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Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 2 (of 3)

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Title: Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 2 (of 3)

Author: Theodore Parker


        
Release date: December 13, 2010 [eBook #34637]
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Language: English

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Produced by Julia Miller, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://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. II.

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.




CONTENTS OF VOLUME II.


I.

A SERMON OF THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF BOSTON.--Preached
at the Melodeon, on Sunday, February 18, 1849

                                                               PAGE 1

II.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE MOST CHRISTIAN USE OF THE
SUNDAY.--A Sermon preached at the Melodeon, on Sunday,
January 30, 1848                                                   56

III.

A SERMON OF IMMORTAL LIFE.--Preached at the Melodeon
on Sunday, September 20, 1846                                     105

IV.

THE PUBLIC EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE.--An Address
delivered before the Onondaga Teachers' Institute at Syracuse,
New York, October 4, 1849                                         139

V.

THE POLITICAL DESTINATION OF AMERICA, AND THE
SIGNS OF THE TIMES.--An Address delivered before
several literary Societies in 1848                                198

VI.

A DISCOURSE OCCASIONED BY THE DEATH OF JOHN
QUINCY ADAMS.--Delivered at the Melodeon, on Sunday,
March 5, 1848                                                     252

VII.

A SPEECH AT A MEETING OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY
SOCIETY, TO CELEBRATE THE ABOLITION OF
SLAVERY BY THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, April 6, 1848                     331

VIII.

A SPEECH AT FANEUIL HALL, BEFORE THE NEW ENGLAND
ANTI-SLAVERY CONVENTION, May 31, 1848                             344

IX.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE FREE SOIL PARTY, AND THE
ELECTION OF GENERAL TAYLOR, December, 1848                        360




A SERMON OF THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF BOSTON.--PREACHED AT THE
MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1849.

MATTHEW VIII. 20.

    By their fruits ye shall know them.


Last Sunday I said something of the moral condition of Boston; to-day I
ask your attention to a Sermon of the Spiritual Condition of Boston. I
use the word spiritual in its narrower sense, and speak of the condition
of this town in respect to piety. A little while since, in a sermon of
piety, I tried to show that love of God lay at the foundation of all
manly excellence, and was the condition of all noble, manly development;
that love of truth, love of justice, love of love, were respectively the
condition of intellectual, moral, and affectional development, and that
they were also respectively the intellectual, moral, and affectional
forms of piety; that the love of God as the Infinite Father, the
totality of truth, justice, and love was the general condition of the
total development of man's spiritual powers. But I showed, that
sometimes this piety, intellectual, moral, affectional or total, did not
arrive at self-consciousness; the man only unconsciously loving the
Infinite in one or all these modes, and in such cases the man was a
loser by frustrating his piety, and allowing it to stop in the truncated
form of unconsciousness.

Now what is in you will appear out of you; if piety be there in any of
these forms, in either mode, it will come out; if not there, its fruits
cannot appear. You may reason forward or backward: if you know piety
exists, you may foretell its appearance; if you find fruits thereof, you
may reason back and be sure of its existence. Piety is love of God as
God, and as we only love what we are like, and in that degree, so it is
also a likeness to God. Now it is a general doctrine in Christendom that
divinity must manifest itself; and, in assuming the highest form of
manifestation known to us, divinity becomes humanity. However, that
doctrine is commonly taught in the specific and not generic form, and is
enforced by an historical and concrete example, but not by way of a
universal thesis. It appears thus: The Christ was God; as such He must
manifest himself; the form of manifestation was that of a complete and
perfect man. I reject the concrete example, but accept the universal
doctrine on which the special dogma of the Trinity is erected. From that
I deduce this as a general rule: If you follow the law of your nature,
and are simple and true to that, as much of godhead as there is in you,
so much of manhood will come out of you, and, as much of manhood comes
out of you, so much of godhead was there within you; as much subjective
divinity, so much objective humanity.

Such being the case, the demands you can make on a man for manliness
must depend for their answer on the amount of piety on deposit in his
character; so it becomes important to know the condition of this town in
respect of piety, for if this be not right in the above sense, nothing
else is right; or, to speak more clerically, "Unless the Lord keep the
city, the watchman waketh but in vain," and unless piety be developed or
a-developing in men, it is vain for the minister to sit up late of a
Saturday night to concoct his sermon, and to rise up early of a Sunday
morning to preach the same; he fights but as one that beateth the air,
and spends his strength for that which is nought. They are in the right,
therefore, who first of all things demand piety: so let us see what
signs or proof we have, and of what amount of piety in Boston.

To determine this, we must have some test by which to judge of the
quality, distinguishing piety from impiety, and some standard whereby to
measure the quantity thereof; for though you may know what piety is in
you, I what is in me, and God what is in both and in all the rest of us,
it is plain that we can only judge of the existence of piety in other
men, and measure its quantity by an outward manifestation thereof, in
some form which shall serve at once as a trial test and a standard
measure.

Now, then, as I mentioned in that former sermon, it is on various sides
alleged that there are two outward manifestations of piety, a good deal
unlike: each is claimed by some men as the exclusive trial test and
standard measure. Let me say a word of each.

I. Some contend for what I call the conventional standard; that is, the
manifestation of piety by means of certain prescribed forms. Of these
forms there are three modes or degrees: namely, first, the form of
bodily attendance on public worship; second, the belief in certain
doctrines, not barely because they are proven true, or known without
proof, but because they are taught with authority; and third, a passive
acquiescence in certain forms and ceremonies, or an active performance
thereof.

II. The other I call the natural standard; that is, the manifestation of
piety in the natural form of morality in its various degrees and modes
of action.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is plain, that the amount of piety in a man or a town, will appear
very different when tested by one or the other of these standards. It
may be that very little water runs through the wooden trough which feeds
the saw-mill at Niagara, and yet a good deal, blue and bounding, may
leap over the rock, adown its natural channel. In a matter of this
importance, when taking account of a stock so precious as piety, it is
but fair to try it by both standards.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let us begin with the conventional standard, and examine piety by its
manifestation in the ecclesiastical forms. Here is a difficulty at the
outset, in determining upon the measure, for there is no one and general
ecclesiastical standard, common to all parties of Christians, from the
Catholic to the Quaker; each measures by its own standard, but denies
the correctness of all the others. It is as if a foot were declared the
unit of long measure, and then the actual foot of the chief justice of a
State, were taken as the rule by which to correct all measurements; then
the foot would vary as you went from North Carolina to South, and, in
any one State, would vary with the health of the judge. However, to do
what can be done with a measure thus uncertain, it is plain, that,
estimated by any ecclesiastical standard, the amount of piety is small.
There is, as men often say, "A general decline of piety;" that is a
common complaint, recorded and registered. But what makes the matter
worse to the ecclesiastical philosopher, and more appalling to the
complainers, is this: it is a decline of long standing. The disease
which is thus lamented is said to be acute, but is proved to be chronic
also; only it would seem, from the lamentations of some modern
Jeremiahs, that the decline went on with accelerated velocity, and, the
more chronic the disease was, the acuter it also became.

Tried by this standard, things seem discouraging. To get a clearer view,
let us look a little beyond our own borders, at first, and then come
nearer home. The Catholic church complains of a general defection. The
majority of the Christian church confesses that the Protestant
Reformation was not a revival of religion, not a "Great awakening," but
a great falling to sleep; the faith of Luther and Calvin was a great
decline of religion--a decline of piety in the ecclesiastical form; that
modern philosophy, the physics of Galileo and Newton, the metaphysics of
Descartes and of Kant, mark another decline of religion--a decline of
piety in the philosophical form; that all the modern democracy of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, marks a yet further decline of
religion--a decline of piety in the political form; that all the modern
secular societies, for removing the evils of men and their sins, mark a
yet fourth decline of religion--a decline of piety in the philanthropic
form. Certainly, when measured by the mediaeval standard of Catholicism,
these mark four great declensions of piety, for, in all four, the old
principle of subordination to an external and personal authority is set
aside.

All over Europe this decline is still going on; ecclesiastical
establishments are breaking down; other establishments are a-building
up. Pius the Ninth seems likely to fulfil his own prophecy, and be the
last of the Popes; I mean the last with temporal power. There is a great
schism in the north of Europe; the Germans will be Catholics, but no
longer Roman. The old forms of piety, such as service in Latin, the
withholding of the Bible from the people, compulsory confession, the
ungrateful celibacy of a reluctant priesthood--all these are protested
against. It is of no avail that the holy coat of Jesus, at Treves, works
greater miracles than the apostolical napkins and aprons; of no avail
that the Virgin Mary appeared on the nineteenth of September, 1846, to
two shepherd-children, at La Salette, in France. What are such things to
Ronge and Wessenberg? Neither the miraculous coat, nor the miraculous
mother, avails aught against this untoward generation, charm they never
so wisely. The decline of piety goes on. By the new Constitution of
France, all forms of religion are equal; the Catholic and the
Protestant, the Mahometan and the Jew, are equally sheltered under the
broad shield of the law. Even Spain, the fortress walled and moated
about, whither the spirit of the middle ages retired and shut herself up
long since, womanning her walls with unmanly priests and kings, with
unfeminine queens and nuns--even Spain fails with the general failure.
British capitalists buy up her convents and nunneries, to turn them into
woollen mills. Monks and nuns forget their beads in some new
handicraft; sister Mary, who sat still in the house, is now also busy
with serving, careful, indeed, about more things than formerly, but not
cumbered nor troubled as before. Meditative Rachels, and Hannahs, long
unblest, who sat in solitude, have now become like practical Dorcas,
making garments for the poor; the Bank is become more important than the
Inquisition. The order of St. Francis d'Assisi, of St. Benedict, even of
St. Dominic himself, is giving way before the new order of Arkwright,
Watt, and Fulton,--the order of the spinning jenny and the power-loom.
It is no longer books on the miraculous conception, or meditations on
the five wounds of the Saviour, or commentaries on the song of songs
which is Solomon's, that get printed there: but fiery novels of Eugene
Sue, and George Sand; and so extremes meet.

Protestant establishments share the same peril. A new sect of
Protestants rises up in Germany, who dissent as much from the letter and
spirit of Protestantism, as the Protestants from Catholicism; men that
will not believe the infallibility of the Bible, the doctrine of the
Trinity, the depravity of man, the eternity of future punishment, nor
justification by faith--a justification before God, for mere belief
before men. The new spirit gets possession of new men, who cannot be
written down, nor even howled down. Excommunication or abuse does no
good on such men as Bauer, Strauss, and Schwegler; and it answers none
of their questions. It seems pretty clear, that in all the north of
Germany, within twenty years, there will be entire freedom of worship,
for all sects, Protestant and Catholic.

In England, Protestantism has done its work less faithfully than in
Germany. The Protestant spirit of England came here two hundred years
ago, so that new and Protestant England is on the west of the ocean; in
England, an established church lies there still, an iceberg in the
national garden. But even there, the decline of the ecclesiastical form
of piety is apparent: the new bishops must not sit in the House of
Lords, till the old ones die out, for the number of lords spiritual must
not increase, though the temporal may; the new attempt, at Oxford and
elsewhere, to restore the Middle Ages, will not prosper. Bring back all
the old rites and forms into Leeds and Manchester; teach men the
theology of Thomas Aquinas, or of St. Bernard; bid them adore the
uplifted wafer, as the very God, men who toil all day with iron mills,
who ride in steam-drawn coaches, and talk by lightning in a whisper,
from the Irk to the Thames,--they will not consent to the philosophy or
the theology of the Middle Ages, nor be satisfied with the old forms of
piety, which, though too elevated for their fathers in the time of
Elizabeth, are yet too low for them, at least too antiquated. Dissenters
have got into the House of Commons; the test-act is repealed, and a man
can be a captain in the army, or a postmaster in a village, without
first taking the Lord's Supper, after the fashion of the Church of
England. Some men demand the abandonment of tithes, the entire
separation of Church and State, the return to "The voluntary principle"
in religion. "The battering ram which levelled old Sarum," and other
boroughs as corrupt, now beats on the church, and the "Church is in
danger." Men complain of the decline of piety in England. An intelligent
and very serious writer, not long ago, lamenting this decline, in proof
thereof, relates, that formerly men began their last wills, "In the name
of God, Amen;" and headed bills of lading with, "Shipped in good order,
by the grace of God;" that indictments for capital crimes charged the
culprit with committing felony, "At the instigation of the devil," and
now, he complains, these forms have gone out of use.

In America, in New England, in Boston, when measured by that standard,
the same decline of piety is apparent. It is often said that our
material condition is better than our moral; that in advance of our
spiritual condition. There is a common clerical complaint of a certain
thinness in the churches; men do not give their bodily attendance, as
once they did; they are ready enough to attend lectures, two or three in
a week, no matter how scientific and abstract, or how little connected
with their daily work, yet they cannot come to the church without
teasing beforehand, nor keep awake while there. It is said the minister
is not respected as formerly. True, a man of power is respected, heard,
sought, and followed, but it is for his power, for his words of grace
and truth, not for his place in a pulpit; he may have more influence as
a man, but less as a clergyman. Ministers lament a prevalent disbelief
of their venerable doctrines; that there is a concealed skepticism in
regard to them, often not concealed. This, also, is a well-founded
complaint; the well-known dogmas of theology were never in worse repute;
there was never so large a portion of the community in New England who
were doubtful of the Trinity, of eternal damnation, of total depravity,
of the atonement, of the Godhead of Jesus, of the miracles of the New
Testament, and of the truth of every word of the Bible. A complaint is
made, that the rites and forms which are sometimes called "the
ordinances of religion," are neglected; that few men join the church,
and though the old hedge is broken down before the altar, yet the number
of communicants diminishes, and it is no longer able-headed men, the
leaders of society, who come; that the ordinances seem haggard and
ghastly to young men, who cannot feed their hungry souls on such a thin
pittance of spiritual aliment as these afford; that the children are not
baptized. These things are so; so in Europe, Catholic and Protestant; so
in America, so in Boston. Notwithstanding the well-founded complaint
that our modern churches are too costly for the times, we do not build
temples which bear so high a proportion to our wealth as the early
churches of Boston; the attendance at meeting does not increase as the
population; the ministers are not prominent, as in the days of Wilson,
of Cotton, and of Norton; their education is not now in the same
proportion to the general culture of the times. Harvard College,
dedicated to "Christ and the Church," designed at first chiefly for the
education of the clergy, graduates few ministers; theological literature
no longer overawes all other. The number of church members was never so
small in proportion to the voters as now; the number of Protestant
births never so much exceeded the number of Protestant baptisms. Young
men of superior ability and superior education have little affection for
the ministry; take little interest in the welfare of the church. Nay,
youths descended from a wealthy family seldom look that way. It is poor
men's sons, men of obscure family, who fill the pulpits; often,
likewise, men of slender ability, eked out with an education
proportionately scant. The most active members of the churches are
similar in position, ability, and culture. These are undeniable facts.
They are not peculiar to New England. You find them wherever the
voluntary principle is resorted to. In England, in Catholic countries,
you find the old historic names in the Established Church; there is no
lack of aristocratic blood in clerical veins; but there and everywhere
the church seems falling astern of all other craft which can keep the
sea.

Since these things are so, men who have only the conventional standard
wherewith to measure the amount of piety, only that test to prove its
existence by, think we are rapidly going to decay; that the tabernacle
is fallen down, and no man rises to set it up. They complain that Zion
is in distress; theological newspapers lament that there are no revivals
to report; that "The Lord has withheld His arm," and does not "pour out
His Spirit upon the churches." Ghastly meetings are held by men with
sincere and noble heart, but saddened face; speeches are made which seem
a groan of linked wailings long drawn out. Men mourn at the infidelity
of the times, at the coldness of some, at the deadness of others. All
the sects complain of this, yet each loves to attribute the deadness of
the rival sects to their special theology; it is Unitarianism which is
choking the Unitarians, say their foes, and the Unitarians know how to
retort after the same fashion. The less enlightened put the blame of
this misfortune on the good God who has somehow "withheld His hand," or
omitted to "pour out His Spirit,"--the people perishing for want of the
open vision. Others put the blame on mankind; some on "poor human
nature," which is not what might have been expected, not perceiving
that if the fault be there it is not for us to remedy, and if God made
man a bramble-bush, that no wailing will make him bear figs. Yet others
refer this condition to the use made of human nature, which certainly is
a more philosophical way of looking at the matter.

Now there is one sect which has done great service in former days, which
is, I think, still doing something to enlighten and liberalize the land,
and, I trust, will yet do more, more even than it consciously intends.
The name of Unitarian is deservedly dear to many of us, who yet will not
be shackled by any denominational fetters. This sect has always been
remarkable for a certain gentlemanly reserve about all that pertained to
the inward part of religion; other faults it might have, but it did not
incur the reproach of excessive enthusiasm, or a spirituality too
sublimated and transcendental for daily use. This sect has long been a
speckled bird among the denominations, each of which has pecked at her,
or at least cawed with most unmelodious croak against this new-fledged
sect. It was said the Unitarians had "denied the Lord that bought them;"
that theirs was the church of unbelief--not the church of Christ, but of
No-Christ; that they had a Bible of their own, and a thin, poor Bible,
too; that their ways were ways of destruction; "Touch not, taste not,
handle not," was to be written on their doctrines; that they had not
even the grace of lukewarmness, but were moral and stone-cold; that
they looked fair on the side turned towards man, but on the Godward side
it was a blank wall with no gate, nor window, nor loop-hole, nor eyelet
for the Holy Ghost to come through; that their prayers were only a show
of devotion to cover up the hard rock of the flinty heart, or the frozen
ground of morality. Their faith, it was said, was only a conviction
after the case was proven by unimpeachable evidence, and good for
nothing; while belief without evidence, or against proof, seems to be
the right ecclesiastical talisman.

For a long time the Unitarian sect did not grumble unduly, but set
itself to promote the cultivation of reason and apply that to religion;
to cultivate morality and apply it to life; and to demand the most
entire personal freedom for all men in all matters pertaining to
religion. Hence came its merits; they were very great merits, too, and
not at all the merits of the times, held in common with the other sects.
I need not dwell on this, and the good works of Unitarianism, in this
the most Unitarian city in the world; but as a general thing the
Unitarians, it seems to me, did neglect the culture of piety; and of
course their morality, while it lasted, would be unsatisfactory, and in
time would wither and dry up because it had no deepness of earth to grow
out of. The Unitarians, as a general thing, began outside, and sought to
work inward, proceeding from the special to the general, by what might
be called the inductive mode of religious culture; that was the form
adopted in pulpits, and in families so far as there was any religious
education attempted in private. That is not the method of nature, where
all growth is the development of a living germ, which by an inward power
appropriates the outward things it needs, and grows thereby. Hence came
the defects of Unitarianism, and they were certainly very great defects;
but they came almost unavoidably from the circumstances of the times.
The sensational philosophy was the only philosophy that prevailed; the
Orthodox sects had always rejected a part of that philosophy, not in the
name of science, but of piety, and they supplied its place not with a
better philosophy, but with tradition, speaking with an authority which
claimed to be above human nature. It was not in the name of reason that
they rejected a false philosophy, but in the name of religion often
denounced all philosophy and the reason which demanded it. The
Unitarians rejected that portion of Orthodoxy, became more consistent
sensationalists, and arrived at results which we know. Now it is easy to
see their error; not difficult to avoid it; but forty or fifty years ago
it was almost impossible not to fall into this mistake. Sometimes it
seems as if the Unitarians were half conscious of this defect, and so
dared not be original, but borrowed Orthodox weapons, or continued to
use Trinitarian phrases long after they had blunted those weapons of
their point, and emptied the phrases of their former sense. In the
controversy between the Orthodox and Unitarians, neither party was
wholly right: the Unitarians had reason to charge the Orthodox with
debasing man's nature, and representing God as not only unworthy, but
unjust, and somewhat odious; the Trinitarians were mainly right in
charging us with want of conscious piety, with beginning to work at the
wrong end; but at the same time it must be remembered, that, in
proportion to their numbers, the Unitarians have furnished far more
philanthropists and reformers than any of the other sects. It is time to
confess this on both sides.

For a long time the Unitarian sect did not complain much of the decline
of piety; it did not care to have an organization, loving personal
freedom too well for that, and it had not much denominational feeling;
indeed, its members were kept together, not so much by an agreement and
unity of opinion among themselves, as by a unity of opposition from
without; it was not the hooks on their shields that held the legion
together with even front, but the pressure of hostile shields crowded
upon them from all sides. They did not believe in spasmodic action; if a
body was dead, they gave it burial, without trying to galvanize it into
momentary life, not worth the spark it cost; they knew that a small
cloud may make a good many flashes in the dark, but that many
lightnings cannot make light. They stood apart from the violent efforts
of other churches to get converts. The converts they got commonly
adhered to their faith, and in this respect differed a good deal from
those whom "Revivals" brought into other churches; with whom
Christianity sprung up in a night, and in a night also perished. Some
years ago, when this city was visited and ravaged by Revivals, the
Unitarians kept within doors, gave warning of the danger, and suffered
less harm and loss from that tornado than any of the sects. Unitarianism
seems, in this city, to have done its original work; so the company is
breaking up by degrees, and the men are going off, to engage in other
business, to weed other old fields, or to break up new land, each man
following his own sense of duty, and for himself determining whether to
go or stay. But at the same time, an attempt is made to keep the company
together; to cultivate a denominational feeling; to put hooks and
staples on the shields which no longer offer that formidable and even
front; to teach all trumpets to give the same sectarian bray, all voices
to utter the same war-cry. The attempt does not succeed; the ranks are
disordered, the trumpets give an uncertain sound, and the soldiers do
not prepare themselves for denominational battle; nay, it often happens
that the camp lacks the two sinews of war--both money, and men. Hence
the denominational view of religious affairs has undergone a change; I
make no doubt a real and sincere change, though I know this has been
denied, and the change thought only official. The men I refer to are
sincere and devout men; some of them quite above the suspicion of mere
official conduct. This sect is now the loudest in its wailing; these
Christian Jeremiahs tell us that we do not realize spiritual things,
that we are all dead men, that there is no health in us. These cold
Unitarian Thomases crowd unwontedly together in public to bewail the
spiritual weather, the dearth of piety in Boston, the "General decline
of religion" in New England. Church unto church raises the Macedonian
cry, "Come over and help us!" The opinion seems general that piety is in
a poor way, and must have watchers, the strongest medicine, and nursing
quite unusual, or it will soon be all over, and Unitarianism will give
up the ghost. Various causes have I heard assigned for the malady; some
think that there has been over-much preaching of philosophy, though
perhaps there is not evidence to convict any one man in particular of
the offence; that philosophy is the dog in the manger, who keeps the
hungry Unitarian flock from their spiritual hay, and cut-straw, which
are yet of not the smallest use to him. But look never so sharp, and you
do not find this dangerous beast in the neighborhood of the fold. Others
think that there has been also an excess of moral preaching, against the
prevalent sins of the nation, I suppose--but few individuals seem
liable to conviction on that charge. Yet others think this decline comes
from the fact that the terrors have not been duly and sufficiently
administered from the pulpit; that while Catholics and Methodists thrive
under such influences, the Unitarian widows are neglected in the weekly
ministration of terror and of threat; that there has not been so much an
excess of lightning in the form of philosophy or morality, but only a
lack of thunder.

This temporary movement among the Unitarians of Boston is natural; in
some respects it is what our fathers would have called "judicial." The
Unitarians have been cold, have looked more at the outward
manifestations of goodness than at the inward spirit of piety which was
to make the manifestations; they have not had an excess of philosophy,
or of morality, but a defect of piety. They have been more respectable
than pious. They have not always quite rightly appreciated the
enthusiasm of sterner and more austere sects; not always done justice to
the inwardness of religion those sects sought to promote. When their
churches get a little thin, and their denominational affairs a little
disturbed, it is quite natural these Unitarians should look after the
cause and pass over to lamentations at the present state of things;
while looking at the community from the new point of view, it is quite
natural that they should suppose piety on the decline, and religion
dying out. Yes, in general it is plain that, if men have no eyes but
conventional eyes, no spirit but that of the ecclesiastical order they
serve in, and of the denomination they belong to, it is natural for them
to think that because piety does not flow in the old ecclesiastical
channel, it does not flow anywhere, and there is none at all to run.
Thus it is easy to explain the complaint of the Catholics at the great
defection of the most enlightened nations of Europe; the lamentation of
the Protestants at the heresy of the most enlightened portion of their
sect; and the Unitarian wail over the general decline of piety in the
city of Boston. Some men can only judge the present age by the
conventional standard of the past, and as the old form of piety does not
appear, they must conclude there is no piety.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let us now recur to the other or natural standard, and look at the
manifestation of piety in the form of morality. Last Sunday I spoke of
our moral condition; and it appeared that morals were in a low state
here when compared with the ideal morals of Christianity. Now as the
outward deed is but the manifestation of the inward life, and objective
humanity the index of subjective divinity, so the low state of morals
proves a low state of piety; if the heart of this town was right towards
God, then would its hand also be right towards man. I am one of those
who for long years have lamented the want of vital piety in this
people. We not only do not realize spiritual things, but we do not make
them our ideals. I see proofs of this want of piety in the low morals of
trade, of the public press; in poverty, intemperance, and crime; in the
vices and social wrongs touched on the last Sunday. I judge the tree by
its fruit. But it is not on this ground that the ecclesiastical
complaint is based. Men who make so much ado about the absence of piety,
do not appeal for proof thereof to the great vices and prominent sins of
the times; they see no sign of that in our trade and our politics; in
the misery that festers in putrid lanes, one day to breed a pestilence,
which it were even cheaper to hinder now, than cure at a later time;
nobody mentions as proof the Mexican War, the political dishonesty of
officers, the rapacity of office-seekers, the servility of men who will
tamely suffer the most sacred rights of three millions of men to be
trodden into the dust. Matters which concern millions of men came up
before your Congress; the great Senator of Massachusetts loitered away
the time of the session here in Boston, managing a lawsuit for a few
thousand dollars, and no fault was publicly found with such neglect of
public duty; but men see no lack of piety indicated by this fact, and
others like it; they find signs of that lack in empty pews, in a
deserted communion-table, in the fact that children, though brought up
to reverence truth and justice, to love man and to love God, are not
baptized with water; or in the fact that Unitarianism or Trinitarianism
is on the decline! How many wailings have we all heard or read, because
the Puritan churches of Boston have not kept the faith of their grim
founders; what lamentations at the rising up of a sect which refuses the
doctrine of the Trinity, or at the appearance of a few men who,
neglecting the common props of Christianity, rest it, for its basis, on
the nature of man and the nature of God: though almost all the eminent
philanthropy of the day is connected with these men, yet they are still
called "Infidel," and reviled on all hands!

The state of things mentioned in the last sermon does indicate a want of
piety, a deep and a great want. I do not see signs of that in the debt
and decay of churches, in absence from meetings, in doubt of theological
dogmas, in neglect of forms and ceremonies which once were of great
value; but I do see it in the low morals of trade, of the press; in the
popular vices. On a national scale I see it in the depravity of
political parties, in the wicked war we have just fought, in the slavery
we still tolerate and support. Yes, as I look on the churches of this
city, I see a want of piety in the midst of us. If eminent piety were in
them, and allowed to follow its natural bent, it would come out of them
in the form of eminent humanity; they would lead in the philanthropies
of this day, where they hardly follow. In this condition of the churches
I see a most signal proof of the low estate of piety; they do not
manifest a love of truth, which is the piety of the intellect; nor a
love of justice, which is the piety of the moral sense; nor a love of
love, which is the piety of the affections; nor a love of God as the
Infinite Father of all men, which is the total piety of the whole soul.
For lack of this internal divinity there is a lack of external humanity.
Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? This is what I complain
of, what I mourn over.

The clergymen of this city are most of them sincere men, I doubt not;
some of them men of a superior culture; many of them laborious men;
most, perhaps all of them, deeply interested in the welfare of the
churches, and the promotion of piety. But how many of them are marked
and known for their philanthropy, distinguished for their zeal in
putting down any of the major sins of our day, zealous in any work of
reform? I fear I can count them all on the fingers of a single hand; yet
there are enough to bewail the departure of monastic forms, and of the
theology which led men in the dimness of a darker age, but cannot shine
in the rising light of this. I find no fault with these men; I blame
them not; it is their profession which so blinds their eyes. They are as
wise and as valiant as the churches let them be. What sect in all this
land ever cared about temperance, education, peace betwixt nations, or
even the freedom of all men in our own, so much as this sect cares for
the baptizing of children with water, and that for the baptizing of men;
this for the doctrine of the Trinity, and all for the infallibility of
the Bible? Do you ask the sects to engage in the work of extirpating
concrete wrong? It is in vain; each reformer tries it--the mild sects
answer, "I pray thee have me excused;" the sterner sects reply with
awful speech. A distinguished theological journal of another city thinks
the philanthropies of this day are hostile to piety, and declares that
true spiritual Christianity never prevails where men think slavery is a
sin. A distinguished minister of a highly respectable sect declares the
temperance societies unchristian, and even atheistical. He reasons thus:
The church is an instrument appointed by God and Christ, to overcome all
forms of wrong, intemperance among the rest; to neglect this instrument
and devise another, a temperance society, to wit, is to abandon the
institutions of God and Christ, and so it is unchristian and
atheistical. In other words, here is intemperance, a stone of stumbling,
and a rock of offence, in our way; there is an old wooden beetle, which
has done great service of old time, and is said to have been made by
God's own hand; men smite therewith the stone or smite it not; still it
lies there a stone of stumbling and a stone of shame; other men
approach, and with a sledge-hammer of well-tempered steel smite the
rock, and break off piece after piece, smoothing the rough
impracticable way; they call on men to come to their aid, with such
weapons as they will. But our minister bids them beware; the beetle is
"of the Lord," the iron which breaks the rock in pieces is an
unchristian and atheistical instrument. Yet was this minister an
earnest, a pious, and a self-denying man, who sincerely sought the good
of men. He had been taught to know no piety but in the church's form. I
would not do dishonor to the churches; they have done great service,
they still do much; I would only ask them to be worthy of their
Christian name. They educate men a little, and allow them to approach
emancipation, but never to be free and go alone.

       *       *       *       *       *

I see much to complain of in the condition of piety; yet nothing to be
alarmed at. When I look back, it seems worse still, far worse. There has
not been "A decline of piety" in Boston of late years. Religion is not
sick. Last Sunday, I spoke of the great progress made in morality within
fifty years; I said it was an immense progress within two hundred years.
Now, there cannot be such a progress in the outward manifestation
without a corresponding and previous development of the inward
principle. Morality cannot grow without piety more than an oak without
water, earth, sun, and air. Let me go back one hundred years; see what a
difference between the religious aspect of things then and now!
certainly there has been a great growth in spirituality since that day.
I am not to judge men's hearts; I may take their outward lives as the
test and measure of their inward piety. Will you say the outward life
never completely comes up to that? It does so as completely now as then.
Compare the toleration of these times with those; compare the
intelligence of the community; the temperance, sobriety, chastity,
virtue in general. Look at what is now done in a municipal way by towns
and States for mankind; see the better provision made for the poor, for
the deaf, the dumb, the blind, for the insane, even for the idiot; see
what is done for the education of the people--in schools, academies,
colleges, and by public lectures; what is done for the criminal to
prevent the growth of crime. See what an amelioration of the penal laws;
how men are saved and restored to society, who had once been wholly
lost. See what is done by philanthropy still more eminent, which the
town and State have not yet overtaken and enacted into law; by the
various societies for reform--those for temperance, for peace, for the
discipline of prisons, for the discharged convicts, for freeing the
slave. See this Anti-slavery party, which, in twenty years, has become
so powerful throughout all the Northern States, so strong that it cannot
be howled down, and men begin to find it hardly safe to howl over it; a
party which only waits the time to lift up its million arms, and hurl
the hateful institution of slavery out of the land! All these humane
movements come from a divine piety in the soul of man. A tree which
bears such fruits is not a dead tree; is not wholly to be despaired of;
is not yet in a "decline," and past all hope of recovery. Is the age
wanting in piety, which makes such efforts as these? Yes, you will say,
because it does no more. I agree to this, but it is rich in piety
compared to other times. Ours is an age of faith; not of mere belief in
the commandments of men, but of faith in the nature of man and the
commandments of God.

This prevailing and contagious complaint about the decline of religion
is not one of the new things of our time. In the beginning of the last
century, Dr. Colman, first minister of the church in Brattle street,
lamented in small capitals over the general decline of piety:--"The
venerable name of religion and of the church is made a sham pretence for
the worst of villanies, for uncharitableness and unnatural oppression of
the pious and the peaceable;" "the perilous times are come, wherein men
are lovers only of their own selves." "Ah, calamitous day," says he,
"into which we are fallen, and into which the sins of our infatuated age
have brought us!" He looks back to the founders of New England; they
"were rich in faith, and heirs of a better world," "men of whom the
world was not worthy;" "they laid in a stock of prayers for us which
have brought down many blessings on us already." Samuel Willard
bewailed "the checkered state of the gospel church;" it was "in every
respect a gloomy day, and covered with thick clouds."

We retire yet further back, to the end of the seventeenth century; a
hundred and sixty or seventy years ago, Dr. Increase Mather, not only in
his own pulpit, but also at "the great and Thursday lecture," lamented
over "the degeneracy and departing glory of New England." He complained
that there was a neglect of the Sabbath, of the ordinances, and of
family worship; he groaned at the lax discipline of the churches, and
looked, says another, "as fearfully on the growing charity as on the
growing vices of the age." He called the existing generation "an
unconverted generation." "Atheism and profaneness," says he, "have come
to a prodigious height;" "God will visit" for these things; "God is
about to open the windows of heaven, and pour down the cataracts of His
wrath ere this generation ... is passed away." If a comet appeared in
the sky, it was to admonish men of the visitation, and make "the haughty
daughters of Zion reform their pride of apparel." "The world is full of
unbelief" (that is, in the malignant aspect and disastrous influence of
comets), "but there is an awful Scripture for them that do profanely
condemn such signal works!"

One of the present and well-known indications of the decline of piety,
that is often thought a modern luxury, and ridiculously denounced in
the pulpit, which has done its part in fostering the enjoyment, was
practised to an extent that alarmed the prim shepherds of the New
England flock in earlier days. The same Dr. Mather preached a series of
sermons "tending to promote the power of godliness," and concludes the
whole with a discourse "Of sleeping at sermons," and says: "To sleep in
the public worship of God is a thing too frequently and easily
practised; it is a great and a dangerous evil." "Sleeping at a sermon is
a greater sin than speaking an idle word. Therefore, if men must be
called to account for idle words, much more for this!" "Gospel sermons
are among the most precious talents which any in this world have
conferred upon them. But what a sad account will be given concerning
those sermons which have been slept away! As light as thou makest of it
now, it may be conscience will roar for it upon a death-bed!" "Verily,
there is many a soul that will find this to be a dismal thought at the
day of judgment, when he shall remember so many sermons I might have
heard for my everlasting benefit, but I slighted and slept them all
away. Therefore consider, if men allow themselves in this evil their
souls are in danger to perish." "It is true that a godly man may be
subject unto this as well as unto other infirmities; but he doth not
allow himself therein." "The name of the glorious God is greatly
prophaned by this inadvertency." "The support of the evangelical
ministry is ... discouraged." He thought the character of the pulpit was
not sufficient explanation of this phenomenon, and adds, in his
supernatural way, "Satan is the external cause of this evil;" "he had
rather have men wakeful at any time than at sermon time." The good man
mentions, by way of example, a man who "had not slept a wink at a sermon
for more than twenty years together," and also, but by way of warning,
the unlucky youth in the Acts who slept at Paul's long sermon, and fell
out of the window, and "was taken up dead." Sleeping was "adding
something of our own to the worship of God;" "when Nadab and Abihu did
so, there went out fire from the Lord and consumed them to death." "The
holy God hath not been a little displeased for this sin." "It is not
punished by men, but therefore the Lord himself will visit for it."
"Tears of blood will trickle down thy dry and damned cheeks forever and
ever, because thou mayest not be so happy as to hear one sermon, or to
have one offer of grace more throughout the never-ending dayes of
eternity." Other men denounced their "Wo to sleepy sinners," and issued
their "Proposals for the revival of dying religion."

Dr. Mather thought there was "A deluge of prophaneness," and bid men "be
much in mourning and humiliation that God's bottle may be filled with
tears." He thought piety was going out because surplices were coming
in; it was wicked to "consecrate a church;" keeping Christmas was "like
the idolatry of the calf." The common-prayer, an organ, a musical
instrument in a church, was "not of God." Such things were to our worthy
fathers in the ministry what temperance and anti-slavery societies are
to many of their sons--an "abomination," "unchristian and atheistic!"
The introduction of "regular singing" was an indication to some that
"all religion is to cease;" "we might as well go over to Popery at
once." Inoculation for the smallpox was as vehemently and ably opposed
as the modern attempt to abolish the gallows; it was "a trusting more to
the machinations of men than to the all-wise providence of God."

"When the enchantments of this world," says the ecclesiastical
historian, "caused the rising generation more sensibly to neglect the
primitive designs and interests of religion propounded by their fathers;
a change in the tenor of the divine dispensation towards this country
was quickly the matter of every one's observation." "Our wheat and our
pease fell under an unaccountable blast." "We were visited with
multiplied shipwrecks;" "pestilential sicknesses did sometimes become
epidemic among us." "Indians cruelly butchered many hundreds of our
inhabitants, and scattered whole towns with miserable ruins." "The
serious people throughout the land were awakened by these intimations of
divine displeasure to inquire into the causes and matters of the
controversie." Accordingly, 1679, a synod was convened at Boston, to
"inquire into the causes of the Lord's controversie with his New England
people," who determined the matter.[1]

A little later, in 1690, the General Court considered the subject anew,
and declared, that "A corruption of manners, attended with inexcusable
degeneracies and apostacies ... is the cause of the controversie." We
"are now arriving at such an extremity, that the axe is laid to the root
of the trees, and we are in eminent danger of perishing, if a speedy
reformation of our provoking evils prevent it not." In 1702, Cotton
Mather complains that "Our manifold indispositions to recover the dying
power of Godliness, were successive calamities, under all of which, our
apostacies from that Godliness, have rather proceeded than abated." "The
old spirit of New England has been sensibly going out of the world, as
the old saints in whom it was have gone; and, instead thereof, the
spirit of the world, with a lamentable neglect of strict piety, has
crept in upon the rising generation."

You go back to the time of the founders and fathers of the colony, and
it is no better. In 1667, Mr. Wilson, who had "A singular gift in the
practice of discipline," on his death-bed declared, that "God would
judge the people for their rebellion and self-willed spirit, for their
contempt of civil and ecclesiastical rulers, and for their luxury and
sloth," and before that he said, "People rise up as Corah, against their
ministers." "And for our neglect of baptizing the children of the
church,... I think God is provoked by it. Another sin I take to be the
making light ... of the authority of the Synods." John Norton, whose
piety was said to be "Grace, grafted on a crab-stock," in 1660, growled,
after his wont, on account of the "Heart of New England, rent with the
blasphemies of this generation." John Cotton, the ablest man in New
England, who "Liked to sweeten his mouth with a piece of Calvin, before
he went to sleep," and was so pious that another could not swear while
he was under the roof, mourned at "The condition of the churches;" and,
in 1652, on his death-bed, after bestowing his blessing on the President
of Harvard College, who had begged it of him, exhorted the elders to
"Increase their watch against those declensions, which he saw the
professors of religion falling into."[2] In 1641, such was the condition
of piety in Boston, that it was thought necessary to banish a man,
because he did not believe in original sin. In 1639, a fast was
appointed, "To deplore the prevalence of the small-pox, the want of zeal
in the professors of religion, and the general decay of piety." "The
church of God had not been long in this wilderness," thus complains a
minister, one hundred and fifty years ago, "before the dragon cast
forth several floods to devour it; but not the least of these floods was
one of the Antinomian and familistical heresies." "It is incredible what
alienations of mind, and what a very calenture the devil raised in the
country upon this odd occasion." "The sectaries" "began usually to
seduce women into their notions, and by these women, like their first
mother, they soon hooked in the husbands also." So, in 1637, the Synod
of Cambridge was convened, to despatch "The apostate serpent:" one woman
was duly convicted of holding "About thirty monstrous opinions," and
subsequently, by the civil authorities, banished from the colony. The
synod, after much time was "spent in ventilation and emptying of private
passions," condemned eighty-two opinions, then prevalent in the colony,
as erroneous, and decided to "Refer doubts to be resolved by the great
God." Even in 1636, John Wilson lamented "The dark and distracted
condition of the churches of New England."

"The good old times," when piety was in a thriving state, and the
churches successful and contented, lay as far behind the "Famous Johns,"
as it now does behind their successors in office and lamentation. Then,
as now, the complaint had the same foundation: ministers and other good
men could not see that new piety will not be put into the old forms,
neither the old forms of thought, nor the old forms of action. In the
days of Wilson, Cotton, and Norton, there was a gradual growth of
piety; in the days of the Mathers, of Colman, and Willard, and from that
time to this, there has been a steady improvement of the community, in
intellectual, moral, and religious culture. Some men could not see the
progress two hundred years ago, because they believed in no piety,
except as it was manifested in their conventional forms. It is so now.
Mankind advances by the irresistible law of God, under the guidance of a
few men of large discourse, who look before and after, but amid the
wailing of many who think each advance is a retreat, and every stride a
stumble.

Now-a-days nobody complains at "The ungodly custom of wearing long
hair;" no dandy is dealt with by the church, for his dress; the weakest
brother is not offended by "Regular singing,"--so it be regular,--"by
organs and the like;" nobody laments at "The reading of Scripture
lessons," or "The use of the Lord's Prayer" in public religious
services, or is offended, because a clergyman makes a prayer at a
funeral, and solemnizes a marriage,--though these are "prelatical
customs," and were detested by our fathers. Yet, other things, now as
much dreaded, and thought "of a bad and dangerous tendency," will one
day prove themselves as innocent, though now as much mourned over. Many
an old doctrine will fade out, and though some think a star has fallen
out of heaven, a new truth will rise up and take its place. It is to be
expected that ministers will often complain of "The general decay of
religion." The position of a clergyman, fortunate in many things, is
unhappy in this: he seldom sees the result of his labors, except in the
conventional form mentioned above. The lawyer, the doctor, the merchant
and mechanic, the statesman and the farmer, all have visible and
palpable results of their work, while the minister can only see that he
has baptized men, and admitted them to his church; the visible and
quotable tokens of his success, are a large audience, respectable and
attentive, a thriving Sunday school, or a considerable body of
communicants. If these signs fail, or become less than formerly, he
thinks he has labored in vain; that piety is on the decline, for it is
only by this form that he commonly tests and measures piety itself.
Hence, a sincere and earnest minister, with the limitations which he so
easily gets from his profession and social position, is always prone to
think ill of the times, to undervalue the new wine which refuses to be
kept in the old bottles, but rends them asunder; hence he bewails the
decline of religion, and looks longingly back to the days of his
fathers.

But you will ask, Why does not a minister demand piety in its natural
form? Blame him not; unconsciously he fulfils his contract, and does
what he is taught, ordained, and paid for doing. It is safe for a
minister to demand piety of his parish, in the conventional form; not
safe to demand it in the form of morality--eminent piety, in the form
of philanthropy: it would be an innovation; it would "Hurt men's
feelings;" it might disturb some branches of business; at the North, it
would interfere with the liquor-trade; at the South, with the
slave-trade; everywhere it would demand what many men do not like to
give. If a man asks piety in the form of bodily attendance at church, on
the only idle day in the week, when business and amusement must be
refrained from; in the form of belief in doctrines which are commonly
accepted by the denomination, and compliance with its forms,--that is
customary; it hurts nobody's feelings; it does not disturb the
liquor-trade, nor the slave-trade; it interferes with nothing, not even
with respectable sleep in a comfortable pew. A minister, like others
loves to be surrounded by able and respectable men; he seeks, therefore,
a congregation of such. If he is himself an able man, it is well; but
there are few in any calling, whom we designate as able. Our weak man
cannot instruct his parishioners; he soon learns this, and ceases to
give them counsel on matters of importance. They would not suffer it,
for the larger includes the less, not the less the larger. He is not
strong by nature; their position overlooks and commands his. He must
speak and give some counsel; he wisely limits himself to things of but
little practical interest, and his parishioners are not offended: "That
is my sentiment exactly," says the most worldly man in the church,
"Religion is too pure to be mixed up with the practical business of the
street." The original and effectual preaching in such cases, is not from
the pulpit down upon the pews, but from the pews up to the pulpit, which
only echoes, consciously or otherwise, but does not speak.

In a solar system, the central sun, not barely powerful from its
position, is the most weighty body; heavier than all the rest put
together; so with even swing they all revolve about it. Our little
ministerial sun was ambitious of being amongst large satellites; he is
there, but the law of gravitation amongst men is as certain as in
matter; he cannot poise and swing the system; he is not the sun thereof,
not even a primary planet, only a little satellite revolving with many
nutations round some primary, in an orbit that is oblique, complicated,
and difficult to calculate; now waxing in a "Revival," now waning in a
"Decline of piety," now totally eclipsed by his primary that comes
between him and the light which lighteth every man. Put one of the cold
thin moons of Saturn into the centre of the solar system,--would the
universe revolve about that little dot? Loyal matter with irresistible
fealty gravitates towards the sun, and wheels around the balance-point
of the world's weight, be it where it may, called by whatever name.

While ministers insist unduly on the conventional manifestation of
piety, it is not a thing unheard of for a layman to resolve to go to
heaven by the ecclesiastical road, yet omit resolving to be a good man
before he gets there. Such a man finds the ordinary forms of piety very
convenient, and not at all burdensome; they do not interfere with his
daily practice of injustice and meanness of soul; they seem a substitute
for real and manly goodness; they offer a royal road to saintship here
and heaven hereafter. Is the man in arrears with virtue, having long
practised wickedness and become insolvent? This form is a new bankrupt
law of the spirit, he pays off his old debts in the ecclesiastical
currency--a pennyworth of form for a pound of substantial goodness. This
bankrupt sinner, cleared by the ecclesiastical chancery, is a solvent
saint; he exhorts at meetings, strains at every gnat, and mourns over
"The general decay of piety," and teaches other men the way in which
they should go--to the same end.

    "So morning insects that in muck begun,
    Shine, buzz, and fly-blow in the evening sun."

I honor the founders of New England; they were pious men--their lives
proved it; but domineered over by false opinions in theology, they put
their piety into very unnatural and perverted forms. They had ideas
which transcended their age; they came here to make those ideas into
institutions. That they had great faults, bigotry, intolerance, and
superstition, is now generally conceded. They were picked men, "wheat
sifted out of three kingdoms," to plant a new world withal. They have
left their mark very deep and very distinct in this town, which was
their prayer and their pride. It may seem unjust to ourselves to compare
a whole community like our own with such a company as filled Boston in
the first half century of its existence,--men selected for their
spiritual hardihood; but here and now, in the midst of Boston, are men
quite as eminent for piety who as far transcend this age, as the
Puritans and the pilgrims surpassed their time. The Puritan put his
religion into the ecclesiastical form; not into the form of the Roman or
the English Church, but into a new one of his own. His descendant,
inheriting his father's faith in God, and stern self-denial, but
sometimes without his bigotry, intolerance, and superstition, with
little fear but with more love of God, and consequently with more love
of man, puts his piety into a new form. It is not the form of the old
Church; the Church of the Puritans is to him often what the Church of
the Pope and the prelates was to his ungentle sire. He puts his piety
into the form of goodness; eminent piety becomes philanthropy, and takes
the shape of reform. In such men, in many of their followers, I see the
same trust in God, the same scorn of compromising right and truth, the
same unfaltering allegiance to the eternal Father, which shone in the
pilgrims who founded this new world, which fired the reformers of the
Church; yes, which burned in the hearts of Paul and John. Piety has not
failed and gone out; each age has its own forms thereof; the old and
passing can never understand the new, nor can they consent to decrease
with the increase of the new. Once, men put their piety into a church,
Catholic or Protestant; they made creeds and believed them; they devised
rites and symbols, which helped their faith. It was well; but we cannot
believe those creeds, nor be aided by such symbols and such rites. Why
pretend to drag a weighty crutch about because it helped your father
once, wandering alone and in the dark, sounding on his dim and perilous
way? Once earthen roads were the best we knew, and horses' feet had
shoes of swiftness; now we need not, out of reverence, refuse the iron
road, the chariot and the steed of flame; nor out of irreverence need we
spurn the path our fathers trod; sorely bested and hunted after,
tear-bedewed and travel-stained, they journeyed there, passing on to
their God. If the mother that bore us were never so rude, and to our
eyes might seem never so graceless now, still she was our mother, and
without her we should not have been born. Wives and children may men
have, and manifold; each has but one mother. The great institution we
call the Christian Church has been the mother of us all; and though in
her own dotage she deny our piety, and call us infidel, far be it from
me to withhold the richly earned respect. Behind a decent veil, then,
let us hide our mother's weakness, and ourselves pass on. Once piety
built up a theocracy, and men say it was divine; now piety, everywhere
in Christendom, builds up democracies; it is a diviner work.

       *       *       *       *       *

The piety of this age must manifest itself in Morality, and appear in a
church where the priests are men of active mind and active hand; men of
ideas, who commune with God and man through faith and works, finding no
truth is hostile to their creed, no goodness foreign to their litany, no
piety discordant with their psalm. The man who once would have built a
convent and been its rigorous chief, now founds a temperance society,
contends against war, toils for the pauper, the criminal, the madman,
and the slave, for men bereft of senses and of sense. The synod of Dort
and of Cambridge, the assembly of divines at Westminster, did what they
could with what piety they had; they put it into decrees and platforms,
into catechisms and creeds. But the various conventions for reform put
their piety into resolves and then into philanthropic works. I do not
believe there has ever been an age when piety bore so large a place in
the whole being of New England as at this day, or attendance on
church-forms so small a part. The attempts made and making for a better
education of the people, the lectures on science and literature
abundantly attended in this town, the increased fondness for reading,
the better class of books which are read--all these indicate an
increased love of truth, the intellectual part of piety; societies for
reform and for charity show an increase of the moral and affectional
parts of piety; the better, the lovelier idea of God which all sects are
embracing, is a sign of increased love of God. Thus all parts of piety
are proving their existence by their work. The very absence from the
churches, the disbelief of the old sour theologies, the very neglect of
outward forms and ceremonies of religion, the decline of the ministry
itself, under the present circumstances, shows an increase of piety. The
baby-clothes were well and wide for the baby; now, the fact that he
cannot get them on, shows plainly that he has outgrown them, is a boy
and no longer a baby.

Once Piety fled to the Church as the only sanctuary in the waste wide
world, and was fondly welcomed there, fed and fostered. When power fled
off from the Church--"Wilt thou also go away?" said she; "Lord," said
Piety, "to whom shall we go? Thou only hast the words of everlasting
life." Once convents and cathedrals were what the world needed as
shelter for this fair child of God; then she dwelt in the grim edifice
that our fathers built, and for a time counted herself "lodged in a
lodging where good things are." Now is she grown able to wander forth
fearless and free, lodging where the night overtakes her, and doing what
her hands find to do, not unattended by the Providence which hitherto
has watched over and blessed her. I respect piety in the Hebrew saints,
prophets, and bards, who spoke the fiery speech, or sung their sweet and
soul-inspiring psalm:

    "Out from the heart of Nature rolled
    The burdens of the Bible old."

I honor piety among the saints of Greece, clad in the form of
philanthropy and art, speaking still in dramas, in philosophies, and
song, and in the temple and the statue too:

    "Not from a vain and shallow thought
    His awful Jove young Phidias brought."

I admire at the piety of the Middle Ages, which founded the monastic
tribes of men, which wrote the theologies, scholastic and mystic both,
still speaking to the mind of men, or in poetic legends insinuated
truth; which built that heroic architecture, overmastering therewith the
sense and soul of man:

    "The passive master lent his hand
    To the vast Soul that o'er him planned:
    And the same Power that reared the shrine,
    Bestrode the tribes that knelt therein."

But the piety which I find now, in this age, here in our own land, I
respect, honor, and admire yet more; I find it in the form of moral
life; that is the piety I love, piety in her own loveliness. Would I
could find poetic strains as fit to sing of her--but yet such

    "Loveliness needs not the foreign aid of ornament,
    But is, when unadorned, adorned the most."

Let me do no dishonor to other days, to Hebrew or to Grecian saints.
Unlike and hostile though they were, they jointly fed my soul in
earliest days. I would not underrate the mediaeval saints, whose words
and works have been my study in a manlier age; yet I love best the fair
and vigorous piety of our own day. It is beautiful, amid the strong,
rank life of the nineteenth century, amid the steam-mills and the
telegraphs which talk by lightning, amid the far-reaching enterprises of
our time, and 'mid the fierce democracies, it is beautiful to find this
fragrant piety growing up in unwonted forms, in places where men say no
seed of heaven can lodge and germinate. So in a June meadow, when a boy,
and looking for the cranberries of another year, faded and tasteless,
amid the pale but coarse rank grass, and discontented that I found them
not, so I have seen the crimson arethusa or the cymbidium shedding an
unexpected loveliness o'er all the watery soil and all the pale and
coarse rank grass, a prophecy of summer near at hand. So in October,
when the fields are brown with frost, the blue and fringed gentian meets
your eye, filling with thankful tears.

There is no decline of piety, but an increase of it; a good deal has
been done in two hundred years, in one hundred years, yes, in fifty
years. Let us admit, with thankfulness of heart, that piety is in
greater proportion to all our activity now than ever before: but then
compare ourselves with the ideal of human nature, our piety with the
ideal piety, and we must confess that we are little and very low. Boston
is the most active city in the world, the most enterprising. In no place
is it so easy to obtain men's ears and their purses for any good word
and work. But think of the evils we know of and tolerate; think of an
ideal Christian city, then think of Boston; of a Christian man, aye of
Christ himself, and then think of you and me, and we are filled with
shame. If there were a true, manly piety in this town, in due proportion
to our numbers, wealth, and enterprise, how long would the vices of this
city last? How long would men complain of a dead body of divinity and a
dead church, and a ministry that was dead? How long would intemperance
continue, and pauperism, in Boston; how long slavery in this land?

       *       *       *       *       *

Last Sunday, in the name of the poor, I asked you for your charity.
To-day I ask for dearer alms: I ask you to contribute your piety. It
will help the town more than the little money all of us can give. Your
money will soon be spent; it feeds one man once; we cannot give it
twice, though the blessing thereof may linger long in the hand which
gave. Few of us can give much money to the poor; some of us none at all.
This we can all give: the inspiration of a man with a man's piety in his
heart, living it out in a man's life. Your money may be ill spent, your
charity misapplied, but your piety never. After all, there is nothing
you can give which men will so readily take and so long remember as
this. Mothers can give it to their daughters and their sons; men, after
spending thereof profusely at home, can coin their inexhausted store
into industry, patience, integrity, temperance, justice, humanity, a
practical love of man. A thousand years ago, it was easy to excuse men
if they chiefly showed religion in the conventional pattern of the
church. Forms then were helps, and the nun has been mother to much of
the charity of our times. It is easy to excuse our fathers for their
superstitious reverence for rites and forms. But now, in an age which
has its eyes a little open, a practical and a handy age, we are without
excuse if our piety appears not in a manly life, our faith in works. To
give this piety to cheer and bless mankind, you must have it first, be
cheered and blessed thereby yourself. Have it, then, in your own way;
put it into your own form. Do men tell you, "This is a degenerate age,"
and "Religion is dying out?" tell them that when those stars have faded
out of the sky from very age, when other stars have come up to take
their place, and they too have grown dim and hollow-eyed and old, that
religion will still live in man's heart, the primal, everlasting light
of all our being. Do they tell you that you must put piety into their
forms; put it there if it be your place; if not, in your place. Let men
see the divinity that is in you by the humanity that comes out from you.
If they will not see it, cannot, God can and will. Take courage from the
past, not its counsel; fear not now to be a man. You may find a new Eden
where you go, a river of God in it, and a tree of life, an angel to
guard it; not the warning angel to repel, but the guiding angel to
welcome and to bless.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was four years yesterday since I first came here to speak to you; I
came hesitatingly, reluctant, with much diffidence as to my power to do
what it seemed to me was demanded. I did not come merely to pull down,
but to build up, though it is plain much theological error must be
demolished before any great reform of man's condition can be brought
about. I came not to contend against any man, or sect, or party, but to
speak a word for truth and religion in the name of man and God. I was in
bondage to no sect; you in bondage to none. When a boy I learned that
there is but one religion though many theologies. I have found it in
Christians and in Jews, in Quakers and in Catholics. I hope we are all
ready to honor what is good in each sect, and in rejecting its evil not
to forget our love and wisdom in our zeal.

When I came I certainly did not expect to become a popular man, or
acceptable to many. I had done much which in all countries brings odium
on a man, though perhaps less in Boston than in any other part of the
world. I had rejected the popular theology of Christendom. I had exposed
the low morals of society, had complained of the want of piety in its
natural form. I had fatally offended the sect, small in numbers, but
respectable for intelligence and goodness, in which I was brought up. I
came to look at the signs of the times from an independent point of
view, and to speak on the most important of all themes. I thought a
house much smaller than this would be much too large for us. I knew
there would be fit audience; I thought it would be few, and the few
would soon have heard enough and go their ways.

I know I have some advantages above most clergymen: I am responsible to
no sect; no sect feels responsible for me; I have rejoiced at good
things which I have seen in all sects; the doctrines which I try to
teach do not rest on tradition, on miracles, or on any man's authority;
only on the nature of man. I seek to preach the natural laws of man. I
appeal to history for illustration, not for authority. I have no fear of
philosophy. I am willing to look a doubt fairly in the face, and think
reason is sacred as conscience, affection, or the religious faculty in
man. I see a profound piety in modern science. I have aimed to set forth
absolute religion, the ideal religion of human nature, free piety, free
goodness, free thought. I call that Christianity, after the greatest man
of the world, one who himself taught it; but I know that this was never
the Christianity of the churches, in any age. I have endeavored to teach
this religion and apply it to the needs of this time. These things
certainly give me some advantages over most other ministers. Of the
disadvantages which are personal to myself, I need not speak in public,
but some which come from my position, ought to be noticed with a word.
The walls of this house, the associations connected with it, furnish
little help to devotion; we must rely on ourselves wholly for that.
Other clergymen, by their occasional exchanges, can present their
hearers with an agreeable variety in substance and in form. A single
man, often heard, becomes wearisome and unprofitable, for "No man can
feed us always." This I feel to be a great disadvantage which I labor
under. Your kindness and affectionate indulgence make me feel it all the
more. But one man cannot be twenty men.

When I came here I knew I should hurt men's feelings. My theology would
prove more offensive and radical than men thought; the freedom of speech
which men liked at a distance would not be pleasing when near at hand;
my doctrines of morality I knew could not be pleasing to all men; not to
all good men. I saw by your looks that in my abstractions I did not go
too far for your sympathy, or too fast for your following. I soon found
that my highest thought and most pious sentiment were most warmly
welcomed as such; but when I came to put abstract thought and mystical
piety into concrete goodness, and translate what you had accepted as
Christian faith into daily life; when I came to apply piety to trade,
politics, life in general, I knew that I should hurt men's feelings. It
could not be otherwise. Yet I have had a most patient and faithful
hearing. One thing I must do in my preaching: I must be in earnest. I
cannot stand here before you and before God, attempting to teach piety
and goodness, and not feel the fire and show the fire. The greater the
wrong, the more popular, the more must I oppose it, and with the
clearer, abler speech. It is not necessary for me to be popular, to be
acceptable, even to be loved. It is necessary that I should tell the
truth. But let that pass. You come hither week after week, it is now
year after year that you come, to listen to one humble man. Do you get
poor in your souls? Does your religion become poor and low? Are you
getting less in the qualities of a man? If so, then leave me, to empty
seats, to cold and voiceless walls; go elsewhere, and feed your souls
with a wise passiveness, or an activity wiser yet. Such is your duty;
let no affection for me hinder you from performing it. The same
theology, the same form suits not all men. But if it is not so, if I do
you good, if you grow in mind and conscience, heart and soul, then I ask
one thing--Let your piety become natural life, your divinity become
humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Synod declared: "That God hath a controversie with his New
England people is undeniable." "There are visible manifest evils, which
without doubt the Lord is provoked by." 1. "A great and visible decay of
the power of Godliness amongst many professors in these churches." 2.
"Pride doth abound in New England. Many have offended God by strange
apparel." 3. "Church fellowship and other divine institutions are
grossly neglected." "Quakers are false worshippers," "and Anabaptists
... do no better than set up an Altar against the Lord's Altar." 4. "The
holy and glorious name of God hath been polluted;" "because of swearing
the land mourns." "It is a frequent thing for men to sit in prayer-time
... and to give way to their own sloth and sleepiness." "We read of but
one man in Scripture that slept at a sermon, and that sin had like to
have cost him his life." 5. "There is much Sabbath-breaking; since there
are multitudes that do profanely absent themselves from the public
worship of God,... walking abroad and travelling ... being a common
practice on the Sabbath Day." "Worldly unsuitable discourses are very
common upon the Lord's Day." "This brings wrath, fires, and other
judgments upon a professing people." 6. "As to what concerns families
and Government thereof, there is much amiss." "Children and servants ...
are not kept in due subjection." "This is a sin which brings great
judgments, as we see in Eli's and David's family." 7. "Inordinate
passions, sinful heats and hatreds, and that amongst church members." 8.
"There is much intemperance:" "it is a common practice for
town-dwellers, yea, and church members, to frequent public houses, and
there to misspend precious time." 9. "There is much want of truth
amongst men." "The Lord is not wont to suffer such an iniquity to pass
unpunished." 10. "Inordinate affection unto the world." "There hath been
in many professors an insatiable desire after land and worldly
accommodations; yea, so as to forsake churches and ordinances, and to
live like heathen, only so that they might have elbow-room in the world.
Farms and merchandisings have been preferred before the things of God."
"Such iniquity causeth war to be in the gate, and cities to be burned
up." "When Lot did forsake the land of Canaan and the church which was
in Abraham's family, that so he might have better worldly accommodations
in Sodom, God fired him out of all." "There are some traders that sell
their goods at excessive rates; day-laborers and mechanics are
unreasonable in their demands." 11. "There hath been opposition to the
work of reformation." 12. "A public spirit is greatly wanting in the
most of men." 13. "There are sins against the gospel, whereby the Lord
has been provoked." "Christ is not prized and embraced in all his
offices and ordinances as ought to be."

[2] In 1646, Mr. Samuel Symonds wrote to Governor Winthrop, as follows:
"I will also mention the text preached upon at our last fast, and the
propositions raised thereupon, because it was so seasonable to New
England's condition. Jeremiah 30:17; For I will restore health to thee,
and heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord; because they called thee an
outcast, saying, This is Zion, whom noe man careth for.

"1. Prop. That sick tymes doe passe over Zion.

"2. That sad and bitter neglect is the portion, aggravation and
affliction of Zion in the tyme of his sicknesse and wounds, but
especially in the neglect of those that doe neglect it, and yet,
notwithstanding, doe acknowledge it to be Zion.

"3. That the season of penitent Zion's passion, is the season of God's
compassion.

"This sermon tended much to the settling of Godly minds here in God's
way, and to raise their spirits, and, as I conceive, hath suitable
effects."




II.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE MOST CHRISTIAN USE OF THE SUNDAY.--A SERMON
PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 30, 1848.

MARK II. 27.

    The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.


From past ages we have received many valuable institutions, that have
grown out of the transient wants or the permanent nature of man. Amongst
these are two which have done a great service in promoting the
civilization of mankind, which still continue amongst us. I speak now of
the institution of Sunday, and that of preaching. By the one, a seventh
part of the time is separated from the common pursuits of life, in order
that it may be devoted to bodily relaxation, and to the culture of the
spiritual powers of man; by the other, a large body of men, in most
countries the best educated class, are devoted to the cultivation of
these spiritual powers. Such at least is the theory of those two
institutions, be their effect in practice what it may. This morning,
let us look at one of them, and so I invite your attention to some
thoughts relative to the Sunday--to the most Christian and profitable
use of that day.

There is a stricter party of Christians amongst us, who speak out their
opinions concerning the Sunday; this comprises what are commonly called
the more "evangelical" sects. There is a party less strict in many
particulars, comprising what are commonly called the more "liberal"
sects. They have hitherto been comparatively silent on this theme. Their
opinions about the Sunday have not usually been so plainly spoken out,
but have been made apparent by their actions, by occasional and passing
words, rather than by full, distinct, and emphatic declarations. The
stricter party, of late years, have been growing a little more strict;
the party less strict likewise advance in the opposite direction.
Recently, a call has been published by a few men, for a convention to
consult and take some steps towards the less rigid course, for the
purpose, as I understand it, of making the Sunday even more valuable
than it is now. I take it for granted that both parties desire to make
the best possible use of the Sunday--the use most conducive to the
highest interests of mankind; that they desire this equally. There are
good men on both sides, the more and the less strict; pious men, in the
best sense of that word, may be found on both sides. There is no need
of imputing bad motives to either party in order to explain the
difference between the two.

Such is the aspect of the two parties in the field, looking opposite
ways, but at one another. It seems likely that there will be a quarrel,
and, as is usual in such cases, hard words on each side, hard thoughts
and unkind feelings on both sides. Before the quarrel begins, and our
eyes are blinded by the dust of controversy; before our blood is fired,
and we become wholly incapable of judgment--let us look coolly at the
matter, and ask, Do we need any change in respect to the observance of
the Sunday? Are the present opinions respecting the origin, nature, and
original design of that institution just and true? Is the present mode
of observing it the most profitable that can be devised? The inquiry is
one of great importance.

To answer these questions, it is necessary to go back a little into the
history of the Hebrew Sabbath and the Christian Sunday. However, it is
not needful to go much into detail, or consume this precious hour in a
learned discussion on antiquarian matters which concern none but
scholars.

With the Hebrews the actual observance of Saturday--the Sabbath--as a
day rest, seems to be of pretty late origin. The first mention of it in
authentic Hebrew history, as actually observed, occurs about two hundred
years after Samuel, and about six hundred after Moses--a little less
than nine hundred before Christ. The passage is found in 2 Kings 4: 23;
a child had died, as the narrative relates--the mother wished to send
for Elisha, "the man of God." Her husband objects, saying, "Wherefore
wilt thou go to him to-day? it is neither new moon nor Sabbath." This
connection with the new moon is significant. In the earlier historical
books of Joshua, Judges, the two books of Samuel, and the first of
Kings, there is no mention of the Sabbath, not the least allusion to it.

This seems to have been the origin of its observance:--The worship of
one God, with the distinctive name Jehovah, gradually got established in
the Hebrew nation; for this they seem largely indebted to Moses.
Gradually this worship of Jehovah became connected with a body of
priests, who were regularly organized at length, and claimed descent
from Levi--some of them from Aaron, his celebrated descendant, the elder
brother of Moses. The rise of the Levitical priesthood is remarkable,
and easily traced in the Old Testament. Some books are entirely
destitute of a Levitical spirit, such as Genesis and Judges; others are
filled with it, as Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and the books of Chronicles.
With the priesthood it seems there came the observance of certain days
for religious or festal purposes--New Moon days, Full Moon days, and the
like. These seem to have been derived from the nations about them, with
whom the moon--deified as Astarte, the Queen and Mother of Heaven, and
under other names--was long an object of worship. The observance of
those days points back to the period when Fetichism, the worship of
Nature, was the prominent form of religion. With the other days of
religious observance came the seventh day, called the Sabbath. No one
knows its true historical origin. The statement respecting its origin,
in the fourth commandment, and elsewhere in the Old Testament, can
hardly be accepted as literally true by any one in this century. No
scientific man, in the present stage of philosophic inquiry, will
believe that God created the universe in six days, and then rested on
the seventh. Did other nations observe this day before the Hebrews; was
it also connected with some Fetichistic form of worship; what was the
historical event which led to the selection of that day in special? This
it is easy to ask, but perhaps not possible to answer. These are curious
questions; they are of little practical importance to us at this moment.

After the Hebrew institutions of religion got fixed--the worship of
Jehovah, the Levitical priesthood, and the peculiar forms of
sacrifice--it became common to refer their origin back to the time of
Moses, who lived fourteen or fifteen hundred years before Christ. Since
few memorials from his age have come down to us, it is plain we can know
little of him. But from the impression which his character left on his
nation, and through them on the whole world; from the myths so early
connected with his name, it seems pretty clear that he was one of the
greatest and most extraordinary men that ever lived. Mankind seldom tell
great things of little men. It is difficult to say what share he had in
making the laws of the Hebrew nation which are commonly referred to
him,--and, as it is popularly taught, revealed to him directly by
Jehovah. Perhaps we are not safe in referring to him even the whole of
the ten commandments; surely not in any one of their present forms.[3]
Was the Sabbath observed as a day of rest before Moses? Was its
observance enforced by him? Was it even known to him? These questions
are not easily answered. This is only certain: from the time of Moses to
that of Jehoram, a period of about six hundred years, there is no
historical mention of its observance, not the least allusion to it. Yet
we have documents which treat of that period,--the books of Joshua,
Judges, Samuel, and the Kings,--some of them historical documents, which
go into the minute detail of the national peculiarities, and were
evidently written with a good deal of concern for strict integrity and
truth; they refer to the national rite of circumcision. Now, if the
Sabbath had been observed during that period, it is difficult to believe
it would have received no passing notice in those historical books. But
not only is there no mention of it therein, none even in the times of
David and Solomon, who favored the priesthood so strongly; but in the
book of Chronicles, the most Levitical book in the Bible, at a date more
than two hundred years later than the time of Jehoram, it is distinctly
declared that the Sabbath had not been kept for nearly five hundred
years.[4] But even if this statement is true, which is scarcely
probable, it is plain from the frequent mention of the Sabbath in the
writings of the latter part of that period--Isaiah, Jeremiah, and
others--that the institution was one well known and highly regarded by
religious men. After the return from the Babylonian exile, it seems to
have been kept with considerable rigor; this we learn from the book of
Nehemiah.

The Hebrew law, as it is contained in the Pentateuch, is a singular
mixture of conflicting statutes, evidently belonging to different ages,
many of them wholly unsuitable to the condition of the people when the
laws are alleged to have been given. However, they are all referred back
to the time of Moses in the Pentateuch itself, and by the popular
theology at the present day. In the law the command is given to keep
the seventh day as a day of rest, and that command is referred
distinctly to Jehovah himself. The reason is given for choosing that
day:--"For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the
seventh day he rested and was refreshed;" the Sabbath, therefore, was to
be kept in commemoration of the fact, that after Jehovah had spent the
week in creating the world, "he rested and was refreshed." It was to be
a day of rest for master and slave, for man and beast. A special
sacrifice was offered on that day, in addition to the usual ceremonies,
but no provision was made for the religious instruction of the people.
The Sabbath was what its Hebrew name implies, a rest from all labor. The
law, in general terms, forbade all work; but, not content with that, it
descends to minute details, specifically prohibiting by statute the
gathering or preparation of food on the Sabbath, even of food to be
consumed on that day itself; the lighting of a fire, or the removal from
one's place; and, by a decision where the statute did not apply, forbade
the gathering of sticks of wood. The punishment for violating the
Sabbath in general, or in any one of these particulars, was death:
"Whosoever doeth work therein shall be put to death." However, amusement
was not prohibited, nor eating and drinking, only work. The command,
"Let no man go out of his place on the seventh day," at a later period,
was liberally interpreted, and a man was allowed to go two thousand
cubits, a Sabbath-day's journey.

Long after the time of Moses, some of the Hebrews returned from exile
amongst a more civilized and refined people. It seems probable that only
the stricter portion returned and established themselves in the land of
their fathers. Nehemiah, their leader, enforced the observance of the
Sabbath with a strictness and rigor of which earlier times afford no
evidence. But the nation was not content with making it a day of
idleness. They established synagogues, where the people freely assembled
on the Sabbath and other public days, for religious instruction, and
thus founded an excellent institution which has shown itself fruitful of
good results. So far as I know, that is the earliest instance on record
of provision being made for the regular religious instruction of the
whole people. Experience has shown its value, and now all the most
highly civilized nations of the earth have established similar
institutions. However, in the synagogues the business of religious
instruction was not at all in the hands of the priests, but in those of
the people, acting in their primary character without regard to
Levitical establishments. A priest, as such, is never an instructor of
the people; he is to go through his ritual, not beyond it.

It is easy to learn from the New Testament what were the current
opinions about the Sabbath in the time of Christ. It was unlawful to
gather a head of wheat on the Sabbath, as a man walked through the
fields; it was unlawful to cure a sick man, though that cure could be
effected by a touch or a word; unlawful for a man to walk home and carry
the light cushion on which he had lain. What was unlawful was reckoned
wicked also; for what is a crime in the eyes of the priest, he commonly
pretends is likewise a sin before the eyes of God. Yet it was not
unlawful to eat, drink, and be merry on the Sabbath; nor to lift a sheep
out of the ditch; nor to quarrel with a man who came to deliver mankind
from their worst enemies. It was lawful to perform the rite of
circumcision on the Sabbath, but unlawful to cure a man of any sickness.
Jesus once placed these two, the allowing of that ritual mutilation and
the prohibition of the humane act of curing the sick on the Sabbath, in
ridiculous contrast. In the fourth gospel he goes further, and actually
denies the alleged ground for the original institution of the Sabbath;
he denies that God had ever ceased from his work, or rested: "My father
worketh hitherto."[5] However, in effecting these cures he committed a
capital offence; the Pharisees so regarded it, and took measures to
insure his punishment. It does not appear that they were illegal
measures. It is probable they took regular and legal means to bring him
to condign punishment as a Sabbath-breaker. He escaped by flight.

Such was the Sabbath with the Hebrews, such the recorded opinion of
Jesus concerning it. There were also other days in which labor was
forbidden, but with them we have nothing to do at present. Jesus taught
piety and goodness without the Hebrew limitations; of course, then, the
new wine of Christianity could not be put into the old bottles of the
Jews. Their fast days and Sabbath days, their rites and forms, were not
for him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now, not long after the death of Christ, his followers became gradually
divided into two parties. First, there were the Jewish Christians; that
was the oldest portion, the old school of Christians. They are mentioned
in ecclesiastical history as the Ebionites, Nazarines, and under yet
other names. Peter and James were the great men in that division of the
early Christians. Matthew, and the author of the Gospel according to the
Hebrews, were their evangelists. The church at Jerusalem was their
strong-hold. They kept the whole Hebrew law; all its burdensome ritual,
its circumcision and its sacrifices, its new-moon days and its full-moon
days, Sabbath, fasts, and feasts; the first fifteen bishops of the
church at Jerusalem were circumcised Jews. It seems to me they
misunderstood Jesus fatally; counting him nothing but the Messiah of the
Old Testament, and Christianity, therefore, nothing but Judaism
brightened up and restored to its original purity.

I have often mentioned how strongly Matthew, taking him for the author
of the first gospel, favors this way of thinking. He represents Jesus as
commanding his disciples to observe all the Mosaic law, as the Pharisees
interpreted that law,[6] though such a command is utterly inconsistent
with the general spirit of Christ's teachings, and even with his plain
declaration, as preserved in other parts of the same gospel. It is
worthy of note, that this command is peculiar to Matthew. But there is
another instance of the same Jewish tendency, though not so obvious at
first sight. Matthew represents Jesus as saying, "The Son of man," that
is, the Messiah, "is Lord even of the Sabbath day." Accordingly, he is
competent to expound the law correctly, and determine what is lawful to
do on that day. In Matthew, therefore, Jesus, in his character of
Messiah, is represented as giving a judicial opinion, and ruling that it
"is lawful to do well on the Sabbath days." Now, Mark and Luke represent
it a little different. In Mark, Jesus himself declares that "The Sabbath
was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." Matthew entirely omits
that remarkable saying. According to Mark, Jesus declares in general
terms, that man is of more consequence than the observance of the
Sabbath, while Matthew only considers that the Messiah is "Lord of the
Sabbath day." The cause of this diversity is quite plain. Matthew was a
Jewish Christian, and thought Christianity was nothing but restored
Judaism.

       *       *       *       *       *

The other party may be called liberal Christians, though they must not
be confounded with the party which now bears that name. They were the
new school of the early Christians. They rejected the Hebrew law, so far
as it did not rest on human nature, and considered that Christianity was
a new thing; Christ, not a mere Jew, but a universal man, who had thrown
down the wall of partition between Jews and Gentiles. All the old,
artificial distinctions, therefore, were done away with at once. Paul
was the head of the liberal party among the primitive Christians. He was
considered a heretic; and though he was more efficient than any of the
other early preachers of Christianity, yet the author of the Apocalypse
thought him not worthy of a place in the foundation of the new
Jerusalem, which rests on the twelve apostles.[7] The fourth gospel with
peculiarities of its own, is written wholly in the interest of this
party; James is not mentioned in it at all, and Peter plays but quite a
subordinate part, and is thrown into the shade by John. The disciples
are spoken of as often misunderstanding their great Teacher. These
peculiarities cannot be considered as accidental; they are monuments of
the controversy then going on between the two parties. Paul stood in
direct opposition to the Jewish Christians. This is plain from the
epistle to the Galatians, in which the heads of the rival sects appear
very unlike the description given of them in the book of Acts. The
observance of Jewish sacred days was one of the subjects of controversy.
Let us look only at the matter of the Sabbath, as it came in question
between the two parties. Paul exalts Christ far above the Messianic
predictions of the Old Testament, calling him an image of the invisible
God, and declaring that all the fulness of divinity dwells in him, and
adds, that he had annulled the old Hebrew law. "Therefore," says Paul,
"let no man judge you in meat or in drink, or in respect of a holy day,
or of the new moon, or of the Sabbath."[8] Here he distinctly states the
issue between the two Christian sects. Elsewhere he speaks of the Jewish
party, as men that "would pervert the gospel of Christ," by teaching
that a man was "justified by the works of the law;" that is, by a minute
observance of the Hebrew ritual.[9] Paul rejects the authority of the
Old Testament. The law of Moses was but a schoolmaster's servant, to
bring us to Christ; man had come to Christ, and needed that servant no
longer; the law was a taskmaster and guardian set over man in his
minority, now he had come of age, and was free; the law was a shadow of
good things, and they had come; it was a law of sin and death, which no
man could bear, and now the law of the spirit of life, as revealed by
Jesus Christ, had made men free from the law of sin and death. Such was
the work of the glorious gospel of the blessed God. Thus sweeping off
the authority of the old law in general, he proceeds to particulars: he
rejects circumcision, and the offering of sacrifices; rejects the
distinction of nations as Jew and Gentile; the distinction of meats as
clean and unclean, and all distinction of days, as holy and not holy. If
one man thought one day holier than another day; if another man thought
all days equally holy, he would have each man true to his conviction,
but not seek to impose that conviction on his brothers. Such was Paul's
opinion of "The law of Moses;" such, of the Sabbath; the Christians were
not "subject to ordinances."

       *       *       *       *       *

Let us come now to the common practice of the early Christians. The
apostles went about and preached Christianity, as they severally
understood it. They spoke as they found opportunity; on the Sabbath to
the Jews in the synagogues, and on other days, as they found time and
hearers. It does not appear from the New Testament, that they limited
themselves to any particular day; they were missionaries, some of them
remained but a little while in a place, making the most of their time.
It seems that the early Christians, who lived in large towns, met every
day for religious purposes. But as that would be found inconvenient, one
day came to be regarded as the regular time of their meetings. The
Jewish Christians observed the Sabbath with pharisaic rigor, while the
liberal Christians neglected it. But both parties of Christians
observed, at length, the first day of the week as a peculiar day. No one
knows when this observance of the Sunday began; it is difficult to find
proof in the New Testament, that the apostles regarded it as a peculiar
day; it seems plain that Paul did not. But it is certain that in the
second century after Jesus, the Christians in general did so regard it,
and perhaps all of them.

Why was the Sunday chosen as the regular day for religious meeting? It
was regarded as the day on which Jesus rose from the dead; and,
following the mythical account in Genesis, it was the day on which God
began the creation, and actually created the light. Here there were two
reasons for the selection of that day; both are frequently mentioned by
the early Christian writers. Sunday, therefore, was to them a symbol of
the new creation, and of the light that had come into the world. The
liberal Christians, in separating from the Jewish Sabbath, would
naturally exalt the new religious day. Athanasius, I think, is the first
who ascribes a divine origin to the institution of Sunday. He says, "The
Lord changed this day from the Sabbath to the Sunday;" but Athanasius
lived three centuries after Christ, and seems to have known little about
the matter.

The officers and the order of services in the churches on the Sunday
seem derived from the usages of the Jewish synagogues. The Sunday was
thus observed: the people came together in the morning; the exercises
consisted of readings from the Old Testament and such writings of the
Christians as the assembly saw fit to have read to them. In respect to
these writings there was a wide difference in the different churches,
some accepting more and others less. The overseer, or bishop, made an
address, perhaps an exposition of the passage of Scripture. Prayers were
said and hymns chanted; the Lord's supper was celebrated. The form no
doubt differed, and widely, too, in different places. It was not the
form of servitude but the spirit of freedom, they observed. But all
these things were done, likewise, on other days; the Lord's supper could
be celebrated on any day, and is on every day by the Catholic church,
even now; for the Catholics have been true to the early practices in
more points than the Protestants are willing to admit. In some places it
is certain there was a "communion" every day. Sunday was regarded holy
by the early Christians, just as certain festivals are regarded holy by
the Catholics, the Episcopalians, and the Lutherans, at this day; as the
New Englanders regard Thanksgiving day as holy. Other days, likewise,
were regarded as holy; were used in the same manner as the Sunday. Such
days were observed in honor of particular events in the life of Jesus,
or in honor of saints and martyrs, or they were days consecrated by
older festivals belonging to the more ancient forms of religion. In the
Catholic church such days are still numerous. It is only the Puritans
who have completely rejected them, and they have been obliged to
substitute new ones in their place. However, there was one peculiarity
of the Sunday which distinguished it from most or all other days. It was
a day of religious rejoicing. On other days the Christians knelt in
prayer; on the Sunday they stood up on joyful feet, for light had come
into the world. Sunday was a day of gladness and rejoicing. The early
Christians had many fasts; they were commonly held on Wednesdays and
Fridays, often on Saturday also, the more completely to get rid of the
Jewish superstition which consecrated that day; but on Sunday there must
be no fast. He would be a heretic who should fast on Sunday. It is
strictly forbidden in the "canons of the apostles;" a clergyman must be
degraded and a layman excommunicated, for the offence. Says St.
Ignatius, in the second century, if the epistle be genuine, "Every
lover of Christ feasts on the Lord's day." "We deem it wicked," says
Tertullian in the third century, "to fast on the Sunday, or to pray on
our knees." "Oh," says St. Jerome, "that we could fast on the Sunday, as
Paul did and they that were with him." St. Ambrose says, the "Manichees
were damned for fasting on the Lord's day." At this day the Catholic
church allows no fast on Sunday, save the Sunday before the crucifixion;
even Lent ceases on that day.

It does not appear that labor ceased on Sunday, in the earliest age of
Christianity. But when Sunday became the regular and most important day
for holding religious meetings, less labor must of course be performed
on that day. At length it became common in some places to abstain from
ordinary work on the Sunday. It is not easy to say how early this was
brought about. But after Christianity had become "respectable," and
found its way to the ranks of the wealthy, cultivated and powerful, laws
got enacted in its favor. Now, the Romans, like all other ancient
nations, had certain festal days in which it was not thought proper to
labor unless work was pressing. It was disreputable to continue common
labor on such days without an urgent reason; they were pretty numerous
in the Roman calendar. Courts did not sit on those days; no public
business was transacted. They were observed as Christmas and the more
important saints' days in Catholic countries; as Thanksgiving day and
the Fourth of July with us. In the year three hundred and twenty-one,
Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, placed Sunday among
their ferial days. This was perhaps the first legislative action
concerning the day. The statute forbids labor in towns, but expressly
excludes all prohibition of field-labor in the country.[10] About three
hundred and sixty-six or seven, the Council of Laodicea decreed that
Christians "ought not to Judaize and be idle on the Sabbath, but to work
on that day; especially observing the Lord's day, and if it is possible,
as Christians, resting from labor." Afterwards the Emperor Theodosius
forbade certain public games on Sunday, Christmas, Epiphany, and the
whole time from Easter to Pentecost. Justinian likewise forbade
theatrical exhibitions, races in the circus, and the fights of wild
beasts, on Sunday, under severe penalties. This was done in order that
the religious services of the Christians might not be disturbed. By his
laws the Sunday continued to be a day in which public business was not
to be transacted. But the Christmas days, the fifteen days of Easter,
and numerous other days previously observed by Christians or pagans,
were put in the same class by the law. All this it seems was done from
no superstitious notions respecting those days, but for the sake of
public utility and convenience. However, the rigor of the Jewish
Sabbatical laws was by no means followed. Labors of love, _opera
caritatis_, were considered as suitable business for those days. The
very statute of Theodosius recommended the emancipation of slaves on
Sunday. All impediments to their liberation were removed on that day,
and though judicial proceedings in all other matters were forbidden on
Sunday, an exception was expressly made in favor of emancipating slaves.
This statute was preserved in the code of Justinian.[11] All these laws
go to show that there were similar customs previously established among
the Christians, without the aid of legislation.

About the middle of the sixth century the Council of Orleans forbade
labor in the fields, though it did not forbid travelling with cattle and
oxen, the preparation of food, or any work necessary to the cleanliness
of the house or the person--declaring that rigors of that sort belong
more to a Jewish than to a Christian observance of the day. That, I
think, is the earliest ecclesiastical decree which has come down to us
forbidding field-labor in the country; a decree unknown till five
hundred and thirty-eight years after Christ. But before that, in the
year three hundred and thirteen, the Council of Elvira in Spain
decreed, that if any one in a city absented himself three Sundays
consecutively from the church, he should be suspended from communion for
a short time. Such a regulation, however, was founded purely on
considerations of public utility. Many church establishments have
thought it necessary to protect themselves from desertion by similar
penal laws.

In Catholic countries, at the present day, the morning of Sunday is
appropriated to public worship, the people flocking to church. But the
afternoon and evening are devoted to society, to amusement of various
kinds. Nothing appears sombre, but every thing has a festive air; even
the theatres are open. Sunday is like Christmas, or a Thanksgiving day
in Boston, only the festive demonstrations are more public. It is so in
the Protestant countries on the continent of Europe. Work is suspended,
public and private, except what is necessary for the observance of the
day; public lectures are suspended; public libraries closed; but
galleries of paintings and statues are thrown open and crowded; the
public walks are thronged. In Southern Germany, and, doubtless,
elsewhere, young men and women have I seen in summer, of a Sunday
afternoon, dancing on the green, the clergyman, Protestant or Catholic,
looking on and enjoying the cheerfulness of the young people. Americans
think their mode of keeping Sunday is unholy; they, that ours is Jewish
and pharisaical. In Paris, sometimes, courses of scientific lectures
are delivered after the hours of religious services, to men who are busy
during the week with other cares, and who gladly take the hours of their
only leisure day to gain a little intellectual instruction.

When England was a Catholic country, Catholic notions of Sunday of
course prevailed. Labor was suspended; there was service in the
churches, and afterwards there were sports for the people, but they were
attended with quarrelling, noise, uproar, and continual drunkenness. It
was so after the Reformation. In the time of Elizabeth, the laws forbade
labor except in time of harvest, when it was thought right to work, if
need were, and "save the thing that God hath sent." Some of the
Protestants wished to reform those disorders, and convert the Sunday to
a higher use. The government, and sometimes the superior clergy, for a
long time interfered to prevent the reform, often to protect the abuse.
The "Book of Sports," appointed to be read in churches, is well known to
us from the just indignation with which it filled our fathers.

Now, it is plain, that in England, before the Reformation, the Sunday
was not appropriated to its highest use; not to the highest interests of
mankind; no, not to the highest concerns, which the people, at that
time, were capable of appreciating. The attempts, made then and
subsequently, by government, to enforce the observance of the day, for
purposes not the highest, led to a fearful reaction; that to other and
counter reactions. The ill consequences of those movements have not yet
ceased on either side of the ocean.

The Puritans represented the spirit of reaction against ecclesiastical
and other abuses of their time, and the age before them. Let me do these
men no injustice. I honor the heroic virtues of our fathers not less
because I see their faults; see the cause of their faults, and the
occasion which demanded such masculine and terrible virtues as the
Puritans unquestionably possessed. I speak only of their doctrine of the
Sunday. They were driven from one extreme to the other, for oppression
makes wise men mad. They took mainly the notions of the Sabbath, which
belong to the later portions of the Old Testament; they interpreted them
with the most pharisaical rigor, and then applied them to the Sunday.
Did they find no warrant for that rigor in the New Testament? they found
enough in the Old; enough in their own character, and their consequent
notions of God. They thus introduced a set of ideas respecting the
Sunday, which the Christian church had never known before, and rigidly
enforced an observance thereof utterly foreign both to the letter and
spirit of the New Testament. They made Sunday a terrible day; a day of
fear, and of fasting, and of trembling under the terrors of the Lord.
They even called it by the Hebrew name--the Sabbath. The Catholics had
said it was not safe to trust the Scriptures in the hands of the people,
for an inspired Word needed an expositor also inspired. The abuse which
the Puritans made of the Bible by their notions of the Sunday, seemed a
fulfilment of the Catholic prophecy. But the Catholics did not see what
is plain to all men now--that this very abuse of Sunday and Scripture
was only the reaction against other abuses, ancient, venerated, and
enforced by the Catholic church itself.

Every sect has some institution which is the symbol of its religious
consciousness, though not devised for that purpose. With the early
Christians, it was their love-feasts and communion; with the Catholics,
it is their gorgeous ritual with its ancient date and divine
pretensions--a ritual so imposing to many; with the Quakers, who scorn
all that is symbolic, the symbol equally appears in the plain dress and
the plain speech, the broad brim, and _thee_ and _thou_. With the
Puritans, this symbol was the Sabbath, not the Sunday. Their Sabbath was
like themselves, austere, inflexible as their "divine decrees;" not
human and of man, but Hebrew and of the Jews, stern, cold, and sad.

The Puritans were possessed with the sentiment of fear before God; they
had ideas analogous to that sentiment, and wrought out actions akin to
those ideas. They brought to America their ideas and sentiments. Behold
the effect of their actions. Let us walk reverently backward, with
averted eyes to cover up their folly, their shame, and their sin, as
they could not walk to conceal the folly of their progenitors. The
Puritans are the fathers of New England and her descendant States; the
fathers of the American idea; of most things in America that are good;
surely, of most that is best. They seem made on purpose for their work
of conquering a wilderness and founding a State. It is not with gentle
hands, not with the dalliance of effeminate fingers, that such a task is
done. The work required energy the most masculine, in heart, head, and
hands. None but the Puritans could have done such a work. They could
fast as no men; none could work like them; none preach; none pray; none
could fight as they fought. They have left a most precious inheritance
to men who have the same greatness of soul, but have fallen on happier
times. Yet this inheritance is fatal to mere imitators, who will go on
planting of vineyards, where the first planter fell intoxicated with the
fruit of his own toil. This inheritance is dangerous to men who will be
no wiser than their ancestors. Let us honor the good deeds of our
fathers; and not eat, but reverently bury their honored bones.

The Puritans represented the natural reaction of mankind against old
institutions that were absurd or tyrannical. The Catholic church had
multiplied feast days to an extreme, and taken unnecessary pains to
promote fun and frolic. The Puritans would have none of the saints' days
in their calendar; thought sport was wicked; cut down Maypoles, and
punished a man who kept Christmas after the old fashion. The Catholic
church had neglected her golden opportunities for giving the people
moral and religious instruction; had quite too much neglected
public prayer and preaching, but relied mainly on sensuous
instruments--architecture, painting, music. In revenge, the Puritan had
a meeting-house as plain as boards could make it; tore the pictures to
pieces; thought an organ "was not of God," and had sermons long and
numerous, and prayers full of earnestness, zeal, piety, and faith, in
short, possessed of all desirable things except an end. Did the
Catholics forbid the people the Bible, emphatically the book of the
people--the Puritan would read no other book; called his children Hebrew
names, and reenacted "the laws of God" in the Old Testament, "until we
can make better." Did Henry and Elizabeth underrate the people and
overvalue the monarchy, nature had her vengeance for that abuse, and the
Puritan taught the world that kings, also, had a joint in their necks.

The Puritans went to the extreme in many things: in their contempt for
amusements, for what was graceful in man or beautiful in woman; in their
scorn of art, of elegant literature, even of music; in their general
condemnation of the past, from which they would preserve little
excepting what was Hebrew, which, of course, they over-honored as much
as they undervalued all the rest. In their notions respecting the Sunday
they went to the same extreme. The general reason is obvious. They
wished to avoid old abuses, and thought they were not out of the water
till they were in the fire. But there was a special reason, also: the
English are the most empirical of all nations. They love a fact more
than an idea, and often cling to an historical precedent rather than
obey a great truth which transcends all precedents. The national
tendency to external things, perhaps, helped lead them to these peculiar
notions of the Sabbath. The precedent they found in "The chosen people,"
and established, as they thought, by God himself.

       *       *       *       *       *

The ideas of the Puritans respecting the Sunday are still cherished in
the popular theology of New England. There is one party in our churches
possessed of many excellences, which has always had the merit of
speaking out fully what it thinks and feels. At this day that party
still represents the Puritanic opinions about the Sunday, though a
little modified. They teach that God created the world in six days, and
rested the seventh; that he commanded mankind, also, to rest on that
day; commanded a man to be stoned to death for picking up sticks of a
Saturday; that by divine authority the first day of the week was
substituted for the seventh, and therefore that it is the religious duty
of all men to rest from work on that day, for the Hebrew law of the
Sabbath is binding on Christians for ever. It is maintained that
abstinence from work on Sunday is as much a religious duty as abstinence
from theft or hatred; that the day must be exclusively devoted to
religion, in the technical sense of that word, to public or private
worship, to religious reading, thought, or conversation. To attend
church on that day is thought to be a good in itself, though it should
lead to no further good, and therefore a duty as imperative as the duty
of loving man and God. The preacher may not edify, still the duty of
attending to his ministration of the word remains the same; for the
attendance is a good in itself. It is taught that work, that amusement,
common conversation, the reading of a book not technically religious, is
a sin, just as clearly a sin as theft or hatred, though perhaps not so
great. Writing a letter, even, is denounced as a sin, though the letter
be written for the purpose of arresting the progress of a war, and
securing life and freedom to millions of men.

Now, it is very plain that such ideas are not consistent with the truth.
In the language of the church, they are a heresy. As we learn the facts
of the case we must give up such ideas concerning the Sunday. It is like
any other day. Christianity knows no classes of days, as holy or
profane; all days are the Lord's days, all time holy time.

       *       *       *       *       *

But then comes the other question, What is the best use to be made of
the day; the use most conducive to the highest interests of mankind?
Will it be most profitable to "give up the Sunday," to use it as the
Catholics do, as the Puritans did, or to adopt some other method? To
answer these questions fairly, let us look and see the effects of the
present notions about the Sunday, and the stricter mode of observing it
here in New England. The experience of two hundred years is worth
looking at. Let us look at the good effects first.

The good and evil of any age are commonly bound so closely together,
that in plucking up the tares, there is danger lest the wheat also be
uprooted, at least trodden down. In America, especially in New England,
every thing is intense, with of course a tendency to extravagance, to
fanaticism. Look at some of the most obvious signs of that intensity. No
conservatism in the world is so bigoted as American conservatism; no
democracy so intense. Nowhere else can you find such thorough-going
defenders of the existing state of things, social, ecclesiastical,
civil; such defenders of drunkenness, ignorance, superstition, slavery,
and war; nowhere such radical enemies to the existing state of things;
such foes of drunkenness, ignorance, superstition, slavery, and war. No
"Revivals of religion" are like the American; none of old were like
these. See how the American soldiers fight; how the American men will
work. Puritanism was intense enough in England; in the New World it was
yet more so. Our fathers were intense Calvinists; more Calvinistic than
Calvin--they became Hopkinsian. They hated the Pope; kings and bishops
were their aversion. They feared God. Did they love him--love him as
much? They had an intense religious activity, but they had another
intensity. It is better that we should say it, rather than men who do
not honor them. That intensity of action, when turned towards material
things, or, as they called them, "carnal things," needed some powerful
check. It was found in their bigotry and superstition. In such an age as
theirs, when the Reformation broke down all the ordinary restraints of
society, and rent asunder the golden ties which bound man to the past;
when the Anglican church ended in fire, and the English monarchy in
blood; when men full of piety thanked God for the fire and the
bloodshed, and felt the wrongs of a thousand years driving them almost
to madness--what was there to keep such men within bounds, and restrain
them from the wildest license and unbridled anarchy? Nothing but
superstition; nothing short of fear of hell. They broke down the
monarchy; they trod the church under their feet. She who had once been
counted as the queen and mother of society, was now to be regarded only
as the Apocalyptical woman in scarlet, the mother of abominations, bride
of the devil, and queen of hell. The Old Testament wrought on the minds
of these men like a charm, to stimulate and to soothe. "One day," said
they, "is made holy by God; in it shall no work be done by man or beast,
or thing inanimate. On that day all must attend church as an act of
religion." Here, then, was a bar extending across the stream of
worldliness, filling one seventh part of its channel, wide and deep, and
wonderfully interrupting its whelming tide. I admire the divine skill
which compounds the gases in the air; which balances centripetal and
centrifugal forces into harmonious proportions,--those fair ellipses in
the unseen air; but still more marvellous is that same skill, diviner
now, which compounds the folly and the wisdom of mankind; balances
centripetal and centrifugal forces here, stilling the noise of kings and
the tumult of the people, making their wrath to serve him, and the
remnant thereof restraining forever.

On Sunday, master and man, the slave stolen from the wilderness, the
servant--a Christian man bought from some Christian conqueror,--must
cease from their work. Did the covetous, the cruel, the strong, oppress
the weak for six days, the Sabbath said, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but
no further." The servant was free from his master, and the weary was at
rest. The plough stood still in the furrow; the sheaf lay neglected in
the field; the horse and the ox enjoyed their master's Sabbath of rest,
all heedless of the divine decrees, of election or reprobation, yet not
the less watched over by that dear Providence which numbered the hairs
of the head, and overruled the falling of a sparrow for the sparrow's
good. All must attend church, master and man, rich and poor, oppressor
and oppressed. Good things and great things got read out of the Bible,
it was the book of the people, the New Testament, written much of it in
the interest of all mankind, with special emphasis laid on the rights of
the weak and the duties of the strong. Good things got said in sermon
and in prayer. The speakers must think, the hearers think, as well as
tremble. Begin to think in a circle narrow as a lady's ring, or the
Assembly's Catechism, you will think out; for thought, like all
movement, tends to the right line. Calvinism has always bred thinkers,
and when barbarism was the first danger was perhaps the only thing which
could do it. Calvinism, too, has always shown itself in favor of popular
liberty to a certain degree, and though it stops far short of the mark,
yet goes far beyond the Catholic or Episcopalian.

Sunday, thus enforced by superstition, has yet been the education-day of
New England; the national school-time for the culture of man's highest
powers; therein have the clergy been our educators, and done a vast
service which mankind will not soon forget. It was good seed they sowed
on this soil of the New World; the harvest is proof of that. They
builded wiser than they knew. Their unconscious hands constructed the
thought of God. Even their superstition and bigotry did much to preserve
church and clergy to us; much also to educate and develop the highest
powers of man. But for that superstition we might have seen the same
anarchy, the same unbridled license in the seventeenth century, which we
saw in the eighteenth, as a consequence of a similar revolution, a
similar reaction; only it would have been carried out with the intensity
of that most masculine and earnest race of men. How much further English
atrocities would have gone than the French did go; how long it would
have taken mankind, by their proper motion, to reascend from a fall so
adverse and so low, I cannot tell. I see what saved them from the
plunge.

True, the Sunday was not what it should be, more than the week;
preaching was not what it should be, more than practice. But without
that Sunday, and without that preaching, New England would have been a
quite different land; America another nation altogether; the world by no
means so far advanced as now. New England with her descendants has
always been the superior portion of America. I flatter no man's
prejudice, but speak a plain truth. She is superior in intelligence, in
morality--that is too plain for proof. The prime cause of that
superiority must be sought in the character of the fathers of New
England; but a secondary and most powerful cause is to be found also in
those two institutions--Sunday and preaching. Why is it that all great
movements, from the American Revolution down to anti-slavery, have begun
here? Why is it that education societies, missionary societies, Bible
societies, and all the movements for the advance of mankind, begin here?
Why, it is no more an accident than the rising of the tide. Find much of
the cause in the superior character, and therefore in the superior aims
of the forefathers, much also will be found due to this--Once in the
week they paused from all work; they thought of their God, who had
delivered them from the iron house and yoke of bondage; they listened to
the words of able men, exhorting them to justice, piety, and a heavenly
walk with God; they trembled at fear of hell; they rejoiced at hope of
heaven. The church--no, the "meeting-house"--was the common property of
all; the minister the common friend. The slave looked up to him; the
chief magistrate dared not look down on him. For more than a hundred
years the ablest men of New England went into the pulpit. No talent was
thought too great, no learning too rich and profound, no genius too holy
and divine, for the work of teaching men their highest duty, and
helping to their highest bliss. He was the minister to all. There was
not then a church for the rich, and a chapel for the poor; the rich and
the poor met together, for one God was the maker of them all--their
Father too; they had one Gospel, one Redeemer,--their Brother not less
than their God; they journeyed toward the same heaven, which had but one
entrance for great and little; they prayed all the same prayer. The
effect of this socialism of religion is seldom noticed; so we walk on
moist earth, not thinking that we tread on the thunder-cloud and the
lightning. But it is not in human nature for men of intense religious
activity to meet in the same church, sing the same psalm, pray the same
prayer, partake the same elements of communion, and not be touched with
compassion--each for all, and all for each. The same causes which built
up religion in New England, built up democracy along with it. Is it not
easy to see the cause which made the rich men of New England the most
benevolent of rich men; gave them their character for generosity and
public spirit--yes, for eminent humanity? The acorn is not more
obviously the parent of the oak than those two institutions of New
England the parent of such masculine virtues as distinguish her sons.

Regarded merely as a day of rest from labor, the Sunday has been of
great value to us. Considering the intense character of the nation, our
tendency to material things, and our restless love of work, it seems as
if a Moses of the nineteenth century, legislating for us, would enact
two rest-days in the week, rather than one. It is a good thing that a
man once a week pauses from his work, arrays himself in clean garments,
and is at rest.

Regarded in its other aspects, Sunday has aided the intellectual culture
of the people to a degree not often appreciated. To many a man, yes, to
most men, it is their only reading day, and they will read "secular"
books, spite of the clerical admonition. Many a poor boy in New England,
who has toiled all the week, and would gladly have studied all the
night, did not obstinate Nature forbid, has studied stealthily all
Sunday, not Jeremiah and the prophets, but Homer and the mathematics,
and risen at length to eminence amongst cultivated men;--he has to thank
the Sunday for the beginnings of that manly growth.

The moral and religious effect of the day is yet more important. One
seventh part of the time was to be devoted to moral and religious
culture. The clergy watched diligently over Sunday, as their own day.
Work was then the accident; religion was the business. Every thing with
us becomes earnest; Sunday as earnest as the week. It must not be spent
idly. Perhaps no body of clergymen, for two hundred years, on the whole,
were ever so wakeful and active as the American. They also are earnest
and full of intensity, especially in the more serious sects. I think I
am not very superstitious; not often inclined to lean on my father's
staff rather than walk on my own feet; not over-much accustomed to take
things on trust because they have been trusted to all along: but I must
confess that I see a vast amount of good achieved by the aid of these
two institutions, the Sunday and preaching, which could not have been
done without them. I know I have my prejudices; I love the Sunday; a
professional bias may warp me aside, for I am a preacher--the pulpit is
my joy and my throne. Judge you how far my profession and my prejudice
have led me astray in estimating the value of the Sunday, its preaching,
and the good they have achieved for us in New England. I know what
superstition, what bigotry, has been connected with both; I know it has
kept grim and terrible guard about these institutions. I look upon that
superstition and bigotry, as on the old New England guns which were
fought with in the Indian wars, the French wars, and the
Revolution;--things that did service when men knew not how to defend
what they valued most with better tools and more Christian. I look on
both with the same melancholy veneration, but honor them the more that
now they are old, battered, unfit for use and covered with rust; I would
respectfully hang them up, superstition and the musket, side by side;
honorable, but harmless, with their muzzles down, and pray God it might
never be my lot to handle such ungodly weapons, though in a cause never
so humane and holy.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let us look a little at the ill effects of these notions of the Sunday
and the observance which they led to. It is thought an act of religion
to attend church and give a mere bodily presence there. Hence the
minister often relies on this circumstance to bring his audience
together; preaches sermons on the duty of going to church, while
ingenuous boys blush for his weakness, and ask, "Were it not better to
rely on your goodness, your piety, your wisdom; on your superior ability
to teach men, even on your eloquence, rather than tell them it is an act
of religion to come and hear you, when both they and you are painfully
conscious that they are thereby made no wiser, no better, nor more
Christian?" This notion is a dangerous one for a clergyman. It flatters
his pride and encourages his sloth. It blinds him to his own defects,
and leads him to attribute his empty benches to the perverseness of
human nature and the carnal heart, which a few snow-flakes can frighten
from his church, while a storm will not keep them from a lecture on
science or literature. No doubt it is a man's duty to seek all
opportunities of becoming wiser and better. So far as church-going helps
that work, so far it is a duty. But to count it in itself, irrespective
of its consequences, an act of religion, is to commit a dangerous
error, which has proved fatal to many a man's growth in goodness and
piety. Let us look to the end, not merely at the means.

This notion has also a bad effect on the hearers. It is thought an act
of religion to attend church, whether you are edified or not by sermon,
by psalm, or prayer; an act of religion, though you could more
profitably spend the time in your own closet at home, or with your own
thoughts in the fields. Of course, then, he who attends once a day is
thought a Christian to a certain degree; if twice, more so; if thrice,
why that denotes an additional amount of growth in grace. In this way
the day is often spent in a continual round of meetings. Sermon follows
sermon; prayer treads upon the footsteps of prayer; psalm effaces psalm,
till morning, afternoon, evening, all are gone. The Sunday is ended and
over; the man is tired--but has he been profited and made better
thereby? The sermons and the prayers have cancelled one another, been
heard and forgot. They were too numerous to remember or produce their
effect. So on a summer's lake, as the winds loiter and then pass by,
ripple follows ripple, and wave succeeds to wave, yet the next day the
wind has ceased and the unstable water bears no trace left there by all
the blowings of the former day, but bares its incontinent bosom to the
frailest and most fleeting clouds.

Another ill effect follows from regarding attendance at church as an act
of religion in itself:--It is forgotten that a man cannot teach what he
does not know. If you have more manhood than I, more religion; if you
are the more humane and the more divine, it is idle for me to try and
teach you divinity and humanity; idle in you to make believe you are
taught. The less must learn of the greater, not the greater directly of
the less. It is too often forgotten by the preacher that his hearers may
be capable of teaching him; that he cannot fill them out of an
emptiness, but a fulness. Hence, it comes to pass that no one, how
advanced soever, is allowed to graduate, so to say, from the church.
Perhaps it may do a great man, mature in Christianity, good to sit down
with his fellows and hear a little man talk who knows nothing of
religion; it may increase his sympathy with mankind. It can hardly be an
act of religion to such a man so advanced in his goodness and piety;
perhaps not the best use he could make of the hour.

The current opinion hinders social tendencies. A man must not meet with
his friend and neighbor, or if he does, he must talk with bated breath,
with ghostly countenance, and of a ghostly theme. From this abuse of the
Sunday comes much of the cold and unsocial character which strangers
charge us with. As things now go, there are many who have no opportunity
for social intercourse except the hours of the Sunday. Then it is
forbidden them. So they suffer and lose much of the charm of life;
become ungenial, unsocial, stiff, and hard, and cold.

This notion hinders men, also, from intellectual culture. They must read
no book but one professedly religious. Such works are commonly poor and
dull; written mainly by men of little ability, of little breadth of
view; not written in the interest of mankind, but only of a sect--the
Calvinists or Unitarians. A good man groans when he looks over the
immense piles of sectarian books written with good motives, and read
with the most devout of intentions, but which produce their best effect
when they lead only to sleep. Yet it is commonly taught that it is
religion to spend a part of Sunday in reading such works, in listening,
or in trying to listen, or in affecting to try and listen, to the most
watery sermons, while it is wicked to read some "secular" book,
philosophy, history, poem, or tale, which expands the mind and warms the
heart. Our poor but wisdom-seeking boy must read his Homer only by
stealth. There are many men who have no time for intellectual pursuits,
none for reading, except on Sunday. It is cruel to tell them they shall
read none but sectarian books or listen only to sectarian words.

But there are other evils yet. These notions and the corresponding
practice tend to make religion external, consisting in obedience to
form, in compliance with custom; while religion is and can be only
piety and goodness, love to God and love to man. To keep the Sunday
idle, to attend church, is not being religious. It is easy to do that;
easy to stop there, and then to look at real, manly saints, who live in
the odor of sanctity, whose sentiment is a prayer, their deeds religion,
and their whole life a perpetual communion with God, and say, "Infidel!
Unbeliever."

Then, as one day is devoted to religion, it is thought that is enough;
that religion has no more business in the world than the world in
religion. So division is made of the territory of mortal life, in which
partition worldliness has six days, while poor religion has only the
Sunday, and content with her own limits, feels no salient wish to absorb
or annex the week! It is painful to see this abuse of an institution so
noble. No commonness of its occurrence renders it less painful. It is
painful to be told that men of the most scrupulous sects on Sunday, are
in the week the least scrupulous of men.

But even in religious matters it is thought all things which pertain
directly to the religious welfare of men are not proper to be discussed
on Sunday. One must not preach against intemperance, against slavery,
against war, on Sunday. It is not "evangelical;" not "preaching the
gospel." Yet it is thought proper to preach on total depravity, on
eternal damnation; to show that God will damn forever the majority of
mankind; that the apostle Peter was a Unitarian. The Sunday is not the
time, the pulpit not the place, preaching not the instrument, wherewith
to oppose the monstrous sins of our day, and secure education,
temperance, peace, freedom, for mankind. It is not evangelical, not
Christian, to do that of a Sunday! Yet wonderful to say, it is not
thought very wicked to hold a political caucus on Sunday for the merest
party purposes; not wicked at all to work all day at the navy-yards in
fitting out vessels, if they are only vessels of war; not at all wicked
to toil all Sunday, if it is only in aiming to kill men in regular
battle. Theological newspapers can expend their cheap censure on a
member of Congress for writing a letter on Sunday, yet have no word of
fault to find with the order which sets hundreds to work on Sunday in
preparing armaments of war; not a word against the war which sets men to
butcher their Christian brothers on the day which Christians celebrate
as the anniversary of Christ's triumph over death! These things show
that we have not yet arrived at the most profitable and Christian mode
of using the Sunday; and when I consider these abuses I wonder not that
the cry of "Infidel" is met by the unchristian taunt, yet more deserved
and biting, "Thou hypocrite!" I wonder not that some men say, "Let us
away with the Sunday altogether; and if we have no place for rest, we
will have none for hypocrisy."

The efforts honestly made by good and honest men, to Judaize the day
still more; to revive the sterner features of ancient worship; to put a
yoke on us which neither we nor our fathers could bear; to transform the
Christian Sunday into the Jewish Sabbath, must lead to a reaction. Abuse
on one side will be met by abuse on the other; despotic asceticism by
license; Judaism by heathenism. Superstition is the mother of denial.
Men will scorn the Sunday; abuse its timely rest. Its hours that may be
devoted to man's highest interests will be prostituted to low aims, and
worldliness make an unbroken sweep from one end of the month to the
other; and then it will take years of toil before mankind can get back
and secure the blessings now placed within an easy reach. I put it to
you, men whose heads time has crowned with white, or sprinkled with a
sober gray, if you would deem it salutary to enforce on your
grandchildren the Sabbath austerities which your parents imposed on you?
In your youth was the Sunday a welcome day; a genial day; or only
wearisome and sour? Was religion, dressed in her Sabbath dress, a
welcome guest; was she lovely and to be desired? Your faces answer. Let
us profit by your experience.

       *       *       *       *       *

How can we make the Sunday yet more valuable? If we abandon the
superstitious notions respecting its origin and original design, the
evils that have hitherto hindered its use will soon perish of
themselves. They all grow out of that root. If men are not driven into
a reaction by pretensions for the Sunday which facts will not warrant;
if unreasonable austerities are not forced upon them in the name of the
law, and the name of God; there is no danger in our day that men will
abandon an institution which already has done so much service to
mankind. Let Sunday and preaching stand on their own merits, and they
will encounter no more opposition than the common school and the
work-days of the week. Then men will be ready enough to appropriate the
Sunday to the highest objects they know and can appreciate. Tell men the
Sunday is made for man, and they will use it for its highest use. Tell
them man is made for it, and they will war on it as a tyrant. I should
be sorry to see the Sunday devoted to common work; sorry to hear the
clatter of a mill, or the rattle of the wheels of business on that day.
I look with pain on men engaged needlessly in work on that day; not with
the pain of wounded superstition, but a deeper regret. I would not water
my garden with perfumes when common water was at hand. We shall always
have work enough in America; hand-work, and head-work, for common
purposes. There is danger that we shall not have enough of rest, of
intellectual cultivation, of refinement, of social intercourse; that our
time shall be too much devoted to the lower interests of life, to the
means of living and not the end.

I would not consider it an act of religion to attend church: only a
good thing to go there when the way of improvement leads through it;
when you are made wiser and better by being there. I am pained to see a
man spend the whole of a Sunday in going to church,--and forgetting
himself in getting acquainted with the words of the preachers. I think
most intelligent hearers, and most intelligent and Christian preachers,
will confess that two sermons are better than three, and one is better
than two. One need only look at the afternoon face of a congregation in
the city, to be satisfied of this. If one half the day were devoted to
public worship, the other half might be free for private studies of men
at home, for private devotion, for social relaxation, for intercourse
with one's own family and friends. Then Sunday afternoon and evening
would afford an excellent opportunity for meetings for the promotion of
the great humane movements of the day, which some would think not
evangelical enough to be treated of in the morning. Would it be
inconsistent with the great purposes of the day, inconsistent with
Christianity, to have lectures on science, literature, and similar
subjects delivered then? I do not believe the Catholic custom of
spending the Sunday afternoon in England, before the Reformation, was a
good one. It diverted men from the higher end to the lower. I cannot
think that here and now we need amusement so much as society,
instruction, refinement, and devotion. Yet it seems to me unwise to
restrain the innocent sports of children of a Sunday, to the same degree
that our fathers did; to make Sunday to them a day of gloom and sadness.
Thoughtful parents are now much troubled in this matter; they cannot
enforce the old discipline, so disastrous to themselves; they fear to
trust their own sense of what is right;--so, perhaps, get the ill of
both schemes, and the good of neither. There are in Boston about thirty
thousand Catholics, twenty-five thousand of them, probably, too ignorant
to read with pleasure or profit any book. At home, amusement formed a
part of their Sunday service; it was a part of their religion to make a
festive use of Sunday afternoon. What shall they do? Is it Christian in
us by statute to interdict them from their recreation? With the
exception of children and these most ignorant persons, it does not
appear that there is any class amongst us who need any part of the
Sunday for sport.

I am not one of those who wish "to give up the Sunday;" indeed there are
few such men amongst us; I would make it yet more useful and profitable.
I would remove from it the superstition and the bigotry which have so
long been connected with it; I would use it freely, as a Christian not
enslaved by the letter of Judaism, but made free by an obedience to the
law of the spirit of life. I would use the Sunday for religion in the
wide sense of that word; use it to promote piety and goodness, for
humanity, for science, for letters, for society. I would not abuse it
by impudent license on the one hand, nor by slavish superstition on the
other. We can easily escape the evils which come of the old abuse; can
make the Sunday ten times more valuable than it is even now; can employ
it for all the highest interests of mankind, and fear no reaction into
libertinism.

The Sunday is made for man, as are all other days; not man for the
Sunday. Let us use it, then, not consuming its hours in a Jewish
observance; not devote it to the lower necessities of life, but the
higher; not squander it in idleness, sloth, frivolity, or sleep; let us
use it for the body's rest, for the mind's culture, for head and heart
and soul.

Men and women, you have received the Sunday from your fathers, as a day
to be devoted to the highest interests of man. It has done great service
for them and for you. But it has come down accompanied with superstition
which robs it of half its value. It is easy for you to make the day far
more profitable to yourselves than it ever was to your fathers; easy to
divest it of all bigotry, to free it from all oldness of the letter;
easy to leave it for your children an institution which shall bless them
for ages yet to come: or it is easy to bind on their necks unnatural
restraints; to impose on their conscience and understanding absurdities
which at last they must repel with scorn and contempt. It is in your
hands to make the Sunday Jewish or Christian.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] These celebrated commandments have come down to us in three distinct
forms; namely, in Exodus xx., in Exodus xxxiv., and in Deut. v. The
differences between these several codes are quite remarkable and
significant.

[4] 2 Chron. 36:21.

[5] John 5:1-18, and 7:19-24.

[6] Matthew 23:1-3.

[7] Rev. 21:14.

[8] Coloss. 2:16.

[9] Galat. 1:5.

[10] Justinian, _Cod._ Lib. iii. Tit. xii. l. 3.

[11] _Cod._, Lib. iii. Tit. xii. l. 2. See also, l. 3 and 11.




III.

A SERMON OF IMMORTAL LIFE.--PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY,
SEPTEMBER 20, 1846.

WISDOM OF SOLOMON III. 1, 4.

    The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God: their
    hope is full of immortality.


It is the belief of mankind that we shall all live forever. This is not
a doctrine of Christianity alone. It belongs to the human race. You may
find nations so rude that they live houseless, in caverns of the earth;
nations that have no letters, not knowing the use of bows and arrows,
fire or even clothes, but no nation without a belief in immortal life.
The form of that belief is often grotesque and absurd; the mode of proof
ridiculous; the expectations of what the future life is to be are often
childish and silly. But notwithstanding all that, the fact still
remains, the belief that the soul of a man never dies.

How did mankind come by this opinion? "By a miraculous revelation," says
one. But according to the common theory of miraculous revelations, the
race could not have obtained it in this way, for according to that
theory the heathen had no such revelations; yet we find this doctrine
the settled belief of the whole heathen world. The Greeks and Romans
believed it long before Christ; the Chaldees, with no pretence to
miraculous inspiration, taught the idea of immortality; while the Jews,
spite of their alleged revelations, rested only in the dim sentiment
thereof.

It was not arrived at by reasoning. It requires a good deal of hard
thinking to reason out and prove this matter. Yet you find this belief
among nations not capable as yet of that art of thinking and to that
degree, nations who never tried to prove it, and yet believe it as
confidently as we. The human race did not sit down and think it out;
never waited till they could prove it by logic and metaphysics; did not
delay their belief till a miraculous revelation came to confirm it. It
came to mankind by intuition; by instinctive belief, the belief which
comes unavoidably from the nature of man. In this same way came the
belief in God; the love of man; the sentiment of justice. Men could see,
and knew they could see, before they proved it; before they had theories
of vision; without waiting for a miraculous revelation to come and tell
them they had eyes, and might see if they would look. Some faculties of
the body act spontaneously at first--so others of the spirit.

Immortality is a fact of man's nature, so it is a part of the universe,
just as the sun is a fact in the heavens and a part of the universe.
Both are writings from God's hand; each therefore a revelation from Him,
and of Him; only not miraculous, but natural, regular, normal. Yet each
is just as much a revelation from Him as if the great Soul of all had
spoken in English speech to one of us and said, "There is a sun there in
the heavens, and thou shalt live for ever." Yes, the fact is more
certain than such speech would make it, for this fact speaks always--a
perpetual revelation, and no words can make it more certain.

As a man attains consciousness of himself, he attains consciousness of
his immortality. At first he asks proof no more of his eternal existence
than of his present life; instinctively he believes both. Nay, he does
not separate the two; this life is one link in that golden and electric
chain of immortality; the next life another and more bright, but in the
same chain. Immortality is what philosophers call an ontological fact;
it belongs essentially to the being of man, just as the eye is a
physiological fact and belongs to the body of man. To my mind this is
the great proof of immortality: the fact that it is written in human
nature; written there so plain that the rudest nations have not failed
to find it, to know it; written just as much as form is written on the
circle, and extension on matter in general. It comes to our
consciousness as naturally as the notions of time and space. We feel it
as a desire; we feel it as a fact. What is thus in man is writ there of
God who writes no lies. To suppose that this universal desire has no
corresponding gratification, is to represent Him, not as the father of
all but as only a deceiver. I feel the longing after immortality, a
desire essential to my nature, deep as the foundation of my being; I
find the same desire in all men. I feel conscious of immortality; that I
am not to die; no, never to die, though often to change. I cannot
believe this desire and consciousness are felt only to mislead, to
beguile, to deceive me. I know God is my father, and the father of the
nations. Can the Almighty deceive his children? For my own part, I can
conceive of nothing which shall make me more certain of my immortality.
I ask no argument from learned lips. No miracle could make me more sure;
no, not if the sheeted dead burst cerement and shroud, and rising forth
from their honored tombs stood here before me, the disenchanted dust
once more enchanted with that fiery life; no, not if the souls of all my
sires since time began came thronging round, and with miraculous speech
told me they lived and I should also live. I could only say, "I knew all
this before, why waste your heavenly speech!" I have now indubitable
certainty of eternal life. Death removing me to the next state, can give
me infallible certainty.

But there are men who doubt of immortality. They say they are conscious
of the want, not of the fact. They need a proof. The exception here
proves the rule. You do not doubt your personal and conscious existence
now; you ask no proof of that; you would laugh at me should I try to
convince you that you are alive and self-conscious. Yet one of the
leaders of modern philosophy wanted a proof of his as a basis for his
science, and said,--"I am because I think." But his thought required
proof as much as his being; yes, logically more, for being is the ground
of thinking, not thinking of being. At this day there are sound men who
deny the existence of this outward world, declaring it only a
dreamworld. This ground, they say, and yonder sun have being but in
fancy, like the sun and ground you perchance dreamed of last night whose
being was only a being-dreamed. These are exceptional men, and help
prove the common rule, that man trusts his senses and believes an
outward world. Yet such are more common amongst philosophers than men
who doubt of their immortal life. You cannot easily reason those men out
of their philosophy and into their senses, nor by your own philosophy
perhaps convince them that there is an outward world.

I think few of you came to your belief in everlasting life through
reasoning. Your belief grew out of your general state of mind and heart.
You could not help it. Perhaps few of you ever sat down and weighed the
arguments for and against it, and so made up your mind. Perhaps those
who have the firmest consciousness of the fact are least familiar with
the arguments which confirm that consciousness. If a man disbelieves it,
if he denies it, his opinion is not often to be changed immediately or
directly by argument. His special conviction has grown out of his
general state of mind and heart, and is only to be removed by a change
in his whole philosophy. I am not honoring men for their belief, nor
blaming men who doubt or deny. I do not believe any one ever willingly
doubted this; ever purposely reasoned himself into the denial thereof.
Men doubt because they cannot help it; not because they will, but must.

There are a great many things true which no man as yet can prove true;
some things so true that nothing can make them plainer, or more plainly
true. I think it is so with this doctrine, and therefore, for myself,
ask no argument. With my views of man, of God, of the relation between
the two, I want no proof, satisfied with my own consciousness of
immortality. Yet there are arguments which are fair, logical, just,
which satisfy the mind, and may, perhaps, help persuade some men who
doubt, if such men there are amongst you. I think that immortality is a
fact of consciousness; a fact given in the constitution of man:
therefore a matter of sentiment. But it requires thought to pick it out
from amongst the other facts of consciousness. Though at first merely a
feeling, a matter of sentiment, on examination it becomes an idea--a
matter of thought. It will bear being looked at in the sharpest and
dryest light of logic. Truth never flinches before reason. It is so with
our consciousness of God; that is an ontological fact, a fact given in
the nature of man. At first it is a feeling, a matter of sentiment. By
thought we abstract this fact from other facts; we find an idea of God.
That is a matter of philosophy, and the analyzing mind legitimates the
idea and at length demonstrates the existence of God, which we first
learned without analysis, and by intuition. A great deal has been
written to prove the existence of God, and that by the ablest men; yet I
cannot believe that any one was ever reasoned directly into a belief in
God, by all those able men, nor directly out of it by all the skeptics
and scoffers. Indirectly such works affect men, change their philosophy
and modes of thought, and so help them to one or the other conclusion.

The idea of immortality, like the idea of God, in a certain sense, is
born in us, and fast as we come to consciousness of ourselves we come to
consciousness of God, and of ourselves as immortal. The higher we
advance in wisdom, goodness, piety, the larger place do God and
immortality hold in our experience and inward life. I think that is the
regular and natural process of a man's development. Doubt of either
seems to me an exception, an irregularity. Causes that remove the doubt
must be general more than special.

       *       *       *       *       *

However, in order to have a basis of thought and reasoning, as well as
of intuition and reason, let me mention some of the arguments for
everlasting life.

I. The first is drawn from the general belief of mankind. The greatest
philosophers and the most profound and persuasive religious teachers of
the whole world have taught this. That is an important fact, for these
men represent the consciousness of mankind in the highest development it
has yet reached, and in such points are the truest representatives of
man. What is more, the human race believes it, not merely as a thing
given by miraculous revelation, not as a matter proven by science, not
as a thing of tradition resting on some man's authority, but believes it
instinctively, not knowing and not asking why, or how; believes it as a
fact of consciousness. Now in a matter of this sort the opinion of the
human race is worth considering. I do not value very much the opinion of
a priesthood in Rome or Judea, or elsewhere on this point, or any other,
for they may have designs adverse to the truth. But the general
sentiment of the human race in a matter like this is of the greatest
importance. This general sentiment of mankind is a quite different thing
from public opinion, which favors freedom in one country and slavery in
another; this sentiment of mankind relates to what is a matter of
feeling with most men. It is only a few thinkers that have made it a
matter of thought. The opinion of mankind, so far as we know, has not
changed on this point for four thousand years. Since the dawn of
history, man's belief in immortality has continually been developing and
getting deeper fixed.

Still more, this belief is very dear to mankind. Let me prove that. If
it were true that one human soul was immortal and yet was to be
eternally damned, getting only more clotted with crime and deeper bit by
agony as the ages went slowly by, then immortality were a curse, not to
that man only, but to all mankind--for no amount of happiness, merited
or undeserved, could ever atone or make up for the horrid wrong done to
that one most miserable man. Who of you is there that could relish
Heaven, or even bear it for a moment, knowing that a brother was doomed
to smart with ever greatening agony, while year on year, and age on age,
the endless chain of eternity continued to coil round the flying wheels
of hell? I say the thought of one such man would fill even Heaven with
misery, and the best man of men would scorn the joys of everlasting
bliss, would spurn at Heaven and say, "Give me my brother's place; for
me there is no Heaven while he is there!" Now it has been popularly
taught, that not one man alone, but the vast majority of all mankind,
are thus to be condemned; immortal only to be everlastingly wretched.
That is the popular doctrine now in this land. It has been so taught in
the Christian churches these sixteen centuries and more--taught in the
name of Christ! Such an immortality would be a curse to men, to every
man; as much so to the "saved" as to the "lost;" for who would willingly
stay in Heaven, and on such terms? Surely not he who wept with weeping
men! Yet in spite of this vile doctrine drawn over the world to come,
mankind religiously believes that each shall live for ever. This shows
how strong is the instinct which can lift up such a foul and hateful
doctrine and still live on. Tell me not that scoffers and critics shall
take away man's faith in endless life: it has stood a harder test than
can ever come again.

       *       *       *       *       *

II. The next argument is drawn from the nature of man.

1. All men desire to be immortal. This desire is instinctive, natural,
universal. In God's world such a desire implies the satisfaction thereof
equally natural and universal. It cannot be that God has given man this
universal desire of immortality, this belief in it, and yet made it all
a mockery. Man loves truth; tells it; rests only in it; how much more
God who is the trueness of truth. Bodily senses imply their objects--the
eye light, the ear sound; the touch, the taste, the smell, things
relative thereto. Spiritual senses likewise foretell their object,--are
silent prophecies of endless life. The love of justice, beauty, truth,
of man and God, points to realities unseen as yet. We are ever hungering
after noblest things, and what we feed on makes us hunger more. The
senses are satisfied, but the soul never.

2. Then, too, while this composite body unavoidably decays, this simple
soul which is my life decays not. Reason, the affections, all the powers
that make the man, decay not. True, the organs by which they act become
impaired. But there is no cause for thinking that love, conscience,
reason, will, ever become weaker in man; but cause for thinking that all
these continually become more strong. Was the mind of Newton gone when
his frame, long over-tasked, refused its wonted work?

3. Here on earth, every thing in its place and time matures. The acorn
and the chestnut, things natural to this climate, ripen every year. A
longer season would make them no better nor bigger. It is so with our
body--that, under proper conditions, becomes mature. It is so with all
the things of earth. But man is not fully grown as the acorn and the
chestnut; never gets mature. Take the best man and the greatest--all his
faculties are not developed, fully grown and matured. He is not complete
in the qualities of a man; nay, often half his qualities lie all unused.
Shall we conclude these are never to obtain development and do their
work? The analogy of nature tells us that man, the new-born plant, is
but removed by death to another soil, where he shall grow complete and
become mature.

4. Then, too, each other thing under its proper conditions not only
ripens but is perfect also after its kind. Each clover-seed is perfect
as a star. Every lion, as a general rule, is a common representation of
all lionhood; the ideal of his race made real in him, a thousand years
of life would not make him more. But where is the Adamitic man; the type
and representative of his race, who makes actual its idea? Even Jesus
bids you not call him good; no man has all the manhood of mankind. Yes,
there are rudiments of greatness in us all, but abortive, incomplete,
and stopped in embryo. Now all these elements of manhood point as
directly to another state as the unfinished walls of yonder rising
church intimate that the work is not complete, that the artist here
intends a roof, a window there, here a tower, and over all a
heaven-piercing spire. All men are abortions, our failure pointing to
the real success. Nay, we are all waiting to be born, our whole nature
looking to another world, and dimly presaging what that world shall be.
Death, however we misname him, seasonable or out of time, is the
birth-angel, that alone.

5. Besides, the presence of injustice, of wrong, points the same way.
The fact that one man goes out of this life in childhood, in manhood, at
any time before the natural measure of his days is full; the fact that
any one is by circumstances made wretched; that he is hindered from his
proper growth and has not here his natural due--all intimates to me his
future life. I know that God is just. I know His justice too shall make
all things right, for He must have the power, the wish, the will
therefor, to speak in human speech. I see the injustice in this city,
its pauperism, suffering, and crime, men smarting all their life, and by
no fault of theirs. I know there must be another hemisphere to balance
this; another life, wherein justice shall come to all and for all. Else
God were unjust; and an unjust God to me is no God at all, but a
wretched chimera which my soul rejects with scorn. I see the autumn
prefigured in the spring. The flowers of May-day foretold the harvest,
its rosy apples and its yellow ears of corn. As the bud now lying cold
and close upon the bark of every tree throughout our northern clime is a
silent prophecy of yet another spring and other summers, and harvests
too; so this instinctive love of justice scantly budding here and nipped
by adverse fate, silently but clearly tells of a kingdom of heaven. I
take some miserable child here in this city, squalid in dress and look,
ignorant and wicked too as most men judge of vagrant vice, made so by
circumstances over which that child had no control; I turn off with a
shudder at the public wrong we have done and still are doing; but in
that child I see proof of another world, yes, Heaven glittering from
behind those saddened eyes. I know that child has a man's nature in him,
perhaps a Channing's trusting piety; perhaps a Newton's mind; has surely
rudiments of more than these; for what were Channing, Newton, both of
them, but embryo men? I turn off with a shudder at the public wrong, but
a faith in God's justice, in that child's eternal life, which nothing
can ever shake.

       *       *       *       *       *

III. A third argument is drawn from the nature of God. He, as the
infinite, the unconditioned, the absolute, is all-powerful, all-wise,
all-good. Therefore he must wish the best of all possible things; must
know the best of all possible things; must will the best of all possible
things, and so bring it to pass. Life is a possible thing; eternal life
is possible. Neither implies a contradiction; yes, to me they seem
necessary, more than possible. Now, then, as life, serene and happy
life, is better than non-existence, so immortality is better than
perpetual death. God must know that, wish that, will that, and so bring
that about. Man, therefore, must be immortal. This argument is brief
indeed, but I see not how it can be withstood.

I do not know that one of you doubts of eternal life. If any does, I
know not if these thoughts will ever affect his doubt. Still, I think
each argument is powerful; to one that thinks, reasons, balances, and
then decides, exceeding powerful. All put together form a mass of
argument which, as it seems to me, no logic can resist. Yet I beg you to
understand that I do not rest immortality on any reasoning of mine, but
on reason itself; not on these logical arguments, but on man's
consciousness, and the instinctive belief which is common to the human
race. I believed my immortality before I proved it; believed it just as
strongly then as now. Nay, could some doubter rise, and, to my thinking,
vanquish all these arguments, I should still hold fast my native faith,
nor fear the doubter's arms. The simple consciousness of men is stronger
than all forms of proof. Still, if men want arguments--why, there they
are.

       *       *       *       *       *

The belief in immortality is one thing; the special form thereof, the
definite notion of the future life, another and quite different. The
popular doctrine in our churches I think is this: That this body which
we lay in the dust shall one day be raised again, the living soul joined
on anew, and both together live the eternal life. But where is the soul
all this time, between our death-day and our day of rising? Some say it
sleeps unconscious, dead all this time; others, that it is in Heaven
now, or else in hell; others, in a strange and transient home, imperfect
in its joy or woe, waiting the final day and more complete account. It
seems to me this notion is absurd and impossible: absurd in its doctrine
relative to the present condition of departed souls; impossible in what
it teaches of the resurrection of this body. If my soul is to claim the
body again, which shall it be, the body I was born into, or that I died
out of? If I live to the common age of men, changing my body as I must,
and dying daily, then I have worn some eight or ten bodies. So at the
last, which body shall claim my soul, for the ten had her? The soul
herself may claim them all. But to make the matter still more intricate,
there is in the earth but a certain portion of matter out of which human
bodies can be made. Considering all the millions of men now living, the
myriads of millions that have been before, it is plain, I think, that
all the matter suitable for human bodies has been lived over many times.
So if the world were to end to-day, instead of each old man having ten
bodies from which to choose the one that fits him best, there would be
ten men, all clamoring for each body! Shall I then have a handful of my
former dust, and that alone? That is not the resurrection of my former
body. This whole doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh seems to me
impossible and absurd.

I know men refer this, as many other things no better, to Jesus. I find
no satisfactory evidence that he taught the resurrection of the body;
there is some evidence that he did not. I know it was the doctrine of
the Pharisees of his time, of Paul, the early Christians, and more or
less of the Christian churches to this day. In Christ's time in Judea,
there were the Sadducees, who taught the eternal death of men; the
Pharisees who taught the resurrection of the flesh and its reunion with
the soul; the Essenes, who taught the immortality of the soul, but
rejected the resurrection of the body. Paul was a Pharisee, and in his
letters taught the resurrection of the dead, the belief of the
Pharisees. From him it has come down to us, and in the creed of many
churches it is still written, "I believe in the resurrection of the
flesh." Many doubted this in early times, but the council of Nice
declared all men accursed who dared to doubt the resurrection of the
flesh. I mention this as absurd and impossible, because it is still, I
fear, the popular belief, and lest some should confound the doctrine of
immortality with this tenet of the Pharisees. Let it be remembered the
immortality of the soul is one thing, the resurrection of the body
another and quite different.

       *       *       *       *       *

What is this future life? what can we know of it besides its existence?
Some men speak as if they knew the way around Heaven as around the wards
of their native city. What we can know in detail is cautiously to be
inferred from the nature of man and the nature of God. I will modestly
set down what seems to me.

It must be a conscious state. Man is by his nature conscious; yes,
self-conscious. He is progressive in his self-consciousness. I cannot
think a removal out of the body destroys this consciousness; rather that
it enhances and intensifies this. Yet consciousness in the next life
must differ as much from consciousness here as the ripe peach differs
from the blossom, or the bud, or the bark, or the earthly materials out
of which it grew. The child is no limit to the man, nor my consciousness
now to what I may be, must be hereafter.

It must be a social state. Our nature is social; our joys social. For
our progress here, our happiness, we depend on one another. Must it not
be so there? It must be an advance upon our nature and condition here.
All the analogy of nature teaches that. Things advance from small to
great; from base to beautiful. The girl grows into a woman; the bud
swells into the blossom, that into the fruit. The process over, the work
begins anew. How much more must it be so in the other life. What old
powers we shall discover now buried in the flesh; what new powers shall
come upon us in that new state, no man can know; it were but poetic
idleness to talk of them. We see in some great man, what power of
intellect, imagination, justice, goodness, piety, he reveals, lying
latent in us all. How men bungle in their works of art! No Raphael can
paint a dew-drop or a flake of frost. Yet some rude man, tired with his
work, lies down beneath a tree, his head upon his swarthy arm, and sleep
shuts, one by one, these five scant portals of the soul, and what an
artist is he made at once! How brave a sky he paints above him, with
what golden garniture of clouds set off; what flowers and trees, what
men and women does he not create, and moving in celestial scenes! What
years of history does he condense in one short minute, and when he
wakes, shakes off the purple drapery of his dream as if it were but
worthless dust and girds him for his work anew! What other powers there
are shut up in men less known than this artistic phantasy; powers of
seeing the distant, recalling the past, predicting the future, feeling
at once the character of men--of this we know little, only by rare
glimpses at the unwonted side of things. But yet we know enough to guess
there are strange wonders there waiting to be revealed.

What form our conscious, social, and increased activity shall take, we
know not. We know of that no more than before our birth we knew of this
world, of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch, or the things which
they reveal. We are not born into that world, have not its senses yet.
This we know, that the same God, all-powerful, all-wise, all-good, rules
there and then, as here and now. Who cannot trust him to do right and
best for all? For my own part, I feel no wish to know how or where, or
what I shall be hereafter. I know it will be right for my truest
welfare; for the good of all. I am satisfied with this trust.

Yet the next life must be a state of retribution. Thither we carry
nothing but ourselves, our naked selves. Our fortune we leave behind us;
our honors and rank return to such as gave; even our reputation, the
good or ill men thought we were, clings to us no more. We go thither
without our staff or scrip; nothing but the man we are. Yet that man is
the result of all life's daily work; it is the one thing which we have
brought to pass. I cannot believe men who have voluntarily lived mean,
little, vulgar and selfish lives, will go out of this and into that,
great, noble, generous, good, and holy. Can the practical saint and the
practical hypocrite enter on the same course of being together? I know
the sufferings of bad men here, the wrong they do their nature, and what
comes of that wrong. I think that suffering is the best part of sin, the
medicine to heal it with. What men suffer here from their wrong-doing is
its natural consequence; but all that suffering is a mercy, designed to
make them better. Every thing in this world is adapted to promote the
welfare of God's creatures. Must it not be so in the next? How many men
seem wicked from our point of view, who are not so from their own; how
many become infamous through no fault of theirs; the victims of
circumstances, born into crime, of low and corrupt parents, whom former
circumstances made corrupt! Such men cannot be sinners before God. Here
they suffer from the tyranny of appetites they never were taught to
subdue; they have not the joy of a cultivated mind. The children of the
wild Indian are capable of the same cultivation as children here; yet
they are savages. Is it always to be so? Is God to be partial in
granting the favors of another life? I cannot believe it. I doubt not
that many a soul rises up from the dungeon and the gallows, yes, from
dens of infamy amongst men, clean and beautiful before God. Christ, says
the Gospel, assured the penitent thief of sharing heaven with him--and
that day. Many seem inferior to me, who in God's sight must be far
before me; men who now seem too low to learn of me here, may be too high
to teach me there.

I cannot think the future world is to be feared, even by the worst of
men. I had rather die a sinner than live one. Doubtless justice is there
to be done; that may seem stern and severe. But remember God's justice
is not like a man's; it is not vengeance, but mercy; not poison, but
medicine. To me it seems tuition more than chastisement. God is not the
Jailer of the Universe, but the Shepherd of the people; not the Hangman
of mankind, but their Physician; yes, our Father. I cannot fear Him as I
fear men. I cannot fail to love. I abhor sin, I loathe and nauseate
thereat; most of all at my own. I can plead for others and extenuate
their guilt, perhaps they for mine; not I for my own. I know God's
justice will overtake me, giving me what I have paid for. But I do not,
cannot fear it. I know His justice is love; that if I suffer, it is for
my everlasting joy. I think this is a natural state of mind. I do not
find that men ever dread the future life, or turn pale on their
death-bed at thought of God's vengeance, except when a priesthood has
frightened them to that. The world's literature, which is the world's
confession, proves what I say. In Greece, in classic days, when there
was no caste of priests, the belief in immortality was current and
strong. But in all her varied literature I do not remember a man dying,
yet afraid of God's vengeance. The rude Indian of our native land did
not fear to meet the Great Spirit, face to face. I have sat by the
bedside of wicked men, and while death was dealing with my brother, I
have watched the tide slow ebbing from the shore, but I have known no
one afraid to go. Say what we will, there is nothing stronger and deeper
in men than confidence in God, a solemn trust that He will do us good.
Even the worst man thinks God his Father; and is he not? Tell me not of
God's vengeance, punishing men for his own glory! There is no such
thing. Talk not to me of endless hell, where men must suffer for
suffering's sake, be damned for an eternity of woe. I tell you there is
no such thing, nor can there ever be. Does not even the hireling
shepherd, when a single lamb has gone astray, leave the ninety and nine
safe in their fold, go forth some stormy night and seek the wanderer,
rejoicing to bring home the lost one on his shoulders? And shall God
forget His child, his frailest or most stubborn child; leave him in
endless misery, a prey to insatiate Sin, that grim, bloodthirsty wolf,
prowling about the human fold? I tell you No; not God. Why, this
eccentric earth forsakes the sun awhile, careering fast and far away,
but that attractive power prevails at length, and the returning globe
comes rounding home again. Does a mortal mother desert her son, wicked,
corrupt and loathsome though he be? If so, the wiser world cries, Shame!
But she does not. When her child becomes loathsome and hateful to the
world, drunk with wickedness, and when the wicked world puts him away
out of its sight, strangling him to death, that mother forgets not her
child. She had his earliest kiss from lips all innocent of coming ill,
and she will have his last. Yes, she will press his cold and stiffened
form to her own bosom; the bosom that bore and fed the innocent babe
yearns yet with mortal longing for the murdered murderer. Infamous to
the world, his very dust is sacred dust to her. She braves the world's
reproach, buries her son, piously hoping, that as their lives once
mingled, so their ashes shall. The world, cruel and forgetful oft,
honors the mother in its deepest heart. Do you tell me that culprit's
mother loves her son more than God can love him? Then go and worship
her. I know that when father and mother both forsake me, in the
extremity of my sin, I know my God loves on. Oh yes, ye sons of men,
Indian and Greek, ye are right to trust your God. Do priests and their
churches say No!--bid them go and be silent forever. No grain of dust
gets lost from off this dusty globe; and shall God lose a man from off
this sphere of souls? Believe it not.

I know that suffering follows sin, lasting long as the sin. I thank God
it is so; that God's own angel stands there to warn back the erring
Balaams, wandering towards woe. But God, who sends the rain, the dew,
the sun, on me as on a better man, will, at last, I doubt it not, make
us all pure, all just, all good, and so, at last, all happy. This
follows from the nature of God himself, for the All-good must wish the
welfare of His child; the All-wise know how to achieve that welfare; the
All-powerful bring it to pass. Tell me He wishes not the eternal welfare
of all men, then I say, That is not the God of the universe. I own not
that as God. Nay, I tell you it is not God you speak of, but some
heathen fancy, smoking up from your unhuman heart. I would ask the worst
of mothers, Did you forsake your child because he went astray, and
mocked your word? "Oh no," she says; "he was but a child, he knew no
better, and I led him right, corrected him for his good, not mine!" Are
we not all children before God; the wisest, oldest, wickedest, God's
child! I am sure He will never forsake me, how wicked soever I become. I
know that he is love; love, too, that never fails. I expect to suffer
for each conscious, wilful wrong; I wish, I hope, I long to suffer for
it. I am wronged if I do not; what I do not outgrow, live over and
forget here, I hope to expiate there. I fear a sin; not to outgrow a
sin.

       *       *       *       *       *

A man who has lived here a manly life, must enter the next under the
most favorable circumstances. I do not mean a man of mere negative
goodness, starting in the road of old custom, with his wheels deep in
the ruts, not having life enough to go aside, but a positively good man,
one bravely good. He has lived heaven here, and must enter higher up
than a really wicked man, or a slothful one, or one but negatively good.
He can go from earth to heaven, as from one room to another, pass
gradually, as from winter to spring. To such an one, no revolution
appears needed. The next life, it seems, must be a continual progress,
the improvement of old powers, the disclosure or accession of new ones.
What nobler reach of thought, what profounder insight, what more
heavenly imagination, what greater power of conscience, faith and love,
will bless us there and then, it were vain to calculate, it is far
beyond our span. You see men now, whose souls are one with God, and so
His will works through them as the magnetic fire runs on along the
unimpeding line. What happiness they have, it is they alone can say. How
much greater must it be there; not even they can tell. Here the body
helps us to some things. Through these five small loop-holes the world
looks in. How much more does the body hinder us from seeing? Through the
sickly body yet other worlds look in. He who has seen only the daylight,
knows nothing of that heaven of stars, which all night long hang
overhead their lamps of gold. When death has dusted off this body from
me, who will dream for me the new powers I shall possess? It were vain
to try. Time shall reveal it all.

I cannot believe that any state in Heaven is a final state, only a
condition of progress. The bud opens into the blossom, the flower
matures into the fruit. The salvation of to-day is not blessedness
enough for to-morrow. Here we are first babes of earth, with a few
senses, and those imperfect, helpless and ignorant; then children of
earth; then youths; then men, armed with reason, conscience, affection,
piety, and go on enlarging these without end. So methinks it must be
there, that we shall be first babes of Heaven, then children, next
youths, and so go on growing, advancing and advancing--our being only a
becoming more and more, with no possibility of ever reaching the end. If
this be true, then there must be a continual increase of being. So, in
some future age, the time will come, when each one of us shall have more
mind, and heart, and soul, than Christ on earth; more than all men now
on earth have ever had; yes, more than they and all the souls of men now
passed to Heaven;--shall have, each one of us, more being than they all
have had, and so more truth, more soul, more faith, more rest and bliss
of life.

       *       *       *       *       *

Do men of the next world look in upon this? Are they present with us,
conscious of our deeds or thoughts? Who knows? Who can say aye or no?
The unborn know nothing of the life on earth; yet the born of earth know
somewhat of them, and make ready for their coming. Who knows but men
born to heaven are waiting for your birth to come--have gone to prepare
a place for us? All that is fancy, and not fact; it is not philosophy,
but poetry; no more. Of this we may be sure, that what is best will be;
what best for saint or sinner; what most conducive to their real good.
That is no poetry, but unavoidable truth, which all mankind may well
believe.

There are many who never attained their true stature here, yet without
blameworthiness of theirs; men cheated of their growth. Many a Milton
walks on his silent way, and goes down at last, not singing and unsung.
How many a possible Newton or Descartes has dug the sewers of a city,
and dies, giving no sign of the wealthy soul he bore!

    "Chill penury repressed his noble rage,
    And froze the genial current of the soul."

What if the best of you had been born slaves in North Carolina, or among
savages at New Zealand; nay, in some of the filthy cellars of Boston,
and turned friendless into the streets; what might you have become?
Surely not what you are; yet, before God, you might, perhaps, be more
deserving, and, at death, go to a far higher place. What is so terribly
wrong here, must be righted there. It cannot be that God will thrust a
man out of Heaven, because his mother was a savage, a slave, a pauper,
or a criminal. It is men's impiety which does so here, not Heaven's
justice there! How the wrong shall be righted I know not, care not now
to know; of the fact I ask no further certainty. Many that are last
shall be first. It may be that the pirate, in heaven, having outgrown
his earthly sins, shall teach justice to the judge who hanged him here.
They who were oppressed and trampled on, kept down, dwarfed, stinted and
emaciate in soul, must have justice done them there, and will doubtless
stand higher in Heaven than we, who, having many talents, used them
poorly, or hid them idle in the dirt, knowing our Father's will, yet
heeding not. It was Jesus that said, Many shall come from the east and
the west, and sit down in the kingdom of God, and men, calling
themselves saints, be thrust out.

       *       *       *       *       *

Shall we remember the deeds of the former life; this man that he picked
rags out of the mud in the streets, and another that he ruled nations?
Who can tell; nay, who need care to ask? Such a remembrance seems not
needed for retribution's sake. The oak remembers not each leaf it ever
bore, though each helped to form the oak, its branch and bole. How much
has gone from our bodies! we know not how it came or went! How much of
our past life is gone from our memory, yet its result lives in our
character! The saddler remembers not every stitch he took while an
apprentice, yet each stitch helped form the saddle.

       *       *       *       *       *

Shall we know our friends again? For my own part I cannot doubt it;
least of all when I drop a tear over their recent dust. Death does not
separate them from us here. Can life in heaven do it? They live in our
remembrance; memory rakes in the ashes of the dead, and the virtues of
the departed flame up anew, enlightening the dim cold walls of our
consciousness. Much of our joy is social here; we only half enjoy an
undivided good. God made mankind, but sundered that into men, that they
might help one another. Must it not be so there, and we be with our
real friends? Man loves to think it; yet to trust is wiser than to
prophesy. But the girl who went from us a little one may be as parent to
her father when he comes, and the man who left us have far outgrown our
dream of an angel when we meet again. I cannot doubt that many a man who
not long ago left his body here, now far surpasses the radiant manliness
which Jesus won and wore; yes, is far better, greater, too, than many
poorly conceive of God.

       *       *       *       *       *

There are times when we think little of a future life. In a period of
success, serene and healthy life; the day's good is good enough for that
day. But there comes a time when this day's good is not enough; its ill
too great to bear. When death comes down and wrenches off a friend from
our side; wife, child, brother, father, a dear one taken; this life is
not enough. Oh, no, not to the coldest, coarsest, and most sensual man.
I put it to you, to the most heartless of you all, or the most cold and
doubting--When you lay down in the earth your mother, sister, wife, or
child, remembering that you shall see their face no more, is life
enough? Do you not reach out your arms for heaven, for immortality, and
feel you cannot die? When I see men at a feast, or busy in the street, I
do not think of their eternal life; perhaps feel not my own. But when
the stiffened body goes down to the tomb, sad, silent, remorseless, I
feel there is no death for the man. That clod which yonder dust shall
cover is not my brother. The dust goes to its place, the man to his own.
It is then I feel my immortality. I look through the grave into heaven.
I ask no miracle, no proof, no reasoning for me. I ask no risen dust to
teach me immortality. I am conscious of eternal life.

But there are worse hours than these: seasons bitterer than death,
sorrows that lie a latent poison in the heart, slowly sapping the
foundations of our peace. There are hours when the best life seems a
sheer failure to the man who lived it, his wisdom folly, his genius
impotence, his best deed poor and small; when he wonders why he was
suffered to be born; when all the sorrows of the world seem poured upon
him; when he stands in a populous loneliness, and though weak, can only
lean in upon himself. In such hour he feels the insufficiency of this
life. It is only his cradle-time, he counts himself just born; all
honors, wealth and fame are but baubles in his baby hand; his deep
philosophy but nursery rhymes. Yet he feels the immortal fire burning in
his heart. He stretches his hands out from the swaddling-clothes of
flesh, reaching after the topmost star, which he sees, or dreams he
sees, and longs to go alone. Still worse, the consciousness of sin comes
over him; he feels that he has insulted himself. All about him seems
little; himself little, yet clamoring to be great. Then we feel our
immortality; through the gairish light of day we see a star or two
beyond. The soul within us feels her wings, contending to be born,
impatient for the sky, and wrestles with the earthly worm that folds us
in.

    "Mysterious Night! when our first Parent knew
      Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,
    Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,
      This glorious canopy of light and blue?
    Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew,
      Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
    Hesperus with the host of heaven came;
      And lo, Creation widened in man's view.
    Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
      Within thy beams, O Sun? or who could find,
    Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed,
      That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind?
    Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife?
      If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?"

I would not slight this wondrous world. I love its day and night. Its
flowers and its fruits are dear to me. I would not wilfully lose sight
of a departing cloud. Every year opens new beauty in a star; or in a
purple gentian fringed with loveliness. The laws too of matter seem more
wonderful the more I study them, in the whirling eddies of the dust, in
the curious shells of former life buried by thousands in a grain of
chalk, or in the shining diagrams of light above my head. Even the ugly
becomes beautiful when truly seen. I see the jewel in the bunchy toad.
The more I live, the more I love this lovely world; feel more its Author
in each little thing; in all that is great. But yet I feel my
immortality the more. In childhood the consciousness of immortal life
buds forth feeble, though full of promise. In the man it unfolds its
fragrant petals, his most celestial flower, to mature its seed
throughout eternity. The prospect of that everlasting life, the perfect
justice yet to come, the infinite progress before us, cheer and comfort
the heart. Sad and disappointed, full of self-reproach, we shall not be
so forever. The light of heaven breaks upon the night of trial, sorrow,
sin; the sombre clouds which overhung the east, grown purple now, tell
us the dawn of heaven is coming in. Our faces, gleamed on by that, smile
in the new-born glow; we are beguiled of our sadness before we are
aware. The certainty of this provokes us to patience, it forbids us to
be slothfully sorrowful. It calls us to be up and doing. The thought
that all will at last be right with the slave, the poor, the weak, and
the wicked, inspires us with zeal to work for them here, and make it all
right for them even now.

There is small merit in being willing to die; it seems almost sinful in
a good man to wish it when the world needs him here so much. It is weak
and unmanly to be always looking and sighing voluptuously for that. But
it is of great comfort to have in your soul a sure trust in
immortality; of great value here and now to anticipate time and live
to-day the eternal life. That we may all do. The joys of heaven will
begin as soon as we attain the character of heaven and do its duties.
That may begin to-day. It is everlasting life to know God, to have His
Spirit dwelling in you, yourself at one with Him. Try that and prove its
worth. Justice, usefulness, wisdom, religion, love, are the best things
we hope for in Heaven. Try them on--they will fit you here not less
becomingly. They are the best things of earth. Think no outlay of
goodness and piety too great. You will find your reward begin here. As
much goodness and piety, so much Heaven. Men will not pay you--God will;
pay you now; pay you hereafter and for ever.




IV.

THE PUBLIC EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE.--AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE
ONONDAGA TEACHERS' INSTITUTE, AT SYRACUSE, NEW YORK, OCTOBER 4, 1849.


Education is the developing and furnishing of the faculties of man. To
educate the people is one of the functions of the State. It is generally
allowed in the free States of America, that the community owes each
child born into it a chance for education, intellectual, moral, and
religious. Hence the child has a just and recognized claim on the
community for the means of this education, which is to be afforded him,
not as a charity, but as a right.

The fact indicates the progress mankind has made in not many years. Once
the state only took charge of the military education of the people; not
at all of their intellectual, moral, or religious culture. They received
their military discipline, not for the special and personal advantage of
the individuals, Thomas and Oliver, but for the benefit of the state.
They received it, not because they were men claiming it in virtue of
their manhood, but as subjects of the state, because their military
training was needful for the state, or for its rulers who took the name
thereof. Then the only culture which the community took public pains to
bestow on its members, was training them to destroy. The few, d

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