FROM “THE SPARKS OF NATURE.”
ATRIOTISM, in our day, is made to be an argument for all public wrong and all private meanness. For the sake of country a man is told to yield everything that makes the land honorable. For the sake of country a man must submit to every ignominy that will lead to the ruin of the State through disgrace of the citizen. There never was a man so unpatriotic as Christ was. Old Jerusalem ought to have been everything to Him. The laws and institutions of His country ought to have been more to Him than all the men in His country. They were not, and the Jews hated Him; but the common people, like the ocean waters, moved in tides towards His heavenly attraction wherever He went.
When men begin their prayers with, “O thou omnipotent, omnipresent, all-seeing, ever-living, blessed Potentate, Lord God Jehovah!” I should think they would take breath. Think of a man in his family, hurried for his breakfast, praying in such a strain. He has a note coming due, and it is going to be paid to-day, and he feels buoyant; and he goes down on his knees like a cricket on the hearth, and piles up these majestically moving phrases about God. Then he goes on to say that he is a sinner; he is proud to say that he is a sinner. Then he asks for his daily bread. He has it; and he can always ask for it when he has it. Then he jumps up, and goes over to the city. He comes back at night, and goes through a similar wordy form of “evening prayers;” and he is called “a praying man!” A [♦]praying man? I might as well call myself an ornithologist, because I eat chicken once in awhile for my dinner.
[♦] ‘prayiny’ replaced with ‘praying’
When I see how much has been written of those who have lived; how the Greeks preserved every saying of Plato’s; how Boswell followed Johnson, gathering up every leaf that fell from that rugged old oak, and pasting it away,—I almost regret that one of the disciples had not been a recording angel, to preserve the odor and richness of every word of Christ. When John says, “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written,” it affects me more profoundly than when I think of the destruction of the Alexandrian Library, or the perishing of Grecian art in Athens or Byzantium. The creations of Phidias were cold stone, overlaid by warm thought; but Christ described His own creations when He said, “The words that I speak unto you, they are life.” The leaving out of these things from the New Testament, though divinely wise, seems, to my yearning, not so much the unaccomplishment of noble things as the destruction of great treasures, which had already had oral life, but failed of incarnation in literature.