← catalogue

Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 1 (of 3)

by Theodore Parker · English · Gutenberg #34573 · 613,484 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 1 (of 3)
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 1 (of 3)

Author: Theodore Parker


        
Release date: December 5, 2010 [eBook #34573]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34573

Credits: Produced by Julia Miller, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This
        file was produced from images generously made available
        by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPEECHES, ADDRESSES, AND OCCASIONAL SERMONS, VOLUME 1 (OF 3) ***




Produced by Julia Miller, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)







SPEECHES, ADDRESSES,

AND

OCCASIONAL SERMONS,

BY

THEODORE PARKER,

MINISTER OF THE TWENTY-EIGHTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH IN BOSTON.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

BOSTON:
HORACE B. FULLER,
(SUCCESSOR TO WALKER, FULLER, AND COMPANY,)
245, WASHINGTON STREET.
1867.


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1855, by
THEODORE PARKER,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court
of the District of Massachusetts.


TO

FRANCIS JACKSON,

THE FOE 'GAINST EVERY FORM OF WRONG,
THE FRIEND OF JUSTICE,
WHOSE WIDE HUMANITY CONTENDS
FOR WOMAN'S NATURAL AND UNALIENABLE RIGHT; AGAINST
HIS NATION'S CRUELTY PROTECTS THE SLAVE;
IN THE CRIMINAL BEHOLDS A BROTHER TO BE REFORMED;
GOES TO MEN FALLEN AMONG THIEVES,--
WHOM PRIESTS AND LEVITES SACRAMENTALLY PASS BY,--
AND SEEKS TO SOOTHE AND HEAL AND BLESS THEM THAT ARE
READY TO PERISH:
WITH ADMIRATION FOR HIS UNSURPASSED INTEGRITY,
HIS COURAGE WHICH NOTHING SCARES,
AND HIS TRUE RELIGION
THAT WOULD BRING PEACE ON EARTH AND GOOD-WILL TO MAN,
THESE VOLUMES
ARE THANKFULLY DEDICATED
BY HIS MINISTER AND FRIEND,

THEODORE PARKER.




PREFACE.


I have collected in these volumes several Speeches, Addresses and
occasional Sermons, which I have delivered at various times during the
last seven years. Most of them were prepared for some special emergency:
only two papers, that on "The Relation of Jesus to his Age and the
Ages," and that on "Immortal Life," were written without reference to
some such emergency. All of them have been printed before, excepting the
sermon "Of General Taylor," and the address on "The American Scholar;"
some have been several times reprinted. I do not know that they are
worthy of republication in this permanent form, but the leading ideas of
these volumes are very dear to me, and are sure to live as long as the
human race shall continue. So I have published a small edition, hoping
that the truths which I know are contained in these pages will do a
service long after the writer, and the occasion of their utterance, have
passed off and been forgot. I offer them to whom they may concern.

THEODORE PARKER.

AUGUST 24, 1851.




CONTENTS OF VOLUME I.


I.

THE RELATION OF JESUS TO HIS AGE AND THE AGES.--A
Sermon preached at the Thursday Lecture, in Boston,
December 26, 1844                                              PAGE 1

II.

THE TRUE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH.--A Discourse
at the Installation of Theodore Parker as Minister of the
Twenty-Eighth Congregational Church in Boston, on Sunday,
January 4, 1846                                                    23

III.

A SERMON OF WAR.--Preached at the Melodeon, on Sunday,
June 7, 1846                                                       63

IV.

A SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE ANTI-WAR MEETING IN
FANUEIL HALL, February 4, 1847                                    113

V.

A SERMON OF THE MEXICAN WAR.--Preached at the
Melodeon, on Sunday, June 25, 1848                                127

VI.

A SERMON OF THE PERISHING CLASSES IN BOSTON.--Preached
at the Melodeon on Sunday, August 30, 1846                        185

VII.

A SERMON OF MERCHANTS.--Preached at the Melodeon,
on Sunday, November 22, 1846                                      227

VIII.

A SERMON OF THE DANGEROUS CLASSES IN SOCIETY.--Preached
at the Melodeon, on Sunday, January 31, 1847                      279

IX.

A SERMON OF POVERTY.--Preached at the Melodeon, on
Sunday, January 14, 1849                                          333

X.

A SERMON OF THE MORAL CONDITION OF BOSTON.--Preached
at the Melodeon, on Sunday, February 11, 1849                     364




I.

THE RELATION OF JESUS TO HIS AGE AND THE AGES.--A SERMON PREACHED AT THE
THURSDAY LECTURE, IN BOSTON, DECEMBER 26, 1844.

JOHN VII. 48.

     "Have any of the Rulers, or of the Pharisees, believed on
     him?"


In all the world there is nothing so remarkable as a great man; nothing
so rare; nothing which so well repays study. Human nature is loyal at
its heart, and is, always and everywhere, looking for this its true
earthly sovereign. We sometimes say that our institutions, here in
America, do not require great men; that we get along better without than
with such. But let a real, great man light on our quarter of the planet;
let us understand him, and straightway these democratic hearts of ours
burn with admiration and with love. We wave in his words, like corn in
the harvest wind. We should rejoice to obey him, for he would speak what
we need to hear. Men are always half expecting such a man. But when he
comes, the real, great man that God has been preparing,--men are
disappointed; they do not recognize him. He does not enter the city
through the gates which expectants had crowded. He is a fresh fact,
brand new; not exactly like any former fact. Therefore men do not
recognize nor acknowledge him. His language is strange, and his form
unusual. He looks revolutionary, and pulls down ancient walls to build
his own temple, or, at least, splits old rocks asunder, and quarries
anew fresh granite and marble.

There are two classes of great men. Now and then some arise whom all
acknowledge to be great, soon as they appear. Such men have what is true
in relation to the wants and expectations of to-day. They say, what many
men wished but had not words for; they translate into thought what, as a
dim sentiment, lay a burning in many a heart, but could not get entirely
written out into consciousness. These men find a welcome. Nobody
misunderstands them. The world follows at their chariot-wheels, and
flings up its cap and shouts its huzzas,--for the world is loyal, and
follows its king when it sees and knows him. The good part of the world
follows the highest man it comprehends; the bad, whoever serves its
turn.

But there is another class of men so great, that all cannot see their
greatness. They are in advance of men's conjectures, higher than their
dreams; too good to be actual, think some. Therefore, say many, there
must be some mistake; this man is not so great as he seems; nay, he is
no great man at all, but an impostor. These men have what is true not
merely in relation to the wants and expectations of men here and to-day;
but what is true in relation to the Universe, to Eternity, to God. They
do not speak what you and I have been trying to say, and cannot; but
what we shall one day years hence, wish to say, after we have improved
and grown up to man's estate.

Now it seems to me, the men of this latter class, when they come, can
never meet the approbation of the censors and guides of public opinion.
Such as wished for a new great man had a superstition of the last one in
their minds. They expected the new to be just like the old, but he is
altogether unlike. Nature is rich, but not rich enough to waste any
thing. So there are never two great men very strongly similar. Nay, this
new great man, perhaps, begins by destroying much that the old one built
up with tears and prayers. He shows, at first, the limitations and
defects of the former great man; calls in question his authority. He
refuses all masters; bows not to tradition; and with seeming
irreverence, laughs in the face of the popular idols. How will the
"respectable men," the men of a few good rules and those derived from
their fathers "the best of men and the wisest,"--how will they regard
this new great man? They will see nothing remarkable in him except that
he is fluent and superficial, dangerous and revolutionary. He disturbs
their notions of order; he shows that the institutions of society are
not perfect; that their imperfections are not of granite or marble, but
only of words written on soft wax, which may be erased and others
written thereon anew. He shows that such imperfect institutions are less
than one great man. The guides and censors of public opinion will not
honor such a man, they will hate him. Why not? Some others not half so
well bred, nor well furnished with precedents, welcome the new great
man; welcome his ideas; welcome his person. They say, "Behold a
Prophet."

       *       *       *       *       *

When Jesus, the son of Mary, a poor woman, wife of Joseph the carpenter,
in the little town of Nazareth, when he "began to be about thirty years
old," and began also to open his mouth in the synagogues and the
highways, nobody thought him a great man at all, as it seems. "Who are
you?" said the guardians of public opinion. He found men expecting a
great man. This, it seems, was the common opinion, that a great man was
to arise, and save the Church, and save the State. They looked back to
Moses, a divine man of antiquity, whose great life had passed into the
world, and to whom men had done honor, in various ways; amongst others,
by telling all sorts of wonders he wrought, and declaring that none
could be so great again; none get so near to God. They looked back also
to the prophets, a long line of divine men, so they reckoned, but less
than the awful Moses; his stature was far above the nation, who hid
themselves in his shadow. Now the well-instructed children of Abraham
thought the next great man must be only a copy of the last, repeat his
ideas, and work in the old fashion. Sick men like to be healed by the
medicine which helped them the last time; at least, by the customary
drugs which are popular.

In Judea, there were then parties of men, distinctly marked. There were
the Conservatives,--they represented the church, tradition,
ecclesiastical or theocratical authority. They adhered to the words of
the old books, the forms of the old rites, the tradition of the elders.
"Nobody but a Jew can be saved," said they; "he only by circumcision,
and the keeping of the old formal law; God likes that, He accepts
nothing else." These were the Pharisees, with their servants the
Scribes. Of this class were the Priests and the Levites in the main, the
National party, the Native-Hebrew party of that time. They had
tradition, Moses and the prophets; they believed in tradition, Moses and
the prophets, at least in public; what they believed in private God
knew, and so did they. I know nothing of that.

Then there was the indifferent party; the Sadducees, the State. They had
wealth, and they believed in it, both in public and private too. They
had a more generous and extensive cultivation than the Pharisees. They
had intercourse with foreigners, and understood the writers of Ionia and
Athens which the Pharisee held in abhorrence. These were sleek
respectable men, who, in part, disbelieved the Jewish theology. It is no
very great merit to disbelieve even in the devil, unless you have a
positive faith in God to take up your affections. The Sadducee believed
neither in angel nor resurrection--not at all in the immortality of the
soul. He believed in the state, in the laws, the constables, the prisons
and the axe. In religious matters, it seems the Pharisee had a positive
belief, only it was a positive belief in a great mistake. In religious
matters the Sadducee had no positive belief at all; not even in an
error: at least, some think so. His distinctive affirmation was but a
denial. He believed what he saw with his eyes, touched with his fingers,
tasted with his tongue. He never saw, felt, nor tasted immortal life; he
had no belief therein. There was once a heathen Sadducee who said, "My
right arm is my God!"

There was likewise a party of Come-outers. They despaired of the State
and the Church too, and turned off into the wilderness, "where the wild
asses quench their thirst," building up their organizations free, as
they hoped, from all ancient tyrannies. The Bible says nothing directly
of these men in its canonical books. It is a curious omission; but two
Jews, each acquainted with foreign writers, Josephus and Philo, give an
account of these. These were the Essenes, an ascetic sect, hostile to
marriage, at least, many of them, who lived in a sort of association by
themselves, and had all things in common.

The Pharisees and the Sadducees had no great living and ruling ideas;
none I mean which represented man, his hopes, wishes, affections, his
aspirations and power of progress. That is no very rare case, perhaps,
you will say, for a party in the Church or the State to have no such
ideas, but they had not even a plausible substitute for such ideas. They
seemed to have no faith in man, in his divine nature, his power of
improvement. The Essenes had ideas; had a positive belief; had faith in
man, but it was weakened in a great measure by their machinery. They,
like the Pharisee and the Sadducee, were imprisoned in their
organization, and probably saw no good out of their own party lines.

It is a plain thing that no one of these three parties would accept,
acknowledge, or even perceive the greatness of Jesus of Nazareth. His
ideas were not their notions. He was not the man they were looking for;
not at all the Messiah, the anointed one of God, which they wanted. The
Sadducee expected no new great man unless it was a Roman quaestor, or
procurator; the Pharisees looked for a Pharisee stricter than Gamaliel;
the Essenes for an Ascetic. It is so now. Some seem to think that if
Jesus were to come back to the earth, he would preach Unitarian
sermons, from a text out of the Bible, and prove his divine mission and
the everlasting truths, the truths of necessity that he taught, in the
Unitarian way, by telling of the miracles he wrought eighteen hundred
years ago; that he would prove the immortality of the soul by the fact
of his own corporeal resurrection. Others seem to think that he would
deliver homilies of a severer character; would rate men roundly about
total depravity, and tell of unconditional election, salvation without
works, and imputed righteousness, and talk of hell till the women and
children fainted, and the knees of men smote together for trembling.
Perhaps both would be mistaken.

So it was then. All these three classes of men, imprisoned in their
prejudices and superstitions, were hostile. The Pharisees said, "We know
that God spake unto Moses; but as for this fellow, we know not whence he
is. He blasphemeth Moses and the prophets; yea, he hath a devil, and is
mad, why hear him?" The Sadducees complained that "he stirred up the
people;" so he did. The Essenes, no doubt, would have it that he was "a
gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners."
Tried by these three standards, the judgment was true; what could he do
to please these three parties? Nothing! nothing that he would do. So
they hated him; all hated him, and sought to destroy him. The cause is
plain. He was so deep they could not see his profoundness; too high for
their comprehension; too far before them for their sympathy. He was not
the great man of the day. He found all organizations against him; Church
and State. Even John the Baptist, a real prophet, but not the prophet,
doubted if Jesus was the one to be followed. If Jesus had spoken for the
Pharisees, they would have accepted his speech and the speaker too. Had
he favored the Sadducees, he had been a great man in their camp, and
Herod would gladly have poured wine for the eloquent Galilean, and have
satisfied the carpenter's son with purple and fine linen. Had he praised
the Essenes, uttering their Shibboleth, they also would have paid him
his price, have made him the head of their association perhaps, at
least, have honored him in their way. He spoke for none of these. Why
should they honor or even tolerate him? It were strange had they done
so. Was it through any fault or deficiency of Jesus, that these men
refused him? quite the reverse. The rain falls and the sun shines on the
evil and the good; the work of infinite power, wisdom and goodness is
before all men, revealing the invisible things, yet the fool hath said,
ay, said in his heart, "There is no God!"

Jesus spoke not for the prejudices of such, and therefore they rejected
him. But as he spoke truths for man, truths from God, truths adapted to
man's condition there, to man's condition everywhere and always, when
the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes went away, their lips curling
with scorn; when they gnashed on one another with their teeth, there
were noble men and humble women, who had long awaited the consolation of
Israel, and they heard him, heard him gladly. Yes, they left all to
follow him. Him! no, it was not him they followed; it was God in him
they obeyed, the God of truth, the God of love.

There were men not counted in the organized sects; men weary of
absurdities; thirsting for the truth; sick, they knew not why nor of
what, yet none the less sick, and waiting for the angel who should heal
them, though by troubled waters and remedies unknown. These men had not
the prejudices of a straightly organized and narrow sect. Perhaps they
had not its knowledge, or its good manners. They were "unlearned and
ignorant men," those early followers of Christ. Nay, Jesus himself had
no extraordinary culture, as the world judges of such things. His
townsmen wondered, on a famous occasion, how he had learned to read. He
knew little of theologies, it would seem; the better for him, perhaps.
No doubt the better for us that he insisted on none. He knew they were
not religion. The men of Galilee did not need theology. The youngest
scribe in the humblest theological school at Jerusalem, if such a thing
were in those days, could have furnished theology enough to believe in
a life-time. They did need religion; they did see it as Jesus unfolded
its loveliness; they did welcome it when they saw; welcome it in their
hearts.

If I were a poet as some are born, and skilled to paint with words what
shall stand out as real, to live before the eye, and then dwell in the
affectionate memory for ever, I would tell of the audience which heard
the Sermon on the mount, which listened to the parables, the rebukes,
the beautiful beatitudes. They were plain men, and humble women; many of
them foolish like you and me; some of them sinners. But they all had
hearts; had souls, all of them--hearts made to love, souls expectant of
truth. When he spoke, some said, no doubt, "That is a new thing, that
The true worshipper shall worship in spirit and in truth, as well here
as in Jerusalem, now as well as any time; that also is a hard saying,
Love your enemies; forgive them, though seventy times seven they smite
and offend you; that notion that the law and the prophets are contained,
all that is essentially religious thereof, in one precept, Love men as
yourself, and God with all your might. This differs a good deal from the
Pharisaic orthodoxy of the synagogue. That is a bold thing, presumptuous
and revolutionary to say, I am greater than the temple, wiser than
Solomon, a better symbol of God than both." But there was something
deeper than Jewish orthodoxy in their hearts; something that Jewish
orthodoxy could not satisfy, and what was yet more troublesome to
ecclesiastical guides, something that Jewish orthodoxy could not keep
down, nor even cover up. Sinners were converted at his reproof. They
felt he rebuked whom he loved. Yet his pictures of sin and sinners too,
were any thing but flattering. There was small comfort in them. Still it
was not the publicans and harlots who laid their hands on the place
where their hearts should be, saying, "You hurt our feelings," and "we
can't bear you!" Nay, they pondered his words, repenting in tears. He
showed them their sin; its cause, its consequence, its cure. To them he
came as a Saviour, and they said, "Thou art well-come," those penitent
Magdalens weeping at his feet.

It would be curious could we know the mingled emotions that swayed the
crowd which rolled up around Jesus, following him, as the tides obey the
moon, wherever he went; curious to see how faces looked doubtful at
first as he began to speak at Tabor or Gennesareth, Capernaum or
Gischala, then how the countenance of some lowered and grew black with
thunder suppressed but cherished, while the face of others shone as a
branch of stars seen through some disparted cloud in a night of fitful
storms, a moment seen and then withdrawn. It were curious to see how
gradually many discordant feelings, passion, prejudice and pride were
hushed before the tide of melodious religion he poured out around him,
baptizing anew saint and sinner, and old and young, into one brotherhood
of a common soul, into one immortal service of the universal God; to see
how this young Hebrew maid, deep-hearted, sensitive, enthusiastic,
self-renouncing, intuitive of heavenly truth, rich as a young vine, with
clustering affections just purpling into ripeness,--how she seized,
first and all at once, the fair ideal, and with generous bosom
confidingly embraced it too; how that old man, gray-bearded, with
baldness on his head, full of precepts and precedents, the lore of his
fathers, the experience of a hard life, logical, slow, calculating,
distrustful, remembering much and fearing much, but hoping little,
confiding only in the fixed, his reverence for the old deepening as he
himself became of less use,--to see how he received the glad
inspirations of the joiner's son, and wondering felt his youth steal
slowly back upon his heart, reviving aspirations, long ago forgot, and
then the crimson tide of early hope come gushing, tingling on through
every limb; to see how the young man halting between principle and
passion, not yet petrified into worldliness, but struggling, uncertain,
half reluctant, with those two serpents, Custom and Desire, that
beautifully twined about his arms and breast and neck, their wormy
folds, concealing underneath their burnished scales the dragon's awful
strength, the viper's poison fang, the poor youth caressing their snaky
crests, and toying with their tongues of flame--to see how he slowly,
reluctantly, amid great questionings of heart, drank in the words of
truth, and then, obedient to the angel in his heart, shook off, as ropes
of sand, that hideous coil and trod the serpents underneath his feet.
All this, it were curious, ay, instructive too, could we but see.

They heard him with welcome various as their life. The old men said, "It
is Moses or Elias; it is Jeremiah, one of the old prophets arisen from
the dead, for God makes none such, now-a-days, in the sterile dotage of
mankind." The young men and maidens doubtless it was that said, "This is
the Christ; the desire of the nations; the hope of the world, the great
new prophet; the Son of David; the Son of Man; yes, the Son of God. He
shall be our king." Human nature is loyal, and follows its king soon as
it knows him. Poor lost sheep! the children of men look always for their
guide, though so often they look in vain.

How he spoke, words deep and piercing; rebukes for the wicked, doubly
rebuking, because felt to have come out from a great, deep, loving
heart. His first word was, perhaps, "Repent," but with the assurance
that the kingdom of God was here and now, within reach of all. How his
doctrines, those great truths of nature, commended themselves to the
heart of each, of all simple-souled men looking for the truth! He spoke
out of his experience; of course into theirs. He spoke great doctrines,
truths vast as the soul, eternal as God, winged with beauty from the
loveliness of his own life. Had he spoken for the Jews alone, his words
had perished with that people; for that time barely, the echo of his
name had died away in his native hamlet; for the Pharisees, the
Sadducees, the Essence, you and I had heard of him but as a Rabbi; nay,
had never been blest by him at all. Words for a nation, an age, a sect,
are of use in their place, yet they soon come to nought. But as he spoke
for eternity, his truths ride on the wings of time; as he spoke for man,
they are welcome, beautiful and blessing, wherever man is found, and so
must be till man and time shall cease.

He looked not back, as the Pharisee, save for illustrations and
examples. He looked forward for his direction. He looked around for his
work. There it lay, the harvest plenteous, the laborers few. It is
always so. He looked not to men for his idea, his word to speak; as
little for their applause. He looked in to God, for guidance, wisdom,
strength, and as water in the wilderness, at the stroke of Moses, in the
Hebrew legend, so inspiration came at his call, a mighty stream of truth
for the nation, faint, feeble, afraid, and wandering for the promised
land; drink for the thirsty, and cleansing for the unclean.

But he met opposition; O, yes, enough of it. How could it be otherwise?
It must be so. The very soul of peace, he brought a sword. His word was
a consuming fire. The Pharisees wanted to be applauded, commended; to
have their sect, their plans, their traditions praised and flattered.
His word to them was, "Repent;" of them, to the people, "Such
righteousness admits no man to the kingdom of heaven; they are a
deceitful prophecy, blind guides, hypocrites; not sons of Abraham, but
children of the devil." They could not bear him; no wonder at it. He was
the aggressor; had carried the war into the very heart of their system.
They turned out of their company a man whose blindness he healed,
because he confessed that fact. They made a law that all who believed on
him, should also be cast out. Well they might hate him, those old
Pharisees. His existence was their reproach; his preaching their trial;
his life with its outward goodness, his piety within, was their
condemnation. The man was their ruin, and they knew it. The cunning can
see their own danger, but it is only men wise in mind, or men simple of
heart, that can see their real, permanent safety and defence; never the
cunning, neither then, neither now.

Jesus looked to God for his truth, his great doctrines not his own,
private, personal, depending on his idiosyncracies, and therefore only
subjectively true,--but God's, universal, everlasting, the absolute
religion. I do not know that he did not teach some errors also, along
with it. I care not if he did. It is by his truths that I know him, the
absolute religion he taught and lived; by his highest sentiments that
he is to be appreciated. He had faith in God and obeyed God; hence his
inspiration, great, in proportion to the greater endowment, moral and
religious, which God gave him, great likewise in proportion to his
perfect obedience. He had faith in man none the less. Who ever yet had
faith in God that had none in man? I know not. Surely no inspired
prophet. As Jesus had faith in man, so he spoke to men. Never yet, in
the wide world, did a prophet arise, appealing with a noble heart and a
noble life to the soul of goodness in man, but that soul answered to the
call. It was so most eminently with Jesus. The Scribes and Pharisees
could not understand by what authority he taught. Poor Pharisees! how
could they? His phylacteries were no broader than those of another man;
nay, perhaps he had no phylacteries at all, nor even a broad-bordered
garment. Men did not salute him in the market-place, sandals in hand,
with their "Rabbi! Rabbi!" Could such men understand by what authority
he taught? no more than they dared answer his questions. They that knew
him, felt he had authority quite other than that claimed by the Scribes;
the authority of true words, the authority of a noble life; yes, the
authority which God gives a great moral and religious man. God delegates
authority to men just in proportion to their power of truth, and their
power of goodness; to their being and their life. So God spoke in
Jesus, as he taught the perfect religion, anticipated, developed, but
never yet transcended.

       *       *       *       *       *

This then was the relation of Jesus to his age: the sectarians cursed
him; cursed him by their gods; rejected him, abused him, persecuted him;
sought his life. Yes, they condemned him in the name of God. All evil
says the proverb, begins in that name; much continues to claim it. The
religionists, the sects, the sectarian leaders rejected him, condemned
and slew him at the last, hanging his body on a tree. Poor priests of
the people, they hoped thereby to stifle that awful soul! they only
stilled the body; that soul spoke with a thousand tongues. So in the
times of old when the Saturnian day began to dawn, it might be fabled
that the old Titanic race, lovers of darkness and haters of the light,
essayed to bar the rising morning from the world, and so heaped Pelion
upon Ossa, and Olympus on Pelion; but first the day sent up his crimson
flush upon the cloud, and then his saffron tinge, and next the sun came
peering o'er the loftiest height, magnificently fair--and down the
mountain's slanting ridge poured the intolerable day; meanwhile those
triple hills, laboriously piled, came toppling, tumbling down, with
lumbering crush, and underneath their ruin hid the helpless giants'
grave. So was it with men who sat in Moses' seat. But this people, that
"knew not the Law," and were counted therefore accursed, they welcomed
Jesus as they never welcomed the Pharisee, the Sadducee or the Scribe.
Ay, hence were their tears. The hierarchical fire burnt not so bright
contrasted with the sun. That people had a Simon Peter, a James, and a
John, men not free from faults no doubt, the record shows it, but with
hearts in their bosoms, which could be kindled, and then could light
other hearts. Better still, there were Marthas and Marys among that
people who "knew not the law" and were cursed. They were the mothers of
many a church.

       *       *       *       *       *

The character of Jesus has not changed; his doctrines are still the
same; but what a change in his relation to the age, nay to the ages. The
stone that the builders rejected is indeed become the head of the
corner, and its foundation too. He is worshipped as a God. That is the
rank assigned him by all but a fraction of the Christian world. It is no
wonder. Good men worship the best thing they know, and call it God. What
was taught to the mass of men, in those days, better than the character
of Christ? Should they rather worship the Grecian Jove, or the Jehovah
of the Jews? To me it seems the moral attainment of Jesus was above the
hierarchical conception of God, as taught at Athens, Rome, Jerusalem.
Jesus was the prince of peace, the king of truth, praying for his
enemies--"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!" The
Jehovah of the Old Testament, was awful and stern, a man of war, hating
the wicked. The sacerdotal conception of God at Rome and Athens was
lower yet. No wonder then, that men soon learned to honor Jesus as a
God, and then as God himself. Apostolical and other legends tell of his
divine birth, his wondrous power that healed the sick, palsied and
crippled, deaf and dumb and blind; created bread; turned water into
wine, and bid obedient devils come and go, a power that raised the dead.
They tell that nature felt with him, and at his death the strongly
sympathizing sun paused at high noon, and for three hours withheld the
day; that rocks were rent, and opening graves gave up their sainted
dead, who trod once more the streets of Zion, the first fruits of them
that slept; they tell too how disappointed Death gave back his prey, and
spirit-like, Jesus restored, in flesh and shape the same, passed through
the doors shut up, and in a bodily form was taken up to heaven before
the face of men! Believe men of these things as they will. To me they
are not truth and fact, but mythic symbols and poetry; the psalm of
praise with which the world's rude heart extols and magnifies its King.
It is for his truth and his life, his wisdom, goodness, piety, that he
is honored in my heart; yes, in the world's heart. It is for this that
in his name churches are built, and prayers are prayed; for this that
the best things we know, we honor with his name.

He is the greatest person of the ages; the proudest achievement of the
human race. He taught the absolute religion, love to God and man. That
God has yet greater men in store I doubt not; to say this is not to
detract from the majestic character of Christ, but to affirm the
omnipotence of God. When they come, the old contest will be renewed, the
living prophet stoned; the dead one worshipped. Be that as it may, there
are duties he teaches us far different from those most commonly taught.
He was the greatest fact in the whole history of man. Had he conformed
to what was told him of men; had he counselled only with flesh and
blood; he had been nothing but a poor Jew--the world had lost that rich
endowment of religious genius, that richest treasure of religious life,
the glad tidings of the one religion, absolute and true. What if he had
said, as others, "None can be greater than Moses, none so great?" He had
been a dwarf; the spirit of God had faded from his soul! But he
conferred with God, not men; took counsel of his hopes, not his fears.
Working for men, with men, by men, trusting in God, and pure as truth,
he was not scared at the little din of church or state, and trembled
not, though Pilate and Herod were made friends only to crucify him that
was a born King of the world. Methinks I hear that lofty spirit say to
you or me, poor brother, fear not, nor despair. The goodness actual in
me is possible for all. God is near thee now as then to me; rich as ever
in truth, as able to create, as willing to inspire. Daily and nightly He
showers down his infinitude of light. Open thine eyes to see, thy heart
to live. Lo, God is here.




II.

THE TRUE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH.--A DISCOURSE AT THE INSTALLATION OF
THEODORE PARKER AS MINISTER OF THE TWENTY-EIGHTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH
IN BOSTON, JANUARY 4, 1846.


For nearly a year we have assembled within these walls from week to
week,--I think not idly; I know you have not come for any trivial end.
You have recently made a formal organization of yourselves for religious
action. To-day, at your request, I enter regularly on a ministry in the
midst of you. What are we doing; what do we design to do? We are here to
establish a Christian church; and a Christian church, as I understand
it, is a body of men and women united together in a common desire of
religious excellence and with a common regard for Jesus of Nazareth,
regarding him as the noblest example of morality and religion,--as the
model, therefore, in this respect for us. Such a church may have many
rites, as our Catholic brothers, or but few rites, as our Protestant
brothers, or no rites at all, as our brothers, the Friends. It may be,
nevertheless, a Christian church; for the essential of substance, which
makes it a religious body, is the union for the purpose of cultivating
love to God and man; and the essential of form, which makes it a
Christian body, is the common regard for Jesus, considered as the
highest representative of God that we know. It is not the form, either
of ritual or of doctrine, but the spirit which constitutes a Christian
church. A staff may sustain an old man, or a young man may bear it in
his hands as a toy, but walking is walking, though the man have no staff
for ornament or support. A Christian spirit may exist under rituals and
doctrines the most diverse. It were hard to say a man is not a
Christian, because he believes in the doctrine of the Trinity, or the
Pope, while Jesus taught no such doctrine; foolish to say one is no
Christian because he denies the existence of a Devil, though Jesus
believed it. To make a man's Christian name depend on a belief of all
that is related by the numerous writers in the Bible, is as absurd as to
make that depend on a belief in all the words of Luther, or Calvin, or
St. Augustine. It is not for me to say a man is not theoretically a
Christian because he believes that Slavery is a Divine and Christian
institution; that War is grateful to God--saying, with the Old
Testament, that God himself "is a man of war," who teaches men to fight,
and curses such as refuse;--or because he believes that all men are
born totally depraved, and the greater part of them are to be damned
everlastingly by "a jealous God," who is "angry with the wicked every
day," and that the few are to be "saved" only because God unjustly
punished an innocent man for their sake. I will not say a man is not a
Christian though he believe all the melancholy things related of God in
some parts of the Old Testament, yet I know few doctrines so hostile to
real religion as these have proved themselves. In our day it has
strangely come to pass that a little sect, themselves hooted at and
called "Infidels" by the rest of Christendom, deny the name of Christian
to such as publicly reject the miracles of the Bible. Time will
doubtless correct this error. Fire is fire, and ashes ashes, say what we
may; each will work after its kind. Now if Christianity be the absolute
religion, it must allow all beliefs that are true, and it may exist and
be developed in connection with all forms consistent with the absolute
religion, and the degree thereof represented by Jesus.

The action of a Christian church seems to be twofold: first on its own
members, and then, through their means, on others out of its pale. Let a
word be said of each in its order. If I were to ask you why you came
here to-day; why you have often come to this house hitherto?--the
serious amongst you would say: That we might become better; more manly;
upright before God and downright before men; that we might be
Christians, men good and pious after the fashion Jesus spoke of. The
first design of such a church then is to help ourselves become
Christians. Now the substance of Christianity is Piety--Love to God, and
Goodness--Love to men. It is a religion, the germs whereof are born in
your heart, appearing in your earliest childhood; which are developed
just in proportion as you become a man, and are indeed the standard
measure of your life. As the primeval rock lies at the bottom of the sea
and appears at the top of the loftiest mountains, so in a finished
character religion underlies all and crowns all. Christianity, to be
perfect and entire, demands a complete manliness; the development of the
whole man, mind, conscience, heart and soul. It aims not to destroy the
sacred peculiarities of individual character. It cherishes and develops
them in their perfection, leaving Paul to be Paul, not Peter, and John
to be John, not Jude nor James. We are born different, into a world
where unlike things are gathered together, that there may be a special
work for each. Christianity respects this diversity in men, aiming not
to undo but further God's will; not fashioning all men after one
pattern, to think alike, act alike, be alike, even look alike. It is
something far other than Christianity which demands that. A Christian
church then should put no fetters on the man; it should have unity of
purpose, but with the most entire freedom for the individual. When you
sacrifice the man to the mass in church or state, church or state
becomes an offence, a stumbling-block in the way of progress, and must
end or mend. The greater the variety of individualities in church or
state, the better is it, so long as all are really manly, humane and
accordant. A church must needs be partial, not catholic, where all men
think alike, narrow and little. Your church-organ, to have compass and
volume, must have pipes of various sound, and the skilful artist
destroys none, but tunes them all to harmony; if otherwise, he does not
understand his work. In becoming Christians let us not cease to be men;
nay, we cannot be Christians unless we are men first. It were
unchristian to love Christianity better than the truth, or Christ better
than man.

But Christianity is not only the absolute religion; it has also the
ideal-man. In Jesus of Nazareth it gives us, in a certain sense, the
model of religious excellence. It is a great thing to have the perfect
idea of religion; to have also that idea made real, satisfactory to the
wants of any age, were a yet further greatness. A Christian church
should aim to have its members Christians as Jesus was the Christ; sons
of man as he was; sons of God as much as he. To be that it is not
needful to observe all the forms he complied with, only such forms as
help you; not needful to have all the thoughts that he had, only such
thoughts as are true. If Jesus were ever mistaken, as the Evangelists
make it appear, then it is a part of Christianity to avoid his mistakes
as well as to accept his truths. It is the part of a Christian church to
teach men so; to stop at no man's limitations; to prize no word so high
as truth; no man so dear as God. Jesus came not to fetter men, but free
them.

Jesus is a model-man in this respect: that he stands in a true relation
to men, that of forgiveness for their ill-treatment, service for their
needs, trust in their nature, and constant love towards them,--towards
even the wicked and hypocritical; in a true relation to God, that of
entire obedience to Him, of perfect trust in Him, of love towards Him
with the whole mind, heart and soul; and love of God is also love of
truth, goodness, usefulness, love of Love itself. Obedience to God and
trust in God is obedience to these things, and trust in them. If Jesus
had loved any opinion better than truth, then had he lost that relation
to God, and so far ceased to be inspired by Him; had he allowed any
partial feeling to overcome the spirit of universal love, then also he
had sundered himself from God, and been at discord, not in harmony with
the Infinite.

If Jesus be the model-man, then should a Christian church teach its
members to hold the same relation to God that Christ held; to be one
with Him; incarnations of God, as much and as far as Jesus was one with
God, and an incarnation thereof, a manifestation of God in the flesh.
It is Christian to receive all the truths of the Bible; all the truths
that are not in the Bible just as much. It is Christian also to reject
all the errors that come to us from without the Bible or from within the
Bible. The Christian man, or the Christian church, is to stop at no
man's limitation; at the limit of no book. God is not dead, nor even
asleep, but awake and alive as ever of old; He inspires men now no less
than beforetime; is ready to fill your mind, heart and soul with truth,
love, life, as to fill Moses and Jesus, and that on the same terms; for
inspiration comes by universal laws, and not by partial exceptions. Each
point of spirit, as each atom of space, is still bathed in the tides of
Deity. But all good men, all Christian men, all inspired men will be no
more alike than all wicked men. It is the same light which is blue in
the sky and golden in the sun. "All nature's difference makes all
nature's peace."

We can attain this relation to man and God only on condition that we are
free. If a church cannot allow freedom it were better not to allow
itself, but cease to be. Unity of purpose, with entire freedom for the
individual, should be the motto. It is only free men that can find the
truth, love the truth, live the truth. As much freedom as you shut out,
so much falsehood do you shut in. It is a poor thing to purchase unity
of church-action at the cost of individual freedom. The Catholic church
tried it, and you see what came thereof: science forsook it, calling it
a den of lies. Morality forsook it, as the mystery of iniquity, and
religion herself protested against it, as the mother of abominations.
The Protestant churches are trying the same thing, and see whither they
tend and what foes rise up against them,--Philosophy with its Bible of
nature, and Religion with its Bible of man, both the hand-writing of
God. The great problem of church and state is this: To produce unity of
action and yet leave individual freedom not disturbed; to balance into
harmonious proportions the mass and the man, the centripetal and
centrifugal powers, as, by God's wondrous, living mechanism, they are
balanced in the worlds above. In the state we have done this more wisely
than any nation heretofore. In the churches it remains yet to do. But
man is equal to all which God appoints for him. His desires are ever
proportionate to his duty and his destinies. The strong cry of the
nations for liberty, a craving as of hungry men for bread and water,
shows what liberty is worth, and what it is destined to do. Allow
freedom to think, and there will be truth; freedom to act, and we shall
have heroic works; freedom to live and be, and we shall have love to men
and love to God. The world's history proves that, and our own history.
Jesus, our model-man, was the freest the world ever saw!

Let it be remembered that every truth is of God, and will lead to good
and good only. Truth is the seed whereof welfare is the fruit; for every
grain thereof we plant some one shall reap a whole harvest of welfare. A
lie is "of the Devil," and must lead to want and woe and death, ending
at last in a storm where it rains tears and perhaps blood. Have freedom,
and you will sow new truth to reap its satisfaction; submit to thraldom,
and you sow lies to reap the death they bear. A Christian church should
be the home of the soul, where it enjoys the largest liberty of the sons
of God. If fettered elsewhere, here let us be free. Christ is the
liberator; he came not to drive slaves, but to set men free. The
churches of old did their greatest work, when there was most freedom in
those churches.

Here too should the spirit of devotion be encouraged; the soul of man
communing with his God in aspirations after purity and truth, in
resolutions for goodness, and piety, and a manly life. These are a
prayer. The fact that men freely hold truths in common, great truths and
universal; that unitedly they lift up their souls to God seeking
instruction of Him, this will prove the strongest bond between man and
man. It seems to me that the Protestant churches have not fully done
justice to the sentiment of worship; that in taking care of the head we
have forgotten the heart. To think truth is the worship of the head; to
do noble works of usefulness and charity the worship of the will; to
feel love and trust in man and God, is the glad worship of the heart. A
Christian church should be broad enough for all; should seek truth and
promote piety, that both together might toil in good works.

Here should be had the best instruction which can be commanded; the
freest, truest, and most manly voice; the mind most conversant with
truth; the eloquence of a heart that runs over with goodness, whose
faith is unfaltering in truth, justice, purity, and love; a faith in
God, whose charity is living love to men, even the sinful and the base.
Teaching is the breathing of one man's inspiration into another, a most
real thing amongst real men. In a church there should be instruction for
the young. God appoints the father and mother the natural teachers of
children; above all is it so in their religious culture. But there are
some who cannot, many who will not fulfil this trust. Hence it has been
found necessary for wise and good men to offer their instruction to
such. In this matter it is religion we need more than theology, and of
this it is not mere traditions and mythologies we are to teach, the
anile tales of a rude people in a dark age, things our pupils will do
well to forget soon as they are men, and which they will have small
reason to thank us for obscuring their minds withal; but it is the
great, everlasting truths of religion which should be taught, enforced
by examples of noble men, which tradition tells of, or the present age
affords, all this to be suited to the tender years of the child.
Christianity should be represented as human, as man's nature in its true
greatness; religion shown to be beautiful, a real duty corresponding to
man's deepest desire, that as religion affords the deepest satisfaction
to man, so it is man's most universal want. Christ should be shown to
men as he was, the manliest of men, the most divine because the most
human. Children should be taught to respect their nature; to consider it
as the noblest of all God's works; to know that perfect truth and
goodness are demanded of them, and by that only can they be worthy men;
taught to feel that God is present in Boston and to-day, as much as ever
in Jerusalem in the time of Jesus. They should be taught to abhor the
public sins of our times, but to love and imitate its great examples of
nobleness, and practical religion, which stand out amid the mob of
worldly pretenders in this day.

Then, too, if one of our members falls into unworthy ways, is it not the
duty of some one to speak with him, not as with authority to command,
but with affection to persuade? Did any one of you ever address an
erring brother on the folly of his ways with manly tenderness, and try
to charm him back, and find a cold repulse? If a man is in error he will
be grateful to one that tells him so; will learn most from men who make
him ashamed of his littleness of life. In this matter it seems many a
good man comes short of his duty.

There is yet another way in which a church should act on its own
household, and that is by direct material help in time of need. There is
the eternal distinction of the strong and the weak, which cannot be
changed. But as things now go there is another inequality not of God's
appointment, but of man's perversity, the distinction of rich and
poor--of men bloated by superfluous wealth and men starving and freezing
from want. You know and I know how often the strong abuse their
strength, exerting it solely for themselves and to the ruin of the weak;
we all know that such are reckoned great in the world, though they may
have grown rich solely by clutching at what others earned. In
Christianity, and before the God of justice, all men are brothers; the
strong are so that they may help the weak. As a nation chooses its
wisest men to manage its affairs for the nation's good, and not barely
their own, so God endows Charles or Samuel with great gifts that they
may also bless all men thereby. If they use those powers solely for
their pleasure then are they false before men; false before God. It is
said of the church of the Friends that no one of their number has ever
received the charity of an almshouse, or for a civil offence been shut
up in a jail. If the poor forsake a church, be sure that the church
forsook God long before.

       *       *       *       *       *

But the church must have an action on others out of its pale. If a man
or a society of men have a truth, they hold it not for themselves alone,
but for all men. The solitary thinker, who in a moment of ecstatic
action in his closet at midnight discovers a truth, discovers it for all
the world and for eternity. A Christian church ought to love to see its
truths extend; so it should put them in contact with the opinions of the
world, not with excess of zeal or lack of charity.

A Christian church should be a means of reforming the world, of forming
it after the pattern of Christian ideas. It should therefore bring up
the sentiments of the times, the ideas of the times, and the actions of
the times, to judge them by the universal standard. In this way it will
learn much and be a living church, that grows with the advance of men's
sentiments, ideas and actions, and while it keeps the good of the past
will lose no brave spirit of the present day. It can teach much; now
moderating the fury of men, then quickening their sluggish steps. We
expect the sins of commerce to be winked at in the street; the sins of
the state to be applauded on election days and in a Congress, or on the
fourth of July; we are used to hear them called the righteousness of the
nation. There they are often measured by the avarice or the ambition of
greedy men. You expect them to be tried by passion, which looks only to
immediate results and partial ends. Here they are to be measured by
Conscience and Reason, which look to permanent results and universal
ends; to be looked at with reference to the Laws of God, the everlasting
ideas on which alone is based the welfare of the world. Here they are to
be examined in the light of Christianity itself. If the church be true,
many things which seem gainful in the street and expedient in the
senate-house, will here be set down as wrong, and all gain which comes
therefrom seen to be but a loss. If there be a public sin in the land,
if a lie invade the state, it is for the church to give the alarm; it is
here that it may war on lies and sins; the more widely they are believed
in and practised, the more are they deadly, the more to be opposed. Here
let no false idea or false action of the public go without exposure and
rebuke. But let no noble heroism of the times, no noble man pass by
without due honor. If it is a good thing to honor dead saints and the
heroism of our fathers; it is a better thing to honor the saints of
to-day, the live heroism of men who do the battle, when that battle is
all around us. I know a few such saints; here and there a hero of that
stamp, and I will not wait till they are dead and classic before I call
them so and honor them as such, for

    "To side with truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
    Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just;
    Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
    Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
    And the multitude make virtue of the faith they once denied;
    For Humanity sweeps onward; where to-day the martyr stands,
    On the morrow crouches Judas, with the silver in his hands;
    Far in front the cross stands ready, and the crackling fagots burn,
    While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return
    To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn."

Do you not see that if a man have a new truth, it must be reformatory
and so create an outcry? It will seem destructive as the farmer's
plough; like that, it is so to tares and thistles, but the herald of the
harvest none the less. In this way a Christian church should be a
society for promoting true sentiments and ideas. If it would lead, it
must go before men; if it would be looked up to, it must stand high.

That is not all: it should be a society for the promotion of good works.
We are all beneath our idea, and therefore transgressors before God. Yet
He gives us the rain, the snow and the sun. It falls on me as well as on
the field of my neighbor, who is a far juster man. How can we repent,
cast our own sins behind us, outgrow and forget them better, than by
helping others to work out their salvation? We are all brothers before
God. Mutually needful we must be; mutually helpful we should be. Here
are the ignorant that ask our instruction, not with words only, but with
the prayer of their darkness, far more suppliant than speech. I never
see an ignorant man younger than myself, without a feeling of
self-reproach, for I ask: "What have I been doing to suffer him to grow
up in nakedness of mind?" Every man, born in New England, who does not
share the culture of this age, is a reproach to more than himself, and
will at last actively curse those who began by deserting him. The
Christian church should lead the movement for the public education of
the people.

Here are the needy who ask not so much your gold, your bread, or your
cloth, as they ask also your sympathy, respect and counsel; that you
assist them to help themselves, that they may have gold won by their
industry, not begged out of your benevolence. It is justice more than
charity they ask. Every beggar, every pauper, born and bred amongst us,
is a reproach to us, and condemns our civilization. For how has it come
to pass that in a land of abundance here are men, for no fault of their
own, born into want, living in want, and dying of want? and that, while
we pretend to a religion which says all men are brothers! There is a
horrid wrong somewhere.

Here too are the drunkard, the criminal, the abandoned person, sometimes
the foe of society, but far oftener the victim of society. Whence come
the tenants of our almshouses, jails, the victims of vice in all our
towns? Why, from the lowest rank of the people; from the poorest and
most ignorant! Say rather from the most neglected, and the public sin
is confessed, and the remedy hinted at. What have the strong been doing
all this while, that the weak have come to such a state? Let them answer
for themselves.

Now for all these ought a Christian church to toil. It should be a
church of good works; if it is a church of good faith it will be so.
Does not Christianity say the strong should help the weak? Does not that
mean something? It once did. Has the Christian fire faded out from those
words, once so marvellously bright? Look round you, in the streets of
your own Boston! See the ignorant, men and women with scarce more than
the stature of men and women; boys and girls growing up in ignorance and
the low civilization which comes thereof, the barbarians of Boston.
Their character will one day be a blot and a curse to the nation, and
who is to blame? Why, the ablest and best men, who might have had it
otherwise if they would. Look at the poor, men of small ability, weak by
nature, born into a weak position, therefore doubly weak; men whom the
strong use for their purpose, and then cast them off as we throw away
the rind of an orange after we have drunk its generous juice. Behold the
wicked, so we call the weak men that are publicly caught in the cobweb
of the law; ask why they became wicked; how we have aimed to reform
them; what we have done to make them respect themselves, to believe in
goodness, in man and God? and then say if there is not something for
Christian men to do, something for a Christian church to do! Every
almshouse in Massachusetts shows that the churches have not done their
duty, that the Christians lie lies when they call Jesus "master" and men
"brothers!" Every jail is a monument, on which it is writ in letters of
iron that we are still heathens, and the gallows, black and hideous, the
embodiment of death, the last argument a "Christian" State offers to the
poor wretches it trained up to be criminals, stands there, a sign of our
infamy, and while it lifts its horrid arm to crush the life out of some
miserable man, whose blood cries to God against Cain in the nineteenth
century, it lifts that same arm as an index of our shame.

Is that all? Oh, no! Did not Jesus say, resist not evil--with evil? Is
not war the worst form of that evil; and is there on earth a nation so
greedy of war; a nation more reckless of provoking it; one where the
war-horse so soon conducts his foolish rider into fame and power? The
"Heathen" Chinese might send their missionaries to America, and teach us
to love men! Is that all? Far from it. Did not Christ say, whatsoever
you would that men should do unto you, do you even so unto them; and are
there not three million brothers of yours and mine in bondage here, the
hopeless sufferers of a savage doom; debarred from the civilization of
our age, the barbarians of the nineteenth century; shut out from the
pretended religion of Christendom, the heathens of a Christian land;
chained down from the liberty unalienable in man, the slaves of a
Christian republic? Does not a cry of indignation ring out from every
legislature in the North; does not the press war with its million
throats, and a voice of indignation go up from East and West, out from
the hearts of freemen? Oh, no. There is none of that cry against the
mightiest sin of this age. The rock of Plymouth, sanctified by the feet
which led a nation's way to freedom's large estate, provokes no more
voice than the rottenest stone in all the mountains of the West. The few
that speak a manly word for truth and everlasting right, are called
fanatics; bid be still, lest they spoil the market! Great God! and has
it come to this, that men are silent over such a sin? 'Tis even so. Then
it must be that every church which dares assume the name of Christ, that
dearest name to men, thunders and lightens on this hideous wrong! That
is not so. The church is dumb, while the state is only silent; while the
servants of the people are only asleep, "God's ministers" are dead!

In the midst of all these wrongs and sins, the crimes of men, society
and the state, amid popular ignorance, pauperism, crime, and war, and
slavery too--is the church to say nothing, do nothing; nothing for the
good of such as feel the wrong, nothing to save them who do the wrong?
Men tell us so, in word and deed; that way alone is "safe!" If I thought
so, I would never enter the church but once again, and then to bow my
shoulders to their manliest work, to heave down its strong pillars, arch
and dome, and roof, and wall, steeple and tower, though like Samson I
buried myself under the ruins of that temple which profaned the worship
of God most high, of God most loved. I would do this in the name of man;
in the name of Christ I would do it; yes, in the dear and blessed name
of God.

It seems to me that a church which dares name itself Christian, the
Church of the Redeemer, which aspires to be a true church, must set
itself about all this business, and be not merely a church of theology,
but of religion; not of faith only, but of works; a just church by its
faith bringing works into life. It should not be a church termagant,
which only peevishly scolds at sin, in its anile way; but a church
militant against every form of evil, which not only censures, but writes
out on the walls of the world the brave example of a Christian life,
that all may take pattern therefrom. Thus only can it become the church
triumphant. If a church were to waste less time in building its palaces
of theological speculation, palaces mainly of straw, and based upon the
chaff, erecting air-castles and fighting battles to defend those palaces
of straw, it would surely have more time to use in the practical good
works of the day. If it thus made a city free from want and ignorance
and crime, I know I vent a heresy, I think it would be quite as
Christian an enterprise, as though it restored all the theology of the
dark ages; quite as pleasing to God. A good sermon is a good thing, no
doubt, but its end is not answered by its being preached; even by its
being listened to and applauded; only by its awakening a deeper life in
the hearers. But in the multitude of sermons there is danger lest the
bare hearing thereof be thought a religious duty, not a means, but an
end, and so our Christianity vanish in words. What if every Sunday
afternoon the most pious and manly of our number, who saw fit, resolved
themselves into a committee of the whole for practical religion, and
held not a formal meeting, but one more free, sometimes for the purpose
of devotion, the practical work of making ourselves better Christians,
nearer to one another, and sometimes that we might find means to help
such as needed help, the poor, the ignorant, the intemperate and the
wicked? Would it not be a work profitable to ourselves, and useful to
others weaker than we? For my own part I think there are no ordinances
of religion like good works; no day too sacred to help my brother in; no
Christianity like a practical love of God shown by a practical love of
men. Christ told us that if we had brought our gift to the very altar,
and there remembered our brother had cause of complaint against us, we
must leave the divine service, and pay the human service first! If my
brother be in slavery, in want, in ignorance, in sin, and I can aid him
and do not, he has much against me, and God can better wait for my
prayer than my brother for my help!

The saints of olden time perished at the stake; they hung on gibbets;
they agonized upon the rack; they died under the steel of the tormentor.
It was the heroism of our fathers' day that swam the unknown seas; froze
in the woods; starved with want and cold; fought battles with the red
right hand. It is the sainthood and heroism of our day that toils for
the ignorant, the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the wicked. Yes, it is
our saints and heroes who fight fighting; who contend for the slave, and
his master too, for the drunkard, the criminal; yes, for the wicked or
the weak in all their forms. It is they that with weapons of heavenly
proof fight the great battle for the souls of men. Though I detest war
in each particular fibre of my heart, yet I honor the heroes among our
fathers who fought with bloody hand; peace-makers in a savage way, they
were faithful to the light; the most inspired can be no more, and we,
with greater light, do, it may be, far less. I love and venerate the
saints of old; men who dared step in front of their age; accepted
Christianity when it cost something to be a Christian, because it meant
something; they applied Christianity, so far as they knew it, to the
lies and sins of their times, and won a sudden and a fiery death. But
the saints and the heroes of this day, who draw no sword, whose right
hand is never bloody, who burn in no fires of wood or sulphur, nor
languish briefly on the hasty cross; the saints and heroes who, in a
worldly world, dare to be men; in an age of conformity and selfishness,
speak for Truth and Man, living for noble aims; men who will swear to no
lies howsoever popular; who will honor no sins, though never so
profitable, respected and ancient; men who count Christ not their
master, but teacher, friend, brother, and strive like him to practise
all they pray; to incarnate and make real the Word of God, these men I
honor far more than the saints of old. I know their trials, I see their
dangers, I appreciate their sufferings, and since the day when the man
on Calvary bowed his head, bidding persecution farewell with his
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," I find no such
saints and heroes as live now! They win hard fare, and hard toil. They
lay up shame and obloquy. Theirs is the most painful of martyrdoms.
Racks and fagots soon waft the soul of God, stern messengers but swift.
A boy could bear that passage, the martyrdom of death. But the
temptation of a long life of neglect, and scorn, and obloquy, and shame,
and want, and desertion by false friends; to live blameless though
blamed, cut off from human sympathy, that is the martyrdom of to-day. I
shed no tears for such martyrs. I shout when I see one; I take courage
and thank God for the real saints, prophets and heroes of to-day. In
another age, men shall be proud of these puritans and pilgrims of this
day. Churches shall glory in their names and celebrate their praise in
sermon and in song. Yea, though now men would steal the rusty sword from
underneath the bones of a saint or hero long deceased, to smite off
therewith the head of a new prophet, that ancient hero's son; though
they would gladly crush the heart out of him with the tomb-stones they
piled up for great men, dead and honored now, yet in some future day,
that mob, penitent, baptized with a new spirit, like drunken men
returned to sanity once more, shall search through all this land for
marble white enough to build a monument to that prophet whom their
fathers slew; they shall seek through all the world for gold of fineness
fit to chronicle such names! I cannot wait; but I will honor such men
now, not adjourn the warning of their voice, and the glory of their
example, till another age! The church may cast out such men; burn them
with the torments of an age too refined in its cruelty to use coarse
fagots and the vulgar axe! It is no less to these men; but the ruin of
the church. I say the Christian church of the nineteenth century must
honor such men, if it would do a church's work; must take pains to make
such men as these, or it is a dead church, with no claim on us, except
that we bury it. A true church will always be the church of martyrs. The
ancients commenced every great work with a victim! We do not call it so;
but the sacrifice is demanded, got ready, and offered by unconscious
priests long ere the enterprise succeeds. Did not Christianity begin
with a martyrdom?

       *       *       *       *       *

In this way, by gaining all the truth of the age in thought or action,
by trying public opinions with its own brave ideas, by promoting good
works, applying a new truth to an old error, and with unpopular
righteousness overcoming each popular sin, the Christian church should
lead the civilization of the age. The leader looks before, goes before,
and knows where he is going; knows the way thither. It is only on this
condition that he leads at all. If the church by looking after truth,
and receiving it when it comes, be in unison with God, it will be in
unison with all science, which is only the thought of God translated
from the facts of nature into the words of men. In such a case, the
church will not fear philosophy, nor in the face of modern science aim
to reestablish the dreams and fables of a ruder day. It will not lack
new truth, daring only to quote, nor be obliged to sneak behind the
inspired words of old saints as its only fortress, for it will have
words just as truly inspired, dropping from the golden mouths of saints
and prophets now. For leaders it will look not back, but forth; will fan
the first faint sparkles of that noble fire just newly kindled from the
skies; not smother them in the ashes of fires long spent; not quench
them with holy water from Jordan or the Nile. A church truly Christian,
professing Christ as its model-man, and aiming to stand in the relation
he stood, must lead the way in moral enterprises, in every work which
aims directly at the welfare of man. There was a time when the Christian
churches, as a whole, held that rank. Do they now? Not even the
Quakers--perhaps the last sect that abandoned it. A prophet, filled with
love of man and love of God, is not therein at home. I speak a sad
truth, and I say it in sorrow. But look at the churches of this city: do
they lead the Christian movements of this city--the temperance movement,
the peace movement, the movement for the freedom of men, for education,
the movement to make society more just, more wise and good, the great
religious movement of these times--for, hold down our eyelids as we
will, there is a religious movement at this day on foot, such as even
New England never saw before;--do they lead in these things? Oh, no, not
at all. That great Christian orator, one of the noblest men New England
has seen in this century, whose word has even now gone forth to the
nations beyond the sea, while his spirit has gone home to his Father,
when he turned his attention to the practical evils of our time and our
land, and our civilization, vigorously applying Christianity to life,
why he lost favor in his own little sect! They feared him, soon as his
spirit looked over their narrow walls, aspiring to lead men to a better
work. I know men can now make sectarian capital out of the great name of
Channing, so he is praised; perhaps praised loudest by the very men who
then cursed him by their gods. Ay, by their gods he was accursed! The
churches lead the Christian movements of these times?--why, has there
not just been driven out of this city, and out of this State, a man
conspicuous in all these movements, after five and twenty years of noble
toil; driven out because he was conspicuous in them! You know it is so,
and you know how and by whom he is thus driven out![1]

Christianity is humanity; Christ is the Son of man; the manliest of men;
humane as a woman; pious and hopeful as a prayer; but brave as man's
most daring thought. He has led the world in morals and religion for
eighteen hundred years, only because he was the manliest man in it; the
humanest and bravest man in it, and hence the divinest. He may lead it
eighteen hundred years more, for we are bid believe that God can never
make again a greater man; no, none so great. But the churches do not
lead men therein, for they have not his spirit; neither that womanliness
which wept over Jerusalem, nor that manliness which drew down fire
enough from heaven to light the world's altars for well-nigh two
thousand years.

There are many ways in which Christ may be denied:--one is that of the
bold blasphemer, who, out of a base and haughty heart mocks, scoffing at
that manly man, and spits upon the nobleness of Christ! There are few
such deniers: my heart mourns for them. But they do little harm.
Religion is so dear to men, no scoffing word can silence that, and the
brave soul of this young Nazarene has made itself so deeply felt that
scorn and mockery of him are but an icicle held up against the summer's
sun. There is another way to deny him, and that is:--to call him Lord,
and never do his bidding; to stifle free minds with his words; and with
the authority of his name to cloak, to mantle, screen and consecrate the
follies, errors, sins of men! From this we have much to fear.

The church that is to lead this century will not be a church creeping on
all fours; mewling and whining, its face turned down, its eyes turned
back. It must be full of the brave, manly spirit of the day, keeping
also the good of times past. There is a terrific energy in this age, for
man was never so much developed, so much the master of himself before.
Great truths, moral and political, have come to light. They fly quickly.
The iron prophet of types publishes his visions, of weal or woe, to the
near and far. This marvellous age has invented steam, and the magnetic
telegraph, apt symbols of itself, before which the miracles of fable are
but an idle tale. It demands, as never before, freedom for itself,
usefulness in its institutions; truth in its teachings, and beauty in
its deeds. Let a church have that freedom, that usefulness, truth, and
beauty, and the energy of this age will be on its side. But the church
which did for the fifth century, or the fifteenth, will not do for this.
What is well enough at Rome, Oxford or Berlin, is not well enough for
Boston. It must have our ideas, the smell of our ground, and have grown
out of the religion in our soul. The freedom of America must be there
before this energy will come; the wisdom of the nineteenth century
before its science will be on the churches' side, else that science will
go over to the "infidels."

Our churches are not in harmony with what is best in the present age.
Men call their temples after their old heroes and saints--John, Paul,
Peter, and the like. But we call nothing else after the old names; a
school of philosophy would be condemned if called Aristotelian,
Platonic, or even Baconian. We out-travel the past in all but this. In
the church it seems taught there is no progress unless we have all the
past on our back; so we despair of having men fit to call churches by.
We look back and not forward. We think the next saint must talk Hebrew
like the old ones, and repeat the same mythology. So when a new prophet
comes we only stone him.

A church that believes only in past inspiration will appeal to old books
as the standard of truth and source of light; will be antiquarian in its
habits; will call its children by the old names; and war on the new age,
not understanding the man-child born to rule the world. A church that
believes in inspiration now will appeal to God; try things by reason and
conscience; aim to surpass the old heroes; baptize its children with a
new spirit, and using the present age will lead public opinion, and not
follow it. Had Christ looked back for counsel, he might have founded a
church fit for Abraham or Isaac to worship in, not for the ages to come,
or the age then. He that feels he is near to God, does not fear to be
far from men; if before, he helps lead them on; if above, to lift them
up. Let us get all we can from the Hebrews and others of old time, and
that is much; but still let us be God's free men, not the Gibeonites of
the past.

Let us have a church that dares imitate the heroism of Jesus; seek
inspiration as he sought it; judge the past as he; act on the present
like him; pray as he prayed; work as he wrought; live as he lived. Let
our doctrines and our forms fit the soul, as the limbs fit the body,
growing out of it, growing with it. Let us have a church for the whole
man: truth for the mind; good works for the hands; love for the heart;
and for the soul, that aspiring after perfection, that unfaltering faith
in God which, like lightning in the clouds, shines brightest, when
elsewhere it is most dark. Let our church fit man, as the heavens fit
the earth!

       *       *       *       *       *

In our day men have made great advances in science, commerce,
manufactures, in all the arts of life. We need, therefore, a development
of religion corresponding thereto. The leading minds of the age ask
freedom to inquire; not merely to believe, but to know; to rest on
facts. A great spiritual movement goes swiftly forward. The best men see
that religion is religion; theology is theology, and not religion; that
true religion is a very simple affair, and the popular theology a very
foolish one; that the Christianity of Christ is not the Christianity of
the street, or the state, or the churches; that Christ is not their
model-man, only "imputed" as such. These men wish to apply good sense to
matters connected with religion; to apply Christianity to life, and make
the world a better place, men and women fitter to live in it. In this
way they wish to get a theology that is true; a mode of religion that
works, and works well. If a church can answer these demands, it will be
a live church; leading the civilization of the times, living with all
the mighty life of this age, and nation. Its prayers will be a lifting
up of the hearts in noble men towards God, in search of truth, goodness,
piety. Its sacraments will be great works of reform, institutions for
the comfort and the culture of men. Let us have a church in which
religion, goodness towards men, and piety towards God, shall be the main
thing; let us have a degree of that suited to the growth and demands of
this age. In the middle ages, men had erroneous conceptions of religion,
no doubt; yet the church led the world. When she wrestled with the
state, the state came undermost to the ground. See the results of that
supremacy--all over Europe there arose the cloister, halls of learning
for the chosen few, minster, dome, cathedral, miracles of art, each
costing the wealth of a province. Such was the embodiment of their ideas
of religion, the prayers of a pious age done in stone, a psalm petrified
as it rose from the world's mouth; a poor sacrifice, no doubt, but the
best they knew how to offer. Now if men were to engage in religion as in
politics, commerce, arts; if the absolute religion, the Christianity of
Christ, were applied to life with all the might of this age, as the
Christianity of the church was then applied, what a result should we not
behold! We should build up a great state with unity in the nation, and
freedom in the people; a state where there was honorable work for every
hand, bread for all mouths, clothing for all backs, culture for every
mind, and love and faith in every heart. Truth would be our sermon,
drawn from the oldest of Scriptures, God's writing there in nature, here
in man; works of daily duty would be our sacrament; prophets inspired of
God would minister the word, and piety send up her psalm of prayer,
sweet in its notes, and joyfully prolonged. The noblest monument to
Christ, the fairest trophy of religion, is a noble people, where all are
well fed and clad, industrious, free, educated, manly, pious, wise and
good.

       *       *       *       *       *

Some of you may now remember, how ten months and more ago, I first came
to this house to speak. I shall remember it forever. In those rainy
Sundays the very skies looked dark. Some came doubtingly, uncertain,
looking around, and hoping to find courage in another's hope. Others
came with clear glad face; openly, joyfully, certain they were right;
not fearing to meet the issue; not afraid to be seen meeting it. Some
came, perhaps, not used to worship in a church, but not the less welcome
here; some mistaking me for a destroyer, a doubter, a denier of all
truth, a scoffer, an enemy to man and God! I wonder not at that.
Misguided men had told you so, in sermon and in song; in words publicly
printed and published without shame; in the covert calumny, slyly
whispered in the dark! Need I tell you my feelings; how I felt at coming
to the town made famous by great men, Mayhew, Chauncy, Buckminster,
Kirkland, Holley, Pierpont, Channing, Ware--names dear and honored in my
boyish heart! Need I tell you how I felt at sight of the work which
stretched out before me? Do you wonder that I asked: Who is sufficient
for these things? and said: Alas, not I, Thou knowest, Lord! But some of
you told me you asked not the wisdom of a wiser man, the ability of one
stronger, but only that I should do what I could. I came, not doubting
that I had some truths to say; not distrusting God, nor man, nor you;
distrustful only of myself. I feared I had not the power, amid the dust
and noises of the day, to help you see and hear the great realities of
religion as they appeared to me; to help you feel the life of real
religion, as in my better moments I have felt its truth! But let that
pass. As I came here from Sunday to Sunday, when I began to feel your
spirits prayed with mine a prayer for truth and life; as I looked down
into your faces, thoughtful and almost breathless, I forgot my
self-distrust; I saw the time was come; that, feebly as I know I speak,
my best thoughts were ever the most welcome! I saw that the harvest was
plenteous indeed: but the preacher, I feel it still, was all unworthy of
his work!

       *       *       *       *       *

Brothers and Sisters: let us be true to our sentiments and ideas. Let us
not imitate another's form unless it symbolize a truth to us. We must
not affect to be singular, but not fear to be alone. Let us not
foolishly separate from our brothers elsewhere. Truth is yet before us,
not only springing up out of the manly words of this Bible, but out of
the ground; out of the heavens; out of man and God. Whole firmaments of
truth hang ever o'er our heads, waiting the telescopic eye of the
true-hearted see-er. Let us follow truth, in form, thought or sentiment,
wherever she may call. God's daughter cannot lead us from the path. The
further on we go, the more we find. Had Columbus turned back only the
day before he saw the land, the adventure had been worse than lost.

We must practise a manly self-denial. Religion always demands that, but
never more than when our brothers separate from us, and we stand alone.
By our mutual love and mutual forbearance, we shall stand strong. With
zeal for our common work, let us have charity for such as dislike us,
such as oppose and would oppress us. Let us love our enemies, bless them
that curse us, do good to them that hate us, and pray for such as
despitefully use us. Let us overcome their evil speech with our own
goodness. If others have treated us ill, called us unholy names, and
mocked at us, let us forgive it all, here and now, and help them also to
forget and outgrow that temper which bade them treat us so. A kind
answer is fittest rebuke to an unkind word.

If we have any truth it will not be kept hid. It will run over the brim
of our urn and water our brother's field. Were any truth to come down
to us in advance from God, it were not that we might forestall the
light, but shed it forth for all His children to walk by and rejoice in.
"One candle will light a thousand" if it be itself lighted. Let our
light shine before men so that they may see our good deeds, and
themselves praise God by a manly life. This we owe to them as to
ourselves. A noble thought and a mean man make a sorry union. Let our
idea show itself in our life--that is preaching, right eloquent. Do
this, we begin to do good to men, and though they should oppose us, and
our work should fail, we shall have yet the approval of our own heart,
the approval of God, be whole within ourselves, and one with Him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Some of you are venerable men. I have wondered that a youthful ardor
should have brought you here. Your silvery heads have seemed a
benediction to my work. But most of you are young. I know it is no aping
of a fashion that has brought you here. I have no eloquence to charm or
please you with; I only speak right on. I have no reputation but a bad
name in the churches. I know you came not idly, but seeking after truth.
Give a great idea to an old man, and he carries it to his grave; give it
to a young man, and he carries it to his life. It will bear both young
and old through the grave and into eternal Heaven beyond.

Young men and women, the duties of the world fall eminently on you. God
confides to your hands the ark which holds the treasures of the age. On
young shoulders He lays the burden of life. Yours is the period of
passion; the period of enterprise and of work. It is by successive
generations that mankind goes forward. The old, stepping into honorable
graves, leave their places and the results they won to you. But
departing they seem to say, as they linger and look back: Do ye greater
than we have done! The young just coming into your homes seem to say:
Instruct us to be nobler than yourselves! Your life is the answer to
your children and your sires. The next generation will be as you make
it. It is not the schools but the people's character that educates the
child. Amid the trials, duties, dangers of your life, religion alone can
guide you. It is not the world's eye that is on you, but God's; it is
not the world's religion that will suffice you, but the religion of a
Man, which unites you with truth, justice, piety, goodness; yes, which
makes you one with God!

Young men and women--you can make this church a fountain of life to
thousands of fainting souls. Yes, you can make this city nobler than
city ever was before. A manly life is the best gift you can leave
mankind; that can be copied forever. Architects of your own weal or woe,
your destiny is mainly in your own hands. It is no great thing to
reject the popular falsehoods; little and perhaps not hard. But to
receive the great sentiments and lofty truths of real religion, the
Christianity of Christ; to love them, to live them in your business and
your home, that is the greatest work of man. Thereby you partake of the
spirit and nature of God; you achieve the true destiny for yourself; you
help your brothers do the same.

When my own life is measured by the ideal of that young Nazarene, I know
how little I deserve the name of Christian; none knows that fact so well
as I. But you have been denied the name of Christian because you came
here, asking me to come. Let men see that you have the reality, though
they withhold the name. Your words are the least part of what you say to
men. The foolish only will judge you by your talk; wise men by the
general tenor of your life. Let your religion appear in your work and
your play. Pray in your strongest hours. Practise your prayers. By
fair-dealing, justice, kindness, self-control, and the great work of
helping others while you help yourself, let your life prove a worship.
These are the real sacraments and Christian communion with God, to which
water and wine are only helps. Criticize the world not by censure only,
but by the example of a great life. Shame men out of their littleness,
not by making mouths, but by walking great and beautiful amongst them.
You love God best when you love men most. Let your prayers be an
uplifting of the soul in thought, resolution, love, and the light
thereof shall shine through the darkest hour of trouble. Have not the
Christianity of the street; but carry Christ's Christianity there. Be
noble men, then your works must needs be great and manly.

       *       *       *       *       *

This is the first Sunday of a new year. What an hour for resolutions;
what a moment for prayer! If you have sins in your bosom, cast them
behind you now. In the last year, God has blessed us; blessed us all. On
some his angels waited, robed in white, and brought new joys; here a
wife, to bind men closer yet to Providence; and there a child, a new
Messiah, sent to tell of innocence and heaven. To some his angels came
clad in dark livery, veiling a joyful countenance with unpropitious
wings, and bore away child, father, sister, wife, or friend. Still were
they angels of good Providence, all God's own; and he who looks aright
finds that they also brought a blessing, but concealed, and left it,
though they spoke no word of joy. One day our weeping brother shall find
that gift and wear it as a diamond on his breast.

The hours are passing over us, and with them the day. What shall the
future Sundays be, and what the year? What we make them both. God gives
us time. We weave it into life, such figures as we may, and wear it as
we will. Age slowly rots away the gold we are set in, but the
adamantine soul lives on, radiant every way in the light streaming down
from God. The genius of eternity, star-crowned, beautiful, and with
prophetic eyes, leads us again to the gates of time, and gives us one
more year, bidding us fill that golden cup with water as we can or will.
There stand the dirty, fetid pools of worldliness and sin; curdled, and
mantled, film-covered, streaked and striped with many a hue, they shine
there, in the slanting light of new-born day. Around them stand the sons
of earth and cry: Come hither; drink thou and be saved! Here fill thy
golden cup! There you may seek to fill your urn; to stay your thirst.
The deceitful element, roping in your hands, shall mock your lip. It is
water only to the eye. Nay, show-water only unto men half-blind. But
there, hard by, runs down the stream of life, its waters never frozen,
never dry; fed by perennial dews falling unseen from God. Fill there
thine urn, oh, brother-man, and thou shalt thirst no more for
selfishness and crime, and faint no more amid the toil and heat of day;
wash there, and the leprosy of sin, its scales of blindness, shall fall
off, and thou be clean for ever. Kneel there and pray; God shall inspire
thy heart with truth and love, and fill thy cup with never-ending
joy![2]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Rev. John Pierpont.

[2] See note at the end of this volume.




III.

A SERMON OF WAR, PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, JUNE 7, 1846.

EXODUS XV. 3.

    "The Lord is a Man of War."

1 JOHN IV. 8.

    "God is Love."


I ask your attention to a Sermon of War. I have waited some time before
treating this subject at length, till the present hostilities should
assume a definite form, and the designs of the Government become more
apparent. I wished to be able to speak coolly and with knowledge of the
facts, that we might understand the comparative merits of the present
war. Besides, I have waited for others, in the churches, of more
experience to speak, before I ventured to offer my counsel; but I have
thus far waited almost in vain! I did not wish to treat the matter last
Sunday, for that was the end of our week of Pentecost, when cloven
tongues of flame descend on the city, and some are thought to be full of
new wine, and others of the Holy Spirit. The heat of the meetings, good
and bad, of that week, could not wholly have passed away from you or me,
and we ought to come coolly and consider a subject like this. So the
last Sunday I only sketched the back-ground of the picture, to-day
intending to paint the horrors of war in front of that "Presence of
Beauty in Nature," to which with its "Meanings" and its "Lessons," I
then asked you to attend.

       *       *       *       *       *

It seems to me that an idea of God as the Infinite is given to us in our
nature itself. But men create a more definite conception of God in their
own image. Thus a rude savage man, who has learned only the presence of
power in Nature, conceives of God mainly as a force, and speaks of Him
as a God of power. Such, though not without beautiful exceptions, is the
character ascribed to Jehovah in the Old Testament. "The Lord is a man
of war." He is "the Lord of Hosts." He kills men, and their cattle. If
there is trouble in the enemies' city, it is the Lord who hath caused
it. He will "whet his glittering sword and render vengeance to his
enemies. He will make his arrows drunk with blood, and his sword shall
devour flesh!" It is with the sword that God pleads with all men. He
encourages men to fight, and says, "Cursed be he that keepeth back his
sword from blood." He sends blood into the streets; he waters the land
with blood, and in blood he dissolves the mountains. He brandishes his
sword before kings, and they tremble at every moment. He treads nations
as grapes in a wine-press, and his garments are stained with their
life's blood.[3]

A man who has grown up to read the Older Testament of God revealed in
the beauty of the universe, and to feel the goodness of God therein set
forth, sees him not as force only, or in chief, but as love. He worships
in love the God of goodness and of peace. Such is the prevalent
character ascribed to God in the New Testament, except in the book of
"Revelation." He is the "God of love and peace;" "our Father," "kind to
the unthankful and the unmerciful." In one word, God is love. He loves
us all, Jew and Gentile, bond and free. All are his children, each of
priceless value in His sight. He is no God of battles; no Lord of hosts;
no man of war. He has no sword, nor arrows; He does not water the earth
nor melt the mountains in blood, but "He maketh His sun to rise on the
evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust." He
has no garments dyed in blood; curses no man for refusing to fight. He
is spirit, to be worshipped in spirit and in truth! The commandment is:
Love one another; resist not evil with evil; forgive seventy times
seven; overcome evil with good; love your enemies; bless them that
curse you; do good to them that hate you; pray for them that
despitefully use you and persecute you.[4] There is no nation to shut
its ports against another, all are men; no caste to curl its lip at
inferiors, all are brothers, members of one body, united in the Christ,
the ideal man and head of all. The most useful is the greatest. No man
is to be master, for the Christ is our teacher. We are to fear no man,
for God is our Father.

These precepts are undeniably the precepts of Christianity. Equally
plain is it that they are the dictates of man's nature, only developed
and active; a part of God's universal revelation; His law writ on the
soul of man, established in the nature of things; true after all
experience, and true before all experience. The man of real insight into
spiritual things sees and knows them to be true.

Do not believe it the part of a coward to think so. I have known many
cowards; yes, a great many; some very cowardly, pusillanimous and
faint-hearted cowards; but never one who thought so, or pretended to
think so. It requires very little courage to fight with sword and
musket, and that of a cheap kind. Men of that stamp are plenty as grass
in June. Beat your drum, and they will follow; offer them but eight
dollars a month, and they will come--fifty thousand of them, to smite
and kill.[5] Every male animal, or reptile, will fight. It requires
little courage to kill; but it takes much to resist evil with good,
holding obstinately out, active or passive, till you overcome it. Call
that non-resistance, if you will; it is the stoutest kind of combat,
demanding all the manhood of a man.

I will not deny that war is inseparable from a low stage of
civilization; so is polygamy, slavery, cannibalism. Taking men as they
were, savage and violent, there have been times when war was
unavoidable. I will not deny that it has helped forward the civilization
of the race, for God often makes the folly and the sin of men contribute
to the progress of mankind. It is none the less a folly or a sin. In a
civilized nation like ourselves, it is far more heinous than in the
Ojibeways or the Camanches.

War is in utter violation of Christianity. If war be right, then
Christianity is wrong, false, a lie. But if Christianity be true, if
reason, conscience, the religious sense, the highest faculties of man,
are to be trusted, then war is the wrong, the falsehood, the lie. I
maintain that aggressive war is a sin; that it is national infidelity,
a denial of Christianity and of God. Every man who understands
Christianity by heart, in its relations to man, to society, the nation,
the world, knows that war is a wrong. At this day, with all the
enlightenment of our age, after the long peace of the nations, war is
easily avoided. Whenever it occurs, the very fact of its occurrence
convicts the rulers of a nation either of entire incapacity as
statesmen, or else of the worst form of treason; treason to the people,
to mankind, to God! There is no other alternative. The very fact of an
aggressive war shows that the men who cause it must be either fools or
traitors. I think lightly of what is called treason against a
government. That may be your duty to-day, or mine. Certainly it was our
fathers' duty not long ago; now it is our boast and their title to
honor. But treason against the people, against mankind, against God, is
a great sin, not lightly to be spoken of. The political authors of the
war on this continent, and at this day, are either utterly incapable of
a statesman's work, or else guilty of that sin. Fools they are, or
traitors they must be.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let me speak, and in detail, of the Evils of War. I wish this were not
necessary. But we have found ourselves in a war; the Congress has voted
our money and our men to carry it on; the Governors call for volunteers;
the volunteers come when they are called for. No voice of indignation
goes forth from the heart of the eight hundred thousand souls of
Massachusetts; of the seventeen million freemen of the land how few
complain; only a man here and there! The Press is well-nigh silent. And
the Church, so far from protesting against this infidelity in the name
of Christ, is little better than dead. The man of blood shelters himself
behind its wall, silent, dark, dead and emblematic. These facts show
that it is necessary to speak of the evils of war. I am speaking in a
city, whose fairest, firmest, most costly buildings are warehouses and
banks; a city whose most popular Idol is Mammon, the God of Gold; whose
Trinity is a Trinity of Coin! I shall speak intelligibly, therefore, if
I begin by considering war as a waste of property. It paralyzes
industry. The very fear of it is a mildew upon commerce. Though the
present war is but a skirmish, only a few random shots between a squad
of regulars and some strolling battalions, a quarrel which in Europe
would scarcely frighten even the Pope; yet see the effect of it upon
trade. Though the fighting be thousands of miles from Boston, your
stocks fall in the market; the rate of insurance is altered; your dealer
in wood piles his boards and his timber on his wharf, not finding a
market. There are few ships in the great Southern mart to take the
freight of many; exchange is disturbed. The clergyman is afraid to buy a
book, lest his children want bread. It is so with all departments of
industry and trade. In war the capitalist is uncertain and slow to
venture, so the laborer's hand will be still, and his child ill-clad and
hungry.

In the late war with England, many of you remember the condition of your
fisheries, of your commerce; how the ships lay rotting at the wharf. The
dearness of cloth, of provisions, flour, sugar, tea, coffee, salt, the
comparative lowness of wages, the stagnation of business, the scarcity
of money, the universal sullenness and gloom--all this is well
remembered now. So is the ruin it brought on many a man.

Yet but few weeks ago some men talked boastingly of a war with England.
There are some men who seem to have no eyes nor ears, only a mouth;
whose chief function is talk. Of their talk I will say nothing; we look
for dust in dry places. But some men thus talked of war, and seemed
desirous to provoke it, who can scarce plead ignorance, and I fear not
folly, for their excuse. I leave such to the just resentment sure to
fall on them from sober, serious men, who dare to be so unpopular as to
think before they speak, and then say what comes of thinking. Perhaps
such a war was never likely to take place, and now, thanks to a few wise
men, all danger thereof seems at an end. But suppose it had
happened--what would become of your commerce, of your fishing smacks on
the Banks or along the shore? what of your coasting vessels, doubling
the headlands all the way from the St. John's to the Nueces? what of
your whale ships in the Pacific? what of your Indiamen, deep freighted
with oriental wealth? what of that fleet which crowds across the
Atlantic sea, trading with east and west and north and south? I know
some men care little for the rich, but when the owners keep their craft
in port, where can the "hands" find work or their mouths find bread? The
shipping of the United States amounts nearly to 2,500,000 tons. At $40 a
ton, its value is nearly $100,000,000. This is the value only of those
sea-carriages; their cargoes I cannot compute. Allowing one sailor for
every twenty tons burden, here will be 125,000 seamen. They and their
families amount to 500,000 souls. In war, what will become of them? A
capital of more than $13,000,000 is invested in the fisheries of
Massachusetts alone. More than 19,000 men find profitable employment
therein. If each man have but four others in his family, a small number
for that class, here are more than 95,000 persons in this State alone,
whose daily bread depends on this business. They cannot fish in troubled
waters, for they are fishermen, not politicians. Where could they find
bread or cloth in time of war? In Dartmoor prison? Ask that of your
demagogues who courted war!

Then, too, the positive destruction of property in war is monstrous. A
ship of the line costs from $500,000 to $1,000,000. The loss of a fleet
by capture, by fire, or by decay, is a great loss. You know at what cost
a fort is built, if you have counted the sums successively voted for
Fort Adams in Rhode Island, or those in our own harbor. The destruction
of forts is another item in the cost of war. The capture or destruction
of merchant ships with their freight, creates a most formidable loss. In
1812 the whole tonnage of the United States was scarce half what it is
now. Yet the loss of ships and their freight, in "the late war," brief
as it was, is estimated at $100,000,000. Then the loss by plunder and
military occupation is monstrous. The soldier, like the savage, cuts
down the tree to gather its fruit. I cannot calculate the loss by
burning towns and cities. But suppose Boston were bombarded and laid in
ashes. Calculate the loss if you can. You may say "This could not be,"
for it is as easy to say No, as Yes. But remember what befell us in the
last war; remember how recently the best defended capitals of Europe,
Vienna, Paris, Antwerp, have fallen into hostile hands. Consider how
often a strong place, like Coblentz, Mentz, Malta, Gibraltar, St. Juan
d'Ulloa, has been declared impregnable, and then been taken; calculate
the force which might be brought against this town, and you will see
that in eight and forty hours, or half that time, it might be left
nothing but a heap of ruins smoking in the sun! I doubt not the valor
of American soldiers, the skill of their engineers, nor the ability of
their commanders. I am ready to believe all this is greater than we are
told. Still, such are the contingencies of war. If some not very
ignorant men had their way, this would be a probability and perhaps a
fact. If we should burn every town from the Tweed to the Thames, it
would not rebuild our own city.

But on the supposition that nothing is destroyed, see the loss which
comes from the misdirection of productive industry. Your fleets, forts,
dock-yards, arsenals, cannons, muskets, swords and the like, are
provided at great cost, and yet are unprofitable. They do not pay. They
weave no cloth; they bake no bread; they produce nothing. Yet from 1791
to 1832, in forty-two years we expended in these things, $303,242,576,
namely, for the navy, etc., $112,703,933; for the army, etc.,
190,538,643. For the same time, all other expenses of the nation came to
but $37,158,047. More than eight ninths of the whole revenue of the
nation was spent for purposes of war. In four years, from 1812 to 1815,
we paid in this way, $92,350,519.37. In six years, from 1835 to 1840, we
paid annually on the average $21,328,903; in all $127,973,418. Our
Congress has just voted $17,000,000, as a special grant for the army
alone. The 175,118 muskets at Springfield, are valued at $3,000,000; we
pay annually $200,000 to support that arsenal. The navy-yard at
Charlestown, with its stores, etc., has cost $4,741,000. And, for all
profitable returns, this money might as well be sunk in the bottom of
the sea. In some countries it is yet worse. There are towns and cities
in which the fortifications have cost more than all the houses,
churches, shops, and other property therein. This happens not among the
Sacs and Foxes, but in "Christian" Europe.

Then your soldier is the most unprofitable animal you can keep. He makes
no railroads; clears no land; raises no corn. No, he can make neither
cloth nor clocks! He does not raise his own bread, mend his own shoes,
make his shoulder-knot of glory, nor hammer out his own sword. Yet he is
a costly animal, though useless. If the President gets his fifty
thousand volunteers, a thing likely to happen--for though Irish lumpers
and hod-men want a dollar or a dollar and a half a day, your free
American of Boston will enlist for twenty-seven cents, only having his
livery, his feathers, and his "glory" thrown in--then at $8 a month,
their wages amount to $400,000 a month. Suppose the present Government
shall actually make advantageous contracts, and the subsistence of the
soldier cost no more than in England, or $17 a month, this amounts to
$850,000. Here are $1,250,000 a month to begin with. Then, if each man
would be worth a dollar a day at any productive work, and there are 26
work days in the month, here are $1,300,000 more to be added, making
$2,550,000 a month for the new army of occupation. This is only for the
rank and file of the army. The officers, the surgeons, and the
chaplains, who teach the soldiers to _wad_ their muskets with the leaves
of the Bible, will perhaps cost as much more; or, in all, something more
than $5,000,000 a month. This of course does not include the cost of
their arms, tents, ammunition, baggage, horses, and hospital stores, nor
the 65,000 gallons of whiskey which the government has just advertised
for! What do they give in return? They will give us three things, valor,
glory, and--talk; which, as they are not in the price current, I must
estimate as I can, and set them all down in one figure = 0; not worth
the whiskey they cost.

New England is quite a new country. Seven generations ago it was a
wilderness; now it contains about 2,500,000 souls. If you were to pay
all the public debts of these States, and then, in fancy, divide all the
property therein by the population, young as we are, I think you would
find a larger amount of value for each man than in any other country in
the world, not excepting England. The civilization of Europe is old; the
nations old, England, France, Spain, Austria, Italy, Greece; but they
have wasted their time, their labor and their wealth in war, and so are
poorer than we upstarts of a wilderness. We have fewer fleets, forts,
cannon and soldiers for the population, than any other "Christian"
country in the world. This is one main reason why we have no national
debt; why the women need not toil in the hardest labor of the fields,
the quarries and the mines; this is the reason that we are well fed,
well clad, well housed; this is the reason that Massachusetts can afford
to spend $1,000,000 a year for her public schools! War, wasting a
nation's wealth, depresses the great mass of the people, but serves to
elevate a few to opulence and power. Every despotism is established and
sustained by war. This is the foundation of all the aristocracies of the
old world, aristocracies of blood. Our famous men are often ashamed that
their wealth was honestly got by working, or peddling, and foolishly
copy the savage and bloody emblems of ancient heraldry in their assumed
coats of arms, industrious men seeking to have a griffin on their seal!
Nothing is so hostile to a true democracy as war. It elevates a few,
often bold, bad men, at the expense of the many, who pay the money and
furnish the blood for war.

War is a most expensive folly. The revolutionary war cost the General
Government directly and in specie $135,000,000. It is safe to estimate
the direct cost to the individual States also at the same sum,
$135,000,000; making a total of $270,000,000. Considering the
interruption of business, the waste of time, property and life, it is
plain that this could not have been a fourth part of the whole. But
suppose it was a third, then the whole pecuniary cost of the war would
be $810,000,000. At the beginning of the Revolution the population was
about 3,000,000; so that war, lasting about eight years, cost $270 for
each person. To meet the expenses of the war each year there would have
been required a tax of $33.75 on each man, woman and child!

In the Florida war we spent between $30,000,000 and $40,000,000, as an
eminent statesman once said, in fighting five hundred invisible Indians!
It is estimated that the fortifications of the city of Paris, when
completely furnished, will cost more than the whole taxable property of
Massachusetts, with her 800,000 souls. Why, this year our own grant for
the army is $17,000,000. The estimate for the navy is $6,000,000 more;
in all $23,000,000. Suppose, which is most unlikely, that we should pay
no more, why, that sum alone would support public schools, as good and
as costly as those of Massachusetts, all over the United States,
offering each boy and girl, bond or free, as good a culture as they get
here in Boston, and then leave a balance of $3,000,000 in our hands! We
pay more for ignorance than we need for education! But $23,000,000 is
not all we must pay this year. A great statesman has said, in the
Senate, that our war expenses at present are nearly $500,000 a day, and
the President informs your Congress that $22,952,904 more will be wanted
for the army and navy before next June!

For several years we spent directly more than $21,000,000 for war
purposes, though in time of peace. If a railroad cost $30,000 a mile,
then we might build 700 miles a year for that sum, and in five years
could build a railroad therewith from Boston to the further side of
Oregon. For the war money we paid in forty-two years, we could have had
more than 10,000 miles of railroad, and, with dividends at seven per
cent., a yearly income of $21,210,000. For military and naval affairs,
in eight years, from 1835 to 1843, we paid $163,336,717. This alone
would have made 5,444 miles of railroad, and would produce at seven per
cent., an annual income of $11,433,569.19.

In Boston there are nineteen public grammar schools, a Latin and English
High school. The buildings for these schools twenty in number, have cost
$653,208. There are also 135 primary schools, in as many houses or
rooms. I know not their value, as I think they are not all owned by the
city. But suppose them to be worth $150,000. Then all the school-houses
of this city have cost $803,208. The cost of these 156 schools for this
year is estimated at $172,000. The number of scholars in them is 16,479.
Harvard University, the most expensive college in America, costs about
$46,000 a year. Now the ship Ohio, lying here in our harbor, has cost
$834,845, and we pay for it each year $220,000 more. That is, it has
cost $31,637 more than these 155 school-houses of this city, and costs
every year $2,000 more than Harvard University, and all the public
schools of Boston!

The military academy at West Point contains two hundred and thirty-six
cadets; the appropriation for it last year, was $138,000, a sum greater
I think, than the cost of all the colleges in Maine, New Hampshire,
Vermont and Massachusetts, with their 1,445 students.

The navy-yard at Charlestown, with its ordnance, stores, etc., cost
$4,741,000. The cost of the 78 churches in Boston is $3,246,500; the
whole property of Harvard University is $703,175; the 155 school-houses
of Boston are worth $803,208; in all $4,752,883. Thus the navy-yard at
Charlestown has cost almost as much as the 78 churches and the 155
school-houses of Boston, with Harvard College, its halls, libraries, all
its wealth thrown in. Yet what does it teach?

Our country is singularly destitute of public libraries. You must go
across the ocean to read the history of the Church or State; all the
public libraries in America cannot furnish the books referred to in
Gibbon's Rome, or Gieseler's History of the Church. I think there is no
public library in Europe which has cost three dollars a volume. There
are six: the Vatican, at Rome; the Royal, at Paris; the British Museum,
at London; the Bodleian, at Oxford; the University Libraries at
Gottingen and Berlin--which contain, it is said, about 4,500,000
volumes. The recent grant of $17,000,000 for the army is $3,500,000 more
than the cost of those magnificent collections!

There have been printed about 3,000,000 different volumes, great and
little, within the last 400 years. If the Florida war cost but
$30,000,000, it is ten times more than enough to have purchased one copy
of each book ever printed, at one dollar a volume, which is more than
the average cost.

Now all these sums are to be paid by the people, "the dear people," whom
our republican demagogues love so well, and for whom they spend their
lives, rising early, toiling late, those self-denying heroes, those
sainted martyrs of the republic, eating the bread of carefulness for
them alone! But how are they to be paid? By a direct tax levied on all
the property of the nation, so that the poor man pays according to his
little, and the rich man in proportion to his much, each knowing when he
pays and what he pays for? No such thing; nothing like it. The people
must pay and not know it; must be deceived a little, or they would not
pay after this fashion! You pay for it in every pound of sugar, copper,
coal, in every yard of cloth; and if the counsel of some lovers of the
people be followed, you will soon pay for it in each pound of coffee and
tea. In this way the rich man always pays relatively less than the poor;
often a positively smaller sum. Even here I think that three-fourths of
all the property is owned by one-fourth of the people, yet that
three-fourths by no means pays a third of the national revenue. The tax
is laid on things men cannot do without,--sugar, cloth, and the like.
The consumption of these articles is not in proportion to wealth but
persons. Now the poor man, as a general rule, has more children than the
rich, and the tax being more in proportion to persons than property, the
poor man pays more than the rich. So a tax is really laid on the poor
man's children to pay for the war which makes him poor and keeps him
poor. I think your captains and colonels, those sons of thunder and
heirs of glory, will not tell you so. They tell you so! They know it!
Poor brothers, how could they? I think your party newspapers, penny or
pound, will not tell you so; nor the demagogues, all covered with glory
and all forlorn, who tell the people when to hurrah and for what! But if
you cipher the matter out for yourself you will find it so, and not
otherwise. Tell the demagogues, whig or democrat, that. It was an old
Roman maxim, "The people wished to be deceived; let them." Now it is
only practised on; not repeated--in public.

Let us deal justly even with war, giving that its due. There is one
class of men who find their pecuniary advantage in it. I mean army
contractors, when they chance to be favorites of the party in power; men
who let steamboats to lie idle at $500 a day. This class of men rejoice
in a war. The country may become poor, they are sure to be rich. Yet
another class turn war to account, get the "glory," and become important
in song and sermon. I see it stated in a newspaper that the Duke of
Wellington has received, as gratuities for his military services,
$5,400,000, and $40,000 a year in pensions!

       *       *       *       *       *

But the waste of property is the smallest part of the evil. The waste of
life in war is yet more terrible. Human life is a sacred thing. Go out
into the lowest street of Boston; take the vilest and most squalid man
in that miserable lane, and he is dear to some one. He is called
brother; perhaps husband; it may be father; at least, son. A human
heart, sadly joyful, beat over him before he was born. He has been
pressed fondly to his mother's arms. Her tears and her smiles have been
for him; perhaps also her prayers. His blood may be counted mean and
vile by the great men of the earth who love nothing so well as the dear
people, for he has no "coat of arms," no liveried servant to attend him,
but it has run down from the same first man. His family is ancient as
that of the most long descended king. God made him; made this splendid
universe to wait on him and teach him; sent his Christ to save him. He
is an immortal soul. Needlessly to spill that man's blood is an awful
sin. It will cry against you out of the ground--Cain! where is thy
brother? Now in war you bring together 50,000 men like him on one side,
and 50,000 of a different nation on the other. They have no natural
quarrel with one another. The earth is wide enough for both; neither
hinders the sun from the other. Many come unwillingly; many not knowing
what they fight for. It is but accident that determines on which side
the man shall fight. The cannons pour their shot--round, grape,
canister; the howitzers scatter their bursting shells; the muskets rain
their leaden death; the sword, the bayonet, the horses' iron hoof, the
wheels of the artillery, grind the men down into trodden dust. There
they lie, the two masses of burning valor, extinguished, quenched, and
grimly dead, each covering with his body the spot he defended with his
arms. They had no quarrel; yet they lie there, slain by a brother's
hand. It is not old and decrepid men, but men of the productive age,
full of lusty life.

But it is only the smallest part that perish in battle. Exposure to
cold, wet, heat; unhealthy climates, unwholesome food, rum, and forced
marches, bring on diseases which mow down the poor soldiers worse than
musketry and grape. Others languish of wounds, and slowly procrastinate
a dreadful and a tenfold death. Far away, there are widows, orphans,
childless old fathers, who pore over the daily news to learn at random
the fate of a son, a father, or a husband! They crowd disconsolate into
the churches, seeking of God the comfort men took from them, praying in
the bitterness of a broken heart, while the priest gives thanks for "a
famous victory," and hangs up the bloody standard over his pulpit!

When ordinary disease cuts off a man, when he dies at his duty, there is
some comfort in that loss. "It was the ordinance of God," you say. You
minister to his wants; you smoothe down the pillow for the aching head;
your love beguiles the torment of disease, and your own bosom gathers
half the darts of death. He goes in his time and God takes him. But when
he dies in such a war, in battle, it is man who has robbed him of life.
It is a murderer that is butchered. Nothing alleviates that bitter,
burning smart!

Others not slain are maimed for life. This has no eyes; that no hands;
another no feet nor legs. This has been pierced by lances, and torn with
the shot, till scarce any thing human is left. The wreck of a body is
crazed with pains God never meant for man. The mother that bore him
would not know her child. Count the orphan asylums in Germany and
Holland; go into the hospital at Greenwich, that of the invalids in
Paris, you see the "trophies" of Napoleon and Wellington. Go to the
arsenal at Toulon, see the wooden legs piled up there for men now active
and whole, and you will think a little of the physical horrors of war.

In Boston there are perhaps about 25,000 able-bodied men between 18 and
45. Suppose them all slain in battle, or mortally hurt, or mown down by
the camp-fever, vomito, or other diseases of war, and then fancy the
distress, the heart-sickness amid wives, mothers, daughters, sons and
fathers, here! Yet 25,000 is a small number to be murdered in "a famous
victory;" a trifle for a whole "glorious campaign" in a great war. The
men of Boston are no better loved than the men of Tamaulipas. There is
scarce an old family, of the middle class, in all New England, which did
not thus smart in the Revolution; many, which have not, to this day,
recovered from the bloody blow then falling on them. Think, wives, of
the butchery of your husbands; think, mothers, of the murder of your
sons!

Here, too, the burden of battle falls mainly on the humble class. They
pay the great tribute of money; they pay also the horrid tax of blood.
It was not your rich men who fought even the Revolution; not they. Your
men of property and standing were leaguing with the British, or fitting
out privateers when that offered a good investment, or buying up the
estates of more consistent tories; making money out of the nation's dire
distress! True, there were most honorable exceptions; but such, I think,
was the general rule. Let this be distinctly remembered, that the burden
of battle is borne by the humble classes of men; they pay the vast
tribute of money; the awful tax of blood! The "glory" is got by a few;
poverty, wounds, death, are for the people!

Military glory is the poorest kind of distinction, but the most
dangerous passion. It is an honor to man to be able to mould iron; to be
skilful at working in cloth, wood, clay, leather. It is man's vocation
to raise corn, to subdue the rebellious fibre of cotton and convert it
into beautiful robes, full of comfort for the body. They are the heroes
of the race who abridge the time of human toil and multiply its results;
they who win great truths from God, and send them to a people's heart;
they who balance the many and the one into harmonious action, so that
all are united and yet each left free. But the glory which comes of
epaulets and feathers; that strutting glory which is dyed in blood--what
shall we say of it? In this day it is not heroism; it is an imitation of
barbarism long ago passed by. Yet it is marvellous how many men are
taken with a red coat! You expect it in Europe, a land of soldiers and
blood. You are disappointed to find that here the champions of force
should be held in honor, and that even the lowest should voluntarily
enroll themselves as butchers of men!

       *       *       *       *       *

Yet more: aggressive war is a sin; a corruption of the public morals. It
is a practical denial of Christianity; a violation of God's eternal law
of love. This is so plain that I shall say little upon it to-day. Your
savagest and most vulgar captain would confess he does not fight as a
Christian--but as a soldier; your magistrate calls for volunteers--not
as a man loving Christianity, and loyal to God; only as Governor, under
oath to keep the Constitution, the tradition of the elders; not under
oath to keep the commandment of God! In war the laws are suspended,
violence and cunning rule everywhere. The battle of Yorktown was gained
by a lie, though a Washington told it. As a soldier it was his duty. Men
"emulate the tiger;" the hand is bloody, and the heart hard. Robbery and
murder are the rule, the glory of men. "Good men look sad, but ruffians
dance and leap." Men are systematically trained to burn towns, to murder
fathers and sons; taught to consider it "glory" to do so. The Government
collects ruffians and cut-throats. It compels better men to serve with
these and become cut-throats. It appoints chaplains to blaspheme
Christianity; teaching the ruffians how to pray for the destruction of
the enemy, the burning of his towns; to do this in the name of Christ
and God. I do not censure all the men who serve: some of them know no
better; they have heard that a man would "perish everlastingly" if he
did not believe the Athanasian creed; that if he questioned the story of
Jonah, or the miraculous birth of Jesus, he was in danger of hell-fire,
and if he doubted damnation was sure to be damned. They never heard
that such a war was a sin; that to create a war was treason, and to
fight in it wrong. They never thought of thinking for themselves; their
thinking was to read a newspaper, or sleep through a sermon. They
counted it their duty to obey the Government without thinking if that
Government be right or wrong. I deny not the noble, manly character of
many a soldier, his heroism, self-denial and personal sacrifice.

Still, after all proper allowance is made for a few individuals, the
whole system of war is unchristian and sinful. It lives only by evil
passions. It can be defended only by what is low, selfish, and animal.
It absorbs the scum of the cities, pirates, robbers, murderers. It makes
them worse, and better men like them. To take one man's life is murder;
what is it to practise killing as an art, a trade; to do it by
thousands? Yet I think better of the hands that do the butchering than
of the ambitious heads, the cold, remorseless hearts, which plunge the
nation into war.

In war the State teaches men to lie, to steal, to kill. It calls for
privateers, who are commonly pirates with a national charter, and
pirates are privateers with only a personal charter. Every camp is a
school of profanity, violence, licentiousness, and crimes too foul to
name. It is so without sixty-five thousand gallons of whiskey. This is
unavoidable. It was so with Washington's army, with Cornwallis's, with
that of Gustavus Adolphus, perhaps the most moral army the world ever
saw. The soldier's life generally unfits a man for the citizen's! When
he returns from a camp, from a war, back to his native village, he
becomes a curse to society and a shame to the mother that bore him. Even
the soldiers of the Revolution, who survived the war, were mostly ruined
for life, debauched, intemperate, vicious and vile. What loathsome
creatures so many of them were! They bore our burden, for such were the
real martyrs of that war, not the men who fell under the shot! How many
men of the rank and file in the late war have since become respectable
citizens?

To show how incompatible are War and Christianity, suppose that he who
is deemed the most Christian of Christ's disciples, the well-beloved
John, were made a navy-chaplain, and some morning, when a battle is
daily looked for, should stand on the gun-deck, amid lockers of shot,
his Bible resting on a cannon, and expound Christianity to men with
cutlasses by their side! Let him read for the morning lesson the Sermon
on the Mount, and for text take words from his own Epistle, so sweet, so
beautiful, so true: "Every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth
God, for God is love." Suppose he tells his strange audience that all
men are brothers; that God is their common father; that Christ loved us
all, showing us how to live the life of love; and then, when he had
melted all those savage hearts by words so winsome and so true, let him
conclude, "Blessed are the men-slayers! Seek first the glory which
cometh of battle. Be fierce as tigers. Mar God's image in which your
brothers are made. Be not like Christ, but Cain who slew his brother!
When you meet the enemy, fire into their bosoms; kill them in the dear
name of Christ; butcher them in the spirit of God. Give them no quarter,
for we ought not to lay down our lives for the brethren; only the
murderer hath eternal life!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Yet great as are these three-fold evils, there are times when the
soberest men and the best men have welcomed war, coolly and in their
better moments. Sometimes a people, long oppressed, has "petitioned,
remonstrated, cast itself at the feet of the throne," with only insult
for answer to its prayer. Sometimes there is a contest between a
falsehood and a great truth; a self-protecting war for freedom of mind,
heart and soul; yes, a war for a man's body, his wife's and children's
body, for what is dearer to men than life itself, for the unalienable
rights of man, for the idea that all are born free and equal. It was so
in the American Revolution; in the English, in the French Revolution. In
such cases men say, "Let it come." They take down the firelock in
sorrow; with a prayer they go forth to battle, asking that the Right
may triumph. Much as I hate war I cannot but honor such men. Were they
better, yet more heroic, even war of that character might be avoided.
Still it is a colder heart than mine which does not honor such men,
though it believes them mistaken. Especially do we honor them, when it
is the few, the scattered, the feeble, contending with the many and the
mighty; the noble fighting for a great idea, and against the base and
tyrannical. Then most men think the gain, the triumph of a great idea,
is worth the price it costs, the price of blood.

I will not stop to touch that question, If man may ever shed the blood
of man. But it is plain that an aggressive war like this is wholly
unchristian, and a reproach to the nation and the age.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now, to make the evils of war still clearer, and to bring them home to
your door, let us suppose there was war between the counties of Suffolk,
on the one side, and Middlesex on the other--this army at Boston, that
at Cambridge. Suppose the subject in dispute was the boundary line
between the two, Boston claiming a pitiful acre of flat land, which the
ocean at low tide disdained to cover. To make sure of this, Boston
seizes whole miles of flats, unquestionably not its own. The rulers on
one side are fools, and traitors on the other. The two commanders have
issued their proclamations; the money is borrowed; the whiskey
provided; the soldiers--Americans, Negroes, Irishmen, all the
able-bodied men--are enlisted. Prayers are offered in all the churches,
and sermons preached, showing that God is a man of war, and Cain his
first saint, an early Christian, a Christian before Christ. The
Bostonians wish to seize Cambridge, burn the houses, churches,
college-halls, and plunder the library. The men of Cambridge wish to
seize Boston, burn its houses and ships, plundering its wares and its
goods. Martial law is proclaimed on both sides. The men of Cambridge cut
asunder the bridges, and make a huge breach in the mill-dam, planting
cannon to enfilade all those avenues. Forts crown the hilltops, else so
green. Men, madder than lunatics, are crowded into the Asylum. The
Bostonians rebuild the old fortifications on the Neck; replace the forts
on Beacon-hill, Fort-hill, Copps-hill, levelling houses to make room for
redoubts and bastions. The batteries are planted, the mortars got ready;
the furnaces and magazines are all prepared. The three hills are grim
with war. From Copps-hill men look anxious to that memorable height the
other side of the water. Provisions are cut off in Boston; no man may
pass the lines; the aqueduct refuses its genial supply; children cry for
their expected food. The soldiers parade, looking somewhat tremulous and
pale; all the able-bodied have come, the vilest most willingly; some are
brought by force of drink, some by force of arms. Some are in brilliant
dresses, some in their working frocks. The banners are consecrated by
solemn words.[6] Your church-towers are military posts of observation.
There are Old Testament prayers to the "God of Hosts" in all the
churches of Boston; prayers that God would curse the men of Cambridge,
make their wives widows, their children fatherless, their houses a ruin,
the men corpses, meat for the beast of the field and the bird of the
air. Last night the Bostonians made a feint of attacking Charlestown,
raining bombs and red-hot cannon-balls from Copps-hill, till they have
burnt a thousand houses, where the British burnt not half so many. Women
and children fled screaming from the blazing rafters of their homes. The
men of Middlesex crowd into Charlestown.

In the mean time the Bostonians hastily repair a bridge or two; some
pass that way, some over the Neck; all stealthily by night, and while
the foe expect them at Bunker's, amid the blazing town, they have stolen
a march and rush upon Cambridge itself. The Cambridge men turn back. The
battle is fiercely joined. You hear the cannon, the sharp report of
musketry. You crowd the hills, the house-tops; you line the Common, you
cover the shore, yet you see but little in the sulphurous cloud. Now
the Bostonians yield a little, a reinforcement goes over. All the men
are gone; even the gray-headed who can shoulder a firelock. They plunge
into battle mad with rage, madder with rum. The chaplains loiter behind.

    "Pious men, whom duty brought,
    To dubious verge of battle fought,
    To shrive the dying, bless the dead!"

The battle hangs long in even scale. At length it turns. The Cambridge
men retreat, they run, they fly. The houses burn. You see the churches
and the colleges go up, a stream of fire. That library--founded amid
want and war and sad sectarian strife, slowly gathered by the saving of
two centuries, the hope of the poor scholar, the boast of the rich
one--is scattered to the winds and burnt with fire, for the solid
granite is blasted by powder, and the turrets fall. Victory is ours. Ten
thousand men of Cambridge lie dead; eight thousand of Boston. There
writhe the wounded; men who but few hours before were poured over the
battle-field a lava flood of fiery valor--fathers, brothers, husbands,
sons. There they lie, torn and mangled; black with powder; red with
blood; parched with thirst; cursing the load of life they now must bear
with bruised frames and mutilated limbs. Gather them into hasty
hospitals--let this man's daughter come to-morrow and sit by him,
fanning away the flies; he shall linger out a life of wretched anguish
unspoken and unspeakable, and when he dies his wife religiously will
keep the shot which tore his limbs. There is the battle-field! Here the
horse charged; there the howitzers scattered their shells, pregnant with
death; here the murderous canister and grape mowed down the crowded
ranks; there the huge artillery, teeming with murder, was dragged o'er
heaps of men--wounded friends who just now held its ropes, men yet
curling with anguish, like worms in the fire. Hostile and friendly, head
and trunk are crushed beneath those dreadful wheels. Here the infantry
showered their murdering shot. That ghastly face was beautiful the day
before--a sabre hewed its half away.

    "The earth is covered thick with other clay,
    Which her own clay must cover, heaped and pent,
    Rider and horse, friend, foe, in one red burial blent."

Again it is night. Oh, what a night, and after what a day! Yet the pure
tide of woman's love, which never ebbs since earth began, flows on in
spite of war and battle. Stealthily, by the pale moonlight, a mother of
Boston treads the weary miles to reach that bloody spot; a widow
she--seeking among the slain her only son. The arm of power drove him
forth reluctant to the fight. A friendly soldier guides her way. Now
she turns over this face, whose mouth is full of purple dust, bit out of
the ground in his extremest agony, the last sacrament offered him by
Earth herself; now she raises that form, cold, stiff, stony and ghastly
as a dream of hell. But, lo! another comes, she too a woman, younger and
fairer, yet not less bold, a maiden from the hostile town to seek her
lover. They meet, two women among the corpses; two angels come to
Golgotha, seeking to raise a man. There he lies before them; they look.
Yes it is he you seek; the same dress, form, features too; it is he, the
son, the lover. Maid and mother could tell that face in any light. The
grass is wet with his blood. The ground is muddy with the life of men.
The mother's innocent robe is drabbled in the blood her bosom bore.
Their kisses, groans, and tears, recall the wounded man. He knows the
mother's voice; that voice yet more beloved. His lips move only, for
they cannot speak. He dies! The waxing moon moves high in heaven,
walking in beauty amid the clouds, and murmurs soft her cradle song unto
the slumbering earth. The broken sword reflects her placid beams. A star
looks down and is imaged back in a pool of blood. The cool night wind
plays in the branches of the trees shivered with shot. Nature is
beautiful--that lovely grass underneath their feet; those pendulous
branches of the leafy elm; the stars and that romantic moon lining the
clouds with silver light! A groan of agony, hopeless and prolonged,
wails out from that bloody ground. But in yonder farm the whippoorwill
sings to her lover all night long; the rising tide ripples melodious
against the shores. So wears the night away,--Nature, all sinless, round
that field of woe.

    "The morn is up again, the dewy morn,
    With breath all incense and with cheek all bloom,
    Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,
    And living as if earth contained no tomb,
      And glowing into day."

What a scene that morning looks upon! I will not turn again. Let the
dead bury their dead. But their blood cries out of the ground against
the rulers who shed it,--"Cain! where are thy brothers?" What shall the
fool answer; what the traitor say?

Then comes thanksgiving in all the churches of Boston. The consecrated
banners, stiff with blood and "glory," are hung over the altar. The
minister preaches and the singer sings: "The Lord hath been on our side.
He treadeth the people under me. He teacheth my hands to war, my fingers
to fight. Yea, He giveth me the necks of mine enemies; for the Lord is
his name;" and "It was a famous victory!" Boston seizes miles square of
land; but her houses are empty; her wives widows; her children
fatherless. Rachel weeps for the murder of her innocents, yet dares not
rebuke the rod.

I know there is no fighting across Charles River, as in this poor
fiction; but there was once, and instead of Charles say Rio Grande; for
Cambridge read Metamoras, and it is what your President recommended;
what your Congress enacted; what your Governor issued his proclamation
for; what your volunteers go to accomplish: yes, what they fired cannon
for on Boston Common the other day. I wish that were a fiction of mine!

       *       *       *       *       *

We are waging a most iniquitous war--so it seems to me. I know I may be
wrong, but I am no partisan, and if I err, it is not wilfully, not
rashly. I know the Mexicans are a wretched people; wretched in their
origin, history, and character. I know but two good things of them as a
people--they abolished negro slavery, not long ago; they do not covet
the lands of their neighbors. True, they have not paid all their debts,
but it is scarcely decent in a nation, with any repudiating States, to
throw the first stone at Mexico for that!

I know the Mexicans cannot stand before this terrible Anglo-Saxon race,
the most formidable and powerful the world ever saw; a race which has
never turned back; which, though it number less than forty millions, yet
holds the Indies, almost the whole of North America; which rules the
commerce of the world; clutches at New Holland, China, New Zealand,
Borneo, and seizes island after island in the furthest seas; the race
which invented steam as its awful type. The poor, wretched Mexicans can
never stand before us. How they perished in battle! They must melt away
as the Indians before the white man. Considering how we acquired
Louisiana, Florida, Oregon, I cannot forbear thinking that this people
will possess the whole of the continent before many years; perhaps
before the century ends. But this may be had fairly; with no injustice
to any one; by the steady advance of a superior race, with superior
ideas and a better civilization; by commerce, trade, arts, by being
better than Mexico, wiser, humaner, more free and manly. Is it not
better to acquire it by the schoolmaster than the cannon; by peddling
cloth, tin, any thing rather than bullets? It may not all belong to this
Government, and yet to this race. It would be a gain to mankind if we
could spread over that country the Idea of America--that all men are
born free and equal in rights, and establish there political, social,
and individual freedom. But to do that, we must first make real these
ideas at home.

In the general issue between this race and that, we are in the right.
But in this special issue, and this particular war, it seems to me that
we are wholly in the wrong; that our invasion of Mexico is as bad as the
partition of Poland in the last century and in this. If I understand the
matter, the whole movement, the settlement of Texas, the Texan
revolution, the annexation of Texas, the invasion of Mexico, has been a
movement hostile to the American idea, a movement to extend slavery. I
do not say such was the design on the part of the people, but on the
part of the politicians who pulled the strings. I think the papers of
the Government and the debates of Congress prove that. The annexation
has been declared unconstitutional in its mode, a virtual dissolution of
the Union, and that by very high and well-known authority. It was
expressly brought about for the purpose of extending slavery. An attempt
is now made to throw the shame of this on the democrats. I think the
democrats deserve the shame; but I could never see that the whigs, on
the whole, deserved it any less; only they were not quite so open.
Certainly, their leaders did not take ground against it, never as
against a modification of the tariff! When we annexed Texas we of course
took her for better or worse, debts and all, and annexed her war along
with her. I take it everybody knew that; though now some seem to pretend
a decent astonishment at the result. Now one party is ready to fight for
it as the other! The North did not oppose the annexation of Texas. Why
not? They knew they could make money by it. The eyes of the North are
full of cotton; they see nothing else, for a web is before them; their
ears are full of cotton, and they hear nothing but the buzz of their
mills; their mouth is full of cotton, and they can speak audibly but
two words--Tariff, Tariff, Dividends, Dividends. The talent of the North
is blinded, deafened, gagged with its own cotton. The North clamored
loudly when the nation's treasure was removed from the United States
Bank; it is almost silent at the annexation of a slave territory big as
the kingdom of France, encumbered with debts, loaded with the entailment
of war! Northern Governors call for soldiers; our men volunteer to fight
in a most infamous war for the extension of slavery! Tell it not in
Boston, whisper it not in Faneuil Hall, lest you weaken the slumbers of
your fathers, and they curse you as cowards and traitors unto men! Not
satisfied with annexing Texas and a war, we next invaded a territory
which did not belong to Texas, and built a fort on the Rio Grande,
where, I take it, we had no more right than the British, in 1841, had on
the Penobscot or the Saco. Now the Government and its Congress would
throw the blame on the innocent, and say war exists "by the act of
Mexico!" If a lie was ever told, I think this is one. Then the "dear
people" must be called on for money and men, for "the soil of this free
republic is invaded," and the Governor of Massachusetts, one of the men
who declared the annexation of Texas unconstitutional, recommends the
war he just now told us to pray against, and appeals to our
"patriotism," and "humanity," as arguments for butchering the Mexicans,
when they are in the right and we in the wrong! The maxim is held up,
"Our country, right or wrong;" "Our country, howsoever bounded;" and it
might as well be, "Our country, howsoever governed." It seems popularly
and politically forgotten that there is such a thing as Right. The
nation's neck invites a tyrant. I am not at all astonished that northern
representatives voted for all this work of crime. They are no better
than southern representatives; scarcely less in favor of slavery, and
not half so open. They say: Let the North make money, and you may do
what you please with the nation; and we will choose governors that dare
not oppose you, for, though we are descended from the Puritans we have
but one article in our creed we never flinch from following, and that
is--to make money; honestly, if we can; if not, as we can!

Look through the action of your Government, and your Congress. You see
that no reference has been had in this affair to Christian ideas; none
to justice and the eternal right. Nay, none at all! In the churches, and
among the people, how feeble has been the protest against this great
wrong. How tamely the people yield their necks--and say: "Take our sons
for the war--we care not, right or wrong." England butchers the Sikhs in
India--her generals are elevated to the peerage, and the head of her
church writes a form of thanksgiving for the victory, to be read in all
the churches of that Christian land.[7] To make it still more
abominable, the blasphemy is enacted on Easter Sunday, the great holiday
of men who serve the Prince of Peace. We have not had prayers in the
churches, for we have no political Archbishop. But we fired cannon in
joy that we had butchered a few wretched men--half starved, and forced
into the ranks by fear of death! Your peace societies, and your
churches, what can they do? What dare they? Verily, we are a faithless
and perverse generation. God be merciful to us, sinners as we are!

       *       *       *       *       *

But why talk for ever? What shall we do? In regard to this present war,
we can refuse to take any part in it; we can encourage others to do the
same; we can aid men, if need be, who suffer because they refuse. Men
will call us traitors: what then? That hurt nobody in '76! We are a
rebellious nation; our whole history is treason; our blood was attainted
before we were born; our creeds are infidelity to the mother-church; our
Constitution treason to our father-land. What of that? Though all the
governors in the world bid us commit treason against man, and set the
example, let us never submit. Let God only be a master to control our
conscience!

We can hold public meetings in favor of peace, in which what is wrong
shall be exposed and condemned. It is proof of our cowardice that this
has not been done before now. We can show in what the infamy of a nation
consists; in what its real glory. One of your own men, the last summer,
startled the churches out of their sleep,[8] by his manly trumpet,
talking with us, and telling that the true grandeur of a nation was
justice, not glory; peace, not war.

We can work now for future times, by taking pains to spread abroad the
sentiments of peace, the ideas of peace, among the people in schools,
churches--everywhere. At length we can diminish the power of the
national Government, so that the people alone shall have the power to
declare war, by a direct vote, the Congress only to recommend it. We can
take from the Government the means of war by raising only revenue enough
for the nation's actual wants, and raising that directly, so that each
man knows what he pays, and when he pays it, and then he will take care
that it is not paid to make him poor and keep him so. We can diffuse a
real practical Christianity among the people, till the mass of men have
courage enough to overcome evil with good, and look at aggressive war as
the worst of treason and the foulest infidelity!

Now is the time to push and be active. War itself gives weight to words
of peace. There will never be a better time till we make the times
better. It is not a day for cowardice, but for heroism. Fear not that
the "honor of the nation" will suffer from Christian movements for
peace. What if your men of low degree are a vanity, and your men of high
degree are a lie? That is no new thing. Let true men do their duty, and
the lie and the vanity will pass each to its reward. Wait not for the
churches to move, or the State to become Christian. Let us bear our
testimony like men, not fearing to be called traitors, infidels; fearing
only to be such.

I would call on Americans, by their love of our country, its great
ideas, its real grandeur, its hopes, and the memory of its fathers--to
come and help save that country from infamy and ruin. I would call on
Christians, who believe that Christianity is a truth, to lift up their
voice, public and private, against the foulest violation of God's law,
this blasphemy of the Holy Spirit of Christ, this worst form of
infidelity to man and God. I would call on all men, by the one nature
that is in you, by the great human heart beating alike in all your
bosoms, to protest manfully against this desecration of the earth, this
high treason against both man and God. Teach your rulers that you are
Americans, not slaves; Christians, not heathen; men, not murderers, to
kill for hire! You may effect little in this generation, for its head
seems crazed and its heart rotten. But there will be a day after to-day.
It is for you and me to make it better; a day of peace, when nation
shall no longer lift up sword against nation; when all shall indeed be
brothers, and all blest. Do this, you shall be worthy to dwell in this
beautiful land; Christ will be near you; God work with you, and bless
you for ever!

This present trouble with Mexico may be very brief; surely it might be
even now brought to an end with no unusual manhood in your rulers. Can
we say we have not deserved it? Let it end, but let us remember that
war, horrid as it is, is not the worst calamity which ever befalls a
people. It is far worse for a people to lose all reverence for right,
for truth, all respect for man and God; to care more for the freedom of
trade than the freedom of men; more for a tariff than millions of souls.
This calamity came upon us gradually, long before the present war, and
will last long after that has died away. Like people like ruler, is a
true word. Look at your rulers, representatives, and see our own
likeness! We reverence force, and have forgot there is any right beyond
the vote of a Congress or a people; any good beside dollars; any God but
majorities and force, I think the present war, though it should cost
50,000 men and $50,000,000, the smallest part of our misfortune. Abroad
we are looked on as a nation of swindlers and men-stealers! What can we
say in our defence? Alas, the nation is a traitor to its great
idea,--that all men are born equal, each with the same unalienable
rights. We are infidels to Christianity. We have paid the price of our
shame.

There have been dark days in this nation before now. It was gloomy when
Washington with his little army fled through the Jerseys. It was a long
dark day from '83 to '89. It was not so dark as now; the nation never so
false. There was never a time when resistance to tyrants was so rare a
virtue; when the people so tamely submitted to a wrong. Now you can feel
the darkness. The sack of this city and the butchery of its people were
a far less evil than the moral deadness of the nation. Men spring up
again like the mown grass; but to raise up saints and heroes in a dead
nation corrupting beside its golden tomb, what shall do that for us? We
must look not to the many for that, but to the few who are faithful unto
God and man.

I know the hardy vigor of our men, the stalwart intellect of this
people. Would to God they could learn to love the right and true. Then
what a people should we be, spreading from the Madawaska to the
Sacramento, diffusing our great idea, and living our religion, the
Christianity of Christ! Oh, Lord! make the vision true; waken thy
prophets and stir thy people till righteousness exalt us! No wonders
will be wrought for that. But the voice of conscience speaks to you and
me, and all of us: The right shall prosper; the wicked States shall die,
and History responds her long amen.

What lessons come to us from the past! The Genius of the old
civilization, solemn and sad, sits there on the Alps, his classic beard
descending o'er his breast. Behind him arise the new nations, bustling
with romantic life. He bends down over the midland sea, and counts up
his children--Assyria, Egypt, Tyre, Carthage, Troy, Etruria, Corinth,
Athens, Rome--once so renowned, now gathered with the dead, their giant
ghosts still lingering pensive o'er the spot. He turns westward his
face, too sad to weep, and raising from his palsied knee his trembling
hand, looks on his brother genius of the new civilization. That young
giant, strong and mocking, sits there on the Alleghanies. Before him lie
the waters, covered with ships; behind him he hears the roar of the
Mississippi and the far distant Oregon--rolling their riches to the sea.
He bends down, and that far ocean murmurs pacific in his ear. On his
left, are the harbors, shops and mills of the East, and a five-fold
gleam of light goes up from Northern lakes. On his right, spread out the
broad savannahs of the South, waiting to be blessed; and far off that
Mexique bay bends round her tropic shores. A crown of stars is on that
giant's head, some glorious with flashing, many-colored light; some
bloody red; some pale and faint, of most uncertain hue. His right hand
lies folded in his robe; the left rests on the Bible's opened page, and
holds these sacred words--All men are equal, born with equal rights from
God. The old says to the young: "Brother, beware!" and Alps and Rocky
Mountains say "Beware!" That stripling giant, ill-bred and scoffing,
shouts amain: "My feet are red with the Indians' blood; my hand has
forged the negro's chain. I am strong; who dares assail me? I will drink
his blood, for I have made my covenant of lies, and leagued with hell
for my support. There is no right, no truth; Christianity is false, and
God a name." His left hand rends those sacred scrolls, casting his
Bibles underneath his feet, and in his right he brandishes the
negro-driver's whip, crying again--"Say, who is God, and what is Right."
And all his mountains echo--Right. But the old genius sadly says again:
"Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not prosper." The hollow
tomb of Egypt, Athens, Rome, of every ancient State, with all their
wandering ghosts, replies, "AMEN."

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Isaiah lxiii. 1-6. _Noyes's_ Version.

    _The People._

    1.   Who is this that cometh from Edom?
       In scarlet garments from Bozrah?
       This, that is glorious in his apparel,
       Proud in the greatness of his strength?

    _Jehovah._

       I, that proclaim deliverance,
       And am mighty to save.

    _The People._

    2. Wherefore is thine apparel red,
       And thy garments like those of one that treadeth the wine-vat?

    _Jehovah._

    3. I have trodden the wine-vat alone,
       And of the nations there was none with me.
       And I trod them in mine anger,
       And I trampled them in my fury,
       So that their life-blood was sprinkled upon my garments,
       And I have stained all my apparel.
    4. For the day of vengeance was in my heart,
       And the year of my deliverance was come.
    5. And I looked, and there was none to help,
       And I wondered, that there was none to uphold,
       Therefore my own arm wrought salvation for me,
       And my fury, it sustained me.
    6. I trod down the nations in my anger;
       I crushed them in my fury,
       And spilled their blood upon the ground.

[4] To show the differences between the Old and New Testament, and to
serve as introduction to this discourse, the following passages were
read as the morning lesson: Exodus, xv. 1-6; 2 Sam. xxii. 32, 35-43, 48;
xlv. 3-5; Isa. lxvi. 15, 16; Joel, iii. 9-17, and Matt. v. 3-11, 38-39,
43-45.

[5] Such was the price offered, and such the number of soldiers then
called for.

[6] See the appropriate forms of prayer for that service by the present
Bishop of Oxford, in Jay's Address before the American Peace Society, in
1845.

[7] _Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving to Almighty God._

"O Lord God of Hosts, in whose hand is power and might irresistible, we,
thine unworthy servants, most humbly acknowledge thy goodness in the
victories lately vouchsafed to the armies of our Sovereign over a host
of barbarous invaders, who sought to spread desolation over fruitful and
populous provinces, enjoying the blessings of peace, under the
protection of the British Crown. We bless Thee, O merciful Lord, for
having brought to a speedy and prosperous issue a war to which no
occasion had been given by injustice on our part, or apprehension of
injury at our hands! To Thee, O Lord, we ascribe the glory! It was Thy
wisdom which guided the counsel! Thy power which strengthened the hands
of those whom it pleased Thee to use as Thy instruments in the
discomfiture of the lawless aggressor, and the frustration of his
ambitious designs! From Thee, alone, cometh the victory, and the spirit
of moderation and mercy in the day of success. Continue, we beseech
Thee, to go forth with our armies, whensoever they are called into
battle in a righteous cause; and dispose the hearts of their leaders to
exact nothing more from the vanquished than is necessary for the
maintenance of peace and security against violence and rapine.

"Above all, give Thy grace to those who preside in the councils of our
Sovereign, and administer the concerns of her widely extended dominions,
that they may apply all their endeavors to the purposes designed by Thy
good Providence, in committing such power to their hands, the temporal
and spiritual benefit of the nations intrusted to their care.

"And whilst Thou preservest our distant possessions from the horrors of
war, give us peace and plenty at home, that the earth may yield her
increase, and that we, Thy servants, receiving Thy blessings with
thankfulness and gladness of heart, may dwell together in unity, and
faithfully serve Thee, to Thy honor and glory, through Jesus Christ our
Lord, to whom, with Thee and the Holy Ghost, belong all dominion and
power, both in heaven and earth, now and for ever. Amen."--See a defence
of this prayer, in the London "Christian Observer" for May, p. 319, _et
seq._, and for June, p. 346, _et seq._

Would you know what he gave thanks for on Easter Sunday? Here is the
history of the battle:

"This battle had begun at six, and was over at eleven o'clock; the
hand-to-hand combat commenced at nine, and lasted scarcely two hours.
The river was full of sinking men. For two hours, volley after volley
was poured in upon the human mass--the stream being literally red with
blood, and covered with the bodies of the slain. At last, the musket
ammunition becoming exhausted, the infantry fell to the rear, the horse
artillery plying grape till not a man was visible within range. No
compassion was felt or mercy shown." But "'twas a famous victory!"

[8] Mr. Charles Sumner.




IV.

SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE ANTI-WAR MEETING IN FANEUIL HALL, FEBRUARY 4,
1847.


Mr. Chairman,--We have come here to consult for the honor of our
country. The honor and dignity of the United States are in danger. I
love my country; I love her honor. It is dear to me almost as my own. I
have seen stormy meetings in Faneuil Hall before now, and am not easily
disturbed by a popular tumult. But never before did I see a body of
armed soldiers attempting to overawe the majesty of the people, when met
to deliberate on the people's affairs. Yet the meetings of the people of
Boston have been disturbed by soldiers before now, by British bayonets;
but never since the Boston massacre on the 5th of March, 1770! Our
fathers hated a standing army. This is a new one, but behold the effect!
Here are soldiers with bayonets to overawe the majesty of the people!
They went to our meeting last Monday night, the hireling soldiers of
President Polk, to overawe and disturb the meetings of honest men. Here
they are now, and in arms!

We are in a war; the signs of war are seen here in Boston. Men, needed
to hew wood and honestly serve society, are marching about your streets;
they are learning to kill men, men who never harmed us, nor them;
learning to kill their brothers. It is a mean and infamous war we are
fighting. It is a great boy fighting a little one, and that little one
feeble and sick. What makes it worse is, the little boy is in the right,
and the big boy is in the wrong, and tells solemn lies to make his side
seem right. He wants, besides, to make the small boy pay the expenses of
the quarrel.

The friends of the war say "Mexico has invaded our territory!" When it
is shown that it is we who have invaded hers, then it is said, "Ay, but
she owes us money." Better say outright, "Mexico has land, and we want
to steal it!"

This war is waged for a mean and infamous purpose, for the extension of
slavery. It is not enough that there are fifteen Slave States, and
3,000,000 men here who have no legal rights--not so much as the horse
and the ox have in Boston: it is not enough that the slaveholders
annexed Texas, and made slavery perpetual therein, extending even north
of Mason and Dixon's line, covering a territory forty-five times as
large as the State of Massachusetts. Oh, no; we must have yet more land
to whip negroes in!

The war had a mean and infamous beginning. It began illegally,
unconstitutionally. The Whigs say, "the President made the war." Mr.
Webster says so! It went on meanly and infamously. Your Congress lied
about it. Do not lay the blame on the democrats; the whigs lied just as
badly. Your Congress has seldom been so single-mouthed before. Why, only
sixteen voted against the war, or the lie. I say this war is mean and
infamous all the more, because waged by a people calling itself
democratic and Christian. I know but one war so bad in modern times,
between civilized nations, and that was the war for the partition of
Poland. Even for that there was more excuse.

We have come to Faneuil Hall to talk about the war; to work against the
war. It is rather late, but "better late than never." We have let two
opportunities for work pass unemployed. One came while the annexation of
Texas was pending. Then was the time to push and be active. Then was the
time for Massachusetts and all the North, to protest as one man against
the extension of slavery. Everybody knew all about the matter, the
democrats and the whigs. But how few worked against that gross mischief!
One noble man lifted up his warning voice;[9] a man noble in his
father,--and there he stands in marble; noble in himself--and there he
stands yet higher up--and I hope time will show him yet nobler in his
son, and there he stands, not in marble, but in man! He talked against
it, worked against it, fought against it. But Massachusetts did little.
Her tonguey men said little; her handymen did little. Too little could
not be done or said. True, we came here to Faneuil Hall and passed
resolutions; good resolutions they were, too. Daniel Webster wrote them,
it is said. They did the same in the State House; but nothing came of
them. They say "Hell is paved with resolutions;" these were of that sort
of resolutions; which resolve nothing because they are of words, not
works!

Well, we passed the resolutions; you know who opposed them; who hung
back and did nothing, nothing good I mean; quite enough not good. Then
we thought all the danger was over; that the resolutions settled the
matter. But then was the time to confound at once the enemies of your
country; to show an even front hostile to slavery.

But the chosen time passed over, and nothing was done. Do not lay the
blame on the democrats; a whig Senate annexed Texas, and so annexed a
war. We ought to have told our delegation in Congress, if Texas were
annexed, to come home, and we would breathe upon it and sleep upon it,
and then see what to do next. Had our resolutions, taken so warmly here
in Faneuil Hall in 1845, been but as warmly worked out, we had now been
as terrible to the slave power as the slave power, since extended, now
is to us!

Why was it that we did nothing? That is a public secret. Perhaps I ought
not to tell it to the people. (Cries of "Tell it.")

The annexation of Texas, a slave territory big as the kingdom of France,
would not furl a sail on the ocean; would not stop a mill-wheel at
Lowell! Men thought so.

That time passed by, and there came another. The Government had made
war; the Congress voted the dollars, voted the men, voted a lie. Your
representative, men of Boston, voted for all three; the lie, the
dollars, and the men; all three, in obedience to the slave power! Let
him excuse that to the conscience of his party; it is an easy matter. I
do not believe he can excuse it to his own conscience. To the conscience
of the world it admits of no excuse. Your President called for
volunteers, 50,000 of them. Then came an opportunity such as offers not
once in one hundred years, an opportunity to speak for freedom and the
rights of mankind! Then was the time for Massachusetts to stand up in
the spirit of '76, and say, "We won't send a man, from Cape Ann to
Williamstown--not one Yankee man, for this wicked war." Then was the
time for your Governor to say, "Not a volunteer for this wicked war."
Then was the time for your merchants to say, "Not a ship, not a dollar
for this wicked war;" for your manufacturers to say, "We will not make
you a cannon, nor a sword, nor a kernel of powder, nor a soldier's
shirt, for this wicked war." Then was the time for all good men to say,
"This is a war for slavery, a mean and infamous war; an aristocratic
war, a war against the best interests of mankind. If God please, we will
die a thousand times, but never draw blade in this wicked war." (Cries
of "Throw him over," etc.) Throw him over, what good would that do? What
would you do next, after you have thrown him over? ("Drag you out of the
hall!") What good would that do? It would not wipe off the infamy of
this war! would not make it less wicked!

That is what a democratic nation, a Christian people ought to have said,
ought to have done. But we did not say so; the Bay State did not say so,
nor your Governor, nor your merchants, nor your manufacturers, nor your
good men; the Governor accepted the President's decree, issued his
proclamation calling for soldiers, recommended men to enlist, appealing
to their "patriotism" and "humanity."

Governor Briggs is a good man, and so far I honor him. He is a
temperance man, strong and consistent; I honor him for that. He is a
friend of education; a friend of the people. I wish there were more
such. Like many other New England men, he started from humble
beginnings; but unlike many such successful men of New England, he is
not ashamed of the lowest round he ever trod on. I honor him for all
this. But that was a time which tried men's souls, and his soul could
not stand the rack. I am sorry for him. He did as the President told
him.

What was the reason for all this? Massachusetts did not like the war,
even then; yet she gave her consent to it. Why so? There are two words
which can drive the blood out of the cheeks of cowardly men in
Massachusetts any time. They are "Federalism" and "Hartford Convention!"
The fear of those words palsied the conscience of Massachusetts, and so
her Governor did as he was told. I feel no fear of either. The
Federalists did not see all things; who ever did? They had not the ideas
which were destined to rule this nation; they looked back when the age
looked forward. But to their own ideas they were true; and if ever a
nobler body of men held state in any nation, I have yet to learn when or
where. If we had had the shadow of Caleb Strong in the Governor's chair,
not a volunteer for this war had gone out of Massachusetts.

I have not told quite all the reasons why Massachusetts did nothing. Men
knew the war would cost money; that the dollars would in the end be
raised, not by a direct tax, of which the poor man paid according to his
little, and the rich man in proportion to his much, but by a tariff
which presses light on property, and hard on the person; by a tax on the
backs and mouths of the people. Some of the Whigs were glad last Spring,
when the war came, for they hoped thereby to save the child of their old
age, the tariff of '42. There are always some rich men, who say "No
matter what sort of a Government we have, so long as we get our
dividends;" always some poor men, who say "No matter how much the nation
suffers, if we fill our hungry purses thereby." Well, they lost their
virtue, lost their tariff, and gained just nothing; what they deserved
to gain.

Now a third opportunity has come; no, it has not come; we have brought
it. The President wants a war tax on tea and coffee. Is that democratic,
to tax every man's breakfast and supper, for the sake of getting more
territory to whip negroes in? (Numerous cries of "Yes.") Then what do
you think despotism would be? He asks a loan of $28,000,000 for this
war. He wants $3,000,000 to spend privately for this war. In eight
months past, he has asked I am told for $74,000,000. Seventy-four
millions of dollars to conquer slave territory! Is that democratic too?
He wants to increase the standing army, to have ten regiments more! A
pretty business that. Ten regiments to gag the people in Faneuil Hall.
Do you think that is democratic? Some men have just asked Massachusetts
for $20,000 for the volunteers! It is time for the people to rebuke all
this wickedness.

       *       *       *       *       *

I think there is a good deal to excuse the volunteers. I blame them, for
some of them know what they are about. Yet I pity them more, for most of
them, I am told, are low, ignorant men; some of them drunken and brutal.
From the uproar they make here to-night, arms in their hands, I think
what was told me is true! I say I pity them! They are my brothers; not
the less brothers because low and misguided. If they are so needy that
they are forced to enlist by poverty, surely I pity them. If they are of
good families, and know better, I pity them still more! I blame most the
men that have duped the rank and file! I blame the captains and
colonels, who will have least of the hardships, most of the pay, and all
of the "glory." I blame the men that made the war; the men that make
money out of it. I blame the great party men of the land. Did not Mr.
Clay say he hoped he could slay a Mexican? (Cries, "No, he didn't.")
Yes, he did; said it on Forefather's day! Did not Mr. Webster, in the
streets of Philadelphia, bid the volunteers, misguided young men, go and
uphold the stars of their country? (Voices, "He did right!") No, he
should have said the stripes of his country, for every volunteer to this
wicked war is a stripe on the nation's back! Did not he declare this
war unconstitutional, and threaten to impeach the President who made it,
and then go and invest a son in it? Has it not been said here, "Our
country, howsoever bounded," bounded by robbery or bounded by right
lines! Has it not been said, all round, "Our country, right or wrong!"

I say I blame not so much the volunteers as the famous men who deceive
the nation! (Cries of "Throw him over, kill him, kill him," and a
flourish of bayonets.) Throw him over! you will not throw him over. Kill
him! I shall walk home unarmed and unattended, and not a man of you will
hurt one hair of my head.

I say again it is time for the people to take up this matter. Your
Congress will do nothing till you tell them what and how! Your 29th
Congress can do little good. Its sands are nearly run, God be thanked!
It is the most infamous Congress we ever had. We began with the Congress
that declared Independence, and swore by the Eternal Justice of God. We
have come down to the 29th Congress, which declared war existed by the
act of Mexico, declared a lie; the Congress that swore by the Baltimore
Convention! We began with George Washington, and have got down to James
K. Polk.

It is time for the people of Massachusetts to instruct their servants in
Congress to oppose this war; to refuse all supplies for it; to ask for
the recall of the army into our own land. It is time for us to tell
them that not an inch of slave territory shall ever be added to the
realm. Let us remonstrate; let us petition; let us command. If any class
of men have hitherto been remiss, let them come forward now and give us
their names--the merchants, the manufacturers, the whigs and the
democrats. If men love their country better than their party or their
purse, now let them show it.

Let us ask the General Court of Massachusetts to cancel every commission
which the Governor has given to the officers of the volunteers. Let us
ask them to disband the companies not yet mustered into actual service;
and then, if you like that, ask them to call a convention of the people
of Massachusetts, to see what we shall do in reference to the war; in
reference to the annexation of more territory; in reference to the
violation of the Constitution! (Loud groans from crowds of rude fellows
in several parts of the hall.) That was a tory groan; they never dared
groan so in Faneuil Hall before; not even the British tories, when they
had no bayonets to back them up! I say, let us ask for these things!

Your President tells us it is treason to talk so! Treason is it? treason
to discuss a war which the government made, and which the people are
made to pay for? If it be treason to speak against the war, what was it
to make the war, to ask for 50,000 men and $74,000,000 for the war? Why,
if the people cannot discuss the war they have got to fight and to pay
for, who under heaven can? Whose business is it, if it is not yours and
mine? If my country is in the wrong, and I know it, and hold my peace,
then I am guilty of treason, moral treason. Why, a wrong,--it is only
the threshold of ruin. I would not have my country take the next step.
Treason is it, to show that this war is wrong and wicked! Why, what if
George III., any time from '75 to '83, had gone down to Parliament and
told them it was treason to discuss the war then waging against these
colonies! What do you think the Commons would have said? What would the
Lords say? Why, that King, foolish as he was, would have been lucky, if
he had not learned there was a joint in his neck, and, stiff as he bore
him, that the people knew how to find it.

I do not believe in killing kings, or any other men; but I do say, in a
time when the nation was not in danger, that no British king, for two
hundred years past, would have dared call it treason to discuss the
war--its cause, its progress, or its termination!

Now is the time to act! Twice we have let the occasion slip; beware of
the third time! Let it be infamous for a New England man to enlist; for
a New-England merchant to loan his dollars, or to let his ships in aid
of this wicked war; let it be infamous for a manufacturer to make a
cannon, a sword, or a kernel of powder, to kill our brothers with,
while we all know that they are in the right, and we in the wrong.

I know my voice is a feeble one in Massachusetts. I have no mountainous
position from whence to look down and overawe the multitude; I have no
back-ground of political reputation to echo my words; I am but a plain
humble man; but I have a back-ground of Truth to sustain me, and the
Justice of Heaven arches over my head! For your sakes, I wish I had that
oceanic eloquence whose tidal flow should bear on its bosom the
drift-weed which politicians have piled together, and sap and sweep away
the sand hillocks of soldiery blown together by the idle wind; that
oceanic eloquence which sweeps all before it, and leaves the shore hard,
smooth and clean! But feeble as I am, let me beg of you, fellow-citizens
of Boston, men and brothers, to come forward and protest against this
wicked war, and the end for which it is waged. I call on the whigs, who
love their country better than they love the tariff of '42; I call on
the democrats, who think Justice is greater than the Baltimore
Convention,--I call on the whigs and democrats to come forward and join
with me in opposing this wicked war! I call on the men of Boston, on the
men of the old Bay State, to act worthy of their fathers, worthy of
their country, worthy of themselves! Men and brothers, I call on you all
to protest against this most infamous war, in the name of the State, in
the name of the country, in the name of man, yes, in the name of God:
Leave not your children saddled with a war debt, to cripple the nation's
commerce for years to come. Leave not your land cursed with slavery,
extended and extending, palsying the nation's arm and corrupting the
nation's heart. Leave not your memory infamous among the nations,
because you feared men, feared the Government; because you loved money
got by crime, land plundered in war, loved land unjustly bounded;
because you debased your country by defending the wrong she dared to do;
because you loved slavery; loved war, but loved not the Eternal Justice
of all-judging God. If my counsel is weak and poor, follow one stronger
and more manly. I am speaking to men; think of these things, and then
act like men.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] John Quincy Adams.




V.

A SERMON OF THE MEXICAN WAR.--PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, JUNE
25, 1848.


Soon after the commencement of the war against Mexico, I said something
respecting it in this place. But while I was printing the sermon, I was
advised to hasten the compositors in their work, or the war would be
over before the sermon was out. The advice was like a good deal of the
counsel that is given to a man who thinks for himself, and honestly
speaks what he unavoidably thinks. It is now more than two years since
the war began; I have hoped to live long enough to see it ended, and
hoped to say a word about it when over. A month ago, this day, the 25th
of May, the treaty of peace, so much talked of, was ratified by the
Mexican Congress. A few days ago, it was officially announced by
telegraph to your collector in Boston, that the war with Mexico was at
an end.

There are two things about this war quite remarkable. The first is, the
manner of its commencement. It was begun illegally, without the action
of the constitutional authorities; begun by the command of the President
of the United States, who ordered the American army into a territory
which the Mexicans claimed as their own. The President says "It is
ours," but the Mexicans also claimed it, and were in possession thereof
until forcibly expelled. This is a plain case, and as I have elsewhere
treated at length of this matter,[10] I will not dwell upon it again,
except to mention a single fact but recently divulged. It is well known
that Mr. Polk claimed the territory west of the Nueces and east of the
Rio Grande, as forming a part of Texas, and therefore as forming part of
the United States after the annexation of Texas. He contends that Mexico
began the war by attacking the American army while in that territory and
near the Rio Grande. But, from the correspondence laid before the
American Senate, in its secret session for considering the treaty, it
now appears that on the 10th of November, 1845, Mr. Polk instructed Mr.
Slidell to offer a relinquishment of American claims against Mexico,
amounting to $5,000,000 or $6,000,000, for the sake of having the Rio
Grande as the western boundary of Texas; yes, for that very territory
which he says was ours without paying a cent. When it was conquered, a
military government was established there, as in other places in Mexico.

The other remarkable thing about the war is, the manner of its
conclusion. The treaty of peace which has just been ratified by the
Mexican authorities, and which puts an end to the war, was negotiated by
a man who had no more legal authority than any one of us has to do it.
Mr. Polk made the war, without consulting Congress, and that body
adopted the war by a vote almost unanimous. Mr. Nicholas P. Trist made
the treaty, without consulting the President; yes, even after the
President had ordered him to return home. As the Congress adopted Mr.
Polk's war, so Mr. Polk adopted Mr. Trist's treaty, and the war
illegally begun is brought informally to a close. Mr. Polk is now in the
President's chair, seated on the throne of the Union, although he made
the war; and Mr. Trist, it is said, is under arrest for making the
treaty, meddling with what was none of his business.

       *       *       *       *       *

When the war began, there was a good deal of talk about it here; talk
against it. But, as things often go in Boston, it ended in talk. The
news-boys made money out of the war. Political parties were true to
their wonted principles, or their wonted prejudices. The friends of the
party in power could see no informality in the beginning of hostilities;
no injustice in the war itself; not even an impolicy. They were
offended if an obscure man preached against it of a Sunday. The
political opponents of the party in power talked against the war, as a
matter of course; but, when the elections came, supported the men that
made it with unusual alacrity--their deeds serving as commentary upon
their words, and making further remark thereon, in this place, quite
superfluous. Many men,--who, whatever other parts of Scripture they may
forget, never cease to remember that "Money answereth all
things,"--diligently set themselves to make money out of the war and the
new turn it gave to national affairs. Others thought that "glory" was a
good thing, and so engaged in the war itself, hoping to return, in due
time, all glittering with its honors.

So what with the one political party that really praised the war, and
the other who affected to oppose it, and with the commercial party, who
looked only for a market--this for merchandise and that for
"patriotism"--the friends of peace, who seriously and heartily opposed
the war, were very few in number. True, the "sober second thought" of
the people has somewhat increased their number; but they are still few,
mostly obscure men.

Now peace has come, nobody talks much about it; the news-boys have
scarce made a cent by the news. They fired cannons, a hundred guns on
the Common, for joy at the victory of Monterey; at Philadelphia,
Baltimore, Washington, New York, men illuminated their houses in honor
of the battle of Buena Vista, I think it was; the custom-house was
officially illuminated at Boston for that occasion. But we hear of no
cannons to welcome the peace. Thus far, it does not seem that a single
candle has been burnt in rejoicing for that. The newspapers are full of
talk, as usual; flags are flying in the streets; the air is a little
noisy with hurrahs, but it is all talk about the conventions at
Baltimore and Philadelphia; hurrahs for Taylor and Cass. Nobody talks of
the peace. Flags enough flap in the wind, with the names of rival
candidates; but nowhere do the stripes and stars bear Peace as their
motto. The peace now secured is purchased with such conditions imposed
on Mexico, that while every one will be glad of it, no man, that loves
justice, can be proud of it. Very little is said about the treaty. The
distinguished senator from Massachusetts did himself honor, it seems to
me, in voting against it on the ground that it enabled us to plunder
Mexico of her land. But the treaty contains some things highly honorable
to the character of the nation, of which we may well enough be proud, if
ever of any thing. I refer to the twenty-second and twenty-third
articles, which provide for arbitration between the nations, if future
difficulties should occur; and to the pains taken, in case of actual
hostilities, for the security of all unarmed persons, for the protection
of private property, and for the humane treatment of all prisoners
taken in war. These ideas, and the language of these articles, are
copied from the celebrated treaty between the United States and Prussia,
the treaty of 1785. It is scarcely needful to add, that they were then
introduced by that great and good man, Benjamin Franklin, one of the
negotiators of the treaty. They made a new epoch in diplomacy, and
introduced a principle previously unknown in the law of nations. The
insertion of these articles in the new treaty is, perhaps, the only
thing connected with the war, which an American can look upon with
satisfaction. Yet this fact excites no attention.[11]

Still, while so little notice is taken of this matter, in public and
private, it may be worth while for a minister, on Sunday, to say a word
about the peace; and, now the war is over, to look back upon it, to see
what it has cost, in money and in men, and what we have got by it; what
its consequences have been, thus far, and are likely to be for the
future; what new dangers and duties come from this cause interpolated
into our nation. We have been long promised "indemnity for the past, and
security for the future:" let us see what we are to be indemnified for,
and what secured against. The natural justice of the war I will not look
at now.

       *       *       *       *       *

First, then, of the cost of the war. Money is the first thing with a
good many men; the only thing with some; and an important thing with
all. So, first of all, let me speak of the cost of the war in dollars.
It is a little difficult to determine the actual cost of the war, thus
far--even its direct cost; for the bills are not all in the hands of
Government; and then, as a matter of political party-craft, the
Government, of course, is unwilling to let the full cost become known
before the next election is over. So it is to be expected that the
Government will keep the facts from the people as long as possible. Most
Governments would do the same. But Truth has a right of way everywhere,
and will recover it at last, spite of the adverse possession of a
political party. The indirect cost of the war must be still more
difficult to come at, and will long remain a matter of calculation, in
which it is impossible to reach certainty. We do not know yet the entire
cost of the Florida war, or the late war with England; the complete cost
of the Revolutionary war must forever be unknown.

It is natural for most men to exaggerate what favors their argument; but
when I cannot obtain the exact figures, I will come a good deal within
the probable amount. The military and naval appropriations for the year
ending in June, 1847, were $40,865,155.96; for the next year,
$31,377,679.92; the sum asked for the present year, till next June,
$42,224,000; making a whole of $114,466,835.88. It is true that all this
appropriation is not for the Mexican war, but it is also true that this
sum does not include all the appropriations for the war. Estimating the
sums already paid by the Government, the private claims presented and to
be presented, the $15,000,000 to be paid Mexico as purchase-money for
the territory we take from her, the $5,000,000 or $6,000,000 to be paid
our own citizens for their claims against her,--I think I am a good deal
within the mark when I say the war will have cost $150,000,000 before
the soldiers are at home, discharged, and out of the pay of the state.
In this sum I do not include the bounty-lands to be given to the
soldiers and officers, nor the pensions to be paid them, their widows
and orphans, for years to come. I will estimate that at $50,000,000
more, making a whole of $200,000,000 which has been paid or must be.
This is the direct cost to the Federal Government, and of course does
not include the sums paid by individual States, or bestowed by private
generosity, to feed and clothe the volunteers before they were mustered
into service. This may seem extravagant; but, fifty years hence, when
party spirit no longer blinds men's eyes, and when the whole is a
matter of history, I think it will be thought moderate, and be found a
good deal within the actual and direct cost. Some of this cost will
appear as a public debt. Statements recently made respecting it can
hardly be trusted, notwithstanding the authority on which they rest.
Part of this war debt is funded already, part not yet funded. When the
outstanding demands are all settled, and the treasury notes redeemed,
there will probably be a war debt of not less than $125,000,000. At
least, such is the estimate of an impartial and thoroughly competent
judge. But, not to exaggerate, let us call it only $100,000,000.

It will, perhaps, be said: Part of this money, all that is paid in
pensions, is a charity, and therefore no loss. But it is a charity paid
to men who, except for the war, would have needed no such aid; and,
therefore, a waste. Of the actual cost of the war, some three or four
millions have been spent in extravagant prices for hiring or purchasing
ships, in buying provisions and various things needed by the army, and
supplied by political favorites at exorbitant rates. This is the only
portion of the cost which is not a sheer waste; here the money has only
changed hands; nothing has been destroyed, except the honesty of the
parties concerned in such transactions. If a farmer hires men to help
him till the soil, the men earn their subsistence and their wages, and
leave, besides, a profit to their employer; when the season is over, he
has his crops and his improvements as the return for their pay and
subsistence. But for all that the soldier has consumed, for his wages,
his clothes, his food and drink, the fighting tools he has worn out, and
the ammunition he has expended, there is no available return to show;
all that is a clear waste. The beef is eaten up, the cloth worn away,
the powder is burnt, and what is there to show for it all? Nothing but
the "glory." You sent out sound men, and they come back, many of them,
sick and maimed; some of them are slain.

The indirect pecuniary cost of the war is caused, first, by diverting
some 150,000 men, engaged in the war directly or remotely, from the
works of productive industry, to the labors of war, which produce
nothing; and, secondly, by disturbing the regular business of the
country, first by the withdrawal of men from their natural work; then,
by withdrawing large quantities of money from the active capital of the
nation; and, finally, by the general uncertainty which it causes all
over the land, thus hindering men from undertaking or prosecuting
successfully their various productive enterprises. If 150,000 men earn
on the average but $200 apiece, that alone amounts to $30,000,000. The
withdrawal of such an amount of labor from the common industry of the
country must be seriously felt. At any rate, the nation has earned
$30,000,000 less than it would have done, if these men had kept about
their common work.

But the diversion of capital from its natural and pacific direction is a
greater evil in this case. America is rich, but her wealth consists
mainly in land, in houses, cattle, ships, and various things needed for
human comfort and industry. In money, we are poor. The amount of money
is small in proportion to the actual wealth of the nation, and also in
proportion to its activity which is indicated by the business of the
nation. In actual wealth, the free States of America are probably the
richest people in the world; but in money we are poorer than many other
nations. This is plain enough, though perhaps not very well known, and
is shown by the fact that interest, in European States, is from two to
four per cent. a year, and in America from six to nine. The active
capital of America is small. Now in this war, a national debt has
accumulated, which probably is or will soon be $100,000,000 or
$125,000,000. All this great sum of money has, of course, been taken
from the active capital of the country, and there has been so much less
for the use of the farmer, the manufacturer, and the merchant. But for
this war, these 150,000 men and these $100,000,000 would have been
devoted to productive industry; and the result would have been shown by
the increase of our annual earnings, in increased wealth and comfort.

Then war produced uncertainty, and that distrust amongst men. Therefore
many were hindered from undertaking new works, and others found their
old enterprises ruined at once. In this way there has been a great loss,
which cannot be accurately estimated. I think no man, familiar with
American industry, would rate this indirect loss lower than
$100,000,000; some, perhaps, at twice as much; but to avoid all
possibility of exaggeration, let us call it half the smallest of these
sums, or $50,000,000, as the complete pecuniary cost of the Mexican war,
direct and indirect.

What have we got to show for all this money? We have a large tract of
territory, containing, in all, both east and west of the Rio Grande, I
am told, between 700,000 and 800,000 square miles. Accounts differ as to
its value. But it appears, from the recent correspondence of Mr.
Slidell, that in 1845 the President offered Mexico, in money,
$25,000,000 for that territory which we now acquire under this new
treaty. Suppose it is worth more, suppose it is worth twice as much, or
all the indirect cost of the war ($50,000,000), then the $200,000,000
are thrown away.

Now, for this last sum, we could have built a sufficient railroad across
the Isthmus of Panama, and another across the continent, from the
Mississippi to the Pacific. If such a road, with its suitable equipment,
cost $100,000 a mile, and the distance should amount to 2,000 miles,
then the $200,000,000 would just pay the bills. That would have been the
greatest national work of productive industry in the world. In
comparison with it, the Lake Moeris and the Pyramids of Egypt, and the
Wall of China seem but the works of a child. It might be a work to be
proud of till the world ends; one, too, which would advance the
industry, the welfare, and general civilization of mankind to a great
degree, diminishing, by half, the distance round the globe; saving
millions of property and many lives each year; besides furnishing, it is
thought, a handsome income from the original outlay. But, perhaps, that
would not be the best use which might be made of the money; perhaps it
would not have been wise to undertake that work. I do not pretend to
judge of such matters, only to show what might be done with that sum of
money, if we were disposed to construct works of such a character. At
any rate, two Pacific railroads would be better than one Mexican war. We
are seldom aware of the cost of war. If a single regiment of dragoons
cost only $700,000 a year, which is a good deal less than the actual
cost, that is considerably more than the cost of twelve colleges like
Harvard University, with its schools for theology, law, and medicine;
its scientific school, observatory, and all. We are, taken as a whole, a
very ignorant people; and while we waste our school-money and
school-time, must continue so.

A great man, who towers far above the common heads, full of creative
thought, of the ideas which move the world, able to organize that
thought into institutions, laws, practical works; a man of a million, a
million-minded man, at the head of a nation, putting his thought into
them; ruling not barely by virtue of his position, but by the
intellectual and moral power to fill it; ruling not over men's heads,
but in their minds and hearts, and leading them to new fields of toil,
increasing their numbers, wealth, intelligence, comfort, morals,
piety--such a man is a noble sight; a Charlemagne, or a Genghis Khan, a
Moses leading his nation up from Egyptian bondage to freedom and the
promised land. How have the eyes of the world been fixed on Washington!
In darker days than ours, when all was violence, it is easy to excuse
such men if they were warriors also, and made, for the time, their
nation but a camp. There have been ages when the most lasting ink was
human blood. In our day, when war is the exception, and that commonly
needless, such a man, so getting the start of the majestic world, were a
far grander sight. And with such a man at the head of this nation, a
great man at the head of a free nation, able and energetic, and
enterprising as we are, what were too much to hope? As it is, we have
wasted our money, and got, the honor of fighting such a war.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let me next speak of the direct cost of the war in men. In April, 1846,
the entire army of the United States, consisted of 7,244 men; the naval
force of about 7,500. We presented the gratifying spectacle of a nation
20,000,000 strong, with a sea-coast of 3,000 or 4,000 miles, and only
7,000 or 8,000 soldiers, and as many armed men on the sea, or less than
15,000 in all! Few things were more grateful to an American than this
thought, that his country was so nearly free from the terrible curse of
a standing army. At that time, the standing army of France was about
480,000 men; that of Russia nearly 800,000 it is said. Most of the
officers in the American army and navy, and most of the rank and file,
had probably entered the service with no expectation of ever shedding
the blood of men. The navy and army were looked on as instruments of
peace; as much so as the police of a city.

The first of last January, there was, in Mexico, an American army of
23,695 regular soldiers, and a little more than 50,000 volunteers, the
number cannot now be exactly determined, making an army of invasion of
about 75,000 men. The naval forces, also, had been increased to 10,000.
Estimating all the men engaged in the service of the army and navy; in
making weapons of war and ammunition; in preparing food and clothing; in
transporting those things and the soldiers from place to place, by land
or sea, and in performing the various o

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/34573