The immense work of universal regeneration through the agency of righteousness and love has already commenced, and must proceed. Until its complete triumph, there will be no repose, because until that consummation, humanity can not cease to suffer. But the inevitable day hastens on, when the people will have but one will and one action, as they are actuated by one interest only, and its dawn will be the advent of universal joy. Let us not fear, but labor with cheerful courage, since for the attainment of an end so magnificent, no exhausting toil should be denied. What better employment for the few days allotted us on earth? If sometimes we suffer lassitude in our repeated endeavors, let us raise our eyes with our hearts, and contemplate at once the omnipotent decree which insures final success, and the ennobled generations who hail their benefactors from afar. After long ages of servitude, be certain that the people will arise, brave and powerful to sweep away the contracted boundaries within which they have been so long packed, and will demand all those rights which have been wrested from them by iniquitous laws. Then will open a new era to abused humanity, when God will recognize and bless the noblest of his creatures, man, for he will then have entered upon the way which from eternity had been assigned. Equality and liberty, become for the people a sacred dogma forever affirmed in the common reason and conscience, will then effectively realize itself in the comprehensive social organizations and philosophical perfection it will spontaneously create.
CHAPTER V.
RELIGION.
Sacred literature constitutes the most vivid testimony one can consult respecting the course of the human mind, its phases, progress, eclipses and illuminations; the influence of moral systems, national governments, and popular customs; the character of diversified races, the knowledge of the past, and the hope of the future.
The sensibility of pagan antiquity was more powerfully impressed with the perfectibility latent in creation than their intellect had the ability to discriminate, or their conscience to realize. At the best transition periods of literary and scientific excellence, in the conclaves of their divinities, they represented each god holding some musical instrument, thus denoting the exquisite and eternal harmony which pervades the universe. But true religion is not the mere enthusiasm of science which worships a great natural law, as one adores an element frozen into a vast ice-idol; it is rectified intelligence beholding the almighty Father, palpable in the glorious creation as it beams all around, and sanctified affection especially exercised in devotion to the incarnated, atoning, and interceding Son, through the power and grace of the eternal Spirit. Montesquieu, in his Soul of Law, has noticed the fact, that Christianity, in fitting us for the felicity of the next life, creates the chief happiness of this. Such exalted fruits are produced by divine redemption wherever its influence is diffused. For instance, despite the grandeur of the empire and the viciousness of the climate, it prevented the establishment of despotism in Ethiopia, and bore into the midst of Africa the legislation and refinements of Europe. Instead of such destruction as was wrought by Timour and Gengis Kan, while they devastated the cities and tribes of Asia, or the perpetual massacres executed by the chiefs of Greece and Rome, the victories of the Cross leave to conquered nations such grand donations as life, liberty, law, refinement, and a religion which injures none but blesses all. Heavenly truth teaches man his duties by unfolding to him his destiny. It does not leave him unaided in secular academies, frigid universities, and pagan gymnasia, to vegetate in a brutal ferocity a hundred times more venomous than the savage state. Pure religion civilizes its subjects by nourishing them with truth, as well as with bread; it ennobles them by aggrandizing the intellect and renovating the heart, thus imparting to the feeblest pupil formed in her school, more lofty and substantial philosophy than can be possessed by the most erudite worldly sage. Its process is of another sort, and directed to different ends than those contemplated by materialists who undertake to perfect the education of a people through evolutions rather than by instructions, placing in their hands a mute stone to facilitate the increase of transient physical force, instead of inculcating those high lessons which to the soul give eternal life.
The salvation of the social world depends upon personal and popular allegiance to Christ, from whom mankind, as a depraved race, are spiritually and politically detached. It is necessary by all means, that public institutions should be constructed on Christian principles, under that divine guidance which, blending things temporal with things celestial, leads both to a common centre and explains how coincident are authority and obedience, while it subordinates force to reason, to righteousness, and the knowledge of infallible truth. Until this end is attained, there can be neither peace nor content; for if the legislator, deceived in his design, establishes a principle different from that which is produced from the nature of things, the state will not cease to be agitated until it is either destroyed or changed, and invincible justice reclaims her original empire. When the use of human faculties is controlled, but not confined, by the doctrines of Christianity which contain all truth, by the precepts and counsels which nourish every virtue, it tends incessantly toward the development of that intelligence and those sentiments which constitute moral perfection. It is thus that the heavenly influence acts without interruption upon popular literatures, arts, sciences, philosophies, laws; and this unfolding of native capacities, which is never long arrested, forms the true progress of those civilizing powers in their potent relation to Christian nations. If the divine preservative is withdrawn from a people, they immediately sink into barbarism, and one everywhere finds profoundly marked the traces of that true light which once shined, though the candlestick be now removed. If primitive faith is allowed to become adulterated, vague opinions will arise from the bosom of doubt and indifference, like the sterile clouds which float in a wintry sky, till night deepens and all is obscured.
Herein is a great difference which distinguished the Christian religion from all anterior systems. In pagan antiquity, the master could, without internal trouble, possess his slave; princes claimed to belong to a divine race, and the patrician felt that he and his plebeian neighbor were born far apart. This was revolted against more than complained of, as the benighted were actuated by natural indignation rather than by conscientious reason. But, under the gospel, within the oppressor, as in the oppressed, a heavenly voice evermore proclaimed the eternal fact that all are equal before God, and that justice is a boon and bond for all. Despite this ennobling principle, this sanctification of the human conscience, however, the advancement of mankind remained subordinate to the same rules. It was ever requisite that successive emancipations should be preceded by an adequate development of intelligence, and a corresponding elevation of moral sentiment. Freedom is a calamitous conquest to one not fitted to enjoy it. But under the instruction of the gospel, and by virtue of its power, the slave, the imbecile, the mendicant, and alien, become equals and brothers in common with the master and citizen, however unbounded may be his wealth and extensive his power. It is the second moral creation of humanity. The natural conscience thereby receives, as incontestable axioms, laws and obligations which in all preceding experience it never discovered in itself. It is meant by this that the application of these laws may become both easy and certain. The office of the Gospel is not to found a state or impart a code. It is addressed to man, whom it leaves in the exercise of free will. The light which each one brings upon earth, by the celestial message becomes more brilliant and divine; but it is, and ever must be, more or less obscured by ignorance and perverted by passion. Absolute fraternity and immaculate charity we should not expect to become the law of the state; they would then cease to be virtues. Our duty and perfection consist in causing them to control and diminish our imperfections. But in proportion as the spirit of the gospel is comprehensively exemplified, and obedience to its requirements is complete, earth, purified from disorder, becomes the image of heaven, and is the sojourn of peace, innocence, and holy joy. The true happiness of man and the healthful tranquillity of states can be established and preserved only by the sacred worship of that religion which, in the energetic language of Tertullian, is "a second royalty." The same principle which places order in society by creating social power, gives order to the family by constituting domestic power. The two powers resemble each other, because the family is society on a small scale; they are unequal, since society at large is a grand family wherein all individuals are a homogeneous aggregate. But both alike emanate from the power of God from whose authority alone all fraternity is derived (Eph. iii. 14, 15). In the same manner, then, as the paternal government is identical with social power in the family, social power is the paternal government of general society: it is herein that we may find a reason for the immortality of power, and perceive why it is that the religion of Jesus Christ, being the container and communicator of all excellence, is the wisest and most beneficent civilizer on earth. Jurists and statesmen are beginning to acknowledge that all legitimate legislation comes from God, the Father of all just law, and that our multifarious libraries of conflicting and impotent statutes, born only of man, resemble a vast hospital of infant foundlings. A piece of inscribed paper, called a constitution, can never long exist and be of value, save as it is the exponent of intelligence, sound morality, and spiritual religion, together with the matured capacity of self-government based on these.
The word "democracy" was invented two thousand years ago, but for many centuries the thing itself did not actually exist. It was in the country of the greatest of great men, and, at the opening of the most auspicious of the progressive ages, the country and age of Washington, that real practical equality was established, and that mainly by the power of reformed religion. A power was then inaugurated higher and better than that which ruled when the Greek Plato, Phrygian Æsop, and Roman Epictetus, were bought and sold as slaves. Preceding nations and religions were in due time excelled, and the mighty successor, in ascending the new throne of imperial equality, incorporated into herself all the most enduring and salutary attributes which could be derived from past civilizations, upon which a better progress, under these brighter skies, has so happily supervened.
For the preparation of a race for such a destiny as is here enjoyed, it was necessary that they should at the outset burst those chains of political and ecclesiastical despotism, which priestcraft had forged and fastened around the human soul; and how nobly did the first colonists perform this duty! Bruce and Wallace at the head of the Covenanters, in Scotland; Cromwell and Milton, Hampden and the Puritans, in England; Washington and the war of American independence constituted one continued struggle for civil and religious liberty. Those fierce and fiery furnaces through which this selectest race fearlessly passed, were intended to purify and qualify them for the work of the latter days; and the result is, that at this moment they are emancipated, and ready to continue the functions of their Heaven-appointed office. The Bacons, Hookers, Miltons, Souths, Baxters, Howes, Taylors, and Owens, of the mother country, contributed the full aggregate of their best wisdom to enrich the commencement of our theology, and are not wanting in worthy representatives and improved disciples among us at the present day. Without losing their depth, our age greatly excels theirs in breadth; and if the few are less erudite, the masses are infinitely more enlightened. Diffusion, expansion, universality, is the great principle of American knowledge; and it is this which distinguishes us above all other lands.
Locke is sometimes represented as the first who asserted the doctrines of religious freedom; but several preceding authors had expressed substantially the same views. Such in particular were Sir Thomas More in his Utopia; some of the earlier Independents, or Brownists; the incomparable Cudworth; Jeremy Taylor in his Liberty of Prophesying, published in 1647; Dr. John Owen in a piece on Toleration, annexed to his Discourse before Parliament the day after the execution of Charles the First; and Milton in his Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes. But these left the work very incomplete. The mediæval period had been a progress, but it became an impediment not easily displaced on the stage of its last and most formidable advancement. The English revolution was the grand event which terminated the seventeenth century, that heir of all foregoing epochs, and which superseded them with a divine commission to finish their imperfect endeavors. The two revolutions which arose in its bosom to close the historical career of the middle age, were only partial and incomplete. Both movements, the political and the religious, were local and, therefore, limited, because their principle lacked generality. But the American revolution opportunely broke forth to universalize the ameliorating germs which anterior institutions had conserved, so that their unchecked growth, and boundless propagation, became possible everywhere. The age of Leo X. then succumbed, and the age of Washington became the dawn of supreme freedom for the best good of universal man.