THE ERROR OF COLUMBUS.
From a sermon by Prof. Swing, printed in Chicago Inter Ocean,1892.
The present rejoices in the remembrance that Columbus was a student, a thinker; that he loved maps and charts; that he was a dreamer about new continents; but after enumerating all these attractive forms of mental activity, it comes with pain upon the thought that he was also a kind of modified pirate. His thoughts and feelings went away from his charts and compasses and touched upon vice and crime. Immorality ruins man's thought. Let the name be Columbus, or Aaron Burr, or Byron, a touch of immorality is the death of thought. "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are beautiful, whatsoever things are of good report," these seek, say, and do, but when the man who would discover a continent robs a merchant ship or steals a cargo of slaves, or when a poet teaches gross vulgarity, then the thinker is hemmed and degraded by criminality. It is the glory of our age that it is washing white much of old thought. What is the emancipation of woman but the filtration of old thought? Did not Columbus study and read and think, and then go out and load his ship with slaves? Did not the entire man—man the thinker, the philosopher, the theologian—cover himself with intellectual glory and then load his ship with enslaved womanhood? Was not the scholar Columbus part pirate? What was in that atmosphere of the fifteenth century which could have given peculiar thoughts to Columbus alone? Was he alone in his piracy? It is much more certain that the chains that held the negro held also all womanhood. All old thought thus awaited the electric process that should weed ideas from crime. Our later years are active in disentangling thought from injustice and vulgarity.