Year: 1874

The Trouble and Its Remedy.


American society is suffering change.
The period of steady habits has gone by and
the age of hifalutin is at hand. The chief
characteristics of the times are an overesti-
mate Of money and an underestimate OF char
acter. Rough gold has little value, while
highly FURNISHED gilt is greatly priced The
men are overstimulated by a huge business
without capital and. after forty, walk on the
ragged edge of apoplexy, while the women
are overstimulated in the imagination by a
tone Of the whole community.


Everywhere there exists an Unsuitable appe-
tite for mere sensationalism Even science
and religion must startle in order to attract
attention. Plain English does not satisfy any
more than old-fashioned morality. The old
adage which tells us it is better to live in
wooden house and have plenty than to live in
q brick house and be pinched has been turned
upside down and the preference given to the
brown stone and constant duns.


1t is pitiful to see science in the parti-colored
pantaloons of the general folly; but the
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himself to his legitimate sphere, must needs
bring the battering ram of his newly -discov-
cred facts to bear against the oaken door of
the Church, and pound away until crowd
gathers to see what will come of it all. If he
narrows his labors to glacial theories, or to
theories Of evolution, he lives amid the ap-
plause Of the few and dies unknelled, uncof-
fined and unknown. To escape this terrible
fate he saddles the hobby horse of induction
and rides rough shod over the faiths and
convictions Of centuries, sending dismay into
the camp of the unlearned and inviting
everybody to assemble quickly to witness the
explosion and the general conaagration. Of
all men our scientists should carefully confne
themselves to their several departments Of re-
search. It is not theirs to reckon the religious
consequences of discovery, but to make new
discoveries. It is the business of the theo-
logian to make inductious from facts ascer-
tanned, and thereby to modify the religious
creeds of the people. The new school Of
scientists, however, seems determined to leave
the theologians nothing to do, but assumes
the right to judge not only the facts of the
physical but the faiths of the spiritual world.


1t is still more pitiful to note the tendency
to sensational buhoonery which is creeping
into the pulpit. If minister desires to be
popular, and has the requisite amount of
shrewdness and brass, he begins by display
of rhetorical pyrotechnics which attracts the
common eye, and holds his own SO long as he
hoe ov,I ~ 20
laugh at his picturesque gymnastics. So NOR
bid has the taste of the people become that
they actually require large amount of spirit
ual buncombe in order to keep up their in
terest. Plain Scripture seems to be flat, stale
and Improbable, and they demand the pepper
and salt of eccentric phraseology, and seem to
be most delighted when the preacher is most
a ranting actor, tearing the air with frantic
gesticulations and making sport of things
aforetime held sacred Crowds wait on the
ministratons of the clerical comedian who
burlesques religion, while the pews of the
reverend expounder of Holy Writ remain
empty and unrented. Sober-minded men
sooner or later become disguised with the
general farce but while looking upon the
current methods of dealing with religion as
the equivalent of the counterfeit currency that
is afoat feel powerless against the strong
tide Of public opinion.


The trouble begins with American educa-
ton and homes. Schoolgirls who should
confine their attention to short clothes and
arithmetic are fed with the exciting pabulum
Of false literature, and are unconsciously
stimulated by style of novel which under
mines the moral nature by unduly heating
the imagination. The fiction Of the day
hides under cover Of an interesting story
theories of domestic life which honeycomb
society," and these theories are absorbed into
the moral nature of the young to such an ex-
tent that we are almost daily compelled to
record extravagances which show that the
common sense of the community is on the ebb.
Home education is entirely neglected, and that
delicate sense of honor which should be as
bright and as dangerous to touch rudely as
the edge Of o razor, is giving way to GER
tain waywardness and recklessness, the logical
result of which will be iIl-assorted marriages,
domestic unhappiness and crop Of divorces
twenty years from date. All chiyalric rela-
tions between the sexes are fast fading out,
and American society is being given over to
the control of boys and girls in their teens.
They are the false queens and knights of the
chessboari, while ambitious mammas are
convenient pawns, occupying position in
the background, and never appearing unless
called for.


Every one knows that this political, social
and moral bankruptcy comes from the want of
early training, and history is not backward in
illustrating the consequences Of general cor
ruption. There is an inevitable logic in the
life Of people, as in the life of an individual
| We must get down on the hardpan of hon.