Gleanings by the Way

by John A. Clark

THE MISSISSIPPI AND SOME OF ITS TRIBUTARIES.

St. Louis—Roman cathedral—Desecration of the Sabbath—Golden sunsets—Sail up the Mississippi—The meeting of the waters of the Missouri and the Mississippi—Alton—The burning prairie.

St. Louis, Tuesday Evening, July 4th.

This, unquestionably is destined in time to become the great city of the west. Its location is pleasant, and from the manner in which the upper part of the city is now building, I should think it would ultimately compete in regularity and beauty with almost any city in the Union. Its most prominent public buildings at present are the theatre and the Roman cathedral. One of the priests politely showed us through the latter building. The interior would be very grand and imposing, were it not for the gaudy paintings, intended as scriptural illustrations, suspended around the audience room. However much these may catch the attention and awaken the admiration of the ignobile vulgus, they cannot fail to excite any thing but complacency in minds accustomed to the more chaste productions of the pencil. In entering the church, we passed through the basement, where are the confessional boxes and a small altar, on which wax candles were burning. Here we saw one of the sisters of charity, sitting in black vestments, in a solitary dusky nook, as though absorbed in holy meditation. In the church we found another priest, engaged, as far as we could understand, in preparing a class of German boys for confirmation.

I learned from an intelligent source that Romanism is making little or no progress among Protestants at St. Louis. They have found it necessary to cut off, or conceal many of its offensive excrescences, so that a friend remarked to me, that he thought that a reformation in spite of themselves, silent and gradual, was going on in the Roman Catholic Church. The fact is, that the great difficulty at St. Louis is, that the mass of the people "care for none of these things." They are equally indifferent to every form of religion. Of course iniquity abounds, and the institutions of God are trampled in the dust. The following fact will illustrate this point. As I went to church on Sunday morning, to my utter astonishment, in passing by the new theatre, I saw some twenty or thirty men at work on it—masons, house-carpenters, and painters. God's law, Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy, was to be of no account, because the people of St. Louis were anxious to have their new theatre opened on the evening of the Fourth of July! Each one of the usual denominations has a church here. From all I could learn, however, I fear religion is at a very low ebb in St. Louis. There are numberless discouragements to be encountered every where in the West, calculated to weaken the hands and depress the spirits of the ministers of religion. No one can understand the number or nature of these discouragements, without being actually on the ground. A successful missionary at the West must have great faith and patience, and be unwearied in his labours. To animate his clergy, and cheer them on in their toil, there could not be a better man than Bishop Kemper. He seems to throw sunshine around him wherever he goes.

One thing struck me as remarkable at the West, and particularly at St. Louis. I refer to the appearance of the heavens at sunset. Nothing can exceed the richness and splendour of a western sunset. I have heard much of an Italian sky, but my imagination never conceived such pictures of beauty and indescribable glory, as are painted on the sky here at the decline of day. The whole hemisphere seems flooded with unearthly radience. The clouds piled up the western sky, appear more brilliant and gorgeous than any or all the colours of earth can make them. And as you look at them, you see, through the clouds, apertures, which seem like golden vistas, through which you look almost into the heaven of heavens.

Our Fourth of July has been spent quietly here. There has not been half the noise and disturbance I had anticipated.

Wednesday Evening, July 5th.

We this morning left St. Louis about nine o'clock. Our progress up the river has been slow. Some eighteen miles from St. Louis we witnessed one of the most interesting sights in all our journey—the meeting of the waters of the Mississippi and the Missouri! I cannot attempt description! The imagination alone can conceive it. If I ever had feelings of sublimity waked up in my bosom, it was when our boat stood off just abreast the Missouri, and I looked up its mighty channel, and thought of its source between two and three thousand miles distant, amid those mountains whose tops are covered with eternal snow, and then thought of the sunny orange groves, near where it empties its waters into the ocean!

We stopped a few hours at Alton, Illinois, just above the point where the Missouri mingles its waters with the Mississippi. This is an interesting town, fast rising into importance. It is destined to become a point of great interest. Its present population exceeds two thousand. We passed Marion City and Quincy, as we advanced up the river. Of the former we have heard frequent descriptions. We stopped an hour or so at the latter, and enjoyed from the high bluff on which it is built, a view of one of the most magnificent prospects that ever stretched before the human eye. The expanded waters of the Mississippi—the innumerable green islets that seem to float on its bosom—the beautiful vistas opening between these—the boundless ocean of forest stretching off to the south and west, and the level, treeless, luxuriant prairie running back to an unknown distance—all these lay at your feet, furnishing one of the most picturesque scenes upon which the eye ever gazed. I regretted the shortness of our stay at Quincy, not only on account of the enchanting loveliness of the spot, but more particularly as it deprived me of the pleasure of paying a visit to Dr. Nelson, the author of a popular work entitled, "The cause and cure of Infidelity," a book of sterling excellence.