crime. There is
a great favor conferred on this settler, and, as it proves, on
everybody else in the world too. Literally, nobody is
aggrieved by the arrangement. Now, into that man's neigh

borhood come other settlers, — Englishmen, Bohemians, Ar
menians, and, if possible, inhabitants of Vesta. They find it
convenient to make their road to the nearest river on some
system, instead of making sixteen roads from their sixteen
houses. They meet together, and appoint a committee of
selectmen to see to this road. Their neighbors, the county
through, meet, and appoint their committees. All together
meet, and appoint county commissioners of roads. But there
is no suppression of crime in the matter. These officers are
chosen, or this government is established, because there
are certain things to be done by the whole body, for the con
venience at once of each and of all. It is more convenient
to have one insane hospital for the whole county, than for
each man to have a separate insane retreat attached, against
a time of need, to his own house. It is more convenient to
have the children of a town educated in ten schoolhouses,
than to have a governess hired in each family, and the dining-
room given up to a jury schoolroom. It is more convenient
to have the State build the lighthouses for my ship, than
for me to send out engineers in advance to set up lights on
the dangerous headlands, when I propose to send her on a
voyage. It is more convenient for me to bid the government
carry all my letters, and all everybody's else, than to keep a
staff of couriers and their horses in readiness for me to send
a note to Winona or St. Paul.
So little is government the child of crime, or created for
the chief purpose of suppressing crime, that there constantly
occur terms of county courts when there are no criminals;
and the renting the county jail to summer boarders is an
event which has happened so often, that people do not now
put it in the newspapers.
The proportion in which the correction of crime is the
work of government appears fairly enough from the expenses
of a State. In the ordinary expenses of the State of Massa
chusetts, the largest item is that for public education. Its
cost to the people annually is about $1,500,000.
The item next in magnitude, which appears on the public
accounts, is the public charge of the poor by the several

towns. Its annual cost is about $600,000.
The item next in magnitude is that for State charitable insti
tutions ; viz., for three insane hospitals, four hospitals or alms
houses for foreigners, two institutions for the blind, and two
for the deaf, and some smaller expenses. These amount in a
year to about $320,000.
The next item is the charge for reform schools for boys
and girls exposed to temptation, and for the State Prison.
This charge is about $140,000. The county jails involve a
charge of $182,000.
The next item is the expense of the legislature, which is
about $130,000.
The next is the salaries of the judges and officers of
court. This is about $110,000.
The last is the salaries of the various executive officers, —
about $75,000.
We do not include in this statement, a statement of the
charges of the government for railroads and other roads.
The statistics are so intermingled with that share of such
expenses met by individuals, that it would be difficult' to
separate them. But to that feature of our civilization, a very
large share of the work of the executive, legislative, and
judicial departments is given. Without attempting any esti
mate of the annual charges here, we will only say, that the
charges named above for correctional institutions — even in
cluding the reform schools, which are rather preventive than
places for punishment — include every penny spent by the
people of this State directly for the punishment of crime.
This charge is $322,000. On the other hand, the education
and public charities of the State cost $2,420,000.
A third amount, $315,000, required by the legislature, the
executive, and the judiciary, might fairly be shared between
the other two, and the various interests of the public, which
do not appear in either of the heads of correction or charity,
— such as roads, commissions of inquiry, administration of
banks, insurance, and other business. They should be shared
proportionally to their amount, or nearly so. At the very
most, then, the repression or the correction of crime requires

not one-eighth of the expense or of the attention of the
government.
We are well aware, that such statistics are very inadequate.
They should be accompanied, on the one side, by the detail
of the taxation and expenses of a town, and, on the other, by
those of the nation. For such an examination, we have not
here the space. But any person acquainted with the facta
knows, that, in town expenses or national expenses, a propor
tion, even less than we have named, is devoted to the detec
tion or repression of crime.
At this point, however, Mr. Spencer's special admirers will
say to us, that, by " crime " he does not mean the crime
which is punished by courts in prisons. He means wicked
ness in general, they will say. In the introduction to his
book, he makes a very ingenious parallel between his study,
and that of a physiologist. In physiology, he says, we study
a supposed perfect human body. It is the business of thera
peutics to deal with disease ; but physiology deals with
health only. And so, he says, " social statics " only deals
with upright men, and a world of upright men. If anybody
wants to write a book of social therapeutics, he may. But
this is not that book. Accordingly, when the book makes
any statement which would otherwise seem quite bold, there
comes in a little reminder at the end, that all this applies only
to possible human beings, and not to actual. After you have
admired for twenty-two pages, at being told that you must
not coerce your children ; that, if they choose to eat unripe
apples in dog-days, you must let them, — it appears that all
this only applies to perfect children ; and that, in case of an
" imperfect humanity," the twenty-two pages may be used
for waste paper. After it has been proved, that men would
volunteer to carry the mail across the prairies and the Rocky
Mountains, from Passamaquoddy to Sceattle, for the love of
the thing, and its natural and spontaneous rewards, it proves
that these are to be perfect men, " upright men," in a perfect
age. This occasional reminder, that the book has, in strict
ness, nothing to do with the circumstances in which we are
actually living, detracts from the vivacity and point of most

of its radicalisms. We do not consider, however, that this dis
claimer even, broad as it is, is sufficient to justify Mr. Spen
cer's argument, that government is the child of crime, only
intended for the repression of crime, and shows always traces
of its origin. It is true, that any book on government seems
to savor of milk-and-water a little, when the author falls back
on the government of cherubs and of angels. But, granting
that such is the object of such treatises, we still hold our
ground. To revert to the particular instance with which we
began, which is, in fact, generally the origin of government
in America, — the case of road-building. We claim that a
company of seraphs, — Uriel, Michael, and Raphael themselves
included, — if settled in this world with the object of subduing
it, would find it to their advantage to subdue it on system.
It would be advisable, that one seraph should do the survey
ing, one the mining, one the bridge-building. It would be
desirable, that they should assign these services according to
fitness of seraph for duty. It would be desirable, that is, that
they should institute a government.
And, to return to the position from which we entered on
this discussion, we believe Mr. Spencer himself would make
a similar statement, if the repeated failures of the English
Government had not driven so many English radicals into the
false theory, that, at best, government is the creature of
crime.
Mr. Spencer's first head in applying his general principles

is, naturally, the consideration of property in land. His argu
ment is concise, clear, and perfectly satisfactory. He apolo
gizes more than he need for it, we should suppose, even in
addressing Boeotians or Englishmen. Society is the land
lord. Each man living has a right to a farm somewhere, if
he will pay the rent society demands. In strictness, there is
no private property in land. This is simply to say, that the
government guarantees every man's title to his land, on con
dition that he pays the taxes which the government, as the
original holder, demands for its rent. What we call fee
simple is really a perpetual lease ; and the taxes and other

services due to the State are the rents paid. In America,
this would be called very conservative doctrine; for it gives
society or government that complete and absolute power
which, in America, we know that divine institution demands,
commands, and should exact for its own preservation, to the
last penny of accumulation, and the last drop of blood. Mr.
Spencer seems to shrink a little from the consequences.
And he encourages his English readers by telling them, that,
as a matter of expediency, it may be well to recognize old
titles ; and that " men having got themselves into the dilemma
by disobedience to law, must get out of it as well as they
can ; " that abstract morality has no concern with our extri
cating ourselves from the perplexities accompanying the
present tenure of property. This encouragement savors a
little of the consolation which the preacher administered to a
hearer who had been overwhelmed with anguish by his
description of Calvary and its sufferings. Finding it difficult
to soothe her, the frightened pastor said, that, after all, it was
a great while ago ; and that the place was far off where it
happened. Abstract morality, as Mr. Spencer admirably
shows in other places, has a great deal to do with the extri
cation of mankind from their present perplexities. It is a
pity to surrender the elixir, at the moment we have discov
ered the poison. The answer that the Duke of Leeds or the
Duke of Sutherland, whom he invokes, would make to his
appeal should be this, and, as we suppose, it would be : " We
are tenants of society. We pay enormous rents to society.
Whatever society demands, when it chooses to enlarge these
rents, we pay. We hold on precisely your tenure." If Mr.
Spencer says, in reply, that society is very inadequately
represented by queen, lords, and commons, the dukes would
answer, that that was not their fault, but " society's." If
society in England chooses to be so represented, — and cer
tainly it does, so far as the world can see, — they do all that
can be demanded of them, in paying to its bailiff all the rents
that he demands.
Having thus stated the origin of what we call property in
land, Mr. Spencer proceeds to state that property in the pro

ducts of a man's labor springs from it. It is, in a certain
sense, more absolutely a man's own than is the earth on which
he labors. Society's contract with the workman has been
this : " Provided you deliver to us a stated share of the pro
duce which, by cultivation, you can obtain from this piece of
land, we give you the exclusive use of the remainder of that
produce." We consider this view of personal property com
pletely sound. It recognizes the essential fact, that property
is the creature of civil order or of society ; that it cannot
exist, in any sense, without some mutual agreement. There
is no original or divine right of property : it is an institution
resulting from the organization of society.
Proceeding safely and surely thus far, Mr. Spencer plunges
into the consideration of property in ideas. Partly, perhaps,
because an author's experience is more like to make him con
versant with such property than with property in stocks or
in land, he enters on this discussion with an intensity which
we hardly observe in other chapters. He is bitterly severe
on legislators and on courts, because they do not recognize,
he says, property in ideas as a right, and because they say
that a patent is only a stimulus to industry and talent.
But all the invective in this chapter seems to us unde
served. Has not Mr. Spencer just been showing that prop
erty in things is not in itself an original right? that it has
been earned only by the supposed rent which a man has paid
to society for the earth out of which these things are created ?
Why should the property in an invention be any more sacred
than the property in a bushel of corn ? It is because specu
lators like Mr. Spencer claim too much for the right of prop
erty in ideas, that legislators and courts, pushing their claims
to the reduction to absurdity, are so apt to speak carelessly,
as if they had no claims at all.
Mr. Spencer's doctrine about visible property, which we
conceive to be true, is this, — that society is the owner of
the whole earth : then, for purposes of convenience, the
earth is assigned into different sections, of a size fit for use,
and the use of them is given to tenants, who are called
VOL. I.XXIX. — 5th S. VOL. XVII. NO. II. 24
owners, on condition that they pay to society such rents or

taxes as are demanded. If they pay these rents, — any corn,
trees, houses, metals, wares, pictures, or statues, which their
industry, mediately or immediately, produces from the land, is
their property. No man may take it away.
Let us now apply the same principle to what is thought the
analogous case of property in ideas. The domain of Truth is
the common freehold of all society. Let a man pay his rents,
and he may enter where he will, and develop it as he will.
In that event, a specific invention which he makes is his
own. But it is only his own, on condition that he pays so
ciety some rent or tax to compensate it for the undivided use
of his invention. For this payment, Mr. Spencer, so far as
this chapter shows, makes no provision.
Farther yet : the analogy between the bushel of corn, and
the invention of a machine, wholly fails, if the inventor try
to push his right so far as to claim the right in all similar
machines. If we adopted Mr. Spencer's favorite reduction to
the absurd, we should say, that in the invention of a new ma
chine lies the germ of all the machines which shall ever use
its principle. Because it contains this germ, the inventor
should be paid at the outset for its value in all time to come ;
or whenever, in after time, the machine is made, he shall
be paid a royalty by the maker for the value of the germ.
If we tried this alternative in the case of the corn, the far
mer would be paid in advance for the contribution, he makes
to all the bushels of corn of which he sells the germs ; or,
through all time, he would have a claim to a royalty on all
the corn which grew from his bushel. In this alternative,
Mr. Spencer would accept the first half. He would say, pay
in advance the inventor, for the worth that his idea is going
to be in all possible future industry. But this is, clearly, to
claim an impossibility. Who shall determine this value ?
The truth is, that, granting the inventor has a right to his
idea or invention, society has at least ah equal right to com
pel him to make the invention. God gave him the power of
invention, for the common good, not for his own. Woe to
him, if he do not use it ! It is the omission to observe this
right of society to the service of all its members, which com

plicates so much the consideration of the so-called rights of
inventors and authors. Mr. Spencer, as usual, looking with
contempt on society, and sympathizing with individuals,
ignores the right of society altogether.
But how, if, on a disabled steamer, which had lost a rudder,
an engineer on board should say, " I know how to construct a
steering apparatus, which will bring us all to port ; but I will
not teach the rest of you how to make it, — unless you unite
in giving me all your property, and binding yourselves to me
as my servants till you die " ? We should say he had no right
to make this sale of his invention. Yet his claim would be
very small compared with Mr. Spencer's. How, if, at the
outset of the rebellion, a statesman had said, that he had
invented a system of conciliation, which would emancipate all
the slaves in the land, and restore the Union, and satisfy
all parties ; but he would not announce that system until we
had settled on him and his heirs the whole national domain 7
Clearly, he has no right to drive any such a bargain. As little
have the heirs of Archimedes the right which Mr. Spencer
claims for them to a royalty, every time any man calculates
the weight of water by Archimedes's invention ; or the heirs
of Shakespeare a right to a royalty from every man who
says, —
" A rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
In point of fact, the share of society in the joint right by

which property in ideas is held is so large, that the property
is worthless unless society have fulfilled, painfully and well,
its share in the invention. Why is the copyright of Mr.
Dickens's book or Mr. Spencer's worth five times as much in
America as in England ? Because in America the government
has chosen to spend millions on millions in teaching every
body to read these books, while in England the system of
government makes it desirable that very few people shall be
able to read them with interest or pleasure. Grant that the
right to the idea is Mr. Spencer's or Mr. Dickens's, the right
to the enjoyment of it seems to spring, in a proportion vastly
larger, from the work of those who have prepared the readers
to use the idea. The value of the idea, without such prepar
ation, may be precisely estimated by those who will carry
the books to Madagascar, and essay the sale of them there.
Mr. Spencer himself, as usual at the end of one of his
chapters, acknowledges that he does not know what to do
about it. He confesses that several people may make an
invention at the same time, without knowing of each other.
In that case, he is at a loss how to decide. But, as usual, he
says it is none of his business. The decision does not seem
to us so difficult. Its principles, as we believe, are these.
Society has a right to the utmost efforts of all its members.
Just as it may make every man fight for it, it may claim that
such thinker or officer shall think his best for it. This is
universally acknowledged regarding moral truths. No man
has a right, we say, to hold back his moral convictions. It
is equally true regarding all truth, invention, or discovery.
Let society, then, after inventions have been made and
tested, after books have been written and circulated, decide
by its most solemn and careful tribunals what are the fit
rewards to be paid from the common treasury to the inventor
or the author. No system of award could be so false and
inconsistent as the present. Our system of copyright pays
to the author of a novel worse than worthless, if it is only
highly enough spiced with licentiousness, higher rewards
than it pays to the author of the " Mdcanique Celeste." The
inventor of a machine so simple that every one can make
it after it is invented, obtains nothing for his patent because it
cannot be protected ; while the inventor of some large-scale
improvement, which must be used under the eyes of the
world, watches his " rights," and obtains his princely income.
No system but that here suggested, will, as we believe,
ever rescue copyright and patent-right from the absurdities
which surround them when we attempt the futile task of
classifying them with other forms of property.
Applying in detail the "first principle" of the book to the

things the State has been accustomed to do, Mr. Spencer
1865.] Spencer's Social Static$. 281
argues that Government has no right to regulate commerce,

none to regulate religion, none to relieve the poor, none to
educate children, none to establish colonies, none to care for
the health of the people except by suppressing nuisances,
none to issue currency, none to carry mails, none to build or
maintain lighthouses. The specific illustrations given of the
danger of people putting their fingers into what they do not
understand, are admirably put ; but, as we have intimated,
the sweeping theories themselves result from the habit of
considering the governors and the governed different people,
with different interests. Let government be what it should
be, — the organization of the governed for the carrying-out of
certain affairs essential to all, — and they will themselves see
to it, that the process shall not interfere unduly with individual
privileges. Mr. Spencer suggests, rather lamely, that what
he calls private enterprize will carry out the work which he
would prohibit government from undertaking. A private
corporation (why not call it the Trinity Board) shall be estab
lished to build the lighthouses of the world. Another private
corporation (let us call it Thurn and Taxis) shall carry the
mails of the world. Another private corporation (shall we
call it the Royal College of Physicians) shall regulate the
sewers. Another private corporation (let us call it the
Church) shall see that by no accidental failure of personal
charity Darby and Joan starve to-night. After having estab
lished a few hundred of such private corporations, we may
rub our hands with glee, and say, " We have left every thing
to unrestricted care : things are taking care of themselves ;
we have discharged all these interests from the function of
government." But the toil-worn man of public spirit, as he
rushes madly from one election of directors to another ; as
he finds all these institutions of private benevolence clash
ing with each other, even when administered by perfectly
upright men, as the whole book supposes, —' exhausted after
his attendance at the last election of the three hundred, will
be apt to say, Why should we not, once for all, lay out a
system by which the relations of these several Boards to each
other should be adjusted once for all, — a system by which
24*
282 State Crimes, and their Penalty. [Sept.
the choice of these administering officers shall be made at

once, and with direct reference to dividing the work, as they
can best discharge it ? This is to ask, Why not establish a
constitution of government with very large powers, to be
used at the direction of the governed?
Art. VIII. — STATE CRIMES, AND THEIR PENALTY.
The scene of the 7th of July closed the last act of that gloomy
tragedy which began with the murder of the 14th of April.
It is not a very pleasant or a very profitable thing to dwell
on, — the putting to death of four persons, bound and help
less, in that deliberate, ostentatious, mechanical way, which
is called a public execution. In general, it has been proved
true, that the punishment of death has in it something to
harden and demoralize the popular heart ; and when a popular
exhibition is made of it, as it still is in many countries, it is
one of the great schools of depravity, and a public horror.
If it is ever to be justified at all, it is in a time of revolution
like the present, when a solemn act of State invests the human
tragedy of death with an awe and respect which are apt to be
lost while human life is cheapened in the accumulation of
worse horrors, — so that the doom of those four malefactors
does more to impress the imagination, and give a sense of
the awe of death, than all the carnage of a battle-field, or all the
mortality of a hospital ; or else, when any given crime has,
by peculiar circumstances of guilt and atrocity in it, thrown
the public mind somewhat off its balance, and jarred the gen
eral conscience in a peculiar way, to which the feeling of
satisfied justice seems to bring some relief, — when the crimi
nal's life is deliberately required by the State, as the forfeit
of his deed.
It is purely by the good or evil of this moral effect, as we
believe, that the death-penalty can fairly be defended or
accused, as a part of the ordinary administration of justice.
In safe and ordinary times, in a civilized and orderly State,
1865.] State Crimes, and their Penalty. 283
the cases must be very rare when it is either wise or right.

The arguments which have generally upheld it have been
either the cowardice that would shuffle crime and its conse
quences out of sight as fast as possible, or else the supersti
tion that has held so blindly to the worst mistakes and horrors
of the past. Nothing, perhaps, has done so much to brutalize
the temper and debauch the conscience of the criminal classes
themselves, as the shocking repetition and cheapening of it
in some modern countries.* To be of any good effect, or to
plead any justification, it should be a very rare, a very deli
berate, and a very solemn thing. And its main justification
then will be, that it is the only way which the law has —
unless we should go back to the ancient horrors of bodily tor
ture — to set apart a particular class of crimes, and testify that
abhorrence of them which is the general verdict of mankind.
It is not for vengeance, not for cruelty, that human law thus
banishes the criminal for ever from the face of the earth, and
the society of human life, — remanding him from man's judg
ment to the bar of Him who sees not as man sees, and is wise
to ordain, and just to judge, where our judgment fails. Nor
is it because death is a more severe or a more adequate punish
ment of guilt than long imprisonment (for instance) with hard
labor, or exile and disgrace. But, if we may say so, there are
cases which seem to appall and paralyze our judgment ; and,
with a certain horror and repugnance, we long to have every
visible token of them buried from our sight : we long that the
deed itself, and the chief agents of it, should pass from the face
of man into oblivion, — at least into history, — and be hence
forth to all the world as if they had not been.
We assume without debate the right of human society over
the life of its subjects and members. Being attacked in its
* Thus, Miss Martineau tolls us, that, in the year 1785, ninety-seven persons
were executed in the city of London alone, for the crime of pilfering from shops ;
in one instance, a batch of twenty persons at once, hung in the public street,
before a vast, profane, quarrelsome, and half-drunken mob of men, women, and
children, of a Monday morning, as the fruit of the previous week's action of the
Courts. In 1811, when Sir Samuel Romilly moved the third reading of his Bill
in the House of Commons, "at that moment there was a child in Newgate, not
ten years of age, under sentence of death for this offence." — History of the Peace,
vol. ii. p. 86.
- --
)
liberties or sovereignty, a State may stand to its own defence,

and employ the persons of its citizens, in whatever way seems
best, safest, most effectual and humane, as a barrier between
it and ruin. Whatever our previous scruples about it may
have been, and whatever our dread of it considering the cruel
and despotic way in which the sovereign power in other coun
tries has used it, — in conscriptions, in standing armies, in
wars of ambition, in terrible vengeance visited upon conspir
acy and rebellion, — the general sense of our people has
heartily ratified that extreme power, and has submitted to a
conscription so vast as to be the astonishment of the world.
This is the practical acknowledgment of the right of society
to claim the lives of its members at need, put to the severest
test, and triumphantly sustained. A corresponding right it
clearly has, in those extreme cases of crime and its penalty,
which have been spoken of. A right to be used very cau
tiously, and only in the last resort. A right whose sacredness
would all be lost, if it were to be used for vengeance or
cruelty or cowardice. A right which is only justified, when
it is used to express, in the most solemn, the most unequivo
cal, the only way, the deepest moral conviction of a com
munity, in judgment of the deepest order of human guilt.
But Justice must hold the sword, as well as the scales. If
there are merit and honor on our side, there must be guilt aud
blame on the other. And that guilt, that blame, must have
their expression in human codes of law. Of course, law cannot
pretend to measure the degrees of personal merit and blame.
No doubt, — everybody knows, — a child is brought up in
crime, or a man is led to crime, by a thousand circumstances
utterly out of his control, which imply no more blame in him
than the fact that he was born at all, or born in such a city,
or such a State. And, if we set about measuring the degrees
of personal guiltiness, there is no one, of any tenderness of
conscience, who could ever bring himself to pronounce sen
tence on his fellowman. " Who am I," he would say, " to de
clare this unhappy creature a sinner, and unfit to live; I,
who have been comfortably and respectably brought up, who
hardly know what violent passion and strong temptation mean ;
I, who never felt the pressure of haggard want, or the
1865.] Slate Crimes, and their Penalty. 285
curse of evil companionship, — who am I, to judge this poor

fellow-creature, born under a different sky, breathing a differ
ent air, trained to another code of right and wrong, beset by
temptations, hounded on by passions that I hardly know the
name of, — who am I, to pronounce his doom ? Let me put
myself in his place rather ; and let me think to myself which
is perhaps more guilty before the bar of God, he or I ! "
This would be the language of conscience dealing with the
question of the degree of personal guilt. But human justice
does not deal with questions of conscience, — that is, essen
tially and directly. It leaves them to be settled in the court
of conscience, at the bar of religion, between a man's heart
and his God, or the teacher he selects to interpret to him the
mind of God. Human justice, as expressed in law, must deal
with facts, with tendencies, with dangers and their remedy.
It cannot go into questions of casuistry, or the metaphysics
of free will, or the philosophy of those influences which act on
character. It deals with men, with facts, with deeds. The
highest reason which it understands, or can take account of,
is the safety and advantage of society itself. If it does its
best for that, it is obliged to leave all questions of human
liberty and guilt and doom, reverently but absolutely, to the
God who alone can judge in the sphere of absolute truth and
perfect right. There will always be a dash of pity in the in
dignation which a right-minded person feels for guilt. And,
within the bounds of public safety, the court must allow for
all circumstances that extenuate the guilt or mitigate its
doom. But we are not to forget, that, in the division of em
ployments in a Commonwealth, it is the business of law to
guard the public safety, just as it is of religion to guard the
public conscience ; and that the last and highest considera
tion which law, as such, can entertain, is the order, the
security, the true liberty, of the State.
In the accumulation of great crimes and horrors which
have marked the latter stages especially of the war, there
has been an uneasy feeling that we ought to do something to
retaliate or avenge, before the bar of our conscience, the guilt
from which the nation has suffered so deeply, and the hearts
of the people have bled so cruelly. There can be no doubt,
286 State Crimes, and their Penalty [Sept.
that, where definite acts of crime can be brought home and

proved upon the doers of them, they ought to be dealt with
sternly, impartially, with the rigid and even justice which marks
the true course of public law. But for retaliation, retribution,
any thing that attempts to apportion the penalty to the guilt, —
and that on so wide a scale and over so vast a territory, — it
is impossible to entertain a serious thought of it. " What ! "
some say, " shall all those monstrous crimes go unpunished ?
Shall we have no satisfaction for the war which was brought
on us wantonly and unprepared ? Shall we have no compen
sation for the tides of blood that have been spilt? Shall the
lives of our sons and brothers, slain in this most wanton of
rebellions, go unavenged ? Shall not this vast calamity which
has overtaken our nation and race be visited upon the heads
of those who, with their eyes open, brought it upon us?" In
one sense, it is even so. We are not commissioned to mea
sure out or to punish the degrees of personal guilt in the
authors of all this misery. Still less are we commissioned to
be the agents of any feeling, however natural or even just, of
retaliation and revenge.
We do not speak of that technical retaliation, in a military
sense, where the life of a prisoner of war, for example, is
threatened, in order to prevent cruelty and outrage on the
other side. Here, there is no thought of punishment, no
accusation of guilt, no thirst for vengeance. It is an awful
last resort, — one so dreadful in its nature, that, in every in
stance we can call to mind, our Government has shrunk from
carrying out its threat, and preferred the humiliation of seem
ing to break its word, and forsake its helpless men, rather than
exact the penalty of their wrongs, in the lives of captive ene
mies. We have no judgment to pass here on that awful last
resort of the law of arms, when the innocent are deliberately
made to suffer for the guilty. But there is another sort of
retaliation, which is nothing else but mischievous and wrong.
Wherever our armies in the South felt free to " punish " (as
they called it) the guilt of treason, of which they felt those
people to be guilty, — in the burning of houses, the destruc
tion of estates, the plundering or insulting of the people, or
any sort of personal cruelty upon them, — in any sort of vio
lence or destruction not strictly enjoined by the law of mili

tary service, or strictly required to supply the wants of our
own armies, or to weaken the military force opposed to them, —
then it was a crime ; and the evil consequences of it are sure
to be brought to bear upon the conscience and welfare of our
people. To some feeble degree we are atoning for it, by
feeding the multitudes who were left to starve, and by cloth
ing the multitudes who were stripped to perish. But the
great atonement of that wrong must be worked out through
years, perhaps generations, of suspicion, ill-will, secret hate,
and brooding treachery ; also, through the crippled industry,
the diminished welfare, the more difficult administration, of the
domain won back blasted to the nation's rule and care. Every
such thought of retaliation, every such notion of the punish
ment of guilt by unlawful modes and unauthorized hands, was
a mistake in the beginning, — a dreadful and disastrous mis
take, whose immediate act was crime, and whose late result
must be for evil.
And this is a distinction which it is important to make very
clear in our own minds, — very much more clear than it seems
to have been in many of the discussions we have heard upon
the subject. The war, let us understand, is a thing of the
past. Whatever the guilt of it in its origin, it has been
visited in the most awful manner upon the whole section of
country, and upon every class of men who have taken part in
it. Nothing can be added on our part to that vengeance with
which divine justice has repaid, with even curious, almost
(we might say) statistical completeness, each item of wrath
that had been laid up against the day of wrath. The day
when the public safety might seem to call for or justify
measures of retaliation, has passed by with the war itself, —
let us hope, never to return. It is time for us, now at least,
to look upon this whole matter of crime and its penalty, calmly
and dispassionately ; to look at it only as it bears on the future
safety, welfare, honor, and the truest moral interest, of our
nation.
Those criminals who were executed in Washington the
other day, for instance, — whatever emotion of wrath or ven
geance their crime had roused, had entirely passed away, with
most of us, in the course of their long trial, in the light thrown
upon the circumstances of their lives, and the unravelling of
their wretched plot, in the spectacle of their friends' distress,
and in the human pity that is awakened by the near presence
of a helpless human creature, bound, and waiting its doom.
All wrath and vengeance were laid aside. Even, we might
say, there was more likelihood of a sentimental compassion, a
morbid tenderness, towards them ; so that of the millions that
loudly demanded their lives in April, very few would have
signed their death-warrant without compunction in July.
But among these few was that stern, inflexible man, of severe
feature, of unbending will, and with a life's experience very
hardly tried, who was, as it were, the divinely commissioned
minister of doom, to expiate his predecessor's murder. Swift
ly the stroke fell. One day only intervened. The country
was spared the scandal, and the criminals the pain, of those
wretched months that so often intervene between the sentence
and its execution. All was over, and the heart of the nation
says, It is well.
What has been so strikingly illustrated here, we ought to
have in mind in that whole course of criminal justice which
now lies before our Government, in dealing with the authors
and upholders of the rebellion. A great and in some respects
a heavy and dreadful task I But one which will be very much
lightened, not merely to the doers of it, but to the heart of
our people at large, who must sustain their agents in it, if we
keep in mind the safe and only rule of public justice : Abso
lutely nothing for retaliation and vengeance ; little, if any thing,
of the pretence to weigh out and apportion the measure of per
sonal responsibility ; every thing in view simply of the general
good, the future peace and honor of the nation. In the course
of the war, there were other feelings which inevitably came
up, and it seemed as if they must be satisfied, could the nation
only get the power. Now the nation has got the power; but
the question of using it shows itself in quite another light.
The controlling motive now must be, not merely to secure the
advantage, safety, and satisfaction of that part of the nation
which remained loyal when attacked, but to bring back to
harmony, prosperity, and peace, a vast population and an
enormous territory long alienated and distressed by war.

There have been many crimes in the course of it, of peculiar
atrocity, — the burning of houses; the hanging of men for
loyalty ; the plunder, outrage, and dispersion of their families ;
the shooting and starving of prisoners ; the series of desperate
plots by which the later fortunes of the war were sought to
be retrieved. There will be work enough to deal with the
doers and accomplices of these, and inflict on them just sen
tence according to the best established principles of law.
But at heart we have felt as if there were one crime which
lay behind them all, and embraced them all ; and this we have
called the crime of treason. How can we deal with it, now
that the day of its great madness is over, and that its power
is gone out in ashes and blood ? Still we say, there is but
one safe rule, — the peace and security of the State. If that
requires, "in a given instance, a man's exile or imprisonment,
or the confiscation of his goods, or the forfeiture of his life
even, so let the law decide, yet without emotion of wrath, or
thought of vengeance, to enforce its verdict. It is not for us
to measure the degrees of guilt, or to mete out the amount of
retribution. These men, for all we know, were like other
men, — no better, and probably not much worse, than the
average of men. Let us put ourselves in their situation, and
we shall not find it hard to see how we might be led, we will
not say to share in their crime, or to approve of it, but to ac
cept it as one of the dreadful necessities of the state of things
they had brought about. As to the first act itself, which we
call treason, — that is, armed resistance against the Govern
ment, — they first persuaded themselves there was no wrong
in that. They had carefully trained themselves to a theory
of government which assumed the right of one State to re
nounce the authority of the rest. No such apparent harm in
that, perhaps, as we look at it in theory : at any rate, it was
a doctrine which twelve years ago was getting rather popular
among some classes of us here at the North, who longed to see
New England free of the restraint and odium of laws passed
in defence of slavery. Follow out their theory, and New
England, a dozen years ago, might have been a sea of fire
VOl.. LXXIX. — &TH 8. VOL. XVII. NO. II. 26
and blood. They were kept in check by the average loyal

common sense of the North. At the South there was no such
check. Personal pride, recklessness of moral restraint, the
habit of despotic authority, feudal temper cherished by feu
dal institutions, State rights, and local jealousies, — all worked
together to make it easy and plain, to turn the plausible
theory of secession into the awful and dangerous experiment
of secession. And, having once chosen their path, it was
harder and harder to quit it.
It is not necessary to think they were criminals, and guilty
above all other men ; that is to say, guilty in their own eyes,
acting against their own sense of right, criminal in the sense
in which a thief or murderer knows that he is guilty. That
they were bred in a system of slavery, corrupt and -effete,
was surely their misfortune, and not their fault ; and, grant
ing this, all the rest follows, almost of its own accord. Most
likely they did not expect a very severe struggle, a very
bloody war, to establish their supremacy. At any rate, their
supremacy they were determined to establish, cost what it
would. Every man would rather secure his ends at a cheap
rate, than a costly one ; at a cheap rate of guilt and suffering,
if he can ; with as little wear and tear of conscience as he
can. The war — at any rate the great scale of it, and the
terrible necessities it brought with it — was no doubt a dread
ful and a sickening surprise to most of those who brought it
on. Some of them were no doubt prepared for it, and perfectly
ready and reckless to plunge the country into it. Some
thought the mere show of violence would be enough to bring
the Government to terms of surrender, — at least, to terms of
peaceable bargaining and compromise. Some proposed to get
off cheaply, with one or two acts of murder at starting, and
offered great rewards to any who would prevent the inaugur
ation of a Northern president. Some hoped one thing, some
another. But what strikes us in their language at the time
is, that everybody hoped, and nobody feared. On our side, we
remember how different it was. Everybody feared, and few
hoped. There, all was hopeful, sunny, proud, complacent, self-
confident. They had embarked on the fatal stream. Little
did they know where it would carry them. Almost we might

say, little did they care. Least of all did they know or sus
pect the gulfs and whirlpools of crime it would sweep them
into ; successions of crime, each by itself startling the world
with a new revelation, as it were from the pit of darkness,
and ending with a culmination of atrocities at which the
world, as it comes to know them, will stand aghast.
When a man has once set out on a course of wrong, ever
so simple and slight, there are only two things open to him:
one is to repent, and change his course in season ; the other
is to succeed in it, and to go on " to the bitter end." The first,
as we know, is very hard for most men. It galls their pride.
It confutes their judgment. It upsets their plans. At the
moment, it is a cruel blow to their self-respect. And so nine
men out of ten, as we find them, will take the other road. No
doubt these men would have preferred to live and succeed,
without the painful need of committing any crime ; to keep
the mask on, without the painful discovery that they were
wearing any mask ; to maintain their proud place in the
world's eye as the representatives of modern chivalry, and
the chiefs of a new order of civilization. But, before all, they
must succeed in the course they had entered on ; succeed,
though it should entail the utmost horrors of civil war, and
crimes worse by far than that in the world's conscience, if not
at the bar of God, — the crimes of robbery, conspiracy, house-
burning, and murder. We have no right to say how many
or how few are directly implicated in the worst of these
crimes. We only say, that the moral law is evident ; the
compulsion of that dreadful necessity which will compel men
even to such crimes as these, — average and ordinary men, —
when they are in a course where success has grown to a ne
cessity, and when affairs are getting desperate. ' They catch
blindly at such refuges as these, for the last gloomy chances
of success. They are like a crowd of men drowning together
in a river, when all skill, prudence, discipline, self-restraint is
gone ; and, in his blind, helpless struggle, a man shall drag
his best friend with him to destruction, or fight for the chances
of safety with a woman or a child. But it required the crime
to show the nature of the struggle, and the nature of the men.
The necessity of it was contingently assumed, when they
took the first step which committed them to the alternative,
to destroy their country's Government, or to perish in the
attempt.
How easy it is to see with them the tangling of that fatal
net of circumstance, which wraps unawares those who have
set themselves wilfully against the laws of society and of
God ! The miserable sophistry, half wilful, half sincere, with
which a man persuades himself to crime by dwelling on the
motives that brought him to it, we have seen in the letter left
written by the assassin himself. He did the deed very delib
erately. Months, years, he dwelt on the details of it, to bring
it to a perfect issue. He took counsel on it ; he took pay for
it ; he hired his accomplices and abettors ; he left his written
testimony, on purpose to show how he persuaded himself that
he should be a hero of history, and the slayer of a tyrant.
But what is all that now ? The mask dropped from the mur
derer's face, when that pistol-shot was fired. More ; the mask
dropped from the murderer's heart. The crime stood revealed
in the astonishment and horror of the world. The criminal
became a fugitive and vagabond upon the earth. The retri
bution that fell has struck the imagination and religious sense
of our people with a certain awe. No man would venture to
add any further penalty to that doom. Tripped by the flag
he mocked with his lying words and his fatal deed ; dragging
himself with a broken bone to that ten days' ignominious and
torturing flight ; shot down at bay like a wild beast, and dying
a death of conscious and sharp agony ; buried in some un
known and unhonored grave, — here was a definite, swift, and
terrible retribution, to which human vengeance could have
added nothing. Those others, poor and cheap tools of a plot
they were never admitted to comprehend, — base instruments
of others' crime, — to them the killing of a man seemed a
small and easy thing, while it could be planned in secret, and
its parts assigned as the parts of some petty stage-play. It
was a very different thing when the deed was done ; when
the eye of the world's conscience was awake ; and when Jus
tice, " with feet of wool, and hands of iron," was tracking and
hunting them to their hiding-place. Poor fools I to them, or
to the conspirators who set them on, it seemed that the death
of this man and that man would be the confusion of the Gov
ernment, and the safe vengeance of the South. Fools, and
blind ! it needed only the stripping-off of that one more mask
from the false cause they served, to kill its last chances of a
sort of half success ; to lift the man they hated upon the ped
estal of a slain martyr in the cause of liberty, and give him
almost the glory of a saint.and hero in the heart of men; to
bring upon themselves the cursing and execration of all the
civilized world; to enthrone armed Justice in the place of
tender Pity ; to put in the place of power a man more keen
to know, and more stern to punish, than he whom they fool
ishly spoke of as an enemy and a tyrant; to make a great
nation as terrible in its roused sense of indignation, and its
demand of strictest penalty for crime, as it had been formida
ble and strong in defending itself from armed assault.
Meanwhile, we do not anticipate the action of the Govern
ment, or the verdict of the courts. The Administration, it is
said, is disinclined to hold any more military trials ; and the
proceedings thus far are little else than the accumulation of
the evidences of guilt. For the one great crime against the
nation's life, there seems little doubt that its penalty will be
left to the working-out of laws more deep and broad than any
statute, — laws written in the constitution of human life, and
built into the framework of human society, — laws which we
reverently call judgments of God, as we see them traced upon
the face of that desolated and impoverished land. Whatever
" satisfaction " we get for the blood of our brothers or chil
dren who perished as victims of that crime will be had not
from vengeance upon those who slew them, but from the tri
umph of the cause they died for. While, for other crimes,
not only against the State as such, but against humanity
itself, and every human code, the magistrate " bears not the
sword in vain;" and the long delay of justice is only, we
will trust, that its work may be more calm, deliberate, and
complete.
26*
294 Review of Current Literature. [Sept.
Art. IX. — REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.
THEOLOGY.
There is no class of religious writings which deserves to be treated
with more sincere sympathy and respect than those which, in spite of
sectarian cavils on one side, and the strong secularist drift of science
on the other, attempt to make Theism a positive creed, and a religion
of vital piety. In Miss Cobbe's little treatise of " Religious Duty,"*
we see something of the conscious effort to maintain a position ex
posed to hazard and attacks from the two opposite sides ; but, if we
mistake not, a good deal more of the genuine and fervent spirit of
piety itself, which the book is meant to teach. It would be hard, we
think, to bring passages from the most devout Christian writers,
which exceed in tender, unaffected, and cheerful piety some of the
chapters, — particularly those on " Thanksgiving," " Prayer," and
" Faith." Where it differs from the more familiar model of de
votional treatises is, first, in the vein of ethical argument, running
uuderneath, and perpetually appearing at the surface; secondly, in
the frequent and rich citations from the sacred writings of the ancient
and oriental, no less than of the Jewish and Christian, faiths ; and,
thirdly, in the polemic appeal to principles of physical or moral
science, as against errors and wrongs in the current opinions or
practices of Christian sects. So that we have a treatise of practical
})iety, very rich in suggestions, with a marked flavor of erudition,
cheerful and healthy in tone, optimistic even to sentimentalism in
doctrine, and in close harmony with the devoutest manuals of Christian
piety, while keeping, on purpose and by pains, wide aloof from the
traditionary forms of Christian argument and appeal.
With these qualifications, the volume occupies mainly the familiar
ground of religious ethics, and half of it might have been taken bodily
from sermons of average thought and style. We are, indeed, fore
warned, in the very divisions and titles of the chapters, that we are
invited to no bold and fresh speculations, but to meditations on trite
and hackneyed topics. The Religious Offences are blasphemy, apos
tasy, hypocrisy, perjury, sacrilege, persecution, atheism, pantheism,
polytheism, idolatry, demonology ; the Religious Faults are thank-
lessness, irreverence, prayerlessness, impenitence, scepticism, world-
liness ; the Religious Obligations are thanksgiving, adoration, prayer,
repentance, faith, self-consecration. And each of these topics is
treated, at various length, in the way of independent homiletic ex
hortation. We do not commend the literary style, which is frequently
vague, diffuse, and declamatory, to a degree only pardoned in works of
this class. But the spirit is altogether pure and noble. It reminds
us, more than any other one work, of the " Meditations " of Marcus
Aurelius. The aim is one which brings to a practical test perhaps
the most important spiritual problem of the present day ; namely,
how to develop " Theism as a religion for the life, no less than as a
* Religious Duty. By Frances Power Cobbe. Boston : Wm. V. Spencer.
>,
philosophy for the intellect." And, surely, no experiment is more

interesting, than that which seeks, in pure intuition, meditation, and
science, an effectual substitute for the grand religious traditions of
the past, and firm mooring amid the conflicting tendencies and
powerful " drift " of modern speculation.
How positive is Miss Cobbe's own faith iu the future of her philo
sophic and sentimental creed is seen when she speaks of " the mighty
fanes where, in future ages, the Theist nations shall adore their only
Lord" (p. 93). The force and clearness of her religious intuition
are shown in such sentences as this : " There is uo better proof of the
power and vitality of man's consciousness of immortality, than that
it has supported for ages such a solid mass of horrors as the doctrine
of eternal hell" (p. 121). The fineness of her moral perception ap
pears in the striking argument by which she contrasts the current
traditional doctrine of the future life with the truly spiritual con
ception of immortality (p. 125). In the long, passage of reasoning
against the use of prayer for physical good (pp. 168-182), we seem
to find a needless check on the simplicity and spontaneousness of the
heart's religious language : but this is required, perhaps, by the
strictness of her doctrine, that prayer for spiritual gifts is veritably
heard and answered ; while, in our philosophy of the matter, it is
doubtless true that " it invariably happens that prayer begins where
science stops, and that as science advances prayer retreats" (p. 172).
We copy, from near the close, a passage in which a profound truth is
touchingly and nobly expressed : — ,
" It was not when God's angel-thoughts were around him, and he took
freely his cup of agony from his Father's hand, that the Christ achieved his
everlasting crown. It was when the death-darkness mounted slowly up the
cross, lill heart and brain grew dim, and God's face was hid, and the cry
burst from his soul, ' Why hast thou forsaken me ? '
" And, in other and lesser martyrdoms than that of Calvary, it is equally
true, that the sacrifice lies in the slow completion of the self-abnegation, and
not in the first oblation. When the exile for conscience' sake stands on the
heaving deck, still beholding his loved ones waving their last farewell, and
feeling their tears yet warm upon his cheek, his sacrifice is but prepared.
When the long years of mind and heart solitude have stolen the vigor from
his brain, and filled with sickly longings the void in his affections ; when
the weary life is drawing to a lonely close, — then, if his soul be kneeling
still, laying willingly still its great gift upon the altar, then is his sacrifice
truly made to God. And thus, too, must be fulfilled all sacrifices, — freely,
cheerfully, to the end ; for it is in the perseverance that lies the sacrifice.
And herein, too, may live its joy and glory ! Ench moment that the soul
resists the temptation to regret, and renews in spirit its vow of sacrifice as
freely as at first, it actually accomplishes its act of virtue : it is marching for
ward in its path, and not merely, as it sometimes seems, standing still on the
barren rock whither a wave of resolution has borne it." — On Self Conse
cration, pp. 318, 319.
TnF. title of Mr. Merivale's volume* suggested the hope, that some
thing had been done to fill the gap — which the public have expected
* The Conversion of the Roman Empire. The Boyle Lectures for the year
1864, delivered at the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. By Charles Merivale. New
York : D. Appleton & Co.
and demanded should be filled — between the close of his great His
tory and the era of Constantine. Such a task, at any rate, seems
indispensable to be done by somebody ; and by whom so well ? In
default of it, we take up his volume of " Lectures " with something
of hope, and more of disappointment. From its slender bulk a good
deal must be deducted, for the apologetic and homiletic requirements
of his lectureship ; and of the remainder, there is barely enough to
give us a few glimpses and hints, where we want the clear outline, if
not the full detail, of a finished picture. What the book contributes
to our knowledge of the period it treats — the four hundred years
from Julius Caesar to Constantine—is, first, the independent judgment
of a man of letters, as well as churchman and apologist, reviewing the
facts from a position as broad and enlightened as his official character
will permit ; and, secondly, a series of very interesting groups of
testimonies, to illustrate the phases of Pagan thought with which the
early church militant had to deal.
In two or three instances, these illustrations are given in scenes, or
historical sketches, drawn with a good deal of force and skill. Such
is the parallel, in the first lecture, between the two most noteworthy
scenes that mark the beginning and end of the period under review,
— the trial of the accomplices of Catiline, in which Julius Caesar
made, without rebuke, his striking declaration of utter disbelief in a
future life ; and the Council of Nicaea, also a great council of state,
presided over by the chief magistrate if the empire, and consulting
how to state the terms of a revelation which had so powerfully moved
men's minds by the reality of things unseen and spiritual. This
striking sketch, showing at one glance the immense space travelled
over by the human spirit in those centuries of struggle, is the finest
single achievement of the volume.
In the second lecture, a description is given, hardly inferior in
interest, of the ceremonial of lustration (detailed by Lucan), to ex
piate the impiety of Caesar's parricidal attack on Rome. This, with
the religious re-action, or revival, cherished by Augustus, is used to
illustrate what is one of the most valuable points in Mr. Merivale's
History, — the reality and power of a secular or state religion among
the Romans, having no reference to a future life of retribution, but
only to the edicts and judgments of the unseen powers respecting the
secular majesty of Rome. A religion how genuine and powerful few
suspect, unless with some such guidance as this they have made it a
matter of special study.
The third exposition made by Mr. Mcrivale — valuable in what it
gives, but much less detailed and complete than we should wish — is
of the development of Roman law, from its rude and harsh germ
into a system of breadth enough, and of abstract justice enough, to
serve as a " schoolmaster to bring men to Christ." This genuine ap
preciation of what was good in Pagan life and thought, so honorable
in him as an historian and critic, is further seen in his treatment of
the Roman moralists, — the " preachers " of the heathen world.
With a true and noble aspiration, but with a tone sad and des
ponding, they also did an important service to the ethical development
of Christianity. A corresponding service might be claimed, perhaps,
but it is less distinctly urged, for the " spiritualists " and mystics
of the later Pagan faith. That this phase of faith degenerated into
necromancy and pious frauds suggests its parallel in our day —
'which Mr. Merivale draws in a manner not flattering to the modern
counterpart. The closing lectures of the volume state the positive
elements brought by Christianity to the great war of the religions, —
its definite theological creed, and the moral power of the Christian
life. In this portion, the thought, in a good measure, is Neander's ;
and the illustration is neither complete nor original enough to add
much to what we had already. Indeed, the chief value which the
reader will find in reference to these matters consists in the citations
made from early writers, both Pagan and Christian, of which the
body of notes serves as a tolerably complete and very interesting
collection.
We have received from England a pamphlet, by Mr. P. W.
Newman,* containing more political wisdom than is often found in
the same number of pages. It embodies the results of the author's
long study of the institutions of his country, given in a few words,
not often with the evidences and the processes of reasoning which
have led to his conclusions, but with the general political principles
always stated in full which these conclusious illustrate. " These give
to his suggestions a high philosophical value. Almost every point
which he makes " is developed out of the single principle, that cen
tralization, and the bureaucracy which it nourishes, must' be severely
abated" (p. 30.) For this reason, the views presented here deserve
to be carefully studied in this country, where, as in all civilized
countries, centralization is at present a serious danger. In England,
however, the danger is of an individualizing centralization ; in the
United States, of a generalizing one. That is to say, in England, the
Parliament has swallowed up, or tends to swallow up, all local legis
lation, and is, consequently, overburdened with private bills, and
with matters which really concern only individual towns or counties :
our Congress, on the other hand, is disembarrassed of all such bur
dens as these, and has no inclination to meddle with the details of
State administration ; the temptatiou it is actually under is to under
take to lay down general rules which shall apply to all the States
without distinction, in matters in which the inherent differences in
the States would make it desirable to leave them free to adopt their
own course of action.
The central idea of the pamphlet, as we have already remarked, is
the menacing growth of centralization and bureaucracy.
" Centralization has come in from continental despotism, from the first
French Revolutionists, and largely from the writings of Bentham, as I under
stand. Bureaucracy has been ever on the increase through the enormous
extent of the empire, and the immensity of power devolving on the ministry
* English Institutions, and their most necessary Reforms. A Contribution of

Thought, by Francis W. Newman, late Professor in University College, London.
London : Trubner & Co., 60, Paternoster Row. 1865. 8vo. pp. 32.
of the dav; while Parliament is too slow in learning facts to be any adequate
check. The House of Peers, as an order, has no interest in bureaucracy,
and none in centralization. Hence, without a shadow of paradox", and with
perfect straightforwardness, I maintain, that, from a true conservative point
of view, our nation has to retrace many wrong steps, and make many right
ones, quickly and boldly" (p. 4).
" The decay of English institutions, from the ascension of William in. to
the death of George III. was mainly due to the fact, that, during European
'war an English Parliament can ill attend to any thing else. Just so, parlia
mentary reform was abandoned, because Russian war came upon us. This
is an evidently defective and barbarous condition; and puts us into melan
choly contrast with the United States, in which no intensity of war lessens
the domestic energy of the State Governments " (p. 24).
" The task laid on the Commons House is at present too overwhelming.
Without new machinery, which shall relieve it of the present intolerable load,
no imaginable change in the mode of electing is likely to cure the evil.
One supreme legislature for 230 millions ! Englishmen who come out of
practical life, and have been deeply immersed in special and very limited oc
cupations, are to judge on private bills innumerable, and on the affairs of
people very unlike to us, and quite unknown to us ! In the United States,
for thirty-one millions of people, there are thirty-five independent local legis
latures, each having, on an average, less than a million ; while the Supreme
Congress is wholly disembarrassed of all local law, and regulates only a
defined number of topics which concern the entire homogeneous union"
(p. 13).
" In the last century and a half, while our papulation has been growing in
numbers, and our affairs in complexity, so far have we been from increasing
and developing our organization, that we have destroyed or spoiled the
organs which existed. The Parliaments of Ireland and Scotland have been
annihilated (one by flagrant, the other by suspected, bribery), and the power
and status of our municipalities and our county organization have been
gravely lowered " (ib.).
Of more practical importance to us are the remarks upon the ex
tension of the franchise : —
" Of what reforms do we now hear talk ? Prominently and solely of
extended suffrage and the ballot. Let me grant to a radical that each of
these may have its value — the ballot for its mechanical convenience, and
as a temporary engine to save a limited class from intimidation. Yet, unless
these are mere steps towards after-reforms, they will leave Parliament over
worked and helpless, the bureaucracy as despotic as ever, India disloyal, the
House of Lords as obstructive as ever to all religious freedom" (p. 11).
" The course which Whig-radical reform has hitherto taken has greatly
frightened many reasonable conservatives. I maintain, that it ought also to
displease, if not alarm, all sincere and reasonable radicals, because it tends
to bring us to the French goal, not to the American goal. With a central
authority preponderating so onormously over our local ; a Parliament, by
the side of which every Municipality is a pigmy ; a ministry, wielding an
executive so vast, while our Mayors and Lord Mayors have sunk into pag
eants, — every step of change which merely extends the parliament ary franchise
is a step towards a system in which it is decided by universal suffrage once
in seven years, what oligarchy shall be our despotic rulers " (p. 5).
" That persons may be ' elevated ' by possessing the suffrage, they must be
able to meet, and discuss, and form definite opinions " (p. 26).
A truth which our reformers are apt to overlook. Another im
portant principle, illustrated in the mode of election of our President
and Senators, is contained in the following extract : —
"The French Reformers in the last century, who first in Europe conceived
generous and noble ideas of popular power, were aware that nothing but
confusion could come of universal suffrage acting directly on a central
system, in a populous nation. They devised the system of double election ;
and, in my belief, were fundamentally right. But, on a sound foundation,
they built unsoundly. The bodies which thus elect ought not to exist merely
for the sake of electing. They should elect,*because they are a substantive
power, trusted for other high duties, and, therefore, trustworthy for this func
tion also" (p. 27).
We will not discuss at length all the criticisms and propositions
made by Mr. Newman, but only the two or three that are of most
general interest. One is especially struck with the avowal, by per
haps the most democratic writer in England, of a desire to strengthen
the genuinely aristocratic element of the State, and to elevate the
character and increase the power of the House of Peers, making it
very much such a body as some wished that our Senate should be, —
chosen for life, and still endowed with its present high functions.
For the creation of Life Peers he would invite the recommendation
of the House of Commons (p. 21). To the House, thus constituted,
he would give " supreme control over Foreign Affairs " (p. 21) ; and
every appointment to office should be made " by the consent of the
House of Peers" (p. 22). "To a reformed House of Peers the
warmest lovers of liberty among us would shortly rally. A popular
movement can only dictate principles, such as are these : let us have
true aristocracy, not bureaucracy ; let us have political vitality
everywhere, restricting centralization to its true functions ; let every
class be represented in the Legislature, and be admissible into the
Executive" (p. 31). Always classes, as with all English writers.
The priaciple, however, advanced by Mr. Mill, and analogous to this
suggestion of Mr. Newman's, of a Life-Senate, composed of states
men, who have gained the confidence of the people, is worthy of
consideration.
In order to re-establish the practice of local legislation, Mr. New
man maintains " that Ireland ought to be divided into four Provinces,
England into (perhaps) six, Scotland into two ; Wales would remain
" the Principality : " hence, might be thirteen Provincial Councils,
with free power of local taxation and local legislation, subject only to
a veto from Parliament, which, in most cases, would gradually become
a formality " (p. 23). Not having Mr. Newman's intimate acquaint
ance with English affairs, we regret much that he did not have the
space to enter into details upon this point, and give us his reasons for
not employing the historical institution of Counties (the Provinces, of
course, in Ireland) for this purpose. The counties would certainly
be amply competent to perform all the local legislation, and the
advantage of employing actual divisions, with historical associations,
and some degree of present independence, is very manifest. It is
only when it should come to being represented in the imperial Parlia
ment that any difficulty would arise ; and it strikes us that it would
be better to meet this difficulty in some other way, than to establish
these purely arbitrary provinces, merely for the reason that they
could more easily be represented equally. We would remark also,
and with more confidence, that the possession of a veto upon provincial
legislation leaves the door open for quite as much centralization as
exists now. It was proposed in our constitutional convention, and
most fortunately rejected. The true principle is that adopted in our
federal government, of a sharp division of sphere between the two
governments, but absolute and complete sovereignty of each within
its sphere.
The above are the topics of reform which are of most general
interest. Hardly less so is "the perilous splendor of India." To
avert danger in which quarter, Mr. Newman makes two propositions :
" 1. The establishment of an Imperial Court in India, to judge all
causes between the Queen's Government and the Princes" (p. 18) ;
secondly, a measure which " was solemnly guaranteed to India by
Lord Grey's ministry in Parliament, and by the Parliamentary
Charter of 1833 ; " viz., " That to every office, high or low, except
that of Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief, native Indians
should be admissible on equal terms with British-born subjects"
(p. 19). This promise is kept at present by the system of com
petitive examinations, which forces the Indians to come to England
to be examined ! Again : —
" The pernicious system of centralization, which makes French legal
liberty impossible, and has gravely damaged England, in India has run riot
without control. When the East India Company overthrew local treasuries
in India, and put into their central exchequer at Calcutta the tolls of roads
and ferries of the most remote south, they perpetrated a deed which doomed
their rule to be a blight upon the land, even if the virtue of their lowest
servants had been on a par with the best. We know, by positive official
statement, that, in consequence of this diversion of moneys from their local
purpose, the roads of whole kingdoms became overgrown, and so lost that
their old course was matter for official inquiry. This hideous blunder re
mains unreversed. India has no local treasuries. Every coin in every
province is liable to be spent in some war against Nepaul, Afghanistan, or
Thibet. War is made with the very lifeblood of material prosperity : road3
and bridges, canals and tanks, cannot be repaired during war, while their
funds are mixed with the war funds " (p. 29).
Other points, discussed in this pamphlet with less fulness, but
always ably and instructively, are the state of Ireland, of the Estab
lished Churches, and of the Peasantry, the reform of the Mutiny
Bill, and the neutralization of merchant vessels in time of war. Upon
Lord Russell he throws the blame of the defeat of the last-named
measure, which was proposed by the American Government, and
received favorably by Lord Palmerston. The defective character of
the Mutiny Bill he considers the cause of many of the unjust wars
into which the nation is plunged by petty governors and commanders.
The other three points are of vital importance, but do not require
from him so full treatment.
*„* A portion of the Review of Current Literature, together with the List of Recent
Publications, is reservedfor November.
THE
CHRISTIAN EXAMINER.
NOVEMBER, 1865.
Art. I. — MILL'S REVIEW OF HAMILTON.
An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, and of the

principal Philosophical Questions discussed in his Writings. By
John Stuabt Mill. 2 vols. Boston : W. V. Spencer.
The personal qualities of John Stuart Mill, as a man deeply

interested in every work of social reform, and in every cause
which concerns his fellow-creatures, have lately brought him
into such wide and distinguished notice, that even his illus
trious fame as a thinker on the profoundest problems in
metaphysics seems to be, for a time, eclipsed. The man is
cordially admired by people who were ignorant enough to sup
pose him the author of Miss Evans's novel, " Mill on the Floss."
Loyal Americans speak of him as the " Great Englishman,"
— why great, they know not, except that he liked them, —
who stoutly maintained their cause throughout the war, as
many another Englishman did ; and who loved the cause bet
ter than they did themselves, because he understood it better.
Such a combination of man's practical sympathy with subtile
metaphysical speculation is exceedingly rare.
It is the more rare, when, as in Mr. Mill's case, the specula
tive talent is in excess of the practical. We consider him to
be pre-eminently a thinker on abstract problems. In his can
vass for Parliament, he opened himself to the criticism of the
short-sighted even, by his singular notion that no one should
vol. lxxix. — 6th s. vol. xvii. ho. m. 26
302 MilVs Review of Hamilton. [Nov.
be allowed to vote who could not work out a sum in the " rule
of three." But his must be a very keen eye that can detect
a fallacy in his logic, or a flaw in the texture of his mental
philosophy. The most difficult themes he handles with the
ease of a master. So full is his consciousness of power, and
so competent his knowledge, that he dares to walk without the
least disguise or affectation over that domain, the frequenters
whereof play the chameleon on principle. He writes on phi
losophical questions like a man of business ; gets as near as he
can to the naked thought ; presses the thought close against
fact ; uses the simplest words, and believes in the possibility
of reaching the bottom of things by the honest use of reason.
For this cause, his writings, however abstruse and profound,
are always interesting.
The volumes before us contain scarcely more than a series
of notes on the philosophical points discussed in the writings
of Sir William Hamilton, and of criticisms on his mode of
treating them. They do not constitute a philosophical work :
but are more like studies for such a work, which we hope,
and are almost tempted to predict, that the author has in
contemplation. For Mr. Mill thinks on long lines ; the action
of his mind is systematic, continuous, exhaustive. It is
not his way to leave questions half-answered ; and we shall
decline to receive this collection of " Remarks," as even so
much as the outline sketch of a system of philosophy. We
regard them as intended to do a work which is incidental to
the statement of a new system ; the work, namely, of prepar
ing the ground by the removal of rubbish. His business here
is the summary exposure and radical extermination of falla
cies ; and the work is done effectually, once and for all time.
Mr. Mill takes up Sir William Hamilton, not because he is
weak, but because he is strong ; because he is the strongest
man whose name is associated with the views he writes to
pass judgment on. The philosophy appears in him at its best.
Mr. Mill prefers, therefore, assailing it under the statement
made by Sir William, than under any statement that he could
make himself; his only regret being, that Sir William, being
dead, cannot meet his objections, or give him the benefit
1865.] Mill's Review of Hamilton. 303
of his criticisms in return. How Sir William would have met

this terrible opponent, we never shall know. To us, it seems
as if encounter would be useless. Not only are we sensible
of something like mortification, in that we esteemed Sir Wil
liam so great a philosopher : we find ourselves doubting if he
was a philosopher at all, in the noble sense of the word.
We did fancy, before reading this book, that we had a tole
rably accurate idea of the Hamiltonian Philosophy. Its grand
features, at least, were sufficiently familiar. We were acquaint
ed with its founder's famous critique on Cousin, wherein he
laid assault to the very citadel of the philosophy of the abso
lute and infinite ; and we had had for years on our shelf his
edition of Reid, with notes and dissertations, wherein, accept
ing substantially the basis of the system of " common sense,"
he attempted to rear an edifice thereupon, more consistent and
complete than the Scotchman was able to construct. We had
considered ourselves well grounded in his " great axiom," that
all our human knowledge is of things relative and phenome
nal ; that of things as existing in and for themselves, without
relation to us or our faculties, — of things absolute, — we know
and can know nothing ; be they external, be they internal, be
they material, intellectual, or spiritual ; the existence of them
being purely an inference from such appearances as our facul
ties can take cognizance of. With the Hamiltonian doctrine
of " The Conditioned," which imports that all we can posi
tively think lies between two opposite poles of thought, which,
as excluding each other, cannot both be true, but of which
one or the other must be, we believed ourselves acquainted.
Mr. Mansel, Sir William's eager disciple, made these two
dogmas of the Relative and the Conditioned somewhat noto
rious by his Essay on " The Limits of Religious Thought."
We had associated the name of Sir William Hamilton with the
opinion that Consciousness is the recognition, by the mind, of
its own acts and affections, and of nothing beside, whether
in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, or in the waters
tinder the earth ; whether things past, present, or to come ;
material or spiritual. We had held him responsible for a pecu
liar theory of Causation which implied that the very idea of
304 Mill's Review of Hamilton. [Not.
Causation was inconceivable ; and for a vigorous defence of the

belief in Free Will, grounded in his philosophy of the Condi
tioned.
But, from these volumes, it appears that we have all along
been ascribing opinions to Sir William which he never con
sistently held. It appears that he either never held, or that
he after a time ceased to hold, the famous doctrine of the
Relativity of Human Knowledge; inasmuch as, while em
phatically asserting it in some passages, in others " he
repudiated it in every sense which makes it other than a
barren truism."
It appears that he takes back in detail what he has affirmed
in general, and reposes arguments on bases which he himself
discarded when stating and arguing his Philosophy of the
Conditioned. It appears that he taught two different, incon
sistent, and opposite doctrines of Consciousness ; one, that it
is synonymous with immediate or intuitive knowledge, and
that we are conscious not merely of our own state of mind,
but of outward objects ; not merely of sensations, but of cer
tain qualities in things; — another, that Consciousness is
simply the mind's recognition of its own acts and feelings.
In respect to Causation, it appears that, while he professes to
explain the phenomenon of Causality, he begins by emptying
the phenomenon of all that requires explanation : and, while
defending the doctrine of Free Will, he " as is often the case
(and it is one of the best things he does) saves his opponents
the trouble of answering his friends."
Mr. Mill brings terrible charges against the great philoso
pher. He accuses him of being rather a polemic than a con
nected thinker ; a man who, " if he can only seize on some
thing which will strike a hard blow at an opponent, seldom
troubles himself how much of his own edifice may be knocked
down by the shock." He alleges of him, that he rejected
doctrines, not because he had examined them and found them
wanting, but without examining them ; that " the character
of his whole Philosophy seems to have been determined by
the requirements of the doctrine of Free Will ; to which doc
trine he clung, because he had persuaded himself that it
1865.] . Mill's Review of Hamilton. 305
afforded the only premises from which human reason could

deduce the doctrines of Natural Religion."—" Instead of hav
ing reasoned out a consistent scheme of thought," says his
critic, " of which every part fits in with the other parts, he
seems to have explored the deeper regions of the mind only
at the points which had some direct connection with the con
clusions he had adopted on a few special questions of Philos
ophy ; and from his different explorations he occasionally
brought back different results."
Mr. Mill even has the audacity to dispute Sir William's claim
to omniscience. He dares to say that he knows little or
nothing of Science ; that he is wholly unacquainted with Ap
plied Mathematics, not understanding so much as the mean
ing of the phrase ; and that he makes serious mistakes in the
department of knowledge with which he is most familiar,
namely, the History of Philosophical Speculation. These
charges are not merely advanced : they are substantiated by
abundant quotations. It will be long before Sir William's
reputation recovers from the blow dealt upon it by his great
countryman, if it ever does.
But Mr. Mill is not striving for victory over an opponent,
however famous. He is striving for the truth. He would
not have laid a finger on Hamilton's renown, if his renown
had not been associated with doctrines which he believed to
be false, and the error of which he thought himself competent
to expose. And yet we must qualify this statement by say
ing, that his quarrel, after all, is not so directly with the
essential character and main drift of Hamilton's Philosophy,
as with Hamilton himself. He accepts heartily — of course,
with reservations on details of argument and statement —
the substance of Hamilton's critique on Cousin and the Tran-
scendentalists. He shares, also, with suitable reservations,
his admiration for Reid. The famous doctrine of the Rela
tivity of Knowledge he holds, under his own definition, to be
fundamental and precious. With some of Sir William's ex
pressions respecting Consciousness he cordially agrees. His
complaint is, that Sir William does not comprehend the scope,
or follow the leading, of his own essential principles.
26*
306 Mill's Review of Hamilton. ' [Nov.
Mr. Mill is a thinker of what is called in the modern speech

the Psychological School, to which belong also Prof. Bain of
Aberdeen, and Herbert Spencer. Under the old classification,
he would be called a Sensationalist as distinguished from a
Transcendentalist ; but Speculative Philosophy has made such
immense gains, during the past generation, in method as well
as in material, that the old nomenclature fails to do any thing
but misrepresent. The Transcendentalist Philosophy is the
main object of attack; and in these volumes he means to hunt
it out of its last refuge, and to kill its last spawn in the writ
ings of one of its foremost antagonists in this century. Its
citadel he supposes carried : he is concerned now to sweep
it out of the cellars. It is confessedly dead : in this work he
fumigates the garments of those who have aided in laying
out the corpse. Every chapter of these volumes throws a
light into some dark corner of Sir William's writings where
the heresy lurks, and makes the presence of it apparent.
The chapters on " The Doctrine of Concepts or General
Notions," on Judgment, on Reasoning, on the Conception of
Logic as a Science, on the Hamiltonian Theory of Pleasure
and Pain, on Sir William's Opinions on the Study of Mathe
matics, are loaded and aimed with the same deadly purpose
of assault on some ghost of Transcendentalism. It often
seems for a moment as if the remorseless critic was losing
scent of his trail and wandering aimlessly in some by-path,
attracted by the love of logical play with so accomplished a
dialectician ; but it is no such thing : he has scented the
odious doctrine on some button of Sir William's coat, and he
springs at it. The trail is taken up again, on the instant.
Though professedly a work of criticism, and not of expo
sition, the writer ventures enough of exposition to make the
leading features of his own system plain. In opposition to
Cousin, who states it as the problem of philosophy to ascer
tain just what Consciousness actually tells us, postponing any
attempt at framing a theory concerning the origin of any of
the facts of Consciousness, till the sum of them has been
carefully noted, Mr. Mill declares that " the origin of our
ideas " is the main stress of the problem of mental science,
1865.] Mitts Review of Hamilton. 307
and the subject which must be first considered in forming a

theory of the Mind. Being unable to examine the actual
contents of our Consciousness until our earliest, which are
necessarily our most firmly knit associations are fully formed,
we cannot study the original elements of mind, in the facts
of our present Consciousness.
" Those original elements can only come to light, as residual phe
nomena, by a previous study of the modes of generation of the mental
facts which are confessedly not original ; a study sufficiently thorough
to enable us to apply its results to the convictions, beliefs, or supposed
intuitions which seem to be original, and to determine whether some
of them may not have been generated by the same modes so early as
to have become inseparable from our consciousness before the time
at which memory commences."
This method of ascertaining the original elements of mind,
Mr. Mill calls the "psychological" as distinguished from the
purely " introspective " mode. It is an adaptation to psy
chology, of the method now universally approved in physical
science. Having full faith in his method, Mr. Mill firmly
believes that all difficulties will yield before it, and in vision
sees the intuitions of the mind one after another resolving
themselves into results of experience. The notion that the
mind possesses a native faculty, by means of which it has,
prior to all experience, an immediate perception of objects,
entities, or beings outside of itself, — an immediate insight into
truths, or direct knowledge of principles, — he discards with
a vigor which we have never seen equalled by any thinker,
not even by Mr. Spencer himself, in some of whose writings
a suspicion of the Intuitive Philosophy lingers. Simple acts
of consciousness, simple movements of thought, mental im
pressions, are all he allows that we know ; and these facts of
consciousness he contends were all acquired, and may all
perhaps be traced to their origin in experience. Mr. Mill is
perfectly right in declaring it superfluous for him to say, that
the doctrine that we have an immediate or intuitive knowl
edge of God, is, in his opinion, " bad metaphysics, involving
a false conception of the nature and limits of the human
Acuities, and grounded on a superficial and erroneous psy
chology." Of course whatever relates to God he holds to

be matter of inference, and of inference based on experience.
The idea of God may be an established possession of the
human mind. We may have had it from the earliest dawn of
our conscious thinking ; the mind, on coming to consciousness,
may find it implanted as by some supernatural hand, or exist
ing as part of its organic formation ; there may be a necessity
of entertaining it which cannot be overcome. Nevertheless
the idea may have been acquired, not by the individual who
holds it now, not by the individuals immediately preceding
him in time, not by the individuals of a century or more
back, — but by the all but infinite series and groups of indi
viduals who, since man came upon the planet, have been
impressed by the order in which the successions of phe
nomena appeared, and by the marks of intelligence which
characterized their processions and changes. These observa
tions have been so constant and multitudinous ; the inferences
from them have been so steady, rapid, and cumulative, —
that the processes by which the belief in God is attained, go
on instinctively, and in fact are fore-ordained for every clear
intelligence.
The idea of immortality, which Mr. Parker thought was
arrived at intuitively, or rather was not arrived at at all, but
discovered as a primeval deposit in the mind, is by Mr. Mill
traced to the same origin. It is not a fact of consciousness,
in the sense of being a native element of consciousness, un-
derived and original. It is a fact of consciousness certainly,
though not strictly a universal one or a necessary one. In
many minds it is wanting; in other minds it dwells as a
thing that might be put away. In others, again, it is retained
by an effort. It is a fact of consciousness: but it has not
always been a fact of consciousness. There is nothing in Mr.
Mill's system that is inconsistent with a firm belief in indi
vidual immortality. There is no tendency in his system, if
we understand it, to weaken the belief in any mind. The
Philosophy takes the belief as it finds it: but, in accounting
for its presence, he would go far back to the multifarious ex
perience of mankind, by which the human mind and heart
have been educated in that special assurance and hope.
1865.] MilFs Review of Hamilton. 309
The same ground, no other and no further, would he

allow for the moral distinction between right and wrong, and
for the moral conviction in favor of the right. No one could
go further than he in maintaining the validity of the dis
tinction ; no one could lay a greater stress on the conviction
as being one of the ineradicable persuasions of the enlightened
and even of the unenlightened mind. He would probably
acknowledge, as at present existing in mankind, in so far as
they have been in concurrence with the general life of
humanity, a moral instinct, a moral sense, which has an imme
diate perception of rectitude as contrasted with iniquity.
But this moral sense, though an inalienable possession dating
back from time immemorial, is to be counted as an inheritance
earned by love and hard experience in living, bought by the
toil and suffering, the success and the failure, of uncounted
generations of men who have been walking over bridges of
swords from earth to paradise, till long practice has made
them wary and skilful in the planting of their feet. The
Golden Rule, he might say, was not picked up by one walk
ing heedlessly over the field of consciousness; nor was it
fashioned by a single blow of genius. It has been heated in
the fires of human sorrow and temptation thrust into the
furnace of affliction, and taken out of it millions and millions
of times. Every race has had it on its anvil under its trip
hammer. Its strength had been tried in every mode that
was conceivable, in every emergency which could possibly
come in the public or private, the social or the personal, re
lations of men. The nations of the East used it in the mea
surement of actions. The Chinese laid it against characters,
and tried them by its standard. The Greeks were familiar
with it, and by their fine manipulation wrought it into finished
and beautiful shape. Jesus found it on the ground, took it
up, experimented with it, applied it to all the occasions that
arose in his career, leaned on it and found it did not break
or bend, gauged by it and found it never came short, and
passed it on. We never ask now where it came from. We
accept it without question. Everybody has it, we say ;
everybody has had it, from the beginning of the world : it
310 Mill's Review of Hamilton. [Nov.
is an innate principle of conscience. That, replies Mr. Mill,

is not so certain. Nothing is to be accepted as an innate
principle that can be accounted for in another way. This
can be.
No original, native, underived knowledge of things, beings,
truths, outside of our own minds ; no revelation by conscious
ness of an objective world, — this we take to be the watch
word of the psychological school. Matter, defined by Mr.
Mill, is simply " a Permanent Possibility of Sensation."
" If I am asked, he says, whether I believe in Matter, I ask whether
the questioner accepts this definition of it. If he does, I believe in
Matter ; and so do all Berkeleians. In any other sense than this, I
do not. But I affirm with confidence, that this conception of Matter
includes the whole meaning attached to it by the common world,
apart from philosophical, and sometimes from theological theories.
The reliance of mankind on the real existence of visible and tangible
objects means reliance on the reality and permanence of possibilities
of visual and tactual sensations when no such sensations are actually
experienced."
Dr. Johnson's famous knock-down argument, the demon
stration of the cudgel, hurts nobody but himself. We are
not called on to deny our sensations, because we deny all
immediate knowledge of the substance composing the stick.
The conscious feeling is the same, whether the wood be a
solid entity or only a projection from the mind.
We have no space for a description of the mental laws
under which the conception of an external world grew up.
We cannot even do justice to the analysis by which the
primary qualities of matter — specified as Resistance, Exten
sion, and Figure — are resolved into sensations which are
referable at last, to the sense of touch, and to the muscles,
acting in obedience to the law of inseparable association. A
long passage is quoted from Professor Bain's work, " The
Senses and the Intellect," as presenting, in its latest and most
improved form, the argument which traces the perception of
the mathematical and mechanical properties of matter to the
muscular sensibility alone. The argument is ingenious, but
not too ingenious to be satisfactory. We give iu to the
1865.] Mill's Review 0/ Hamilton. 311
belief, that the space moved through by the foot in pacing

may be appreciated solely through the muscles of the limb,
as well as by the movements of the touching hand or the
seeing eye ; that the body's own movements, in empty space,
would suffice to make the same impressions on the mind as
the movements excited by outward objects ; that the notion
of length in space is constructed by the mind's laws out of
the notion of length in time ; and that the notion of extended
body is that of various resisting points, which successively
come under the touch, and which are said to be at different
distances from one another, because the series of intervening
muscular sensations is longer in some cases than in others.
Sir William Hamilton unwittingly confirms this explanation,
which elsewhere he pronounces wholly unsatisfactory, by
quoting the experience of a man born blind, as drawn from
him by the metaphysician Platner. The truth elicited seemed
to be, that, with the blind, time served instead of space.
" Vicinity and distance mean, in their mouths, nothing more
than the longer or shorter time, the smaller or greater
number of feelings which they find necessary to attain from
some one feeling to another." — "In like manner he distin
guished figures in external bodies merely by the varieties of
impressed feelings : the cube, for example, affected his feel
ings differently from the sphere." The theory, in a word, is
this: "The sensation of muscular motion unimpeded, con
stitutes our notion of empty space ; and the sensation of
muscular motion impeded, constitutes that of filled space."
It is a theory, which when fully exhibited meets the demands
of the problem, without recourse to the intuitions. It sub
stitutes, for " Categories of the Mind," mental representa
tions caused by impressions on the sense.
The same process of reasoning which begets the conviction
that consciousness gives no evidence of the existence of an
outward world of Matter, begets the conviction that con
sciousness gives no evidence of an inward world of Mind.
Of Mind itself we know nothing; only of a succession of
manifold feelings which are called States or Modifications of
Mind. It is, indeed, true that we think of Mind as of some
312 Mill's Review of Hamilton. [Not.
thing permanent, remaining always the same, while the special

feelings which seem to " pass over it," or " pass through it,"
change and disappear. But is there good reason for thinking,
that this attribute of permanence, which we ascribe to Mind,
differs in any essential respect from the attribute of perma
nence which we ascribe to Matter? and may not the explana
tion given of the origin of the one suffice to account for the
origin of the other? And is the belief that the Mind exists,
when it neither thinks nor feels, nor is conscious of its exist
ence, any thing more than a belief in the permanent possi
bility of these states? What hinders us, then, from thinking
of Mind, simply as the series of actually occurring sensations,
with the addition of an indefinite possibility of feelings, under
conditions which are always in existence and which may
combine. To this statement, that Mind, the mind of any
individual, is but a series of feelings, or thread of conscious
ness, woven by the laws of association, and infinitely drawn
out by the Mind's expectation of new feelings occurring in
some under-stated and constant conditions, — to this state
ment that Mind is not an entity of which we have immediate
knowledge, it is no objection that, if true, it would blot other
sentient creatures from existence, leaving each man a solitary
Ego shut up in the loneliness of his interior sensations. May
not their minds be series of feelings too ? They have bodies
intimately associated with feelings such as ours. They make
a multitude of outward signs such as we know to be caused
by feelings. The inference is necessary that they are indi
viduals such as we are. The proof is as good under this
theory as under any Realistic theory that may be entertained.
The argumentum bacidinum, the demonstration of the stick,
is as futile in defence of the mental entity as of the material.
Why should not the existence of God be as susceptible ot
proof on this theory, as on any other ? What is the Divine
Mind to our thought, but the series of divine thoughts and
feelings enduring through eternity? Arguments for the
existence of God remain unaffected, even in their terms.
From the relation which human works bear to human thoughts
and feelings, men commonly infer that a corresponding rela
1 865 . ] Mill's Review of Hamilton. 313
tion exists between the vastly greater works of the universe

and the thoughts and feelings of a Creative Mind. The
psychologist does the same thing precisely. No man sees
God. All men reason from mental states of their own to
another's mental states. The world, as a permanent possi
bility of inducing sensations, is as full of order, constancy,
design, harmony, beauty, as if it were a solid substance. The
Mind, as a permanent capacity of experiencing sensations, is
as competent to carry on logical processes as if it were a
spiritual essence. The theory does not in the least affect the
persuasions or the principles on which we act in practical
life.
It is as easy to believe in immortality on this theory as on
the commonly accepted one. Why not? May not the expect
ation, that states of feeling will continue to succeed each
other, which is the basis of the idea of permanence, be pro
longed indefinitely, and even eternally ? The conditions must
be imagined at any rate ; but the laws of association make it
not difficult to imagine them. And thus every argument for
immortality, except the very poor one of the assumed inperish-
ableness of a spiritual substance, remains in full force.
We are conscious, then, neither of Matter nor of Mind, as
substances : we have no immediate knowledge of the essential
constitution of either ; nor have we good ground for supposing,
that either has a being in and of itself apart from a certain
series of phenomena. This seems like going pretty far ; but
it brings us only to the threshold of the inquiry. We must
probe deeper than this if we would reach the heart of the trans,
cendental theory. It is necessary to dispense entirely with the
resort to intuitions. It is necessary to expel from the mind
every vestige of the intuitional philosophy. No " innate
ideas," or " necessary truths," or " original beliefs," or axioms
existing independent of outward verification and antecedent
to outward experience, can be admitted. But is not the truth
that twice two make four such an axiom ? Is not the persua
sion that the same body cannot, at the same moment, be round
and square, or white and black, such a belief? Is not the
certainty that two straight lines cannot inclose a space, such
VOL. LXXIX. — OTH 8. VOL. XVII. HO. III. 27
a necessary truth ? Is not the notion that time and space are
endless, an instance of such an innate idea ? Mr. Mill boldly
says, " No." These truths are all acquired truths ; and it
would not be very difficult to analyze the process by which
they were acquired. An inseparable association compels us
to accept two and two as equivalent to four. We have never
met with an exception to the fact. It is presented to us at
almost every moment of our lives. Whenever we count, we
recognize it. It is before us in the sight of our four fingers.
The four corners of a book, or any square object, print it on the
retina. The observation of thousands of years has brought to
light no one instance in which two and two made five. But,
on the other hand, there is no difficulty in conceiving that an
equally inseparable association might have made us think of
two and two as equivalent to five. And does any one believe,
that a teacher who should gravely tell a class of boys and girls
that one and one made three, — two and two five, — three and
three seven, — four and four nine, and so on, would be straight
way rebuked by the scholars for such an affront put upon them,
and for such an insult offered to the necessary truths of the
human mind ? No one has ever seen a round square. It is
the uniform experience of mankind, that the instant a thing
begins to be round, it ceases to be square ; and the instant
it begins to be square, it ceases to be round. The one idea,
in experience, excludes the other. But does it of necessity
exclude the other in imagination? Would not a visit to
Hermann or Heller make us sufficiently familiar with the
phenomenon of two distinct sensations, as the product of one
object, to concede that any two incompatible attributes might
co-exist in the same body ? As for the impossibility of con
ceiving that two parallel lines should enclose a space, it may
easily, Mr. Mill thinks, be disposed of. Few persuasions are
more obviously acquired, and few could, we imagine, be more
easily overthrown. In fact, an intellectual effort is required to
hold the idea. " A world in which every object was round, with
the single exception of a straight, inaccessible railway, would
be a world in which every one would believe that two straight
lines enclosed a space." A simple man, who had never heard
the proposition stated as an axiom, and had never observed the

tendency of parallel lines, or thought particularly about them,
might, very possibly, standing on a railway, and seeing the
lines apparently converging in the distance behind and before,
conclude that they met further on. Reid in fact admits, that,
judging by the sense of sight alone, it would appear "that
every right line, if produced, might at last return to itself," and
that " any two right lines, being produced, would meet in two
points." He even adds, that persons thus constituted would
believe firmly, " that two and more bodies may exist in the
same place."
In the cases adduced, the origin of the truism may be
traced directly to the senses. The axioms are material ; they
cannot be detached from sensible objects, and we all know
how the senses may be fooled. Let us come, then, to a problem
of another order. We will take the sense of moral account
ability, which is generally by philosophers affirmed to be
" inborn," an ultimate fact of consciousness. Sir William
Hamilton takes his stand on this as an impregnable ground,
upon it plants the belief in moral freedom, and rears the edifice
of Natural Religion. Is this notion and feeling of responsi
bility a primeval part of the human constitution ? Mr. Mill
doubts it. The feeling, he says, is acquired, and acquired by
experience. For, in the last analysis, what is this sense of
responsibility? Is it any thing more than an assurance,
that, if one acts in this or that way, he will incur the risk of
punishment? When we say, We hold ourselves accountable,
do we not mean simply that we are willing to pay damages?
But this idea of penalty, as attached to conduct, may be
explained as the result of external experience. The feeling of
liability to punishment may be a feeling of expectancy or
of assurance that punishment will be inflicted by some power,
human or divine. But to account for this feeling of expect
ancy or assurance, we need institute no search beyond the
familiar education of life. Parents, pedagogues, play-mates,
8ocial custom, civil and criminal law, priests and preachers,
have inculcated that belief, and have left the mark of it very
visibly on our persons and our lot. It would be exceedingly
strange if the universal practice of punishment, from time

immemorial, had not begotten the universal expectation of it,
on every occasion of nonconformity with the ruling will,
whether human or divine.
But how shall we explain the feeling, equally universal and
equally instructive, that the penalty is deserved ; that the
punishment is just and ought to be inflicted? This, after all,
is the main point. The moral problem hinges on this. But
why, asks Mr. Mill, may not this too be explained in the same
way? Why should not the constant and universal fact of
punishment be sufficient to beget the persuasion that it is
deserved ? What multitudes of people are oppressed, even to
agony, by the sense of guilt, where no guilt does, or can be
supposed to, exist ! The perpetual preaching of the doctrine
of future retribution and the everlasting misery of all, save
the very small number of the " elect," has made thousands
of the sweetest and saintliest people imagine themselves to
be totally depraved, and justly amenable to the consuming
anger of God. The fatalism of the Turks and of a large
portion of Christians takes away the whole logical ground of
demerit, makes the sense of moral guilt utterly irrational ; but
it does not practically remove either the anticipation of punish
ment in the next life, or the conviction that the punishment
will be deserved. The steady proclamation of doom compels
the moral assent to it. Another fact equally remarkable lends
its force to this illustration. The sense of moral demerit does
not exist, where the liability to punishment does not exist, even
where guilt has been atrocious in character and enormity.
The oriental despot perpetrates crimes of gigantic proportions
openly, in face of all the world ; but, being actually account
able to no one who has power to make him suffer, he has no
anticipation of punishment, and little, if any, consciousness of
guilt. The member of a privileged caste, supposed to be
heaven-appointed and favored, has no feeling of moral demerit
in view of wrongs and inhumanities inflicted on members of
the caste below him. Does the slaveholder feel that he
deserves punishment for burning or whipping to death his
slave ? Is Jefferson Davis or Robert Lee, or any other leader
1865.] MilFs Review of Hamilton. 317
in the Southern Confederacy, at all pricked in conscience by

the moral turpitude he displayed, the lying, stealing, perjuring)
he committed, at the beginning of the war; or by the hideous
barbarities with which he allowed it to be carried on ? Not at
all. Who was there to punish him? To whom had he ever
owned himself accountable ? The poor slave, who had been
educated to expect fifty lashes if he failed to black his master's
boots, no doubt had been drilled into the belief that he
deserved the flogging. But the master, who had never been
flogged for rape or murder, will not confess to a consciousness
of feeling unworthy of heaven. And yet these same persons
feel morally accountable to their peers, and will acknowledge
themselves deserving of severe censure, if they have violated
a rule of etiquette which the chivalry have established. The
sense of accountability arises whenever one incurs the dislike,
and forfeits the good-will and kindly offices, of those who can
make him suffer for his conduct. We accordingly find that it
is governed by no internal law, but varies in intensity and in
direction with the social position and the personal relations of
the individual or the class.
Sir William Hamilton makes moral freedom an inference
from the fact of responsibility, which is attested by conscious
ness ; the testimony of consciousness being far more direct
on this last point than on the first. But, if the sense of moral
responsibility is acquired, the belief in moral freedom, as a
primary belief, falls to the ground. It is more usual to assert
that man is conscious of moral freedom, and to make the sense
of moral accountability follow from that as a logical inference.
But Mr. Mill declares, and we think justly, that there is no such
consciousness of moral freedom as has been claimed. No one
can be conscious, before having decided, of a power to decide
in one or in another way. " Consciousness tells me what I do
or feel ; but what I am able to do is not a matter of conscious
ness. Consciousness is not prophetic. We never know that
we are able to do a thing, except from having done it or some
thing equal or similar to it." But, in every decision, are we
not conscious that we might have decided the other way?
Yes : we are conscious that we might have decided the other
27*
318 MilFs Review of Hamilton. [Nov.
way, if we had chosen to ; but we are not conscious that we

could have chosen otherwise, while we decided as we did. We
are not conscious that we might have chosen any thing, and
preferred an opposite thing. " We are not conscious of being
able to act in opposition to the strongest present desire or
aversion." — "When we think of ourselves as having acted
otherwise than we did, we always suppose a difference in the
antecedents ; we picture ourselves as having known something
that we did not know, or not known something that we did
know, which is a difference in the external motives ; or as
having desired something, or disliked something, more or less
than we did, which is a difference in the internal motives."
Thus consciousness no more testifies to moral freedom than
experience does. Experience proves that men exercise voli
tions in obedience to the strongest motives. Consciousness
bears witness to the fact that we are free to yield to the
strongest motive, and that we are not at liberty to yield to
the weakest. The motive that seems to impel us towards the
greatest satisfaction always carries it over the motive that is
loaded with the smallest.
But is not a doctrine like this fatal to human improvability ?
Not in the least, answers Mr. Mill. It is more conducive to
human improvability than any other. That a man's will is at
the mercy of the motive which promises the most satisfac
tion, or that menaces the most pain, instead of being dis
couraging to human virtue, is directly encouraging to it.
If the will is supposed capable of acting in opposition to the
motives that would naturally be the strongest, what hold
can education, correction, discipline, have on it? We reward
and punish people on the express ground, that their will is
determined by interior or exterior sensations. By causing
such sensations, motives are brought to bear. The theory of
Freedom is inconsistent with the justice of inflicting penalties
for ill conduct, not the theory of Necessity. Mr. Mill is a firm
believer in the moral education of mankind, in the ability to
train the will, to weaken and eradicate such desires or aver
sions as are likeliest to lead to evil, to cultivate and intensify
such desires or aversions as are likeliest to lead to good. He
I860.] MilVt Review of Hamilton. 319
is a Causationist. He holds that not only conduct but char

acter is, in a measure under control of will ; that, by employ
ment of the suitable means, character may be improved;
that if our character, such as it is, compels us to do wrong,
motives may justly be applied which will compel us to move
in the opposite direction. We shall not apply the motives
ourselves unless we can make the idea of improvement
attractive, and can awaken a desire for it which shall over
come our repugnance to the means employed to bring it
about. But if the idea of improvement can be made attract
ive, and the desire for it strong, no assumed power of acting
in opposition to the strongest motive will stand in the way of
our moral endeavor.
Mr. Mill is a Causationist. He is not a Necessarian, and he
objects to the word Necessity as used in describing the opin
ions of those who disbelieve in the doctrine of moral freedom
as popularly understood. He disbelieves in the fatalism
which assumes that our actions do not depend on our desires
or volitions ; that an arbitrary power or an abstract destiny,
or a mysterious force of compulsion, overrules feeling, wish,
purpose, aspiration, thought, and compels us to act in a
certain predestined way, in spite of our loves and hatreds, and
our unavailing efforts to cultivate the one or to repress the
other.
He disbelieves, too, in the theory which holds that the
fundamental elements of character, being bequeathed to us
by ancestry or forced on us by the circumstances of training
and example before our consciousness was developed, must
remain fixed and unalterable; so that — whatever apparent
freedom of motion may appear on the surface of existence ;
though will determines conduct, and desire determines will,
and influences of many kinds, partly from interior dispositions
and partly from outward inducements, determine desire —
the determining causes that work as permanent powers, are
independent of all circumstance and influence, — are a fate
in the constitution of the person, making hope and struggle
alike impotent. Against this, which is perhaps the prevailing
form of the doctrine of Necessity, Mr. Mill enters his protest.
What causes may be he knows not. He knows nothing of

cause. Invariability of sequence he knows, but that is all.
To the common doctrine of the intuitive school, that the
internal consciousness of power, exerted by ourselves on
outward objects in our voluntary actions, gives us the notion
of cause, he replies with Hamilton, that " between the
overt act of corporeal movement of which we are cognizant,
and the internal act of mental determination of which we
are also cognizant, there intervene a numerous series of
intermediate agencies of which we know nothing ; and, con
sequently, that we can have no consciousness of any causal
connection between the extreme links of this chain, the voli
tion to move and the limb moving." Sir William illustrates
his point by the case of a paralytic, who, conscious of no
inability of his limb to fulfil the determination of his volition,
wills to move his arm. The muscles do not act in response
to the volition ; the arm hangs motionless. Experience, and
experience alone, teaches him that the external movement
does not in all cases follow the internal act. Is it not probable
that the man in health learns that his limbs do obey the man
date of his will precisely as the paralytic learns that they do
not ; namely, by experience ?
Mr. Mansel, acknowledging the validity of this reasoning,
still contends that our immediate intuition of power is given
us by the conscious ability of the mind to produce its own
volitions, not to produce bodily movements through its voli
tions. I form my resolutions, and it is the feeling of compe
tency to do so that gives me the sense of freedom and power.
The law of causality is reduced at last to this, and here its
seat is impregnable ; for, on this point, experience testifies
only in one way. To this, Mr. Mill makes reply by denying
the alleged fact. He declares himself wholly ignorant of hia
possessing such a power. If it exists, he is unconscious of
it. He can influence his volitions indirectly, by the employ
ment of appropriate means ; but directly he has no control
over them. He can cause his volitions to be appealed to,
stimulated, and moved ; but move them immediately without
the agency of conditions, he protests he cannot. No doubt,
he says, we naturally and necessarily form our first conception

of all the agencies in the universe from the analogy of our
human volitions. The obvious reason is, that nearly every
thing which is interesting to us comes, in earliest infancy,
either from our own voluntary motions, or from the voluntary
motions of others. And, among the few sequences of phe
nomena which at that time fall within the scope of our per
ceptions, scarcely any others afford us the spectacle of an
apparently absolute commencement; of one thing setting
others in motion, without being in motion itself. But in all
'this we have evidence of nothing more than experience
informs us of; and it informs us merely of immediate invari
able and unconditional sequence. True again it is, he admits,
that the idea of effort, as if to overcome an obstacle, always
enters into our notion of power, and is always associated
with our conception of will. But whence is this idea of
effort derived, if not from the actual resistance which our
volitions encounter, either from the outward world, or from
parts of the muscular organization? The idea of effort is
essentially a notion derived from the action of our muscles,
or from that combined with affections of our brain and
nerves. Every voluntary action is attended by the muscular
sensation of resistance ; and experiencing this, as we do,
whenever we voluntarily move an object, we, by a mere act
of natural generalization, the result of unconscious association,
on beholding the same object moved by the wind, for
example, conceive the wind as overcoming the same obstacle,
and as putting forth the same effort, that we do. The result
of the mind's volition and of the wind's movement is the
same, and it is long before the antecedents of the result come
to be distinguished. Something like a common cause is
naturally supposed and imagined. " An abstract entity "
is conjured up, and thrust between the antecedent and the
consequent, to explain the latter. This abstract entity, this
purely subjective notion, this product of generalization and
abstraction, acting on the real feelings of muscular or nervous
effort, is Power.
This "abstract metaphysical entity," Mill repudiates en
322 MiWs Review of Hamilton. [Nov.
tirely. He knows nothing of force, of will, of causing

energy ; he knows nothing, therefore, of compulsion of law,
of destiny, of fate. Invariable sequence he knows ; but that
is a very different thing from necessity. Invariable sequence
is entirely consistent with infinite possibilities of sensation ;
and infinite possibilities of sensation imply possibilities of
movement, change, growth, improvement, renewal. Man in
every part becomes pliant and movable. The very elements
of character are subject to modification, as sensations become
more complicated, and new orders arise in the conditions of
life. Mr. Mill, therefore, believes in institutions, in teaching
and preaching, in rewards and penalties, in social reforms, in
political revolution, in all practicable agencies for improving
the condition of mankind.
Such, hastily and scantily indicated in a few of its main
points, is the system entertained by Mr. Mill and his school
of thinkers. It is a system that gives sign of great influence
in the future. It is attractive from its simplicity, but more
than all, from its realism. It draws the attention away from
abstractions to facts; it encourages the cultivation of the
senses, and the faculties of observation ; it links the logical
processes to experimental truths, and associates pure specu
lation with knowledge.
It is not time yet to submit the system to judicial trial, for
its case has hardly been presented. These volumes give us
a few masterly studies on some points of detail, and some bold
sketches of leading features in the theory. Mr. Bain's cele
brated work, " The Senses and the Intellect," gives very large
and important contributions to the same general scheme of
philosophy. Herbert Spencer, more ambitious and audacious,
in a book written in the interest of the same general order of
speculation, " The Principles of Psychology," undertakes to
indicate the process by which the most rudimental, muscular
motions, manifested in the lowest form of organized life,
become developed through the continuous adjustment of
internal relations to external relations, into instinct, intelli
gence, memory, reason, feelings, and will. Mill and Spencer
would disagree no doubt on many points, and on many import
ant points. But we regard the general drift of their specu

lation as being the same. .
We wish, before closing our review, to say a very few
words about the religious aspect of the psychological theory.
The theory, on the face of it, does not pretend to deal with
actual religious beliefs, or with accepted theological ideas : it
merely bears on the origin of those as well as of all other
ideas. It certainly affects existing beliefs, and affects them
seriously, as is evident from the terrible earnestness with
which Mill assails Mansel's position, that no inference can be
drawn from the moral qualities of man to the moral qualities
of God. The passage is so noble and grand, so suggestive,
moreover, of the religious bearings of the theory, that we
cannot forbear quoting a portion of it.
" If, instead of the ' glad tidings ' that there exists a Being in
whom all the excellences which the highest human mind can conceive
exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world
is ruled by a Being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are
we cannot learn, nor what are the principles of his government,
except that the highest human morality which we are capable of
conceiving does not sanction them, — convince me of it, and I will
bear my fate as I may. But when I am told that I must believe
this, and at the same time call this Being by the names which express
and affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain terms, that I
will not. Whatever power such a Being may have over me, there
is one thing which he shall not do : he shall not compel me to wor
ship him. I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I
apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures ; and, if such a being can
sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go."
This is magnificent on the negative side. Mr. Mill will
believe in nothing that does not correspond with facts of
experience. But does he find any thing that does so corre
spond ? Does he claim to have any hold on the supersensual ?
He certainly does; for he believes in all the valid results of
" experience," understood in his large sense : he accepts the
intellectual, moral, and spiritual deposits of time and life,
when carefully analyzed and discriminated. We have already
seen that he admits the validity, on his principles, of the argu
ment from design. His theory allows as firm a basis as any

for belief in the immortality of the soul. The distinction
between good and evil he holds as clearly and rigorously as
any orthodox Christian ; and the justifiableness of rewards
and punishments he not only admits, but contends for. The
incidental beliefs that are affected by literary criticism,
beliefs affecting the character of the Bible, the trustworthi
ness of the evangelical history, — the person and career of
Jesus, the foundation of the Church, the elements of Chris
tianity, the origin of the Church dogma, — beliefs which seek
their authentication outside of philosophy, — are of course
put wholly out of the account. The fundamental beliefs of
mankind he may consistently entertain; of "the Absolute,"
and " the Infinite," he professes no knowledge whatever ; he
has no conception of them. But it is easy enough to conceive
of a Being who is inBnite, — that is, unbounded, — in power
or wisdom ; and he knows well what he means when he talks
of a Being who is absolute in wisdom and goodness : that is,
who knows every thing, and at all times intends what is best
for every sentient creature. If the conception is inadequate,
that is simply because the mind is ignorant of all the details
which make up the character of such a Being. The notion
of the Being is no less positive and palpable for being incom
plete. He limits himself to the psychological fact. But
this fact may include every essential religious belief.
Nay, more, Mr. Mill may not only claim his full title to
entertain the primary beliefs of mankind, in their simple and
natural form as deposits of human experience, — results of
human experiment, so to speak: he may claim to have fur
nished a ground and guarantee for them, such as no other
system has supplied.
The old " Sensationalist " Philosophy, which referred all
the mental processes to sensation, and found the origin of all
ideas in impressions on the senses, laid itself open to the most
terrible assault on the religious side, and incurred the bitterest
odium from religious men. The system was in itself exceeding
crude and narrow, to be sure : its notion of " sensation " was,
at the best, very imperfect ; it had no knowledge of the com
1865.] Mill's Review of Hamilton. 3S5
plexities of the universe ; it had no science, no physiology,

no organic chemistry, no biology, no sociology ; so that it
was really incapable of exhibiting its case with any fulness.
But, when it came to religion, it discarded all it knew, dis
owned its small modicum of fact, disavowed its very principle,
and substituted, for impressions on the sensitive organization,
a bit of record in a printed book. All ideas and beliefs have
their origin in sensation : very good. But then, instead of
appealing to sensation in a grand way, as Mr. Mill does, it ac
complished the hideous non-sequitur of appealing to the miracle
narratives of the New Testament. All fundamental religious
ideas — God and immortality, chief of all — are authenticated
by experiment in life ? No : by certain texts in Matthew ! A
system that could be guilty of such blatant foolishness ought
to be, as Rufus Choate would say, " ejaculated out of the win
dow," with condign scorn. The nonsense passed current, so
long as the critics slumbered and slept. But presently they
woke, turned over the pages of the New Testament, vented
certain rationalistic opinions, questioned the genuineness of
the Gospels, doubted the received accounts of miracles, and
excited sensations which were unfavorable to belief. The
whole edifice of faith came tumbling down, or rather would
have done so had it really rested on those paper foundations.
It did come down, in fact, on the heads of those who fancied
that it did so rest. The sensational philosophy stood charge
able with a vast amount of infidelity.
At this juncture, the Transcendental Philosophy came to
the rescue of religious credence. The fundamental beliefs
of religion, it said, rest on the basis of human consciousness.
Man is conscious of the absolute and infinite : he has an imme
diate perception of moral and spiritual entities : he has an
organ which enables him to see facts in the spiritual order as
distinctly as the eye perceives facts in the material order.
No evidence is needed to establish the existence of God. The
nature of man is so constituted, that his existence, under some
form, cannot be doubted. Men may disbelieve the record of
the New Testament, may discard every record of miracle,
may hold the great central miracle of the resurrection to be
VOL. LXXiX. — 6th S. VOL. XVII. NO. III. 28
Mill's Review of Hamilton. [Nov.
incredible. Man's soul will always give him assurance of im

mortality. The Sermon on the Mount may be apocryphal, the
character of Jesus a fiction, the gospel narrative a romance ;
nevertheless the human conscience will recognize the authority
of the golden rule, and the human will confess its allegiance
to the holiest. The primeval facts of consciousness being
indestructible, the faith which is grounded on those facts must
be indestructible also. Before the soul's essential faith can
be eradicated, the soul itself must be turned to ashes. By
this bold position, the Transcendental Philosophy delivered
spiritual truth from the dilemma into which it had been put,
and saved the faith of thousands of people. The debt of
humanity to Cousin and Kant and Schleiermacher, and the
other masters of that school, cannot be overestimated. The
memory of Theodore Parker, the popular and powerful expos
itor of the same system in America, is cherished fondly by
vast numbers of men and women speaking the English tongue,
as the memory of one who was their saviour from the abysa
of utter unbelief.
Now it looks as if the Transcendental Philosophy too were
destined to pass away. Sir William Hamilton's critique of
Cousin was powerful, and was felt to be formidable. But the
assault of Sir William Hamilton was feeble as compared with
the onset of a man like John Stuart Mill. We must concede
the possible necessity of yielding the ground to such an oppo
nent. No champion on the other side can claim to be his peer.
What then? Is religious faith again imperilled by being put
at the mercy of " sensation " ? Must we tremble for the spirit
ual beliefs of mankind, because their origin is traceable, at
last, to impressions on the muscular and nervous organization
of mankind? Not so; for "sensation" now is so interpreted
as to include an infinite number of impressions, infinite in
variety, by which the very organization of man has been
wrought into its present shape and educated to its present
sensibility, — the natural, spontaneous, instinctive beliefs of
the mind ; the beliefs which the mind recognizes as being its
own. When the results of false teachings, the deposits of er
ror, misjudgment, fallacy, and illusion, have been swept away,
1865.] Palgrave's Arabia. 327
the faiths which cannot be got rid of, and which must be
regarded as the final products of human thinking, feeling, suf
fering, and doing, will be found to repose on pillars as strong
as human nature itself. Given not by inspiration from above,
but by transpiration from below and behind; not dropped into
the minds of a chosen few, but passed through the minds of all,
though by a few only clearly perceived and interpreted ; not
implanted but inwrought, and manifest in the very texture of
well-organized humanity, — they are safe from fatal denial or
disabling doubt. What these ultimate beliefs will finally be
allowed to be, by thinkers like Mill and Bain and Spencer, can
of course only be conjectured. We venture the prediction,
however, that they will be all that humanity requires for its
strength and its consolation.
Art. II. — PALGRAVE'S ARABIA.

Narrative of a Year's Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia
(1862-1863). By William Gifford Palgrave. With Portrait
and Map. 2 vols. 8vo. London.
The author of these volumes enables us, for the first time, to
know Arabia as it is ; the Arabia of the genuine Arab, in
marked contrast with the Arab of the outskirts of the land.
One of our most recent Encyclopaedias tells us, that Arabia
has for its seventh district " Nejed the central desert region ; "
and of the whole region through which our traveller passed,
the same authority knows only " a vast tract of shifting sands,
interspersed about the centre with various ranges of hills,
generally barren and uninteresting." Mr. Palgrave has cor
rected all this, and reconstructed the map of Arabia. Of
sands, indeed, there can be no doubt ; but within them are
locked islands of singular fruitfulness and interest. An
empire is planted in Nejed, with 316 towns, and a population
of some 1,200,000. Across a vast river of sand to the north
828 Palgrave's Arabia. [Nov.
west of Nejed is an outlying kingdom, with a population of

274,000, in 86 towns or villages. The empire is that of the
Wahhabee monarch Feysul ; the kingdom is that of Telal-ebu-
Rasheed. No Bedouins are included in this enumeration.
The Wahhabee Sultan holds in subjection 76,500 of these
degraded Arabs of the desert, a much diminished element of
central Arabia. King Telal holds in his firm sway 166,000.
These are the careful estimates of Mr. Palgrave.
The account given by our author of the Bedouins, their
garb, character, worship, &c, is full of interest. We have
gleaned a. number of passages which we place before the
reader in full as of much greater value than any sketch we
could frame. It is thus he describes the appearance of the
Bedouin: —
" A long and very dirty shirt, reaching nearly to the ankles, a
black cotton handkerchief over the head, fastened on by a twist of
camel's hair, a tattered cloak, striped white and brown, a leather
girdle, much the worse for wear, from which dangled a rusty knife,
a long-barrelled and cumbrous matchlock, a yet longer sharp-pointed
spear, a powder-belt, broken and coarsely patched up with thread,
— such was the accoutrement of these worthies, and such, indeed, is
the ordinary Bedouin guise on a journey." pp. 4, 5.
Next, the Bedouin's beast : —
" The camel — in a word, he is from first to last an nndomestic-
ated and savage animal, rendered serviceable by stupidity alone,
without much skill on his master's part or any co-operation on his
own, save that of extreme passiveness. Neither attachment uor even
habit impress him ; never tame, though not wide awake enough to be
exactly wild. One passion alone he possesses, namely, revenge, of
which he furnishes many a hideous example ; while, in carrying it out,
he shows an unexpected degree of far-thoughted malice, united mean
while with all the cold stupidity of his usual character. . . . Indeed,
so marked is this unamiable propensity, that some philosophers,
doubtless of Prof. Gorres's school, have ascribed the revengeful char
acter of the Arabs to the great share which the flesh and milk of the
camel have in their sustenance, and which are supposed to communi
cate to those who partake of them over-largely the moral or immoral
qualities of the animal to which they belonged. . . . Thus much I
can say, that the camel and his Bedouin master do afford so many
and such obvious points of resemblance, that I did not think an Arab
of Shomer far in the wrong when I once of a time heard him say,
' God created the Bedouin for the camel, and the camel for the
Bedouin.'" pp. 40, 41.
We copy the following picture of the Bedouin worship and

feith : —
" The sun rose ; and then, for the first time, I witnessed what after
wards became a daily spectacle, the main act of Bedouin worship in
their own land. Hardly had the first clear rays struck level across
the horizon, than our nomade companions, facing the rising disk,
began to recite alternately, but without any previous ablution or even
dismounting from their beasts, certain formulas of adoration and invo
cation, nor desisted till the entire orb rode clear above the desert
edge. Sun-worshippers as they were before the days of Mahomet,
they still remain such ; and all that the Hejaz prophet could say, or
the doctors of his law repeat, touching the Devil's horns between
'which the great day-star rises, as true Mahometans know or ought to
know, and the consequently diabolical character of worship at such a
time, and in a posture, too, which directs prayers and adorations then
made exactly towards the Satanic head-gear, has been entirely thrown
away on these obstinate adherents to ancient customs. The fact is,
that, among the great mass of the nomade population, Mahometanism,
during the course of twelve whole centuries, has made little or no
impression either for good or ill : that it was equally ineffectual in
this quarter at the period of its very first establishment, we learn
from the Coran itself, and from early tradition of an authentic char
acter. Not that the Bedouins on their part had any particular aver
sion from their inspired countryman or the Divine Unity, but simply
because they were themselves, as they still are, incapable of receiving
or retaining any of those serious influences and definite forms of
thought and practice which then gave a permanent mould to the
townsmen of Hejaz and many other provinces ; just as the impress
of a seal is lost in water, while retained in wax. ' Unstable as water,
thou shalt not excel,' is an imprecation which, if meant originally for
Reuben, has descended in all its plenitude on the Bedouins of Arabia.
At the same time, surrounded by, and often more or less dependent
on, sincere and even bigoted followers of Islam, they have occasion
ally deemed it prudent to assume a kindred name and bearing, and
28*
thus to style themselves Mahometans for the time being, and even go
through some prayer or religious formula, when indeed they can
manage to learn any." pp. 8, 9.
Setting out from Southern Palestine, and crossing the

gravelly desert in a south-easterly direction, Mr. Palgrave
first reached the Djowf, an outlying dependency of the king
dom of Telal. We cannot better indicate the general course
and progress of the remarkable journey thus entered upon
than by quoting the following; premising that Wadi Serhan
is occupied by Bedouins : —
" If my readers will draw a diagonal line across the map of Arabia
from north-west to south-east, following the direction of my actual
journey through that country, and then distinguish the several regions
of the peninsula by belts of color brightening while they represent
the respective degrees of advancement in arts, commerce, and their
kindred acquirements, they will have for the darkest line that nearest
to the north, or Wadi Serhan ; while the Djowf, Djebel Shomer,
Nejed, Hasa, and their dependencies, grow lighter in succession more
and more, till the belt corresponding to 'Oman should show the
cheerfullest tint of all. In fact, it is principally owing to the circum
stance that the Northern and Western parts of Arabia have been
hitherto those almost exclusively visited by travellers, that the idea
of Arab barbarism or Bedouinism has found such general acceptance
in Europe." pp. 166, 167.
The Djowf is a kind of porch or vestibule to central Arabia.

The Northern desert separates it from Syria. Between it
and the nearest mountains of the central Arabian plateau
stretches a wide pass of sand. Thus isolated, it forms an
oasis, a large oval depression sixty or seventy miles long, by
ten or twelve broad. It has twelve towns or villages and 40,000
inhabitants. Its rich gardens, its real, civilization, and the
hospitality of its genuine Arabs, were a surprise and a delight
to the traveller from Syria and the desert. But we must let
Mr. Palgrave speak: —
" Here, for the first time in our southward course, we found the
date-palm a main object of cultivation. The apricot and the peach,
the fig-tree and the vine, abound ; and their fruit surpasses, in copi
ousness and flavor, that supplied by the gardens of Damascus or the

hills of Syria and Palestine. Corn, leguminous plants, gourds, melons,
&c, &c, are widely cultivated. Here, too, for the last time, the
traveller bound for the interior, sees the irrigation indispensable to
all growth and tillage in this droughty climate kept up by running
streams of clear water, whereas in the Nejed and its neighborhood it
has to be laboriously procured from wells and cisterns. . . . Were
we to place the general standard of the Djowf thermometer in the
shade at noon during the months of June, July, and August at about
9(P or 95° Fahr., we should not, I think, be far wrong for this valley.
At night the air is, with very few exceptions, cool, at least compara
tively, so that a variation of twenty or more degrees often occurs
within a very short period." pp. 58, 59.
" Among all their different kinds of produce, one only is considered
as a regular article of sale and export, — the date. ... It is almost
incredible how large a part the date plays in Arab sustenance ; it is
the bread of the land, the staff of life, and the staple of commerce.
Mahomet, who owed his wonderful success at least as much to his
intense nationality as to any other cause whether natural or supernat
ural, is said to have addressed his followers on the subject in these
words : ' Honor the date-tree, for she is your mother ; ' a slight exten
sion of the fifth commandment, though hardly, perhaps, exceeding the
legislative powers of a prophet." p . 60.
From the Djowf Mr. Palgrave advanced to the chief district

of Telal's kingdom, Djebel Shomer. To do this, he had to
cross a wide inlet of the desert, no longer gravelly, but deep
sand formed into waves more lofty and more fearful than
those of the sea, though more stable. This formation occurs
throughout the desert, the sand-billows taking a height pro
portioned to the depth of the sea of sand. Our author had
the truly infernal pleasure of breasting, in midsummer, waves
two hundred feet high. The trough of this sea was naturally
a pit of fire. But in and out, in and out, through perilous
nights and days, was necessary to reach the great plateau on
which Arabia is no longer Bedouin and savage, but Arab and
civilized. The passage of this fearful Nefood was accom
plished in safety, and Mr. Palgrave presented himself at the
court of Telal in the city of Ha'yel. It is impossible in any
sketch to convey an adequate idea of the picture of life at
332 Palgrave't Arabia. [Nov.
Ha'yel which the vivid though sober narrative of our author

presents. Hospitably received by the king and his ministers,
provided with a residence and furnished with abundant oppor
tunities for medical practice, Mr. Palgrave had no difficulty
in prosecuting his studies. It should be mentioned that our
adventurous traveller both assumed, and with great success
maintained, the character of a doctor. He had resided for
some time in Syria, and could readily pass as from Damascus.
A Syrian attendant was the companion of his journey. To
an English University education of the highest rank, Mr.
Palgrave had added many years of acquaintance with oriental
life in India, Syria, and elsewhere, with a knowledge of both
the language and the literature of Arabia almost perfect. He
was able to play the Arab with the address and intelligence
of the finest European culture. Throughout his residence in
Arabia a great part of his time was spent in conversation
with Arab gentlemen and scholars whom he could daily meet
in the K'hawahs, or reception and coffee rooms, of distin
guished Arab acquaintances, by whom his society was sought
Here were discussed the history, the condition, the poets, of
Arabia, and whatever other matters came within the range
of Arab culture.
In King Telal our traveller found an able monarch and
a generous friend. His acuteness penetrated the Syrian doc
tor's aims to such an extent that Mr. Palgrave finally con
cluded to fully explain his real character and motives ; and
this confidence was not misplaced. By the enlightened sym
pathy of Zamil, the prime minister, and of Telal, the objects
of a European exploration were greatly aided, and in spite
of the fact that a bigoted Wahhabee-party at court, headed
by the king's uncle, Obeyd the Wolf, would gladly have
made short work with the doubtful Syrian doctor and his
companion. It should be said here, that Wahhabeeism is a
fierce revival of Islam, forced upon Nejed particularly, and to
some extent upon all Central and Eastern Arabia, by the
sword of the Wahhabee Empire of Feysul. It insists on
prayers, on harems, on abstinence from tobacco and wine, and
on war as the faith may need, but on nothing else. Its rep
resentative in Telal's kingdom is The Wolf Obeyd, a blood-

guzzling old war-dog, who glories in slaughter, in orthodoxy,
and in a full harem. A corresponding character at the court
of Feysul was found by Mr. Palgrave in Abd-Allah, the eldest
son of Feysul, while the second son of the old Wahhabee
proved the most liberal, sunny-tempered, and delightful gen
tleman in the kingdom, — a perfect hero of romance, dashing,
brilliant, and brave, — the most complete contrast to his elder
brother. Now to Abd-Allah, The Wolf gave our traveller a
letter of introduction, which he opened, upon good advice,
and read. It was a sly epistle, meant for a death-warrant.
We shall see how Abd-Allah's clutches were barely escaped
when we reach Rind, the capital of Nejed. We must now
call attention to some of Mr. Palgrave's valuable notes upon
Arab life and culture, as they were made during his stay at
Ha'yel, the chief city of Djebel Shomer. But we must not
fail to say, explicitly, that the chief ministers of Telal, with
Telal himself, are liberals in religion, just such as they would
have been in Boston or Paris. They conform somewhat in
the matter of prayers, because the kingdom is not quite inde
pendent of the Wahhebee Empire, — the sovereignty of Dje
bel Shomer having been assigned to Telal's father by the
Wahhabee, — but they do this with none of the bigotry or
vices of Obeyd and Abd-Allah.
" In Upper Nejid, religion has a real import, being interwoven

into every fibre of the national, nay, almost of the individual, frame ;
and hence such details have there a peculiar value, not, perhaps,
exactly on their own account, but in the way of illustration and of
completing the principal view. On the contrary, in Ha'yel and
Djebel Shomer, the Mahometan prayers and usages are rather polite
ceremonies adopted out of courtesy to their neighbors, than an inti
mate expression of national belief and thought. Hence their practice
is almost exclusively confined to the great official mosque of the capi
tal, and a few similar localities. It is more an expedient than a
faith, and an act of prudence rather than of conviction, and because
such offers little worthy of remark except its hollowness. The real
state of mind touching religious matters is, throughout this region,
uncertainty and fluctuation ; there is much of Paganism, something
334 Falgrave's Arabia. [Nov.
of Islamism, a lingering shade of Christianity, and great impa

tience of any code or dogma." pp. 179, 180.
In this connection, the following account of the true people

of Arabia will be found interesting : —
" Take the Wahhabees, that is, those who are really such, and the
Bedouins together, they will not exceed one-fourth of the denizens of
Arabia. The remaining three-fourths consist of townsmen and peas
ants spread throughout the land, enthusiastic partisans of their local
chiefs and rulers, and true lovers of Arab freedom, — patriots, in
short, but alike hostile to Bedouin marauders and to Wahhabee co
ercion. They cling to a national glory and patriotic memories of a
date much older than the recent honors of Ebn-Sa'ood, and rivalling
or surpassing in antiquity those of Koreysh itself. Love of order
and commerce renders them also the enemies of nomadic anarchy.
Lastly, they far outweigh their antagonists collectively, in numbers,
no less than in national importance ; and to them alone, if to any, are
reserved the destinies of Arabia. Mahomet, a master mind, saw
this in his time ; and it was exactly by enlisting this part of the Arab
commonwealth and these feelings in his cause, that he secured his
ascendency over the whole peninsula. The Coran and contemporary
tradition give no other clue to his able line of conduct, and to the pro
digious success that justified it. Had he stopped here, he would have
been the first and greatest benefactor of his native country. But the
prophet marred what the statesman had begun, and the deadening fatal
ism of his religious system, that narcotic of the human mind, stopped
for ever the very progress to which he had himself half opened the
way by his momentary fusion of Arabia into a common nation with a
common aim. Again, the Judaical narrowness and ceremonial inter
ferences of his law soon fretted the impatient and expansive mind of
his countrymen into that almost universal revolt which accompanied
rather than followed the news of his death. The revolt was indeed
repressed for a moment, but soon re-appeared, nor ceased until the
final and lasting disintegration of the Arab Empire in Arabia."
pp. 193, 194.
Evidently the power of Islam in Arabia is by no means as
firm as Europe has supposed. In fact, Mr. Palgrave says : —
" In no part of the world is there more of secret division, aver
sion, misbelief (taking Mahometanism for our standard), and unbe
lief, than in those very lands which to a superficial survey seem

absolutely identified in the one common creed of the Coran and its
author." p. 10.
Having occasion to speak of Arab singing and services,
Mr. Palgrave touches upon two or three points which add
not a little to the completeness of his picture of the Arab as
he is. He mentions, in another connection, that the Arab is
usually a master of self-possession, and addresses you in his
fine voice with great courtesy, though he may wish you
damned all the while : —
" If the Arab voice be not adapted, and it most certainly is not, to
singing, it is admirably well qualified for all the tones of public
speaking, reading aloud, and the entire range of conversation and
eloquence. Clear and sonorous, it is a powerful, though not a sweet-
toned, instrument ; and those who possess it know well how to put it
to its best. Besides, it has here a remarkable advantage, elsewhere
denied it ; namely, that of being united with the fullest and completest
pronunciation of a language which is one of the most copious, if not
the most copious, in the universe. . . . The question is sometimes
asked, ' Is the Arabic of the Coran and of the golden age of Arabian
literature in general yet a spoken language, or was it ever really so ? '
The answer is affirmative : it certainly was a spoken language, for it
is yet so in the districts above mentioned ; nor only spoken, but popu
lar, vulgar even, at least in the etymological sense of that word. But
the choicest display of Arab elocution is in the public recital of the
Coran, and in this the Wahhabees bear away the palm. Religious
enthusiasm and scrupulosity worthy of a Jewish rabbi at a Saturday
reading of the Pentateuch, gives force to every consonant, depth
to every vowel, and precision to every accent and inflexion, till the
bearer, even though an ' infidel ' at heart, ceases to wonder at
the influence exercised by these singular rehearsals over the Arab
believer. For whatever merit the Coran can claim lies wholly and
merely in its remarkable eloquence and extreme purity of diction :
good sense there is little, and reasoning is not to be expected. Hence
a translation, however skilful, is simply intolerable ; and few, I should
think, have found their way through Sale's Coran from beginning to
end. But the very repetitions, monotonous formula?, and abrupt
transitions, which drive an English or a French reader to despair, add
in the original Arabic to the force and rythmical emphasis of the
text, and are felt accordingly by its Eastern auditors." p. 311.
The journey to Riad, the Wahhabee capital, led Mr. Pal-

grave by a continually ascending road to the highest plateau
of central Arabia. Here he found himself at once an object
of extreme suspicion. Feysul, the old Sultan, not only hated
with a deadly hatred the thought of European spies, but he
stood in mortal terror of the Persian fanatics who pass
through his territory on the pilgrimage to Mecca. The
Wahhabees not only disapprove of tombs, pilgrimages, and
the like, but their government unmercifully bleeds the pil
grims who are compelled to pass that way to Mecca. The
father of Feysul fell by the dagger of a Persian assassin while
attending prayers in the great mosque. Now, along with Mr.
Palgrave there had come up to Riad a Persian nabob, to rep
resent the grievances of a caravan of pilgrims, and to demand
justice from the monarch. Feysul, with his superstitions,
his fears, and his consciousness of unmitigated rascality,
found the situation distressing in the extreme, and took ref
uge in one of his country gardens. Mr. Palgrave had been
fortunate enough to secure as guide a gentleman who enjoyed
the confidence of the Wahhabee government, and held under
it the office of pilgrim caravan conductor, Aboo-Eysa by
name, a character of great interest. By his aid Mr. Palgrave
got himself established, and was soon in the full tide of suc
cessful medical practice.
Mahboob, the young negro Prime Minister, was one of his
first patients, and became his warm friend. Mahboob is of
the party of Feysul's second son, Sa'ood, the more liberal
party. He is supposed to be the son of Feysul and a beauti
ful slave. Abd-Allah, the elder prince of the royal house,
affected to patronize Mr. Palgrave ; he even went so far as to
offer him a fine house and a wife, and to request his perma
nent residence at Riad. The request was meant for a com
mand, Abd-Allah's intention being to defeat in that way any
plan the Syrian doctor might have to spy out the land. One
service in particular Abd-Allah required of his physician, —
a supply of strychnine, a drug new to the Arabs, and success
fully employed by Mr. Palgrave in a case which came under
Abd-Allah's observation. Mr. Palgrave was convinced that
Abd-Allah's purpose was to get rid of his younger brother,

Sa'ood, by poison ; and he persistently refused Abd-Allah's
requisition, as well as declined his offer of an establishment
near the court.
It was a desperate struggle, and conducted on Mr. Pal
grave's part with infinite address, secretly aided to the utmost
by Aboo-Eysa. The end was this. Mr. Palgrave was waited
on by negro-slaves, one dark night, with a summons to attend
at the palace of Abd-Allah. He considered, and went. A
considerable company was present in the Khawah of Abd-
Allah; but coffee was not served as usual. Instead, Mr. Pal
grave was charged by Abd-Allah with playing the spy, and
was threatened with instant death. Mr. Palgrave denied the
charge and braved the threat. He told the Prince that he
could not and dared not murder him. Abd-Allah ordered a
servant to bring coffee ; and one cup was brought in, contrary
to all custom. Abd-Allah motioned to pass it to Mr. Palgrave,
who poured it off at a draught, bade the servant fill his cup
again, and drank that also. Abd-Allah was cowed, and showed
it. The company began a conversation which indicated their
belief that the doctor was no spy, and he was allowed to
depart. But the danger was imminent. No time was lost in
escaping to a retreat in the country, where Aboo-Eysa joined
Mr. Palgrave and his companions, and conducted them on
their journey from Nejed across a wide arm of the sand-ocean
to Hasa, on the Persian Gulf; where the governor, a negro
and friend of Mahboob, received them with great cordiality.
Of life at Riad we cannot pretend to give much account in
this paper. The Zelators, a body of ecclesiastical lynch-Iaw
judges, whose business it is to drive people to prayers, and
to otherwise watch over orthodoxy of life and manners, form
an institution peculiar to the Wahhabee revival of Islam.
The drift of Mahometan orthodoxy is thus stated by Mr. Pal
grave, with an illustration of its tone : —
" Purgatory for Mahometans ; hell for all else. . . . ' God guides
aright whom he chooses, and leads into error whom he chooses.' . . .
However, they very commonly imagine the Mahometan religion
almost universal throughout the world, while other creeds are sup-
vol. lxxiX. — 5th s. vol. XVII. NO. III. 29
posed to number in comparison but very few followers. Europe, for

instance, they know to be Christian ; but then they conceive it to be
but one town, neither more nor less, within whose mural circuit its
seven kings — for that is the precise number, count them how you
please — are shut up in a species of royal cage, to deliberate on
mutual peace or war, alliance or treaty, though always by permission
and under the orders of the Sultan of Constantinople." Vol. ii. p. 8.
" Abd-el-Lateef was the orator that day, and his theme the obli
gation of strict orthodoxy, and the danger of modern innovations.
To confirm his thesis, he recounted a celebrated tradition, wherein
Mahomet is reported to have given his companions the consolatory
news, that, ' as the Jewish body had been divided into seventy-one
different sects, and the Christian into seventy-two, even so his own
co-religionists would separate into seventy-three sects, while of these
numerous ramifications seventy-two were destined to hell-fire, and one
only to Paradise.' . . . They eagerly demanded the signs of that happy
sect to which is ensured the exclusive possession of Paradise. ' It is
those who shall be in all conformable to myself and to my compan
ions.' — ' And that, by the mercy of God, are we, the people of Biad,'
added Abd-el-Lateef. One deep Âshedu «n la Ilah ilia Allah ' went
through the mosque ; and every forefinger was raised to attest that
undivided, all-devouring unity which ensures the salvation of true
believers, while it justifies the damnation of the incredulous and the
polytheist." Vol. ii. pp. 22, 23.
If we ask for the moral result of this complacent orthodoxy,

the answer is as follows : —
" Of morality, justice and judgment, mercy and truth, purity of

heart and tongue, and all that makes man better, I never heard one
syllable during a month and a half of sermon frequentation in this
pious capital. But of prayers, of war against unbelievers, of the
rivers of Paradise, of houris and bowers, of hell, devils, and chains,
also of the laws of divorce, and of the complicated marital obligations
of polygamy, plenty and to spare. Nor should I omit a very frequent
topic, the sinfulness of tobacco, ay, and that confirmed by visible aud
appalling judgments, curiously resembling those which a spirit less
Christian than Judaical introduces occasionally into European books
of edification. . . . Profligacy of all kinds, even such as language
refuses to name, is riper here than in Damascus and Seyda them
selves ; and the comparative decency of most other Arab towns sets
off the blackness of Riad in stronger and stranger contrast." Vol. ii.
pp. 23, 24.
Toward the close of Mr. Palgrave's second volume occurs a
passage which will explain further in this connection the pro
hibitions of Mahometanism, and Mr. Palgrave's view of the
motives of the " Meccan camel-driver : " —
" As to the prohibition of wine, — the strongest arguments would

lead us to assign it, with considerable probability, to the Prophet's
antipathy to Christianity, and to a desire to broaden the line of
demarcation between his followers and those of Christ. . . . Hence
also the profound aversion to all imagery or painting, so essential to
the oriental idea of Christianity. . . . Hence his anathema on bells,
because this signal of prayer was universal among the rival sect.
. . . Hence, too, Mahomet's barbarous detestation of music, which
he classed among the worst devices of the Devil to lead mankind
astray. . . . Hence, also, his disapproval of prayers offered up
between sunrise and the two or three hours that follow it, and also of
adorations addressed to the Divinity between the afternoon and sun
set, because those are the very times in which oriental Christians
assemble to the daily worship of mass and vespers. . . . Hence, too,
his discouragement of commerce, hinted in the Coran, and more
clearly set forth by tradition ; and, above all, his extreme dislike to
ships and seafaring displayed in the authentic but most un-English
words of the Hejazee camel-driver, ' He who twice embarks on sea is
a very infidel.' ... In a word, to set his religion and his followers
in diametrical opposition to Christianity and Christians was a main
feature of Mahomet's plan, and in this he fully succeeded ; nor have
a thousand years and more brought nigher by one hair's breadth sects
whose very badge denotes the ' strong antipathy ' of contradictory
terms." pp. 428-430.
. If now the reader wishes to gain an accurate knowledge of
the modern revival of the faith of Mahomet, we can commend
to him, as of great interest and value, the extracts with which
we close our article. Beyond Nejed Mr. Palgrave's journey
was less instructive, though still interesting in the extreme.
His shipwreck in the Persian Gulf, followed by severe illness,
put a period to his explorations, and occasioned his hasty
return to Syria by the way of the Tigris. Upon his return
340 Palgrave's Arabia. [Xov.
to Europe, he re-united himself at Berlin with the English

Church. He was a member of the Society of Jesus when he
undertook his journey through Arabia, but has not found the
connection, it seems, agreeable to his conscience of religious
truth. Quite recently, we are informed, he has returned to
the banks of the Tigris, to watch the fortunes of Arabia, to
hear news of Telal, of Prince Sa'ood, and of the many friends
he left on the green isles of the desert, the highlands of cen
tral Arabia.
Of the Wahhabees this is the story: —
" Mohammed-ebn-'Abd-el-Wahbab, founder of the sect named

after him Wahhabees, was born in Horeymelah, somewhat before the
middle of the last century. . . . Commerce led him to Damascus,
where he fell in with some of the learned and very bigoted sheykhs
of that town, Hanbelees like himself, or Shafi'ees, but alike opposed,
whether to the prevailing laxities of the Nakshbundees and other
northern free-thinkers, or to the superstitious practices of Darwee-
shes, Fakeers, Welees, and whatever else Persian or Turkish ideas
have introduced almost everywhere in the East. The son of 'Abd-el-
Wahhab was above thirty years of age, and in the full vigor of his
physical and intellectual existence, a vigor much above the average
standard. To the persevering doggedness and patient courage of his
Nejdean countrymen, he added a power of abstraction and generaliza
tion rare among them ; his eye was observant, and his ear attentive ;
he had already seen much and reflected deeply. But the lessons of
the Damascene sheykhs aided him to combine once for all, and to
render precise, notions that he had long before, it seems, entertained
in a floating and unsystematized condition. He now learned to dis
tinguish clearly between the essential elements of Islam and its acci
dental or recent admixtures, and at last found himself in possession
of what had been the primal view and starting point of the Prophet
and his first companions in Hejiiz twelve ages before. . . . To him
is the praise, if praise it be, of having discovered amid the ruins of
the Islamitic pile its neglected key-stone, and, harder still, of having
dared to form the project to replace it, and with it and by it recon
struct the broken fabric.
" This key-stone, this master thought, this parent idea, of which
all the rest is but the necessary and inevitable deduction, is contained
in the phrase, far oftener repeated than understood, ' La Ilah ilia
Alliih,' 'there is no god but God,' — a literal translation, but much

too narrow for the Arab formula, and quite inadequate to render its
true force in an Arab mouth or mind. . . . The words, in Arabia and
among Arabs, imply that this one Supreme Being is also the only
Agent, the only Force, the only Act existing throughout the universe,
and leave to all beings else, matter or spirit, instinct or intelligence,
physical or moral, nothing but pure unconditional passireness, alike
in movement or in quiescence, in action or in capacity. The sole
power, the sole motor, movement, energy, and deed, is God ; the rest
is downright inertia and mere instrumentality, from the highest arch
angel down to the simplest atom of creation. Hence, in this one sen
tence, ' La Ilah ilia Allah,' is summed up a system which, for want
of a better name, I may be permitted to call the Pantheism of Force
or of Act, thus exclusively assigned to God, Who absorbs it all,
exercises it all, and to Whom alone it can be ascribed, whether for
preserving or for destroying, for relative evil or for equally relative
good. I say ' relative,' because it is clear that in such a theology no
place is left for absolute good or evil, reason or extravagance ; all is
abridged in the autocratical will of the one great Agent, ' Sic volo,
sic jubeo, stet pro ratione voluntas ; ' or, more significantly still, in
Arabic, * Kema yesha'o,' — 'as he wills it,' to quote the constantly
recurring expression of the Coran.
" Thus immeasurably and eternally exalted above, and dissimilar
from, all creatures, which lie levelled before Him on one common
plane of instrumentality and inertness, God is one in the totality of
omnipotent and omnipresent action, which acknowledges no rule,
standard, or limit, save His own sole and absolute will. He com
municates nothing to His creatures, for their seeming power and act
ever remain His alone, and in return He receives nothing from them ;
for whatever they may be, that they are in Him, by Him, and from
Him only. And, secondly, no superiority, no distinction, no pre-emi
nence, can be lawfully claimed by one creature over its fellow, in the
utter equalization of their unexceptional servitude and abasement ; all
are alike tools of the one solitary Force which employs them to crush
or to benefit, to truth or to error, to honor or to shame, to happiness
or to misery, quite independently of their individual fitness, deserts,
or advantage, and simply because He wills it and as He wills it.
" One might, at first sight, think that this tremendous Autocrat,
this uncontrolled and unsympathizing Power, would be far above
any thing like passions, desires, or inclinations. Yet such is not the
2<J*
case ; for He has, with respect to His creatures, one main feeling and
source of action, namely, jealousy of them, lest they should perchance
attribute to themselves something of what is His alone, and thus
encroach on his all-engrossiug kingdom. Hence He is ever more
prone to punish than to reward, to inflict pain than to bestow pleasure,
to ruin than to build. It is His singular satisfaction to let created
beings continually feel that they are nothing else than His slaves, His
tools, and contemptible tools also, that thus they may the better
acknowledge His superiority, and know His power to be above their
power, His cunning above their cunning, His will above their will,
His pride above their pride ; or, rather, that there is no power, cun
ning, will, or pride, save His own. But He Himself, sterile in His
inaccessible height, neither loving nor enjoying aught save His own
and self-measured decree, without son, companion, or counsellor, is
no less barren for Himself than for His creatures, and His own bar
renness and lone egoism in Himself is the cause and rule of His
indifferent and unregarding despotism around. The first note is the
key of the whole tune, and the primal idea of God runs through and
modifies the whole system and creed that centres in Him.
" Islam is, in its essence, stationary, and was framed thus to remain.
Sterile like its God, lifeless like its first Principle and supreme Ori
ginal in all that constitutes true life, — for life is love, participation,
and progress, and of these the Coranic Deity has none, — it justly
repudiates all change, all advance, all development. To borrow the
forcible words of Lord Houghton, the ' written book ' is there ' the
dead man's hand,' stiff and motionless : whatever savors of vitality
is by that alone convicted of heresy and defection. . . . Islam is life
less, and because lifeless cannot grow, cannot advance, cannot change,
and was never intended so to do ; stand-still is its motto and its most
essential condition ; and therefore the son of 'Abd-el-Wahhab, in doing
his best to bring it back to its primal simplicity, and making its goal
of its starting-point, was so far in the right, and showed himself
well acquainted with the nature and first principles of his religion."
For the story of the religious revolution which followed,
and for many details illustrating Arabian history and life,
which we had marked for extraction, we must refer the
reader to the volumes from which we have already bo freely
quoted, and which we regard as among the most curious and
important of recent contributions to our knowledge of the
outlying regions of religious belief and practice.
-.
1865.] Dr. Keioman't Apologia. 343
Art. III. — DR. NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA.
Apologia pro Vita sua. Being a Reply to a Pamphlet entitled, " What,
then, does Dr. Newman mean ? " By John Henry Newman, D.'D.
New York : D. Appleton & Co. 1865.
If, in re-publishing this book, the Messrs. Appleton had ven

tured to leave out that part of it which is filled with the
details of Dr. Newman's controversy with Mr. Kingsley, per
haps the author would have been displeased, but his book
would have been vastly bettered by the deed. Not that we
blame the Doctor for his evident intention not to leave one
stone of Mr. Kingsley's argument upon another; not that
we can help admiring him for doing what he does in such a
thorough-going and remorseless way ; not but that the details
of this controversy give us two very interesting .chapters
and a very sharp appendix, although the interest is of such a
sort as generally attaches to a foot-race or regatta, and the
sharpness smacks too strongly of contempt for us to greatly
relish it ; but because we think it quite too bad that any thing
so reverent and tender and so beautiful as is this Apology
should be introduced and ended with matter, in the main but
little relevant, and surely not harmonious. We say, but little
relevant, because, if this book is to be read and re-read, to
live and be admired, it will not be for any controversial matter
it contains, but for the singularly bold and graphic picture
which it gives us of a life in almost every way remarkable ;
and those parts of it which deal with Mr. Kingsley, and his
charges against Dr. Newman and his Church, contribute noth
ing toward the fuller understanding of that life which is not
revealed in the Apology itself in a far better way. Certainly,
we shall not reverence Dr. Newman any more because they
have been written, although we may admire him for his legal
skill ; because, if they prove any thing but this, it is that Dr.
Newman can be very angry when sufficiently provoked. But
of this too we have an inkling in the body of the work. It
344 Dr. Newman's Apologia. [Nov.
may be that the Doctor's vigorous onslaught upon Kingsley

will delight a larger audience than the almost rhythmic march
of his own story ; but it will be an audience of a very different
sort, and, when it is all asleep or dead, as it will be very
soon, the generation of men who would like to read this
history of a great man's theological experience should not be
obliged to enter it through such an endless propylaeum, or
leave it through such heaps of lumber and ddbris.
We must confess that we are glad, that Mr. Kingsley's
charges, at least so much of them as was entirely personal,
have been successfully rebutted. We hope that we have
listened candidly to the evidence upon both sides. At first
thought, it would seem a great deal harder to do so now than
it would have been five or six years ago ; for then we loved
Charles Kingsley, and thanked God every day for his " Hypa-
tia " and " Saints' Tragedy." How generously he clasped
hands with the Reformers of the time in " Alton Locke " ! and,
in " Two Years ago," how good it was for those of ua who
fought with our pet demon on this side of the world to hear
his " Sursum Corda " ! " Yea, to the Lord we have lifted them
up," and he has filled them full of wonder and thanksgiving.
But Kingsley is not with us any more ; and it would be only
natural if we heard of his discomfiture more calmly now than
if it had been then. But, at second thought, is it not plain
that we can judge between him and his antagonist more
fairly now than ever, because our wholesome dislike of him
will scarcely more than balance our natural distrust of any
thing that comes from Dr. Newman's side of the house?
Between a Roman Catholic and an English rebel-sympathizer
an American Protestant ought to judge impartially ; and,
when we say that we are glad that Mr. Kingsley's charges
did not take effect, it is not because Mr. Kingsley made them,
but because we should hate to believe that Dr. Newman is so
radically dishonest as in his dealings with America his oppo
nent has proved himself to be.
But, when Dr. Newman agrees to be responsible for the
whole method of that church into which he has at length
drifted, he assumes a burden much too heavy even for him to
1865.] Dr. Newman's Apologia. 345
bear; and, though we cannot follow Mr. Kingsley in the

form, and perhaps not in the spirit, of his first attack on
Catholic veracity, it must be granted that his innuendoes
pointed to a fact which Dr. Newman's logic cannot dissipate.
But for the Society of Jesus, Roman-Catholicism would have
been dead and buried more than a century ago. Now, it
" may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveller
from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take
bxs stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the
ruins of St. Paul's." So Lord Macaulay prophesied. And,
should it happen so, it will be through the agency of that
society which grew out of the fiery heart of Loyola. Jesuit
ism has been the soul of the Church, and the soul of Jesuitism
has been " the Economy. " * Dr. Newman may prove that it
is possible for his Saint Alphonzo Liguori to write a book of
casuistry which even he cannot accept (although, for saying
so, he hopes he shall not lose his intercession), and still be
very saintly in his private life, always acting from his con
science, and never from his rules ; but " corporations have no
souls," and so it does not follow that the theory of Jesuitism
did not affect its practice. Individuals may put to shame
the moral formulas which they accept ; but a church is never
better than its creed, a corporation never better than the
formula which it accepts. Jesuitism accepted " the Economy "
as its guide, substituting it for the active conscience of the
individual man. And though it would be mad and foolish
not to grant that there have been and are disciples of this
school than whose fragrant piety the world knows nothing
sweeter, yet to say " Jesuitism " has always been to say chi
canery, equivocation, sophistry. This was the substance of
Mr. Kingsley's charge ; for the sins of Jesuitism are the sins
of the Roman Church. This Dr. Newman has not answered.
* Dr. Newman uses this word to express the casuistic principle in operation.
It does not consist in " doing evil that good may come." Oh, no I but in doing
just the next thing to it, — in stretching the truth until the difference between it
and a lie is not appreciable. See the Doctor's instances. No wonder that he
thinks the method dangerous.
He has demolished the form of Mr. Kingsley's accusation;

but its essence still remains.
Beginning at part third, we have a history of Dr. New
man's religious opinions from his earliest years up to the
time when he found completest rest and satisfaction in the
Roman Church. And there are several points of view from
which it is intensely interesting. Regarded merely as a work
of art, it is as beautiful as the immortal Meditations and Con
fessions, — as Antonine's and Augustine's. We do not know
of any book written with more grace and fluency, any that
contains touches more rarely delicate or passages of more
incisive wit and power. One does not care to rise from pages
such as this, where, speaking of the dangers of the Church in
1831, he says: —
" With the Establishment thus divided and threatened, th.ua igno
rant of its true strength, I compared that fresh vigorous power of
which I was reading in the first centuries. In her triumphant zeal on
behalf of that Primeval Mystery to which I had had so great a devo
tion from my youth, I recognized the movement of my Spiritual
Mother. 4 Incessu patuit Dea.' The self-conquest of her ascetics,
the patience of her martyrs, the irresistible determination of her
bishops, the joyous swing of her advance, both exalted and abashed
me. I said to myself, ' Look on this picture, and on that ; ' I felt
affection for my own Church, but not tenderness ; I felt dismay at her
prospects, anger and scorn at her do-nothing perplexity. I thought
that, if Liberalism once got a footing within her, it was sure of the
victory in the event. I saw that Reformation principles were power
less to rescue her. As to leaving her, the thought never crossed
my imagination ; still I ever kept before me that there was something
greater than the Established Church, and that that was the Church
Catholic and Apostolic, set up from the beginning, of which she was
but the local presence and organ. She was nothing unless she was
this. She must be dealt with strongly, or she would be lost. There
was need of a second Reformation." — p. 80.
But, for all the beauty of the forms in which this writer
casts his feelings and his thoughts, it must not be supposed
that he has given to us a great or universal book. It is a
most valuable and entertaining contribution to the history of
that movement which should have borne his name, not that
of Dr. Pu8ey. But its account of Dr. Newman's personal
life, its loves and hates, perplexities and trials, will keep much
longer. For, in a little while, the man, and the movement
also, will have had their day. Now a dead man still interests
if he was once alive ; but a dead movement is of no account.
Again, this book is welcome as a sort of commentary upon the
Pope's recent letter to his churches, which by itself seemed
very weak and very impudent. But here is reasoning to
the same effect. Why, then, is not the book remarkable
enough to make a lasting fame ? Because its faults are funda
mental ; because its subject-matter is not great. It deals
with words, rather than with things. It is the " History of
my Religious Opinions." Dr. Newman's brother wrote a book,
and called it " Phases of Faith." It was what it claimed to
be : it dealt with the essential matters of the soul. The
Doctor's faith seems to have been always pretty much the
same. He never doubted much of any thing that is worth
believing. His theory was that probability is the guide of
life. And he Was greatly troubled at the thought that other
men would have to pray, " 0 God ! if there be a God, save my
bouI if I have a soul." But, for himself, he believed in God
because he could not help it. His trouble was with questions
of antiquity, sacraments, and apostolical succession. His book
is hardly up to the title which he gives it. It is not so much
the history of his religious as of his ecclesiastical opinions.
And this is why it is not great. The wonder is that a great
man could have written it, beautiful as it is. But, if Dr.
Newman was a little man, the great men are but few.
It is evident, from this volume, that the Tractarian move
ment was Dr. Newman's own affair ; not that it contains one
boastful word ; but for this reason, that, although the attempt
is made to credit it to other men, to Keble, Pusey, Hurrell,
Froude, it singularly fails. Dr. Pusey was not fairly con
nected with the movement until 1835 or 1836. His influence,
so Dr. Newman says, was felt at once. He saw that there
must be more of order and sobriety, that the movement must
be conducted in a more responsible way. In short, his word
was " Organize." And Dr. Newman, beating about to find a

reason why he came to be the centre of the movement,
pitches upon this. But he never was its vital centre ; for, in
another chapter of his book, the writer tells us that Organiza
tion was the disease of which the movement died. Its days
of irresponsibility were its days of power. It was Dr. Pu-
sey's position that made him seem to be its centre. In so far
as it was born of the spirit, John Keble was its father. But
the coarse materialism of the day would have trodden its life
out in a jiffy, if Dr. Newman had not always carried it in his
strong arms. As long ago as 1826, Whately could see around
him the signs of an incipient party of which he was himself
unconscious.
The one thing which Dr. Newman always took for granted
was the Church. He also took for granted that liberalism in
whatever form must be its enemy. Therefore he hated it.
He thought that Anglicanism sometimes led into it if one went
far enough. He wanted to walk parallel to it and to the Ro
man Church for ever, and to keep clear of both. Hence the
" Via Media; " the middle way between Romanism, which he
tried to hate, and Liberalism, which he hated without trying.
It was a defensive movement. He felt the need of it more
strongly every day. In 1831, he wrote as we have quoted
him above. In 1832, he went away and travelled on the con
tinent; but the thought of the coming battle between Reason
and the Church still haunted him.
" England was in my thoughts solely, and the news from England
came rarely and imperfectly. The Bill for the Suppression of the
Irish Sees was in progress, and filled my mind. I had fierce thought
against the Liberals." — p. 81.
" It was the success of the Liberal cause which fretted me inwardly :
I became fierce against its instruments and its manifestations. A French
vessel was at Algiers : I would not even look at the tricolor." p. 82.
" At this time, I was specially annoyed with Dr. Arnold, though it
did not last into later years. Some one, I think, asked, in conversation
at Rome, whether a certain interpretation of Scripture was Christian.
It was answered that Dr. Arnold took it ; I interposed, But is he a
Christian?" — p. 82.
It was at Rome, too, that he and Froude began to write the

Lyra Apostolica. Bunsen lent them a Homer, and they chose
for a motto the words of Achilles when he returned to the
battle, " You shall know the difference now that I am back
again." He began to think that he had a mission. Cardinal
Wiseman expresses a wish that he would come again to Rome ;
and he replied, " I have a work to do in England." He was
very sick in Sicily, and his servant thought that he would die ;
but he said, "I shall not die, I shall not die: I have not
sinned against the light, I have not sinned against the light."
He sat down on his bed one morning sobbing bitterly, and,
when asked what ailed him, he could only say, " I have a
work to do in England." On the way home, he wrote the best
of all his verses, those beginning —
" Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom."
On the Sunday after his return, Keble preached a sermon

on the national apostasy, and the Tractarian movement was
begun.
The motto of the Lyra Apostolica was made good : Dr. New
man was " back again." The Church began at once to " know
the difference." For helpers he had Keble and Froude,
Messrs. Perceval and Palmer, and Mr. Hugh Rose, to whom
he dedicated a volume of his sermons, speaking of him as the
man " who, when hearts were failing, bade us stir up the gift
that was in us, and betake ourselves to our true mother."
" Froude was a bold rider, as on horseback, so also in his
speculations." Dr. Newman's portrait of him is wonderfully
painted. We have him represented as a man of high genius,
brimful and overflowing with ideas and views which crowded
and jostled against each other in their effort after distinct
shape and expression. He professed openly his admiration of
the Church of Rome, and his hatred of the Reformers, He
delighted in the notion of an ecclesiastical system and of sa
cerdotal power. He gloried in accepting tradition as a main
instrument of religious teaching. He was a Roman Catholic
in every thing but name. He died in 1836. If he had lived,
VOL. I.XXIX. — 5TH 8. VOL. XVII. NO. III. 80
he must very soon have gone to Rome, which would have

hastened Dr. Newman's movement in the same direction. He
adored the blessed Virgin ; delighted in the Saints ; thought
that the miracles of the middle ages were as good as any;
accepted the principle of penance and mortification ; had an
utter hatred of Erastianism, of any union between Church and
State ; firmly believed in the Real Presence in the Eucharist.
His influence upon Newman must have been very great. He
estimates it thus : —
" He made me look with admiration towards the Church of Borne,
and in the same degree to dislike the Reformation. He fixed deep in
me the idea of devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and led me gradually
to believe in the Real Presence." — p. 74.
But the reminiscences of Keble are still more interesting.

Dr. Newman's reverence for him is very beautiful, and it
was well deserved ; for everybody seems to have admired
and loved this man, he was so pure in heart, so gentle and
refined in all his acts and ways. It was Froude's doings that
he and Newman came together. It is one of the sayings
preserved in his "Remains," — "Do you know the story of
the murderer who had done one good thing in his life ?
Well, if I was ever asked what good deed I had ever done,
I should say that I had brought Keble and Newman to
understand each other."
It is Dr. Newman's fashion to make an inventory of the
opinions which he gets from various persons. He tickets
them as confidently as if he bought them at a shop. Thus it
was Dr. Hawkins who used to snub him severely, and who
taught him to weigh his words, and to be cautious in his
statements. From him he got the doctrine of Baptismal
Regeneration, and the idea that, "before many years, an
attack would be made on the books and canon of Scripture."
From him also he got the doctrine of Tradition, " the propo
sition, self-evident as soon as stated, that the sacred text was
never intended to teach doctrine, but only to prove it ; and
that, if we would learn doctrine, we must have recourse to
the formularies of the Church."
" And now, as to Dr. Whately, I owe him a great deal. He was
a man of generous and warm heart. He was particularly loyal to
his friends, and, to use the common phrase, ' all his geese were
swans.'. While I was still awkward and timid, in 1822, he took me
by the hand, and acted the part to me of a gentle and encouraging
instructor. He emphatically opened my mind, and taught me to
think, and to use my reason." — p. 62.
" What he did for me, in point of religious opinion, was, first, to
teach me the existence of the Church, as a substantive body or corpo
ration ; next, to fix in me those anti-Erastian views of Church polity
which were one of the most prominent features of the Tractarian
movement." — p. 63.
From Keble he obtained — what Butler had already taught
him, in a less decided form — the " Sacramental system," i.e.,
" Berkleyism," in its application to Church forms and mys
teries and the law of probability. As Butler left this matter,
the stumbling-block with Dr. Newman was, " But who can
really pray to a being of whose existence he is seriously in
doubt?"
" I considered that Mr. Keble met this difficulty by ascribing the
firmness of assent which we give to religious doctrine, not to
the probabilities which introduced it, but to the living power of
faith and love which accepted it. In matters of religion, he seemed
to say, it is not merely probability which makes us intellectually
certain, but probability as it is put to account by faith and love."
— p. 69.
Such were the principles, and such the men, with which
the Church of England entered on that Via Media which, to
so many of her children, has proved a Via Dolorosa, leading
them away from her into the embrace of Rome. There must
be fundamental dogmas; there must be a visible Church,
with sacraments and rites, with Bishops, standing in the
place of God, with power to order penance, and to enforce it.
These dogmas were the dogmas of the Prayer-Book ; this
Church, the Church of England. Liberalism was, in its very
nature, anti-dogmatic. Therefore it must be crushed. And
the Romish Church claimed to be the Church by virtue of
its antiquity, by virtue of its apostolic line, by virtue of its
852 Dr. Neu-man's Apologia. [Nov.
sanctity. Now, the Church was necessarily one. If it was

Roman, then it was not Anglican. Therefore the Romish
Church must be opposed.
Into this twofold battle Dr. Newman plunged himself, with
all the noble ardor that he could command. He toiled like
Hercules. He began the Tracts out of his own head, and saw
to it that they were circulated far and wide. He travelled
everywhere, talking with curates and with rectors, urging
them to go to work and do the duty nearest to them in this
matter. He wrote epistles numberless to young men, to
women, to the newspapers, to the magazines. He had
come back from the continent, brimful of joyous energy.
He was full of confidence in his position, absolutely certain
that the English Church might be the sole channel of invis
ible grace, if she would only be true to herself, i.e., to her
history and Prayer-book, as he read them. He exulted in
his confidence ; and there was a sort of fierceness in his
exultation, something savage in his energy. In one of his
first sermons after his return, he said, " I do not shrink from
uttering my firm conviction, that it would be a gain to the
country, were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more
gloomy, more fierce in its religion, than at present it shows it
self to be." The corrector of the press bore these strong epi
thets till he got to "more fierce," and then he put in the
margiu a query. He said of the Bishops, that there could not
be a more blessed termination of their course than the spoil
ing of their goods, and martyrdom. Contrasting heretics and
heresiarchs, he said, " The latter should meet with no
mercy." Earnestness of this sort is contagious, no matter
if its subject-matter is not great. Especially, the young
men at Oxford took fire, and then those young men in the
Churches who were so much dissatisfied with the general
deadness of the Church that they clutched eagerly at any
thing that promised better things. The movement grew and
prospered. Its leader's presence was magnetic and electrical.
Enthusiasts flocked to his standard. He looked at men, and
they trembled. He spoke to them, and they bowed. His
tracts, his letters, and his fame were everywhere. " From
beginnings 80 small, from elements of thought so fortuitous,

with prospects so unpromising, the Anglo-Catholic party
became a power in the National Church, and an object of
alarm to her rulers and friends." It had a system, a litera
ture, a sacramental order, of its own. And then came the
crash. Dr. Newman wrote " Tract 90," and it was con
demned. It was a commentary on the Articles. They had
been regarded as the sea-wall against Rome. Dr. Newman
proved that they were no such thing. He showed, or thought
he did, that they were not opposed to " Catholic Doctrine,"
but only to the dominant errors of Rome. The distinction
was not relished. It was received with indignation. A
demand was made for the suppression of the tract. It was
not granted. But Dr. Newman wrote to his Bishop, and gave
up his place in the movement. And, with his loss, the move
ment ceased to be a power. It lost its vigor and its buoy
ancy ; its firm, elastic step ; and, since, it has gone tottering.
But it was in the very nature of this movement to grow
feeble, and die. How can a man be born when he is old ?
Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb, and be
born? It was an article of Tractarian faith that such a
thing was possible. Here was no advance, but a re-action ;
an attempt to foist the thought and life of mediaeval times
upon the genius of the nineteenth century. The wonder is,
that it succeeded even for a little time. But it ought not to
be, if we have stopped to think of England and the English
Church as they were in 1831. The life of any time is pachy
dermatous. But, if you probe deep enough, you will find
the quick. The Church of England had as many barks as
any tree that ever grew in park or forest ; and, when the
Tractarians said, " Cut it down, why cumbereth it the
ground ? and out of it we will make bits of the true cross
and rosaries," it did not mind them till they went clear down
beneath its moss-grown forms and usages, into its real life.
But then it was discovered that —
"There dwelt an iron nature in the grain;
The glittering axe was broken in their arms ;
Their arms were shattered to the shoulder-blade."
30*
In the external life of England, there were many points

of attachment for Dr. Newman's notion of a primitive and
apostolic Church. Just in proportion as the National Church
had any real vitality, it more than passively endured : it
actively embraced the principles which he proclaimed. And,
if the living England of to-day had only held its peace, there
might have been on English soil a formalism which Rome
itself might not eclipse; a faith as childish and unreasonable
as ever Catherine of Siena cherished in her breast. And
this would have been easier than not. Dr. Newman was not
wrong in thinking that any form of life must flourish just in
proportion as it is true to itself, whether it be God's life or
the devil's. To imagine that the English Church, as such,
will thrive upon its present principle, that its creeds and arti
cles mean any thing you please, is not to be wise. Dr. New
man saw that it would thrive only as its sons agreed to be
one thing or another."
" They cannot go on for ever standing on one leg, or sitting with
out a chair, or walking with their feet tied, or grazing, like Tityrus's
stags, in the air. They will take one view or another ; but it will be
a consistent view. It may be Liberalism, or Erastianism, or Popery,
or Catholicity ; but it will be real." — p. 145.
Now, the English Church was born of Schism, not of
Heresy. Its break with Rome was neither sacramental nor
dogmatic : it was political. And so, when Dr. Newman went
back far enough, he found that Anglican and Catholic teaching
were the same. To be true to herself, then, the Church of
England must also be true to Rome. But when it came to
this, the nation was not ready. It would choose Liberalism
rather than Rome, if it had to choose between them. But
for the Church of England to do this, was for her to sink, if
it was sinking, into " a merely national institution." Her
proper life was that of the first and middle ages. But that
was the life of Romanism also; and so, though it might come
hard, she chose to live the life of Englishmen. It has proved
harder even than she deemed, — a great deal harder than it
would be if she generously offered, instead of grudgingly
conceded, herself to the great present. She is still " standing
on one leg," — trying" to be and not to be " at the same time.

It will not do. Better have gone to Rome. But that she
could not; for the spirit of the age stood up, and thwarted
her. And now that spirit waits to join her in eternal wed
lock with itself. Will she rise, and follow where it beckons
her? Would to Heaven that she might ! Then, instead of
being without parent or child, she should have God for her
father, and, Nature for her mother ; Science and Art for her
dear children.
From the beginning of the movement, there had been fierce
and frequent condemnation of its Roman tendency. And,
now that Dr. Newman is a Catholic, there are those who
think that he was always one, and not unconsciously. It is
contended that he knew just where his feet were going, and
that still he did not warn the simple souls who followed after
him. But to read these pages, is to be convinced that Dr.
Newman did not know that he was going to Rome. Before
the thing was fairly started, everybody opened their eyes,
and stared at him as if he ought to know that he was teach
ing nothing but sheer Popery. But he answered them,
"True, we seem to be making straight for it; but, go on
awhile, and you will come to a deep chasm across the path,
which makes real approximation impossible." It would
appear that he could not have been more sure of his position
than he was before the summer months of 1839. And not
only did he have full confidence in his own, but he despised
every other system and its arguments ; and when, as late as
1841, people came to him, frightened almost out of their wits
by his " Tract 90," and told him that he might as well go
over to the Pope at once, he could not agree with them.
And, when the tract had been condemned, and charged
against, and consequently his withdrawal from the movement
had taken place, he still remained inactive. His enemies
cried out upon him, and his friends were filled with sorrow
and perplexity. He wished and prayed that he might help
them, but he could not even help himself. One of his fol
lowers, a lady of great wit and earnestness, has given a
humorous account of the perplexities with which his action
356 Dr. Newman's Ajiologia. [Nov.
troubled her own mind. She describes herself as following

him over a bleak common, and coming nearer every minute
to " the king's highway," against which they were being
always warned. Suddenly he stopped, and vowed that he
would go no farther.
" He did not, however, take the leap at once ; but sat down on the
top of the fence, with his feet hanging towards the road, as if he
meant to take his time, and let himself down easily."
But he did not propose to jump at any thing. He desired

to walk with logical exactness over every inch of the way.
He did not wish to go to Rome. He was bound that he
would not, if he could help it. He loved the Via Media. It
was his only child ; and, when he first suspected that it might
be untenable, he felt as one might feel to see the death-damp
gather on the forehead of his eldest-born. But this suspicion,
horrible as it was, did not imply a corresponding one that he
might go to Rome.
And yet he did, although not speedily. What everybody
else was seeing, it was strange he did not see. But it was
as if God blinded him, so that he might go right on, regard
less of the consequences. The Church, the Nation, the
Movement, also had seen them, and recoiled. Better, they
said, that we should be illogical, than go to Rome. But Dr.
Newman said, that, let come what come would, he would be
logical ; and he was so, and that is why he is a Roman Catholic
to-day.
Dr. Newman's picture of himself, retreating inch by inch
from the position which he had assumed so confidently, is
sad in the extreme. But it proves, beyond a cavil, the one
thing for the sake of proving which the book was written,
viz., his honesty ; and it was, moreover, the best sort of
honesty. He was perfectly honest with himself. He had
accepted certain premises ; and he resolved not to hold back
from the conclusion, whatever it might be. Ease and friend
ship and ambition had their voices for him, not less than for
those who listened to them and then said, " We can go with
you no further." He might have obeyed them. His will
was strong enough to draw a line that his intellect should

not pass over. But then what would it profit him, if he
should gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? He
began to doubt the Via Media in 1839 ; he entered into com
munion with Rome in October, 1845.
It was the history of the Monophysites that gave him his
first blow. The Notes of a true Church, as he calls them,
were Antiquity, Apostolicity, Universality. His great strong
hold was Antiquity ; and here, in the middle of the fifth
century, he saw the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries
reflected. He saw his face in the mirror, and he was a Mon-
ophysite. The Church of the Via Media was in the position
of the Eastern Churches then. Rome was where she is now.
The Protestants were the Eutychians.
" What was the use of continuing the controversy or defending
my position, if, after all, I was forging arguments for Arius or Euty-
ches, and turning devil's advocate against the much-enduring Atha-
nasius and the majestic Leo ? Be my soul with the saints, and shall
I lift up my hand against them ? Sooner may my right hand forget
her cunning, and wither outright, as his who once stretched it out
against a prophet of God ! Anathema to a whole tribe of Cranmers,
Ridleys, Latimers, and Jewels ! perish the names of Bramhall,
Usher, Taylor, Stillingfleet, and Barrow from the face of the earth,
ere I should do aught but fall at their feet in love and in worship,
whose image was continually before my eyes, and whose musical
words were ever in my ears and on my tongue ! " — p. 156.
But, as if this blow were not enough to stagger him,
another followed hard upon it. An article on "The Anglican
Claim " appeared in the " Dublin Review." It was a parallel
between the Donatists and Anglicans. Dr. Newman did not
think it very strong. But it contained this sentence of St.
Augustine's with reference to the Church : Securus judical
orbis terrarum. It decided questions on a simpler rule than
that of Antiquity.
" What a light was hereby thrown upon every controversy in the
Church ! not that, for the moment, the multitude may not falter in
their judgment, — not that, in the Arian hurricane, Sees more than
can be numbered did not bend before its fury, and fall off from St.
Athanasius, — not that the crowd of Oriental Bishops did not need
to be sustained, during the contest, by the voice and the eye of St.
Leo ; but that the deliberate judgment, in which the whole Church
at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription, and a final
sentence against such portions of it as protest and secede." — p. 157.
" Who can account," he says, " for the impressions that are
made upon him ? " These words of the Great Saint, himself
Antiquity's great oracle, deciding thus against himself; for
the consensus of the Church came to him with all the force
of the child's " Tolle, lege ; tolle, lege," which Augustine
himself heard in the garden, and started as when Adam heard
the voice of God. Securus judicat orbis terrarum. " By
those great words of the ancient Father, the theory of the
Via Media was absolutely pulverized."
Those who contend that Dr. Newman's gradual secession
from the English Church was not a logical catena, but "a
string of moods," think that in this case alone is proof enough
of their position.* Here is no logic, they affirm, but mere
feeling. And it was this which guided him through all his
course. But better than logic, and far more convincing, are
its illustrations. " Mere paper logic " Dr. Newman tells us
that he did not like. But here was the logic of events. He
listened to Antiquity, and it bade him listen to the Church.
His logic told him that there must be a visible Church set up
in the world. It also told him that to apostatize from that
Church was the shortest way of being damned. And who
should judge of his apostasy ? Securus judicat orbis ter
rarum, said Augustine. It was self-evident. Could the
fallible judge of the infallible ? — a man's own " private judg
ment" tell him whether he was in the Church or out of it?
If so, then why not be a Protestant? But this his premises
would not admit. And then Dr. Newman looked in his Euty-
chian mirror, and saw himself again ; and saw that he was
an apostate, a Monophysite. No wonder that his soul
was stirred.
But he waited for still further confirmation. The affair of
* Quarterly Review, October, 1864.

"Tract 90" was in the spring of 1841. The way in which

it was received was any thing but promising. But then it
was not actually suppressed ; and in this there was some con
solation. The experiences of 1839 still haunted him; but then
he was busying himself with getting up another theory. It
was that Sanctity might furnish an excuse for the existence
of the English Church, though she could not prove herseli
to be possessed of other Notes that had been deemed neces
sary. In the summer of this year, he sat down to his trans
lation of St. Athanasius. He had got but a little way, when
the trouble of 1839 returned on him. The ghost had come
a second time. In the Arian history, he found the very same
phenomenon, in a far bolder shape, which he had found in the
Mouophysite. He discovered that the pure Arians were
the Protestants, the Semi-Arians were the Anglicans, and
that Rome now was what it was. But still he thought that
Anglicanism had the Note of life, " not any sort of life, not
such as can come of Nature, but a supernatural Christian life
which could only come directly from above." He felt that
this was next door to pure Protestantism ; that it was equiv
alent to saying that there was no visible Church. But it was
the best that he could do. He was not quite certain that the
English Church was wrong, and he was any thing but ceftain
that the Roman Church was right. But he must have some
reason for being where he was.
He was not obliged to stay there very long. In the fall
of 1841, there were two occurrences that settled his affair, at
least so far as it concerned the Anglicans. The first of these
was that the Bishops charged upon him. This they did for
mally. They condemned the principles which underlaid the
Tracts. For them to do this was to avow that " they did not
even aspire to Catholicity." It was to say that heresy was
not so very bad or dangerous. Immediately afterward, they
added, "No; nor schism either." The affair of the Jerusalem
Bishopric amounted to this. Here was a Church inviting
Lutherans and Calvinists to its wedding-feast, and telling
them to never mind about the wedding-garment. It put
Dr. Newman in communion with a crowd of heretics and
schismatics. It was more than he could stand. Looking

back, a short time after, on these acts, he wrote : —
" Many a man might have held an abstract theory about the
Catholic Church, to which it was difficult to adjust the Anglican, —
might have admitted a suspicion, or even painful doubts, about the
latter, — yet never have been impelled onwards, had our rulers pre
served the quiescence of former years ; but it is the corroboration of
a present, living, and energetic heterodoxy which realizes and makes
them practical." — p. 185.
But one thing remained to do, and that was to convince
himself that the Rome of the fifth century was that of the
nineteenth. He could find no flaw in it so far as its Aposto-
licity was concerned. The sacred " imposition" had descended
in an unbroken line. The hands of Leo were upon the head
of Pius IX. It but remained to test her Catholicity. In the
spring of 1843, he made a formal retraction of all that he
had ever said against her. In the autumn of that year,
he resigned his living at St. Mary's. Meanwhile, he rested
in " Samaria : " i. c, although he had resolved that Anglican
ism was not the Church of the Apostles, he thought that she
might be subject to extraordinary grace ; just as the Samari
tans, notwithstanding their schism, and worse than schism,
were still recognized as a people by the Divine Mercy. God
had sent his holy prophets to reclaim them, without intimating
that they must make over to Jerusalem. Might not Angli
canism be reclaimed without making over to Rome? This
was his notion of " Samaria."
He lived in it two or three years. But it was a dreadful
sort of life. The Bishops kept on charging at him, every day
more furiously. After his resignation of St. Mary's, he went
down to Littlemore to die in peace. But he was not allowed
the privilege. All sorts of lies were told about him ; he was
in league with Rome, — he was starting a monastery. Every
body took it for granted that he would be a Catholic, sooner
or later ; and the majority kept whispering or shouting,
" Why does he stay?" " Why don't he go over?" But, as
he tells us, great events take time ; and going over was for
him a great event. But when he discovered that Rome was
not less Catholic than Apostolic ; that she held no dogma now
that might not have been developed from the dogmas of the
Primitive Chnrch, — then he passed through Samaria, and
went up to Jerusalem.
"Littlemore, Oct. 8th, 1845. — I am this night expecting Father
Dominic, the Passionist. . . . He does not know of my intention ;
but I mean to ask of him admission into the one Fold of Christ." —
p. 261.
And now, in closing up this article, we are in duty bound to
say, that no man who believes in an authority other than that
which God enthrones in every human breast, has any right
to find one word of fault with Dr. Newman's course and final
action in this matter. If there is any such authority, then is
Dr. Newman nearer right than any who imagine that they have
it, though still outside the Roman-Catholic communion. His
premises were exactly those which are accepted by the whole
of Christendom, unless, as some believe, Christendom is large
enough to take in Theists and Transcendentalists: the con
clusion which he draws from them is unavoidable. If, as he
took for granted, man is so constituted that he never can attain
to any knowledge of the truth, and yet cannot be saved in any
other way than by a knowledge of the truth, then there must
be an authority of some sort set up in the world. As much
as this the Protestant believes. Breaking with Rome, he did
not give up his notion of authority, nor of infallibility. But
he vested them in the Bible, whereas they had been vested
in the Church. But Dr. Newman saw that, if the Bible was
intended to teach dogmatically, it was not equal to the pur
pose for which it was designed. He saw no reason why, in
course of time, as things were going, there should not be as
many sects as there are chapters in both Testaments. The
Bible, then, must be interpreted. He found, so far as Angli
canism was concerned, that this had been done in the Prayer-
book, in the creeds and articles. But there came a time
when his own Bishop said that these might mean something
or nothing. And then he knew that there must be a living
voice of God, empowered to teach the truth infallibly, and to
VOL. LXXIX. — GTH 8. VOL. XVII. MO. III. 81
interpret alike the Bible and the creeds. And thus, deliber
ately and logically, he went to Rome.
And, so far as logic is concerned, there is no reason why
the whole of Christendom should not arise at once and follow
him. Of all that curse the human reason in these days, or
say that it is cursed, none are so brave, so thorough-going,
so consistent, as was he. But even he, with all his intellectual
rigidity, with logical acumen such as is not given to ten men in
a century, would not perhaps have gone to Rome, if he had
not been taunted, scourged, and vilified ; if his steps had not
been dogged ; if men's heated brains had not gone on for
ever forging lies. Not that these things carried him there ;
but they helped to neutralize the forces which would perhaps
have kept him in his place but for this counteraction. Not
the least beautiful portion of this record is that which proves
how dearly Dr. Newman loved his friends. It must have
been as terrible as death to part with them. Then, too, he
was the recognized leader of the greatest movement that his
Church had known for many a day. And he delighted in
the exercise of power. It could not have been an easy thing
for him to sink at once into the merest nobody. And then
there were so many looking to him for help. Alas ! if they
should think that he had cheated them ! In view of all these
things, not one man in a thousand would have gone to Rome ;
no, not though they had been hounded on even more furiously
than he.
And, since it was so hard for him to go where logic mani
festly led the way, we shall not be surprised if the great body
of the Christian world prefer to be illogical, and to stay just
where they are. It is the whole man that reasons, and logic
is so small a part of us that it is not very often that it has its
way. But the rationale of the matter is not changed. It is
still true, that, between the premises that we have named and
the conclusion in which Dr. Newman now reposes, we cannot
logically pause. But is there no alternative if we do not care
either to go to Rome, or to convict ourselves of cowardice by
deserting, at the last moment, the stately ship in which we
have embarked ? Yes, one and but one. It is to set our
faces just the other way ; to walk with Francis Newman,

rather than with John, forward into the realm of freedom,
not backward into that of clanking chains. We can go be
hind the premises which all the world accept, and see if they
are worth accepting. Let it be proved, if possible, that man
has undergone some " terrible original calamity," * by which
he has been robbed of his ability to know the truth, and to
commune with God. Or let it be shown that these are facts
inherent in the human constitution. And then let it be proved
that man is only to be saved by truth rolled up into a dogma,
and swallowed down as if it were a pill. These are the camels
of theology ; and, when a man has swallowed them, there is no
need of straining out the gnats of miracle and superstition
that still remain in the flagon. The Roman Catholic does not
care to do this.; but Protestants, who pretend to use their
reason, are very careful of their intellectual oesophagus. But,
to him that believes in miracles, a thousand, more or less,
should make no difference. It is absurd to draw a line be
tween the power of St. Paul's bodyf to work miracles, and
that of St. Walburga's bones ; to believe in one, and not
believe in the other. Nothing is difficult if you can prove
the fundamental mysteries of human incapacity and salvation
through acceptance of a creed.
But these pretended facts have not a shadow of foundation.
The human soul is capable of loving all things beautiful, of
doing all things good, of finding out enough of God's own
truth to answer all its glorious purposes. So much of intel
lectual certainty as is needed for our tasks, we can purchase
by the modest use of our own powers. There is no need of
any oracle outside of the breast. It is there that we must
listen for the only words that are infallible. And those there
spoken are not infallible for other men, but only for ourselves.
And for ourselves to-day, but not to-morrow. Should any
ask, "But is this Christianity?" we should answer, "No, if
by Christianity you mean the current faith of Christendom.
Yes, if you mean the faith which Jesus cherished, and in
which he lived and died."
* Apologia, p. 268. t Acts xix. 12.

364 Pioneers of France in the New World. [Nov.
Art. IV. — PIONEERS OF FRANCE IN THE

NEW WORLD.
Pioneers of France in tlie New World. By Francis Pabkman, Author

of the Conspiracy of Pontiac, Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life,
Sec. Boston : Little, Brown, & Co.
The written history of North America begins where Henry

the VII., " the English Solomon," wrote in his privy-purse
account-book, " To him that found the new isle, ten pounds."
This was as early as August 10, 1497. Between that early
date and 1574, there is hardly a word of America in the archives
of England. From 1497 quite down to 1607* when Newport
and John Smith at last got firm foothold of Virginia, there
is more than a century of adventure, of experiment, and of
waiting, — a century which is to be called the century of the
dawn, to which belongs all the mythic history that we have, —
a great store of romance, should civilization ever start up new
romances, and of which the general student wonders that so
little is recorded or widely known. Before that century was
past, Mexico and South America had really passed through
the most imposing and eventful crises of their history. The
cities and cathedrals were built; Santa Rosa, our one Ameri
can Saint, was born and had died ; and the rivers of gold and
silver had overflowed for the destruction of Spain, and had
begun to run dry. Yet, of that period, general history tells
of the country north of Mexico a most scanty story of a little
fishing, and a little quest at the north for India ; hints at a
little squabbling about title between Spain and England ; but,
on the whole, lets the century drift by, as if it had as little to
do with America as the century before.
Into one of the great halls of history, as empty and dark
as this, Mr. Parkman walks boldly; throws open the shut
ters ; brushes the dust off the pictures ; shall we say,
takes the linen covers from the statues ; and shows that the
iun was as bright and the world as active — that men were as
1865.] Pioneers of France in the New World. 365
brave, as noble, and as manly — that adventure was as des

perate and passions as hot, north of the line of Mexico, as
they were south of it, for these hundred years of prepara
tion, before Protestant America was born. He begins with
Florida, the most tropical of our States, the oldest of our
colonies, the most mysterious in her history, shall we not
say, the most hopeful in her future ? He tells very briefly —
rather too briefly — the stories of Ponce de Leon, of the foun
tain of Youth, and De Soto ; for the Spanish adventurers are
not his heroes, but the French. Thus he opens up for us
the history of the French colonies in Carolina and Florida.
As early as 1550, there is the curious episode of Villegagnon's
Huguenot colony in Rio Janerio. This failed, and the next
French Protestant colony tried its fortune in Port Royal
Bay.
" At length (in 1562) they reached a scene made glorious in after-
years. Opening betwixt flat and sandy shores, they saw a commodi
ous haven, and named it Port Royal. On the 27th of May they
crossed the bar, where the war-ships of Dupont crossed three hun
dred years later. They passed Hilton Head, where, in an after gene
ration, rebel batteries belched their vain thunder ; and, dreaming of
nothing of what the rolling centuries should bring forth, held their
course along the peaceful bosom of Broad River."
The object of this expedition was not immediate settle
ment, but exploration; but so enthusiastic were the voy
agers, as they saw the beauties of that region in early June,
that a company of volunteers, thirty in number, were left to
attempt a settlement. Wholly unprepared they were, and
wholly ignorant of the undertaking before them. The story
of the colony is a story of famine, misery, and death, like one
before it, and like so many which come after it. The Euro
pean races had passed so many centuries since their last
exodus, that they had lost the art of colonizing, now so well
known again ; and they had all to learn by cruel experience.
The next year closed on Port Royal without one Frenchman
on its shores ; on North America, without one white man north
of Mexico. All was to be begun again.
The new beginning was made by Laudonni&re with another
81*
Huguenot colony, in 1564. He landed in the River of May,

which we call the River of St. John. Remember him, new
colonists, who shall carry a new religion, new laws, and the
new-tested rights of men into that river, in the new birth of
Florida I Ribaut, who had led the last colony, had landed on
those lonely shores; and he and his Frenchmen were ten
derly remembered there. They made themselves the friends
of the savages from the very beginning. Made welcome by
the prestige they had gained, the colony of Laudonniere
established itself at Fort Caroline. The story of their ad
ventures and intrigues with one and another sept or tribe
of the Indians; the story of their relief by Hawkins, the
inventor of the slave-trade and prince of legalized bucca
neers ; the story of their conflict with Menendez, the Spanish
leader, who came to rout them out from the empire of Spain,
discovered them, outnumbered and overmastered them, broke
faith with their starving fugitives, and for ever tainted the
names of Catholic and of Spaniard by his treatment of them,
— all these stories give full material for a narrative of melo
dramatic interest. Then comes poetical justice. Menendez,
the Spanish leader, hanged Ribaut and his other prisoners,
with the inscription, " I do this, not as to Frenchmen, but as
to Lutherans." Nothing in the recent annals of Southern
warfare has been more brutal or barbarous than the treat
ment which the Jesuit leader inflicted on his Huguenot
captives. The French king at home had no ear for the tale.
But Dominique de Gourgues, a private Huguenot gentleman,
read of these cruelties ; collected a crew of men willing to
avenge his countrymen ; sailed in 1568 for the River of May ;
found the Indians willing to join him against the Sp'aniards,
and, in a whirlwind assault, took them prisoners in their turn.
Grimly he arrayed his prisoners before the trees where
Menendez had hanged his captives. They were hanged there
in turn, with the inscription, " I do this, not as to Spaniards, nor
as to Morescoes,1 but as to traitors, robbers, and murderers."
1 Maxane, which we render "Morescoes," was a term of ignominy. As

one might say "nigger" of a white man.
And so Gourgues's mission was fulfilled. Like a whirlwind

he camo ; like a whirlwind he went. He bade the Indians
demolish the fort, and not one stone was left upon another.
He sailed, and all was to be begun again.
Mr. Parkman, having wrought out all the exciting narra
tive of these coasts with the most sedulous care, yet with
the most picturesque narration, turns to the events further
north in the valley of the St. Lawrence. The narrative of
these begins a few years earlier than those we have been
tracing ; but the main movement of the story is of a later
date. Examining the question, whether the Basque fisher
men knew of the Newfoundland cod-fishery before Columbus,
Mr. Parkman follows along the history of French exploration
through the century. The earliest description of the United
States known to exist, is the report of one of these explora
tions, that made by Verrazzano, as early as 1524, which he
wrote from Dieppe to the king on the 8th of July of that
year. Jacques Cartier's first reconnoissance was made in
1534; his second more careful voyage, in 1535. In this
expedition, Stadacone* and Hochelaga, where now stand
Quebec and Montreal, were discovered ; and the winter of
1535-36, in the horrors of a Quebec climate, where men,
wholly unprepared for such adventure, met scurvy, famine,
and cold, witnessed the dreadful failure of the first European
colony north of Mexico. So many such failures must be
made, alas ! before men could learn the art of colonization.
Two more dreadful winters, at or near the same spot, marked
the winters of 1541 and 1542; but, in the summer of 1543,
what was left of the colony was taken back to Europe. So
all was'to be begun again.
The next beginning was made, as we have seen, at Port
Royal. That at Fort Caroline was the next. Each ended
almost as soon as it began. The French fishermen followed
the fisheries every year. It must be, that one or another
spent the winter by some accident or adventure here, some
times ; as the New London whalers now winter, of choice, on
the shores of Davis's Straits opposite Greenland. But there
is no narrative of such adventure. As late as 1598, the
368 Pioneers of France tn the New World. Lôv-
Marquis de la Roche, a Catholic nobleman of Brittany, asked

for a patent to colonize New France, and obtained it. That
winter he landed forty convicts on Sable Island, still one of
the most desolate regions of our coast. He sailed further
himself to search for more genial home, but either lost or
deserted the convict colonists. They spent five years of
misery there, living on seals, foxes, fish, and whortleberries ;
and then the twelve who were left were rescued, and, for
Sable Island, all was to be begun again. These wretches
seem to have been the only white persons in America north
of Mexico, when the seventeenth century came in.
The new history of French effort in America comes in
with the manhood of Samuel de Champlain, one of the most
striking and interesting characters of history. It seems that
he trained himself for his great enterprise in the best school
of his day, namely, in the Spanish service ; and Mr. Parkman,
with his usual diligence in detail, has even studied the manu
script history of the first adventure which Champlain made
westward, under the orders of Francisco Colombo, a Spanish
admiral, in the year 1600. The manuscript of the journal he
then wrote is still preserved in Dieppe. So soon as Cham
plain was of an age and position to undertake such adventure,
he sought American employment under the auspices of
France. By a fortunate alliance with De Chastes, he obtained
the patent which all parties then thought so necessary, and,
with Pontgravd, sailed in 1604 for New France.
We must not trace the detail of this adventure, more than
we have attempted to do the others to which we have alluded.
It is because it introduces Champlain, the hero, par excellence,
of these early romantic days, that that particular "voyage
differs from earlier or later experiments of failure. Not in
this voyage, but in one and another expedition, only ending
with his death, he penetrates the unknown world into recesses
which, to this hour, are the home of native Indians almost as
savage now as they were then. He brought all that was
worth bringing of chivalry into the conflicts with the giants
and infidels and wild enchantments of the New World. With
a spirit always young, he essayed every adventure most
cheerfully. He brought such civilization as the world had to

the wilderness, and seems never to have disgraced the name
of civilization. He won the love of the Indians, even their
respect and obedience, and does not seem to have forfeited
it by any intentional disloyalty to his promise. Let us add,
that, in the most attractive contrast to all Puritan adven
turers, he told his story with animation and spirit. He let
us see what he saw, and hear what he heard. We will do all
fit honor to Winslow and Bradford and Winthrop and Morton,
and the rest of our own annalists. But if their fathers had led
them to some altar, and bade them swear never to reveal to
posterity the familiar method of their lives, and of the lives
of those around them, how they did what they did, how the
new landscape impressed them, what were the manners of
the men they met, and what their own sensations as they
exchanged the Old World for the New, — had their fathers
done this, and sometimes we think they did bind them to
such awful secrecy, they would not have left us fewer traces
than they did of their daily lives, or of the impressions,
which, for all their taciturnity, we believe must have been
overwhelming, of a life so completely new. Let us do honor
to Samuel de Champlain, that, while he did well, he could tell
what he did as well ; while he saw well, he could tell what
he saw ; and how fortunate for us, that the tracing out his
work has fallen now into the hands of so successful a narra
tor!
But we have not yet come to successful colonizing. Acadie
(the land of the pollock fish, whose Indian name is aquoddie)
was first settled, at the mouth of the St. Croix, in the expedi
tion of 1604. The next spring, the colony was removed to
Port Royal, now Annapolis, in Nova Scotia. In 1608, Cham-
plain, acting with De Monts, settled at Quebec again. The
Acadian colony had endless hardships and misadventures.
In 1614, they essayed a plantation at Frenchman's Bay,
when Argall, an English seaman, acting on pure buccaneer
law, swept down on them and afterwards on Port Royal, and
carried all Frenchmen away captive, although, in pretence,
France was at peace with England. Jesuits and Huguenots,
courtiers and merchants, great noblemen and great ladies,

soldiers, adventurers, fishermen, and traders, mix themselves
up in the narrative with the most fascinating blending of
colors and of voices. With the background of the brilliant
array made by such a chorus, there is, however, always in the
front a duo, sometimes even a trio or quatuor, of leading
men, with just a glimpse of Madame de Guercheville, whom
we may fairly call a leading woman, and of Madame de Cham-
plain. Such men as Poutrincourt, as Biencourt, as De Monts,
and the hero of chivalry whom we have named, will not let
the chorus clamor run into chaos. They steadily rebuild
burned forts, re-establish deserted sites, out-manceuvre the
most crafty antagonists ; and, for that generation, Acadie and
Canada are established on foundations which are sure.
The reader will readily judge how interesting a narrative
might be wrought out of such adventures, if only the narra
tors condescend to leave some memoirs of them behind.
Mr. Parkman's rare zeal, of which we are to speak again, has
brought out what is really large store of material for the
reproduction of such history. Merchants, soldiers, and priests
had the French tact at " memoires pour servir." And so the
dull page of the history of poor, starving, fishing settlements
is lighted up with gleams of human pathos, and becomes as
wild and affecting as the story should be which is the begin
ning of the history of nations.
With the winter following the lawless raid of Argall on
Acadie, Mr. Parkman turns from that province to the St.
Lawrence, and follows the fortunes of Champlain and of his
colony there. We have spoken of the man. The scenes of
his adventures were the St. Lawrence, the lake which is his
fit monument because it bears his noble name, all the great
lakes but Lake Superior, and all the waters between them.
The people with whom he had to do were mostly the Iroquois
Indians ; a variety of the Indian race much more interesting
than our dead and stolid Algonquins were. Shall we say
that the talkative, adventurous, and sociable Iroquois was the
Frenchman of America; and that the dull, stoical, morose
Penobscot or Massachusetts man was its Englishman? Mr.
Parkman will rule us out of court for such a dashing gener

alization. But none the less is this true, that, in his hands
and in Champlain's narratives, the Iroquois and the Hurons
are far more interesting companions than Roger Williams or
John Eliot ever make out our " red-skins " here to be.
We have attempted the briefest possible sketch of this
curiously varied narrative, simply to direct the attention of
the reader to the volume itself, in which it is so thoroughly
digested. Under the title which we have quoted, Mr. Park-
man presents to us now this interesting study of every suc
cessive effort which France made in America, by way of
introduction to his study of the rivalry of France and Eng
land on this continent, — a study for which he is particularly
well prepared, — of a subject of the first interest and impor
tance. We must not leave our sketch without direct acknowl
edgment of the picturesque interest of the narrative, and of
the solid and manly style in which the work is done.
Although it is evident that the history of the attempts of
an absolute civic rule and an armed hierarchy to establish
themselves over a domain so vast, and a population so utterly
unaccustomed to and unfit for the restraints of organized
society, must be sought for and found, if at all, in many
places, and in scattered and fragmentary condition, yet it is
surprising to find how much of written authority remains
upon which to base it. The earlier period of the history of
New France was, it appears, very prolific of a class of pub
lications of much historical value, but of which many are now
exceedingly rare. Of these most important tributaries to the
work which he had in hand, Mr. Parkman is able to say in
his introductory note, " The writer, however, has at length
gained access to them all." This "all" includes a vast amount
of unpublished matter, like the early records of the colonies
in the archives of France, and other documents of important
bearing upon the subjects, treasured in public and private
libraries in France and in Canada. Besides these more hid
den authorities, there is the published matter with regard to
this history; but even that is much scattered and little known.
Captain Jean Ribaut's account of his voyage to Florida, in
1562, only exists in the English translation made the next

year. Le Clerc's " Establissemenk de Foi" was suppressed by
the government soon after its publication in 1691. Of the
eight accounts of the Huguenot occupation of Florida, given
by eye-witnesses, used by our author, none can be said to
be works easily attainable or generally known to exist; and
two of them are still in the original manuscript, and only
unearthed — so to speak — by his investigations. With re
sources of this sort dispersed over the world, and buried in
many obscure recesses, Mr. Parkman says that it has " been
his aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject
treated ; " and he expresses a confidence, which we cannot
think misplaced, that nothing of importance has escaped
him. Indeed, the internal evidence of untiring research, and
judicious selection, and careful weighing and comparison of
authorities, furnished by the volume itself, is sufficient to
show that there is little left for the gleaner in the field where
he has gathered and bound the sheaves.
But it is not merely in the examination of the special
authorities for the immediate transactions and incidents that
he records, that Mr. Parkman has appreciated and accom
plished his duty. That more general study aud cultivation
which enables him to grasp the whole of his subject; to
exhibit it as a whole, and not as a series of fragments ; and
from the mass of colors, and the confused lights before him,
to make one intelligible, interesting, and agreeable picture
— has preceded and accompanied the work of detail. He
has himself personally followed much of the trail. He has
possessed himself of the tone and spirit of pioneer life by an
actual experience of its haunts and its habits ; and such has
been the result of the strenuous effort at French subjugation
of this continent, that, in many an instance, he can describe,
from his own observation, scenes of his drama, still as wild,
as savage and deserted, as when they were first seen by the
adventurers whose progress he narrates. As he has thus
prepared himself, by a personal acquaintance, with the actual
boundaries of his subject, he has, by the study of the history
and literature and romance of the times of which he writes,
1865.] English Colleges and Schools. 373
imbued himself with the spirit and fathomed the character of

those with whom he speaks, and made habitual to himself a
clear and accurate judgment of their principles, their pas
sions, and their motives. He is as much at home in the intel
lectual and spiritual sphere of his drama, as in its outward
and local one. He groups his actors as well as he paints and
shifts his scenes ; and brings back to us, as far as seems possi
ble, the " very form and image of the times."
Art. V. — ENGLISH COLLEGES AND SCHOOLS.
1. Classical and Scientific Sttidies, and the Great Schools of England.

A Lecture. By William P. Atkinson.
2. On the Cam. Lectures on the University of Cambridge in England.
By William Everett. Cambridge : Sever & Francis.
These two books, between them, embrace the whole subject

of the Higher Education in England. One takes for its subject
the Public Schools ; the other, the Universities : the second
thus taking up the subject where the first laid it down. But
here the continuity ends. The two accounts do not dovetail
into each other at all. So far from one supplementing the
other, the two are so violently contrasted, that it would seem
hardly possible to believe that they were written on subjects
so closely connected. If we are to believe Mr. Atkinson, the
English system is below contempt ; it is more than a failure : it
is a cheat and a sham. If we follow Mr. Everett, it is a noble,
a magnificent scheme of education; second to none in the
world ; unapproachable, indeed, in its own line. Mr. Atkinson
brings forward his evidence to show that the public schools
send a wretched set of ignoramuses to college. Mr. Everett
gives his to the effect, that the English schools send to col
lege much better classical scholars than the American colleges
graduate. At first sight, then, we seem obliged to decide in
favor of one of two witnesses, who flatly contradict each other ;
VOL. LXXIX. — 5TH 8. VOL. XVII. KO. III. 82
874 English Colleges and Soltools. [Nov.
and should probably incline to favor that of the eye-witness :

for Mr. Atkinson gets at his facts from a parliamentary blue-
book, while Mr. Everett obtained his by actual residence at
an English university. The real truth, however, is, that the
two are looking at the same object from opposite directions ;
Mr. Atkinson fixing his eyes exclusively on the defects, while
Mr. Everett looks chiefly at the excellences, of the English
system.
Let us proceed, then, to examine each of these witnesses
separately. For we shall find that each has valuable truth to
tell, — truth that it behooves the American educator to con
sider, and that quickly : for it will not be denied now, if ever
it was denied, that the destiny of a first-rate nation is coming
upon us ; and that that destiny is coming upon us faster than
we can educate first-rate minds to meet it. Mr. Atkinson has
a cause to plead, which he rightly feels to be noble, — the
cause of science. His earnest advocacy of this ennobles his
pamphlet, and makes it, in spite of many unfairnesses, a most
welcome contribution to educational literature. The sum of
what he would say is this : —
" The study of Physical Science is as ennobling as the study

of Language or of Mathematics, and ought therefore to have an
honored place in any comprehensive system of education. Further,
there are some minds, of a very high order, who gravitate toward
Physical Science, just as surely as other minds gravitate toward Lan
guage or Mathematics ; and it is a grievous injustice to such minds
that their scientific faculties should not be developed at as early an
age, and with as constant care, as the language faculties and the
mathematical faculties are already developed. At present, partly
from the lack of competent instructors, and partly from the general
ignorance which prevails upon the subject, this is nowhere adequately
done ; the English public schools being, perhaps, the most conspicu
ous and most outrageous offenders in this respect. "
To enforce this idea, he makes admirable use of the Report

of the Commissioners of Public Schools. The evidence he
quotes, weighty or ludicrous, as the case may be, is all brought
to bear upon this central topic. The criticism is just. Mr.
Atkinson has hit upon the great, palpable, glaring defect of

English education. He does this, not in a spirit of fault
finding, but with an eye to the defects of American educa
tion in the same direction, and with a view to their remedy.
To correct those defects is his special aim ; and if one only of
his suggestions were carried out, namely, that proficiency in
scientific studies should be accepted at the examination for
entrance at our colleges, — as an equivalent, say, for the
study of Greek, — we should soon see a marked improvement
in our system of instruction.
It is, indeed, enough to rouse the indignation of the lover of
his race, to think of the deplorable waste of the most valuable
minds which is perpetually going on in England, and else
where also. A one-sided system of education is a sin against
the Holy Ghost. On all other sides, " we are all of us, as it
were, naturalists by accident," says Professor Owen, mourn
fully. When God sends England an embryo chemist, a geolo
gist, or a naturalist, she does not know what to do with him.
There is tragedy, as well as comedy, in " Tom Brown's "
account of the treatment of Martin the naturalist, at Rugby.
Such minds as his are the Ugly Ducks of the English system.
This indignation Mr. Atkinson has felt to the full; and it is
this which partly excuses, and accounts for, his really unfair
account of what the English public schools do accomplish in
their own line. One word, however, of caution, before we
attempt to prove our statement. The change which Mr.
Atkinson is working so manfully to effect is of such vital im
portance, and the educational world owes him so heavy a
debt for having come forward as he has done, that we would
sooner lay down our pen without writing a word of criticism,
than weaken in the mind of a single reader the immense force
of his positive statements. We trust that he will continue to
cry aloud, and spare not, until Science, long defrauded, has
her just rights, at last, in every scheme of liberal education.
We trust also that every careful reader will ponder the really
tragic significance of the evidence of scientific men, given
before the Commission ; the quintessence of which Mr. Atkin
son has given us in his admirable Appendix.
376 English Colleges and Schools. [Nov.
"With Mr. Atkinson's main purpose, then, we deeply sympa

thize. We simply criticise his picture of the public schools
of England, by saying that he puts a part, and that the worst
part, for the whole ; gives their bad side, without seeming
even to be aware that there is a good side. Even here, then,
we must not be misunderstood. Mr. Atkinson's criticisms and
quotations are only too true a picture of a certain type. The
genus he paints exists, nay flourishes, in every public school
and every college in England. It is as true a picture as that
Dickens gives, in " Martin Chuzzlewit," of the Jefferson Bricks
of the American press, and the land-sharks of Western specu
lation. But our criticism of Dickens is that he gave undue
prominence to the hateful type, and thus left an impression of
American society as unfair as a true picture of the thieves'
corner in St. Giles's would be if given as the type of London
society in general. Mr. Atkinson unconsciously commits the
same injustice when he would have us believe that cricket and
nonsense-verses are the two great staples of an English public-
school education ; the real curriculum being the former, and
the sham the latter. '
There are several ways of accounting for this. First, he
has only the evidence of others to go by, — evidence which
may be, and sometimes is, very one-sided ; and has no imme
diate acquaintance with the facts himself, as a corrective to
this one-sidedness. Secondly, without any argument or pref
ace whatever, — evidently thinking that it needs neither, —
he lays down, as if it were as self-evident as an axiom of
geometry, the following entirely one-sided method of weigh
ing the value of an educational system :—
" The true merits of a school are determined by what it does for
the great mass of average minds. . . . The education of the able
minority is never a true test of the worth of a system or of the char
acter of a school."
If any one admits this as an axiom, it is not too much to

say, that he can no more pass a true judgment on the English
system of education, than a blind man can judge of colors.
For the peculiar merit of the English system lies just here,
1865.] ' English Colleges and Schools. 877
namely, in its unequalled power of developing the able

minority ; while, on the other hand, which makes such one
sided judgment the more unfortunate, the most striking defect
of American education is its inability to develop beyond a
certain point. Mr. Everett, in a single sentence, gives a
really impartial and substantially correct judgment on the
English system. " It is admirably calculated," he says, " to
make a select body of distinguished scholars, but is not nearly
as well adapted for the cultivation of average intellects."
(p. 312.) In a word, English education sacrifices the many
to the few. We are apt to sacrifice the few to the many.
One of our greatest dangers is the being perfectly contented
with a decent average of intelligence. " After all, is it not
the tendency of Democracy to produce a general level?" In
other words, " After all, is it not inevitable that Democracy
should be insufferably tame, dull, flat, and uninteresting?"
Says De Tocqueville, " Words cannot convey the common-
placeness of the ordinary American life." Says Renan, "The
worst part of Channing's world is, that one would die of dul-
ness there." Such criticism as this will continue to have a
certain truth, until we find out the way to educate our best
minds in the best manner. The truth is, that at least half of
our judgment of a school or a college should be founded on the
career and opportunities it affords to young men of high intel
ligence. One legitimate glory, then, of a scholarly university
is the roll of the names of the great scholars she has trained ;
because she has furnished them with the knowledge needed
in their own line. It is as true in scholarship as in the mili
tary art, that a first-class scholar wholly self-trained is a rara
avis indeed. In a century, you may count on your fingers the
names of such. True, minds of " active strength and origin
ality" do make their mark in the world; but, in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred, they do so by taking a line which
does not require a great amount of previous attainment. Mr.
Atkinson quotes Lord Brougham as giving Milton as one of
those of whom the English system of education unjustly
boasts. He could not have quoted a name that casts more
weight into the opposite scale. Milton was, from a boy, dis
32*
tinguished as a classical scholar. He was captain (head) of

St. Paul's School ; a position entirely gained by pre-eminence
over all others in the studies of the place, namely, Greek and
Latin. He was a master of Latin as well as English verse ;
and, in every page of the " Paradise Lost," shows the most
intimate acquaintance with the classical authors and heroes.
Any one who could write Latin verse like Milton must not
only have had genuine poetic talent, but a strict, learned, and
conscientious classical teacher.
We may, then, with strictest justice, arraign the English
system for its unpardonable neglect of the natural sciences;
for its absurd contempt for general knowledge and the modern
languages and literature; for its utter inability to develop,
decently, minds of merely ordinary intelligence. But it is
gross injustice to attempt to rob that system of the glory it
has fairly won by the great scholars, and, in the case of
Cambridge at least, the great mathematicians, it has reared.
No one personally acquainted with the subject can doubt for
a moment that nine-tenths, at least, of the classical scholars of
England owe their scholarly culture to the English public
schools and universities ; while the most cursory survey of the
facts will prove that the great majority of English mathema
ticians are Cambridge men. But to proceed.
Mr. Atkinson feels all along that he is describing a failure ;
a great, portentous sham ; an immense system of no-educa
tion, where "How not to do it" has been illustrated on a
gigantic scale. His " chief object," he says in his preface,
has been to give —
"The very surprising picture of the great English schools contained
in the Report of the Commissioners on English Public Schools;
schools, some of which would seem, at the present time, to answer
hardly any other purpose than that of serving as the demonstration,
by a rednctio ad absurdum, of the inefficiency of a one-sided and obso
lete system of education."
Again (p. 85) : —
" They have been tried so long, so much pains and cost have been
lavished upon them, that their failure cannot be accounted for, ex
cept on the theory of some fundamental error in their organization."
This is the tone throughout. Certainly, it would be diffi

cult to believe, from the tone of Mr. Atkinson's pamphlet, that
there is scarcely one of these schools which does not yearly
send to college half-a-dozen young men superior in classical
attainments (the main staple, at present, of college require
ments in both hemispheres) to any half-dozen which could be
picked out from all the schools in America put together ; that
from these public schools, taken as a whole, there go up yearly,
to Oxford and Cambridge, from twenty to thirty young men,
whose average age will be under nineteen, who are superior
in classical attainments to any twenty or thirty that might be
selected from all the colleges in America put together. If
this be indeed true, — and we leave it to any American grad
uate who has tried the experiment of competition with them
to decide whether it be true or no, — surely a somewhat more
respectful way of discussing the English public-school edu
cation would be more appropriate.
That we may not seem to misrepresent Mr. Atkinson, let
him speak for himself here. He himself shall put an ingen
uous but ill-fated British youth through his course of no-
education, from public school to university, from university to
the great world.
First, then, our youth is at a public school. Of these we
will choose the " worst," and call it Eton. He is there, with
all manner of budding capabilities in him, which are labori
ously not brought out.
After a graphic sketch of the studies not taught him, Mr.
Atkinson, very naturally, proceeds as follows :—
" But I shall expect you to begin to say, the thing is incredible :
you are proving too much. It cannot be that this great number of
boys should be herded together without receiving any education at all.
Observe, gentlemen, that I have nowhere said that these boys re
ceived no education at all ; and now, having gone over the parts of
that education which they do not receive, let me proceed very briefly
to describe the education which they do."
" Now, in any great collection of boys or men, if the organized
and accredited system of education should prove unsuitable and a
failure, you may be sure that an unorganized and unaccredited sys
tem will be established by the boys themselves." In these schools

they have organized " a system of vigorous and manly sports, and
this is the real education of these great schools. The studies of this
curriculum are, first and foremost, cricket ; second, and hardly less
important, rowing ; and, as subordinate elementary studies, rackets,
hare and hounds, &c, of which we read such glowing accounts in
' Tom Brown.' You may smile at this as a jest ; but listen to the
evidence. Mr. Johnson, an Elton master, testifies that cricket has
become such a grave and serious science as to require special train
ers, professors as it were ; and that the needful practice consumes
twenty-seven honrs a week."
He quotes an amusing piece of evidence as illustration.

Mr. Walford, one of the masters of Eton, is cross-examined
' by Mr. Thompson.
" (Mr. Thompson) : Do you know if it is the case that five hours
are considered barely sufficient for cricket ? — I should think it was.
" That a boy cannot attain the proficiency in cricket, which an
Eton boy aspires to, without five hours' study of it? — I should
think so.
" Would it not require a boy of strong constitution to read six
hours a day in the classics, after having studied five hours in
cricket ? — Yes."
Mr. Atkinson seems to consider this the most enormous

joke of the whole affair. We think, however, that something
may be said even here. In the first place, let us criticise
the evidence itself a little. First, cricket is played in an
English public school little more than three months out of the
year, i.e., from the end of April to the beginning of October,
with two months of vacation intervening. That is, it is
played during the hottest season of the public-school year,
when a wise education would apportion the smallest amount
of time for study, and the largest for open-air exercise.
Secondly, the worst-conducted school in England never
thinks of putting five hours of cricket in the morning, and
then six hours of study in the afternoon. The " study" of
cricket, in the main, follows, not precedes, the study of Latin.
During the intermissions, it is true, wickets may be hastily
set up, and half-an-hour's practice obtained. Very good

physiology, by the bye. But the main " study" of cricket is
carried on after the larger part of the school-work is over, so
that a good night's rest intervenes between cricket and
Cicero, — also good physiology; while the matches, which
may be called the final examinations of this study, take place
on the half-holidays, of which there are from two to three a
week. Any Saturday afternoon, at Rugby, Harrow, Eton, and
a dozen other schools, you may see the game go on from two
to nine, through the long afternoon and lingering evening of
those wonderful English summer-days. Counting in these,
you do, indeed, get a formidable aggregate of hours ; but not
so much too many as one might be apt to think. In the
second place, we may well afford to ask, Can an enlightened
American teacher, like Mr. Atkinson, find nothing but a jest
in the great system of manly sports which " are the inheri
tance of every British boy " ? Has it not been the crying sin
and sorrow of American education, that, until but yesterday,
it has sullenly refused to learn the priceless lesson the sports
of the English public schools had to teach? If Young Eng
land plays too much, has Young America played enough?
" Here is where Waterloo was won," said the Duke of Wei"
lington when walking in the " playing-fields " of Eton. That
is, " Here was manufactured that terrible endurance before
which even Napoleon's legions recoiled, baffled at last." Out
of the four first Elevens in the four Philadelphia Cricket
Clubs, all but seven men went to the war ; and of these, two
were the English professionals. What does this mean but
that manly young bodies, developed by manly games, are a
nation's cheap defence ? Surely our war has taught us this
lesson at least, that true souls encased in stout bodies are the
real ultima ratio of liberty. But how many brave young
men we had among us, who longed to give themselves up for
the good cause, but whose poor, weak, untrained bodies
meanly said them nay? How many dropped down, killed
by the first day's march, before they had seen the foe?
Surely, surely we shall learn this lesson of the war at least.
It is, indeed, true, as Matthew Arnold complains, that to-day
88% English Colleges and Schools. [Nov.
the higher classes in England amuse themselves overmuch ;

true, it is a sorry sight, as Mr. Atkinson well says, to see
in England the too-frequent development of bodies without
brains. But, at present, the greatest danger to us is the
development of brains without bodies ; and the chief remedy
for this lies in the introduction of the manly sports for the
million.
But to proceed. There must, after all, be a pretence of
doing something, even though nothing be done. Our hapless
youth has school-hours, in which there must be lessons, even
though nothing be learnt. You begin to ask in despair,
" What do the boys learn?" The answer is brief, and it is
this, that their chief mental occupations are, —
" ' First, the committing of a quantity of Greek and Latin verse
to memory ; ' and ' secondly, the manufacturing themselves of vast
quantities of Greek and Latin verses, or what are called verses ;
which is usually done with the help of a ' Gradus,' and, in point of
educational value, is about on a par with the operation of turning the
handle of a barrel-organ.' "
So much for the Public Schools. Our hapless school-boy
passes to the Universities. Alas ! he is " out of the frying-
pan into the fire." The Universities —
" ' Are little more than cock-pits on a larger scale, and for older
combatants to engage in contests of the same kind;' which it is
simply ' preposterous to call education,' but in which ' there is a
never-failing supply of combatants, not from the best minds of the
nation, who, intent on real knowledge, scorn to prostitute their
talents to such base purposes, but of second-rate and vulgar men,
who are ready to travel any road that offers them any prospect, how
ever distant, of a fellowship."
To sum up, broadly, —'
" All the means of promotion to which an English literary man or
clergyman must look, are absolutely dependent, not so much upon his
real knowledge of the substance of Latin and Greek literature, as
upon his skill in making Greek iambics, or the rate at which he can
grind out Latin hexameters. The manufacture of Greek and Latin
verses is fostered by a system of bounties that are almost prohibitory
of any other style of teaching."
But, "last change of all," our not-educated Eton scholar

becomes a not-educator himself. Our astonishment at this
state of things will perhaps be somewhat diminished when
we read the following description of the mode of education
and appointment of the Eton masters. For Eton, it will be
seen, is the great scapegoat throughout; it is the "worst" of
the great Public Schools, the monstrum, horrendum, informe,
ingens, cut lumen ademptum.
Mr. Atkinson quotes a somewhat stupid passage (not
knowing that it is stupid) from the " Edinburgh Review," to
prove that the absurd curriculum is complimented by a set of
incompetent and worthless masters, all old Eton " Collegers,"
who were " grossly neglected and ill-educated " at school, and
thence passed to King's College, Cambridge (not " Oxford ") ;
a college " notorious for idleness and laxity," and when there
" encountered none of the public examinations of the Univer
sity." When one set is " superannuated," other Collegers, as
carefully educated by similar teachers, " take their places, and
thus the vicious circle has been perpetuated from age to
age."
Now, confessedly, Eton is full of faults, and the manage
ment of it is, in many respects, bad ; but its directors are not
insane, as this account would have us believe. A single
glance at the Cambridge Calendar would have given the
" Edinburgh Reviewer " a little much-needed information.
Had he turned to the list of Craven University Scholars, he
would have seen, that, from 1840 to 1850, five out often were
King's men; and that three of these, Johnson, Day, and
Wayte, are now masters of Eton. It would require some
local knowledge to know that one more out of the ten was
an Eton man, making six Craven scholars out of ten ; a pretty
fair proportion from a school so insanely conducted. It
ought to be said here, that the Craven Scholarship is about on
a par with the place of Senior Classic in the Classical " Tripos,"
the two being the two highest honors in classics which the
University has to bestow. It was, indeed, a great misfortune
to King's men, that, in times past, they could not enter the
Classical Tripos, as well as the examination for University
scholarships ; but it must be distinctly understood, that the

test of the Craven Scholarship is even more severe, as gener
ally only one is given each year.
Mr. Atkinson is indeed " proving too much." Here we
have six Eton students gaining, year after year, the highest
classical honor (some three of them at least gained this when
they had been at Cambridge less than a year and a quarter) ;
showing a proficiency in classical knowledge which no single
student in any American college, and very few professors,
possess ; necessitating an extent of classical reading at least
quadruple in amount of that which the most proficient
American graduate has gone through ; and we are to believe
that all this has been accomplished at a school conducted in
the insane way which Mr. Atkinson describes.
But let us analyze the matter a little more closely ; as by
so doing we shall gain something of a real insight into the
English system.
The general question of writing Latin and Greek verse as
part of a scholarly education is a large one. Dr. Arnold, at
one time of his life, considered skill of this kind " one of the
most contemptible prettinesses " that a youth could waste his
time upon. Experience afterwards caused him to modify
his opinion ; as also another cognate one, namely, the under
valuing of the Greek tragedians.
The truth is, that, while it is successful, this exercise gives
the very aroma of classical thought and culture, and gives a
sympathetic appreciation of the most delicate and tender
shades of meaning that the ancient languages can convey;
while, on the other hand, where it is unsuccessful on account
of lack of poetic sensibility on the part of the pupil, it is an
unmitigated waste of time. It is, then, an accomplishment
for a scholar : it is poor discipline for average minds. Here,
then, as elsewhere, English education has sacrificed the many
to the few.
It is, moreover, generally conceded in Cambridge, that
Eton, especially, does devote too much time to versification ;
but, leaving verses wholly out of the question, the test of the
Craven Scholarship is so severe, that only an examination of
the papers themselves, and the manuscripts of the successful

candidates, would convince an American scholar that such
attainments were possible at so early an age, say twenty or
twenty-one.
To gain an accurate idea of these examinations, one has
only to inspect with a little care the papers set for the Classi
cal Tripos, contained in each year's Cambridge Calendar;
premisiug that there is not much difference between these
papers and those set for the Craven Scholarship.
We give, then, a synopsis of the papers set in the year
I860:—
One Greek-verse paper, containing a score of lines from
Bryant's " Forest Hymn " commencing, —
"My heart is awed within me, when I think
Of the great miracle that still goes on
In silence round me ; "
and a dozen from Shelley's " Cloud," —
" I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers ; "
to be turned, the first into iambics, the second into ana-
pests, by the " barrel-organ " process ; possibly, however,
intermingled with some dim sense of the tender grace and
beauty of the one passage and the solemn grandeur of the
other, as well as of the wonderful capacity of the language
of Euripides and -iEschylus to express both in perfection.
One Latin-verse paper, containing (1) a score of lines, from
Tennyson's " Vivien," for hexameters ; and (2) four stanzas
from Whittier, —
" Enowest thou not, all germs of evil
In thy heart await their time ?
Not thyself, but God's restraining,
Stays their growth of crime," &c.
to be turned into alcaics, also by the " barrel-organ " process.
Two English prose-papers ; one to be translated into Latin,
and the other into Greek prose.
A long paper of questions in Greek and Roman History,
Policy, Law, Philosophy, &c.
These five papers are together not quite half the exami
nation.
VOL. LXXIX. — &TH 8. VOL. XVII. NO. III. 33
The other three days — six hours of examination in each

day — are devoted to translations, on paper, from Latin and
Greek authors; the various passages and authors being se
lected by the examiners, — the only preparation possible
being, 1st, a general knowledge of the Greek and Latin lan
guages ; and, 2d, a thorough knowledge of each author, and
his peculiar style. The high men have probably studied
carefully every author set, and are familiar with about from
two-thirds to three-fourths of the passages given. The only
way, for instance, to be sure of a passage in Sophocles is to
have read carefully each one of the seven extant plays of this
author ; and similarly for the rest. The following is a list of
authors from whom passages are selected in this particular
Examination of 1860 : —
Cicero (De Legibus, two Orations, three Epistles), Livy,
Sallust, Tacitus, Seneca, Plautus, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid,
Juvenal, Horace, Lucan, and Catullus, in Latin ; and Homer,
Aristotle, Isaeus, Demosthenes, Plato, Thucydides, Herodotus,
Pindar, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Meleager
(Epigrams), in Greek. iEschylus is omitted, an unusual
thing. The passages set are from fifteen to twenty lines in
length.
But what preparation is made for this searching examina
tion?
One who is striving for the place of Junior Classic will
have read (1) the whole of uEschylus, Sophocles, Aristoph
anes, Pindar, Herodotus, Thucydides, Greek Epigrams, and
perhaps Euripides ; (2) a large part of Homer, Hesiod, Theoc
ritus, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, in Greek :
with (1) all Virgil, Horace, Caesar, Nepos, Juvenal, Lucre
tius, Persius, Sallust, and Tacitus ; and (2) the major part of
Cicero, Livy, Terence, Ovid; and (3) variable quantities of
Plautus, Catullus, Seneca, Quintilian, Suetonius, and Martins,
in Latin. This, allowing for the variations of individuals, is,
we presume, an average amount.
But how much of this has he gained at schools, and how
much at college ?
A young man who has stood high in an English public
school, has read, before going to college, on on average, —

1. Caesar (say four books) ; 2. Cornelius Nepos (half the
lines) ; 3. Ovid (say five thousand lines) ; 4. Yirgil, Bucolics,
Georgics, and six books of the JSneid ; 5. Horace, — knows the
Odes by heart, and has read half the Satires, &c. ; 6. Lucre
tius, three books ; 7. Juvenal, six to twelve Satires ; 8. Cicero,
De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Officiis, Orations, Tusculam
Disputations, three books ; 9. Livy, two to four books ; 10.
(possibly) Tacitus, two books. In Greek, he has read, —
1. Xenophon, Cyropajdia and Anabasis (parts) ; 2. Homer,
from ten to twenty books ; 3. -^schylus, two plays ; 4. Sopho
cles, two plays ; 5. Euripides, four plays ; 6. Aristophanes,
three plays ; 7. Herodotus, seven books ; 8. Thucydides, two
books; 9. Pindar, all, or nearly all; 10. Plato, Phaedo; 11.
Demosthenes, De CoronS,; 12. Greek Epigrams, half. This
is, as nearly as possible, a sketch from life. Of course, the
books alter ; but the total result is about as above.
We are sorry to say, that, besides this, he can translate
Wordsworth's Excursion into Latin hexameters, and his Odes
into alcaics or asclepiads ; Shakspeare into Greek iambics, and
Shelley into anapaests. But surely the rest of his culture
ought not to be entirely ignored on account of this ; which is,
after all, his misfortune, and not his fault. Surely he may be
allowed to write Latin and Greek prose without any loss of
caste. This for a fair average. If, however, he happens to
be a " grossly neglected and ill-educated " Eton Colleger, who
gets his University Scholarship in his first or second year
(eventually, on account of this puerile distinction, to be
made a grossly neglecting and ill-educating master, with a
salary of $7000 a year for not doing it), he must have accom
plished, before he leaves school, at least twice that amount of
reading. If any one doubts the possibility of doing this before
nineteen years of age (the age beyond which no one con
tinues at school), he does not know the immense stimulus
which the mere thought of becoming University Scholar gives
to an ardent, though " ill-educated " mind.
But to return. The " Verses " occupy about one-sixth
part of the examination; and preparation for the verse-papers
has occupied, say, two to four hours a week. But, leaving

these out altogether, we are forced to acknowledge that
the subjects of the examination are the Latin and Greek
Languages, Literature, and History. The examination itself,
again, is so thorough and searching that nothing but real and
thorough knowledge of the subject can avail any thing. If
this, indeed, be true, and if our unfortunate Eton man does
really ever come up to so high a standard, and actually, six
times out of ten, distances all competitors, is it possible to
believe that his education was quite such a nullity as Mr.
Atkinson makes it out to be ? " Do men gather grapes of
thorns, or figs of thistles ? "
N.B. — The first class, in the year whose papers we have
given (1860), contained nine men an unusually small num
ber. A King's man was Senior Classic, and three other of
his " grossly neglected and ill-educated " brothers in misfor
tune were in the class ; making four out of nine.
When a young man of twenty-one or twenty-two is Univer
sity Scholar or Senior Classic, it means that he is at once
enrolled among the scholarly minds of the world. It means
that the Greek and the Roman language and literature have
passed into his very being. He becomes, at once, another link
between the old and the new ; one more barrier against the
overweening conceit of to-day ; one more witness for the
worth of men whose bones are dust, but whose words and
deeds are immortal. Such youths are a glory to any system
of education ; and, while England produces yearly a handful
of such, they will be the " fifty righteous " who save her edu
cational city. This is no fancy sketch : such men, filled with
noble enthusiasm, as well as high knowledge ; with eye open
to the mighty Future as well as the noble Past, — we have seen
and honored and loved. If such minds can be produced by
the " barrel-organ " process, why, let us at once proceed to
purchase every Latin Gradus in existence. Each copy is
worth more than the fabled philosopher's stone.
Again : Two-thirds of the able men at Cambridge, as any
body may ascertain by referring to a Cambridge Calendar, do
not take classical honors at all, and are therefore entirely
innocent of verse-making, Greek or Latin. They study

mathematics, pure and applied ; and find that first-rate mathe
matical talent is as good a passport to a fellowship as classical
ability is. So much for Cambridge. As for Oxford (the
scapegoat of the Universities, as Eton is the scapegoat of
the Schools), in her examinations for classical honors, no
verses are required at all. The " barrel-organ " system is
therefore comparatively guiltless of the manufacture of
" Oxford bigotry."
This brings us to what is perhaps the most unfair passage
in the whole book, as well as the one most easily refuted, —
the one, namely, touching on the state of theology.
"What is it in England that keeps theology so far behind all
other sciences, but the fact that the clergy are the only profession
who are compelled to subject their minds to the full deftientalizing
power of Oxford training ? What power less potent could produce
the bigotry of an English High-Church bishop ? "
Mr. Atkinson puts the word compelled in Italics. He feels

justified in so doing by quoting the evidence (p. 88) of an
English clergyman given in 1859. But the fact is, that
not only are clergymen not compelled to take a University
degree, but, of late years, only about forty per cent of those
receiving ordination have had a University education at all.
Colenso, in his preface to his second volume, gives the statis
tics on this point ; noticing the alarming fact, that every year
the number offering themselves for ordination from the Uni
versities is steadily diminishing, being now not more than
half the average of former years.
He gives, as one of the chief causes of this diminution, the
fact that the restrictions which the Church of England throws
around free thought are so irksome to liberally educated men,
that they will not endure them any more.
Mr. Atkinson erroneously supposes, that England at large
is more liberal theologically than the Universities. It is, on
the contrary, the " uneducated " men, especially fitted for the
Church in middle-class schools and theological seminaries,
who fill the depleted ranks of the ministry ; notoriously keep
33*
ing up the sorely needed supply of ignorance, narrowness,

and bigotry, by which free thought is to be voted down.
The injustice of such a criticism may be more plainly seen
if we call to mind that there is hardly a single liberal theolo
gian in England of any note — if we accept James Martineau
and a few of his noble brothers in the faith — who is not a
University man.
Dr. Arnold, Julius Charles Hare, Coleridge, Baden Powell,
Williams, Stanley, Jowett, Colenso, Whately, Macnaught,
Hampden, Robertson, Maurice, Francis Newman, — in fact,
almost the whole army of liberal theologians in England has
been recruited at the Universities. Among the Orthodox
Dissenters, numbering millions, whose ministers have been
brought up at " middle-class schools " and dissenting colleges,
scarce a sjngle name ; indeed, not one, so far as we know.
Why is this? Simply, because in them culture has not
risen high enough to make investigation a necessity.
Who, then, in England, have done the lion's share of the
work of enlightening the people of England on the great
questions of theology ? We answer emphatically, " The
scholars of Oxford and Cambridge." Honor to whom honor
is due. Science has, it is true, exercised a vast influence,
indirectly, in modifying our theology. But we must not
forget that criticism, after all, has borne the burden and heat
of the day. In other words, the liberal theologians of
England, as well as of Germany, are scholars, rather than
men of science. If a man unacquainted with the ancient
languages were to pretend to criticise, ex cathedra, the
ancient Scriptures, it would be a piece of presumption too
great to be endured. In other words, scholarly training of
the most rigorous kind is the essential preliminary to critical
success. Now, it is just this which the English system of
education gives to its best minds. Take Jowett himself for
an example, whom Mr. Atkinson quotes as a private tutor (by
the bye, he is public Professor of Greek to the University).
Take away his thorough knowledge of the Greek language,
the foundation of which was laid at St. Paul's School and at
Oxford, and where would his masterly edition of the Pauline
Epistles be? Some of the most important criticism there

hangs upon a comparison between the classical and the New-
Testament usage of Greek particles, prepositions, such as <H
&c. The true explanation of several passages is, that the
Apostle Paul did not write Greek correctly ; and that, more
than once, he did not mean to give the sense which, gram
matically considered, his sentences will sometimes bear : but
only a ripe scholar would have either the right or the courage
to decide so delicate a matter.
But what, after all, is the position of which science, exclu
sive of mathematics, can offer to a Cambridge student ? As
far as external arrangements are concerned, there is nothing
to complain of here. As there is a mathematical, classical,
legal, moral science, and theological Tripos, or roll of honor;
so there is an honor list in natural science.
When this new Tripos was formed, great hopes were enter
tained of its success. But the great mistake was made of
making the scientific examinations far inferior, in thorough
ness and extent of requirement, to the mathematical and
classical examinations ; so that, while it required years of
hard study to gain high honors in the latter, a few months
sufficed for the former. Of course, therefore, a high place in
the scientific Tripos was. valued very little ; for it stood for
only a smcdl amount of scientific knowledge : and therefore
the various colleges still give their Fellowships to mathe
matical or classical men. In fact, the Oxford examination in
the physical sciences finds more favor than that of Cambridge.
Until, therefore, a thorough reform is effected, in this depart
ment, — until the competition is as real, and the rewards as
great, as in the other departments, — Mr. Atkinson's censure
is deserved.
It will not surprise any one to learn, that Mr. Atkinson
prints in Italics, as a summing-up of the whole affair, a remark
able statement of Struve, the Russian astronomer; namely,
that " the first boys at schools disappear at the college, and those
who are first in the colleges disappear in the world." This, if
true, would prove that the existing schools and colleges are
worse than useless; for they not only cannot foster, they
actually destroy, the best intellects. Nothing but actual

proof is sufficient to establish so startling a proposition. How
can this be done? A certain portion of the needed evidence
can be collected without much difficulty. Take the first half
of the proposition, — "The first boys at schoolsdisappear at the
colleges."
Now, the Cambridge Calendar gives a list of the successful
candidates for honors each year ; and it would not be diffi
cult to find out what public schools they came from. Take,
for instance, the list of classical honors for 1852 (this year
is chosen, simply because the present writer knows most
about it).
Here, then, is a list of the first ten in the first class, in the
order in which they stand (the names bracketed being equal):
giving, at the same time, the schools they came from, and
their relative rank in the school : —
I Burn, First Scholar, from Shrewsbury.
Hammond, First, from Christ's Hospital.
Macnaghten, distinguished at Dublin University.
Pening, Second, from Shrewsbury.
Chandless, Third, from Shrewsbury.
i Broadribb, not known.
( Thompson, Second, from Christ's Hospital.
Benson, Second, from King Edward's School, Birmingham,
f Ellis, not known.
\ Pearse, First, from King Edward's School, Birmingham.
It will be seen from this list, that not only do the best
scholars from the public schools monopolize the classical hon
ors, but that they stand pretty much in the order in which
they stood at school : with only one exception, indeed ; and, in
this case, the second scholar came up with a reputation supe
rior to that of ihe first. Two out of the ten, from want of
knowledge, are not classified ; but it is in the highest degree
probable that both would prove illustrations of, and not ex
ceptions to, the rule.
The real fact is, that at least four-fifths of the classical men
who will distinguish themselves in the University, are known,
the first day they come up, by their school reputation.
So much for the first half of Struve's proposition. Now

for the second, — ''' The first in the colleges disappear in the
world"
The last time Thackeray saw Macaulay was on the steps
of the University-Club House in London. An English baronet
had just asked, " Well, after all, what do your high men at
Cambridge do in the world?" (Macaulay was himself a
University scholar.) Prom the depths of that wonderful
memory, Macaulay answered him. He went through the list
of all the Senior Wranglers (i. e., the first mathematical schol
ars) of each year of the present century, and showed just
what they had done. Here are a few specimens : —
1801, Henry Martyn (saint and martyr). 1804, Kaye,
Bishop of Lincoln. 1805, Turton, Bishop of Ely. 1806, Pol
lock, Lord Chief Baron. 1808, Bickersteth, Lord Langdale.
1809, Alderson, Judge, and Baron of the Exchequer. 1810,
Maule, Chief Justice. 1813, Herschel, Sir John, the astron
omer. 1816, Whewell, Master of Trinity, was Second Wrang
ler. 1818, Lefevre, the well-known Clerk of the Parliaments.
1823, Airy, Astronomer Royal. 1825, Challis, the Professor.
1828, Perry, Bishop of Melbourne. 1831, Earnshaw, the mathe
matical author. 1834, Kelland, Professor of Mathematics at
Edinburgh. 1835, Cotterill, Bishop of Grahamstown. 1836,
Colenso was Second Wrangler. 1841, Stokes, the Lucasian
Professor, and discoverer of new phenomena in the solar rays.
1843, Adams, co-discoverer with Leverrier of the planet Nep
tune, &c.
The above will probably be sufficient. We pass over several
names, well known in England as belonging to first-rate
mathematicians, but not so well known here. Now, will any
one in his senses believe that any forty-three men, picked
hap-hazard out of the communities, could produce among them
such a list as this ? Nay, could any ten thousand picked hap
hazard produce such a list ? It is therefore only from lack
of proper and systematic investigation that such absurd
charges are made.
But how about the " barrel-organ " system, which flowers
out in the Classical Tripos ? The Classical Tripos was insti
tuted in 1824. In 1827, Kennedy, Head Master of Shrews

bury, was Senior Classic. 1828, Selwyn, Lady Margaret's
Professor of Divinity. 1829, Martin, Chief Justice of New
Zealand, was Second Medallist. 1830, Wordsworth, author of
Wordsworth's Greece, &c. In the same year, Merrivale,
author of the Roman History, was fourth. 1831, Kennedy,
second of that wonderful family, translator of Demosthenes,
Ac. Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand, was second. 1832,
Lushington, Professor of Greek at Glasgow. Thompson, Pro
fessor of Greek at Cambridge, was Second Medallist. Alford,
author of the Greek Testament, was eighth. 1834, a third
Kennedy, one of the sweetest "barrel-organ" tuners that
ever lived. We cannot refrain from giving here a single
specimen of his grinding, from Shelley's " Skylark " : —
" Sound of vernal showers
On the meadow grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, they
.Music doth surpass."
" Suave coruscantes vernus cadit imber in herbas,

Suave olet a pluvia flos reseratus aqua,
Carraina sed pnestant tua quidquid in orbe sereni est,
Quidquid Uetifici, quidquid odoris inest."
In the same year, Donaldson, author of the " New Craty-

tus," was second ; Forsyth, author of " Hortensius," was
third. 1837, Whytehead, one of the sweetest of the poets,
that die before their times, author of the lines, —
" This world I deem
But a beautiful dream
Of shadows that are not what they seem,"
(given in the-" Monthly Journal," in May, 1861,) was second.

Conybeare and Howson, authors of the " Life of St. Paul,"
were, respectively, third and sixth. 1838, Lord Lyttleton,
one of these very Commissioners, was bracketed Senior
Classic with Vaughan, the late head -master of Harrow.
1842, Munro, the Aristotelian, was second, and Charles Kings-
ley was ninth. 1843, Ginbrd, head-master of King Edward's
School, Birmingham, was second. 1844, Maine, Professor of

Civil Law, Clark, William G., the author and Tutor of Trin
ity, was second. 1845, Holden, editor of " Aristophanes,"
and Randall, assistant- master of Harrow, were bracketed
Senior Classics. 1847, Evans, assistant master of Rugby
(we believe), and giver of evidence quoted. 1848, Scott,
head -master of Westminster, and Westcott the theologian,
were bracketed Senior Classics. 1849, Elwyn, late head
master of Charter House, &c. These men, it is plain, have
not disappeared ; and it will also be seen that the masters of
the public schools are not generally ignoramuses. In fact,
there is hardly a single master in any of the public schools
who did not highly distinguish himself at college.
Lastly, if we turn to the list of the University Scholarships,
and find at a glance that it contains the names of such men
as Richard Porson, C. J. Blomfield, Connop Thirlwall, George
Long, T. B. Macaulay, Capel Lofft, Christopher Wordsworth,
Vaughan, Lyttelton, and Monro, we shall see that, as far as
Cambridge is concerned, Struve's epigram is a complete libel ;
while a like examination of the Oxford Calendar would prove
the same for Oxford. We will not enter into this examina
tion ; merely saying that Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Gladstone, and
Jowett were " double firsts " at Oxford ; Cobham Smith, a
first, &c.
One more abuse is the excessively high pay of the mas
ters of the schools. Mr. Atkinson, having throughout an eye
on the American system, gives, as a motto to his pamphlet,
" Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur." Let the American
public take warning, and correct, ere it is too late, its indis
creet, its excessive, its absurd generosity to its public teach
ers I True, there is some excuse for America in this regard.
She feels so justly proud of her great system of education,
feels so truly that a great Republic without great teachers
is an impossibility, that, after all, one can hardly be sur
prised at seeing each section of the country vying with
every other in paying the present immense salaries, offered
as inducements to draw the very best minds into the busi
ness of educating the best brain of the rising generation !
Seriously, it is worth while to consider whether there is any

thing beside an accidental connection between the two facts, —
1st, That the masters of the English public schools are paid
very high salaries ; and, 2d, That, somehow, the very best
minds in England are engaged in the task of education. It
is probably nothing more than a mere coincidence. The
fact is, that, in England, people have an absurd notion, — 1st,
That a teacher of young gentlemen should live like a gentle
man himself; and, 2d, That he ought, in his working days,
to lay by a provision for his old age, and for his family after
his death. Here, in America, we have got beyond such old-
world prejudice.
Had we space, we could draw from Mr. Everett's book a
really accurate portrait of Cambridge as it is. The contrast
between such extracts and those from Mr. Atkinson is almost
amusing : —
"The training in the Greek and Latin languages acquired at
the great English public schools, like Eton, Harrow, and Rugby, is
certainly very much superior to any acquired at our colleges by the
required course of instruction."
" The great work," in the classical examinations, " is to put Latin
and Greek prose and verse into accurate and idiomatic English : for
bad English " [we assure Mr. Atkinson that this is indeed the case]
" will condemn a translation quite as soon as incorrect rendering."
pp. 83, 84.
" The stern, conscientious study of the honor-men brings out a
solidity and a brilliancy that the world never saw surpassed."
At the same time, he does not fail to show the weak side of
Cambridge education ; its system of luisscz /aire with respect
to lazy men, who come up without the slightest intention of
studying. " The system pursued with them " is simply " to
require nothing of them." — p. 112.
But there is also another weakness well pointed out by Mr.
Everett in his tenth lecture. The " specialists " have every
advantage given them, and rightly ; but really industrious
men, who could do very tolerably in several subjects, and who
thereby could obtain the best education possible to them, get
very little encouragement.
I860.] English Colleges and Schools. 397
" The examinations are made of exceeding difficulty ; difficult even

for the best."
" It is plain that these papers are exceedingly discouraging to inferior
minds. Then the stimulus, though very intense for superior scholars,
is very small for a man of moderate powers : what he wants is a con
stant stimulus, — little successes day by day, a good recitation here,
a neat exercise there, to keep him along and mark his improvement :
he cannot bring himself to the lofty point of resolution which will
work unflinchingly for a prize three years off."
" I am conscious that many a young man in England feels the
'want of a general course, where his attention shall be attracted to as
much as he can master of all valuable branches at once, without
being forced to make a selection of some one, for which, perhaps, he
cares no more than for any other, and strain his mind in the vain
effort to reach an impossible elevation." — Lecture X. pp. 312-316.
All this. is genuine criticism, and would be acknowledged as

such by any candid Englishman. Mr. Everett remarks, how
ever, very truly, that in England there is a constant demand
for minds highly developed in special directions, and that the
universities are pressed to keep up a constant supply to this
demand; while the demand for men who know a little of
every thing is much smaller than it is here. The really ex
cellent examinations for entrance guard our best colleges
from those complete ignoramuses whom an English university
weekly admits ; and not only so, a far greater sense of respon
sibility for the welfare of a student of only average ability is
felt in an American college than in an English one. Too
many of the last half in an English university depart after
a three years' course, not merely knowing nothing, but with
an ingrained conviction that it is gentlemanly to do nothing;
and with a fixed purpose of doing it, if possible, for the rest of
their natural lives. Year after year, the universities turn out
a stock of these drones. With us, this class of young men is
still small and uninfluential ; but English society is deeply
tainted with their spirit, and the universities have much to
answer for, in that they do so little to prevent, and so much
to foster it. We trust that America will never tolerate in her
colleges the disgraceful negligence which, at English universi-
VOL. LXXIX. — 5th 8. VOL. XVII. NO. III. 34
ties, sits still and folds its arms, while hosts of young men are
going to ruin around it every day. There are here, too, far
fewer of those utter failures, those shipwrecks of name and
fortune aud decency, which form the night-side of university
life. There are fewer spendthrifts, fewer betting-men, fewer
gamblers, fewer debauchees, fewer voluptuaries at an Ameri
can college, than at an English one. In a word, if there are
not such great successes, there are not so many hideous
failures.
A university has two great and sacred tasks. First, to give
to all its members as high a culture as they can receive, and
thus steadily raise the tone of the whole community by send
ing in a constant influx of cultivated minds ; and, secondly, to
prepare true leaders of thought in all directions, by developing
to the highest point minds of the first class. The American
colleges devote themselves almost exclusively to the first ; the
English universities, to the second. Each, therefore, could take
a lesson from the other ; but it is our special business here to
learn the lesson the English universities can teach us.
One of our foremost American scholars thus described his
college course : —
" From a very early age, I fonnd that my mind had a scholarly
bent. I went to college considerably in advance of the general aver
age of students in my knowledge of the languages, and felt eager
ness to pursue this class of studies. But I was ambitious, and wished
to stand high in my class. I found that a few minutes' reading was
sufficient to give me the highest marks in my classical recitation,
while it took me several hours to get up my mathematics, for which
I had not the slightest taste : consequently, the studies in which I
excelled, and which I loved, received no attention at all ; while the
studies for which I had no aptitude, and which have disappeared,
leaving no trace save a certain soreness of memory, usurped almost
the whole of my mind and energy. I left college with very little
more knowledge of the classics than when I entered it, while my
mathematic attainments were simply zero. Now, what has been the
result on my after life ? My scholarly bent has proved too strong to
be resisted ; and I have been obliged, from sheer necessity, to grind
out with grammar and dictionary the great authors whose pages
ought to have been familiar to me as household words, and would

have been had I been allowed in college to follow my bent."
This is the reiterated testimony of every man of strong

literary bent, who has been through the college course at any
American college. It is equally true with scientific or mathe
matical minds. How many such minds have lost all interest
in the college course, turned idle and worthless, simply
because high excellence in their own direction could obtain no
due acknowledgment ?
The English system will give us here certain invaluable
hints. To begin, then, with the schools, we can at once raise
the standard of all the schools in the country by the simple
expedient of offering scholarships to be tried for by all comers,
before entrance into college ; the schools, therefore, getting all
the honor from the successful men.
The scholarship system, already partially introduced into
American colleges, is a great success, as far as it has been
fairly tried. In many cases the mistake has been made of
offering such scholarships to needy scholars alone. This at
once degrades a scholarship from a high honor to a mere bene
faction, very useful, it is true, to individuals, but valueless as a
general stimulus to high attainments. Further, a stringent
examination ought, in all cases, to be the passport to a scholar
ship. The State of Massachusetts throws away yearly a con
siderable sum in the form of assistance to second-rate students*
the only condition being that the recipients should be in the
first half of the class. If the State yearly gave two scholar
ships to each of her colleges, to be won only after a rigorous
examination, — the best man to win, rich or poor, — every dol
lar she thus expended would return to her with usury. What
we, however, are specially advocating, namely, the stimulating
the schools by scholarships to be gained before entrance, is an
entire novelty in America. It is a thoroughly tested success
in England. It is impossible to over-estimate the value of the
examinations for entrance as at present conducted, viewed sim
ply as a stimulus to the schools. The standard they require is,
however, nearly, if not quite, as high as it is wise to demand as
essential to entrance. The plan proposed would be as great a

stimulant to the best scholars, as the present one is to average
ones, and seems to be the only feasible way left for getting a
higher quality of mind for the college to work upon.
II. But this plan would, in the end, necessitate very serious
modifications in the present academic system. For, if you
induce able young men to come up in a high state of prepara
tion in any branch of study, you must so arrange your curri
culum that they shall be able at once to start where they left
off, instead of being wearied to death with listening to the
repetition of things they knew years ago. There are two
ways of meeting this point, and only two ; and, until one of
them or both together are tried, American colleges will be for
ever iuferior to the universities of Europe, so far as superior
attainments are concerned.
The first method is strict classification, according to merit,
begun at the earliest possible period, so that the best scholars
in any branch of study shall be classed together; the first
class, at least, rigidly excluding all but the most thorough
students : indolence, as well as ignorance, being made a suffi
cient reason for exclusion. As it is, the amount of work
done, though fully as much as can reasonably be expected
from a class composed of a medley of good, bad, and indiffer
ent scholars, is simply below contempt, if compared with the
knowledge that might have been gained from the same pro
fessor, if he had a select few from the same class, to whom he
might communicate his own enthusiasm, and who would mu
tually encourage each other.
The second plan, which can be pursued either alone or
together with the first, is private tuition. This, coupled with
the tremendous final examination, is the sheet-anchor of an
English university. Like every thing British, this really
wonderful system was not made, but grew, till, at last, in spite
of many objections, some wise and some foolish, it is now
generally admitted to be the very best method of generating
high excellence in any branch of study. The plan pursued is
briefly this : When a young man wishes to read for honors at
Cambridge, as soon as he comes up to college, he consults with
1865.] English Colleges and Schools. -^ (r ' 401
Lis friends on the important matter of selecting for himself a

private tutor. These private tutors are, for the most part,
Bachelor scholars, or Junior Fellows, who have taken a high
degree ; the most famous of all, however, being men who
have made the taking of pupils a permanent profession.
With the selection of the private tutor the authorities have
nothing whatever to do. The motto is, " Free trade in tui
tion." Anybody can set up as a private tutor, and anybody
can go to him as a pupil. Our student, then, selects Mr.
Blank ; and to him he goes every day, if a " whole pupil," or
every other day, if a " half pupil," and has the privilege of
being shut up for an hour with a man whose sole business it
is to pour his knowledge into his pupil's brain as fast as he
can. To him he translates page after page of Latin or Greek ;
has his mistakes, not somebody else's, pointed out; has his
papers looked over, every error underlined and corrected,
every excellence praised, and the path of progress clearly
marked out.
Now, no matter how energetic a professor may be, he can
not stretch four hours into twenty. If he has a class of thirty
in Greek, and hears four recitations a week, a simple mathe
matical calculation will show that he cannot put each man on
more than eight minutes a week. During these eight min
utes, how much chance has he for probing all the weaknesses
and bringing out all the excellences of each individual ? It is
easy, therefore, to see, that, if the private tutor be put into
competition with the recitation system, this last will be
" nowhere " in the race, provided that you have got an earn
est student to begin with. If any man were closeted with
Agassiz an hour a day for three years, he must be a dolt, if,
at the end of that time, he did not know something of geolo
gy. The private tutor system is the best conceivable method
of getting the largest possible amount of knowledge into a
man's head in the shortest possible time. But there is
another immense advantage ; namely, the opportunity of inti
mate and confidential association with a maturer mind, thus
given to the student.
There is no assumption of authority ; the only power used
34*
by the tutor is the unconscious one of superior character. He

knows every part of the life the student has to lead, and has
lived it successfully himself. He not only can tell the student
just how much improvement he must make to gain such a
scholarship, or be in the first half-dozen in the class-list, but
he can also drop a priceless word in season, to aid the moral
and spiritual development of his pupil.
Now, confessedly, there would be some difficulty in introdu
cing this system into an American college. It presupposes so
much more spontaneity, so much more zeal, for study on the
part of the student than he is generally, on the American sys
tem, supposed to possess, that it would have to contend, at the
outset, with a good deal of not unnatural distrust. Much of
this, however, would be obviated by the private tutor making
constantly reports to the authorities concerning his pupil's
progress, and by frequent examinations made by the authori
ties themselves.
Another difficulty is, how to get private tutors ? In an En
glish university, the best men step up for some time after
taking their degree ; here, they almost invariably disappear.
It were greatly to be wished that there were Fellowships
obtainable by high success at the final examination for degrees,
to be held on condition that a certain number of private pupils
should be taken at a moderate charge.
This at once suggests a further difficulty, — the expense to
the student. In England a half-pupil pays from .£7 to .£10 for
a term of nine weeks, and a whole pupil double that sum.
Some colleges liberally pay the expense of a private tutor for a
young man of ability, if he cannot afford to do so himself.
We presume, however, that if a young graduate were given
$500 a year by the college, he could afford to take pupils for
a very moderate sum, and leave a margin of time for his own
private studies. Of one thing we are assured, that, if once
the system were fairly tried, it would be found that it could
move side by side with the recitation-system, without any col
lision ; and, not only so, would soon prove itself to be the
most potent of all engines for the production of high excellence.
The experiment might be made very unobtrusively. A few
1865.] English Colleges and Sclwols. 403
earnest students might be selected to try the experiment; and

hardly any one would be the wiser. At present, the best men
cannot help feeling that a great deal of their precious time is
taken up in hearing the recitations of somewhat dull indi
viduals. Three hours is a large slice out of a student's day.
A private tutor would do away with the necessity of at least
one recitation. At Trinity, Cambridge, the Freshmen are
competent to attend two " lectures " a day for five days in the
week, from nine to eleven. The other years they are only
required to attend one, and that a strictly classical one ; so
that a student attends the " lecture " best suited to his power.*
But both private tutor and pupil need a constant stimulus
to exertion. In England, this is given by the competitive
examinations. Both the failures and successes of the English
universities teach a priceless lesson here. Cambridge has a
truly grand final examination in classics and mathematics,
which only ignorance can afford to undervalue. The results
of these examinations are shown in the men produced by them.
Probably no university in the world can show any thing to
compare with the list of her Senior Wranglers. The exami
nations perpetually keep up the standard of scholarship at the
various colleges, and at the great public schools. They are
the great fountain-heads, whence the minor streams of culture
flow. So thorough, so searching, so fair, are they, that the
whole country depends absolutely on their verdict. They arc
the tests universally appealed to, of the fitness of any man to
fill any position, however high, which demands either classical
or mathematical knowledge of the highest order. The reason
why they are so trusted is because they are real. A Senior
Wrangler is not simply called the first mathematician of the
year : he is, in fact, one of the best mathematicians in the
country, capable at once of meeting the highest mathematical
minds as an associate and an equal. So of the Senior Classic:
* These remarks are only intended to refer to the recitations miscalled

" Lectures " at Cambridge. It would be, we conceive, a great mistake to alter
the law which makes attendance upon the admirable scientific, historical, and
certain other lectures given at our colleges, compulsory on all the students.
404 English Colleges and Scliools. [Nov.
he at once, by virtue of his place, takes high rank among the

scholars of. the country, because it is an established fact, that
he could not possibly have attained that position unless he was
a firstrrate scholar. On the other hand, Cambridge has a com
plete second-rate examination in the Natural Sciences, Moral
Sciences, and Law. As a matter of course, University honors
in this direction are little valued, for they stand for but little.
They do nothing to elevate the standard of requirement in
these subjects throughout the country ; and few of the best
men go in for them, and then only as a supplement to their
severer studies. Cambridge experience teaches just this, that
a first-rate final examination is of priceless value to a uni
versity system, while a second-rate examination is hardly
worth the paper expended on it.
When the classical and mathematical examinations were
first instituted at Oxford, scholarship was at a very low ebb.
To raise the standard, they resolved to put the requirements
of the first class very high, and for some time there were no
first class men at all, and so the lists began with a " First Class
-." This was the very thing to stimulate a really
fine young man to the most strenuous exertions, and so one
day the list appeared thus: —
Clasties : Mathematics :
Class I. Class I.
Bobebt Feel. Robert Peel.
And, from that day to this, a first class at Oxford has stood
for a real thing, because it is a real thing. It is idle to say,
that, in other countries, university honors are not so highly
thought of. University honors will always, in the long run,
stand for just what they are worth: if they are worth little,
for little ; if much, for much.
If, then, any American college aims at the highest excel
lence in any or all departments, let it, at once, institute final
examinations of the strictest character ; in which knowledge,
and knowledge alone, shall be the passport to success. It is
very good to be regular at chapel and at recitations : by all
means let there still be a high reward for general good con
duct, and also for general success in the regular studies of the
recitation rooms. But all this must be absolutely ignored in

the special examinations for honors.
In every university there ought to be at least five or six
different final examinations for honors, namely : 1. Classics ;
2. Mathematics ; 3. Modern Languages ; 4. The Natural Sci
ences; 5. Moral Sciences, — including History, Ancient and
Modern, Political Economy, Philosophy, Law, &c. ; and 6. A
general examination of all the studies required of all the
students during the college course. To the marks gained in
this examination, the marks gained in the recitations through
out the course might be added ; or the latter might be used to
form an honor list by themselves. Decent success in any one
of these examinations should be made an indispensable pre
liminary to the degree, which will then mean something. At
present it is much harder to get in college than to get out of
it. The utmost care must be taken to avoid making any one
of these honor lists " a refuge for the distressed." Let there
be three, four, or five classes, as the case may be, in each
honor list ; but, as a sine qud non, let no one be put into the
first class who does not come up to a certain high and fixed
standard. Let the first class be vacant ten years, rather than
degrade it by putting into it a second-rate man. If this be
done, does any one believe that the American public will be so
foolish as not to value these honors, when it finds out that they
are the sign and seal of high excellence in the very depart
ments where high excellence is most needed throughout the
country ? *
To sum up, then. Four hints of great value can be obtained
from the English Universities : —
1. The Scholarship system; including University Scholar
ships, and Scholarships offered before entrance ; 2. Strict
* To be thorough, these examinations will, of necessity, be very laborious,

as none of them ought to take less than four days. (The Cambridge Mathe
matical Examination consumes eight days.) The examiners, therefore, must
not only be the very best men obtainable in their line, but must be liberally paid
for their work. There are four examiners in both Classics and Mathematics at
Cambridge. Each receives £20 from the university chest; the position itself
being considered a very high honor.
Classification, such as is adopted by the larger college ; 3. Pri

vate Tuition, the first year ; and 4. Final Examinations for
Degrees. It is, perhaps, well that the habit of carefully devel
oping a creditable average of culture should have been so
thoroughly ingrained into the American system, before it at
tempted systematically to give the highest culture known to
the race. For this last is so fascinating, so engrossing, that it
is only too apt to monopolize all the enthusiasm which is due
to the whole number of students, talented or untalented.
When we ascend into the higher regions, and deal with
minds of the first class, a great many vexatious questions,
really very perplexing on a lower level, disappear altogether.
It is very hard to decide which is the best ; a little classics, or
a little mathematics, or a little science, or a little French or
German, or music. It is quite an open question, whether it is
worth while to learn the scales, if we only intend to study
music half a year, or the grammar, if we do not intend to get
beyond the First Reader. But once divide the type to which a
first-class mind belongs, and all these questions settle them
selves.
Small need of debating the value of classical studies with
the scholar, when the simple fact is, that to the scholar, that
is, to the student of the languages, literatures, and histories of
men, they are priceless ; for they form the basis of all his
studies. All, therefore, be they few or many, who covet a
complete scholarly culture, must begin with these ; and upon
them, as foundations, build the natural superstructure of the
modern languages and literatures. The cultivated nations of
Europe — as Matthew Arnold well puts it — associate on the
common ground of acquaintance with the ancient literature
and with each other. The real question to be decided, then, is,
what is the proportion of scholarly minds ? or, rather, as that
happens to be already settled by Providence, — 1. How are we
to discover those minds for whom a scholarly culture is the
best possible ? and, 2. How are we to secure them such cul
ture ? Equally futile is it to raise the question of the value of
scientific studies. To the scientific mind they are the one
thing needful. They are the atmosphere which he breathes.
As well debate with the carpenter as to the value of his tools,

as to debate the value of mathematics to the mathematician.
For such pronominal natures, then, their course is settled
beforehand. There remains only that class among the higher
minds which has a natural avidity for general knowledge, —
that class which mediates among first-rate minds of different
orders, and also between first-rate minds of all orders, and the
public at large. For them, it is a delicate and difficult task to
know what of each branch to take, and what refuse. But, un
doubtedly, the best way for them is to accept the guidance of
acknowledged masters in each direction, and let them epito
mize their results, as Herschel has done in his astronomy.
America is so ambitious of excellence, that she will never
rest contented until her universities vie with the best in
Europe. Candor compels any one who has any knowledge of
the subject, to allow, that, at present, this is far from being
the case. In the mean time, what is to be done for our finest
minds ?
If the question were put, Do you advise a residence at an
English university to give the finishing touch to a young
American's education ? we should answer by putting three
others : 1. Are you sure of his moral character, and his self-
control as to personal expenditure ? 2. Are his abilities of a
high order in a scholarly or mathematical direction ? 3. Are
you sure that he is so impregnated with the American idea,
that he will come back an American, with American ideas on
the dignity of labor, and the duties of a citizen of a republic
founded on the central thought of the worth of man as man ?
Unless all these questions were answered unhesitatingly in the
affirmative, we would say at once, He had better stay at home.
Of all contemptible objects, a mongrel American is the most
contemptible. Better sacrifice scholarship than one's birth
right. But still it is a distressing alternative. The only real
remedy on a large scale is to put our shoulders to the wheel,
and resolve that our children shall have secured to them hero,
in the land of their birthright, — here, in the midst of this
•Treat Western wind which so expands the breast, that it can
harbor the wildest and most impossible hopes for man, — here,
408 The President's Reconstruction. [Nov.
where all labor is honorable, and the scholar feels the great
pulse of the people's heart beating through his bosom, making
the keen brain and the hard hand one in sympathy, — here, to
establish a university system, so high, so thorough, so all-
embracing, that there shall be no need of looking elsewhere
for that culture which is to fine intellects the very breath
of life.
Art. VI.— THE PRESIDENT'S RECONSTRUCTION.
1. Speeches of Andrew Johnson, President of the United States.

With a Biographical Introduction, by Frank Moore. Boston :
Little, Brown, & Co.
2. Great and Grave Questions for American Politicians. By Ebora-
cds.
The late war was held to prove that a republic can be,
at need, the strongest form of human government, surest of
its resources, most confident in the temper of its citizens,
most apt to deal with " sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebel
lion," most absolute in the exercise of that authority needed
for its safety, — its power, at such a time, being like that of a
water-flood, each particle mobile and uncertain, but held in
the one channel by elemental forces, and resistless in its accu
mulated sweep. Even the form of a confederation, which
has been generally thought the weakest bond of States, has
not checked the exercise of a central, consolidated power,
practically as absolute and unchallenged as that of any mon
archy. Respecting, to a remarkable degree, the traditions and
scruples of a constitutional regime as to its genial policy,
the Government has held, in carrying it out, the almost
despotic control of an amount of financial and military
strp £th, — freely, nay, eagerly conceded to it by the people,
— which has its only parallel in the revolutionary autocracy
of Napoleon. The sudden coming-on of peace, with the Presi-
1865.] The Presidents Reconstruction. 409
dent's murder at its beginning, took this accumulated power

from the tried and trusted hands, where we saw it rest with
out anxiety, and committed it to new hands, which few of us
had once thought of in connection with that office. What if
they should prove treacherous or weak? "The accident of
an accident," — the transfer of power by a rule arbitrary and
impersonal, almost, as the divine right of kingly inheritance,
— what if it should prove, at last, a calamity and mistake ?
The ease and dignity with which Mr. Johnson assumed the
reins of administration, six months ago, were only matched by
the secure and undoubting confidence which prevailed every
where in the public mind. At the very moment our commiser
ating English cousins were deploring the "anarchy" into which
the great Republic had fallen, at length, in the hands of an
ignorant, weak, and nntrusty ruler, there was on this side a
clearer consciousness of unity and strength, a more hopeful
confidence in the destiny and future of the nation, than any of
us would have thought possible, with the wounds of war so
fresh. The work of peace was already begun in earnest.
Terms of conciliation were already offered, and getting widely
accepted among the revolted populations. One army of the
insurrection after another was laying down its arms in abso
lute surrender. The soil was extensively preparing, and the
conditions of labor and employment were fast getting estab
lished, for the greatly needed harvests of the year. The
nation, just rallying victorious from its life-and-death struggle,
was exercising a wise and needful charity, in the supply of
destitution, and a healing of desolation, absolutely unparal
leled. One of the highest officers in the military service, a
man as well known for his Christian humanity as for his sol
dierly fidelity, was the appointed agent of the nation's guar
dianship over the newly enfranchised race, that was still to
be protected from the jealous cruelty of its former mas
ters, and initiated in the painful, slow, first steps towards
civilization, equal justice, and political liberty. This was
the " reconstruction " which the nation required. And to the
immense task of it, the new President had already devoted
himself, with an intelligent purpose and a consecration of will
VOL. LXXIX. — 6TH 8. VOL. XVII. SO. III. 86
410 The President'1s Reconstruction. [Xov.
which nothing in his career hitherto permitted us to doubt, —

at the very time when he had to vindicate himself before the
world from the most wanton misrepresentation, and the most
undeserved contempt.
It is worth while to look back over these six months, so as
to see what ground they have covered, and what advance we
have actually made, and to judge fairly the position to which
they have brought us. Especially because it cannot be over
looked, that a very painful suspicion and misunderstanding
have prevailed among many of the best friends of the coun
try, and the steadiest supporters of the administration, — a
suspicion and misunderstanding which the next few weeks
must do very much either to remove or fix. While it would
be idle to anticipate the developments which the coming
session of Congress brings so near, it is simple matter of
justice and prudence to judge fairly as we may the great
multitude and complexity of the elements which beset the
immediate problem of our future.
It is indeed very striking to the imagination, — the im
mense, almost unchallenged authority which rests at present
in one man's hands. It is stating it quite moderately to
say, that the chances of civil peace or war, of liberty or
slavery to many generations of the blacks, of sectional hatred
or good-will amongst the whites, rest on the single decision of
one whom, a year ago, few men had thought of in any con
nection with the national administration. Old party lines are
melted down, and rival political, organizations bid for his con
fidence and support. State elections turn on the dispute,
which set of politicians best represents his mind and purpose.
Conventions and platforms are dumb or eloquent on great
points of public policy, according as he has reserved or
declared his own. The confidence which the North is so for
ward to profess, comes echoed back -in Southern speeches,
resolutions, and newspapers. Journals of unflinching loyalty
throughout the war are foremost in sustaining a plan of
reconstruction, which is accepted and praised hardly less for-
wardly by men fresh from their rebellious counsels, still
cleaving to their State-rights' theories, and haughtily accept
I860.] The President's Reconstruction. 411
ing the forms of pardon for an unacknowledged wrong. A

measure of simple political equity and democratic consistency
fails in a New-England State, it is said, because it is uncer
tain whether the President will desire it as a condition of
reconstruction in the South : the majority of six thousand in
Connecticut against negro suffrage would have been the other
way, we are told, if only his mind were clear about it. Now,
in very marked phases and movements of public thought,
not easy to account for otherwise, it is often possible to see,
afterwards, evidence of some secret necessity there was in
them, — as it were a divine or unconscious popular instinct ;
and the fact vindicates what was the despair of our theory.
And we incline to think that we ourselves may recognize here
after, that this intense need, this imperious demand, of
national unity after so fierce a conflict, has its necessary place
in our history. Nay, is there not something in the tone of
the diplomatic correspondence which is just coming over to
us, to make us feel that the astonishing solidity and harmony
of our political structure, but just now so rudely jarred, may
be our safety from disaster or disgrace abroad ? When Earl
Russell, who, four years ago, condensed the misrepresenta
tions of half England into an epigram, charging that " the
North fought for empire, the South for independence ; " and
who, two years ago, found matter only of cavil and censure in
the edict of emancipation, — when he respectfully solicits our
Government to accept his sincere sympathy and congratula
tion that the " empire " has been established, and the emanci
pation achieved, we seem to see the vindication of at least
one motive in the President's somewhat hasty process of
reconciliation. It has at least surprised Europe into acknowl
edging the legitimacy and the nationality of our republic.
Perhaps no testimony of the last few months has been more
striking, than that of the little charm war has for a people
that had sustained it so cheerily and fiercely, and of the
eagerness for a return to the arts and ways of peace. An
army so great that a few months back the Government seems
to have feared to give the figures, — an army, as it is now
stated, of thirteen hundred thousand men, — has almost liter
ally melted away, unobserved, into the ranks of peaceful

industry ; and, of all the returned soldiers we have conversed
with or heard of, not one but was glad to escape from the
alternating idleness and excitement of the service to the quiet
of home and the round of daily labor. Even the period of
violent crimes, to which we were reconciling ourselves as
we might, a few months ago, as the necessary brood of war,
and the inevitable train of a disbanded army, seems to have
passed as suddenly as it threatened ; and we find ourselves
again in the securities and moralities of a long peace, — quali
fied only by occasional turmoil in great cities, and by the
unhealed miseries of the seat of war. The great financial
task of meeting such vast arrears of pay, of crowding into a
month the disbursements of half a year, of meeting obliga
tions amounting to six hundred million dollars as fast as the
mechanical process of distribution could be carried on, has
been effected, skilfully and easily ; the necessary loans were
raised with no other disturbance to the business of the coun
try than a slight " ground-swell " in prices ; and the work was
so cleanly done, that the one month of September saw an
actual reduction of twelve and a half millions in the public
debt, implying a decrease of more than half a million in the
annual burden of it. The large navy of merchant ships,
extemporized so suddenly for blockading purposes, has been
sold in some cases at higher prices than were paid at first, to
meet the reviving demands of commerce ; while many millions
have been gathering from the sale of stores designed to sup
ply the enormous waste of field and hospital. This resolute
prudence, this indefatigable economy, so essential to our
recovery from the exhaustions of these four years, it is only
justice to acknowledge as one main feature of the President's
reconstruction.
The next need in importance, hardly less imperative, has
been the restoring of industry and business confidence at the
South. We have spoken of this so often before, — employ
ing the words, and, where possible, the hand of eye-witnesses
in that field, — that we have nothing to add now respecting
the principles of general justice and economy which it re
1865.] TJie President's Reconstruction. 413
quires. If we are still compelled to hear — more few faint

and far off— instances of disorder and brutality, especially
as practised on the unresisting and helpless laboring popula
tion, at least it is fair to bear in mind what we had reason to
fear from the animosities of that long series of campaigns,
embittered and crossed by a social revolution forced on a
proud, beaten, and reluctant people. In our judgment, the
confidence we have all along expressed, in the better quali
ties and temper of our people, is abundantly vindicated in
the general bearing of the facts, which we accept as way-
marks of social progress at the South. We confess, with
some shame, that great allowance has#still to be made for the
temper and prejudice of Northern soldiers, no less than of
Southern masters. This is only to say, that we deal not with an
ideal world, but with a very practical and imperfect one. If we
demand a more extensive military rule, and claim more of North
ern protection for the Southern blacks, — the doubt occurs,
whether, as things are, the Northern soldier can be trusted as
a safe guardian: Quia custodiet ipsos custodies? The reserve
of force, in garrisons amply manned, and largely by colored
troops, the Government does right in maintaining ; but the
show of force, especially in men of the race scarce yet ran
somed and acknowledged, the Government may do wisely in
withholding. Certainly, it is not a question which can be well
argued at a distance. Meanwhile, the Freedmen's Bureau is
claimed to be a vigilant and efficient protector of the right
of the blacks to personal freedom and equal justice. The most
definite token of " conquest " now subsisting in the South
would appear to be the quasi-military tribunals, maintained
expressly to try cases involving the rights of freedmen. So
long as their testimony is excluded from State-courts, so long
as they are not acknowledged equal before the law, these
tribunals will be maintained : so it has just been announced
to the State authorities of South Carolina. Amidst very great
difficulties and perplexities, — which only those wilfully blind
failed to see three years ago, when the policy of emancipa
tion yet hung doubtful, — the Government does assert itself
the vindicator of equal justice, and the champion of the
85*
414 The Presidents Reconstruction. [Nov.
freedmen for their civil rights. Even if it goes no further

than that at present, we believe the verdict must be, that, bo
far as that, it has acted with sincerity, frankness, and good
faith.
Is not, then, the President's reconstruction already an am
ple and magnificent success, looking only to the testimony of
these six months ? A flood of prosperity at the North, un
stayed and unchecked, — commerce revived in larger propor
tions than ever before, — enterprises of peaceful industry, in
arts, mines, railways, emigration, scarce diminished during
war, and pushed with redoubled activity now, — industry and
prosperity reclaiming the desolate places of the South, — the
great lines of railway and telegraph restored or fast restor- '
ing, — a degree of general confidence, a harmony of public
sentiment, and a cordiality in the support of Government
measures in every section, such as the country has never
known, — is not this fruit enough, and testimony enough, for
a single summer, to vindicate the Administration in its policy,
its energy, and its good faith ? What distrust yet remains ?
and what abatement must we make from the general, nay,
triumphant assent, which the Government might seem enti
tled to claim?
If we would answer these questions fairly, and so do just
ice to those who, with no inferior patriotism, distrust, or
even condemn the policy we have outlined, we must assume
the ground of the very noblest political theories, and a stand
ard of public justice such as no human government has ever
thought of putting into practice, on any large scale. We
must also understand, and to some extent share, that exceed
ing jealousy of any thing that falls short of the ideal, which
in religious minds leads to " conviction of sin," and in State
affairs makes a sincere " radical." Judged by all precedents
we know, — by the standard of mercy and justice which any
nation has ever shown in its conquest of rebellious subjects,
or its dealing with inferior races of men, — by the standard
which we should wish to see followed in such instances as
make the nearest parallel, the subjugation of Hungary, of
Poland, of Ireland, of Hindostan, — it may fairly be claimed
I860.] Tlie President's Reconstruction. 415
that the present administration stands with a clean, an honor

able, a glorious record. Or, judging by the theory of our
own Government, — a republic of equal and confederated
States, — and considering the absolute need there is of free
and willing acquiescence in all the parts, the mischief and
impotency of any permanent domineering by any portion over
any other, under the pretext of rebellion and conquest or any
other, — we should be apt to say that the way our Govern
ment has undertaken its task is the right and only way ; that
genuine reconciliation should be sought by all means, and
especially by cherishing all local liberties to the very verge
of the public safety j that the Government is justified in deal
ing with the recognized and representative populations in the
several States ; that, having assumed the function of defender
of civil rights in a revolutionary period, it is justified in leav
ing all political questions, as subordinate, to future spontane
ous arrangements ; that, requiring the one condition of loyalty
to the national authority from every person claiming to be a
citizen, it is entitled to treat with the States as political
organizations, which, by our theory, have never escaped the
obligations of the Union, or forfeited its rights.
The wide-spread anxiety and distrust we have spoken of,
in the face of the evidence of facts we have already cited,
touch these three things : the wholesale pardon of indivi
duals, virtually abolishing all legal penalty for treason in the
vast majority of cases ; the failure to secure political rights
for the blacks, threatening to surrender them back to a con
dition of vassalage little better than their former slavery ;
and the fear lest power in the Union may be restored to the
hands that have sought to destroy it, without security against
a treacherous and hostile use of it.
As to the first, the free and almost indiscriminate issue of
pardons, — several hundred in a day, stamped, it is said, with
a printed signature, to save labor, — we shall not repeat what
has been urged so often, of the mistake of attempting to mete
out just penalty for offences on so vast a scale, or exacting
any thing like retributory vengeance, or following any other
rule than simply the public safety, advantage, and honor.
416 Hie President's Reconstruction. [Nov.
We do not profess to read the motives of the Administration,

or to speak for it in any sense ; but we have been greatly
impressed with the deliberate, stern, inexorable way in which
the crimes of the rebellion have been dragged to light, and
shown in their most revolting shapes before the world, in the
two great criminal trials, of which the last is just concluded.
Surely, it would appear, if the design of the Government
were to condone and gloss the deep guilt that stains the
Southern record, it would not display thus those hideous se
crets, the mere reference to which must goad and sting the
soul of every man who gave himself to the Southern cause.
Where the nation's justice can lay its hand definitely on the
author of this or that given crime, we hold that that justice
should not spare. Armed, and biding its time, it holds in its
grasp the lonely prisoner of Fort Monroe, as it has just dealt
with the jailer of Andersonville. No sign, yet, that the se
vere purpose of the Government is relaxed, or that the defin
ite crime of treason will fail of being strictly judged at the
nation's bar ; no need that haste or vengeance of ours should
anticipate the time. Further than to vindicate the authority
of that law which defines treason and appoints its penalty,
it is apparently not the purpose of the Government to go.
Whether it should, we hold to be simply a question of public
honor and safety. Is there danger lest the South be not suf
ficiently subdued? Who shall answer? Mr. Wendell Phil
lips, in a brilliant speech, declares " the South victorious."
Mr. Secretary McCulloch, at Fort Wayne, declares that never
in all history was a population so completely subjugated as
'the South. Let us decide, if we will, which verdict is the
true one. But, granting the official interpretation to be cor
rect, it would be a crime as well as a blunder if the Govern
ment did not extend its amnesty in every single- instance,
irrespective of past political acts, that should not now
threaten the public peace.
The question of negro suffrage has often been discussed
as if it were the essential, if not the only one in the policy
of reconstruction. And the distinction between " universal "
and '• impartial " suffrage, which was a little confused at first,
1865.] The President's Reconstruction. 417
is getting cleared up. Regarding the suffrage not as a natu

ral, but as a political and artificial right,.— regarding it, too,
not merely as a right, but even more as a power and a trust,
— we hold that any State which respects itself, and desires
security for its future, should establish some conditions of
character and competency for the exercise of so high a trust.
Regarding it as a question of simple political justice, we
should earnestly desire any measure that would declare —
and, if necessary, compel — equal conditions of citizenship
to every man, without respect to race or color. In the pre
cise shape in which the question comes before the country
now, we cannot help thinking that it is of less practical con
sequence than is sometimes thought. Consistency and equal
justice are, in the long-run, the best expediency. The right
way is the safe way. And the right way in this matter
seems so clear, and so exactly in the line of our political
development hitherto, that it seems impossible the public mind
should not by and by be won to it. General Banks reports,
that, with simple freedom to start with, the blacks are sure
to be a political power in the South presently. The latest
and most authentic report of the President's own view, is,
that he definitely desires and looks forward to engrafting the
political rights of negroes on the Constitution of Tennessee.
That his theory of the Government should leave it as a
question for the Southern States to settle, — which in this
case seem quite as likely to do justice as the Northern ones, —
we neither wonder nor regret. He is apparently convinced
that the political power of the freedmen, just now, would
mean the political power of their late masters, as against the
poor whites and recent colonists. Who shall gainsay this con
viction ? At all events, — even if the general mind of the
country were prepared to insist upon this matter as a con
dition in reconstruction, which it very evidently is not, — it
is impossible for us to believe, that any reliance could be
placed on the Northern sympathies, or the intelligent loyalty
of any large mass of newly emancipated voters in the South,
in the face of the conflicts at the polls, and the threatened
reign of terror, too likely to be inaugurated. If the choice
lies between the present disfranchisement of the negro and

the postponement cf any reconstruction at all, — and we are
forced to think it does, — we have only, with whatever
regrets, to take our choice ; or, rather, as the question has
probably been decided without any choice of ours, we have
only to make the best of the result. To say nothing of the
passions to be stirred anew by an obstinate struggle on this
point, or the doubtful advantage of success, if gained, could
the nation bear the demoralization or the financial strain of
a long tenure of military empire in the South? We think,
surely not. And therefore, much as we desire that the mili
tary tenure should be kept till the nation's safety is made
absolutely sure, — strongly as we would ever insist upon main
taining it, till the strictest pledge is given of equal civil
rights for all classes, and strict equality before the law, —
steadily as we hold that equal political privilege is also the
right way and the safe way, — we do not condemn a policy of
reconstruction that remands this final act of justice to another
tribunal and a later day.
The real difficulty that besets us, — the real anxiety that
haunts us, — the difference which sets our case apart from
that of every other nation that has subdued a rebellion, and
is to be met at the threshold of any political reconstruction,
is this : we cannot restore the citizens of rebellious States to
their position in the Union, without at the same time restoring
their control over the destinies of the Union. It is true, as
Mr. Beecher has just said, that we must trust men some
where, — we must have some reliance on their honor and
good faith, if we are to stand in any friendly relations with
them at all. And the conditions of pardon, or of political fel
lowship, which the Southern leaders accept, we entertain no
doubt that they intend to keep. A State-rights theory which
betrayed them into breaking their allegiance to the Union is
one thing : to betray that allegiance after definitely renoun
cing the pretext, is quite another thing. Mr. Lincoln set the
example, which Mr. Johnson has followed, of requiring, as
the test of loyalty, the usual oath of allegiance to the Gov
ernment, together with assent to the proclamations and laws
respecting slavery. So far, there seems no hesitation on

the part of the South ; and we think the South accepts both
these conditions in good faith, — nay, with the general inten
tion of doing fairly and justly by the negroes, whom the war
makes free. But we shall be surprised if Congress does not
insist on one condition more. A body of very important
legislation has been enacted by the thirty-seventh and thirty-
eighth Congresses, in the absence of any member from the
seceded States, — enacted, it may be presumed, by authority
of a quorum ; that is, a simple majority being present from the
States actually represented. As specimens of the importance
of this legislation, we may mention only the Homestead Law,
the Pacific Railroad, the organization of the Army, the Pen
sion laws, and the Public Debt. It is notorious and signifi
cant, that a considerable party at the North, during the war,
as well as all the South with one accord, protested against
this whole body of legislation as unconstitutional, — the Gov
ernment being de facto dissolved by the acts of secession
and the theory of State sovereignty denying the validity of
any laws passed over an absent State. If any political perils
shall come hereafter, we apprehend that they will gather
about this point. In the conditions of pardon as heretofore
announced, and in the amnesty oath as signed by General
Lee, we do not observe any assurance in regard to it. It
cannot be supposed that so grave a matter has escaped the
eye of the President, or that he is treacherously inviting a
compromise, which might prove his own political ruin, and
the great dishonor of the nation. It is, without doubt, among
the topics which he reserves to Congress. And the clear
duty of Congress, the clear condition of public security,
seems to be, that the body of laws, passed by the National Con
gress in the last few years, shall be accepted as the valid and
authoritative legislation of the country. It may be said that
no such pledge will be held binding, — that repudiation or
repeal will be a remedy for any hurts or grievances, just as
easy after such acceptance as before. But, in the first place,
we believe such a pledge will be held binding by those who
take it ; and in the second place, even if it were not, at least
they are debarred by it from ever taking their advantage of
420 Tlie President's Reconstruction. [Nov.
State-rights theoty, or their claim of the invalidity of certain

legislation, in any future political intrigues and affiliations.
An obnoxious law, or the grievance of a debt incurred to
one's own detriment and harm, becomes a very different thing,
when a man has once assented to it as the condition of a
great advantage. And, though the South may show a repu-
diator or a nullifier here and there, we do not believe that
the South will ever be able to send a body of men to Con
gress, prepared to repudiate or nullify what has been once
solemnly accepted in the terms of amity and restoration.
With this one condition secured, — and with the ratification
of the Constitutional Amendment, not only forbidding slavery,
but empowering Congress to pass all needful laws to make
liberty secure, — we believe that every thing will have been
done which can be done to insure the public honor and
safety, as a condition precedent to the re-distribution of polit
ical power. And we should be glad to see the anxiety and
jealousy, so widely manifested as to the two other points,
directed upon this. Unless — as we feel sure it must be —
Congress is prepared, with the support of the Administration,
and without any advice of ours, to insist on some such vindi
cation of its own dignity and the nation's honor, it is im
possible to conjecture what treacheries and cabals it may not
deliberately invite, by over-hastily admitting into the counsels
of the nation, and into a share of government patronage and
power, a class of men who but now boasted of being public
enemies. Fortunately, the precise form of the danger is one
which is very clear to see, which must be met at the very
first step of any negotiation whatever, and which is per
fectly within the power of Congress to control.
Our own leanings may dispose us to put too favorable a con
struction on the past. But we cannot possibly over-estimate
the opportunities of the future. President Johnson has had
a task assigned him, under Providence, and in the orderly
working of our form of government, to which either the wis
dom, courage, humanity, or firmness of few men is equal. It
was natural that he should regard that task from the point of
view of the class of which he is so honorable a representative,
— the class of the industrious whites of the South. It would
be natural if he did not share in the more refined and humane

sympathies, which have drawn the conscience of great bodies
of men at a distance, to feel first and most for the race which
has so far been the victim of our social and political arrange
ments. In the place of official responsibility in which he
stands, and amid its infinite embarrassments, it is hardly to be
wondered at that his words to the colored troops the other
day, while generous and manly, should be words less of laud
ation and cheer than of grave and honest counsel. It is but
three years since Mr. Lincoln's words to a colored delegation
were colder still, and spoke of expatriation instead of equal
citizenship. Yet they were honestly and kindly meant. And,
while he always postponed his philanthropy to his theory of
official duty, and declared that, whether it should involve the
freedom or slavery, the deliverance or ruin, of the negro
race, the Union must be saved at any rate, it is Abraham
Lincoln, and not any theorist, or philanthropist, or declaimer of
them all, that the reverence of that race has singled out as
its Deliverer ; nay, even in a high religious sense, its Messiah.
Mr. Johnson's words may seem measured and cold, but we
will trust him that they are honest. And what words that
have been spoken in all the country have a heartier ring and
a more manly glow than those of his addressed to the colored
people of Nashville, which are reprinted now by his own
authority ? —
" Humble and unworthy as I am, if no other better shall be found,
I will indeed be your Moses, and lead you, through the Red Sea of
war and bondage, to a fairer future of liberty and peace. I speak now
as one who feels the world his country, and all who love equal rights
his friends. I speak, too, as a citizen of Tennessee. I am here on my
own soil ; and here I mean to stay and fight this great battle of truth
and justice to a triumphant end. Rebellion and slavery shall, by
God's good help, no longer pollute our State. Loyal men, whether
white or black, shall alone control her destinies ; and, when this strife
in which we are all engaged is past, I trust, I know, we shall have a
better state of things ; and shall rejoice that honest labor reaps the
fruit of its own industry, and that every man has a fair chance in the
race of life."
vol. lxxix. — 5th s. vol. xvii. so. III. 86
422 Review of Current Literature. [Nov.
Art. VH. — REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.
THEOLOGT.
In the " Astrology of the Reformation," * it is Dr. Friedrich's

purpose to show, that Luther wisely availed himself of the popu
lar belief ia astrology to promote the Reformation ; that he accepted
in good faith the prevailing ideas respecting the influence of the stars
upon human destiny, and turned them to account in carrying forward
his work. Luther's faith in astrology is shown, not only from numer
ous passages in his correspondence, but also from the preface to his
edition (1527) of the " Proquosticon Propheticum" of John Lichten-
burg, a renowned German astrologer. This work was filled with
predictions of direful events that would occur in the natural world, as
well as to the Church, the papacy, and the Empire.
Why should not Luther have believed, what was so wisely accepted,
that even scepticism was constrained to support its ridicule ? It is a
mistake to suppose, that the increase of scientific knowledge has ren
dered astrology impossible in this age ; that the boundaries between
the natural and the supernatural are so well determined that the stars
no longer minister to superstition. Astrological almanacs are annu
ally published in England. In America, astrologers advertise in the
papers. Many a farmer consults the position of the planets before he
sows his seed, or kills his animals. Many a man likes to see the
new moon over his right shoulder. Nurses inquire of the stars, before
weaning an infant. We are informed that, in this very year, the Vice
roy of Egypt has postponed his intended visit to Europe because the
astrologers pronounced it unlucky. Multitudes of men look upon
comets with something more than admiration, although the discovery
of their periodical times has put an end to any serious belief in their
fatal influence.
Why should we wonder that Luther shared in the universal delu
sion of his times, when scientific men like Cardan and Kepler con
fessed their faith in the influence of the planets over human impulses ?
when Tycho Brahe drew horoscopes, and was frightened at the ap
pearance of Halley's comet ? The German emperors, contemporary
with Luther, kept astrologers in their service, and consulted them in
important undertakings. Charles the Fifth and Catherine De Me-
dicis patronized astrology, and the Vatican admitted its power.
" Paul the Third appointed no important sitting of the consistory,
undertook no journey, without observing the constellations, and choos
ing the day which appeared to him recommended by their aspect." f
* Astrology of the Reformation. By Dr. Jons Fiubdrich, Theological

Instructor in the University of Munich. Munich. 1864.
t Ranke's History of the Popes, i. p. 157.
I860.] Theology. 423
This philosophy of the ruling classes was the religion of the com
mon people. They believed that certain conjunctions of the planets
portended misfortunes, storms, floods, epidemic diseases, wars, revo
lutions. This was Luther's life-long faith. He was an attentive
observer of unusual appearances in the natural world. " Within the
last four years, how many signs and wonders have we seen in the
heavens, — suns, crosses, extraordinary rainbows, and other wonderful
things not in the natural course of events ; and portending, as reason
teaches us, the wrath and judgments of God ! If they do not announce
the last day, yet tumults and wars that shall change the governments
of States, and occasion extreme misery to the people." *
In this is nothing censurable. It was the faith of all classes. Our
own fathers accepted it. In England the art of astrology was pub
licly taught and practised more than a century after Luther's death.
In 1666 a parliamentary committee consulted a professor of astrology
concerning the origin of the great fire in London. There is no evi
dence that Luther made improper use of the popular superstition, or
any use of it different from what any other earnest and intelligent
man would have made. Dr. Friedrich's book is written with a
strong bias against Luther, but fails to establish his complicity with
the authors of the peasants' war, which, it is alleged, originated with
the astrologers. That their predictions had a great influence on the
popular mind, in connection with the war, is true ; and it is also true,
that a religious reform was included among the demands of the peas
ants. But that Luther favored the insurrection is not proved. His
tendencies were against it. His sympathies were with the Govern
ment, and the higher classes who supported his movement, — a move
ment which did not penetrate the lower ranks of German society, as
is shown by the extensive re-action that soon took place. His feelings
were conservative, and he strenuously opposed the peasants' war, and
deplored their excesses. It was not for astrological predictions, or
the oppressions of peasants, to originate, or greatly to modify, a reli
gious movement which was already prepared in the history of past
ages, and only required a fitting occasion.
Dr. Friedrich's book is the result of careful research among the
curious old literature of Germany, and would be an important contri
bution to the history of the Reformation, if its allegations against the
spirit and method of Luther's work were established.
At this stage of theological science, one hardly opens a book upon

dogmas with the expectation of finding novelties. The main doctrines
of Christianity, rightly or wrongly deduced from the Gospels and the
Epistles, were long ago settled ; and the great task of modern criticism
has been to prove their falsity, or soften their rigor. In noble oppo
sition to the Old-Testament sternness, and the cold intellectualism of
Calvin, Wesley undertook the grateful task of developing the social
* Tract on "The Last Day, and the Signs of its Coming.'

find emotional nature of believers, and of forming a community that

should be held together by the element of love, — an element that played
by no means so important a part in the old dispensation as in the
new. A Church established upon such a basis was in its origin a
pleasing and an edifying spectacle. Its continued growth and pros
perity show, that it appealed to a deep-seated want of the human heart,
and that it did a great deal to satisfy that want. But it is no less
plain, from an examination of the career of Methodism, and from the
aspect of the congregations that fill its churches, that it has become a
religions sect, with as one-sided a tendency as either Lutheranism or
Calvinism. It has ever made too great a demand upon nerve force, to
the exclusion of intellectual. The groans and the shouts of the faith
ful, in conference and revival meetings, will remain a blemish upon
the Methodist Church, so long as it indulges in violent appeals to the
emotional natures of its communicants, and makes no attempt to
supply their exhausted systems with the chalybeate of reason. We
believe, that a consciousness of their defects has been impressing itself
upon the minds of the thinking men of the denomination, and that the
late activity of the leaders, both in America and in Germany, is to be
traced to a gradual awakening to a sense of what the age requires.
With this conviction of the merits and defects of Methodism, it has
given us great pleasure to greet the really able attempt of Mr. War
ren* (formerly a pastor in Boston), to put into the hands of the stu
dents under his charge a text-book intended at once to spread abroad
juster ideas of the doctrines of his sect, and to educate, as its leaders,
a class of ministers who should be more intelligent and better versed
in theological science than their predecessors. In a subject so vexed
and so uncertain as that of the respective boundaries of ethics and
dogmatics, many would find fault with the definition given to system
atic theology, and with the sphere assigned to its constituents. " Sys
tematic theology," he says, " is the comprehensive, scientific presenta
tion of the Christian doctrine of God, of man, and of the mutual
relation of the two. It embraces : first, Christian dogmatics, which
treats of the relation of God to man, and the Christian doctrine of
God thence resulting ; and, second, Christian ethics, which treats
of the relation of man to God, and the Christian doctrine of man
thence resulting." A definition commendable for simplicity, rather
than capable of rigorous and distinct development, or practical treat
ment. So the einheitlich, or unitary method, consisting in the union
of ethics and dogmatics, is an arrangement better suited to oral and
informal lectures from the professor's chair, than to a scientific trea
tise. The two subjects can hardly be mingled without confusion.
It is a remarkable event, not only in theology but in general litera
ture, that an American should write a work in German, and with the
* Systematische Theologie einheitlich behandelt. Von William F. War

ren", Doctor und Professor der Theologie. Erste Lieferung Allgemeine Einles-
tung. Bremen : Verlag des Tractathauses. Zurich : Zeltweg, Nr. 728. Cincin
nati, Ohio : Poe & Hitchcock. 1805. 8vo. pp. 186.
successful handling of the language that has attended the effort of Mr.
Warren. But our interest in the book is not limited by the novelty
of the printed characters. With some defects of style, and a slight
tendency to rhetorical exaggeration, it takes high rank as an attempt
to introduce scientific theology into Methodistic teaching and preach
ing. Its tables of works upon doctrines peculiar to the various faiths
possess some value ; more particularly, those relating to Methodism.
It contains a large amount of interesting matter, especially a careful
criticism, from the Methodistic stand-point, of the different confessions,
and an accurate characterization of them, according to their predomi
nation and principle. Of course no one will be surprised when he
sees the various creeds arranged, in respect to development and per
fection, as Roman Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran, and Methodist ; and
most persons will be unable to join with Mr. Warren in considering
the last a complete climax. But, without such a conviction on his
part, Mr. Warren's faith would be vain, and the denomination would
have lacked this noteworthy attempt to give greater dignity to their
cause.
" Greece is the natural home of poetry," says Ampere,* " and, at
a former period, I have studied Greek poetry in Greece ; but Rome is
the laud of history, and now I undertake at Rome to write the history
of Rome." And no one who has read his work will fail to regret
that his premature death has brought it to an end before his original
design of carrying the story down to the age of Constantine had been
accomplished. It was his intention, also, upon finishing this work,
to enter upon another treating of Christian Rome, which his careful
investigation, and lucid style, and quick perception of the controlling
features in character and art, would have made, we have no doubt,
one of the most entertaining and instructive upon the subject, so little
understood after all that has been written upon it. The " History of
the City of Rome in the Middle Age," by Gregorovius, which we
have already reviewed in these pages, was a work of equal industry,
and somewhat similar character, although occupied with a wholly
different period ; but it was deficient in that vivid portraiture and that
keen analysis which make the charm of Ampere. With this excep
tion, there is no history of Rome worth reading, written upon the
plan of the present work.
It is impossible, of course, in an exhaustive survey of the Roman
world, to confine one's attention to the events of which Rome was the
centre, or to the men of whom it was the home. To understand
Roman history, we must understand the ancient world. Yet a pic
ture so vast as that of the rise and fall of Rome will hardly ever
perhaps be painted. Even Gibbon was obliged to content himself
with its decline. For the display of learning, the field is too im-
* L'Histoire Romaine a Rome. Par J. J. Ampere de l'Acad^mie Fran9aise,

&c. Tome Quatrieme. Paris : Michel Levy, Freres. 1864.
36*
mense ; and for artistic effect, the subject, if we may say so, is too
panoramic. But it is possible, as Ampere has shown in a very bril
liant way, to sift a great deal of that mass of facts which goes to
make up Roman history, to select the leading men, and to indicate
the chief causes that made the civilized world revolve at last round a
single city, obedient to a single will.
The greatest man in Roman history was Ctesar ; the greatest man
in modern history, to a Frenchman, is Buonaparte. Between these
two men, not merely in their character and purpose, but still more in
the circumstances and condition of the time, it has been much the
fashion of late to draw a parallel. If it were a matter merely of
literary criticism, the subject would not have much interest perhaps,
except to that somewhat morbid class of mind that are ever striving
to find in the past some proof of the little progress of the present ;
some confirmation of their glowing theory, that history does but repeat
itself. But as involving a political question, affecting not merely the
present administration but the whole future government of France
and of Europe, the parallel between Ca?sar and Buonaparte is a mat
ter of intense interest, which it did not need the sophistry of the
present Emperor of France, in his recent political pamphlet, entitled,
the " Life of Julius Caesar," to increase or diffuse.
But this political question is one not easily stated, and the method
of its solution is one not easily indicated. To discuss it is to decide
upon the tendency of institutions which have long since perished, and
the character of men who have long since passed away. The more
you consider it, the farther you are from arriving at a just conception
even of its scope. But its existence is the necessary result of the
historical studies of the time. The creative faculty has given way to
the analytic. We do not have history now, but theories of history.
As in art, it is not so much what you do as how you do it ; so in
history, it has come to be not so much matter what your facts are, as
how you regard them. You may, indeed, like Niebuhr, re-write
whole chapters of early history, or, like Cornewall Lewis, deny that
they were ever written at all ; but, when you have fairly entered upon
fields where you are never without contemporary chronicles, it is im
possible to write without feeling yourself guided, as by an unseen
hand, to a far-off but definite conclusion. It is thus that many of the
historians of Germany insist upon finding in the history of that
divided country, all through its worst distractions, one steady, silent
tendency to unity. And it is thus that Ampere, living at Rome, and
unable to withdraw himself from that ever-present temptation to inter
pret the monuments of the past, which is one of the embarrassments,
if also one of the inspirations, of the modern city, has written the
history of Rome, which has lost none of its point, we may add, in his
hands. After a vivid portrait of Cato, who, as Sallust said, loved to
be, better than to appear, honest, and of whom even Seneca could say,
that while some were of the party of Caesar, and others of Pompey,
Cato alone was for the Republic, he terminates the history of the
Republic, "For, the senate conquered and Cato dead, to use the. pro
phetic expression of Thiers, L'empire etait fait." — " My judgment

upon Augustus is that of Macchiavelli and of Montesquieu, of Voltaire
and of Gibbon ; but the prejudice of the schools is against me." —
" But as for me," he says again, and his words are the protest of the
whole liberal party of France, " it is because I am liberal, that I
hate evil done in the name of liberty."
Political discussion, however, dignify it, or adorn it, or disguise it,
as we will, wearies us at last ; and we turn aside, with a feeling of
relief, to those quieter and less irritating subjects which afford oppor
tunity for no more bitter controversies than those of scholars, and for
no zeal noisier than that of the antiquary. The promenade historiqtie
in Sabine Rome, in the time of Numa, and the chapters upon the
Campagna and the primitive climate and poetic traditions of Rome,
together with the brilliant essays upon the influence of Greek art
upon the Roman, so well entitled, " La Grece a Rome dans l'Art,"
suggest topics less vexing, and in the end perhaps not less useful,
than the Agrarian Laws, or the ambition of C.rsar.
It is to the fact, indeed, that his history was written at Rome, that it
will owe much of its interest to many persons. For there, within the
limits of the city itself, half buried in the ground, or scattered,
broken, and confused upon the surface, lie all the memorials of its
ancient career. Without going out of Rome, you ' may trace its
architecture from the times of the kings to those of the Republic and
the Empire ; and follow the progress and decline of sculpture, from
the bronze wolf to the ruins of the Capitol, and from the latter to the
bas-reliefs of Constantino's arch. . The modern villas also are, to a
certain extent, a reproduction of the ancient. Often situated upon the
same spot, as the villa of the Medici, which has succeeded to the gar
dens of Lucullus, and the villas Massimi and Pamphili, which claim
the site of those of Sallust and of Galba, there is in all of them the
same melange of statues and fountains and verdure which characterize
the ancient luxury. Se promener dans une villa de- Rome, c'est se
promener dans I'antiquite. The piquant analogies, indeed, which are
ever springing up between Ancient Rome, with its still existing art, and
Modern Rome with its still surviving paganism, could not but be full
of suggestions to so acute a critic and so quick an observer ; but, in
bringing to bear upon them, as he has done, so much careful learning,
Ampere has shown himself to be anxious for something more than
mere effect.
That the Romans were not as a nation fond of art will hardly be
disputed ; yet it is surprising sometimes to find how much Roman art
there really was. The temples of the second age of the Republic, if
all Greek in their architecture, were almost all Roman in their artists ;
and it is a singular fact, that Antiochus Epiphanes, while he imitated
at Antioch, with great magnificence, the temple of Jupiter Capitoli-
nus, caused a Roman architect to come to Athens, in order to finish
the temple of Jupiter Olympius, of which the construction had been
interrupted since the time of Pisistratus. The kings of Asia also, it
is said, were obliged to employ Roman artists in Greece, in order to
counteract in that country the influence of Rome ; and Ariobarzanes

II., King of Cappadocia, summoned Roman architects to Athens to
finish the Odeum of Pericles, which had been destroyed in the siege of
Sulla. But, besides the Roman, it is in Rome also, in the works
of Phidias and Myson and Praxiteles, that you can form an idea of
the principal types of Greek art.
Praxiteles, when asked which was the fiuest of his statues, replied,
" The one which Nicias has painted." "Whatever doubt may have
been once entertained, it is now beyond question, that the Greeks
painted their sculpture as they painted their architecture. Traces of
painting have been found at Rome, both upon sculptures which may
be ascribed to a Greek original, and upon those which are purely
Roman. They have been found upon the friores of the Parthenon,
and of the temple at Phigalia ; upon the Pallas de Velletri and the
Venus d'Aries at Paris ; upon the Venus de Medici at Florence, and a
statue of Drusus at Naples ; upon the Nile, and the pretended Antin-
oiis of the Capitol ; upon the Colossi of Monte Cavallo, and the Orestes
and Electra of the Villa Ludovisi. But, upon the more difficult
question of modern painted sculpture, Ampere, with great politeness,
avoids expressing any opinion, and wounding anybody's feelings.
" We are not agreed," he says, " upon the preference to be given to
the painted statues of Mr. Gibson over those which are not painted ;
but we are all agreed upon the talent which has produced both the
one and the other."
The pretence, however, that Raphael found the models of his
arabesques for the loggie of the Vatican in the Golden House of
Nero, into the chambers of which, not then laid open, he descended
from above, can hardly be sustained, though the Italian name for
arabesques, grotteschi, whence, with some change of meaning, our
word grotesque is derived, seems to indicate that some sort of painting
was so named from its original discovery in the grottos, as the sub
terranean chambers were called, in which such mural compositions
were found. Raphael had other models in the sculptured arabesques,
which he might contemplate without difficulty and by daylight, among
the ruins, and which the sculptors of the preceding century had
admired and reproduced.
The important subject of an organization of the national militia is

fully and ably discussed in an anonymous pamphlet printed in Bos
ton.* The writer has made the mistake of crowding into it a mass
of documents, showing the need of a proper militia system, and
making suggestions, — all of them of historical value, no doubt, but
making the pamphlet too bulky. It would be more serviceable,
would circulate more, and be read more, if these extracts were re
duced at least a half, and better arranged under their several heads.
* The Militia of the United States. What it has been. What it should be.
Boston : Press of T. R. Marvin & Son, 42, Congress Street. 1864. 8vo. pp.
131
For instance, no dates are given. The reader is left to guess whether
a particular statement of defects in the militia organization was made
recently, or in the early years of the Government.
The discussion of the subject by the author, which precedes and
follows these copious extracts, errs rather, if at all, on the side of
brevity. The main point of the argument, which is proved by the
testimony of many eminent men, is, that " the radical defect of our
militia system, and the primary cause of its failure, was the excess
of numbers" (p. 21). To remedy this defect, the author proposes
" for Congress, leaving the enrollment as it stands, and fixing upon
the fraction they consider adequate, to enact, that one tenth or one
eighth, or whatever portion, shall be trained, leaving the selection of
ages, between eighteen and forty-five, to the discretion of the States,
and leaving it also optional with them to increase the number, if
their circumstances render it desirable " (p. 99). In order then to
create a fit material for an efficient militia, he urges the military edu
cation of boys in the public schools. The officers should not be
elected. " One of the first articles of the Swiss military system is,
' that the militia is under no circumstances a deliberative body.' "
(p. 107). They should be appointed from educated military men, —
appointed, of course, by the State authorities, as prescribed by the
Constitution ; but all military academies should, he urges, be national,
not State, institutions. As for the rank and file, there should be no
exemptions except for actual physical disability, and no substitutes
allowed.
" To accomplish and maintain the organization, arming, and disci
pline of the militia, a Federal Militia Staff is needed, and should
consist of an assistant attached to each branch of the General Army
Staff, devoted exclusively to the militia" (p. 105). Providing
arms and equipments, prescribing the mode of instruction, and de
termining the organization and discipline of the force, completes the
duties of the national Government. It then remains for the States to
appoint a Board to examine the qualifications of officers, and a State
Inspector, to act in concert with the Federal Inspector. Further
details are left the States themselves. The author specially recom
mends a more rigid penal code for the militia, the retention of tried
officers in their position as long as possible, and the rule that no com
mission should be granted above the rank of colonel ; the necessity
for all these being amply shown.
CRITICISM.
At the beginning of the present century, Alfieri said there were not
more than thirty persons in Italy who really read the " Divina Com-
media." If that be so, certainly the last thirty or forty years have
made ample amends for the neglect, — not in Italy merely, but in
Germany and England and France. All over the civilized world,
indeed, with the increasing activity of mind which the present century
has witnessed in political and moral as well as in scientific investiga
tion, the remembrance of Dante has been quickened, by the obser

vation of his almost poetic insight, into the causes and means of cure
of the evils, and tendencies to evil, which afflict modern society. With
the revival of the ideal of nationalities, in Italy and Hungary and
Poland, or wherever else discord and oppression weighed heavily
upon the hearts of men longing to be free, but ignorant of the fun
damental principles of freedom, the reading of Dante has been a
spiritual refreshment, an inspiration strong and pure. Now, there
fore, when, after six hundred years of war and tumult, after so many
triumphs in art, and so much abasement in morals, after such bitter
experience of domestic weakness, and such degrading submission to
foreign intervention, Italy, awakened and free, feels the throbbing of
a new life through all its borders, from the fruitful plains of Lom-
bardy to the rocky passes of the Calabrian Apennines, — it is no
wonder that it pauses full of gratitude to celebrate the memory of
him who first taught it to look for regeneration in union and for
power in peace.
As one of the offerings from a distant land in aid of this mag
nificent commemoration of the birth of Dante,* Mr. Botta's book will
meet with a generous welcome. As a popular exposition, moreover,
of the life and the aims, the philosophy and the aspirations, of Dante,
it will command general attention, and exert an excellent influence,
by its lucid explanations and its sympathetic spirit ; for it cannot
fail to invite those who know not Dante, if such there be, to a careful
study of his works. The obscurity in which, to most readers, the
age of Dante is involved, arising from the various factions into which
the nation was split, so often changing their objects and spirit without
changing their names, is very well cleared up ; and the author's re
marks upon the Florentine constitution, and the aims of the Papacy
as a political power, — opposed by Dante as such, as well as in its
claims to spiritual sovereignty, — and upon the disturbances at Flor
ence, which ended in the exile of the poet, are worth a good deal
more to the general reader than all the conjectures and sublimities
that have been hazarded upon Beatrice and the Vita Nuova, and the
mystic meaning of both. Literally, writes Dante himself, the poem
treats of the state of the spirits after death ; but, allegorically, it
signifies the present hell in which man does either right or wrong in
his pilgrimage on earth. Again, in its historical and political aspects,
the poem has two meanings. It describes the face and prefigures the
redemption of Italy and the world : for it is not only the despair of
his nation and his time, but its hope and its triumph, that Dante
sings ; showing thereby, not only his immense superiority as a poet,
but that higher prophetic power which gives even to human words a
saving grace for all ages. But these points are so very well brought
out by our author, that we need only refer the reader to his book ;
* Dante as Philosopher, Patriot, and Poet. With an Analysis of the Divina

Corainedia; its Plot and Episodes. By Vincenzo Botta. New York : Charles
Scribner & Co. 1865.
while we thank him for showing how well Italians can write English
when they write to instruct us in the worth of Dante.
War has broken out afresh between the English nation and Mr.
Ruskin.* We hasten to declare ourselves strictly neutral in this con
test, which, by the vigor of its commencement, promises to be both
prolonged and- desperate. Let us say, however, that Mr. Ruskin,
who is certainly the attacking party, has, to our thinking, made a
great advance since the days when his wrath was so far expended
upon renaissance architects and French painters, dead centuries ago,
as to leave nothing more dangerous than sarcasm for the present
generation of his countrymen to fear. Having now, as we may pre
sume, finished to his satisfaction his mediaeval enemies, he turns in
deadly earnest, and with what Mr. Einglake would call the rapture
of instant fight, to the herculean task of taking the conceit out of the
noble British people, of which he, if any man is in that respect as in
many others, the most exaggerated and undeniable type.
The first onslaught fell upon an innocent thousand or two of the
unsuspecting people of Manchester, who, lapped- in a fatal security,
•' dreaming no danger nigh," went calmly up to their Free-trade
Hall to hear the distinguished art-critic discourse upon Kings' Treas
uries, expecting we know not what entrancing picture of the archi
tectural glories which ought to surround and illumine those golden
depositories, and were saluted instead with such a flood of refined and
rhetorical cursing as must have left them in much the same state of
bewilderment as Oswald's after the objurgation of Kent, — "Why,
what a monstrous fellow art thou, thus to rail on one that is neither
known of thee nor knows thee ! "
He adopts, practically, at the outset, Carlyle's estimate of the
British population, — " twenty-seven millions, mostly fools ; " calls
without success for a show of hands to sustain him ; gravely assumes,
upon this, his audience to be with him, and then goes on with his
extraordinary philippic against the " senseless avarice " of that
" money-making mob," the English nation ; telling many undeniable
truths, bitter enough at least to be wholesome, but telling them in
such a temper, and with such a sublime mixture of " arrog'ancy,
spleen, and pride," as to neutralize wholly the good effect which, in a
more temperate mouth, they could hardly fail of working. His indig
nation is hot, like that of an angry teamster with a balky horse, and
without much more dignity or moral force ; and his unmeasured
and indiscriminate vituperation recalls his own definition of the feel
ings of a gentleman or a gentle nation, as contrasted with those of a
vulgar person or of a mob. " For as in nothing is a gentleman bet
ter to be discerned from a vulgar person, so in nothing is a gentle
nation (such nations have been) better to be discerned from a mob
than in this, — that their feelings are constant and just, results of due
* Sesame and Lilies : Two Lectures delivered at Manchester in 1864. By

John Ruskin. New York : 1865.
contemplation and of equal thought. You can talk a mob into any
thing ; its feelings may be, — usually are, — on the whole, generous and
right : but it has no foundation for them, no hold of them ; you may
tease or tickle it into any, at your pleasure ; it thinks by infection for
the most part, catching a passion like a cold, and there is nothing so
little that it will not roar itself wild about when the fit is on ; nothing
so great but it will forget in an hour when the fit is past. But a gen
tleman's, or a gentle nation's, passions are just, measured, and con
tinuous." — p. 41.
The distinction is not amiss, but to accept it is to rule its author
out of the category of gentlemen for ever. Mr. Buskin has no
power of moral perspective. His wrath is a dilettante wrath, and.
is excited not so much by what is really base or cruel, as by what is
in bad taste. At Venice, in 1850, he was intensely indignant with
the Austrians for directing their guns against the palaces which con
tained the magnificent pictures of Titian and Veronese ; but so little
indignant with their beastly tyranny over the Italian people, that he
could prepare an elaborate Appendix to the " Stones of Venice," ex
pressly to defend it. And, in the present volume, he is very nearly as
much shocked by the Swiss railways, as by the astounding luxury of
a Paris lorette, or the starvation of a family of London workpeople.
Lastly, from a moralist so sensitive in matters of social order, what
is the significance of passages like these ? —
" Alas ! it is the narrowness, selfishness, minuteness of your sen
sation that you have to deplore in England at this day ; — sensation
which spends itself in bouquets and speeches, in revellings and jun
ketings, sham-fights and gay puppet-shows, while you can look on
and see noble nations murdered, man by man, woman by woman, child
by child, without an effort or a tear." — p. 40. "Also a great na
tion, having made up its mind that hanging is quite the wholesomest
process for its homicides in general, can yet with mercy distinguish
between the degrees of guilt in homicides, and does not yelp like a
pack of frost-pinched wolf-cubs on the blood-track of an unhappy
crazed boy, or gray-haired clodpate Othello, ' perplexed in the ex
treme,' at the moment that it is sending a minister of the crown to
make polite speeches to a man who is bayoneting young girls in their
father's sight, and killing noble youths in cool blood, faster than a
country butcher kills lambs in spring." — p. 45.
This is one of Mr. Buskin's illustrations of the advantage of pos
sessing "just, measured, and continuous passions;" and these words
— we hesitate to express what seems too monstrous a suspicion —
these words, in an English mouth, can only be meant for Abraham
Lincoln, to whom Sir F. Bruce was newly accredited about the time
when those lectures were preparing for the press. What is the value
of the social and political speculations or criticisms of a man who, at
the close of the American Rebellion, still regards the American Presi
dent as a murderer, and the extinguished Rebel Confederacy as a
noble and agonized nation ? What grief is there in the tears he sheds
over the sufferings of English proletaires, and the hypocrisy and ava
rice of English society ? Under all the superficial delicacy of taste

and sentiment, under all the magnificent farrago of rhetorical display,
here shows forth the groundwork of vulgar bigotry, of brutal and
stupid prejudice, of real charlatanism, which all the culture and study
of a life of elegant leisure have failed to destroy or even to conceal.
This is no reformer of social evils, loudly as he may declaim against
the folly of the time ; no reformer, but a conceited and bilious rheto
rician, with a mind of much delicacy and power, and capable, origin
ally, of admirable performance, but ill-balanced, ill-governed, and
distorted by vanity and prejudice to a degree that makes it nearly
impossible for him now to advocate any good cause, except in a spirit
'which makes his advocacy a misfortune.
We have been in years past among the warmest of Mr. Raskin's
admirers ; and so long as he was content to be simply a writer upon
Art, and a critic of artists, no one could be more ready than we to
acknowledge the wonderful vigor and eloquence of his writings, the
purity of his taste, and the courage and power with which he attacked
vulgarity and pretence in all their forms. In respect to Architecture
especially, it is hardly too much to say that he has created whatever
there is of excellence in the architectural practice of England to-day;
and our heartiest wish is, that the architects of our own country
'would take his lessons to heart in the same spirit of conscientious
study with which they have been received by those of London. But,
in an evil hour, Mr. Buskin conceived the notion that he might become
a political economist ; he who, among all English men of letters, is,
beyond doubt, the one most entirely governed by the impulse and pas
sion of the moment, deliberately abandoned the field on which, by
common consent, he had gained the first position, to enter upon the
discussion of those questions, which, more than all others, demand
the cool judgment, the patient and passionless reflection, and the life
long preparatory study, which only men, precisely his opposite in
temperament and mental habit, can give. "VVe might adopt his own
language, and say, " Such a change is not merely Fall, it is Catas
trophe."
Of purely literary essays, we cannot recall any more thoughtful

and suggestive than the two which open the very attractive volume of
Matthew Arnold,* — that, namely, on " The Function of Criticism,"
and that on " The Literary Influence of Academies." A poet inferior
only to the very best, — the author of what, without much risk, we
may call the finest narrative poem in English, " Sohrab and Rus-
turn," — a scholar whose refined appreciation of what is most excel
lent in the ancient classics is seen in such compositions as " Merope,"
and the Lectures " On Translating Homer." He impresses us even
more as a conscientious and thoughtful critic, devoting himself to the
study and illustration of the qualities most needed in English litera
ture at the present day. Of the special topics he treats, several
* Essays in Criticism. By Matthew Arnold. Boston : Ticknor & Fields.

vol. lxxix. — 6th s. vol. xvii. no. hi. 87
belong to names which refuse to become familiar to the English

tongue. De Guerin, brother and sister, Joubert, even Heinrich Heine,
to say nothing of Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza, belong to that rank
of authors known, not by common fame, but by special and scholarly
exposition ; and even of these he rather satisfies our curiosity than
stirs it to desire something more. Mr. Arnold is strongly convinced,
that the continental mind, especially the French, has qualities which
his own countrymen do ill to be ignorant of; and his particular
" mission," as scholar and critic, is to stand as the interpreter of
those qualities. We should prefer that a volume of this kind might
deal more with the large topics and the world-wide fames in literature.
For we feel, that, when we are dealing with minds of the past, our
best economy is to deal most with only the rarest and highest minds.
But the charm of Mr. Arnold's workmanship is so great, and his
quality of thought so exquisite, that we care little for the text, while
we are sure of the man. As original essays, quite apart from the
titles and topics superscribed, the contents of this volume have a pecu
liar charm and an independent value.
We have spoken before of Mr. Arnold's Lectures " On Translating

Homer," and of his controversy with Professor Newman thereupon.*
At that time we had not seen Mr. Newman's reply,f to which Mr.
Arnold's "Last Words" were a rejoinder. A careful reading does
not convince us that Mr. Newman has made a translation which, as
an English poem, will take the place, to average readers, of many
versions before the public, — some of them of far inferior scholarship
and ability. But it does confirm us in the judgment, that, for the
unlearned reader, especially if he be a student and content to learn,
there is no other book in English that can compare with it in value,
as a revelation of many of the most striking and characteristic Ho
meric qualities. A critic, whom Mr. Newman himself had reviewed
severely, pronounced it, without exaggeration, " the most Homeric
thing in English." Not that it gives, unless rarely, the flow, the maj
esty, and the charm which scholars are wont to find in the imperish
able Greek ; but that it conveys to the careful reader, as no other
book in English does, those qualities which the scholar ascertains by
assiduous study, and which put him in a mental condition to under
stand and enjoy the poem itself, or a more liberal version of it. As a
further carrying-out of the same powers, the scholar will find the
brief essay we have cited extremely interesting, — with enough of
polemic spice to pique the mind into attention, while it is crowded
with the results of cautious, careful, and conscientious scholarship.
We say this with the more pleasure, because Mr. Newman's ver
sion has been treated with most undeserved disparagement and neglect.
Forget it, or condemn it, if you will, as a poem : it remains, neverthe-
* See Christian Examiner for May, 1863.

t Homeric Translations, in Theory and Practice. By Francis W. New
man. London : Williams & Norgate. pp. 104.
lesa, a study of the great poem UDequalled in its way ; and, perhaps,
the best help we can have to an unprejudiced reading of the work
itself. For the strange gloss of " stateliness " and "dignity" with
'which our modern associations insist on clothing the picturesque and
vivacious epic, needs removing, quite as much as the film of igno
rance that prevents our listening to the words in which it was
spoken first. It is no disparagement to what Mr. Arnold has done,
by way of poetic elucidation, to say that, on many points where he has
crossed Mr. Newman's path, he has decidedly the worst of the en
counter.
As to the form of verse or stanza which best fits a version of the

Greek hexameter, it is perhaps an idle controversy. Mr. Arnold's
brief essays at an English reproduction of it prove as valuable as
Mr. Newman's somewhat monotonous and languid cadence. One
translator, whose name we are unable to recall, ventures in the Iliad
the intricacy of the Spenserian stanza ; which Worsley had found so
admirable a medium for the Odyssey. For ourselves, we incline to
think that the rhymed fourteen-syliable measure, — the same employed
by Chapman, but suffering comparative neglect at the present day, —
when cultivated and developed up to the standard of euphony, ease,
and strength now demanded, will yet prove the most adequate. If
we go beyond careful scholarship or conventional smoothness, and
look for the finer poetic qualities, where else shall we find them, even
now, as we find them in Chapman ? A model of conventional smooth
ness and good taste, with considerable of manly force and vigor, we
find in Lord Derby's version ; * but, within the few months since it
appeared, five new competitors are stated to have entered the field, —
pretty good evidence that it is not to be considered as having supplied
the want. And yet it may not be too much to say, that, for the
average English reader, with average English taste, it is the most
satisfactory version that has yet appeared.
Without encumbering himself with hexameters or rhymes, or any
of the metrical absurdities which sometimes beguile unwary transla
tors, Lord Derby has wisely adopted that simplest and most useful of
all metres, the heroic blank verse. " In the progress of this work,"
he writes in the preface, " I have been more and more confirmed in the
opinion which 1 expressed at its commencement, that (whatever may
be the extent of my own individual failure), if justice is ever to be
done to the easy flow and miijestic simplicity of the grand old poet, it
can only be in the heroic blank verse." His management of this
measure evinces much skill and judgment ; and his verse is, except in
a few instances, strong, clear, polished, and harmonious. In respect
to an almost literal fidelity, he is also entitled to high praise ; and,
though the necessities of a translator sometimes compel him to weaken
the force of the original by the adoption of a too diffuse style, his sins
* The Iliad of Homer, rendered in English Blank Verse. By Edward,

Earl of Derby. New York : Charles Scribner & Co. 2 vols.
in this particular are comparatively few. Much of the spirit and

vivacity and homely simplicity of the original have been preserved ;
and the language of the translator is uniformly correct and dignified
where these characteristics are justified by the original.
It is well that these beautiful and not too costly volumes have done
something to nationalize among us the taste for this fascinating study ;
but wish that some publisher might feel justified in offering to Amer
ican readers the advantage of comparing it with Newman's Iliad,
with Worsley's Odyssey, and with some one or more of its five suc
cessors in the field.
The author of " Atalanta in Calydon," * by a single effort, has

placed himself in the foremost rank of the younger English poets ;
and, if the future productions of his pen redeem the promise of his first
poem, he will prove himself the undisputed successor of Tennyson
and Browning, and their worthy rival. Adopting for his theme a
well-known Greek myth, he has treated it with so much power, with
such an affluence of imagination, and such a command of the resources
of his art, as to make his comparatively brief tragedy one of the most
remarkable productions of its class, which,' so far as we remember,
has been written within the lifetime of this generation. Thoroughly
classic in spirit and form, it bears enough of the marks of modern
taste and culture to make it welcome even to those who care little for
the Greek drama. The story itself is one of the saddest of the Greek
fables ; but it is admirably suited to Mr. Swinburne's purpose, and in its
development he has shown at once how thoroughly his mind has been
saturated with the influence of Grecian literature, and how rich and
various are his powers. His imagiuation is vigorous and healthful ;
and, if his diction is sometimes too copious aud affluent, it is never
weak or commonplace. There are single lines and passages of the
most exquisite beauty and finish scattered all through the poem, which
linger in the memory long after the reader has closed the volume.
Indeed, Mr. Swinburne's skill in versification is scarcely less striking
and admirable than the strength of his imagination and the warmth
of his fancy. In only one respect is his versification justly open to
criticism : the exuberance of his imagination sometimes renders
him obscure, by leading him to multiply metaphors and comparisons ;
but this obscurity is never, we believe, the result of ambiguity in the
mind of the writer, while his verse is always smooth and graceful.
From powers of so high an order much may be anticipated ; and we
shall look with great interest for Mr. Swinburne's next volume, which
we see is already announced as. in press.
The most elegant volume which has issued from the American
press during the current year is the new selection of " Gems from
* Atalanta in Calydon. A Tragedy. By Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 1865. 16mo.
Tennyson." * Of the contents of the volume, we need only say that

it comprises most of the favorite pieces to which every reader first
turns in any selection from Tennyson ; and the paper, presswork, and
binding are unexceptionable. But the chief attraction is in the engrav-
iugs, thirty-two in number, which are not only beautiful as pictures,
but arc real illustrations of the author's meaning. Many, perhaps
most, of them, we are glad to say, are by American artists and engrav
ers ; while those to which English names are attached have been
selected with excellent judgment. Where all the illustrations are so
meritorious, it might be difficult to select any for special praise ; but
we have been particularly struck by those from the pencil of Hen-
nessy, and by a little sea-view by Kensett. In no respect is this book
inferior to the best illustrated editions of the poets which have ap
peared in former years ; and the illustrations, we think, are better
than we have seen in any similar volume.

THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS.
Congregationalism ; what it is, whence it is, how it works, why it is better
than any other Form of Church Government, and its Consequent Demands.
By Henry M. Dexter. Boston : Nichols & Noyes. 8vo. pp. 306.
The Radical Creed ; a Discourse. By David A. Wasson, at his Installa
tion as Minister of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society of Boston.
With the Installation Services. Boston : Walker, Fuller, & Co. pp. 40.
Address at the Funeral of Rev. Samuel Abbot Smith. By Thomas Hill ;
with the Discourse by Rufus P. Stebbins on the Sunday following; and a
Sermon by Mr. Smith. Boston : Walker, Fuller, & Co. pp. 32.
The Nation's Sacrifice ; Abraham Lincoln. Two Discourses by A. D.
Mayo. Cincinnati : Robert Clark & Co. pp. 28.
East and West. By the Same. pp. 33.
Sabbath Psalter ; a Selection of Psalms for Public and Family Worship.
Compiled by Rev. Henry J. Fox. New York : Carlton & Porter, pp. 236.
Reminiscences, Historical and Biographical, of Sixty-four Years in the
Ministry. By Rev. Henry Boehm. New York : Carlton & Porter. 12mo.
pp. 493.
Life of Michael Angelo, by Hermann Grimm. Translated by Fanny
Elizabeth Bunn&tt. Boston : Little, Brown, & Co. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 558,
619. (A brilliant and enthusiastic sketch of the period and the group of
celebrated men famous as the age of Michael Angelo. It is somewhat over
crowded with incident, though generally picturesque and clear; and the
translation, while mostly easy and idiomatic, sometimes leaves the author's
sense obscure, betraying here and there an ignorance of detail in the transla
tor, which careful editing should remove. It is one of the most beautiful
works of the American press, and deserves a more full review, which we hope
to give in January.)
* Gems from Tennyson. With Illustrations by W. J. Hennessy, J. F. Ken-
sett, S. Eyhinge, jr., F. O. C. Darley, &c, &c. Boston : Ticknor & Fields.
1865. 4to.
438 New Pvblications Received. [Nov.
Thoughts on the Future Civil Policy of America. By John William Dra

per. New York : Harper & Brothers. 8vo. pp. 325. (We are disappointed
of the .review we hoped to receive of this very valuable and striking book.
As a picturesque exhibition of the physical condition of American life, the
facts of climate, and of physical as connected with political geography, to-
fether with the parallels furnished by other times and lands, it stands alone,
n some of its most brilliant passages, such as that on what we owe to Asia
(p. 72), and on the career of the Saracens in Europe (pp. 179-198), it forms
both a parallel and a sequel to Professor Draper's History of the Intellectual
Development of Europe. With its many merits, we think, however, that its
value as a discussion of political philosophy is injured by the form and style
of Lectures which it adopts.)
The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke. Revised edition.
Boston : Little & Brown. (A very convenient and beautiful library edition.)
Crown 8vo. Vols. i. ii. pp. 537, 576.
Speeches of John Bright, M.P., on the American Question. With an
Introduction by Frank Moore. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 12mo.
pp. 278.
POETRY AND FICTION.
Companion Poets for the People. Illustrated.—1. Household Poems. By
Henry W. Longfellow. 2. Songs for all Seasons. By Alfred Tennyson.
3. National Lyrics. By John G. Whittier. 4. Lyrics of Life. By Robert
Browning. Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 16mo. pp.96. 5. Voices of Na
ture. By William Cullen Bryant. New York : D. Appleton & Co.
The Poetry of the Orient. By William Rounseville Alger. Boston:
Roberts Brothers. 16mo. pp. 337. (An edition of this work, numbering
sixteen hundred copies, was published in 1856. It is now out of print. The
present edition is enlarged by considerable new introductory matter, and by
over one hundred additional specimens ; also by an Appendix, consisting of
poems not of an oriental character.)
Works of Charles Dickens ; Household edition. Pictures from Italy and
American Notes ; 2 vols. Also, The Uncommercial Traveller. New York:
Sheldon & Co. pp. 285, 318.
My Married Life at Hillside. By Barry Gray. New York: Hurd &
Houghton. 12mo. pp. 290.
Denis Donne. By Annie Thomas; Belial. New York: Harper & Bro
thers.
Standish ; a Story of our Day. Boston : Loring.
SCIENCE AND EDUCATION.
Hypodermic Injections in the Treatment of Neuralgia, Rheumatism, Gout,
and other Diseases. By Antoine Ruppaner. Boston : Burnham. 16mo.
pp. 160.
An Intellectual Arithmetic, upon the Inductive Method, with an Introduc
tion to Written Arithmetic. By James S. Eaton. Boston : Taggard &
Thompson, pp. 176.
Chambers's Encyclopedia ; a Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for the
People. Vol. vii. Numismatics -Puerperal Mania. Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippincott & Co. 8vo. pp. 828.
The Tenth and Twelfth Books of the Institutions of Quintilian, with
Explanatory Notes. By Henry S. Friezer. pp. 175. Hand-book of the
Steam Engine, containing all the Rules required for the Right Construction
and Management of Engines of every class; with the easy arithmetical
solution of those rules, constituting a Key to the Catechism of the Steam
Engine. By John Bourne, pp. 474. On Radiation : the " Rede " Lecture,
delivered before the University of Cambridge. By John Tyndall. pp. 48.
New York : D. Appleton & Co.
INDEX
CHRISTIAN EXAMINER,
NEW SERIES, VOL. XVII.
JULY TO NOVEMBER, 1865.
Africa, Southwest (Baines), 149. — the critics, 9 — American life,

Africa, Walk across (Oram), 150. 11 — spiritualism, 12 — its doc
Alford's Queen's English, 146. trines, 16 — theism, 19 — atheism,
American Unitarian Pulpit, 27-44. 20 — pantheism, 21 — authority of
Ampere's Rome, 425. conscience, 25 — the omens, 26.
Antioch College and Horace Mann, Egypt, Kremer, 152.
51 ; 252-264. English Institutions (F. W. New
Arabia, Palgrave's Journey in, 327- man), 297.
342. English Schools and Colleges, 373-
Arnold (Matthew), Essays in Criti 408 — Mr. Atkinson's criticism,
cism, 433. 373 — course of study, 379 — com
Astrology of the Reformation, 422. petition examinations, 385 — stan
Atalanta in Calydon, 436. dard of scholarship, 404.
Atkinson, W. C, on English Schools, Everett, W., On the Cam, 373.
373. Forsyth's Life of Cicero, 57-66.
Baines, Southwest Africa, 149. French Colonists in America, F.
Bedouins, 328. Parkman, 365.
Beecher, Lyman, Autobiography of, Grant's Walk across Africa, 150.
175-200. Grant's Zulu Land, 149.
Bost, Liberal Protestantism, 136. Hedge, F. H., Reason in Religion,
Botta, Dante, 430. 84-95 ; also, 157-164.
Bruston, St. John's Gospel, 136. Johnson, President, his Reconstruc
Ceesar, History of, by Napoleon III., tion policy, 408-421.
139. Kremer's Egypt, 152.
Cambridge (England), University of, Mangan, James Clarence, 200-211.
392. Mann, Horace, 45-56 ; 252-264.
Church, Ideal, «7- 83. Merivale, Conversion of the Em
Cicero, Forsyth's Life of, 57-66. pire, 295.
Cobbe, Miss F. P., Religious Duty, Mill, .1. S., his criticism of Hamil
294. ton's Philosophy, 301-327 — doc
Dante (Botta), 430. trine of consciousness, 304 — of
Dewey's Address at the Cambridge matter, 311 — of freewill, 315 —
Theological School, 211-225. the religious application, 323.
Drift Period in Theology, 1-27 — Napoleon III., History of Julius Cae
volcanic periods, 2 — the Roman sar, 139.
church, 4 — independent minds, 7 Nation (the New), 118-135 — return
440 Index.
of Peace, 118 — attitude of the Schiller, Text of, 143.

government, 119 — popular tem South Carolina one of the United
per, 120 — the South, 123— de States, 226-251.
struction of property, 125 — con Spencer's Social Statics, 265-282.
dition of the blacks, 127 — negro Spiritualism, 12-18 — its doctrines,
suffrage, 129 — amnesty, 133. 16.
Newman, F. W., on English Institu Sprague, Dr., his Unitarian Pulpit,
tions, 297 — on Homeric transla 27-44.
tion, 434. State Crimes and their Penalty, 282—
Newman, J. H., Apologia pro Vita 293.
sua, 343-363 — the tractarian Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon, 436.
movement, 347. Tennyson, Gems from, 436.
Nile Basin (Burton), 151. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 154.
Palgrave's Arabia, 327-342. Theism and Christianity, 157-174 —
Parker, Theodore, Lessons of Nature Dr. Hedge's book, 157-164— di
and Life, 137. vinity and humanity, 166 — the
Parkman, Francis, French Colonists theism of Christ, 169 — authority,
in America, 365. 173.
Pusey, his place in the Tractarian Thoreau, H. D., 96-117.
movement, 347. Tractarian Movement at Oxford, 347.
Protestantism, liberal (Bost), 136. Unitarian Pulpit in America, 27-44
Queen's English, Alford, 146. — Dr. Sprague's book, 28 — social
Radicalism and Conservatism, Ad relations, 30 — Buckminster, 32;
dress by Dr. Dewey, 21 1-225. and Channing, 34 — doctrine, 36
Reason in Religion, F. H. Hedge, — not a sect, 37— historical and
84-95 ; also, 157-164. transcendental, 39 — Semitic and
Reconstruction, the President's pol European, 41 — Broad Church, 43.
icy, 408-421 — national unity and Vanity Fair, 154.
concentration of power, 412 — re Wahhabees, Moslem fanatics of Ara
sults of six months, 414 — grounds bia, 334.
of apprehension, 415 — the critical Warren's Systematic Theology, 424.
point, 418. Woolsey's International Law, 142.
Kuskin, Sesame and Lilies, 431. Zulu Land, 149.
Cambridge : Press of John Wilson & Sous.

Indºr,
Peace, 118 – attitude of the Schler, Tert of 143.

--ºr, 119-popular tem. South Carºlina one ºf the tº
. .”—the South, 123-de States, 2.5-lâl.
...tº ºf prºry, 1.5-ton Spencer's Swill Statics, º
.* ºf the bucks, 127-megro Spiritualism, ſº-3-is iº
16.
º-smº, 133.
*- F. W., on Exºb Institu. Sºrge, Dr, is tire Aft
... .º-an H-ment 77-44.
-. § 4.
Sº Crimsinjº
... J. H. Arlº Fro Wità 293,
hºw. — the tractarian Sºme Airlińſº
****, 34. Tennyson, Gems tº
Thackeray, Viſitſ fºr |#.
** * H.-, e. 151. Thism and Chriviliº 15-ſ}
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ſº... *, Lessºns of Nature jºinityHº-3
and humº 15-ſº
1 *. 19. theism of Chiº ºff-ºff
, Fa-º, French Colonists
173.
-*.*, jº.
Thoreau, H. D. 96-111.
... place in the Tractarian Tractºrian -
Mºntrºl Dºrº
-º-, 247. [...ran Pulpiti, Aº :
... …. .ºn Bº 135. pºsinº.”
, ... º. Aſ ºl. 146. Ad j-Bºsminº”
relations,
, a st. Coºrºº: and Channing
—not #-ºxºg
a set'; 37–
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sºft tº
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- .**
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This is a reproduction of a library book that was digitized

by Google as part of an ongoing effort to preserve the

Accession No.Tjl/) 3'/ CLiss No.

REGULATIONS OF THE LIBRARY.

The Gift '/_._

FIFTH SERIES, VOLUME XVI.

January, March, May, 1865.

WALKER, FU^&^' ft 00^246, Washington Street,

LONDON 178, Stkakd.

Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1865, by

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

I. The True Work and Method of the Preacher . .157

I. The Morbid and the Healthy View of Ld?e . . .313

Art. I. — THE ORDER OF SAINT PAUL THE APOSTLE;

1. Questions of the Soul. By I. T. Hecker. 5th edit. 1864.

The Roman Catholic Order of St. Paul the Apostle was

successor of St. Peter, as the head of Christ's Church, and his

" To be a Christian, according to this Gospel [the Gospel of Luther],

individualism, and they will simply be marched over who

places by the way. There is plenty of good companionship.

poor people count them off by beads. To put a bit of bread

In his second paper from the Civiltd Cattolica, Mr. Hecker

institutions than the Protestant dogma, is a fact too clear to

mankind in the bosom of the Church on an equality. Her

cord is not felt, because the necessity of the concord is not

of the will ; we distrust the natural reason of mankind ; we

"H cannot be denied," says Ernest Renan, "that Ultra

Buckle's " History of Civilization." * The republics of Switzer

* Vol. I. pp. 610-614.

when, in a momentary crossing and mingling of the religious

neither Catholicism nor anti-republicanism gained much by

luxurious, unenterprising, fond of traditions, fond of display,

remnants of the civilizations of the Old World. They are for

Art. II. — THE UNITY OF THE SPIRIT.

An Address delivered (in part) before the Massachusetts Convention of

This will be known as the age of secession, a word of old

disjunctive, but understands not the copulative conjunction.

me ; and however much Jesus may be more thau anybody

What the oneness is, in contact with which we thus come,

by the big trenches, we so faintly conceive, of the grave-yard on

has been said more effect can be produced by a baptism than

Genesis, the mathematics of Exodus, the ceremonial of Deuter

after a battle found a wounded lad plucking violets. The

But everything, in morals as in matter, has two sides.

other men. He rose from his death-bed to marry a couple,

we see. Sight is final, and not to be sacrificed. If I see

Art. HI. — SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI.

1. Histoire de Saint Francois cTAssise. Par E. Dadrignac. Paris.

Upon a certain summer evening in the year 1210, just as

is alive with Petrobrussians, Henricians, Paterines, and Catha-

success. Innocent well knew that the other monastic orders,

* De Antiquis Ritibus, Vol. II.

from man ; that he was houseless, wifeless, childless, cast out,

Excluded, into variance he ran

sum." If Francis of Paula, " Nos minimi sumus," — our Fran

Scarcely had the finishing touch been put to the regulations,

cis's preaching," says St. Bonaventura, " went to the very

burnt, conclude, not that my message was false, but that it

* Bleating the name Bethlehem, like a sheep, says Michelet.

two hundred thousand comers, thronging with cries and songs

Art. IV. — UNDER THE BAN.

Under the Ban. (Le Maudit.) A Tale of the Nineteenth Century.

The Tinker-prophet, dreaming for immortality in Bedford