From the Easy Chair, Volume 3

by George William Curtis

But the minister passes in, not clad in gown and bands and cocked hat of the older day, but in plain black clothes. The chatting loiterers follow him in. The bell which has gathered the village into the sacred fold rests from its labors. There is no one in the street. There is no sound. But after a few moments the music of "Old Hundred" pours out of the open doors and windows of the meeting-house, sung by a well-balanced and well-trained choir. It is the opening hymn, and it has a full, vigorous, triumphant sound. Once more Thus saith the Lord. There is another interval of silence, but at a little distance you can hear the voice of reading and prayer. Hark! another hymn. It is "Federal Street," or "Coronation," or "Dundee," but whatever it is, it is a strain from other years, and voices and faces and scenes and days that are no more all blend in the familiar music, and a Sabbath benediction rests upon the listener's soul.

A longer silence follows, broken by fragmentary sounds of energetic speech. Is the preacher emphasizing and elucidating the five points? Is he denouncing and alarming that tough regiment in woollen, or winning the wondering and doubting mind? Is his sermon upon an official and perfunctory discourse by which little children are soothed to sleep and in which the elders like unqualified damnation and the hottest fire as a toper likes "power" in his dram? Or is his pure and manly life and conversation his true preaching, and the Sabbath sermon only a statement of the principles of such holy living, and a revival of the colors in the immortal portrait of the holy life of the Gospel?

Before we can answer there is a burst of music, then two strokes of the bell to announce that "meeting is out;" then an issue of the congregation, a procession homeward, a driving away of wagons, and soon once more the solitary street. In the afternoon there is the Sabbath-school, and the good pastor preaches at one of the school-houses in a farther part of the town. But it is always the Sabbath, in every sight and sound until the sun has set, and then from the neighboring house upon the hill above the village street comes a clear, resonant soprano voice singing hymns and prolonging the solemn spell of the holy day.

The tithing-men are gone, and the deacons do not sit severe and conspicuous in the meeting-house, and the minister has not the air of a lord spiritual of the village; and the genius of modern times and the spirit of the age are entertained with full consciousness of what they are. But it is still the sober and constrained and decorous New England Sabbath which recurs every seventh day; and the honest, industrious, intelligent, self-respecting, plain-living village recalls remotely the day of the severer dispensation, and illustrates the noble manhood that the severe dispensation fostered.

THE REUNION OF ANTISLAVERY VETERANS. 1884

N a pleasant day and evening during the autumn a few venerable graybeards and bald-heads met in a church in the city, and sang and spoke, and told old tales of former meetings, and rejoiced that they had not died before their eyes had seen the glory. The meeting produced no ripple upon the surface of the city life. The newspapers printed brief reports of it among the other city news. But the return of the Philadelphia baseball players, and the "mill" between Sullivan and other bruisers, challenged very much more space and a very much more public attention.

Yet fifty years before, when those gray beards were brown, and those bald heads were shaggy as Samson's, their meeting convulsed the city, and occasioned a riot which was the precursor of similar desperate disturbances, and the forerunner of one of the greatest of civil wars. The meeting was then denounced in advance in double-leaded editorials, which were the direct, and doubtless the intentional incitements to bloodshed and the subversion of popular rights; for the popular right which is the foundation of all other rights is that of free speech. The mere announcement of the meeting drew a vast and excited throng to prevent it. Men of standing in the community made themselves leaders of the mob, and occupied in advance the entrance to the hall where it was to take place. The proprietors of the hall, appalled by the evidences of furious hostility to the meeting and its purposes, refused to open it to those who had engaged it, and they went elsewhere.

But the obstructing mob did not relax their purpose. They hastened to another hall where men of respected and even noted names harangued them violently, introducing resolutions decrying the purpose of the original meeting; and suddenly hearing that the projectors were assembled elsewhere, the crowd rushed wildly to the place, which was a small chapel, and, swarming in eager for crime, found the chapel deserted. The holders of the meeting had accomplished their object and retired from the rear of the building as the mob burst in through the front doors. The press of the city, with one or two notable exceptions, the next morning celebrated the intended suppression of a peaceful meeting by an angry mob as if it had been a national victory over piratical invaders. It denounced the leaders of the meeting with a malignant bitterness with which the familiars of the Inquisition might have anathematized Luther and his friends, and the few voices in the papers which protested against treating the holders of the meeting with violence, yet spoke of them in a strain of abhorrence which virtually branded them as public enemies.

Who were these dangerous and desperate men whose mere proposal to meet and organize themselves for a purpose which was plainly declared, and which was to be sought by legal methods only, had so profoundly disturbed the city and startled the press into sounding a furious alarm? They were a few persons who asserted the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and demanded that all Americans should enjoy the rights which the Declaration affirmed to belong to all men. The object of the meeting was the formation of a city antislavery society, and those who assembled in October of this year were the survivors of that meeting. Their object has been accomplished, and the views whose announcement fifty years ago convulsed the city are now common-places of universal acceptance. It would be incredible that the sentiment of the city within easy memory of men living was so hostile to the American principle and its fundamental guarantees if a still later experience had not illustrated the same hostility.