The Growth of Thought as Affecting the Progress of Society

by William Withington

Conclusion.

The matter of the preceding thoughts may be thus summed up.

A progressive movement has been going on towards the rule, that, self-love directed towards the material, the sensible, the showy, the distinguishing, is so the ruling motive of human conduct, as to constitute it the first requisite in adjusting the social relations, that private interests, and class interests may not flourish best, short of the best attainable flourish of the whole. When this point shall be so thoroughly understood, that it shall be taken for no reproach of any class of men to regard them practically as subject to the common influences which control human conduct; we may expect an effective move, for giving to the lawyer and to the physician a relation to society, analogous to that sustained by the pastor among Protestants; instead of leaving their professions to find their best flourish, at about the vigor of intellectual and moral life, which just now we live.

But this idea loses its importance as another comes into appreciation, —namely, that the conflicts of self-love with self-love, suppose mistaken estimates of happiness to be uppermost; and, just in proportion as men rightly estimate life, and truly love themselves, they appreciate those strong, numberless, delicate, indissoluble ties, which bind the members of the social body to suffer, or to rejoice together.

And this idea again lessens in importance, as yet a third gains the ascendancy—the living conviction, that time is but the portal to eternity; the soul meanwhile tasting "the powers of the world to come;" and knowing the persuasiveness of that strongest call to mutual endearment, "If God so loved us, we ought also to love one another."

And now the consideration of these three points is commended especially to the attention of those, who, in the execution of their office and ministry, have weekly access to the mind of the people. We mourn the waning influence of the American pulpit. Where the power thence emanating in the stirring days of trial to men's souls,—when its ministers stood on that commanding point, where they caught the first beams of rising day, and reflected the light in the face of the people? At our Revolutionary period, ministers, in their earnestness to preach to the times, might have come short in preaching eternity. So far there was a mistake to be rectified; but they did well to preach to the times. It is among the reasons, why religious so tempered political zeal; and, accordingly, why, as our Revolution was without a model, so it remains without a rival. It is well that the struggle came, before the toad-eaters to capital's feed agents in legislative halls occupied the high seats of moral influence.

The true successors to the fathers are not the preachers of party politics, but they who aim to supply the lack of all parties, in that they fail to make liberty a means, valuable only as affording facilities to improvement.

We are exceedingly contracted in our notions of the Christian preacher's just province. If we confine it to administering directly to the soul's spiritual wants and everlasting interests, we stray wide from the example, which God himself sets, when he writes a revelation for man. The Bible is full of histories, maxims, laws, just as might be expected in a book, which ignored any other life, than that which now is. One half of it (within bounds) might remain as it is, on the supposition, that men have neither hopes nor duties, but such as pertain to them as joint tenants of this earthly life.

If we would keep people superior to the impulses of appetite, and the solicitations of sensual pleasure, we must attempt servitute corporis uti by imperio animi* [In Sallust's well known sentence servitute may be the object of utimur, imperio the ablative of the means; or, reversing the construction, the sense may be, by keeping the body in subjection, we better maintain the mind's supremacy. Neither, I believe, is the common understanding of the passage.]—by training the mind to know its capacities and powers. If this be neglected, purely spiritual influences, supposing them forthcoming, will hardly save the body from unduly controlling the man. Vulgar ambition is to be forestalled in the same way. Imperium populi may be expected to be attractive, in proportion as imperium animi is unstudied, unknown; and of course the full sense missed, in which knowledge is power. He who knows the greatness of the world within, hears nothing strange in the declaration-that "greater is he who ruleth his own spirit, than he who taketh a city." That the recipients of a (so called) liberal education so often become the votaries of vulgar ambition, and vulgar pleasure too, is to be accounted for on the three-fold consideration: first, that what passes for a liberal education is often a very illiberal thing, doing very little to unfold the spirit to itself, and so impress the greatness of mastering its capabilities; secondly, that merely intellectual without moral influences, do not suffice; and thirdly, the law is supreme, which binds all to suffer, in their intellectual and spiritual life, from the mental and moral degradation of a part.

Jesus thought it not beneath the dignity of his office, nor the sacredness of the Sabbath, nor the proprieties of the synagogue, to discourse to people on politeness and good breeding; nor to enforce attention to decorum, by the comparatively low consideration, "Then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee." Unworthy alike, both the lesson and the motive, would cry a false spirituality, if the example of such preaching were set by any lower authority. A false spirituality it is, for it originates in missing the close connection between the temporal and the spiritual, the outward and the inward, the life that now is, and that which is to come.