Yorkville enquirer. [volume] (Yorkville, S.C.) 1855-2006, 1883-11-22

|
tains. "The Cottcr's Saturday Night" is
not more palpably indebted to the Scrip
lures than are some Of the finest passages
| in Shelley's "Queen Nab" The "Paradise
Lost" and the Pilgrim's Progress" are not
more really the outgrowth of the old He
brew soul than are some of the subllmest
conceptions Of Lord ByrOn's Cain" NO
man could have written "Caln" or Queen
Nab" whose genius had not been developed
by Christian civilization, and whose mil
deity had not been fired by collision with
the Epistle to the Romans. The power to
be so blasphemous grew out of Christian
knowledge ; and the power to express the
blasphemy with such lurid grandeur sprang
| from the culture which Christianity had crc-
ated.
The atheism of Great Britain, which is
working so disastrously among the artisan
classes Of the kingdom, owes its chief re-
sources of power over the popular mind to
the fact that it holds on to so much of scrip
tural thought. Its capital ideas are Bibli,
cal ideas. Strip it Of these, and it would
have no chance of hearing in the work
shops of Birmingham. What else than
Christianity ever gave to the human con-
science spring enough to enable it to con-
ceive of such thing as Il practical religion
without God: Yet this is English athe-
ism to-day 1t is not vice; it is not con-
scious blasphemy; it is not moral nihilism;
| it is an aim ut morality, moral culture,
moral principle, moral progress, even moral
worship, after its kind-all which it auda-
ciOusly proposes to support without God
| for the centre ofthe moral instincts. When
| did the human soul ever before get force
enough OfmOral instincts to conceive OF such
a moral project as that?
Similar to the lesson taught by the ath-
| ciSm of Great Britain is that taught by the
most powerful phases of intidelity IN TINS
country. 1t would be entertaining, if it
were not too painfully solemn to observe the
depth to which Christian thought has pene-
| trated, and the extent to which CHRISTIAN
cOlorings of speech have sutfused the cul-
ture exhibited by the most brilliant of the
| infidel lecturers and writer's among us.
Mark it anywhere on the PLATFORM in the
newspapers, in magazines, in books; the
materials of thought which these men are
welding, to the saddest hurt of an I'M
thinking faith, are at bottom Christian pro-
ducts. No other class Of literary men are
so profoundly indebted to the Scriptures, yet
so profoundly obivious of the debt.
| Open one of their books, turn to its most
captivating pages, sift its style, weigh its
thought, and what do you find of good ster-
ling worth? Wherever you find clear ideas
held in honest Saxon grip, you find them
yitalized by something or other which they
owe to Christianity. Here it is truth as
old as Moses there it is the power to con-
ceive of the opposite of truth again it is
an antithesis of half truths; farther on it is
dislocated quotation, or warped and
| twisted allusiOn, now it is a fungus over
growing germ of truth which gives it a
power to grow then it is Pantheistc turn
to language which Pantheism never origi-
mated, but which, in its original, Christian
souls love. Even down to the indetinable
ingenuites of style, you find at work the
alert and sinewy fingers of a Christian cul-
| ture. The very sentences which express or
imply semi-Paganism in theology, but the
structure of which makes them play in the,
very heavens of beauty like the cOruscatlons
| of the northern lights, are, as specimens OF
style, the product of our Oriental yet Saxon
Bible. Are Confucius, Ioroaster, Socrates,
at the root of the thoughts and the forms
which you feel in such pages: No. it is
Moses /; it is Isaiah; it is David; it is st.
John; it is Christ. Take away the elements
of culture which these have contributed to
such literature, and no man would care what
heroes or philosophers might claim the re-
siduum.
The most striking illustration, in my judg-
ment, which has exhibited the truth of the
fact before us, in our country, it is that given
by Rev. Theodore Parker. For twenty
years the most vital infdelty in this land
was persOnified in him. He brought to the
solitary altar at which he ministered in
Boston, 4 generous scholarship, Il mercurlal
genius, Il versatile command Of thought,
and fascinating style. Taking him all IN
ALL his was Il more earnest character than
that of any other man who has gained any
thing like equal eminence in the ranks OF
active hostility to what he called ''the pop
ular theology of New Epgland." The puri-
ty of his life was almost ascetic. For one, l
am compelled to concede the power Of the
man in his lifetime, whatever may be true
of it now. I do not think that any candid
man among us who knows the classes or
mind which were reached, and the momen-
tum given to them, for twenty years, from
that Twenty eighth Congregational pulpit,
will feel, that, as a friend Of truth, he can
afford to ignore that power or underrate it.
But it was not the power Of his intidelity; ;
it was the power Of his unconscious obliga-
tons to truth. His vital and vitaizing
ideas were Christian ideas. He owed them
to the Book which he disowned. He drank
them in from all the living literatures which
he mastered He maligned religion as we
conceived of it. He ridiculed Scriptures
which to us are sacred. He denounced as
barbaric the groundwork OF our hope OF
heaven He scOtled at our ideal of Il Re-
lips would be blasphemy. Yet the interior
forces which bore up as All oceanic ground
swell, this mass of error were forces, every
one of which sprung from that ocean of in
spired thought whose great deeps were bro
ken up in the civilization around him.
! What were some of those forces? In what
ideas did they find their origin? They were
! such as these the fatherhoOd Of God, the
unity of the human brotherhood before God,
the dignity Of manhood, the intensity of
life as the prelude of Immortality, and more
than all else, the application Of these ideas
to social and national reforms. These were
the forces which he welded. Without them
the world would not have heard of him.
Yet these are, every one of them, Biblical
forces He owed them to the Christian
Scriptures and he owed the susceptibility
to them in the popular mind on which he
worked SO disastrously to that interpreta,,
ti0n Of the Scriptures which has expressed
itself in our New England theology. Thus
it is with every development Of intidelity
which has force enough to make it respecta-
Bile. 1t feeds on Christianity itself, and
grows Iusty therefore.
How BANANAS ARE RA1SED.-AS every
body knows who has eaten banana, the
luscious pulp is secdess. The plants are
propagatcd from other plants, SO that the
stock is not likely to run out. The plant
requires for vigorous growth deep, rich
soil, abundantly watered. With these con-
ditions present, there is said to be be no
risk of a crop in hot regions where alone
the fruit is produced. Nine months after
IL cutting has been planted, purple bud
appears in the center of the unfolding
leaves that shoot out from the head of the
Wac III oh f1r III