Daily Ohio statesman. [volume] (Columbus, Ohio) 1855-1870, 1866-03-08
NUMBER Oh.

over Ine pages OI MI buleTsVns Essays, OF
of the Dial, he finds these emancipated New
lEnglanders dancing the old dances, per-
forming the old antics, reciting the old rig
marole of the Anabaptists and neO-P PlatOn-
lists. - - a' = ~ 2f1 ~ 4
The transmitted self-consciousness and
cOnceit of the Puritan character is respon-
sible for these vagaTies. Your original
Puritan, had he lived in the days of our
Lord and neard those stern and solemn
words, "Let him that is without sin among
you cast the first stone at her." would have
caught up the biggest brick in the neigh
borhoOd and heaved it nightly at the
wretched woman before him.. [Laughterl
Your modern transcendentalist, when he
! finds that a law or a custom rooted by ages
in the life of great people Is lin the way Of
any fancy or crotchet of his own, quietly
exclaims, II am both the Deity and humalI-
ity myself-in me are all constitutions and
charters-the sun, also the moon, do they
not rise in me and set In me? Let all these
things be changed, for do they not con-
strain my soul?" Observe how this influ-
ence has oozed over from le original ves-
sells and penetrated the New England
| mind. The ancient phrase, eve are the
men, and wisdom shall die with MS, of the
Puritans Of 1866, who whipped one Oliver
Holmes in Boston for peryersely being a
Baptist is only reproduced under another
form in the transcendentalists of 1866, who
worship another Oliver Holmes in Boston
for proclaiming himself all autocrat of the
breakfast table. The Bradfords and Carv-
ers and HiggiDsons and the rest of the men
of 1920 who could not bear to remain In
England where their own opinions were
not regarded as the supreme law of human
faith and practice, are only the prototypes
of the Summers and Wilson's and Phillipses,
who foam at the mouth il one but suggest
the possibility of their being mistaken in
any one particular of insight, foresight, or
wisdom. The Puritans of the seventeenth
century undoubtedly would have hanged,
without mercy, the transcendentalists of
the nineteenth but though fur glove is
two different things according as you turn
the fur outside or inside, it is always one
thing-and that is, tur glove. Laugh
teri 'ri
Mr.. Lowell speaks of one eminent New
England light as being who
..... red in the face is
With leaping and Jumping in Emersons traces"
But this is true of the whole sect, that they
are always red in the face with leaping and
jumping in somebody's traces by way of
p. owing that they are not as other men who
are content to walk along life's road as nat
uraly and as comfortably as may be. In
the works OF the cleverest writers of this !
schOol-and some of them are men of un- /,
questionable ability-you are perpetually
worried by the mental gymnastics of the
author. Their thoughts, when they are
lucky enough to have thoughts, pirouette,
one leg in the air, or jump distractedly at
you through gauze hoop, or make their
bow at you, balancing on the top OF forty
foot pole. Laughter. That provincial
dOgmatism which is only amusing and roll
licking in the Noctes of Edinburgh, be-
comes a mere downright bore in the Noctes
of Boston. The literary pretensions of the
Scotch ATHENS" are not much less silly to
be sure than those of the American Athens,
but they rest, at least, on larger basis, aud
have livelier flavor both of whisky punch
and of wit. .t...
In tie world of politics the secondary
virus of Puritanism, as it has been felicit-
ously called, shows itself in analogous re-
suits. The characteristic New England
politicians of to-day bear the same sort of
relation to Nance Capac, and Cadmus, and
Solon, and Lycurgus, and Moses, that En-
ersOn bears to a ZOrOaster, and COnfucius,
and Plato and Jacob Bolman, and the au-
thors OF the Vedas. That is to say, he full
ly believes himself to be the flower of all
law-givers, and worthy to be heard and
needed of mankind in his day and genera
ton as all these were of old. You reinen-
Der the story of the German who, being
dSheu 10 uGSCTlUO SlluJ ulDlSell up
in his closet and CONSTRUCTED the beast out
of his own consciousness" .,......
This is what your Sumner and your Phil
lips will do for you any day, with consti-
tuition or a code. If one of these men were
honestly to publish his whole thought" as
the jargon of the school goes, he would
say: ',rhe real United States is but a carl
cature and catastrophe of that perfect aud
ideal United States which yearns at the birth
in my BRAIN" [Laughter.l -.y
Perhaps not the worst way of testing the
worth of such a conviction as this would be
to initiate the midwifery OF Vulcan, who re-
lieved the paturient brain of Jupiter by let
ting Minerva out of it with one good whack
of his axe. doubt, however, if in the mod
ern case we should see another Goddess of
Wisdom leap to light. nli.
But is there no milder cure possible of
this modern form of the Puritan disease?
Its best diagnosis l find, after all, in the
best of all books of spiritual practice-in
the true materia medica of the mind. The
Scriptures have given us the symptoms
when they warn us "be not puffed up" "be
not carried about with divers winds of doc.
trine," do not think of ourselves more
highly than we ought to think" The
Scriptures, too, have given us the best treat
ment, when they bid us "do justly, love
mercy, and walk humbly.n Old as the dis
ease is, and obstinate, its power for mis-
chief lessons yearly with the widening Of
its area of action. .. ..-. .. a-t...t
/ live in the cheerful hope that our chill
dren, If not ourselves, will see even New
England herself as heartily ashamed of her
transcendental bigots aud their naked war
dances as of her Puritan bigots, and their
stalking to and fro in steeple hats to drown
witches, destroy Acadia, whip Baptists, and