(1813-1887)
BY LYMAN ABBOTT
he life of Henry Ward Beecher may be either compressed into a sentence or expanded into a volume. He was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on the 24th day of June, 1813, the child of the well-known Lyman Beecher; graduated at Amherst College in 1834, and subsequently studied at Lane Theological Seminary (Cincinnati), of which his father was the president; began his ministerial life as pastor of a Home Missionary (Presbyterian) church at the little village of Lawrenceburg, twenty miles south of Cincinnati on the Ohio River; was both sexton and pastor, swept the church, built the fires, lighted the lamps, rang the bell, and preached the sermons; was called to the pastorate of the First Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis, the capital of Indiana, where he remained for eight years, 1839 to 1847, and where his preaching soon won for him a reputation throughout the State, and his occasional writing a reputation beyond its boundaries; thence was called in 1847 to be the first pastor of the newly organized Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, where he remained with an ever increasing reputation as preacher, lecturer, orator, and writer, until the day of his death, March 8th, 1887.
Such is the outline of a life, the complete story of which would be the history of the United States during the most critical half-century of the nation's existence. Living in an epoch when the one overshadowing political issue was pre-eminently a moral issue, and when no man could be a faithful preacher of righteousness and not a political preacher; concerned in whatever concerned humanity; believing that love is the essence of all true religion, and that love to God is impossible without love to man; moral reformer not less than gospel preacher, and statesman even more than theologian: throwing himself into the anti-slavery conflict with all the courage of a heroic nature and all the ardor of an intensely impulsive one,--he stands among the first half-score of writers, orators, reformers, statesmen, and soldiers, who combined to make the half-century from 1835 to 1885 as brilliant and as heroic as any in human history.
The greatness of Henry Ward Beecher consisted not so much in a predominance of any one quality as in a remarkable combination of many. His physique justified the well-known characterization of Mr. Fowler, the phrenologist, "Splendid animal." He was always an eager student, though his methods were desultory. He was familiar with the latest thought in philosophy, had studied Herbert Spencer before his works were republished in the United States, yet was a child among children, and in his old age retained the characteristic faults and virtues of childhood, and its innocent impulsiveness.
His imagination might have made him a poet, his human sympathies a dramatic poet, had not his strong common-sense kept him always in touch with the actualities of life, and a masterful conscience compelled him to use his æsthetic faculties in sterner service than in the entertainment of mankind. The intensity of his moral nature enhanced rather than subdued his exuberant humor, which love prevented from becoming satire, and seriousness preserved from degenerating into wit. His native faculty of mimicry led men to call him an actor, yet he wholly lacked the essential quality of a good actor,--power to take on another's character,--and used the mimic art only to interpret the truth which at the moment possessed him.
Such power of passion as was his is not often seen mated to such self-control; for while he spoke with utter abandon, he rarely if ever did so until he had carefully deliberated the cause he was espousing. He thought himself deficient in memory, and in fact rarely borrowed illustrations from his reading either of history or of literature; but his keenness of observation photographed living scenes upon an unfading memory which years after he could and did produce at will. All these contrary elements of his strangely composite though not incongruous character entered into his style,--or, to speak more accurately, his styles,--and make any analysis of them within reasonable limits difficult, if not impossible.
For the writer is known by his style as the wearer by his clothes. Even if it be no native product of the author's mind, but a conscious imitation of carefully studied models,--what I may call a tailor-made style, fashioned in a vain endeavor to impart sublimity to commonplace thinking,--the poverty of the author is thereby revealed, much as the boor is most clearly disclosed when wearing ill-at-ease, unaccustomed broadcloth. Mr. Beecher's style was not artificial; its faults as well as its excellences were those of extreme naturalness. He always wrote with fury; rarely did he correct with phlegm. His sermons were published as they fell from his lips,--correct and revise he would not. The too few editorials which he wrote, on the eve of the Civil War, were written while the press was impatiently waiting for them, were often taken page by page from his hand, and were habitually left unread by him to be corrected in proof by others.
His lighter contributions to the New York Ledger were thrown off in the same way, generally while the messenger waited to take them to the editorial sanctum. It was his habit, whether unconscious or deliberate I do not know, to speak to a great congregation with the freedom of personal conversation, and to write for the press with as little reserve as to an intimate friend. This habit of taking the public into his confidence was one secret of his power, but it was also the cause of those violations of conventionality in public address which were a great charm to some and a grave defect to others. There are few writers or orators who have addressed such audiences with such effect, whose style has been so true and unmodified a reflection of their inner life. The title of one of his most popular volumes might be appropriately made the title of them all--'Life Thoughts.'
But while his style was wholly unartificial, it was no product of mere careless genius; carelessness never gives a product worth possessing. The excellences of Mr. Beecher's style were due to a careful study of the great English writers; its defects to a temperament too eager to endure the dull work of correction. In his early manhood he studied the old English divines, not for their thoughts, which never took hold of him, but for their style, of which he was enamored. The best characterization of South and Barrow I ever heard he gave me once in a casual conversation. The great English novelists he knew; Walter Scott's novels, of which he had several editions in his library, were great favorites with him, but he read them rather for the beauty of their descriptive passages than for their romantic and dramatic interest. Ruskin's 'Modern Painters' he both used himself and recommended to others as a text-book in the observation of nature, and certain passages in them he read and re-read.
But in his reading he followed the bent of his own mind rather than any prescribed system. Neither in his public utterances nor in his private conversation did he indicate much indebtedness to Shakespeare among the earlier writers, nor to Emerson or Carlyle among the moderns. Though not unfamiliar with the greatest English poets, and the great Greek poets in translations, he was less a reader of poetry than of poetical prose. He had, it is true, not only read but carefully compared Dante's 'Inferno' with Milton's 'Paradise Lost'; still it was not the 'Paradise Lost,' it was the 'Areopagitica' which he frequently read on Saturday nights, for the sublimity of its style and the inspiration it afforded to the imagination. He was singularly deficient in verbal memory, a deficiency which is usually accompanied by a relatively slight appreciation of the mere rhythmic beauty of literary form. It is my impression that for amorous poems, such as Moore's songs, or even Shakespeare's sonnets, and for purely descriptive poetry, such as the best of 'Childe Harold' and certain poems of Wordsworth, he cared comparatively little.
But he delighted in religious poetry, whether the religion was that of the pagan Greek Tragedies, the mediaeval Dante, or the Puritan Milton. He was a great lover of the best hymns, and with a catholicity of affection which included the Calvinist Toplady, the Arminian Wesley, the Roman Catholic Faber, and the Unitarian Holmes. Generally, however, he cared more for poetry of strength than for that of fancy or sentiment. It was the terrific strength in Watts's famous hymn beginning
"My thoughts on awful subjects dwell,
Damnation and the dead,"
which caused him to include it in the 'Plymouth Collection,' abhorrent as was the theology of that hymn alike to his heart and to his conscience.
In any estimate of Mr. Beecher's style, it must be remembered that he was both by temperament and training a preacher. He was brought up not in a literary, but in a didactic atmosphere. If it were as true as it is false that art exists only for art's sake, Mr. Beecher would not have been an artist. His art always had a purpose; generally a distinct moral purpose. An overwhelming proportion of his contributions to literature consists of sermons or extracts from sermons, or addresses not less distinctively didactic. His one novel was written avowedly to rectify some common misapprehensions as to New England life and character. Even his lighter papers, products of the mere exuberance of a nature too full of every phase of life to be quiescent, indicated the intensity of a purposeful soul, much as the sparks in a blacksmith's shop come from the very vigor with which the artisan is shaping on the anvil the nail or the shoe.
But Mr. Beecher was what Mr. Spurgeon has called him, "the most myriad-minded man since Shakespeare"; and such a mind must both deal with many topics, and if it be true to itself, exhibit many styles. If one were to apply to Mr. Beecher's writings the methods which have sometimes been applied by certain Higher Critics to the Bible, he would conclude that the man who wrote the Sermons on Evolution and Theology could not possibly have also written the humorous description of a house with all the modern improvements. Sometimes grave, sometimes gay, sometimes serious, sometimes sportive, concentrating his whole power on whatever he was doing, working with all his might but also playing with all his might, when he is on a literary frolic the reader would hardly suspect that he was ever dominated by a strenuous moral purpose. Yet there were certain common elements in Mr. Beecher's character which appeared in his various styles, though mixed in very different proportions and producing very different combinations. Within the limits of such a study as this, it must suffice to indicate in very general terms some of these elements of character which appear in and really produce his literary method.
Predominant among them was a capacity to discriminate between the essentials and the accidentals of any subject, a philosophical perspective which enabled him to see the controlling connection and to discard quickly such minor details as tended to obscure and to perplex. Thus a habit was formed which led him not infrequently to ignore necessary limitations and qualifications, and to make him scientifically inaccurate, though vitally and ethically true. It was this quality which led critics to say of him that he was no theologian, though it is doubtful whether any preacher in America since Jonathan Edwards has exerted a greater influence on its theology. But this quality imparted clearness to his style. He always knew what he wanted to say and said it clearly. He sometimes produced false impressions by the very strenuousness of his aim and the vehemence of his passion; but he was never foggy, obscure, or ambiguous.
This clearness of style was facilitated by the singleness of his purpose. He never considered what was safe, prudent, or expedient to say, never reflected upon the effect which his speech might have on his reputation or his influence, considered only how he could make his hearers apprehend the truth as he saw it. He therefore never played with words, never used them with a double meaning, or employed them to conceal his thoughts. He was indeed utterly incapable of making a speech unless he had a purpose to accomplish; when he tried he invariably failed; no orator ever had less ability to roll off airy nothings for the entertainment of an audience.
Coupled with this clearness of vision and singleness of purpose was a sympathy with men singularly broad and alert. He knew the way to men's minds, and adapted his method to the minds he wished to reach. This quality put him at once en rapport with his auditors, and with men of widely different mental constitution. Probably no preacher has ever habitually addressed so heterogeneous a congregation as that which he attracted to Plymouth Church. In his famous speech at the Herbert Spencer dinner he was listened to with equally rapt attention by the great philosopher and by the French waiters, who stopped in their service, arrested and held by his mingled humor, philosophy, and restrained emotion. This human sympathy gave a peculiar dramatic quality to his imagination. He not only recalled and reproduced material images from the past with great vividness, he re-created in his own mind the experiences of men whose mold was entirely different from his own. As an illustration of this, a comparison of two sermons on Jacob before Pharaoh, one by Dr. Talmage, the other by Mr. Beecher, is interesting and instructive. Dr. Talmage devotes his imagination wholly to reproducing the outward circumstances,--the court in its splendor and the patriarch with his wagons, his household, and his stuff; this scene Mr. Beecher etches vividly but carelessly in a few outlines, then proceeds to delineate with care the imagined feelings of the king, awed despite his imperial splendor by the spiritual majesty of the peasant herdsman. Yet Mr. Beecher could paint the outer circumstances with care when he chose to do so. Some of his flower pictures in 'Fruits, Flowers, and Farming' will always remain classic models of descriptive literature, the more amazing that some of them are portraits of flowers he had never seen when he wrote the description.
While his imagination illuminated nearly all he said or wrote, it was habitually the instrument of some moral purpose; he rarely ornamented for ornament's sake. His pictures gave beauty, but they were employed not to give beauty but clearness. He was thus saved from mixed metaphors, the common fault of imaginative writings which are directed to no end, and thus are liable to become first lawless, then false, finally self-contradictory and absurd. The massive Norman pillars of Durham Cathedral are marred by the attempt which some architect has made to give them grace and beauty by adding ornamentation. Rarely if ever did Mr. Beecher fall into the error of thus mixing in an incongruous structure two architectural styles. He knew when to use the Norman strength and solidity, and when the Gothic lightness and grace.
Probably his keen sense of humor would have preserved him from this not uncommon error. It is said that the secret of humor is the quick perception of incongruous relations. This would seem to have been the secret of Mr. Beecher's humor, for he had in an eminent degree what the phrenologists call the faculty of comparison. This was seen in his arguments, which were more often analogical than logical; seen not less in that his humor was not employed with deliberate intent to relieve a too serious discourse, but was itself the very product of his seriousness. He was humorous, but rarely witty, as, for the same reason, he was imaginative but not fanciful. For both his imagination and his humor were the servants of his moral purpose; and as he did not employ the one merely as a pleasing ornament, so he never went out of his way to introduce a joke or a funny story to make a laugh.
Speaking broadly, Mr. Beecher's style as an orator passed through three epochs. In the first, best illustrated by his 'Sermons to Young Men,' preached in Indianapolis, his imagination is the predominant faculty. Those sermons will remain in the history of homiletical literature as remarkable of their kind, but not as a pulpit classic for all times; for the critic will truly say that the imagination is too exuberant, the dramatic element sometimes becoming melodramatic, and the style lacking in simplicity. In the second epoch, best illustrated by the Harper and Brothers edition of his selected sermons, preached in the earlier and middle portion of his Brooklyn ministry, the imagination is still pervasive, but no longer predominant. The dramatic fire still burns, but with a steadier heat. Imagination, dramatic instinct, personal sympathy, evangelical passion, and a growing philosophic thought-structure, combine to make the sermons of this epoch the best illustration of his power as a popular preacher. In each sermon he holds up a truth like his favorite opal, turning it from side to side and flashing its opalescent light upon his congregation, but so as always to show the secret fire at the heart of it. In the third epoch, best illustrated by his sermons on Evolution and Theology, the philosophic quality of his mind predominates; his imagination is subservient to and the instrument of clear statement, his dramatic quality shows itself chiefly in his realization of mental conditions foreign to his own, and his style, though still rich in color and warm with feeling, is mastered, trained, and directed by his intellectual purpose. In the first epoch he is the painter, in the second the preacher, in the third the teacher.
Judgments will differ: in mine the last epoch is the best, and its utterances will long live a classic in pulpit literature. The pictures of the first epoch are already fading; the fervid oratory of the second epoch depends so much on the personality of the preacher, that as the one grows dim in the distance the other must grow dim also; but the third, more enduring though less fascinating, will remain so long as the heart of man hungers for the truth and the life of God,--that is, for a rational religion, a philosophy of life which shall combine reverence and love, and a reverence and love which shall not call for the abdication of the reason.
BOOK-STORES AND BOOKS
From 'Star Papers'
Nothing marks the increasing wealth of our times, and the growth of the public mind toward refinement, more than the demand for books. Within ten years the sale of common books has increased probably two hundred per cent., and it is daily increasing. But the sale of expensive works, and of library editions of standard authors in costly bindings, is yet more noticeable. Ten years ago such a display of magnificent works as is to be found at the Appletons' would have been a precursor of bankruptcy. There was no demand for them. A few dozen, in one little show-case, was the prudent whole. Now, one whole side of an immense store is not only filled with admirably bound library books, but from some inexhaustible source the void continually made in the shelves is at once refilled. A reserve of heroic books supply the places of those that fall. Alas! where is human nature so weak as in a book-store! Speak of the appetite for drink; or of a bon vivant's relish for a dinner! What are these mere animal throes and ragings compared with those fantasies of taste, those yearnings of the imagination, those insatiable appetites of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller's temptation-hall?
How easily one may distinguish a genuine lover of books from a worldly man! With what subdued and yet glowing enthusiasm does he gaze upon the costly front of a thousand embattled volumes! How gently he draws them down, as if they were little children; how tenderly he handles them! He peers at the title-page, at the text, or the notes, with the nicety of a bird examining a flower. He studies the binding: the leather,--russia, English calf, morocco; the lettering, the gilding, the edging, the hinge of the cover! He opens it and shuts it, he holds it off and brings it nigh. It suffuses his whole body with book magnetism. He walks up and down in a maze at the mysterious allotments of Providence, that gives so much money to men who spend it upon their appetites, and so little to men who would spend it in benevolence or upon their refined tastes! It is astonishing, too, how one's necessities multiply in the presence of the supply. One never knows how many things it is impossible to do without till he goes to Windle's or Smith's house-furnishing stores. One is surprised to perceive, at some bazaar or fancy and variety store, how many conveniences he needs. He is satisfied that his life must have been utterly inconvenient aforetime. And thus too one is inwardly convicted, at Appletons', of having lived for years without books which he is now satisfied that one cannot live without!
Then, too, the subtle process by which the man convinces himself that he can afford to buy. No subtle manager or broker ever saw through a maze of financial embarrassments half so quick as a poor book-buyer sees his way clear to pay for what he must have. He promises himself marvels of retrenchment; he will eat less, or less costly viands, that he may buy more food for the mind. He will take an extra patch, and go on with his raiment another year, and buy books instead of coats. Yea, he will write books, that he may buy books! The appetite is insatiable. Feeding does not satisfy it. It rages by the fuel which is put upon it. As a hungry man eats first and pays afterward, so the book-buyer purchases and then works at the debt afterward. This paying is rather medicinal. It cures for a time. But a relapse takes place. The same longing, the same promises of self-denial. He promises himself to put spurs on both heels of his industry; and then, besides all this, he will somehow get along when the time for payment comes! Ah! this SOMEHOW! That word is as big as a whole world, and is stuffed with all the vagaries and fantasies that Fancy ever bred upon Hope. And yet, is there not some comfort in buying books, to be paid for? We have heard of a sot who wished his neck as long as the worm of a still, that he might so much the longer enjoy the flavor of the draught! Thus, it is a prolonged excitement of purchase, if you feel for six months in a slight doubt whether the book is honestly your own or not. Had you paid down, that would have been the end of it. There would have been no affectionate and beseeching look of your books at you, every time you saw them, saying, as plain as a book's eyes can say, "Do not let me be taken from you."
Moreover, buying books before you can pay for them promotes caution. You do not feel quite at liberty to take them home. You are married. Your wife keeps an account-book. She knows to a penny what you can and what you cannot afford. She has no "speculation" in her eyes. Plain figures make desperate work with airy "somehows." It is a matter of no small skill and experience to get your books home, and into their proper places, undiscovered. Perhaps the blundering express brings them to the door just at evening. "What is it, my dear?" she says to you. "Oh! nothing--a few books that I cannot do without." That smile! A true housewife that loves her husband can smile a whole arithmetic at him at one look! Of course she insists, in the kindest way, in sympathizing with you in your literary acquisition. She cuts the strings of the bundle (and of your heart), and out comes the whole story. You have bought a complete set of costly English books, full bound in calf, extra gilt! You are caught, and feel very much as if bound in calf yourself, and admirably lettered.
Now, this must not happen frequently. The books must be smuggled home. Let them be sent to some near place. Then, when your wife has a headache, or is out making a call, or has lain down, run the books across the frontier and threshold, hastily undo them, stop only for one loving glance as you put them away in the closet, or behind other books on the shelf, or on the topmost shelf. Clear away the twine and wrapping-paper, and every suspicious circumstance. Be very careful not to be too kind. That often brings on detection. Only the other day we heard it said, somewhere, "Why, how good you have been lately. I am really afraid that you have been carrying on mischief secretly." Our heart smote us. It was a fact. That very day we had bought a few books which "we could not do without." After a while you can bring out one volume, accidentally, and leave it on the table. "Why, my dear, what a beautiful book! Where did you borrow it?" You glance over the newspaper, with the quietest tone you can command: "That! oh! that is mine. Have you not seen it before? It has been in the house these two months." and you rush on with anecdote and incident, and point out the binding, and that peculiar trick of gilding, and everything else you can think of; but it all will not do; you cannot rub out that roguish, arithmetical smile. People may talk about the equality of the sexes! They are not equal. The silent smile of a sensible, loving woman will vanquish ten men. Of course you repent, and in time form a habit of repenting.
Another method which will be found peculiarly effective is to make a present of some fine work to your wife. Of course, whether she or you have the name of buying it, it will go into your collection, and be yours to all intents and purposes. But it stops remark in the presentation. A wife could not reprove you for so kindly thinking of her. No matter what she suspects, she will say nothing. And then if there are three or four more works which have come home with the gift-book--they will pass through the favor of the other.
These are pleasures denied to wealth and old bachelors. Indeed, one cannot imagine the peculiar pleasure of buying books if one is rich and stupid. There must be some pleasure, or so many would not do it. But the full flavor, the whole relish of delight only comes to those who are so poor that they must engineer for every book. They sit down before them, and besiege them. They are captured. Each book has a secret history of ways and means. It reminds you of subtle devices by which you insured and made it yours, in spite of poverty!
Copyrighted by Fords, Howard and Hulbert, New York.
SELECTED PARAGRAPHS
From 'Selections from the Published Works of Henry Ward Beecher', compiled by Eleanor Kirk.
An intelligent conscience is one of the greatest of luxuries. It can hardly be called a necessity, or how would the world have got along as well as it has to this day?--SERMON: 'Conscience.'
A man undertakes to jump across a chasm that is ten feet wide, and jumps eight feet; and a kind sympathizer says, "What is going to be done with the eight feet that he did jump?" Well, what is going to be done with it? It is one of those things which must be accomplished in whole, or it is not accomplished at all.--SERMON: 'The True Value of Morality.'
It is hard for a strong-willed man to bow down to a weak-willed man. It is hard for an elephant to say his prayers to an ant.--SERMON: 'The Reward of Loving.'
When Peter heard the cock crow, it was not the tail-feathers that crew. The crowing came from the inside of the cock. Religion is something more than the outward observances of the church.--SERMON: 'The Battle of Benevolence.'
I have heard men, in family prayer, confess their wickedness, and pray that God would forgive them the sins that they got from Adam; but I do not know that I ever heard a father in family prayer confess that he had a bad temper. I never heard a mother confess in family prayer that she was irritable and snappish. I never heard persons bewail those sins which are the engineers and artificers of the moral condition of the family. The angels would not know what to do with a prayer that began, "Lord, thou knowest that I am a scold."--SERMON: 'Peaceableness.'
Getting up early is venerable. Since there has been a literature or a history, the habit of early rising has been recommended for health, for pleasure, and for business. The ancients are held up to us for examples. But they lived so far to the east, and so near the sun, that it was much easier for them than for us. People in Europe always get up several hours before we do; people in Asia several hours before Europeans do; and we suppose, as men go toward the sun, it gets easier and easier, until, somewhere in the Orient, probably they step out of bed involuntarily, or, like a flower blossoming, they find their bed-clothes gently opening and turning back, by the mere attraction of light.--'EYES AND EARS.'
There are some men who never wake up enough to swear a good oath. The man who sees the point of a joke the day after it is uttered,--because he never is known to act hastily, is he to take credit for that?--SERMON: 'Conscience.'
If you will only make your ideal mean enough, you can every one of you feel that you are heroic.--SERMON: 'The Use of Ideals.'
There is nothing more common than for men to hang one motive outside where it can be seen, and keep the others in the background to turn the machinery.--SERMON: 'Paul and Demetrius.'
Suppose I should go to God and say, "Lord, be pleased to give me salad," he would point to the garden and say, "There is the place to get salad; and if you are too lazy to work for it, you may go without."--LECTURE-ROOM TALKS: 'Answers to Prayer.'
God did not call you to be canary-birds in a little cage, and to hop up and down on three sticks, within a space no larger than the size of the cage. God calls you to be eagles, and to fly from sun to sun, over continents.--SERMON: 'The Perfect Manhood.'
Do not be a spy on yourself. A man who goes down the street thinking of himself all the time, with critical analysis, whether he is doing this, that, or any other thing,--turning himself over as if he were a goose on a spit before a fire, and basting himself with good resolutions,--is simply belittling himself.--'LECTURES ON PREACHING.'
Many persons boil themselves down to a kind of molasses goodness. How many there are that, like flies caught in some sweet liquid, have got out at last upon the side of the cup, and crawl along slowly, buzzing a little to clear their wings! Just such Christians I have seen, creeping up the side of churches, soul-poor, imperfect, and drabbled.--'ALL-SIDEDNESS IN CHRISTIAN LIFE.'
No man, then, need hunt among hair-shirts; no man need seek for blankets too short at the bottom and too short at the top; no man need resort to iron seats or cushionless chairs; no man need shut himself up in grim cells; no man need stand on the tops of towers or columns,--in order to deny himself.--SERMON-'Problem of Joy and Suffering in Life.'
Copyrighted by Fords, Howard and Hulbert, New York, 1887.
SERMON
POVERTY AND THE GOSPEL
TEXTS: Luke iv. 17-21, Matt. xi. 2-6
Here was Christ's profession of his faith; here is the history also of his examination, to see whether he were fit to preach or not. It is remarkable that in both these instances the most significant indication that he had, both of his descent from God and of his being worthy of the Messiahship, consisted in this simple exposition of the line of his preaching,--that he took sides with the poor, neglected, and lost. He emphasized this, that his gospel was a gospel of mercy to the poor; and that word "poor," in its most comprehensive sense, looked at historically, includes in it everything that belongs to human misery, whether it be by reason of sin or depravity, or by oppression, or by any other cause. This, then, is the disclosure by Christ himself of the genius of Christianity. It is his declaration of what the gospel meant.
It is still further interpreted when you follow the life of Christ, and see how exactly in his conduct he interpreted, or rather fortified, the words of the declaration. His earliest life was that of labor and poverty, and it was labor and poverty in the poorest districts of Palestine. The dignified, educated, and aristocratic part of the nation dwelt in Judea, and the Athens of Palestine was Jerusalem. There Christ spent the least part of his life, and that in perpetual discussions. But in Galilee the most of his miracles, certainly the earlier, were performed, and the most of his discourses that are contained bodily in the gospels were uttered. He himself carried out the declaration that the gospel was for the poor. The very miracles that Christ performed were not philosophical enigmas, as we look at them. They were all of them miracles of mercy. They were miracles to those who were suffering helplessly where natural law and artificial means could not reach them. In every case the miracles of Christ were mercies, though we look at them in a spirit totally different from that in which he performed them.
In doing thus, Christ represented the best spirit of the Old Testament. The Jewish Scriptures teach mercy, the very genius of Jewish institutions was that of mercy, and especially to the poor, the weak, the helpless. The crimes against which the prophets thundered their severest denunciations were crimes upon the helpless. It was the avarice of the rich, it was the unbounded lust and cruelty of the strong, that were denounced by them. They did not preach against human nature in general. They did not preach against total depravity and the original condition of mankind. They singled out violations of the law in the magistrate, in the king, in rich men, everywhere, and especially all those wrongs committed by power either unconsciously or with purpose, cruelty upon the helpless, the defenseless, the poor and the needy. When Christ declared that this was his ministry, he took his text from the Old Testament; he spoke in its spirit. It was to preach the gospel to the poor that he was sent. He had come into the world to change the condition of mankind. Beginning at the top? No; beginning at the bottom and working up to the top from the bottom.
When this view of the gospel enters into our understanding and is fully comprehended by us, how exactly it fits in with the order of nature, and with the order of the unfolding of human life and human society! It takes sides with the poor; and so the universal tendency of Providence and of history, slowly unfolded, is on the whole going from low to high, from worse to better, and from good toward the perfect. When we consider, we see that man begins as a helpless thing, a baby zero without a figure before it; and every step in life adds a figure to it and gives it more and more worth. On the whole, the law of unfolding throughout the world is from lower to higher; and though when applied to the population of the globe it is almost inconceivable, still, with many back-sets and reactions, the tendency of the universe is thus from lower to higher. Why? Let any man consider whether there is not of necessity a benevolent intelligence somewhere that is drawing up from the crude toward the ripe, from the rough toward the smooth, from bad to good, and from good through better toward best. The tendency upward runs like a golden thread through the history of the whole world, both in the unfolding of human life and in the unfolding of the race itself. Thus the tendency of nature is in accordance with the tendency of the gospel as declared by Jesus Christ, namely, that it is a ministry of mercy to the needy.
The vast majority of mankind have been and yet are poor. There are ten thousand men poor where there is one man even comfortably provided for, body and soul, and hundreds of thousands where there is one rich, taking the whole world together. The causes of poverty are worthy a moment's consideration. Climate and soil have much to do with it. Men whose winter lasts nine or ten months in the year, and who have a summer of but one or two months, as in the extreme north,--how could they amass property, how could they enlarge their conditions of peace and of comfort? There are many parts of the earth where men live on the borders of deserts, or in mountain fastnesses, or in arctic rigors, where anything but poverty is impossible, and where it requires the whole thought, genius, industry, and foresight of men, the year round, just to feed themselves and to live. Bad government, where men are insecure in their property, has always been a very fertile source of poverty. The great valley of Esdraelon in Northern Palestine is one of the most fertile in the world, and yet famine perpetually stalks on the heels of the population; for if you sow and the harvest waves, forth come hordes of Bedouins to reap your harvest for you, and leave you, after all your labor, to poverty and starvation. When a man has lost his harvest in that way two or three times, and is deprived of the reward of his labors, he never emerges from poverty, but sinks into indolence; and that, by and by, breeds apathetic misery. So where the government over-taxes its subjects, as is the case in the Orient with perhaps nearly all of the populations there to-day, it cuts the sinews and destroys all the motives of industry; and without industry there can be neither virtue, morality, nor religion in any long period. Wars breaking out, from whatever cause, tend to absorb property, or to destroy property, or to prevent the development of property. Yet, strange as it may seem, the men who suffer from war are those whose passions generally lead it on. The king may apply the spark, but the combustion is with the common people. They furnish the army, they themselves become destroyers; and the ravages of war, in the history of the human family, have destroyed more property than it is possible to enter into the thoughts of men to conceive.
But besides these external reasons of poverty, there are certain great primary and fundamental reasons. Ignorance breeds poverty. What is property? It is the product of intelligence, of skill, of thought applied to material substances. All property is raw material that has been shaped to uses by intelligent skill. Where intelligence is low, the power of producing property is low. It is the husbandman who thinks, foresees, plans, and calls on all natural laws to serve him, whose farm brings forth forty, fifty, and a hundred fold. The ignorant peasant grubs and groans, and reaps but one handful where he has sown two. It is knowledge that is the gold mine; for although every knowing man may not be able to be a rich man, yet out of ignorance riches do not spring anywhere. Ignorant men may be made the factors of wealth when they are guided and governed by superior intelligence. Slave labor produced gigantic plantations and estates. The slave was always poor, but his master was rich, because the master had the intelligence and the knowledge, and the slave gave the work. All through human society, men who represent simple ignorance will be tools, and the men who represent intelligence will be the master mechanics, the capitalists. All society to-day is agitated with this question of justice as between the laborer and the thinker. Now, it is no use to kick against the pricks. A man who can only work and not think is not the equal in any regard of the man who can think, who can plan, who can combine, and who can live not for to-day alone, but for to-morrow, for next month, for the next year, for ten years. This is the man whose volume will just as surely weigh down that of the unthinking man as a ton will weigh down a pound in the scale. Avoirdupois is moral, industrial, as well as material, in this respect; and the primary, most usual cause of unprosperity in industrial callings therefore lies in the want of intelligence,--either in the slender endowment of the man, or more likely the want of education in his ordinary and average endowment. Any class of men who live for to-day, and do not care whether they know anything more than they did yesterday or last year--those men may have a temporary and transient prosperity, but they are the children of poverty just as surely as the decrees of God stand. Ignorance enslaves men among men; knowledge is the creator of liberty and wealth.
As with undeveloped intelligence, so the appetites of men and their passions are causes of poverty. Men who live from the basilar faculties will invariably live in inferior stations. The men who represent animalism are as a general fact at the bottom. They may say it is government, climate, soil, want of capital, they may say what they please, but it is the devil of laziness that is in them, or of passion, that comes out in eating, in gluttony, in drinking and drunkenness, in wastefulness on every side. I do not say that the laboring classes in modern society are poor because they are self-indulgent, but I say that it unquestionably would be wise for all men who feel irritated that they are so unprosperous, if they would take heed to the moral condition in which they are living, to self-denial in their passions and appetites, and to increasing the amount of their knowledge and fidelity. Although moral conditions are not the sole causes, they are principal causes, of the poverty of the working classes throughout the world. It is their misfortune as well as their fault; but it is the reason why they do not rise. Weakness does not rise; strength does.
All these causes indicate that the poor need moral and intellectual culture. "I was sent to preach the gospel to the poor:" not to distribute provisions, not to relieve their wants; that will be included, but that was not Christ's primary idea. It was not to bring in a golden period of fruitfulness when men would not be required to work. It was not that men should lie down on their backs under the trees, and that the boughs should bend over and drop the ripe fruit into their mouths. No such conception of equality and abundance entered into the mind of the Creator or of Him who represented the Creator. To preach the gospel to the poor was to awaken the mind of the poor. It was to teach the poor--"Take up your cross, deny yourselves, and follow me. Restrain all those sinful appetites and passions, and hold them back by the power of knowledge and by the power of conscience; grow, because you are the sons of God, into the likeness of your Father." So he preached to the poor. That was preaching prosperity to them. That was teaching them how to develop their outward condition by developing their inward forces. To develop that in men which should make them wiser, purer, and stronger, is the aim of the gospel. Men have supposed that the whole end of the gospel was reconciliation between God and men who had fallen--though they were born sinners in their fathers and grandfathers and ancestors; to reconcile them with God--as if an abstract disagreement had been the cause of all this world's trouble! But the plain facts of history are simply that men, if they have not come from animals, have yet dwelt in animalism, and that that which should raise them out of it was some such moral influence as should give them the power of ascension into intelligence, into virtue, and into true godliness. That is what the gospel was sent for; good news, a new power that is kindled under men, that will lift them from their low ignorances and degradations and passions, and lift them into a higher realm; a power that will take away all the poverty that needs to be taken away. Men may be doctrinally depraved; they are much more depraved practically. Men may need to be brought into the knowledge of God speculatively; but what they do need is to be brought into the knowledge of themselves practically. I do not say that the gospel has nothing in it of this kind of spiritual knowledge; it is full of it, but its aim and the reason why it should be preached is to wake up in men the capacity for good things, industries, frugalities, purities, moralities, kindnesses one toward another: and when men are brought into that state they are reconciled. When men are reconciled with the law of creation and the law of their being, they are reconciled with God. Whenever a man is reconciled with the law of knowledge, he is reconciled with the God of knowledge, so far. Whenever a man is reconciled with the law of purity he is so far reconciled with a God of purity. When men have lifted themselves to that point that they recognize that they are the children of God, the kingdom of God has begun within them.
Although the spirit and practice of the gospel will develop charities, will develop physical comfort, will feed men, will heal men, will provide for their physical needs, yet the primary and fundamental result of the gospel is to develop man himself, not merely to relieve his want on an occasion. It does that as a matter of course, but that is scarcely the first letter of the alphabet. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things [food and raiment] shall be added unto you." The way to relieve a man is to develop him so that he will need no relief, or to raise higher and higher the character of the help that he demands.
In testing Christianity, then, I remark first that it is to be tested not by creeds, but by conduct. The evidence of the gospel, the reality of the gospel that is preached in schools or churches, is to be found in the spirit that is developed by it, not in the technical creeds that men have constructed out of it. The biography of men who have died might be hung up in their sepulchres; but you could not tell what kind of a man this one had been, just by reading his life there--while he lay dead in dust before you. There are thousands of churches that have a creed of Christianity hung up in them, but the church itself is a sepulchre full of dead men's bones; and indeed, many churches in modern times are gnawing the bones of their ancestors, and doing almost nothing else.
The gospel, changed from a spirit of humanity into a philosophical system of doctrine, is perverted. It is not the gospel. The great heresy in the world of religion is a cold heart, not a luminous head. It is not that intelligence is of no use in religion. By no means. Neither would we wage a crusade against philosophical systems of moral truth. But where the active sympathy and humanity of loving hearts for living men, and for men in the ratio in which they are low, is laid aside or diminished to a minimum, and in its place is a well-elaborated philosophical system of moral truths, hewn and jointed,--the gospel is gone. If you go along the sea-shores, you will often find the shells of fish--the fish dead and gone, the shells left. And if you go along the shores of ecclesiastical organization, you will find multitudes of shells of the gospel, out of which the living substance has gone long ago. Organized Christianity--that is, the institutions of Christianity have been in the first instance its power, and in the second instance its damnation. The moment you substitute the machinery of education for education itself, the moment you build schools and do not educate, build colleges that do not increase knowledge in the pupils, you have sacrificed the aim for the instrument by which you were to gain that aim. In churches, the moment it is more important to maintain buildings, rituals, ministers, chanters, and all the paraphernalia of moral education than the spirit of personal sympathy, the moment these are more sacred to men than is the welfare of the population round about which they were set to take care of, that very moment Christ is dead in that place; that very moment religion in the midst of all its institutions has perished. I am bound to say that in the history of the world, while religious institutions have been valuable and have done a great deal of good, they have perhaps done as much harm as good. There is scarcely one single perversion of civil government, there is scarcely one single persecution of men, there is scarcely a single one of the great wars that have depopulated the globe, there is scarcely one great heresy developed out of the tyranny of the church, that has not been the fruit of institutional religion; while that spirit of humanity which was to give the institution its motive power has to a certain extent died out of it.
Secondly, churches organized upon elective affinities of men are contrary to the spirit of the gospel. We may associate with men who are of like taste with ours. We have that privilege. If men are knowledgeable and intellectual, there is no sin in their choosing for intimate companions and associates men of like pursuits and like intellectual qualities. That is right. If men are rich, there is no reason why men who hold like property should not confer with each other, and form interests and friendships together. If men are refined, if they have become æsthetic, there is no reason why they should not associate in the realm of beauty, artists with artists, nor why the great enjoyers of beauty should not be in sympathy. Exit all these are not to be allowed to do it at the price of abandoning common humanity; you have no right to make your nest in the boughs of knowledge, and let all the rest of the world go as it will. You have no right to make your home among those who are polished and exquisite and fastidious in their tastes, whose garments are beauty, whose house is a temple of art, and all whose associations are of like kind, and neglect common humanity. You have no right to shut yourself up in a limited company of those who are like you in these directions, and let all the rest of men go without sympathy and without care. It is a right thing for a man to salute his neighbor who salutes him; but if you salute those who salute you, says Christ, what thank have ye--do not even the publicans so? It is no sin that a man, being intellectual in his nature, should like intellectual people, and gratify that which is divine and God-like in him; but if, because he likes intellectual people, he loses all interest in ignorant people, it convicts him of depravity and of moral perversion. When this is carried out to such an extent that churches are organized upon sharp classification, upon elective affinities, they not only cease to be Christian churches, but they are heretical; not perhaps in doctrine, but worse than that, heretical in heart.
The fact is that a church needs poor men and wicked men as much as it does pure men and virtuous men and pious men. What man needs is familiarity with universal human nature. He needs never to separate himself from men in daily life. It is not necessary that in our houses we should bring pestilential diseases or pestilential examples, but somehow we must hold on to men if they are wicked; somehow the circulation between the top and the bottom must be carried on; somehow there must be an atoning power in the heart of every true believer of the Lord Jesus Christ who shall say, looking out and seeing that the world is lost, and is living in sin and misery, "I belong to it, and it belongs to me." When you take the loaf of society and cut off the upper crust, slicing it horizontally, you get an elect church. Yes, it is the peculiarly elect church of selfishness. But you should cut the loaf of society from the top down to the bottom, and take in something of everything. True, every church would be very much edified and advantaged if it had in it scholarly men, knowledgeable men; but the church is strong in proportion as it has in it something of everything, from the very top to the very bottom.
Now, I do not disown creeds--provided they are my own! Well, you smile; but that is the way it has been since the world began. No denomination believes in any creed except its own. I do not say that men's knowledge on moral subjects may not be formulated. I criticize the formulation of beliefs from time to time, in this: that they are very partial; that they are formed upon the knowledge of a past age, and that that knowledge perishes while higher and nobler knowledge comes in; that there ought to be higher and better forms; and that while their power is relatively small, the power of the spirit of humanity is relatively great. When I examine a church, I do not so much care whether its worship is to the one God or to the triune God. I do not chiefly care for the catechism, nor for the confession of faith, although they are both interesting. I do not even look to see whether it is a synagogue or a Christian church--I do not care whether it has a cross over the top of it or is Quaker plain. I do not care whether it is Protestant, Catholic, or anything else. Let me read the living--- the living book! What is the spirit of the people? How do they feel among each other? How do they feel toward the community? What is their life and conduct in regard to the great prime moral duty of man, "Love the Lord thy God and thy neighbor as thyself," whether he be obscure or whether he be smiling in the very plenitude of wealth and refinement? Have you a heart for humanity? Have you a soul that goes out for men? Are you Christ-like? Will you spend yourself for the sake of elevating men who need to be lifted up? That is orthodox. I do not care what the creed is. If a church has a good creed, that is all the more felicitous; and if it has a bad creed, a good life cures the bad creed.
One of the dangers of our civilization may be seen in the light of these considerations. We are developing so much strength founded on popular intelligence, and this intelligence and the incitements to it are developing such large property interests, that if the principle of elective affinity shall sort men out and classify them, we are steering to the not very remote danger of the disintegration of human society. I can tell you that the classes of men who by their knowledge, refinement, and wealth think they are justified in separating themselves, and in making a great void between them and the myriads of men below them, are courting their own destruction. I look with very great interest on the process of change going on in Great Britain, where the top of society had all the "blood," but the circulation is growing larger and larger, and a change is gradually taking place in their institutions. The old nobility of Great Britain is the lordliest of aristocracies existing in the world. Happily, on the whole, a very noble class of men occupy the high positions: but the spirit of suffrage, this angel of God that so many hate, is coming in on them; and when every man in Great Britain can vote, no matter whether he is poor or rich, whether he has knowledge or no knowledge, there must be a very great change. Before the great day of the Lord shall come, the valleys are to go up and the mountains are to come down; and the mountains have started already in Great Britain and must come down. There may be an aristocracy in any nation,--that is to say, there may be "best men"; there ought to be an aristocracy in every community,--that is, an aristocracy of men who speak the truth, who are just, who are intelligent: but that aristocracy will be like a wave of the sea; it has to be reconstituted in every generation, and the men who are the best in the State become the aristocracy of that State. But where rank is hereditary, if political suffrage becomes free and universal, aristocracy cannot live. The spirit of the gospel is democratic. The tendency of the gospel is leveling; leveling up, not down. It is carrying the poor and the multitude onward and upward.
It is said that democracies have no great men, no heroic men. Why is it so? When you raise the average of intelligence and power in the community it is very hard to be a great man. That is to say, when the great mass of citizens are only ankle-high, when among the Lilliputians a Brobdingnagian walks, he is a great man. But when the Lilliputians grow until they get up to his shoulder, he is not so great a man as he was by the whole length of his body. So, make the common people grow, and there is nobody tall enough to be much higher.
The remarkable people of this world are useful in their way; but the common people, after all, represent the nation, the age, and the civilization. Go into any town or city: do not ask who lives in that splendid house; do not say, This is a fine town, here are streets of houses with gardens and yards, and everything that is beautiful the whole way through. Go into the lanes, go into the back streets, go where the mechanic lives; go where the day-laborer lives. See what is the condition of the streets there. See what they do with the poor, with the helpless, and the mean. If the top of society bends perpetually over the bottom with tenderness, if the rich and strong are the best friends of the poor and needy, that is a civilized and a Christian community; but if the rich and the wise are the cream and the great bulk of the population skim-milk, that is not a prosperous community.
There is a great deal of irreligion in men, there is a great deal of wickedness and depravity in men, but there are times when it is true that the church is more dissipated than the dissipated classes of the community. If there is one thing that stood out more strongly than any other in the ministry of our Lord, it is the severity with which he treated the exclusiveness of men with knowledge, position, and a certain sort of religion, a religion of particularity and carefulness; if there is one class of the community against which he hurled his thunderbolts without mercy and predicted woes, it was the scribes, Pharisees, scholars, and priests of the temples. He told them in so many words, "The publican and the harlot will enter the kingdom of God before you." The worst dissipation in this world is the dry-rot of morality, and of the so-called piety that separates men of prosperity and of power from the poor and ignoble. They are our wards....
I am not a socialist. I do not preach riot. I do not preach the destruction of property. I regard property as one of the sacred things. The real property established by a man's own intelligence and labor is the crystallized man himself. It is the fruit of what his life-work has done; and not in vain, society makes crime against it amongst the most punishable. But nevertheless, I warn these men in a country like ours, where every man votes, whether he came from Hungary, or from Russia, or from Germany, or from France or Italy, or Spain or Portugal, or from the Orient,--from Japan and China, because they too are going to vote! On the Niagara River, logs come floating down and strike an island, and there they lodge and accumulate for a little while, and won't go over. But the rains come, the snows melt, the river rises, and the logs are lifted up and down, and they go swinging over the falls. The stream of suffrage of free men, having all the privileges of the State, is this great stream. The figure is defective in this, that the log goes over the Niagara Falls, but that is not the way the country is going or will go.... There is a certain river of political life, and everything has to go into it first or last; and if, in days to come, a man separates himself from his fellows without sympathy, if his wealth and power make poverty feel itself more poor and men's misery more miserable, and set against him the whole stream of popular feeling, that man is in danger. He may not know who dynamites him, but there is danger; and let him take heed who is in peril. There is nothing easier in the world than for rich men to ingratiate themselves with the whole community in which they live, and so secure themselves. It is not selfishness that will do it; it is not by increasing the load of misfortune, it is not by wasting substance in riotous living upon appetites and passions. It is by recognizing that every man is a brother. It is by recognizing the essential spirit of the gospel, "Love thy neighbor as thyself." It is by using some of their vast power and riches so as to diffuse joy in every section of the community.
Here then I close this discourse. How much it enrolls! How very simple it is! It is the whole gospel. When you make an application of it to all the phases of organization and classification of human interests and developments, it seems as though it were as big as the universe. Yet when you condense it, it all comes back to the one simple creed: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself." Who is my neighbor? A certain man went down to Jericho, and so on. That tells you who your neighbor is. Whosoever has been attacked by robbers, has been beaten, has been thrown down--by liquor, by gambling, or by any form of wickedness; whosoever has been cast into distress, and you are called on to raise him up--that is your neighbor. Love your neighbor as yourself. That is the gospel.
A NEW ENGLAND SUNDAY
From 'Norwood'
It is worth all the inconveniences arising from the occasional over-action of New England Sabbath observance, to obtain the full flavor of a New England Sunday. But for this, one should have been born there; should have found Sunday already waiting for him, and accepted it with implicit and absolute conviction, as if it were a law of nature, in the same way that night and day, summer and winter, are parts of nature. He should have been brought up by parents who had done the same thing, as they were by parents even more strict, if that were possible; until not religious persons peculiarly, but everybody--not churches alone, but society itself, and all its population, those who broke it as much as those who kept it--were stained through with the color of Sunday. Nay, until Nature had adopted it, and laid its commands on all birds and beasts, on the sun and winds, and upon the whole atmosphere; so that without much imagination one might imagine, in a genuine New England Sunday of the Connecticut River Valley stamp, that God was still on that day resting from all the work which he had created and made, and that all his work rested with him!
Over all the town rested the Lord's peace! The saw was ripping away yesterday in the carpenter's shop, and the hammer was noisy enough. Today there is not a sign of life there. The anvil makes no music to-day. Tommy Taft's buckets and barrels give forth no hollow, thumping sound. The mill is silent--only the brook continues noisy. Listen! In yonder pine woods what a cawing of crows! Like an echo, in a wood still more remote other crows are answering. But even a crow's throat to-day is musical. Do they think, because they have black coats on, that they are parsons, and have a right to play pulpit with all the pine-trees? Nay. The birds will not have any such monopoly,--they are all singing, and singing all together, and no one cares whether his song rushes across another's or not. Larks and robins, blackbirds and orioles, sparrows and bluebirds, mocking cat-birds and wrens, were furrowing the air with such mixtures as no other day but Sunday, when all artificial and human sounds cease, could ever hear. Every now and then a bobolink seemed impressed with the duty of bringing these jangling birds into more regularity; and like a country singing-master, he flew down the ranks, singing all the parts himself in snatches, as if to stimulate and help the laggards. In vain! Sunday is the birds' day, and they will have their own democratic worship.
There was no sound in the village street. Look either way--not a vehicle, not a human being. The smoke rose up soberly and quietly, as if it said--It is Sunday! The leaves on the great elms hung motionless, glittering in dew, as if they too, like the people who dwelt under their shadow, were waiting for the bell to ring for meeting. Bees sung and flew as usual; but honey-bees have a Sunday way with them all the week, and could scarcely change for the better on the seventh day.
But oh, the Sun! It had sent before and cleared every stain out of the sky. The blue heaven was not dim and low, as on secular days, but curved and deep, as if on Sunday it shook off all incumbrance which during the week had lowered and flattened it, and sprang back to the arch and symmetry of a dome. All ordinary sounds caught the spirit of the day. The shutting of a door sounded twice as far as usual. The rattle of a bucket in a neighbor's yard, no longer mixed with heterogeneous noises, seemed a new sound. The hens went silently about, and roosters crowed in psalm-tunes. And when the first bell rung, Nature seemed overjoyed to find something that it might do without breaking Sunday, and rolled the sound over and over, and pushed it through the air, and raced with it over field and hill, twice as far as on week-days. There were no less than seven steeples in sight from the belfry, and the sexton said:--"On still Sundays I've heard the bell, at one time and another, when the day was fair, and the air moving in the right way, from every one of them steeples, and I guess likely they've all heard our'n."
"Come, Rose!" said Agate Bissell, at an even earlier hour than when Rose usually awakened--"Come, Rose, it is the Sabbath. We must not be late Sunday morning, of all days in the week. It is the Lord's day."
There was little preparation required for the day. Saturday night, in some parts of New England, was considered almost as sacred as Sunday itself. After sundown on Saturday night no play, and no work except such as is immediately preparatory to the Sabbath, were deemed becoming in good Christians. The clothes had been laid out the night before. Nothing was forgotten. The best frock was ready; the hose and shoes were waiting. Every article of linen, every ruffle and ribbon, were selected on Saturday night. Every one in the house walked mildly. Every one spoke in a low tone. Yet all were cheerful. The mother had on her kindest face, and nobody laughed, but everybody made it up in smiling. The nurse smiled, and the children held on to keep down a giggle within the lawful bounds of a smile; and the doctor looked rounder and calmer than ever; and the dog flapped his tail on the floor with a softened sound, as if he had fresh wrapped it in hair for that very day. Aunt Toodie, the cook (so the children had changed Mrs. Sarah Good's name), was blacker than ever and shinier than ever, and the coffee better, and the cream richer, and the broiled chickens juicier and more tender, and the biscuit whiter, and the corn-bread more brittle and sweet.
When the good doctor read the Scriptures at family prayer, the infection of silence had subdued everything except the clock. Out of the wide hall could be heard in the stillness the old clock, that now lifted up its voice with unwonted emphasis, as if, unnoticed through the bustling week, Sunday was its vantage ground, to proclaim to mortals the swift flight of time. And if the old pedant performed the task with something of an ostentatious precision, it was because in that house nothing else put on official airs, and the clock felt the responsibility of doing it for the whole mansion.
And now came mother and catechism; for Mrs. Wentworth followed the old custom, and declared that no child of hers should grow up without catechism. Secretly, the doctor was quite willing, though openly he played off upon the practice a world of good-natured discouragement, and declared that there should be an opposition set up--a catechism of Nature, with natural laws for decrees, and seasons for Providence, and flowers for graces! The younger children were taught in simple catechism. But Rose, having reached the mature age of twelve, was now manifesting her power over the Westminster Shorter Catechism; and as it was simply an achievement of memory and not of the understanding, she had the book at great advantage, and soon subdued every question and answer in it. As much as possible, the doctor was kept aloof on such occasions. His grave questions were not to edification, and often they caused Rose to stumble, and brought down sorely the exultation with which she rolled forth, "They that are effectually called do in this life partake of justification, adoption, sanctification, and the several benefits which in this life do either accompany or flow from them."
"What do those words mean, Rose?"
"Which words, pa?"
"Adoption, sanctification, and justification?"
Rose hesitated, and looked at her mother for rescue.
"Doctor, why do you trouble the child? Of course she don't know yet all the meaning. But that will come to her when she grows older."
"You make a nest of her memory, then, and put words there, like eggs, for future hatching?"
"Yes, that is it exactly: birds do not hatch their eggs the minute they lay them. They wait."
"Laying eggs at twelve to be hatched at twenty is subjecting them to some risk, is it not?"
"It might be so with eggs, but not with the catechism. That will keep without spoiling a hundred years!"
"Because it is so dry?"
"Because it is so good. But do, dear husband, go away, and not put notions in the children's heads. It's hard enough already to get them through their tasks. Here's poor Arthur, who has been two Sundays on one question, and has not got it yet."
Arthur, aforesaid, was sharp and bright in anything addressed to his reason, but he had no verbal memory, and he was therefore wading painfully through the catechism like a man in a deep-muddy road; with this difference, that the man carries too much clay with him, while nothing stuck to poor Arthur.
The beauty of the day, the genial season of the year, brought forth every one; old men and their feebler old wives, young and hearty men and their plump and ruddy companions,--young men and girls and children, thick as punctuation points in Hebrew text, filled the street. In a low voice, they spoke to each other in single sentences.
"A fine day! There'll be a good congregation out to-day."
"Yes; we may expect a house full. How is Widow Cheney--have you heard?"
"Well, not much better; can't hold out many days. It will be a great loss to the children."
"Yes; but we must all die--nobody can skip his turn. Does she still talk about them that's gone?"
"They say not. I believe she's sunk into a quiet way; and it looks as if she'd go off easy."
"Sunday is a good day for dying--it's about the only journey that speeds well on this day!"
There was something striking in the outflow of people into the street, that till now had seemed utterly deserted. There was no fevered hurry; no negligent or poorly dressed people. Every family came in groups--old folks and young children; and every member blossomed forth in his best apparel, like a rose-bush in June. Do you know that man in a silk hat and new black coat? Probably it is some stranger. No; it is the carpenter, Mr. Baggs, who was racing about yesterday with his sleeves rolled up, and a dust-and-business look in his face! I knew you would not know him. Adams Gardner, the blacksmith,--does he not look every inch a judge, now that he is clean-washed, shaved, and dressed? His eyes are as bright as the sparks that fly from his anvil!
Are not the folks proud of their children? See what groups of them! How ruddy and plump are most! Some are roguish, and cut clandestine capers at every chance. Others seem like wax figures, so perfectly proper are they. Little hands go slyly through the pickets to pluck a tempting flower. Other hands carry hymn-books or Bibles. But, carry what they may, dressed as each parent can afford, is there anything the sun shines upon more beautiful than these troops of Sunday children?
The old bell had it all its own way up in the steeple. It was the licensed noise of the day. In a long shed behind the church stood a score and half-score of wagons and chaises and carryalls,--the horses already beginning the forenoon's work of stamping and whisking the flies. More were coming. Hiram Beers had "hitched up," and brought two loads with his new hack; and now, having secured the team, he stood with a few admiring young fellows about him, remarking on the people as they came up.
"There's Trowbridge--he'll git asleep afore the first prayer's over. I don't b'lieve he's heerd a sermon in ten years. I've seen him sleep standin' up in singin'.
"Here comes Deacon Marble,--smart old feller, ain't he?--wouldn't think it, jest to look at him! Face looks like an ear of last summer's sweet corn, all dried up; but I tell ye he's got the juice in him yit! Aunt Polly's gittin' old, ain't she? They say she can't walk half the time--lost the use of her limbs; but it's all gone to her tongue. That's as good as a razor, and a sight better 'n mine, for it never needs sharpenin'.
"Stand away, boys, there's 'Biah Cathcart. Good horses--not fast, but mighty strong, just like the owner."
And with that Hiram touched his new Sunday hat to Mrs. Cathcart and Alice; and as he took the horses by the bits, he dropped his head and gave the Cathcart boys a look of such awful solemnity, all except one eye, that they lost their sobriety. Barton alone remained sober as a judge.
"Here comes 'Dot-and-Go-One' and his wife. They're my kind o' Christians. She is a saint, at any rate."
"How is it with you, Tommy Taft?"
"Fair to middlin', thank'e. Such weather would make a hand-spike blossom, Hiram."
"Don't you think that's a leetle strong, Tommy, for Sunday? P'raps you mean afore it's cut?"
"Sartin; that's what I mean. But you mustn't stop me, Hiram. Parson Buell 'll be lookin' for me. He never begins till I git there."
"You mean you always git there 'fore he begins."
Next, Hiram's prying eyes saw Mr. Turfmould, the sexton and undertaker, who seemed to be in a pensive meditation upon all the dead that he had ever buried. He looked upon men in a mild and pitying manner, as if he forgave them for being in good health. You could not help feeling that he gazed upon you with a professional eye, and saw just how you would look in the condition which was to him the most interesting period of a man's earthly state. He walked with a soft tread, as if he was always at a funeral; and when he shook your hand, his left hand half followed his right, as if he were about beginning to lay you out. He was one of the few men absorbed by his business, and who unconsciously measured all things from its standpoint.
"Good-morning, Mr. Turfmould! How's your health? How is business with you?"
"Good--the Lord be praised! I've no reason to complain."
And he glided silently and smoothly into the church.
"There comes Judge Bacon, white and ugly," said the critical Hiram. "I wonder what he comes to meetin' for. Lord knows he needs it, sly, slippery old sinner! Face's as white as a lily; his heart's as black as a chimney flue afore it's cleaned. He'll get his flue burned out if he don't repent, that's certain. He don't believe the Bible. They say he don't believe in God. Wal, I guess it's pretty even between 'em. Shouldn't wonder if God didn't believe in him neither."
As soon as the afternoon service was over, every horse on the green knew that it was time for him to go home. Some grew restless and whinnied for their masters. Nimble hands soon put them into the shafts or repaired any irregularity of harness. Then came such a scramble of vehicles to the church door for the older persons; while young women and children, venturing further out upon the green, were taken up hastily, that the impatient horses might as soon as possible turn their heads homeward. Clouds of dust began to arise along every outward-going road. In less than ten minutes not a wagon or chaise was seen upon the village green. They were whirling homeward at the very best pace that the horses could raise. Stiff old steeds vainly essayed a nimbler gait, but gave it up in a few rods, and fell back to the steady jog. Young horses, tired of long standing, and with a strong yearning for evening oats, shot along the level ground, rushed up the little hills, or down upon the other side, in the most un-Sunday-like haste. The scene was not altogether unlike the return from a military funeral, to which men march with sad music and slow, but from which they return nimbly marching to the most brilliant quick-step.
In half an hour Norwood was quiet again. The dinner, on Sunday, when for the sake of the outlying population the two services are brought near together in the middle of the day, was usually deferred till the ordinary supper hour. It was evident that the tone of the day was changed. Children were not so strictly held in. There was no loud talking, nor was laughing allowed, but a general feeling sprung up around the table that the severer tasks of the day were ended.
Devout and age-sobered people sat in a kind of golden twilight of meditation. The minister, in his well-ordered house, tired with a double service, mingled thoughts both glad and sad. His tasks were ended. He was conscious that he had manfully done his best. But that best doing, as he reflected upon it, seemed so poor, so unworthy of the nobleness of the theme, and so relatively powerless upon the stubborn stuff of which his people's dispositions were made, that there remained a vague, unquiet sense of blame upon his conscience.
It was Dr. Wentworth's habit to walk with his family in the garden, early in the morning and late in the afternoon. If early, Rose was usually his company; in the afternoon the whole family, Agate Bissell always excepted. She had in full measure that peculiar New England feeling that Sunday is to be kept by staying in the house, except such time as is spent at church. And though she never, impliedly even, rebuked the doctor's resort to his garden, it was plain that deep down in her heart she thought it an improper way of spending Sunday; and in that view she had the secret sympathy of almost all the noteworthy villagers. Had any one, upon that day, made Agate a visit, unless for some plain end of necessity or mercy, she would have deemed it a personal affront.
Sunday was the Lord's day. Agate acted as if any use of it for her own pleasure would be literal and downright stealing.
"We have six days for our own work. We ought not to begrudge the Lord one whole day."
Two circumstances distressed honest Agate's conscience. The one was that the incursion of summer visitors from the city was tending manifestly to relax the Sabbath, especially after the church services. The other was that Dr. Wentworth would occasionally allow Judge Bacon to call in and discuss with him topics suggested by the sermons. She once expressed herself in this wise:--
"Either Sunday is worth keeping, or it is not. If you do keep it, it ought to be strictly done. But lately Sunday is raveling out at the end. We take it on like a summer dress, which in the morning is clean and sweet, but at night it is soiled at the bottom and much rumpled all over."
Dr. Wentworth sat with Rose on one side and her mother on the other, in the honeysuckle corner, where the west could be seen, great trees lying athwart the horizon and checkering the golden light with their dark masses. Judge Bacon had turned the conversation upon this very topic.
"I think our Sundays in New England are Puritan and Jewish more than Christian. They are days of restriction rather than of joyousness. They are fast days, not feast days."
"Do you say that as a mere matter of historical criticism, or do you think that they could be improved practically?"
"Both. It is susceptible of proof that the early Christian Sunday was a day of triumph and of much social joy. It would be well if we could follow primitive example."
"Judge, I am hardly of your opinion. I should be unwilling to see our New England Sunday changed, except perhaps by a larger social liberty in each family. Much might be done to make it attractive to children, and relieve older persons from ennui. But after all, we must judge things by their fruits. If you bring me good apples, it is in vain to abuse the tree as craggy, rude, or homely. The fruit redeems the tree."
"A very comely figure, Doctor, but not very good reasoning. New England has had something at work upon her beside her Sundays. What you call the 'fruit' grew, a good deal of it at any rate, on other trees than Sunday trees."
"You are only partly right. New England character and history are the result of a wide-spread system of influences of which the Sabbath day was the type--and not only so, but the grand motive power. Almost every cause which has worked benignly among us has received its inspiration and impulse largely from this One Solitary Day of the week.
"It is true that all the vegetable growths that we see about us here depend upon a great variety of causes; but there is one cause that is the condition of power in every other, and that is the Sun! And so, many as have been the influences working at New England character, Sunday has been a generic and multiplex force, inspiring and directing all others. It is indeed the Sun's day.
"It is a little singular that, borrowing the name from the heathen calendar, it should have tallied so well with the Scripture name, the Lord's day--that Lord who was the Morning Star in early day, and at length the Sun of Righteousness!
"The Jews called it the Sabbath--a day of rest. Modern Christians call it the Sun's day, or the day of light, warmth, and growth. If this seems fanciful so far as the names of the day are concerned, it is strikingly characteristic of the real spirit of the two days, in the ancient and modern dispensation. I doubt if the old Jews ever kept a Sabbath religiously, as we understand that term. Indeed, I suspect there was not yet a religious strength in that national character that could hold up religious feeling without the help of social and even physical adjuvants. Their religious days were either fasts or like our Thanksgiving days. But the higher and richer moral nature which has been developed by Christianity enables communities to sustain one day in seven upon a high spiritual plane, with the need of but very little social help, and without the feasting element at all."
"That may be very well for a few saints like you and me, Doctor, but it is too high for the majority of men. Common people find the strict Sundays a great annoyance, and clandestinely set them aside."
"I doubt it. There are a few in every society that live by their sensuous nature. Sunday must be a dead day to them--a dark room. No wonder they break through. But it is not so with the sturdy, unsophisticated laboring class in New England. If it came to a vote, you would find that the farmers of New England would be the defenders of the day, even if screwed up to the old strictness. Their instinct is right. It is an observance that has always worked its best effects upon the common people, and if I were to change the name, I should call Sunday THE POOR MAN'S DAY.
"Men do not yet perceive that the base of the brain is full of despotism, and the coronal brain is radiant with liberty. I mean that the laws and relations which grow out of men's relations in physical things are the sternest and hardest, and at every step in the assent toward reason and spirituality, the relations grow more kindly and free.
"Now, it is natural for men to prefer an animal life. By-and-by they will learn that such a life necessitates force, absolutism. It is natural for unreflecting men to complain when custom or institutions hold them up to some higher degree. But that higher degree has in it an element of emancipation from the necessary despotisms of physical life. If it were possible to bring the whole community up to a plane of spirituality, it would be found that there and there only could be the highest measure of liberty. And this is my answer to those who grumble at the restriction of Sunday liberty. It is only the liberty of the senses that suffers. A higher and nobler civil liberty, moral liberty, social liberty, will work out of it. Sunday is the common people's Magna Charta."
"Well done, Doctor! I give up. Hereafter you shall see me radiant on Sunday. I must not get my hay in if storms do threaten to spoil it; but I shall give my conscience a hitch up, and take it out in that. I must not ride out; but then I shall regard every virtuous self-denial as a moral investment with good dividends coming in by-and-by. I can't let the children frolic in the front dooryard; but then, while they sit waiting for the sun to go down, and your Sun-day to be over, I shall console myself that they are one notch nearer an angelic condition every week. But good-night, good-night, Mrs. Wentworth. I hope you may not become so spiritual as quite to disdain the body. I really think, for this world, the body has some respectable uses yet. Good-night, Rose. The angels take care of you, if there is one of them good enough."
And so the judge left.
They sat silently looking at the sun, now but just above the horizon. A few scarfs of cloud, brilliant with flame-color, and every moment changing forms, seemed like winged spirits, half revealed, that hovered round the retiring orb.
Mrs. Wentworth at length broke the silence.
"I always thought, Doctor, that you believed Sunday over-strictly kept, and that you were in favor of relaxation."
"I am. Just as fast as you can make it a day of real religious enjoyment, it will relax itself. True and deep spiritual feeling is the freest of all experiences. And it reconciles in itself the most perfect consciousness of liberty with the most thorough observance of outward rules and proprieties. Liberty is not an outward condition. It is an inward attribute, or rather a name for the quality of life produced by the highest moral attributes. When communities come to that condition, we shall see fewer laws and higher morality.
"The one great poem of New England is her Sunday! Through that she has escaped materialism. That has been a crystal dome overhead, through which Imagination has been kept alive. New England's imagination is to be found, not in art and literature, but in her inventions, her social organism, and above all in her religious life. The Sabbath has been the nurse of that. When she ceases to have a Sunday, she will be as this landscape is:--now growing dark, all its lines blurred, its distances and gradations fast merging into sheeted darkness and night. Come, let us go in!"
Copyrighted by Fords, Howard and Hulbert.