# The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 07/Discourse 5

V.
"Hitherto hath the Lord helped us."—1 Samuel, vii. 12.
A man who has only tho spirit of his age can easily be a popular man; if he have it in an eminent degree, he must be a popular man in it: he has its hopes and its fears; his trumpet gives a certain and well-known sound; his counsel is readily appreciated; the majority is on hip side. But he cannot be a wise magistrate, a just judge, a competent critic, or a profitable preacher. A man who has only the spirit of a former age can be none of these four things; and not even a popular man. He remembers when he ought to forecast, and compares when he ought to act; he cannot appreciate the age he lives in, nor have a fellow-feeling with it. He may easily obtain the pity of his age, not its sympathy or its confidence. The man who has the spirit of his own, and also that of some future age, is alone capable of becoming a wise magistrate, a just judge, a competent critic, and a profitable preacher. Such a man looks on passing events somewhat as the future historian will do, and sees them in their proportions, not distorted; sees them in their connection with great general laws, and judges of the falling rain not merely by the bonnets it may spoil and the pastime it disturbs, but by the grass and corn it shall cause to grow. He has hopes and rears of his own, but they are not the hopes and fears of men about him; his trumpet cannot give a welcome or well-known sound, nor his counsel be presently heeded. ​ Majorities are not on his side, nor can he be a popular man. To understand our present moral condition, to be able to give good counsel thereon, you must understand the former generation, and have potentially the spirit of the future generation; must appreciate the past, and yet belong to the future. Who is there that can do this? No man will say, "I can." Conscious of the difficulty, and aware of my own deficiencies in all those respects, I will yet endeavour to speak of tho moral condition of Boston.
First, I will speak of tho actual moral condition of Boston, us indicated by tho morals of trade. In a city like Rome, you must first feel the pulse of the church, in St. Petersburg that of tho court, to determine the moral condition of those cities. Now trade is to Boston what the church is to Rome and the imperial court to St. Petersburg: it is the pendulum which regulates all the common and authorized machinery of the place; it is on organization of the public conscience. We cure little for any Pius tho Ninth, or Nicholas the First; the dollar is our emperor and pope, above all the parties in the State, all sects in the church, lord paramount over both, its spiritual and temporal power not likely to be called in question; revolt from what else we may, we are loyal still to that.
A little while ago, in a "Sermon of Riches," speaking of the character of trade in Boston, I suggested that men were better than their reputation oftener than worse ; that there were a hundred honest bargains to one that was dishonest. I have heard severe strictures from friendly tongues, on that statement, which gave me more pain than any criticism I have received before. The criticism was, that I overrated the honesty of men in trade. Now, it is a small thing to be convicted of an error—a just thing and a profitable have it detected and exposed; but it is a painful thing to find you have overrated the moral character of your townsmen. However, if what I said be not true as history, I hope it will become so as prophecy; I doubt not my critics will help that work.
Love of money is out of proportion to love of better things—to love of justice, of truth, of a manly character developing itself in a manly life. Wealth is often made ​ the end to live for; not the means to live by, and uttain a manly character. The young man of good abilities does not commonly propose it to himself to be a nobleman, equipped with all the intellectual and moral qualities which belong to that, and capable of tho duties which come thereof. He is satisfied if he can become a rich man. It is the highest ambition of many a youth in this town to become one of the rich men of Boston ; to have tho social position which wealth always gives, and nothing else in this country can commonly bestow. Accordingly, our young men that are now poor, will sacrifice everything to this one object; will make wealth the end, and will become rich without becoming noble. But wealth without nobleness of character is always vulgar. I have seen a clown staring at himself in the gorgeous mirror of a French palace, and thought him no bad emblem of many an ignoble man at home, surrounded by material riches which only reflected back the vulgarity of their owner.
Other young men inherit wealth, but seldom regard it as a means of power for high and noble ends, only as the means of selfish indulgence; unneeded means to elevate yet more their self-esteem. Now and then you find a man who values wealth only as an instrument to serve mankind withal. I know some such men; their money is a blessing akin to genius, a blessing to mankind, a means of philanthropic power. But such men are rare in all countries, perhaps a little less so in Boston than in most other large trading towns; still, exceeding rare. They are sure to meet with neglect, abuse, and perhaps with scorn; if they are men of eminent ability, superior culture, and most elevated moral aims, set off, too, with a noble and heroic life, they are sure of meeting with eminent hatred. I fear the man most hated in this town would be found to be some one who had only sought to do mankind some great good, and stepped before his age too far for its sympathy. Truth, justice, humanity, are not thought in Boston to have come of good family; their followers are not respectable. I am not speaking to blame men, only to show the fact; we may meddle with things too high for us, but not understand nor appreciate.
Now, this disproportionate love of money appears in various ways. You see it in the advantage that is taken of ​ the feeblest, the most ignorant, and the most exposed classes in tho community. It is notorious that they pay the highest, prices, tho dearest rents, and are imposed upon in their dealings oftener than any other class of men; so the raven and the hooded crow, it is said, seek out tho sickliest sheep to pounce upon. The fact that a man is ignorant, poor, and desperate, furnished to many men an argument for defrauding the man. It is bad enough to injure any man; but to wrong an ignorant man, a poor and friendless man; to take advantage of his poverty or his ignorance, and to get his services or his money for less than a fair return—that is petty baseness under aggravated circumstances, and as cowardly as it is mean. You are now and then shocked at rich men telling of the arts by which they got their gold—sometimes of their fraud at home, sometimes abroad; and a good man almost thinks there must be a curse on money meanly got at first, though it falls to him by honest inheritance.
This some disproportionate love of money appears in the fact that men, not driven by necessity, engage in the manufacture, the importation, and the sale of an article which corrupts and rums men by hundreds; which has done more to increase poverty, misery, and crime, than any other one cause whatever; and, as some think, more than all other causes whatever. I am not speaking of men who aid in any just and proper use of that article, but in its ruinous use. Yet such men, by such a traffic, never lose their standing in society, their reputation in trade, their character in the church. A good many men will think worse of you for being an Abolitionist; men have lost their place in society by that name; even Dr. Channing "hurt his usefulness and "injured his reputation" fry daring to speak against that sin of the nation; but no man loses caste in Boston by making, importing, and selling the cause of ruin to hundreds of families—though he does it with his eyes open, knowing that he ministers to crime and to ruin! I am told that large quantities of New England nun have already been sent from this city to California; it is notorious that much of it is sent to the nations of Africa—if not from Boston, at least from New England—as an auxiliary in the slave trade. You know with what feelings of grief and indignation a clergyman of this city saw that charac​ teristic manufacture of his town on the wharves of a Mahometan city. I suppose there are not ten ministers in Boston who would not "get into trouble," as the phrase is, if they were to preach against intemperance, and the causes that produce intemperance, with half so much zeal as they innocently preach "regeneration" and o "form of piety" which will never touch a single corner of the earth. As the minister came down, the spirit of trade would meet him on the pulpit stairs to warn him: "Business is business; religion is religion; business is ours, religion yours: but if you make or even allow religion to interfere with our business, then it will be tho worse for you—that is all!" You know it is not a great while since we drove out of Boston the one Unitarian minister who was a fearless apostle of temperance. His presence here was a grief to that "form of piety;" a disturbance to trade. Since then the peace of the churches has not been much disturbed by the preaching of temperance. The effect has been salutary; no Unitarian minister has risen up to fill that place!
This same disproportionate love of money appears in the fact, that tho merchants of Boston still allow coloured seamen to he, taken from their ships and shut up in the gaols of another State. If they cared as much for the rights of man as for money, as much for the men who sail the ship as for the cargo it carries, I cannot think there would be brass enough in South Carolina, or all the South, to hold another freeman of Massachusetts in bondage, merely for the colour of his skin. No doubt, a merchant would lose his reputation in this city by engaging directly in the slave trade, for it is made piracy by the law of the land. But did any one ever lose his reputation by taking a mortgage on slaves as security for a debt; by becoming, in that way, or by inheritance, the owner of slaves, and still keening them in bondage?
You shall tcke the whole trading community of Boston, ​ rich and poor, good and bad, study the phenomena, of trade as astronomers tho phenomena of the heavens, and from the observed facts, by the inductive method of philosophy, construct the ethics of trade, and you will find one great maxim to underlie tho whole: Money must he made. Money-making is to the ethics of trade what attraction is to the material world; what truth is to the intellect, and justice in morals. Other things must yield to that; that to nothing. In the effort to comply with this universal law of trade, many a character gives way; many a virtue gets pushed aside; the higher, nobler qualities of a man are held in small esteem.
This characteristic of the trading class appears in the thought of the people as well as their actions. You see it in the secular literature of our times; in the laws, even in. the sermons; nobler things give way to love of gold. So in an ill-tended garden, in some bed where violets sought to open their fragrant bosoms to the sun, have I seen a cabbage come up and grow apace, with thick and vulgar stalk, with coarse and vulgar leaves, with rank unsavoury look; it thrust aside the little violet, which, underneath that impenetrable leaf, lacking the morning sunshine and the dew of night, faded and gave up its tender life; but above tho grave of the violet there stood the cabbage, green, expanding, triumphant, and all fearless of the frost. Yet the cabbage also had its value and its use.
There are men in Boston, some rich, some poor, old and young, who are free from this reproach ; men that have a well-proportioned love of money, and make the pursuit thereof an effort for all the noble qualities of a man. I know some such men. not very numerous anywhere, men who show that the common business of life is the place to mature great virtues in; that the pursuit of wealth, successful or not, need hinder the growth of no excellence, but may promote all manly life. Such men stand here as violets among the cabbages, making a fragrance and a loveliness all their own; attractive anywhere, but marvellous in such a neighbourhood as that.
Look next on the morals of Boston, as indicated by the newspapers, the daily and the weekly press. Take the whole newspaper literature of Boston, cheap and costly, ​ good and bad, study it all as a whole, and by the inductive method construct the ethics of the press, and here you find no signs of a higher morality in general than you found in trade. It is the same centre about which all things gravitate here as there. But in the newspapers the want of great principles is more obvious, and more severely felt than in trade—the want of justice, of truth, of humanity, of sympathy with man. In trade you meet with signs of great power; the highway of commerce bears marks of giant feet. Our newspapers seem chiefly in the hands of little men, whose cunning is in a large ratio to their wisdom or their justice, you find here little ability, little sound learning, little wise political economy; of lofty morals almost nothing at all. Here, also, the dollar is both pope and king; right and truth are vass&ls, not much esteemed, nor over-often called to pay service to their lord, who has other soldiers with more pliant neck and knee.
A newspaper is instrument of great importance; all men read it ; many read nothing else; some it serves as reason and conscience too: in lack of bettor, why not P It speaks to thousands every day on matters of great moment—on matters of morals, of politics of finance. It relates daily the occurrences of our land, and of all the world. All men are affected by it; hindered or helped. To many a man his morning paper represents more reality than his morning prayer. There are many in a community Vice this who do not know what to say— I do not mean wliat to think, thoughtful men know what to think—about anything til somebody tells them; yet they must talk, for "the mouth goes always." To such a man a newspaper is invaluable; as the idolater in the Judges had "a Levite to his priest," so he has a newspaper to his reason or his conscience, and can talk to the day's end. An able and humane newspaper would get this class of persons into good habits of speech, and do them a service, inasmuch as good habits of speech are better than bad.
One portion of this literature is degrading; it seems purposely so, as if written by base men, for base readers, to serve base ends. I know not which is most depraved thereby, the taste or the conscience. Obscene advertisements are there, meant for the licentious eye; there are loathsome details of vice, of crime, of depravity, related ​ with the design to attract, yet so disgusting that any but a corrupt man must revolt from them, there are accounts of the appearance of culprits in the lower courts, of their crime, of their punishment; these are related with an impudent flippancy, and a desire to make sport of human wretchedness and perhaps depravity, which amaze a man of only tho average humanity. We read of Judge Jeffreys and the bloody assizes in England, one hundred and sixty years ago, but never think there are in the midst of us men who, like that monster, can make sport of human misery; but for a cent you can find proof that the race of such is not extinct. If a penny-a-liner were to go into a military hospital, and make merry at the sights he saw there, at the groans he heard, and the keen smart his eye witnessed, could he publish his fiendish joy at that spectacle—you would not say ha was a man. If one mock at the crimes of men, perhaps at their sins, at the infamous punishments they suffer—what can you say of him?
It is a significant fact that the commercial newspapers, which of course in such a town are the controlling newspapers, in reporting the European news, relate first the state of the markets abroad, the price of cotton, of consols, and of corn; then the health of the English Queen, and the movements of the nations. This is loyal and consistent; at Rome the journal used to announce first some tidings of the Pope, then of the lesser dignitaries of the church, then of the discovery of new antiques, and other matters of great pith and moment; at St. Petersburg, it was first of the Emperor that the journal spoke ; at Boston it is legitimate that the health of the dollar should be reported first of all.
The political newspapers are a melancholy proof of the low morality of this town. You know what tney will say of any parcy movement; that measures and men are judged on purely party grounds. The country is commonly put before mankind, and the party before the country. Which of them in political matters pursues a course mat is fair and just; how many of them have ever advanced a great idea, or been constantly true to a great principle of natural justice; how many resolutely oppose a great wrong; how many can be trusted to expose the most notorious blunders of their party; how many of them aim to promote the ​ higher interests of mankind? What servility is there in some of these journals, a cringeing to the public opinion of the party; a desire that "our efforts may be appreciated!" In our politics everything which relates to money is pretty carefully looked after, though not always well looked after; but what relates to the moral part of politics is commonly passed over with much less heed. Men would compliment a senator who understood finance in all its mysteries, and sneer at one who had studied as faithfully the mysteries of war, or of Slavery. The Mexican war tested the morality of Boston, as it appears both in the newspapers and in trade, and showed its true value.
There are some few exceptions to this statement; here and there is a journal which does set forth the great ideas of this age, and is animated by the spirit of humanity. But such exceptions only remind one of the general rule.
In the sectarian journals the same general morality appears, but in a worse form. What would have been political hatred in the secular prints, becomes theological odium in the sectarian journals; not a mere hatred in the name of party, but hatred in the name of God and Christ. Here is less fairness, less openness, and less ability than there, but more malice; the form, too, is less manly. What is there a strut or a swagger, is here only a snivel. They are the last places in which you need look for the spirit of true morality. Which of the sectarian journals of Boston advocates any of the great reforms of the day? nay, which is not an obstacle in the path of all manly reform? But let us not dwell upon this, only look and pass by.
I am not about to censure the conductors of these journals, commercial, political, or theological. I am no judge of any man's conscience. No doubt they write as they can or must. This literature is as honest and as able as "the circumstances will admit of." I look on it as an index of our moral condition, for a newspaper literature always represents the general morals of its readers. Grocers and butchers purchase only such articles as their customers will buy; the editors of newspapers reveal the moral character of their subscribers as well as their correspondents. The transient literature of any age is always a good index of the moral taste of the age. These two witnesses attest the moral condition of the better part of the ​ city; but there are men a good deal lower than the general morals of trade and the press. Other witnesses testify to their moral character.
Let mo now speak of your moral condition as indicated by the poverty in this city. I have so recently spoken on the subject of poverty in Boston, and printed the sermon, that I will not now mention the misery it brings. I will only speak of the moral condition which it indicates, and the moral effect it has upon us.
In this age, poverty tends to barbarize men; it shuts them out from the educational influences of our times. The sons of the miserable class cannot obtain the intellectual, moral, and religious education which is tho birth-right of the comfortable and the rich. There is a great gulf between them and the culture of our times. How hard it must be to climb up from a cellar in Cove Place to wisdom, to honesty, to piety. I know how comfortable pharisaic self-righteousness can say, "I thank thee I am not wicked like one of these and God knows which is the best before His eyes, the scorner, or the man he loathes and leaves to dirt and destruction. I know this poverty belongs to the state of transition we are now in, and can only be ended by our passing through this into a better. I see the medicinal effect of poverty, that with cantharidian sting it drives some men to work, to frugality and thrift; that the Irish has driven tho American beggar out of the streets, and will shame him out of the alms-house ere long. But there are men who have not force enough to obey this stimulus ; they only cringe and smart under its sting. Such men are made barbarians by Poverty,—barbarians in body, in mind and conscience, in heart and soul. There was great amount of this barbarism in Boston; it lowers the moral character of the place, as icebergs in your harbour next June would chill the air all feet day.
The fact that poverty is here, that little is done by public authority, or by the ablest men in the land, to remove the evil tree and dig up its evil root; that amid all the wealth of Boston and all its charity, there are not even comfortable tenements for the poor to be had at any but a ruinous rent— that is a sad foot, and bears a said ​ testimony to our moral state! Sometimes the spectacle of misery does good, quickening the moral sense and touching the electric tie which binds all human hearts into one great family; but when it does not lead to this result, then it debases the looker on. To know of wont, of misery, of all the complicated and far-extended ill they bring; to hear of this, and to see it in the streets; to have the money to alleviate, and yet not to alleviate; the wisdom to devise a cure therefore, and yet make no effort towards it—that is to be yourself debased and barbarized. I have often thought, in seeing the poverty of London, that the daily spectacle of such misery did more in a year to debauch the British heart than all the slaughter at Waterloo. I know that misery has called out heroic virtue in some men and women, and made philanthropists of such as otherwise had been only getters and keepers of gain. We have noble examples of that in the midst of us; but how many men has poverty trod down into the mire; how many has this sight of misery hardened into cold worldliness, the man frozen into mere respectability, its thin smile on his lips, its ungodly contempt in his heart!
Out of this barbarism of poverty there come three other forms of evil which indicate the moral condition of Boston; of that portion named just now as below the morals of trade and the press. These also I will call up to testify.
One is intemperance. This is a crime against the body; it is felony against your own frame. It makes a schism amongst your own members. The amount of it is fearfully great in this town. Some of our most wealthy citizens, who rent their buildings for the unlawful sale of rum to be applied to an intemperate abuse, are directly concerned in promoting this intemperance; others, rich but less wealthy, have sucked their abundance out of the bones of the poor, and are actual manufacturers of the drunkard and the criminal. Here are numerous distilleries owned, and some of them conducted, I am told, by men of wealth. The fire thereof is not quenched at all by day, and there is no night there; the worm dieth not. There out of the sweetest plant which God has made to grow under a tropic sun, men distil a poison the most ​ baneful to mankind which the world has ever known. The poison of the Borgias was celebrated once; cold-hearted courtiers shivered at its name. It never killed many; those with merciful swiftness. The poison of rum is yet worse; it early murders thousands; Kills them by inches, body and soul. Here are respectable and wealthy men, men who this day sit down in a Christian church, and thank God for His goodness, with contrite hearts praise Him xor that Sou of mm who gave His life for mankind, and -would gladly give it to mankind; yet these men have ships on the sea to bring the poor man's poison here, or bear it hence to other men as poor; have distilleries on the land to make still yet more for the ruin of their fellow-Christians; have warehouses full of this plague, which "outvenoms all the worms of Nile;" have shops which they rent for the illegal and murderous sale of this terrible scourge. Do they not know the nun which they work; are they the only men in the land who have not heard of the effects of intemperance? I judge them not, great God! I only judge myself. I wish I could say, "They know not what they do;" but at this day who does not know the effect of intemperance in Boston?
I speak not of the sale of ardent spirits to be used in the area to be used for medicine, but of the needless use thereof; of their use to damage the body and injure the soul of man. The chief of your police informs me there are twelve hundred places in Boston where this article is sold to be drunk on the spot; illegally sold. The Charitable Association of Mechanics, in this city, have taken the accumulated savings o£ more than fifty years, and there-with built a costly establishment, where intoxicating drink is needlessly but abundantly sold! Low as the moral standard of Boston is, low as are the morals of cite press and trade, I had hoped better things of these men, who live in the midst of hardworking labourers, and see the miseries of intemperance all about them. But the dollar was too powerful for their temperance.
Here are splendid houses, where the rich man or the thrifty needlessly drinks. Let me leave them; the evil demon of intemperance appears not there; he is there, but under well-made garments, amongst educated men, who are respected and still reaped themselves. Amid ​ monument and song tho demon appears not. He is there, gaunt, bony, and destructive; but so elegantly clad, with manners so unoffending, you do not murk his nice, nor four bin stops. Hut go down to that miserable lane, where men mothered by misery and sired by crime, where the sons of poverty and the daughters of "wretchedness, are huddled thick together, and you see thin demon of intemperance in all his ugliness. Let me sneak soberly; exaggeration is a figure of speech would always banish from my rhetoric, hero, above all, where the fact is more appalling than any fiction I could devise. In the low parts of Boston, where want abounds, where misery abounds, intemperance abounds yet more, to multiply want, to aggravate misery, to make savage what poverty has only made barbarian; to stimulate passion into crime. Here it is not music and the song which crown the bowl; it is crowned by obscenity, by oaths, by curses, by violence, sometimes by murder. These twine the ivy round the poor man's bowl; no, it is the Upas that they twine. Think of the sufferings of the drunkard himself, of his poverty, his hunger, and his nakedness, his cold; think of his battered body; of his mind and conscience, how they are gone. But is that all? Far from it. These curses shall become blows upon his wife; that savage violence shall be expended on his child.
In his senses this man was a barbarian; there are centuries of civilization betwixt him and cultivated men. But the man of wealth, adorned with respectability, and armed with science, harbours a demon in the street, a profitable demon to tho rich man who rents his houses for such a use. The demon enters our barbarian, who straightway becomes a savage. In his fury he tears his wife and child. The law, heedless of the greater culprits, the demon and the demon-breeder, seizes our savage man and shuts him in the gaol. Now he is out of the tempter's reach; let us leave him; let us go to his home. His wife and children still are there, freed from their old tormentor. Enter: look upon the squalor, the filth, the want, the misery, still left behind. Respectability halts at the door with folded arms, and can no further go. But charity, the leve of man which never fails, enters even there; enters to lift up the fallen, to cheer the despairing, to comfort and ​ to bless. Let us leave her there, loving the unlovely, and turn to other sights.
In the streets, there are about nine hundred needy boys, and about two hundred needy girls, the sons and daughters mainly of the intemperate: too idle or too thriftless to work; too low and naked for the public school. They roam about—the nomadic tribes of this town, the gipsies of Boston—doing some chance work for a moment, committing some petty theft. The temptations of a great city are before them. Soon they will be impressed into the regular army of crime, to be stationed in your gaols, perhaps to die on your gallows. Such is the fate of the sons of intemperance; but the daughters! their fate—let me not tell of that.
In your Legislature they have just been discussing a law against dogs, for now and then a man is bitten, and dies of hydrophobia. Perhaps there are ten mad dogs in the State at this moment, and it may be that one man in a year dies from the bite of such. Do the legislators know now many shops there are in this town, in this State, which all the day and all the year sell to intemperate men a poison that maddens with a hydrophobia still worse? If there were a thousand mad dogs in the land, if wealthy men had embarked a large capital in the importation or the production of mad dogs, and if they bit and maddened and slew ten thousand men in a year, do you believe your Legislature would discuss that evil with such fearless ​ speech? Thou you are very young, and know little of the tyranny of public-opinion, and the power of money to silence speech, while justice still comes in, with feet of wool, but iron hands.
There is yet another witness to the moral condition of Boston. I mean crime. Where there is such poverty and intemperance, crime may be expected to follow. I will not now dwell upon this theme; only let me say, that in 1848, three thousand four hundred and thirty-five grown persons, and six hundred and seventy-one minors, were lawfully sentenced to your gaol and house of correction; in all, four thousand one hundred and six; three thousand four hundred and forty-four persons were arrested by the night police, and eleven thousand one hundred and seventy-eight were taken into custody by the watch; at one time there were one hundred and forty-four in the common gaol. I have already mentioned that more than a thousand boys and girls, between six and sixteen, wander as vagrants about your streets; two hundred and thirty-eight of these are children of widows, fifty-four have neither parent living. It is a fact known to your police, that about one thousand two hundred shops aro unlawfully open for re​ tailing the means of intemperance. These we most thickly-strewn in the haunts of poverty. On a single Sunday the police found there hundred and thirteen shops in the full experiment of unblushing and successful crime. These rum-shops are tho factories of crime; the raw material is furnished by poverty; it passes into the hands of the rum-seller, and is soon ready for delivery at the mouth of the gaol or the foot of the gallows. It is notorious that intemperance is the proximate cause of three-fourths of the crime in Boston; yet it is very respectable to own houses and rent them for the purpose of making men intemperate; nobody loses his standing by that. I am not surprised to hear of women armed with knives, and boys with six-barrelled revolvers in their pockets; not surprised at the increase of capital trials.
One other matter let me name—I call it the crime against woman. Let us see the evil in its type, its most significant form. Look at that thing of corruption and of shame—almost without shame—whom the judge, with brief words, despatches to the gaol. That was a woman once. No! At least, she was once a girl. She had a mother; perhaps beyond the hills, a mother, in her evening prayer, remembers still this one child more tenderly than all the folded flowers that slept the sleep of infancy beneath her roof; remembers, with a prayer, her child, whom the world curses after it has made corrupt ! Perhaps she had no such mother, but was born in the filth of some reeking cellar, and turned into the mire of the streets, in her undefended innocence, to mingle with the coarseness, the intemperance, and the crime of a corrupt metropolis. In either case, her blood is on our hands. The crime which is so terribly avenged on woman—think you that God will hold men innocent of that ? But on this sign of our moral state I will not long delay.
Put all these things together: the character of trade, of the press; take the evidence of poverty, intemperance, and crime—it all reveals a sad state of things. I call your attention to these facts. We are all affected by them more or less—all more or less accountable for them.
Hitherto I have only stated facts, without making com​ parisons. Let me now compare the present condition of Boston with that in former times. Every man has an ideal, which is better than the actual facts about him. Some men amongst us put that ideal in times past, and maintain it was then an historical fact; they are commonly men who have little knowledge of the past, and less hope for the future; a good deal of reverence for old precedents, little for justice, truth, humanity; little confidence in mankind, and a great deal of fear of new things. Such men love to look back and do homage to tho past, but it is only a past of fancy, not of fact, they do homage to. They tell us we have fallen; that the golden age is behind us, and the garden of Eden ; ours are degenerate days; the men are inferior, the women less winning, less witty, and less wise, and the children are an untoward generation, a disgrace, not so much to their fathers, but certainly to their grandsires. Sometimes this is the complaint of men who have grown old; sometimes of such as seem to be old without growing so, who seem born to the gift of age, without the grace of youth.
Other men have a similar ideal, commonly a higher one, but they place it in the future, not as an historical reality, which has been, and is therefore to be worshipped, but one which is to be made real by dint of thought, of work. I have known old persons who stoutly maintained that the pears, and the plums, and the peaches, are not half so luscious as they were many years ago ; so they bewailed the existing race of fruits, complaining of "the general decay" of sweetness, and brought over to their way of speech some aged juveniles. Meanwhile, men born young, set themselves to productive work, and, instead of bewailing an old fancy, realized a new ideal in new fruits, bigger, fairer, and better than the old. It is to men of this latter stamp that we must look for criticism and for counsel. The others can afford us a warning, if not by their speech, at least by their example.
It is very plain that the people of New England are advancing in wealth, in intelligence, and in morality; but in this general march there are little apparent pauses, slight waverings from side to side; some virtues seem to straggle from the troop; some to lag behind, for it is not always the same virtue that leads the van. It is with the flock of ​ virtues, as with wild fowl—the leaders alternate, It is probable that the morals of New England in general, and of Boston in special, did decline somewhat from 1776 to 1790; there were peculiar but well-known causes, which no longer exist, to work that result. In the previous fifteen years it seems probable that there had been a rapid increase of morality, through the agency of causes equally peculiar and transient. To estimate the moral growth or decline of this town, we must not take either period as a standard. But take the history of Boston from 1650 to 1700, from 1700 to 1750, thence to 1800, and you will see a gradual, but a decided progress in morality, in each of these periods. It is not easy to prove this m a short sermon; I can only indicate the points of comparison, and state the general fact. From 1800 to 1849, this progress is well marked, indisputable, and very great. Let us look at this a little in detail, pursuing the same order of thought as before.
It is generally conceded that the moral character of trade has improved a good deal within fifty or sixty years. It was formerly a common saying, that "If a Yankee merchant were to sell salt-water at high-tide, he would yet cheat in the measure." The saying was founded on the conduct of American traders abroad, in the West Indies and elsewhere. Now things have changed for the better. I have been told by competent authority, that two of the most eminent merchants of Boston, fifty or sixty years ago, who conducted each a large business, and left very large fortunes, were notoriously guilty of such dishonesty in trade as would now drive any man from the Exchange. The facility with which notes are collected by the banks, compared to the former method of collection, is itself a proof of an increase of practical honesty; the law for settling the affairs of a bankrupt tells the same thing. Now this change has not come from any special effort, made to produce this particular effect, and, accordingly, it indicates the general moral progress of the community.
The general character of the press, since the end of the last century, has decidedly improved, at any one may convince himself of by comparing the newspapers of that period with the present; yet a publicity in now-a-days given to certain things which were formerly kept more ​ closely from the public eye and ear. This circumstance sometimes produces an apparent increase of wrong- doing, while it is only an increased publicity thereof. Political servility and political rancour are certainly bad enough and base enough at this day, but not long ago both were baser and worse; to show this, I need only appeal to the memories of men before me, who can recollect the beginning of the present century. Political controversies are conducted with less bitterness than before; honesty is more esteemed; private worth is more respected. It is not many years since the Federal party, composed of men who certainly were an honour to their age, supported Aaron Burr, for the office of President of the United States—a man whose character, both public and private, was notoriously marked with the deepest infamy. Political parties are not very puritanical in their virtue at this day; out I think no party would now for a moment accept such a man as Mr. Burr for such a post. There is another pleasant sign of this improvement in political parties; last autumn the victorious party, in two wards of this city, made a beautiful demonstration of joy at their success in the Presidential election; and on Thanksgiving-day, and on Christmas, gave a substantial dinner to each poor person in their section of the town. It was a trifle, but one pleasant to remember.
Even the theological journals have improved within a few years. I know it has been said that some of them are not only behind their times, which is true, "but behind all times." It is not so. Compared with the sectarian writings—tracts, pamphlets, and hard-bound volumes of an earlier day—they are human, enlightened, and even liberal.
In respect to poverty, there has been a great change for the better. However, it may be said in general, that a good deal of the poverty, intemperance, and crime, is of foreign origin; we are to deal with it, to be blamed if we allow it to continue ; not at all to be blamed for its origin. I know it is often said, "The poor are getting poorer, and soon will become the mere vassals of the rich;" that "The post is full of discouragement: the future full of fear." I cannot think so. I feel neither the discouragement nor the fear. It should be remembered that many of the ​ Fathers of New England owned the bodies of their labourers and domestics! The condition of the working man has improved relatively to tho wealth of the land over since. The wages of any kind of labour, at this day, bear a higher proportion to the things needed for comfort end convenience than ever before for two hundred years.
If you go back one hundred years, I think you will find that, in proportion to the population and wealth of this town or this State, there was considerably more suffering from native poverty then than now. I have not, however, before me the means of absolute proof of this statement; but this is plain, that now public charity is more extended, more complete, works in a wiser mode, and with far more beneficial effect; and that pains are now taken to uproot the causes of poverty—pains which our fathers never thought of. In proof of this increase of charity, and even of tho existence of justice, I need only refer to the numerous benevolent societies of modern origin, and to the establishment of tho ministry at large, in this city—the latter tho work of Unitarian philanthropy. Some other churches have done a little in this good work. But none have done much. I am told the Catholic clergy of this city do little to remove the great mass of poverty, intemperance, and crime among their followers. I know there are some few honourable exceptions, and how easy it is for Protestant hostility to exaggerate matters; still I fear the reproach is but too well founded, that the Catholic clergy are not vigilant shepherds, who guard their sacred flock against the terrible wolves which prowl about the fold. I wish to find myself mistaken here.
Some of you remember the "Old Almshouse" in Park Street; the condition and character of its inmates; the effect of the treatment they there received. I do not say that our present attention to the subject of poverty is anything to boast of—certainly we have done little in comparison with what common sense demands; very little in comparison with what Christianity enjoins; still it is something; in comparison with "the good old times," it is much that we are doing.
There has been a great change for the better m the matter of intemperance in drinking. "Within thirty years, the progress towards sobriety is surprising, and so well​ marked and obvious that to name it is enough. Probably there is not a "respectable" man in Boston who would not be ashamed to have been seen drunk yesterday; even to have been drunk in ever so private a manner; not one who would willingly get a friend or a guest in that condition to-day! Go back a few years, and it brought no public reproach, and, I fear, no private shame. A few years further back, it was not a rare thing, on great occasions, for the fathers of the town to reel and stagger from their intemperance—the magistrates of the land voluntarily furnishing the warning which a romantic historian says the Spartans forced upon their slaves.
It is easy to praise the Fathers of New England; easier to praise them for virtues they did not possess, than to discriminate and fairly judge those remarkable men. I admire and venerate their characters, but they were rather hard drinkers; certainly a love of cold water was not one of their loves. Let me mention a fact or two. It is recorded in the Probate Office, that in 1678, at the funeral of Mrs. Mary Norton, widow of the celebrated John Norton, one of the ministers of the first church in Boston, fifty-one gallons and a half of the best Malaga wine were consumed by the "mourners;" in 1685, at the funeral of the Rev. Thomas Cobbett, minister at Ipswich, 'there were consumed one barrel of wine and two barrels of cider—"and as it was cold," there was " some spice and ginger for the cider." You may easily judge of the drunkenness and riot on occasions less solemn than the funeral of an old and beloved minister. Towns provided intoxicating drink at the funeral of their paupers; in Salem, in 1728, at the funeral of a pauper, a gallon of wine and another of cider are charged as "incidental;" the next year, six gallons of rum on a similar occasion; in Lynn, in 1711, the town furnished "half a barrel of cider for the "Widow Dispaw's funeral." Affairs had come to such a pass, that, in 1742, the General Court forbade the use of wine and rum at funerals. In 1673, Increase Mather published his Wo unto Drunkards. Governor Winthrop complains, in 1630, that "the young folk gave themselves to drink hot waters very immoderately." ​ But I need not go back so far. Who that is fifty years of age does not remember the aspect of Boston on public days—on the evening of such days? Compare the "Election-day," or the 4th of July, as they wore kept thirty or forty years ago, with such days in our time. Some of you remember tho Celebration of Peace, in 1783; many of you can recollect the similar celebration in 1815. On each of those days the inhabitants from the country towns came here to rejoice with the citizens of this town. Compare the riot, the confusion, the drunkenness then, with the order, decorum, and sobriety of the celebration at the introduction of water last autumn, and you see what has been done in sixty or seventy years for temperance.
A great deal of the crime in Boston is of foreign origin: of the one thousand and sixty-six children vagrant in your streets, only one hundred and three had American
​ parents; of the nine hundred and thirty-three persons in the house of correction here, six hundred and sixteen were natives of other countries; I know not how many were the children of Irishmen, who had not enjoyed the advantages of our institutions. I cannot tell how many rum-shops are kept by foreigners. Now, in Ireland, no pains have been taken with the education of the people by the Government; very little by the Catholic church; indeed, the British Government for a long time rendered it impossible for the church to do anything in this way. For more than seventy years, in that Catholic country, none but a Protestant could keep a school, or even be a tutor in a private family. A Catholic schoolmaster was to be transported, and, if he returned, adjudged guilty of high treason, barbarously put to death, drawn, and quartered. A Protestant schoolmaster is as repulsive to a Catholic as a Mahometan schoolmaster or an Atheist would be to you. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Irish are ignorant; and, as a consequence thereof, are idle, thriftless, poor, intemperate, and barbarian; not to be wondered at if they conduct like wild beasts when they are set loose in a land where we think the individual must be left free to the greatest extent. Of course they will violate our laws, those wild bisons leaping over the fences which easily restrain the civilized domestic cattle; will commit the great crimes of violence, even capital offences, which certainly have increased rapidly of late. This increase of foreigners is prodigious; more than half the children in your public schools are children of foreigners ; there are more Catholic than Protestant children born in Boston.
With the general and unquestionable advance of morality, some offences are regarded as crimes which were not noticed a few years ago. Drunkenness is an example of this. An Irishman in his native country thinks little of beating another or being beaten; he brings his habits of violence with him, and does not at once learn to conform to our laws. Then, too, a good deal of crime which was once concealed is now brought to light by the press, by the superior activity of the police; and yet, after all that is said, it seems quite clear that what is legally called crime, and ​ committed by Americans, has diminished a good deal in fifty years. Such crime, I think, never bore so small a proportion to the population, wealth, and activity of Boston, as now. Even if we take all the offences committed by these strangers who have come amongst us, it does not compare so very unfavourably, as some allege, with the "good old times." I know men often look on the fathers of this colony as saints; but in 1635, at a time when the whole State contained less than one-tenth of the present population of Boston, and they were scattered from Weymouth Fore-River to the Merrimack, the first grand jury ever impannelled at Boston "found" a hundred bills of indictment at their first coming together.
If you consider the circumstances of tho class who commit the greater part of the crimes which get punished, you will not wonder at the amount. The criminal court is their school of morals ; the constable and judge are their teachers; but under this rude tuition I am told that the Irish improve, and actually become better. The children who receive the instruction of our public schools, imperfect as they are, will be better than their fathers; and their grand-children will have lost all trace of their barbarian descent.
I have often spoken, of our penal law as wrong in its principle, taking it for granted that the ignorant and miserable men who commit crime do it always from wickedness, and not from the pressure of circumstances which have brutalized the man ; wrong in its aim, which is to take vengeance on the offender, and not to do him a good in return for the evil he has done ; wrong in its method, which is to inflict a punishment that is wholly arbitrary, and then to send the punished man, overwhelmed with new disgrace, back to society, often, made worse than before,—not to keep him till we can correct, cure, and send him back a reformed man. I would retract nothing of what I have often said of that; but not long ago all this was worse; the particular statutes were often terribly unjust ; the forms of trial afforded the accused but little chance of justice; the punishments were barbarous and terrible. The plebeian tyranny of the Lord Brethren in New England was not much lighter than the patrician despotism of the Lord Bishops in the old world, and was more insulting. Let me mention a few facts, to refresh the memories of those who ​ think we are going to ruin, and can only save ourselves by holding to the customs of our fatht^s, and of the " good old times." In 1631, a man was fined forty pounds, whipped on the naked back, both his ears out oflj and then banished this colony, for uttering hard speeches against the government and the church at Salem. In the first century of the existence of this town, the magistrates could banish a woman because she did not like the preaching, nor all the ministers, and told the people why; they could whip women naked in the streets, because they spoke reproachfully of the magistrates; they could nne men twenty pounds, and then banish them, for comforting a man in gaol before his trial; they could pull down, with legal formality, the house of a man they did not like; they could whip women at a cart's tail from Salem to Rhode Island for fidelity to their conscience; they could beat, imprison, and banish men out of the land, simply for baptizing one another in a stream of water, instead of sprinkling them ft-om a dish ; they could crop the ears, and scourge the backs, and bore the tongues of men, for being Quakers—yes, they could shut them in gaols, could banish them out of the colony, could sell them as slaves, could hang them on a gallows, solely for worshipping God after their own conscience; they could convulse the whole land, and hang some thirty or forty men for witchcraft;, and do all this in the name of God, and then sing psalms, with most nasal twang, and pray by the hour, and preach.'—I will not say how long, nor what, nor how I It is not yet one hundred years since two slaves were judicially burnt alive on Boston Heck, for poisoning their master.
But why talk of days so old? Some of you remember when the pillory and the whipping-post were a part of the public furniture of the law, and occupied a prominent place in the busiest street in town. Some of you have seen mm and women scourged, naked and bleeding, in State Street; have seen men judicially branded in the forehead with a hot iron, their ears clipped off by the sheriff, and held up to teach humanity to the gaping crowd of idle boys and vulgar men. A magistrate was once brought into odium, in Boston, for humanely giving back to his victim, a part of the ear he had officially shorn off, that the mutilated member might be restored and made whole. How ​ long is it since men sent their servants to the "work-house" to he beaten "for disobedience," at the discretion of the master? It is not long since the gallows was a public spectacle here in the midst of us, and a hanging made a holiday for the rabble of this city and the neighbouring towns; even women came to see the death-struggle of a fellow-creature, and formed the larger part of the mob. Many of you remember the procession of the condemned man sitting on his coffin, a procession from the gaol to the gallows, from one end of the city to the other. I remember a public execution some fourteen or fifteen years ago, and some of the. students of theology at Cambridge, of undoubted soundness in the Unitarian faith, came here to see men kill a fellow-man!
Who can think of these things, and not see that a great progress has been made in no long time? But if these things foe not proof enough, then consider, what has been done here in this century for the reformation of juvenile offenders; for the discharged convict; for the blind, the deaf, and the dumb; for the insane,- and now even for the idiot. Think of the numerous societies for the widows and orphans; for the seamen; the Temperance Societies; the Peace Societies; the Prison Discipline Society; the mighty movement against slavery, which, beginning with a few heroic men who took the roaring lion of public opinion by the beard, fearless of his roar, has gone on now, till neither the hardest nor the softest courage in the State dares openly defend the unholy institution. A philanthropic female physician delivers gratuitous lectures on physiology to the poor of this city, to enable them to take better care of their houses and their bodies; an unpretending man, for years past, responsible to none but God, has devoted all his time and his toil to the most despised class of men, and has saved hundreds from the gaol, from crime, and. ruin at the last. Here are many men and women not known to the public, but known to the poor, who are daily ministering to the things, and who can doubt that a great moral progress has been made? It is not many years since we had white slaves, and a Scotch boy was invoiced at fourteen pounds lawful money, in the inventory of an estate in Boston. In 1630, Govenor Dudley complains that some of the founders ​ of Now England, in consequence of a famine, wore obliged to wot free one hundred and eighty servants, "to our extreme loss," for they had cost sixteen or twenty pounds each. Seventy years since, negro slavery prevailed in Massachusetts, and men did not blush at the institution. Think of the treatment which the leaders of the anti-Slavery reform met with but a few years ago, and you see what a progress has been made!
I have extenuated nothing of our condition; I have said the morals of trade are low morals, and the morals of the press are low; that poverty is a terrible evil to deal with, and we do not deal with it manfully; that, intemperance is a mournful curse, all the more melancholy when rich men purposely encourage it; that here is an amount of crime which makes us shudder to think of; that the voice of human blood cries out of the ground against us. I disguise nothing of all this; let us confess the fact, and, ugly as it is, look it fairly in the face. Still, our moral condition is better than ever before. I know there are men who seem born with their eyes behind, their hopes all running into memory; some who wish they had been born long ago—they might as well; sure it is no fault of theirs that they were not. I hear what they have to tell us. Still, on the whole, the aspect of things is most decidedly encouraging; for if so much has been done when men understood the matter less than we, both cause and cure, how much more can be done for the future?
What can we do to make things better?
I have so recently spoken of poverty that I shall say little now. A great change will doubtless take place before many years in the relations between capital and labour; a great change in the spirit of society. I do not believe the disparity now existing between the wealth of men has its origin in human nature, and therefore is to last for ever; I do not believe it is just and right that less than one-twentieth of the people in the nation should own more than ten-twentieths of the property of the nation, unless by their own head, or hands, or heart, they do actually create and earn that amount. I am not now blaming any ​ class of men; only stating a fact. There is a profound conviction in the hearts of many good men, rich as well as poor, that things are wrong; that there is an ideal right for the actual wrong; but I think no man yet has risen up with ability to point out for us the remedy of these evils, and deliver us from what has not badly been named the feudalism of capital. Still, without waiting for the great man to arise, we can do something with our littleness even now; the truant children may be snatched from vagrancy, beggary, and ruin; tenements can be built for the poor, and rented at a reasonable rate. It seems to me that something more can be done in the way of providing employment for the poor, or helping them to employment.
In regard to intemperance, I will not say we can end it by direct efforts. So long as there is misery there will be continued provocation to that vice, if the means thereof are within reach. I do not believe there will be much more intemperance amongst well-bred men; among the poor and wretched it will doubtless long continue. But if we cannot end, we can diminish it, fast as we will. If rich men did not manufacture, nor import, nor sell; if they would not rent their buildings for the sale of intoxicating liquor for improper uses; if they did not by their example favour the improper use thereof, how long do you think your police would arrest and punish one thousand drunkards in the year? how long would twelve hundred rum-shops disgrace your town? Boston is far more sober, at least in appearance, than other large cities of America; but it is still the head-quarters of intemperance for the State of Massachusetts. In arresting intemperance, two-thirds of the poverty, three-fourths of the crime of this city would end at once, and an amount of misery and sin which I have not the skill to calculate. Do you say we cannot diminish intemperance, neither by law, nor by righteous efforts without law ? Oh, fie upon such talk! Come, let us be honest, and say we do not wish to, not that we cannot. It is plain that in sixteen years we can build seven great railroads radiating out of Boston, three or four hundred miles long; that we can conquer the Connecticut and the Merrimack, and all the lesser streams of New England; can build up Lowell, and Chicopee, and Lawrence; why, ​ in four years Massachusetts can invest eight-and-fifty millions of dollars in railroads and manufactures, and cannot prevent intemperance! cannot diminish it in Boston! So there are no able men in this town! I am amazed at such talk, in such a place, full of Rich men, surrounded by such trophies of their work! When tho churches preach and men believe that Mammon is not the only God we are practically to serve; that it is more reputable to keep men sober, temperate, comfortable, intelligent, and thriving, than it is to make money out of other men's misery; more Christian, than to sell and manufacture rum, to rent houses for tho making of drunkards and criminals, then we shall set about this business with the energy that shows we are in earnest, and by a method which will do tho work.
In the matter of crime, something can be done to give efficiency to the laws. No doubt a thorough change must he made in the idea of criminal legislation; vengeance must give way to justice, policemen become moral missionaries, and gaols moral hospitals, that discharge no criminal until he is cured. It will take long to get the idea into men's minds. You must encounter many a doubt, many a sneer, and expect many a failure, too. Men who think they "know the world," because they know that most men are selfish, will not believe you. We must wait for new facts to convince such men. After the idea is established, it will take long to organize it fittingly.
Much can be done for juvenile offenders, much for discharged convicts, even now. We can pull down the gallows, and with it that loathsome theological idea on which it rests—the idea of a vindictive God. A remorseless court, and careful police, can do much to hinder crime; but they cannot remove the causes thereof.
Last year a good man, to whom the State was deeply indebted before, suggested that a moral police should be appointed to look after offenders; to see why they committed their crime; and if only necessity compelled them, to seek out for them some employment, and so remove the causes of crime in detail. The thought was worthy of the ​ ago and of tho man. In tho hands of a practical man, this thought might load to good results. A beginning has already been made in the right direction, by establishing the State Reform School for Boys. It will be easy to improve on this experiment, and conduct prisons for men on tho same scheme of correction and cure, not merely of long as poverty, misery, intemperance, and ignorance continue, no civil police, no moral police, can keep such causes crime? Your morality, your religion? Is it? Take away your property, your home, your friends, the respect of respectable men; take away what you have received from education, intellectual, moral, and religious; and how much better would tho best of us be than the men who will to-morrow be huddled off to gaol, for crimes committed in a dram-shop to-day? The circumstances which have kept you temperate, industrious, respectable, would have made nine-tenths of the men in gaol as good men as you are.
It is not pleasant to think that there are no amusements which lie level to the poor in this country. In Paris, Naples, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, there are cheap pleasures for poor men, which yet are not low pleasures. Here there are amusements for the comfortable and the rich, not too numerous, rather too rare, perhaps, but none for the poor, save only the vice of drunkenness; that is hideously cheap; the inward temptation powerful; the outward occasion always at hand. Last summer, some benevolent men treated tho poor children of the city to a day of sunshine, fresh air, and frolic in the fields. Once a year the children, gathered together by another benevolent man, have a floral procession in the streets ; some of them have charitably been taught to dance. These things are beautiful to think of; signs of our progress from "the good old times," and omens of a brighter day, when Christianity shall bear more abundantly flowers, and fruit even yet more fair.
The morals of the current literature, of the daily press—you can change when you will. If there is not in us a
​ It has boon my aim to give suggestions, rather than propose distinct plans of action; I do not know that I am capable of that. But some of you are rich men, some able men; many of you, I think, are good men. I appeal to you to do something to raise the moral character of this town. All that has been done in fifty years, or a hundred and fifty, seems very little, while so much still remains to do; only a hint and an encouragement. You cannot do much, nor I much; that is true. But, after all, everything must begin with individual men and women. You can at least give the example of what a good man ought to be and to do to-day; to-morrow you will yourself be the better man for it. So far as that goes, you will have done something to mend the morals of Boston. You can toil of actual evils, and tell of your remedy for them; can keep clear from committing the evils yourself; that also is something.
Here are two things that are certain: We are all brothers, rich and. poor, American and foreign; put here by the same God, for the same end, and journeying towards the same heaven, owing mutual help. Then, too, the wise men and good men are the natural guardians of society, and God will not hold them guiltless, if they leave their brothers to perish. I know our moral condition is a reproach to us; will not deny that, nor try to abate the shame and grief we should feel. When I think of the poverty and misery in the midst of us, and all the consequences thereof, I hardly dare'feel grateful for the princely fortunes some men have gathered together. Certainly it is not a Christian society, where such extremes exist; we are only in the process of conversion; proselytes of the gate, and not much more. There are noble men in this city, who have been made philanthropic, by the sight of wrong, of intemperance, and poverty, and crime. Let mankind honour great conquerors, who only rout armies, and "plant fresh laurels where they kill;" I honour most the men who contend against misery, against crime and sin; men that are the soldiers of humanity, and in a low age, amidst the mean and sordid spirits of a great trading town, lift up their serene foreheads, and tell us of the right, the true, first good, first perfect, and first fair. From such men I hear the prophecy of the better time to come. In their ​ example I see proofs of the final triumph of good over evil. Angels are they who keep the tree of life, not with flaming sword, repelling men, but, with friendly hand, plucking therefrom, and giving unto all the leaves, the flower, and the fruit of life, for the healing of the nations. A single good man, kindling his early flame, wakens the neighbours with his words of cheer; they, at his lamp, shall light their torch and household fire, anticipating the beamy warmth of day. Soon it will be morning, warm and light; we shall be up and a doing, and the lighted lamp, which seemed at first too much for eyes to bear, will look ridiculous, and cast no shadow in the noonday sun. A hundred years hence, men will stand here as I do now, and speak of the evils of these times as things past and gone, and wonder that able men could over be appalled by our difficulties, and think them not to be surpassed. Still, all depends on the faithfulness of men—your faithfulness and mine.
The last election has shown us what resolute men can do on a trifling occasion, if they will. You know the efforts of the three parties—what meetings they held, what money they raised, what talent was employed, what speeches made, what ideas set forth; not a town was left unattempted; scarce a man who had wit to throw a vote, but his vote was solicited. You see the revolution which was wrought by that vigorous style of work. When such men set about reforming the evils of society, with such a determined soul, what evil can stand against mankind? We can leave nothing to the next generation worth so much as ideas of truth, justice, and religion, organized into fitting institutions; such we can leave, and, if true men, such we shall.
VI.
"By their fruits ye shall know them."—Matthew, viii. 20.
Last Sunday I said something of the moral condition of Boston; to-day I ask your attention to a " Sermon of the Spiritual Condition of. JJos,tqn." I use the word spiritual in its narrower sense, and speak of the condition "Sermon of Piety," I tried to show that love of God lay at the foundation of all manly excellence, and was the condition of all noble, manly development; what love of truth, love of justice, love of love, were respectively the condition of intellectual, moral, and affectional development, and that they were also respectively the intellectual, moral, and affectional forms of piety; that the love of God as the Infinite Father, the totality of truth, justice, and love, was the general condition of the total development of man's spiritual powers. But I snowed that sometimes this piety, intellectual, moral, affectional, or total, did not arrive at self-consciousness; the man only unconsciously loving the Infinite in one or all these modes, and in such cases the man was a loser by frustrating his piety, and allowing it to stop in the truncated form of unconsciousness.
Now what is in you will appear out of you; if piety be there in any of these forms, in either mode, it will come out; if not there, its fruits cannot appear. You may reason forward or backward; if you know piety exists, you of this town in respect to piety. ​ may foretell its appearance; if you find fruits thereof, you may reason back, and be sure of its existence. Piety is love of God as God; and as we only love what we are like, and in that degree, so it is also a likeness to God. Now it is a general doctrine in Christendom that divinity must manifest itself; and, in assuming the highest form of manifestation known to us, divinity becomes humanity. However, that doctrine is commonly taught in the specific and not generic form, and is enforced by an historical and concrete example, but not by way of a universal thesis. It appears thus: The Christ was God; as such Ho must manifest himself; the form of manifestation was that of a complete and perfect man. I reject the concrete example, but accept the universal doctrine on which the special dogma of the Trinity is erected. From that I deduce this as a general rule: if you follow the law of your nature, and are simple and true to that, as much of godhead as there is in yon, so much of manhood will come out of you; and, as much of manhood comes out of you, so much of godhead was there within you; as much subjective divinity, so much objective humanity.
Such being the case, the demands you can make on a man for manliness must depend for their answer on the amount of piety on deposit in his character; so it becomes important to know the condition of this town in respect of piety, for if this be not right in the above sense, nothing else is right; or, to speak more clerically, "Unless the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain;" and unless piety be developed or a developing in men, it is vain for the minister to sit up late of a Saturday night to concoct his sermon, and to rise up early of a Sunday morning to preach the same; he fights but as one that beateth the air, and spends his strength for that which is nought. They are in the right, therefore, who first of all things demand piety; so let us see what signs or proof we have, and of what amount of piety in Boston.
To determine this, we must have some test by which to judge of the quality, distinguishing piety from impiety, and some standard whereby to measure the quantity thereof for though you may know what piety is in you, I what is in me, and God what is in both and in all the rest of us, it is plain that we can only judge of the existence of piety ​ in other men, and measure its quantity by an outward manifestation thereof, in some form which shall serve at once as a trial test and a standard measure.
Now, then, as I mentioned in that former sermon, it is on various sides alleged that there are two outward manifestations of piety, a good deal unlike; each is claimed by some men as the exclusive trial test and standard measure. Let me say a word of each.
I. Some contend for what I call tho conventional standard; that is, tho manifestation of piety by means of certain prescribed forms. Of these forms there are three modes or degrees, namely: first, the form of bodily attendance on public worship; second, the belief in certain doctrines, not barely because they are proven true, or known without proof, but because they are taught with authority; and, third, a passive acquiescence in certain forms and ceremonies, or an active performance thereof.
II. The other I call the natural standard; that is, the manifestation of piety in the natural form of morality in its various degrees and modes of action.
It is plain that the amount of piety in a man or a town, will appear very different when tested, by one or the other of these standards. It may be that very little water runs through the wooden trough which feeds the saw-mill at Niagara, and yet a good deal, blue and bounding, may leap over the rock, adown its natural channel. In a matter of this importance, when taking account of a stock so precious as piety, it is but fair to try it by both standards.
Let us begin with the conventional standard, and examine piety by its manifestation in the ecclesiastical forms. Here is a difficulty at the outset, in determining upon the measure, for there is no one and general ecclesiastical standard, common to all parties of Christians, from the Catholic to the Quaker; each measures by its own standard, but denies the correctness of all the others. It is as if a foot were declared the unit of long measure, and then the actual foot of the chief justice of a State, were taken as the rule by which to correct all measurements; then the foot would vary as you went from North Carolina to South, and, in any one State, would vary with the health of the ​ judge. However, to do what can be done with a measure thus uncertain, it in plain that, estimated by airy ecclesiastical standard, the amount of piety is small. There is, as men often say, "a general decline of piety;" that is a common complaint, recorded and registered. But what makes the matter worse to the ecclesiastical philosopher, and more appalling to the complainers, is this: it is a decline of long standing. Tho disease which is thus lamented is paid to be acute, but is proved to be chronic also; only it would seem, from the lamentations of some modern Jeremiahs, that tho decline went on with accelerated velocity, and, the more chronic the disease was, the acuter it also became.
Tried by this standard, things seem discouraging. To get a clearer view, let us look a little beyond our own borders, at first, and then come nearer home. The Catholic church complains of a general defection. The majority of the Christian church confesses that the Protestant Reformation was not a revival of religion, not a "great awakening," but a great falling to sleep; the faith of Luther and Calvin was a great decline of religion—a decline of piety in the ecclesiastical form; that modern philosophy, the physics of Galileo and Newton, the metaphysics of Descartes and of Kant, mark another decline of religion—a decline of piety in the philosophical form; that all the modern Democracy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries marks a yet further decline of religion—a decline of piety in the political form; that all the modern secular societies, for removing the evils of men and their sins, mark a yet fourth decline of religion—a decline of piety in the philanthropic form. Certainly, when measured by the mediaeval standard of Catholicism, these mark four great declensions of piety, for, in all four, the old principle of subordination to an external and personal authority is set aside.
All over Europe this decline is still going on; ecclesiastical establishments are breaking: down; other establishments are a building up. Pius the Ninth seems likely to fulfil his own prophecy, and be the last of the popes; I mean the last with temporal power. There is a great schism in the north of Europe; the Germans will be Catholics, but no longer Roman. The old forms of piety, ​ such as service in Latin, the withholding of the Bible from the people, compulsory confession, the ungrateful celibacy of a reluctant priesthood—all these are protested against. It is of no avail that the holy coat of Jesus, at Treves, works greater miracles than the apostolical napkins and aprons; of no avail that tho Virgin Mary appeared on the 19th of September, 1846, to two shepherd-children, at La Salette, in France. What are such things to Kongo and Wessenberg? Neithor the miraculous coat, nor the miraculous mother, avails aught against thin untoward generation, charm they never so wisely. Tho decline of piety goes on. By tlio now Constitution of France, all forms of religion are equal; tho Catholic and the Protestant, the Mahometan and the Jew, are equally sheltered under tho broad shield of tho law. Even Spain, the fortunes walled and moated about, whithor the spirit of the Middle Ages retired and shut herself up long since, womanning her walls with unmanly priests and kings, with unfeminine queens and nuns—even Spain fails with the general failure. British capitalists buy up her convents and nunneries, to turn them into woollen mills. Monks and nuns forget their beads in some new handicraft; sister Mary, who sat still in the house, is now also busy with serving—careful, indeed, about more things than formerly, but not cumbered nor troubled as before. Meditative Rachels, and Hannahs, long unblest, who sat in solitude, have now become like practical Dorcas, making garments for the poor; the Bank is become more important than the Inquisition. The order of St. Francis d'Assisi, of St. Benedict, even of St. Dominic himself, is giving way before the new order of Arkwright, Watt, and Fulton,—the order of the spinning jenny and the power-loom. It is no longer books on the miraculous conception, or meditations on the five wounds of the Saviour, or commentaries on the song of songs which is Solomon's that get printed there; but fiery novels of Eugene Sue and George Sand; and so extremes meet.
Protestant establishments share the same peril. A new sect of Protestants rises up in Germany, who dissent as much from the letter and spirit of Protestantism, as the Protestants from Catholicism ; men that will not believe the infallibility of the Bible, the doctrine of the Trinity, ​ the depravity of man, the eternity of future punishment, nor justification by faith—a justification before God, for more belief before men. The new spirit gets possession of new men, who cannot be written down, nor even howled down. Excommunication or abuse does no good on such men as Bauer, Strauss, and Schwegler; and it answers none of their questions. It seems pretty clear, that in all the north of Germany, within twenty years, there will be entire freedom of worship, for all sects, Protestant and Catholic.
In England, Protestantism has done its work less faithfully than in Germany. The Protestant spirit of England came here two hundred years ago, so that new and Protestant England is on the west of the ocean; in England, an established church lies there still, an iceberg in the national garden. But even there the decline of the ecclesiastical form of piety is apparent: the new bishops must not sit in the House of Lords, till the old ones die out, for the number of lords spiritual must not increase, though the temporal may; the new attempt, at Oxford and elsewhere, to restore the Middle Ages, will not prosper, Bring back all the old rites and forms into Leeds and Manchester; teach men the theology of Thomas Aquinas, or of St. Bernard; bid them adore the uplifted wafer, as the very God, men who toil all day with iron mills, who ride in steam-drawn coaches, and talk by lightning in a whisper, from the Irk to the Thames,—they will not consent to the philosophy or the theology of the Middle Ages, nor be satisfied with the old forms of piety, which, though too elevated for their fathers in the time of Elizabeth, are yet too low for them, at least too antiquated. Dissenters have got into the House of Commons; the Test Act is repealed, and a man can be a captain in the army, or a postmaster in a village, without first taking the Lord's Supper, after the fashion of the Church of England, Some men demand the abandonment of tithes, the entire separation of Church and State, the return to "the voluntary principle" in religion. "The battering ram which levelled old Sarum," and other boroughs as corrupt, now beats on the church, and the "Church is in danger." Men complain of the decline of piety in England. An intelligent and very serious writer, not long ago, lamenting this ​ decline, in proof thereof relates that formerly men began their last wills, "In the name of God, Amen;" and headed bills of lading with, "Shipped in good order, by the grace of God;" that indictments for capital crimes charged the culprit with committing felony, "At the instigation of tho devil," and now, he complains, these forms have gone out of use.
In America, in New England, in Boston, when measured by that standard, the same decline of piety is apparent. It is often said that our material condition is better than our moral; that in advance of our spiritual condition. There is a common clerical complaint of a certain thinness in the churches; men do not give their bodily attendance, as once they did; they are ready enough to attend lectures, two or three in a week, no matter how scientific and abstract, of how little connected with their daily work, yet they cannot come to the church without teasing beforehand, nor keep awake while there. It is said the minister is not respected as formerly. True, a man of power is respected, heard, sought, and followed, but it is for his power, for his words of grace and truth, not for his place in a pulpit; he may have more influence as a man, but less as a clergyman. Ministers lament a prevalent disbelief of their venerable doctrines; that there is a concealed scepticism in regard to them, often not concealed. This, also, is a well-founded complaint; the well-known dogmas of theology were never in worse repute; there was never so large a portion of the community in New England who were doubtful of the Trinity, of eternal damnation, of total depravity, of the atonement, of the Godhead of Jesus, of the miracles of the New Testament, and of the truth of every word of the Bible. A complaint is mode, that the rites and forms which are sometimes called "the ordinances of religion," are neglected; that few men join the church, and though the old hedge is broken down before the altar, yet the number of communicants diminishes, and it is no longer able-headed men, the leaders of society, who come; that the ordinances seem haggard and ghastly to young men, who cannot feed their hungry souls on such a thin pittance of spiritual aliment as these afford; that the children are not baptized. These things are so; so in Europe, Catholic and Protestant; so in America, so in Boston. Notwith​ standing tho well-founded complaint that our modern churches are too costly for the times, we do not build temples which bear so high a proportion to our wealth as the early churches of Boston; the attendance at meeting does not increase as the population; the ministers are not prominent, as in tho days of Wilson, of Cotton, and of Norton; their education is not now in the some proportion to the general culture of the times. Harvard College, dedicated to "Christ and the Church," designed at first chiefly for the education of the clergy, graduates few ministers; theological literature no longer overawes all other. The number of church members was never so small in proportion to the voters as now ; the number of Protestant births never so much exceeded the number of Protestant baptisms. Young men of superior ability and superior education have little affection for the ministry; take little interest in the welfare of the church. Nay, youths descended from a wealthy family seldom look that way. It is poor men's sons, men of obscure family, who fill the pulpits; often, likewise, men of slender ability, eked out with an education proportionately scant. The most active members of the churches are similar in position, ability, and culture. These are undeniable facts. They are not peculiar to New England, You find them wherever the voluntary principle is resorted to. In England, in Catholic countries, you find the old historic names in the Established Church; there is no lack of aristocratic blood in clerical veins ; but there and everywhere the church seems falling astern of all other craft which can keep the sea.
Since these things are so, men who have only the conventional standard wherewith to measure the amount of piety, only that test to prove its existence by, think we are rapidly going to decay; that the tabernacle is fallen down, and no man rises to set it up. They complain that Zion is in distress; theological newspapers lament that there are no revivals to report; that "the Lord has withheld His arm," and does not "pour out His Spirit upon the churches." Ghastly meetings are held by men with sincere and noble heart, but saddened face; speeches are made which seem a groan of linked wailings long drawn out. Men mourn at the infidelity of the times, at the coldness of some, at the deadness of others. All the sects complain of ​ this, yet each loves to attribute the deadness of tho rival sects to their special theology; it is Unitarianism which is choking tho Unitarians, say their foes, and tho Unitarians know now to retort after tho samo fashion. The less enlightened put tho blame of this misfortune on tho good God, who has somehow "withheld. His hand," or omitted to "pour out His Spirit,"—the people perishing for want of tho open vision. Others put tho blame on mankind; some on "poor human nature," which is not what might have been expected, not perceiving that if tho fault be there, it is not for us to remedy, and if God made man a bramble-bush, that no wailing will make him bear figs. Yet others refer this condition to the use made of human nature, which certainly is a more philosophical way of looking at the matter.
Now there is one sect which has done great service in former days, which, is, I think, still doing something to enlighten and liberalize the land, and, I trust, will yet do more, more even than it consciously intends. The name of Unitarian is deservedly dear to many of us, who yet will not be shackled by any denominational fetters. This sect been always been remarkable for a certain gentlemanly reserve about all that pertained to the inward part of religion; other faults it might have, but it did not incur the reproach of excessive enthusiasm, or a spirituality too sublimated and transcendental for daily use. This sect has long been a speckled bird among the denominations, each of which has pecked at her, or at least cawed with most unmelodious croak against this new-fledged sect. It was said the Unitarians had "denied the Lord that bought them;" that theirs was the church of unbelief—not the church of Christ, but of no-Christ; that they had a Bible of their own, and. a thin, poor Bible, too ; that their ways were ways of destruction; "Touch not, taste not, handle not," was to be written on their doctrines; that they had not even the grace of lukewarmness, but were moral and stone-cold; that they looked fair on the side turned towards man, but on the Godward side it was a blank wall with no gate, nor window, nor loop-hole, nor eyelet for the Holy Ghost to come through; that their prayers were only a show of devotion to cover up the hard rock of the flinty heart, or the frozen ground of morality. Their faith, it was said, ​ was only a conviction after the case was proven by unimpeachable evidence, and good for nothing; while belief without evidence, or against proof, seems to be tho right ecclesiastical talisman.
For a long time the Unitarian sect did not grumble unduly, but set itself to promote the cultivation of reason, and apply that to religion; to cultivate morality and apply it to life; and to demand the most entire personal freedom for all men in all matters pertaining to religion. Hence came its merits; they were very great merits, too, and not at all tho merits of the times, held in common with the other sects. I need not dwell on this, and the good works of Unitarianism, in this the most Unitarian city in the world; but as a general thing the Unitarians, it seems to me, did neglect the culture of piety; and of course their morality, while it lasted, would be unsatisfactory, and in time would wither and dry up because it had no deepness of earth to grow out of. The Unitarians, as a general thing, began outside, and sought to work inward, proceeding from the special to the general, by what might be called the inductive mode of religious culture: that was the form adopted in pulpits, and in families, so far as there was any religious education attempted in private. That is not the method of nature, where all growth is the development of a living germ, which by an inward power appropriates the outward things it needs, and grows thereby. Hence came the defects of Unitarianism, and they were certainly very great defects; but they came almost unavoidably from the circumstances of the times. The sensational philosophy was the only philosophy that prevailed! The Orthodox sects had always rejected a part of that philosophy, not in tho name of science, but of piety; and they supplied its place not with a better philosophy, but with tradition, speaking with an authority which claimed to be above human nature. It was not in the name of reason that they rejected a false philosophy, but in the name of religion often denounced all philosophy and the reason which demanded it. The Unitarians rejected that portion of orthodoxy, became more consistent sensationalists, and arrived at results which we know. Now it is easy to see their error; not difficult to avoid it; but forty or fifty years ago it was almost impossible not to fell ​ into thin mistake. Sometimes it Booms an if the Unitarians were half conscious of this defect, and so dared not be original, but borrowed Orthodox weapons, or continued to use Trinitarian phrases, long after they had blunted those weapons of their point, and emptied the phrases of their former sense. In the controversy between tho Orthodox and Unitarians, neither party was wholly right: the Unitarians had reason to charge the Orthodox with debasing man's nature, and representing God as not only unworthy, but unjust, and somewhat odious; the Trinitarians were mainly right in charging us with want of conscious piety, with beginning to work at tho wrong end; but at tho same time it must be remembered that, in proportion to their numbers, the Unitarians have furnished far more philanthropists and reformers than any of the other sects. It is time to confess this on both sides.
For a long time the Unitarian sect did not complain much of the decline of piety; it did not care to have an organization, loving personal freedom too well for that, and it had not much denominational feeling; indeed, its members were kept together, not so much by an agreement and unity of opinion among themselves, as by a unity of opposition from without; it was not the hooks on their shields that held the legion together with even front, but the pressure of hostile shields crowded upon them from all sides. They did not believe in spasmodic action; if a body was dead, they gave it burial, without trying to galvanize it into momentary life, not worth the spark it cost; they knew that a small cloud may make a good many flashes in the dark, but that many lightnings cannot make light They stood apart from the violent efforts of other churches to get converts. The converts they got commonly adhered to their faith, and in this respect differed a good deal from those whom " Revivals" brought into other churches; with whom Christianity sprung up in a night, and in a night also perished. Some years ago, when this city was visited and ravaged by Revivals, the Unitarians kept within doors, gave warning of the danger, and suffered less harm and loss from that tornado than any of the sects. Unitarianism seems, in this city, to have done the original work; so the company is breaking up by degrees, and the men are going off, to engage in other ​ business, to wood other old fields, or to break up new land, each man following his own sense of duty, and for himself determining whether to go or stay. But at tho same time an attempt is made to keep the company together; to cultivate a denominational feeling; to put hooks and staples on the shields which no longer offer that formidable and even front; to teach all trumpets to give the same sectarian bray, all voices to utter tho same war-cry. The attempt does not succeed; the ranks are disordered, the trumpets give an uncertain sound, and tho soldiers do not prepare themselves for denominational battle; nay, it often happens that the camp lacks the two sinews of war—both money and men. Hence the denominational view of religious affairs has undergone a change; I make no doubt a real arid sincere change, though I know this has been denied, and tho change thought only official. The men I refer to are sincere and devout men; some of them quite above the suspicion of mere official conduct. This sect is now the loudest in its wailing; these Christian Jeremiahs tell us that we do not realize spiritual things, that we are all dead men, that there is no health in us. These cold Unitarian Thomases crowd unwontedly together in public to bewail the spiritual weather, the dearth of piety in Boston, the "general decline of religion" in New England. Church unto church raises the Macedonian cry, "Come over and help us!" The opinion seems general that piety is in a poor way, and must have watchers, the strongest medicine, and nursing quite unusual, or it will soon be all over, and Unitarianism will give up the ghost. Various causes have I heard assigned for the malady; some think that there has been over-much preaching of philosophy, though perhaps there is not evidence to convict any one man in particular of the offence; that philosophy is the dog in the manger, who keeps the hungry Unitarian flock from their spiritual hay, and out straw, which are yet of not the smallest use to him. But look never so sharp, and yon do not find this dangerous beast in the neighbourhood of the fold. Others think that there has been also an excess of moral preaching, against the prevalent sins of the nation, I suppose—but few individuals seem liable to conviction on that charge. Tet others think this decline comes from the fact that the terrors have not been duly and sufficiently ​ administered from tho pulpit; that while Catholics and Methodists thrive under such influences, tho Unitarian widows are neglected in the weekly ministration of terror and of threat; that there has not neon so much an excess of lightning in tho form of philosophy or morality, but only a lack of thunder.
This temporary movement among the Unitarians of Boston is natural; in some respects it is what our fathers would have called " judicial." Tho Unitarians have been cold, have looked more at tho outward manifestations of goodness than at tho inward spirit of piety which was to make the manifestations; they have not had an excess of philosophy, or of morality, but a defect of piety. They have been more respectable than pious. They have not always quite rightly appreciated tho enthusiasm of sterner and more austere sects; not always done justice to the inwardness of religion those sects sought to promote. When their churches get a little thin, and their denominational affairs a little disturbed, it is quite natural these Unitarians should look after the cause, and pass over to lamentations at the present state of things; while looking at the community from the new point of view, it is quite natural that they should suppose piety on the decline, and religion dying out. Yes, in general it is plain that, if men have no eyes but conventional eyes, no spirit but that of the ecclesiastical order they serve in, and of the denomination they belong to, it is natural for them to think that because piety does not flow in the old ecclesiastical channel, it does not flow anywhere, and there is none at all to run. Thus it is easy to explain the complaint of the Catholics at the great defection of the most enlightened nations of Europe; the lamentation of the Protestants at the heresy of the most enlightened portion of their sect; and the Unitarian wail over the general decline of piety in the city of Boston. Some men can only judge the present age by the conventional standard of the past, and as the aid. form of piety does not appear, they must conclude there is no piety.
Let us now recur to the other or natural standard, and look at the manifestation of piety in the form of morality. Last Sunday I spoke of our moral condition; and it ap​ peared that morals were in a low state hero when compared with the ideal morals of Christianity. Now, as the outward deed is but tho manifestation of the inward life, and objective humanity tho index of subjective divinity, so the low state of morals proves a low stato of piety; if the heart of this town was right towards God, then would its hand also be right towards man. I am one of those who for long years have lamented the want of vital piety in this people. We not only do not realize spiritual things, but we do not make them our ideals. I see proofs of this want of piety in tho low morals of trade, of the public press; in poverty, intemperance, and crime; in the vices and social wrongs touched on the last Sunday. I judge the tree by its fruit. But it is not on this ground that the ecclesiastical complaint is based. Men who make so much ado about the absence of piety, do not appeal for proof thereof to the great vices and prominent sins of the times; they see no sign of that in our trade and our politics; in the misery that festers in, putrid lanes, one day to breed a pestilence, which it were even cheaper to hinder i»ow, than cure at a later time; nobody mentions as proof the Mexican war, the political dishonesty of officers, the rapacity of office-seekers, the servility of men who will tamely suffer the most sacred rights of three millions of men to be trodden into the dust. Matters which concern millions of men came up before your Congress; the great senator of Massachusetts loitered away the time of the session here in Boston, managing a lawsuit for a few thousand dollars, and no fault was publicly found with such neglect of public duty; but men see no lack of piety indicated by this fact, and others like it; they find signs of that lack in empty pews, in a deserted communion-table, in the fact that children, though brought up to reverence truth and justice, to love man and to love God, are not baptized with water; or in the fact that Unitarianism or Trinitarianism is on the decline! How many waitings have we all heard, or read, because the Puritan churches of Boston have not kept the faith of their grim founders; what lamentations at the rising up of a sect which refuses the doctrine of the Trinity, or at the appearance of a few men who, neglecting the common props of Christianity, rest it, for its basis, on the nature of man and the nature of God: though almost ​ all the eminent philanthropy of the day is connected with these men, yet they are still called "infidel," and reviled on all hands!
The state of things mentioned in the last sermon does indicate a want of piety, a deep and a great want. I do not see signs of that in the debt and decay of churches, in absence from meetings, in doubt of theological dogmas, in neglect of forms and ceremonies which once were of great value; but I do see it in the low morals of trade, of the press; in the popular vices. On a national scale I see it in the depravity of political parties, in the wicked war we have just fought, in the slavery we still tolerate and support. Yes, as I look on the churches of this city, I see a want of piety in the midst of us. If eminent piety were in them, and allowed to follow its natural bent, it would come out of them in the form of eminent humanity; they would load in the philanthropies of this day, where they hardly follow. In this condition of the churches I see a most signal proof of the low estate of piety; they do not manifest a love of truth, which is the piety of the intellect; nor a love of justice, which is the piety of the moral sense; nor a love of love, which is the piety of the affections; nor a love of God as the Infinite Father of all men, which is the total piety of the whole soul. For lack of this internal divinity there is a lack of external humanity. Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? This is what I complain of, what I mourn over.
The clergymen of this city are most of them sincere men, I doubt not; some of them men of a superior culture; many of them laborious men; most, perhaps all of them, deeply interested in the welfare of the churches, and the promotion of piety. But how many of them are marked and known for their philanthropy, distinguished for their zeal in putting down any of the major sins of our day, zealous in any work of reform? I fear I can count them all on the fingers of a single hand; yet there are enough to bewail the departure of monastic forms, and of the theology which led men in the dimness of a darker age, but cannot shine in the rising light of this. I find no fault with these men; I blame them not; it is their profession which so blinds their eyes. They are as wise and as valiant as the churches let them be. What sect in all ​ this land ever cared about temperance, education, peace betwixt nations, or even tho freedom of all men in our own, so much as this sect cares for the baptizing of children with water, and that for the baptizing of men; this for the doctrine of the Trinity, and all for the infallibility of tho Bible? Do you ask the sects to engage in the work of extirpating concrete wrong? It is in vain; each reformer trios it—the mild sects answer, "I pray the have me excused; "the sterner sects reply with awful speech.
​ I see much to complain of in the condition of piety; seems worse still, for worse, lucre has not been "a decline of piety" in Boston of late years. Religion is not sick. Last Sunday I spoke of the great progress made in morality within fifty years; I said it was an immense progress within two hundred years. Now, there cannot be such a progress, in the outward manifestation without a corresponding and previous development of the inward principle. Morality cannot grow without piety, more than an oak without water, earth, sun, and air. Let me go back one hundred years; see what a difference between the religious aspect of things then and now ! certainly there has been a great growth in spirituality since that day. I am not to judge men's hearts; I may take their outward lives as the teat and measure of their inward piety. Will you say the outward life never completely comes up to that? It does so as completely now as then. Compare the toleration of these times with those ; compare the intelligence of the community ; the temperance, sobriety, chastity, virtue in. general. Look at what is now done in a municipal way by towns and States for mankind; see the better provision made for the poor, for the deaf, the dumb, the blind, for the insane, even for the idiot; see what is done for the education of the people—in schools, academies, colleges, and by public lectures; what is done for the criminal, to prevent the growth of crime. See what an amelioration of the penal laws ; how men are saved and restored to society, who had once been wholly lost. See what is done by philanthropy still more eminent, which the town and State have not yet overtaken and enacted into law; by the various societies for reform—those for temperance, for peace, for the discipline of prisons, for the discharged convicts, for freeing the slave. See this anti-Slavery party, which, in twenty years, has become so powerful throughout all the Northern States, so strong that it cannot be howled down, and men begin to find it hardly safe to howl over it; a party which only waits the time to lilt up its million arms, and hurl the hateful institution of Slavery out of the land! All these humane movements come from a divine piety in the soul, of man. A tree which bears such fruits is not a dead tree; is not wholly to ​ be despaired of; is not yet in a "decline," and past all hope of recovery. Is the age wanting in piety, which makes such efforts as those? Yes, you will say, because it does no more. I agree to this; but it is rich in piety compared in other time? Ours is an age of faith; not of mere belief in the commandments of men, but of faith in the nature of man and the commandments of God. This prevailing and contagious complaint about the decline of religion is not one of the new things of our time. In the beginning of the last century, Dr. Colman, first minister of the church in Brattle Street, lamented in small capitals over the general decline of piety:—"The venerable name of religion and of the church is made a sham pretence for the worst of villanies, for uncharitableness and unnatural oppression of the pious and the peaceable;" "the perilous times are some, wherein men are lovers only of their own selves." "Ah! calamitous day," says he, "into which we are fallen, and into which the sins of our infatuated age hive brought us!" He looks back to the founders of New England; they "were rich in faith, and heirs of a better world " men of whom the world was not worthy;" "they laid in a stock of prayers for us which have brought down many blessings on us already." Samuel Willard bewailed "the chequered state of the gospel church;" it was "in every respect a gloomy day, and covered with thick clouds."
We retire yet further back, to the end of the seventeenth century; a hundred and sixty or seventy years ago, Dr, Increase Mather, not only in his own pulpit, but also at "the great and Thursday lecture," lamented over "the degeneracy and departing glory of New England." He complained that there was a neglect of the Sabbath, of the ordinances, and of family worship; he groaned at the lax discipline of the churches, and looked, says another, "as fearfully on the growing charity as on the growing vices of the age." He called the existing generation " an unconverted generation." "Atheism and profaneness," says he, "have come to a prodigious height;" "God will visit" for these things; "God is about to open the windows of heaven, and pour down the cataracts of His wrath ere this generation … is passed away." If a comet appeared in the sky, it was to admonish men of the visitation, and ​ make "the haughty daughters of Zion reform their pride of apparel. "The world is full of unbelief" (that is, in tho malignant aspect and disastrous influence of comets), "but there is an awful Scripture for them that do profanely condemn such signal works!"
One of the present and well-known indications of the decline of piety, that is often thought a modern luxury, and ridiculously denounced in the pulpit, which has done its part in fostering the enjoyment, was practised, to an extent that alarmed the prim shepherds of the New England flock in earlier days. The same Dr. Mather preached a series of sermons "tending to promote the power of godliness," and concludes the whole with a discourse "of sleeping at sermons," and says: "To sleep in the public worship of God is a thing too frequently and easily practiced; it is a great and a dangerous evil." "Sleeping at a sermon is a greater sin than speaking an idle word. Therefore, if men must be called to account for idle words, much more for this!" "Gospel sermons are among the most precious talents which any in this world have conferred upon them. But what a sad account will be given concerning those sermons which have been slept away! As light as thou makest of it now, it may be conscience will roar for it upon a death-bed!" "Verily, there is many a soul that will find this to be a dismal thought at the day of judgment, when he shall remember, so many sermonB I might have heard for my everlasting benefit, but I slighted and slept them all away. Therefore consider, if men allow themselves in this evil their souls are in danger to perish." "It is true that a godly man may be subject unto this as well as unto other infirmities; but he doth not allow himself therein." "The name of the glorious God is greatly prophaned by this inadvertency." "The support of the evangelical ministry is …discouraged." He thought the character of the pulpit was not sufficient explanation of this phenomenon, and adds, in his supernatural way, "Satan is the external cause of this evil;" "he had rather have men wakeful at any time than at sermon time." The good man mentions, by way of example, a man who "had not slept a wink at; a sermon for more than twenty years together;" and also, but by way of warning, the unlucky youth in the Acts who ​ slept, at Paxil's long sermon, and fell out of thb window, and "was taken up dead." Sleeping was "adding something of our own to the worship of God;" "when Nadab and Abihu did so, there went out fire from the Lord and consumed them in death." "The holy God hath not been a little displeased for this sin." "It is not punished by men, but therefore the Lord himself will visit for it. "Tears of blood will trickle down thy dry and damned cheeks for ever and ever, because thou mayest not be so happy as to hear one sermon, or to have one offer of grace more throughout the never-ending days of eternity." Other men denounced their "Woe to sleepy sinners," and issued their "Proposals for the revival of dying religion."
Dr. Mather thought there was " a deluge of prophaneness," and bid men "be much in mourning and humiliation, that God's bottle may bo filled with tears." He thought piety was going out because surplices were coming in; it was wicked to "consecrate a church;" keeping Christmas was "like the idolatry of the calf." The common-prayer, an organ, a musical instrument in a church, was "not of God." Such things were to our worthy fathers in the ministry what temperance and anti-Slavery societies are to many of their sons—an "abomination," "unchristian and atheistic! "The introduction of "regular singing" was an indication to some that "all religion is to cease;" "we might as well go over to Popery at once." Inoculation for the small-pox was as vehemently and ably opposed as the modern at tempt to abolish the gallows; it was "a trusting more to the machinations of men than to the all- wise providence of God."
"When the enchantments of this world," says the ecclesiastical historian, "caused the rising generation more sensibly to neglect the primitive designs and interests of religion propounded by their fathers, a change ia the ten our of the Divine dispensation towards this country was quickly the matter of every one's observation." "Our wheat and our peas fell under an unaccountable blast." "We were visited with multiplied shipwrecks;" "pestilential sicknesses did sometimes become epidemic among us." "Indians cruelly butchered many hundreds of our inhabitants, and scattered whole towns with miserable ​ ruins." "The serious people throughout the land were awakened by these intimations of Divine displeasure to inquire into the causes and matters of the controversie." Accordingly, 1679, a synod wast convened at Boston, to "inquire into the causes of the Lord's controversie with His New England people," who determined the matter.
A little later, in 1690, the General Court considered the subject anew, and declared that "A corruption of manners, attended with inexcusable degeneracies and apostacies… ​ is the cause of tho controvesie." We "are now arriving such an extremity, that the axe is laid to the root of tho trees, and we are in imminent danger of perishing, if a speedy reformation of our provoking evils prevent it not." In 1702, Cotton Mather complains that " Our manifold indispositions to recover the dying power of godliness were successive calamities, under all of which our apostacies from that godliness have rather proceeded than abated." "The old spirit of New England has been sensibly going out of tho world, as the old saints in whom it was have gone; and, instead thereof, the spirit of the world, with a lamentable neglect of strict piety, has crept in upon the rising generation."
You go back to the time of the founders and fathers of the colony, and it is no better. In 1667, Mr. "Wilson, who had "a singular gift in the practice of discipline," on his death-bed declared, that " God would judge the people for their rebellion and self-willed spirit, for their contempt of civil and ecclesiastical rulers, and for their luxury and sloth; "and before that he said, people rise up as Corah, against their ministers." "And for our neglect of baptizing the children of the church, … I think God is Srovoked by it. Another sin I take to be the making light… of the authority of the synods." John Norton, whose piety was said to be " Grace, grafted on a crab-stock," in 1660, growled, after his wont, on account of the "Heart of New England, rent with the blasphemies of this generation." John Cotton, the ablest man in New England, who "liked to sweeten his mouth with a piece of Calvin, before he went to sleep," and was so pious that another could not swear while he was under the roof, mourned at "the condition of the churches;" and, in 1652, on his death-bed, after bestowing his blessing on the President of Harvard College, who had begged it of him, exhorted the elders to " Increase their watch against those declensions, which he saw the professors of religion falling into." In 1641, such was the condition of piety in ​ Boston, that it was thought necessary to banish a man, because he did not believe in original sin. In 1639, a fast was appointed, "To deplore the prevalence of the small-pox, the wont of zoal in the professors of religion, and the general decay of piety." "The church of God had not been long in this wilderness," thus complains a minister, one hundred and fifty years ago, "before the dragon cast forth several floods to devour it ; but not the least of these floods was one of the Antinomian and familistical heresies." "It is incredible what alienations of mind, and what a very calenture the devil raised in the country upon this odd occasion." "The sectaries" "began usually to seduce women into their notions, and by these women, like their first mother, they soon hooked in the husband; also." So, in 1637, the synod of Cambridge was convened, to despatch "The apostate serpent:" one woman was duly convicted of holding "about thirty monstrous opinions," and subsequently, by the civil authorities, banished from the colony. The synod, after much time was "spent in ventilation, and emptying of private passions, condemned eighty-two opinions, then prevalent in the colony, as erroneous, and decided to " refer doubts to be resolved by the great God." Even in 1636, John Wilson lamented "the dark and distracted condition of the churches of New England."
"The good old times," when piety was in a thriving state, and the churches successful and contented, lay as far behind the "Famous Johns," as it now does behind their successors in office and lamentation. Then, as now, the complaint had the same foundation: ministers and other good men could not see that new piety will not be put into the old forms, neither the old forms of thought nor the old forms of action. In the days of Wilson, Cotton, ​ and Norton, there was a gradual growth of piety; in the days of the Mathers, of Colmon, and Willard, and from that time to this, there has boon a steady improvement of the community, in intellectual, moral, and religious culture. Some men could not see the progress two hundred years ago, because they believed in no piety, except as it was manifested in their conventional forms. It is so now. Mankind advances by the irresistible law of God, under the guidance of a few men of large discourse, who look before and after, but amid the wailing of many who think each advance is a retreat, and every stride a stumble.
Now-a-days nobody complains at "the ungodly custom of wearing long hair;" no dandy is dealt with by the church for his dress; the weakest brother is not offended by "regular singing"—so it be regular,—"by organs and the like;" nobody laments at " the reading of Scripture lessons," or "the use of the Lord's Prayer" in public religious services, or is offended because a clergyman makes a prayer at a funeral, and solemnizes a marriage,—though these are "prelatical customs," and were detested by our fathers. Yet, other things, now as much dreaded, and thought "of a bad and dangerous tendency," will one day prove themselves as innocent, though now as much mourned over. Many an old doctrine will fade out, and though some think a star has fallen out of heaven, a new truth will rise up and take its place. It is to be expected that ministers will often complain of "the general decay of religion." The position of a clergyman, fortunate in many things, is unhappy in this : he seldom sees the result of his labours, except in the conventional form mentioned above. The lawyer, the doctor, the merchant and mechanic, the statesman and the farmer, all have visible and palpable results of their work, while the minister can only see that he has baptized men, and admitted them to his church; the visible and quotable tokens of his success are a large audience, respectable and attentive, a thriving Sunday school, or a considerable body of communicants. If these signs fail, or become less than formerly, he thinks he has laboured in vain, that piety is on the decline : for it is only by this form that he commonly tests and measures piety itself. Hence, a sincere and earnest minister, with the limitations which he so easily gets from his profession ​ and social position, is always prone to think ill of the times to undervalue the new wine which refuses to be kept in the old bottles, but rends them asunder; hence he bewails the decline of religion, and looks longingly back to the days of his fathers.
​ In. a solar system, the central sun, not barely powerful from its position, is the most weighty body—heavier than all the rest put together; so with even swing they all revolve about it. Our little ministerial sun was ambitious of being, amongst large satellites; he is there, but the law of gravitation amongst men is as certain as in matter; he cannot poise and swing the system; he is not the sun thereof, not even a primary planet, only a little satellite revolving with many nutations round some primary, in an orbit that is oblique, complicated, and difficult to calculate; now waxing in a "Revival," now waning in a "decline of piety," now totally eclipsed by his primary that comes between him and the light which lighteth every man. Put one of the cold thin moons of Saturn into the centre of the solar system, — would the universe revolve about that little dot? Loyal matter with irresistible fealty gravitates towards the sun, and wheels around the balance-point of the world's weight, be it where it may, called by whatever name.
While ministers insist unduly on the conventional manifestation of piety, it is not a thing unheard of for a layman to resolve to go to heaven by the ecclesiastical road, yet omit resolving to be a good man before he gets there. Such a man finds the ordinary forms of piety very convenient, and not at all burdensome; they do not interfere with his daily practice of injustice and meanness of soul; they seem a substitute for real and manly goodness; they offer a royal road to saintship here and heaven hereafter. Is the man in arrears with virtue, having long practised wickedness and become insolvent? This form is a new bankrupt law of the spirit, he pays off his old debts in the ecclesiastical currency—a pennyworth of form for a pound of substantial goodness. This bankrupt sinner, cleared by the ecclesiastical chancery, is a solvent saint; he exhorts at meetings, strains at every gnat, and mourns over "the general decay of piety," and teaches other men the way in which they should go—to the same end.
"So morning insects, that in muck begun,
Shine, buzz, and fly-blow in the evening sun."
I honour the founders of New England; they were pious men—their lives proved it; but domineered over by ​ false opinions in theology, they put their piety into very unnatural and perverted forms. They had ideas which transcended their age; they came here to make those ideas into institutions That they had great faults, bigotry, intolerance, and superstition, is now generally conceded. They were picked men, "wheat sifted out of three kingdoms," to plant a new world withal. They have left their mark very deep and very distinct in this town, which was their prayer and their pride. It may seem unjust to ourselves to compare a whole community like our own with such a company as filled Boston in the first half century of its existence,—men selected for their spiritual hardihood; but here and now, in the midst of Boston, are men quite as eminent for piety, who as far transcend this age as the Puritans and the pilgrims surpassed their time. The Puritan put his religion into the ecclesiastical form; not into the form of the Roman or the English Church, but into a new one of his own. His descendant, inheriting his father's faith in God, and stern self-denial, but sometimes without his bigotry, intolerance, and superstition, with little fear but with more love of God, and consequently with more love of man, puts his piety into a new form. It is not the form of the old church; the church of the Puritans is to him often what the church of the Pope and the prelates was to his ungentle sire. He puts his piety into the form of goodness; eminent piety becomes philanthropy, and takes the shape of reform. In such men, in many of their followers, I see the same trust in God, the same scorn of compromising right and truth, the same unfaltering allegiance to the eternal Father, which shone in the pilgrims who founded this new world, which fired the reformers of the church; yes, which burned in the hearts of Paul and John. Piety has not failed and gone out; each age has its own forms thereof; the old and passing can never understand the new, nor can they consent to decrease with the increase of the new. Once, men put their piety into a church, Catholic or Protestant; they made creeds and believed them; they devised rites and symbols, which helped their faith. It was well; but we cannot believe those creeds, nor be aided by such symbols and such rites. Why pretend to drag a weighty crutch about because it helped your father once, wandering alone and in the dark, sound​ ing on his dim and perilous way? Once earthen roads wore the best we know, and horses’ foot had shoes of swiftness; now we need not, out of reverence, refine the iron road, the chariot and the steed of flame; nor out of irreverence need we spurn tho path our fathers trod; sorely bested and hunted after, tear-bedewed and travel-stained, they journeyed there, passing on to their God. If the mother that bore us were rover so rude, and to our eyes might seem never so graceless now, still she was our mother, and without her we should not have been born. Wives and children may men have, and manifold; each Christian Church has been the mother of us all; and though in her own dotage she deny our piety, and call us infidel, far be it from me to withhold the richly earned respect. Behind a decent veil, then, let us hide our mother's weakness, and ourselves pass on. Once piety built up a theocracy, and men say it was divine; now piety, everywhere in Christendom, builds up democracies; it is a diviner work.
The piety of this age must manifest itself in morality, and appear in a church where the priests are men of active mind and active hand; men of ideas, who commune with God and man through faith and works, finding no truth is hostile to their creed, no goodness foreign to their litany, no piety discordant with their psalm. The man who once would have built a convent and been its rigorous chief, now founds a temperance society, contends against war, toils for the pauper, the criminal, the madman, and the slave, for men bereft of senses and of sense. The synod of Dort and of Cambridge, the assembly of divines at Westminster, did what they could with what piety they had; they put it into decrees and platforms, into catechisms and creeds. But the various conventions for reform put their Siety into resolves and then into philanthropic works. I do not believe there has ever been an age when piety bore so large a place in the whole being of New England as at this day, or attendance on church-forms so small a part. The attempts made and making for a better education of the people, the lectures on science and literature abundantly attended in this town, the increased fondness for reading, ​ the better class of books which are read—all those indicate an increased love of truth, the intellectual part of piety; societies for reform and for charity show an increase of the moral and affectional parts of piety; the better, the lovelier idea of God, which all sects are embracing, is a sign of increased love of God. Thus all parts of piety are proving their existence by their work. The very absence from the churches, the disbelief of the old sour theologies, the very neglect of outward forms and ceremonies of religion, the decline of the ministry itself, under the present circumstances, shows an increase of piety. The baby-clothes were well and wide for the baby; now, the fact that he cannot get them on, shows plainly that he has outgrown them,—is a boy, and no longer a baby.
Once Piety fled to the Church as the only sanctuary in the waste wide world, and was fondly welcomed there, fed and fostered. When power fled off from the Church——"Wilt thou also go away?" said she. "Lord," said Piety, "to whom shall we go? Thou only hast the words of everlasting life." Once convents and cathedrals were what the world needed as shelter for this fair child of God; then she dwelt in the grim edifice that our fathers built, and for a time counted herself "lodged in a lodging where good things are." Now is she grown able to wander forth fearless and free, lodging where the night overtakes her, and doing what her hands find to do, not unattended by the Providence which hitherto has watched over and blessed her. I respect piety in the Hebrew saints, prophets, and bards, who spoke the fiery speech, or sung their sweet and soul-inspiring psalm:—
"Out from the heart of Nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old."
I honour piety among the saints of Greece, clad in the form of philanthropy and art, speaking still in dramas, in philosophies, and song, and in the temple and the statue too:—
"Not from a vain and shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought."
I admire at the piety of the Middle Ages, which founded the monastic tribes of men, which wrote the theologies, ​ scholastic and mystic both, still speaking to the mind of men, or in poetic legends insinuated truth; which built that heroic architecture, overmastering therewith the sense and soul of man:—
"The passive muter lent his hand
To the vast Soul that o'er him planned:
And the same Power that reared the shrine
B-wtrode the tribes that knelt therein."
But the piety winch I find now, in this age, here in our own land, I respect, honour, and admire yet more; I find it in the form of moral life ; that is the piety I love, piety in her own loveliness. Would I could find poetic strains as fit to sing of her—but yet such
"Loveliness needs not the foreign aid of ornament,
But is, when unadorned, adorned the most."
Let me do no dishonour to other days, to Hebrew or to Grecian saints. Unlike and hostile though they were, they jointly fed my soul in earliest days. I would not underrate the mediaeval saints, whose words and works have been my study in a manlier age; yet I love best the fair and vigorous piety of our own day. It is beautiful, amid the strong, rank life of the nineteenth century, amid the steam-mills and the telegraphs which talk by lightning, amid the far-reaching enterprises of our time, and amid the fierce democracies, it is beautiful to find this fragrant piety growing up in unwonted forms, in places where men say no seed of heaven can lodge and germinate. So in a June meadow, when a boy, and looking for the cranberries of another year, faded and tasteless, amid the pale but coarse rank grass, and discontented that I found them not, so I have seen the crimson arethusa or the cymbidium shedding an unexpected loveliness o'er all the watery soil, and all the pale and coarse rank grass, a prophecy of summer near at hand. So in October, when the fields are brown with frost, the blue and fringed gentian meets your eye, filling with thankful tears.
There is no decline of piety, but an increase of it; a good deal has been done in two hundred years, in one hundred years,—yes, in fifty years. Let us admit, with thankfulness of his art, that piety is in greater proportion to ​ all out activity now than ever before; but then compare ourselves with the ideal of human nature, our piety with the ideal piety, and we must confess that we are little and very low, Boston is the most active city in the world, the most enterprising. In no place is it so easy to obtain men's ears and their purses for any good word and work. But think of the evils we know of and tolerate; think of an ideal Christian city, then think of Boston; of a Christian man,—ay, of Christ himself,—and then think of you and me, and we are filled with shame. If there were a true, manly piety in this town, in due proportion to our numbers, wealth, and enterprise, how long would the vices of this city last? How long would men complain of a dead body of divinity and a dead church, and a ministry that was dead? How long would intemperance continue, and pauperism, in Boston; how long Slavery in this land?
Last Sunday, in the name of the poor, I asked you for your charity. Today I ask for dearer alms; I ask you to contribute your piety. It will help the town more than the little money all of us can give. Your money will soon be spent; it feeds one man once; we cannot give it twice, though the blessing thereof may linger long in the hand which gave. Few of us can give much money to the poor; some of us none at all. This we can all give: the inspiration of a man with a man's piety in his heart, living it out in a man's life. Your money may be ill-spent, your charity misapplied, but your piety never. After all, there is nothing you can give which men will so readily take and so long remember as this. Mothers can give it to their daughters and their sons; men, after spending thereof profusely at home, can coin their inexhausted store into industry, patience, integrity, temperance, justice, humanity, a practical love of man. A thousand years ago, it was easy to excuse men if they chiefly showed religion in the conventional pattern of the church. Forms then were helps, and the nun has been mother to much of the charity of our times. It is easy to excuse our fathers for their superstitious reverence for rites and forms. But now, in an age which has its eyes a little open, a practical and a handy age, we are without excuse if our piety appears not ​ in a manly life, our faith in works. To give this piety to cheer and bless mankind, you must have it first, be cheered end blessed thereby yourself. Have it, then, in your own way; put it into your own form. Do men tell you, "This is a degenerate age," and " religion in dying out?" tell them that when those stars have faded out of the sky from very age, when other stars have come up to take their place, and they too have grown dim and hollow-eyed and old, that religion will still live in iron's heart, the primal, everlasting light of all our being. Do they tell you that you must put piety into their forms; put it there if it be your place; it not, in your place. Let men see the divinity that is in you by the humanity that comet out from you. If they will not see it, cannot, God can and will. Take courage from the past, not its counsel; fear not now to be a man. You may find a new Eden where you go, a river of God in it, and a tree of life, an angel to guard it; not the warning angel to repel, but the guiding angel to welcome and to bless.
It was four years yesterday since I first came here to speak to you; I came hesitatingly, reluctant, with much diffidence as to my power to do what it seemed to me was demanded. I did not come merely to pull down, but to build up, though it is plain much theological error must be demolished before any great reform of man's condition can be brought about, t came not to contend against any man, or sect, or party, but to speak a word for truth and religion in the name of man and God. I was in bondage to no sect; you in bondage to none. When a boy I learned that there is but one religion though many theologies. I have found it in Christians and in Jews, in Quakers and in Catholics. I hope we are all ready to honour what is good in each sect, and in rejecting its evil not to forget our love and wisdom in our zeal.
When I came I certainly did not expect to become a popular man, or acceptable to many. I had done much which in all countries brings odium on a man, though perhaps leas in Boston than in any other part of the world. I had rejected the popular theology of Christendom. I had exposed the low morals of society, had complained of the want of piety in its natural form. I had fatally offended ​ the soot, small in numbers, but respectable for intelligence and goodness, in which I was brought up. I came to look at the signs of the times from an independent point of view, and to speak on the most important of all themes. I thought a house much smaller than this would be much too large for us. I knew there would be lit audience; I thought it would be few, and the few would soon have heard enough and go their ways.
I know I have some advantages above most clergymen: I am responsible to no sect; no sect feels responsible for me; I have rejoiced at good things which I have seen in all sects; the doctrines which I try to teach do not rest on tradition, on miracles, or on any man's authority; only on the nature of man. I seek to preach the natural laws of man. I appeal to history for illustration, not for authority. I have no fear of philosophy. I am willing to look a doubt fairly in the face, and think reason is sacred as conscience, affection, or the religious faculty in man. I see a profound piety in modern science. I have aimed to set forth absolute religion, the ideal religion of human nature, free piety, free goodness, free thought. I call that Christianity, after the greatest man of the world, one who himself taught it; but I know that this was never the Christianity of the churches in any age. I have endeavoured to teach this religion and apply, it to the needs of this time. These things certainly give me some advantages over most other ministers. Of the disadvantages which are personal to myself, I need not speak in public, but some which come from my position, ought to be noticed with a word. The walls of this house, the associations connected with it, furnish little help to devotion; we must rely on ourselves wholly for that. Other clergymen, by their occasional exchanges, can present their hearers with an agreeable variety in substance and in form. A single man, often heard, becomes wearisome and unprofitable, for "No man can feed us always." This I feel to be a great disadvantage which I labour under. Your kindness and affectionate indulgence make me feel it all the more, But one man cannot be twenty men.
When I came here I knew I should hurt men's feelings. My theology would prove more offensive and radical than men thought; the freedom of speech which men liked at a ​
* ↑ Rev. John Pierpont.
* ↑ This statement was made in 1849; subsequent events have shown that I was mistaken. It is now thought respectable and patriotic not only to engage in the slave trade, bat to kidnap men and women in Boston. Host of the prominent newspapers, and several of the most prominent clergy, defend the kidnapping. Attempts have repeatedly been made to kidnap my own parishioners. Kidnapping is not even a matter of church discipline in Boston in 1851.
* ↑ The conduct of public magistrates, who are paid for serving the people, is not what it should be in respect to temperance. The city authorities allow the laws touching the sale of the great instrument of demoralization to be violated continually. There is no serious effort made to enforce these laws. Nor is this all; the shameless conduct of conspicuous men at the supper given in this city after the funeral of John Quincy Adams, and the debauchery on that occasion, are well known, find will long be remembered. At the next festival (in September, 1851), it is notorious that the city authorities, at the expense of the citizens, provided a large quantity of intoxicating drink for the entertainment of our guests during the excursion in the harbour. It is also a matter of great notoriety, that many were drunk on that occasion. I need hardly add, that on board one of the crowded steamboats, three cheers were given for the " Fugitive Slave Law," by men who it is hoped will at length become sober enough to "forget" it. When the magistrates of Boston do such deeds, and are not even officially friends of temperance, what shall we expect of the poor and the ignorant and the miserable?" Cain, where is thy brother?" may be asked here and now as well as in the Bible story.
* ↑ The statistics of intemperance are instructive and surprising. Of the one thousand two hundred houses in Boston where intoxicating drink is retailed to be drunken on the premises, suppose that two hundred are too insignificant to be noticed, or else are large hotels to be considered presently; then there are one thousand common retail groggeries. Suppose they are in operation three hundred and thirteen days in the year, twelve hours each, day; that they sell one glass in a little less than ten minutes, or one hundred glasses in the day, and that five cents is the price of a glass. Then each groggery receives $5 a day, or $1,565 (313 x 5) in a year, and the one thousand groggeries receive $1,565,000. Let us suppose that each sells drink for really useful purposes to the amount of §65 per annum, or all to the amount of $65,000 ; there still groggeries. This is about twice the sum raised by taxation for the retrains the sum of $1,500,000 spent for intemperance in these one thousand public education of all the children in the State of Massachusetts! But this calculation does not equal the cost of intemperance in these places the receipts of these retail houses cannot be less than $2,000 per annum, or in the aggregate, §2,000,000. This sum in two years would pay for the new aqueduct. Suppose the amount paid for the needless, nay, for the injurious use of intoxicating drink in private families, in boarding houses, and hotels, is equal to the smallest sum above named ($1,500,000), then it appears that the city of Boston spends ($1,500,000 + $1,500,000 =) $3,000,000 annually for an article that does no good to any, but harm to all, and brings ruin on thousands each year. But if a school-house or a school costs a little money, a complaint is soon made,
* ↑ It must be remembered that this was written, not In 1851, but in 1849.
* ↑ In 1679, "The Reforming Synod," assembled at Boston, thus complained of intemperance, amongst other Bins of the times:—"That heathenish and idolatrous practice of health-drinking is too frequent. That shameful iniquity of sinful drinking is become too general a provocation. Days of training and other public solemnities have been abused in this respect; and not only English, but Indians have been debauched by those that call themselves Christians… This is a crying sin, and the more aggravated in that the first planters of this colony did… come into this land with a design to convert the heathen unto Christ, but if instead of that they be taught wickedness … the Lord may well punish by them… There are more temptations and occasions unto that sin, publicly allowed of, than any necessity doth require. The proper end of taverns, etc., being for the entertainment of strangers… a far less number would suffice," etc. Cotton Mather says of intemperance in his time: "To see … a drunken man become a drowned man, is to see but a most retaliating hand of God. Why we have seen this very thing more than threescore times in our land. And I remember the drowning of one drunkard, so oddly circumstanced; it was in the hold of a vessel that lay full of water near the shore. We have seen it so often, that I am amazed at you, O ye drunkards of New England; I am amazed that you can harden your hearts in your sin, without expecting to be destroyed suddenly and without remedy. Yea, and we have seen the devil that has possessed the drunkard, throwing him into fire, and then kept shrieking, 'Fire! Fire!' till they have gone down to the fire that never shall be quenched. Yea, more than one or two drunken women in this very town have, while in their drink, fallen into the fire, and so they have tragically gone roaring out of one fire into another. O ye daughters of Belial, hear and fear, and do wickedly no more." The history of the first barrel of rum which was brought to Plymouth has been carefully traced out to a considerable extent. Nearly forty of the "Pilgrims" or their descendants were publicly punished for the drunkenness it occasioned.
* ↑ Over eight hundred in 1851.
* ↑ This statement appears somewhat exaggerated in 1851.
* ↑ In 1847, the amount of goods stolen in Boston, and reported to the police, beyond what was received, was more than $87,000; in 1848, less than $11,000. In 1849, the police were twice as numerous as in the former year, and organized and directed with new and remarkable skill.
* ↑ The Synod declared: "That God hath a controversie with His New England people is undeniable" "There are visible manifest evils, which without doubt the Lord is provoked by." 1. "A great and visible decay of the power of godliness amongst many professors in these churches." 2. "Pride doth abound in Now England. Many have offended God by strange apparel." 3. "Church fellowship and other divine institutions are grossly neglected." "Quakers are also worshippers," "and Anabaptists… do no better than set up an altar against the Lord's altar." 4. "The holy and glorious name of God hath been polluted;" "because of swearing the land mourns" "It is a frequent thing for men to sit in prayer-time… and to give way to their own sloth and sleepiness." "We read of but one man in Scripture that slept at a sermon, and that sin had like to have cost him his life." 5. "There is much Sabbath-breaking; since there are multitudes that do profanely absent themselves from the public worship of God,…" walking abroad and travelling… being a common practice on the Sabbath day." "Worldly unsuitable discourses are very common upon the Lord's day." "This brings wrath, fires, and other judgments upon a professing people." 6. "As to what concerns families and Government thereof, there is much amiss." "Children and servants… are not kept in due subjection." "This is a sin which brings great judgments, as we see in Eli's and David's family." 7. "Inordinate passions, sinful heats and hatreds, and that amongst church members." 8. "There is much intemperance:" "it is a common practice for town-dwellers, yea, and church members, to frequent public-houses, and there to mis-spend precious time." 9. "There is much want of truth amongst men." "The Lord is not wont to suffer such an iniquity to pass unpunished." 10. "Inordinate affection unto the world." "There hath been in many professors an insatiable desire after land and worldly accommodations; yea, so as to forsake churches and ordinances, and to live like heathen, only be that they might have elbow-room in the world. Farms and merchandisings have been preferred before the things of God." "Such iniquity causeth war to be in the gate, and cities to be burned up." "When Lot did forsake the land of Canaan and the church which was in Abraham's family, that so he might have better worldly accommodations in Sodom, God fired him out of all." "There are some traders that sell their goods at excessive rates; day-labourers and mechanics are un-reasonable in their demands." 11. "There hath been opposition to the work of reformation." 12. "A public spirit is greatly wanting in the most of men." 13. "There are sins against the, gospel, whereby the Lord has been provoked." "Christ is not prized and embraced in all His offices and ordinances as ought to be."
* ↑ In 1646, Mr. Samuel Symonds wrote to Governor Winthrop, as follows: "I will also mention the text preached upon at our last fast, and the propositions raised thereupon, because it was so seasonable to New England's condition. Jeremiah xxx. 17: For I will restore health to thee, and heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord; because they called thee an outcast, Baying, This is Zion, whom noe man careth for. 1. Prop. That sick tymes doe passe over Zion. 2. That sad and bitter neglect is the portion, aggravation and affliction of Zion in the tyme of his sicknesse and wounds, bat especially in the neglect of those that doe neglect and yet, notwithstanding, doe acknowledge it to be Zion. 3. That the season of penitent Zion' a passion is the season of God's compassion. "This sermon tended much to the settling of godly minds here in God's way, and to raise their spirits, and, as I conceive, hath suitable effects."