NVSOl^' mm/A ir>r-l ,.# % IIVDJQ^ 4,. MIFO/?^ II il mm//^... -n rS NV-SO# ^, >;^ mm//L- ^lOSANCflfjv ^JUVD-JO*" # 6: ^OFCAIIFO^^ 'X> 2?. s>^ ARYOc i v>^^ ^itfOJITVDJO*' >/ ^QFCAIIFO^,; 6^4^! laoNvsoi^ o 63 UNIVERSITY ')- C-^JFOUmM LOS ANGELJSa SELECTED FROM THE AVRITINGS HORA( K MA>sN. I hold Education to be an organic necessity of a human hcinp. IIOKACK ]Mann. BOSTON: H. B. FTLLKli AND COMPANY. (Successors to Walker. FrixER & Co.) 245 WASHINGTON STREET. Kntcred, acoonling to Act of Congress, in thp j-ear 1.SH7, l>y MARY MANN. In the Clerk's Office of tlie District Court of the Distriot «f Massachusetts. STEReOTVPfcO AT IHE BOSTON STEREOTYPE fOUN NO. 4 SPRING LANE. 'resswork by John Wilson and Son. CONTEXTS A.. PAGE Abolitionism 145 Absolut* truth immutable. . 86 : Action of conscience. . . 63, 116 I Activities of matter— Poly- | theism 230 Actirities of nature 62 Adaptation of motives. . . . 221 Add to knowled^ virtue. . 221 Advantage of knowledge. . 61 A free country 120 , Agitation 123 j All men created equal. . *' All must be clean, or none can be clean." " A man's a man for a' that.'' American slaves in Liberia. Ancient and modern Sha- drach 130 A new race 41 Annexation of Texas. ... 127 Application of principles. . . 113 Arbitrary governments. . . 130 Assimilation 9 Association of ideas 67 Atheists 178 A torch of fire 122 PAGB Benevolence 224 Biography 105 179 i 125' 136 Cant 224 Caste 135 Causality 90 Cause and effect 71 Causes 98 Causes of alienation between science and religion. ... 77 Causes of necromancy. &c. • 30 Change of measures 173 Change of tactics 134 Christ teaching 192 Civilization 57 Civilization and Christianity. 87 Classes of truths 61 Classical study as discipline. 106 Colleges and the people. . . 109 Commerce and freedom. . . 167 Compensation 112 Compromise measures of ISoO 119, 123 Concentration of thought. . 228 contp:is'ts. PAGE Congress in 1849 145 Connection of science and relig-ion 186 Conscience 90, 124 Consequences of physical evils 83 Cure of superstition 234 Danger of the republic. . . 180 Deliverance 134 Delights of knowledge. . . 12 Difficulties of an educator. . 227 Diffusion and extension of knowledge 15 Discussion and agitation. . . 122 Disinterested love 188 Disunion 153 Do as you would be done by. 127 Does intellectual power make a man virtuous .' 44 Duties of republics. . . 168, 170 Duty 90 Duty a happiness 49 Duty of the teacher 113 Education. . . . 7, 8, 10, 11, 14-16 Education an organic neces- sity of man 235 Education in a republic. . . 42 Efl'ects of imperfect training. 21 Error contagious 69 Errors of education 189 Every individual's right to education 31 Every man has his own God. 192 Evils of bad teaching. ... 112 Excuses of temptation. . . 116 Extension of slavery. ... 160 I PAGE I False knowledge 104 ; Fanaticism 108 I Federal constitution 126 Fictitious literature 101 Follow Nature 113 Freedom in the territories. . 154 Freedom or subjection ? . . 182 Free-soilism in 1850 146 Free speech 120 Free thinking 13 Free thought in Galileo's time 149 Geology 199,230 Gibbon and Shakspeare. . . 224 God said, " Let there be liglit." 37 God's laws 81 God's lessons in Nature. . . 107 Golden rule perverted. . . . 128 Good behavior 28 Good opinion of others influ- ential for good 152 Good teaching 226 Grace 82 Greatness not dependent upon the sphere of action. 46 Greatness of heart 48 Growth 225 Growth of the mind 226 Guilt transforms 76 H. Habit 115 Harmony of Nature 78 Haste in teaching 222 Have heathens souls ? . . . 115 Heaven not a place 193 History 104 CONTENTS. PAGE Honesty is the best policy." 2i7 Human improvability. ... 22 Human nature a problem. . 53 I. Ideality 195 Ideality a prophecy 228 Ignorance 103 Ignorance and miracles. . . 95 Ignorance breeds error. . . 143 Immortality 194, 195 Importance of early impres- sions 20 Importance of early influence. 10 Importance of health. ... 55 Individuality 90 Ineffective teaching 225 Influence of a good teacher . 34 Influences of city and coun- try 72 Influence of the majority in a republic 184 Insight 80 Intellect CO Is matter inert ? 228 Is Providence inscrutable ? . 234 It is easier to die for others than to live for others. . . 200 Key to the universe 82 Kingdom of God 99 Knowledge but an instru- ment 15 " Knowledge is power." . . 232 Language 54 Law of liberty 131 Law of responsibUity. ... 95 PAGE Laws of mmd 64 Laws of nature 106 Laws of the soul 62 Leading men responsible to the community 154 Learn of the birds 55 Liberty and labor 1.32 Liberty of thought. . . .17,130 Libraries in common schoolff. 17 Literary expression 116 Literature 105 Live to the truth 190 Look inward 97 Love 91 Love of improvement a prophecy 199 Love of truth an attribute of the intellect 189 Mahomet 224 Man is fearfully and wonder- fully made 56 Man progressive 12 Massachusetts consent to slavery ! IGO Material importance of edu- cation 191 Mental exercise strengthens, as well as physical. . . . 223 Mental philosophy 227 Miracles 78 Moral earthquakes 166 Moral growth 58 Moral influence of intellect- ual cultivation 108 More sugar-plums. ..... 167 Mr. Clay's compromises. . . 157 Mr. Webster appeals to higher authority 101 Multitude of truths 01 CONTENTS. IV. PAGE National crimes 1S4 Native love of liberty. . . . 135 Natural knowledge 74 Natural language 74 Natural philosophy. . . 103, 107 Natural philosophy versus literature and history. . . 102 Nature's advertisements. . . 75 Nature's path 222 Nature would work for man. 233 New Mexico 156 No education for the slave. . 141 No such thing- as Accident in Nature 97 No truth useless 185 Objects of knowledge. . . . 236 Origin of the words urbane, polite, civil 32 Parental authority 19 Parental conscience 187 Parental influence 53 Parental love 185 Party dictation 167 Pennsylvania's wrongs. . • 164 Philosophy of history. ... 105 Philosophy of insanity. ... 68 Philosophy of teaching. . . 222 Physical deterioration. ... 21 Pleasures of knowledge. . . 51 Political economy 191 Poverty 100 Poverty of spirit 118 Power of eloquence 68 Power over evil men 46 Powers of the mind 62 Preservation of our liberties. 132 PAGE Priestcraft Ill Protection to labor 134 Progress 240 Progress of science 23 Proportion 89 Public opinion in 1850. ... 124 Punishment self-inflicted. . 75 Puritan ideas of education. . 24 Purity of childhood 45 Read always 47 Reason in teaching 223 Reflection — perception. . . 72 Relations of things 114 Religion of Nature. ... 80, 92 Religious liberty 131 Remedy for poverty 100 Remorse 100 Responsibilities 117 Retribution 122 Ripeness of men 81 Rich and poor 225 School-houses 27 Schools 18 Schools the counterpart of freedom 175 Scriptures symbolical. ... 88 Self-confidence of ignorance. Ill Self-government 171 Self-reliance 11 Shall we go on .'' 8 Skilled labor 52 Skill in educating 10 Slave marts 136 Slavery a state of war, ... 125 Slavery extension. . . . 138, 163 Slavery in the constitution. . 144 Slavery or freedom 164 CONTENTS. PAGE Slavery sanctioned by the constitution ? 151 Slavery sanctioned by the Levitical law 149 Slavery the " sum of all vil- lanies." 1G2 Slaves better off here than in Africa 139 Slave-soilism 1-1? Source of faith in the world's progress 10 Source of spiritual errors. . 05 Source of the wealth of Mas- sachusetts 30 Spirit of the age 15G Spiritual conditions 04 Spiritual truth 100 Spiritual wrecks SO Strength of a republic. . . . 170 Study of astronomy 41 Study of languages GO Study of science 59, 00 Summary trial of a slave. . . 125 Superstition natural 71 Supremacy of law 88, 90 Symmetry in Nature 93 T. Take care of circumstances. 10 Teachings of history. ... 09 »* Teach out of a mine." . . . 220 Temperament 73 Temperance 201, 210 Temptation 90 The child a small man. . . . 223 The child is fatlier of the man 39 The " coal bags " of the as- tronomers 237 The door to the temple. . . 48 PAGE The educated and the unedu- cated man 43 The fact of slavery and the law of slavery 150 The groat future 14 The infinite and the finite, . 52 The kingdoms of Christ and of Satan 192 The law of cause and effect. . 70 The limitations of education. 43 The Moloch of slavery. . . 120 The moral faculties supreme. 57 The most important things the most common 50 The remedy for evil 58 The soul one 188 The sovereign people. . . . 176 The spelling-book 23 The still small voice 91 The true great men 80 Tlie universe full of the ob- jects of knowledge 236 The value of knowledge. . . 51 The voting day 172 Think — act 199 Treat with respect the rea- soning powers 23 Trial by jury 125,102 Truth, and a soul to see it. . 181 Truth and error 129 Truth seeks light 123 XJ. Union 134 Union of heart and intellect. 192 Union of intellectual and moral life 89 Universal education 45 Uses of knowledge 87 CONTENTS. PAGE Value of knowledge to ev- ery human being 142 Value of time 66 Values 221 Vice in colleges 185 Virtue a growth 19 TV. PAGE Wealth of nations 186 What is education? 44 What is God to man ? . . . 239 What sanctifies civilization ? 200 Why is education in disre- pute? 113 Wilmot proviso 158 Without God in the world. . 49 Writing of composition. . . 226 THOUGHTS EDUCATION. IF ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education. It has intrinsic and indestruc- tible merits. It holds the welfare of mankind in its embrace, as the protecting arms of a mother hold her infant to her bosom. The very ignorance and selfishness which obstruct its path -^re the strongest arguments for its promotion, for it fur- nishes the only adequate means for their removal. It is worthy, therefore, to be urged forward over the dead obstacles of listlessness and apathy, and against the living hostility of those sordid men who oppose its advancement for no higher reason than that of the silversmiths who trafficked in the shrines of the goddess Diana, and who would have quenched the holy light of Christianity for all man- kind rather than forego their profits upon idol worship. (7) THOUGHTS. SHALL WE GO ONI I offer a single reason for arresting its progress not be equally available for reducing its present amount. . . . The useful and elegant arts, that minister to the comfort of man, and gladden his eye with beauty ; poetry and eloquence, that ravish the soul ; philosophy, that comprehends the work- manship of the heavens, and reads in the present condition of the earth, as in the leaves of a book, the records of myriads of ages gone by ; language, by which we are taught by all the generations that are past, and by which we may teach all the gen- erations that are to come, — all these would be sunk in oblivion, and all the knowledge possessed by the descendants of Bacon, and Xewton, and Franklin would be to chatter and mow, to burrow in a hole, and crack nuts with the teeth. Such is the catastrophe to which we should come, could those prevail who would make the present horizon of human knowledge stationary. PHYSICAL EDUCATION. PHYSICAL education is not only of great im- portance on its own account, but in a certain THOUGHTS. 9 sense it seems to be invested with the additional importance of both intellectual and moral ; be- cause, although we have frequent proofs that there may be a human body without a soul, yet, under our present earthly conditions of existence, there cannot be a human soul without a body. The statue must lie prostrate without a pedestal ; and in this sense the pedestal is as important as the statue. ASSIMILATION. HOW can a work, at once so vast and delicate as a symmetrical development of the human faculties, be conducted, without the deepest science in the preparation of means, and exquisite skill in applying them? The infant mind grows, not by accretion, but through organization. Intelligence, and wisdom, and virtue, cannot be poured out of one mind into another, as water from a vessel. The increment comes by assimilation, not trans- fusion. Ideas, knowledge, may be brought within reach of the mind, but if they are not digested, and prepared by a process of the spirit itself upon them, they give no more vigor and power to the mind than sacks of grain nourish the jaded beast when they are fastened to his back. 10 THOUGHTS. IMPORTANCE OF EARLY INFLUENCE. THOSE who exert the first influence upon the mind, have the greatest power. They have power, not only to regulate the action of given faculties, but they can enlarge or belittle the fticulties themselves. Hence, favoring or adverse circumstances in the early culture of mind, though imperceptible at the time, will at last w^ork out broadly into beauty or deformity. SKILL IN EDUCATING. ONE of the great masters of painting used to prepare and mix his own colors, lest some crudeness in the material should baffle his skill, and dim the lustre or cloud the majesty of his finished work. Do we act upon this principle in regard to education? SOURCE OF FAITH IN THE WORLD'S PROGRESS. I BELIEVE the v/orld's condition moves with a strong gravitation towards truth, though this belief comes more from my faith in the existence of an all-perfect Deity than from actual observa- tion. THOUGHTS. 11 NEGLECT OF EDUCATION: WHATEVER deficiency or neglect of educa- tion there may be, I cannot attribute it to any general want of parental love. That fire has not gone out, for Nature is its vestal. But if, in- stead of twenty-one years, the formation of the human character — its fate for weal or woe — were accomplished in twenty-one days, I suppose the merchant would leave his bargains, the farmer the ingathering of his harvests, and even the drunkard would rise from the middle of his debauch, and those three weeks would be spent without much sleep, and with many prayers. Yet it cannot be denied that the consequences of a vicious educa- tion given to a child are precisely the same at the end of twenty-one years as they would be at the expiration of twenty-one days after birth, were that the appointed period. SELF-RELIANCE. BOTH poetry and philosophy are prodigal of eulogy over the mind which ransoms itself by its own energy from a captivity to custom, which breaks the common bounds of empire, and cuts a Simplon over mountains of difficulty for its own purposes, whether of good or of evil. 12 THOUGHTS. DELIGHTS OF KNOWLEDGE. IF there is anytliiDg for which I would go back to childhood, and live this weary life over again, it is for the burning, exalting, transporting thrill and ecstasy with which the young faculties hold their earliest communion with knowledge. When the panting and thirsting soul first drinks the deli- cious w^aters of truth, w^hen the moral and intel- lectual tastes and desires first seize the fragrant fruits that flourish in the garden of knowledge, then does the child catch a glimpse and foretaste of heaven. He regales himself upon the nectar and ambrosia of the gods. Later in life this zest is rarely if ever felt so keenly as at the beginning. Such ought not to be the fact ; but our bodies are so systematically abused by transgressions of the laws of health and diet, that the sympathizing soul loses the keenness of its daily relish. . . . But these lofty and enduring satisfactions, this pleasure — it is no extravagance to say, this bliss — of knowl- edge, both for parent and child, is withheld cruelly, — remorselessly withheld from the slave. MAN PROGRESSIVE. M AN has a progressive intellect, instead of a stationary instinct. He has a conscience THOUGHTS. 13 which can cle^vve, like lightning, those ethical knots into which truth and error have been most com- pactly twisted. He has an inborn religious senti- ment that whispers of a God to his inmost soul, as a shell taken from the deep yet echoes forever the ocean's roar ; and as a shell cannot be carried so far from the sea as to forget its native tones, so man can never sweep so far in his aphelion from God as to escape the justice of his law and the beauty of his light. Man has a spontaneous pre- sentiment of immortality, and of a Supreme Being, near to whom, or away from whom, he must spend an eternity. FREE-THINKING. CAN anything mark more strikingly the degi'a- dation and desecration which oppression has wrought upon the human soul, than the fact, that the word which should have been the noblest appel- lation in our language has been made a term of contumely and reproach? In former times, men who thought outside of their rulers' creeds were vilified as "free-thinkers," — an epithet which still has a tone of opprobrium in it. But for their free thinking, what troglodytes and monkeys should we now be, if we should have been in existence at all ! 14 THOUGHTS THE GREAT FUTURE. MEN who tak( of nations, :e any enlarged view of the course and the destiny of the human race, see that a new era has opened upon the world. The history of the future is to be widely different from that of the past. The stream of time is changing its direction. It is about to pass through moral regions, such as in its whole previous course, since it broke from the original fountain, it has never traversed before. We must prepare ourselves to move with safety through the new realms we are entering. COMPLETED EDUCATIOX. THE education already given to the people creates the necessity of giving them more. What has been done has awakened new and un- paralleled energies ; and the mental and moral forces Avhich have been roused into activity, are now to be regulated. These forces are not me- chanical, which expend their activity and subside to rest ; they are spiritual forces, endued with an inextinguishable principle of life and progression. The coiled spring of the machine loses power as it unwinds ; but the living soul of man, once con- scious of its power, cannot be quelled : it multiplies THOUGHTS. 15 its energy, and accelerates its speed, in an upward or downward direction, forever. KXOIVLEDGE BUT AX IXSTRUMEXT. OUR age has unwonted strength, and is ad- vancing to greater ; but it wants the spirit of docility and teachableness. Wisdom must be con- stituted its guardian. Let us think, betimes, that power and freedom may be a curse as w^ell as a blessing ; that knowledge is but an instrument, which the profligate and the flagitious may use as well as the brave and the just. ED UC ATI ox OF ALL. TRUTHS, no matter how momentous or en- during, are nothing to the individual until he appreciates them, and feels their force, and acknowl- edges their sovereignty. He cannot bow to their majesty until he sees their power. All the blind, then, and all the ignorant, — that is, all the chil- dren, — must be educated up to the point of per- ceiving and admitting truth, and acting according to its mandates. I DIFFUSIOX AXD EXTEXSIOX OF KXOWLEDGE. T is said that we are an educated people ; and there is a sense in which this declaration is 16 THOTTGHTS. true. Such an assertion, however, supposes a com- parison. . . . Compared with many, and even with most people on the earth, the result would be in our favor ; but compared with what we may be, and should be, our present inferiority is un- speakable. ACTION OF GOVERNMENT IN EDUCATION. HOW poor was the gift of Midas, fabled to pos- sess the po^\ ev of turning whatever he touched into gold, compared with the power of turning gold into knowledge, and wisdom, and virtue ! How glorious is the prerogative of the legislator when he faithfully uses his privileges for the benefit of his race ! Though he fill but a brief hour of political existence, yet in that hour he can speak a word which shall enhance the happiness of posterity at the distance of a thousand years. This is tlie only worthy immortality upon earth — not to leave a name, to be upon the lips of men, but to do acts which shall improve the condition of men through the flowing ages. TAKE CARE OF CIRCUMSTANCES. LET US, at least, make the way which leads to right as open and accessible as that which leads to wrong. Children are governed by circum- THOUGHTS. 17 stances as well as by innate tendencies. If we can- not prescribe the natural tendencies of children, we can prescribe, in a great measure, the circumstances in which they are placed. The first may belong to the jurisdiction of Nature ; the last is within our own. LIBRARIES IX COMMON SCHOOLS. THE benefit of libraries in common schools is a modern discovery. But it is one which is des- tined to increase, almost indefinitely, the efficiency of those schools. . . . Good books are to the young mind what the warming sun and the refreshing rain of spring are to the seeds which have lain dormant in the frosts of winter. They are more, for they may save from that which is worse than death, as well as bless wdth that which is better than life. LIBERTY OF THOU GET. THE two subjects respecting which men, for ages, had been most straitened, pent up, walled in on every side, were those which embraced the political condition and the future destinies of man ; that is, the relations of men to each other in the social compact, and the relations of man to his Maker. No wonder that men, bursting from thral- dom, should rush into error. No wonder that the 2 18 THOUGHTS. opinions and convictions of men should be partial, incomplete, and therefore false, before they had time to collect the proofs necessary for the estab- lishment of truth. And perhaps we ought not to be surprised that, in the mean time, each one should seize, and hold with unyielding tenacity, those opinions which, to his peculiar mind, appear to possess the holy reality of truth, and that he should denounce all conflicting opinions as hereti- cal and ruinous. THE SCHOOLS. THE great object of the schools — an object dear to the heart of every lover of his kind — is, to exercise and to strengthen the minds of the children ; to save them from vicious associations and from depraved habits ; to lead them to the perception and the love of truth in the exact sciences ; to give them a delight in exploring the vast world of natural history, where, at every step, they are surrounded by proofs of the greatness and goodness of God ; and thus to prepare them, as far as by any human means they can be prepared, to bring a clearer and stronger mind and less selfish and impure affections, a more ardent love of man and a higher reverence for God, to the decision of THOUGHTS. 19 those momentous questions of time and eternity which in the last resort each man must not only decide for himself, but must abide the consequences of his decision. VIRTUE A GROWTH. ARE not great mistakes committed in the gov- ernment of children, by acting upon the sup- position that they can grow strong in virtuous resolutions in a single clay f If all our active affections, whether good or bad, are the result of growth, then opportunity must be allowed for the seeds to germinate after they have been sown. PARENTAL A UTHORITY. NO parent or teacher should ever issue a com- mand without the highest degree of certainty that it will be obeyed. To command a child to do or to abstain from doing what, under the circum- stances, he will probably refuse to do or to abstain from doing, is as false to duty as it would be in a general to engage, voluntarily, in a battle where be was exposed to certain defeat. When the moral sense is weak, and the propensities strong, we must begin, in regard to the former, with the lightest conceivable duties. Present no temptation to the 20 THOUGHTS. child wliicli he has not strength to overcome. Let the temptation be increased only as the power of resistance is strengthened. IMPOETAXCE OF EARLY IMPRESSIONS. THERE are many men who are wholly unable to recollect the dimensions, forms, heights, lengths, breadths, colors, &c., of the objects they have actually seen. Their ideas are dim, half- formed ; and often, when they endeavor to revive them, they will not reappear. Hence it is that honest men often give false testimony in court. Witnesses contradict each other ; they expose them- selves to charges of perjury ; and the only reason why their evidence is not perjury is, that it was not given with the intent to falsify. Their testimony violates truth, though it is free from corruption ; but to the party, against whose interest, or char- acter, or life, it is given, it does all the mischief of downright perjury. The immediate cause of this is a feebleness in perceiving and recollecting objects, as they actually exist, or events as they actually have happened ; but the origin of it was laid far back, in a neglect of the use of their faculties in childhood. THOUGHTS. 21 EFFECTS OF IMPERFECT TRAIXIXG. FROM the commeucement of our government, — nay, before that commencement, — the indi- viduals of the community, with more or less knowledge of the cause they espoused, decided the most important questions with the least possible inquiry or consideration ; and questions which have now convulsed the country for nearly half a century (1841) are yet, apparently, as far from being settled as when they first arose. The parents contended while they lived, bequeathed the conten- tion to their children when they died, to be trans- mitted by them to later descendants. How im- mensely different would have been the residt, if, from the organization of the government, the grand aim had been to train the then rising generation to profoundness of thought and rectitude of purpose ! Pn YSICA L DE TEIilORA TION. THE present generation is suffering incalculably under an ignorance of physical education. The fifteen millions of the United States, at the present day, are by no means five times the three millions of the revolutionary era. Were this degeneracy attributable to mother Nature, we should compare her to a fraudulent manufacturer, who, having 22 THOUGHTS. established his name in the market for the excel- lence of his fabrics, should avail himself of his reputation to palm off subsequent bales or pack- ages, with the same stamp or ear-mark, but of meaner quality. . . . The old hearts of oak are gone. Society is suffering under a curvature of the spine. If deterioration holds on at its present rate, especially in our cities, we shall soon be a bed-rid people. . . . The intellect will never be sufficiently expanded to receive a system of truths, and single truths cut out from their connections, and adopted without reference to kindred truths, always mis- lead. The forces of the soul will retreat from the forehead to the hindhead, and the brow, that " dome of thought and palace of the soul," will be narrow and " villanously low ; " for it is here that Nature sets her signet, and stamps her child a phi- losopher or a cretin. HUMAN IMPROVABILITT. THE capacities of mind can go on developing, improving, perfecting, as long as the cycles of eternity revolve. For this improvement of the race, a high, a generous, an expansive education is the true and efficient means. There is not a good work which the hand of man has ever undertaken, which THOUGHTS. 23 his heart has ever conceived, which does not require a good education for its helper. There is not an evil afflicting the earth which can be extii'pated until the auxiliary of education shall lend its mighty aid. TREAT WITH liESPECT THE REASOXIXG POWERS. IAVOULD lay down a general principle, which I think of great importance, viz., that the fac- ulties by which we reason ought never to be em- ployed on any subject when the logical results to which sound reasoning would arrive are not the true results. If the thing to be done or learned is arbitrary, let it be done by force of authority, of imitation, of mere association of ideas ; but do not maltreat the powers of reasoning by calling in their aid when their responses will be repudiated as soon as uttered. Apply this argument to teaching the art of reading English by learning the letters of our alphabet. THE SPELLIXG-BOOK. IN Scotland, the spelling-book is called the " spell- book," and we ought to adopt that appellation here ; for, as it is often used with us, it does cast a spell over the faculties of children, which, generally, they do not break for years, and oftentimes, we be- 24 THOUGHTS. lieve, never. If any two things on earth should be put together and kept together, one would suppose that it should be the idea of a thing, and the name of that thing. The spelling-book, however, is a most artful and elaborate contrivance, by which words are separated from their meanings, so that the words can be transferred into the minds of the pupil without permitting any glimmer of the meaning to accompany them. A spelling-book is a collection of signs without the things signified — of words without sense — a dictionary without definitions. It is a place where words are shut up and im- pounded, so that their significations cannot get at them. Yet, formerly, it was the almost universal practice — and we fear it is now nearly so — to keep children two or three years in the spelling-book, where the mind's eye is averted from the objects, qualities, and relations of existing things, and fastened upon a few marks, of themselves Avholly uninteresting. PURITAN IDEAS OF EDUCATION. EVEN a cursory examination of the character and history of the Puritans will sufiice to show that they paid but little regard to the sensibili- ties OF CHiLDREX. While they surpassed their descendants in appreciating more highly many of THOUGHTS. 25 the great demerits of character, they had a far less adequate conception of the extent and variety of influences which contribute to the formation of the youthful mind. In fortitude, in a rigid morality that was proof against the solicitations of natural affection, in a punctilious adherence to every iota of their reli- gious faith, — in these qualities they were armed as in panoply, always ready for battle or for martyrdom. But they were too austere and stoical to exercise kindly, gentle, and benignant influences upon child- hood. Hence they brought the mightiest principles, — considerations embracing all time, and all eter- nity, — an enginery whose missiles were infinite weal or infinite Avoe, — to bear upon tender, un- formed, thoughtless natures, whose whole experi- ence was but of yesterday, and whose futurity con- sisted only of to-morrow. But almost entirely, and disastrously, did they neglect those higher tenden- cies and adaptations, which, by being proportioned to the capacities of the juvenile mind, have a far more important bearing upon the character than the mightiest truths, of which no adequate compre- hension can be had. They did not reflect that the slightest circumstance which a child can understand is of more importance to his mental growth than the exposition of a universal law, which, from its 26 THOUGHTS. very universality, is beyond the grasp of his con- ceptions. Every child Avill feel a deeper interest in a perception of the fact, that its plaything may fall and be broken, than in the law of gravitation which holds the solar system together. But a considera- tion of the aggregate force of minute and subtile influences, effective because proportioned and adapted to infantile and juvenile susceptibilities, and con- trolling because of their endless repetition, did not enter into the stern philosophy of the Puritan fa- thers. Hence one great source of their neglect of those appliances and accommodations, which, by their perpetual action upon the minds of the young, exert an almost transforming poAver over their dis- positions and tastes, and shape the fluidity of their nature, while it is in the process of hardening into the solid substance of intellect and will. The infant soul, on its first introduction into life, is unformed, pliant, aerial, subject to the gentlest impulse, and fashioned most readily by the lightest touches ; — it is like a morning mist upon a hill-top, whose form a zephyr will change, while a thunderbolt would pass through it traceless. THOUGHTS. 27 SCHOOL-HOUSES. WE can now call to mind several cases which we have witnessed in travelling over the state, where barns, piggeries, and other outbuild- ings have been erected according to the most ap- proved style of Gothic architecture, and the abode of brute animals decorated with the profusion of ornament which belongs to that finical order. But the models of the old school-houses did not come from the classic land of the East ; their ori- gin was aboriginal, — not copied from Greece or Rome, but rather from the Pequots and Narra- gansetts. Not only would many of our school-houses furnish an illustration in geography, because five steps would carry the pupil through the five zones, but astronomy also could be studied in them to advantage, for through the rents in the roof the stars might all be seen as they come to the zenith. THERE is an unspeakable gratification in stand- ing by a good cause in the day of its feebleness or its adversity. There is a deeper pleasure in fol- lowing truth to the scaftbld or the cross, than in joining the multitudinous retinue, and mingling our 28 THOUGHTS. shouts with theirs, when victorious error celebrates its triumphs. Whatever statesman or sage will effect reforms upon a gigantic or godlike scale must begin with the young. He must labor in accordance with a principle which lies at the bottom of all reforms, — which prevents errors by preoccupying the ground before they invade it, and fortify themselves in it. The antidotes are so cheap that the poorest com- munity can supply them ; the remedies so costly, that they will beggar the treasury of a prince. Here is a field of labor more luxuriant than ever Ceres planted — a field from which the gleaner will bear home richer sheaves than can ever reward the toil of the reaper in any other harvest. . . . It has been found that missionary stations in for- eign lands could not sustain themselves and carry oU their evangelizing work with anything above a very low degree of success until they began with the children, and trained them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. What a lesson is taught, by this impressive fact, to all who have ears to hear ! GOOD BEnAVIOR. MANNERS easily and rapidly mature into morals. As childhood advances to manhood, THOUGHTS. 29 the transition from bad manners to bad morals is almost imperceptible. Vulgar and obscene forms of speecli keep vulgar and obscene objects before the mind, engender impure images in the imagination, and make unlawful desires prurient. From the prevalent state of the mind, actions proceed, as water rises from a fountain. Hence what was originally only a word or a phrase becomes a thought, is meretriciously embellished by the im- agination, is inflamed into a vicious desire, gains strength and boldness by being always made wel- come, until at last, under some urgent temptation, it dares, for once, to put on the visible form of action ; it is then ventured upon again and again, more frequently and less warily, until repetition forges the chains of habit ; and then language, im- agination, desire, and habit bind their victim in the prison-house of sin. In this way, profane language Avears away the reverence for things sacred and holy ; and a child who has been allowed to follow, and mock, and hoot at an intemperate man in the streets, is far more likely to become intemperate himself than if he had been accustomed to regard him with pity, as a fallen brother, and with a sacred abhorrence, as one self-brutified or demonized. So, on the other hand, purity and chasteness of language 30 THOUGHTS. tend to preserve purity and cliasteness of thought and of taste ; they repel licentious imaginings ; they delight in the unsullied and the untainted, and all their tendencies and aptitudes are on the side of virtue. Excepting prior-formed habits, habit can overcome anything but instinct, and can greatly modify even that. CAUSES OF NECROMANCY, ASTROLOGY, cj-c. IN all countries and times, it has been an impulse, if not an instinct, of the human mind to long for a knowledge of the future — to desire to lift the curtain that hides coming events from our eyes. To obtain prescience of future fortunes, whether individual or national, men have vainly watched the flight of birds as they obeyed the great law of their migration ; they have laid open and examined the entrails of animals ; they have traced the courses and conjunctions of the stars ; they have pretended to wake the dead, and to wring from them the se- crets which time holds in its bosom, and they have put the gods themselves to the question, to make them foretell the fate they had foredoomed. Hence numerous orders of men have been set apart to the work of divination and prophecy — the necro- mancer, the soothsayer, the augur, the astrologer. THOUGUTS. 31 Heuce patriots have wrestled with destiny to insure the salvation of their country, and priests have supplicated Heaven to vouchsafe those temporal blessings which they were doing so little to obtain. Yet the solution of this awful mystery lay before them, like an open book, while they were searching afar off — looking among the silent stars, and ques- tioning the uuanswering dead — to find it. It lay in the agencies for good or for evil, Avhich were forming the minds and hearts of the rising genera- tion around them. EVERT INDIVIDUAL'S EIGHT TO EDUCATION. I BELIEVE in the existence of a great, immu- table principle of natural law, or natural ethics, — a principle antecedent to all human institutions, and incapable of being abrogated by any ordinances of man, — a principle of divine origin, clearly legi- ble in the ways of Providence as those ways are manifested in the order of nature, and in the history of the race, which proves the absolute right of every human being that comes into the world to an edu- cation ; and which, of course, proves the correlative duty of every government to see that the means of that education are provided for all. In regard to the application of this principle of 32 THOUGHTS. natural law, — that is, in regard to the extent of the education to be provided for all at the public expense, — some differences of opinion may fairly exist, under different political organizations ; but under a republican government, it seems clear that the minimum of this education can never be less than such as is sufficient to qualify each citizen for the civil and social duties he will be called to discharge ; — such an education as teaches the indi- vidual the great laws of bodily health ; as qualifies for the fulfilment of parental duties ; as is indispen- sable for the civil functions of a witness or juror; as is necessary for the voter in municipal affairs ; and finally, for the faithful and conscientious dis- charge of all those duties which devolve upon the inheritor of a portion of the sovereignty of this great republic. ORIGIX OF THE WORDS URBANE, POLITE, CIVIL. A PEOPLE cannot pass from a state of bar- barism to one of refinement and civilization without casting off the exterior of rude and rugged manners, as well as by becoming skilful in the arts and learned in the sciences. This change from the coarse to the refined is supposed to have first taken place in cities and in the courts of kings. THOUGHTS. 33 From cities and from courts are derived almost all the words which we now use to express the man- ners of a lady or a gentleman ; while the words which express inelegance and want of refinement are borrowed from the country. Etymologically, the words urbane and urhanity are derived from a Latin word signifying a city ; while their opposites, rustic and rusticity, signify qualities which were supposed to belong to the country. The word -polite, also, has a derivation precisely similar, though it comes from another language ; while impolite means something unlike the city. Civility, in the same way, is an abstract term, derived from the manners of city residents ; incivility, from those who resided elsewhere. So courtesy was borrowed from the court, and indicates the elegance of man- ners, the complaisance and the kindness which belong to a true gentleman or lady. But, since the signification and use of these and similar words have become fixed, great changes have takerf place. On the one hand, refinement has often run into a hateful fastidiousness, while the spirit of true politeness and civility has evapo- rated, leaving nothing but heartless conventionalism behind ; and, as a natural consequence, an adhe- rence to certain arbitrary forms, in the intercourse 3 . 34 THOUGHTS. of life, has been deemed of more value than benevo- lence and sincerity. On the other hand, the con- dition of the masses has been greatly improved. In many nations they have been elevated from the state of serfs and slaves to the enjoyment of a few natural and civil rights, and occasionally they have been allowed to exercise political franchises. In our own country, the whole people, by a single revolutionary act, have declared themselves to be freemen and sovereigns ; as freemen, repudiating all foreign authority, and as sovereigns, assuming the exclusive right to govern themselves. If, then, "with us, every man calls himself a citizen, his con- duct should be characterized by civility ; and if all the people, by virtue of their political franchises, are sovereigns, and have a right of presentation at court, the manners of all should be stamped with courtesy. INFLUENCE OF A GOOD TEACHER. TO save a considerable portion of the rising generation from falling back into the condi- tion of half-civilized or savage life, Avhat other in- strumentality does society afford than to send into every obscure and hidden district in the state a young man or a young woman, whose education is THOUGHTS. 35 sound ; whose language is well-selected ; whose pronunciation and tones of voice are correct and attractive ; whose manners are gentle and refined ; all whose topics of conversation are elevating and instructive ; whose benignity of heart is constantly- manifested in acts of civility, courtesy and kind- ness ; and who spreads a nameless charm over whatever circle may be entered. Such a person should the teacher of every common school be. Such a teacher, by associating with the children of the school for a considerable portion of the time each day ; by remaining with them for weeks and months successively ; by having an opportunity to observe their conduct towards each other, and thus to become acquainted with their various disposi- tions ; by gaining access to their minds through the delightful medium of instruction ; — and, finally, by prolonging this relationship through all the suscep- tive and impressible years of childhood and youth, — such a teacher, so ftir as it may be in the power of any mortal agency to do it, may mould the habits and manners of the rising generation into the pleasing forms of propriety and decorum, and, by laying their foundations in the principles of jus- tice, magnanimity, and affection, may give them an ever-during permanence. w 36 TU OUGHTS. SOURCE OF THE WEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS. HENCE comes the wealth of Massachusetts? I do not mean the gorgeous wealth which is displayed in the voluptuous and too often enervating residences of the affluent, but that golden mean of property, — such as Agar asked for in his perfect prayer, — which carries blessings in its train to thousands of householders ; which spreads solid comfort and competence through the dwellings of the land ; which furnishes the means of instruction, of social pleasures and refinement, to the citizens at large ; Avhich saves from the cruel temptations of penury. The families scattered over her hills and along her valleys have not merely a shelter from the inclemencies of the seasons, but the sanc- tuary of a home. Not only food, but books, are spread upon their tables. Her commonest houses have the means of hospitality ; they have appliances for sickness, and resources laid up against accident and the infirmities of age. "Whether in her rural districts or her populous towns, a wandering, native-born beggar is a prodigy, and the eleven millions of dollars deposited in her Savings Insti- tutions do not more loudly proclaim the frugality and providence of the past, than they foretell the competence and enjoyments of the future. THOUGHTS. 37 One copious, exhaustless fountain supplies all this abundance. It is education — the intellectual, moral, and religious education of the people. Having no other mines to work, Massachusetts has mined into the human intellect, and from its limitless resources she has won more sustaining and enduring prosperity and happiness, than if she had been founded on a stratification of silver and gold, reaching deeper down than geology has yet penetrated. From her high religious convictions she has learned this great lesson — to set a value upon time. Regarding the faculties as the gift of God, she has felt bound both to use and to improve them. Verily, verily, not as we ought have we obeyed the laws of Jehovah, or imitated the divine ex- ample of the Savior ; and yet, for such imperfect obedience and distant imitation as we have ren- dered, God has showered down manna from the heavens, and opened a rock whence flow living waters to gladden every thirsty place. GOD SAID, ''LET THERE BE LIGHT:' MAGNIFICENT indeed was the material cre- ation when, suddenly blazing forth in mid- space, the new-born sun dispelled the darkness of the ancient night. But infinitely more magnificent 38 THOUGHTS. is it when the human soul rays forth its subtler and swifter beams ; when the light of the senses irra- diates all outward things, revealing the beauty of their colors and the exquisite symmetry of their proportions and forms ; when the light of reason penetrates to their invisible properties and laws, and displays all those hidden relations that make up all the sciences ; when the light of conscience illumines the moral world, separating truth from error, and virtue from vice. The light of the newly-kindled sun, indeed, was glorious. It struck upon all the planets, and waked into existence their myriad capacities of life and joy. As it rebounded from them, and showed other vast orbs, all wheel- ing, circle beyond circle, in their stupendous courses, the sons of God shouted for joy. That light sped onward, beyond Sirius, beyond the Pole-Star, be- yond Orion and the Pleiades, and is still speeding onward into the abysses of space. But the light of the human soul flies swifter than the light of the sun, and outshines its meridian blaze. It can em- brace not only the sun of our system, but all suns and galaxies of suns ; ay ! the soul is capable of knowing and enjoying Him who created the suns themselves ; and when those starry lustres that now glorify the firmament shall wax dim, and fade away THOUGHTS. 39 like a wasted taper, the light of the soul shall still remain ; nor time, nor cloud, nor any power but its own perversity, shall ever quench its briglitness. Whenever a human soul is born into the world, God stands over it, and pronounces the sublime fiat, " Let there be light ! " And may the time soon come when all human governments shall cooperate with the divine government in carrying this benediction and baptism into fulfilment. " THE CHILD IS FATHER OF THE MAN." TAKE the infant now in your arms, and train it jyhysicaUy. It is now well formed, full of mus- cular powers, compacted of elastic fibres. Its body is like a close-woven tissue of well-tempered steel springs. What a magazine of energies is a little babe ! What strength, what robustness, what celerity, are in him ! How many journeys, across continents if need be, on errands of mercy and love, may lie snugly packed away in those little feet ! Look at those little hands, now seeming so empty and impotent. Yet what mechanical con- trivances may come from them ; what new steam engines, power presses, telescopes ; what treasures of goods, and garments, and gold, for almsgiving, for charitable distributions, for founding hospitals, 40 THOUGHTS. schools, universities, for sending boon and blessing to other lands and climes ! From between that little right thumb and finger, what volumes may flow out — poetry, history, philosophy, ethics ! In those yet inarticulating lips, what tones and speeches of kind- ness and love, sweeter than ever came from lyre or lute, clearer than ever came from clarion, sounding ten thousand times farther than any that ever pealed from organ or orchestra, penetrating through all the recesses of the heart, and carrying benediction and joy into all its depths ; what orations, what sermons, what advocacy of the right that shall ransom the wronged, what thunders against the oppressor that shall break the captive's chains ! May not all these stand behind that vocal appa- ratus, as it were behind a curtain, ready, when the occasions come, to leap into performance and con- summation? Now, what shall be done with all these exquisitely wrought instruments, with these marvellous powers and capabilities ? Shall they be mutilated, destroyed, like Orient pearl and gem in the hands of a false lapidary? Or shall they be cultivated, trained, evolved into the fulness of life, changed from the possible into the actual, from the capacity into the reality ? Shall they not be rescued from all doubt and fear, and pass beyond hope, and THOUGHTS. 41 be securely fixed and uncbangeable in blessed, im- mortal, indestructible truth and history, for the coming ages to rejoice in? A NEW RACE. THE gay, guileless, thoughtless young ! The young, ignorant, yet needing all knowledge to save them from harm ; thoughtful only of the pres- ent moment, yet embarked on the voyage of eternity ; too careless to save a toy, yet intrusted with un- limited treasures ; blind, though environed with perils ; as unconscious of the glorious enthusiasm or of the terrible passions that lie sleeping in their bosoms, as is the cloud of the tempest and the lightning which it inwraps in its folds, — it is of these precious, immortal beings, that we say, Here is a new race ; begin once more ! STUDY OF ASTRONOMY. ASTRONOMY is one of the sublimest fields of human investigation. The mind that grasps its facts and principles receives something of the enlargement and grandeur belonging to the science itself. It is a quickener of devotion. All its prob- lems and its truths not only expand the intellect, but they are effusive of a religious influence. 42 THOUGHTS. EDUCATION IX A REPUBLIC. IN many of the more enlightened yet arbitrary governments of Europe, where the great doc- trines of human rights are dimly seen in theory, and still more dimly recognized in practice, a dis- tinction prevails in regard to the education of the community at large, which should be sedulously excluded from a republican system. According to this distinction, all the avocations of men naturally arrange themselves under three heads. The first class embraces all those industrial employments where we act with material instruments upon material things — with matter upon matter. This includes all mere manual laborers, — the hewers of wood, the drawers of water, ditchers, delvcrs, &c. In the second class are comprised all those who act by mind upon matter — the master mason, or architect, head machinists, head miners, forest- ers, engineers, &c. The third class are those who act by mind upon mind — the orator, the poet, historian, statesman, &c. Different courses of edu- cation are projected to meet the supposed necessity of these different grades. But how incongruous and absurd are these notions among a people by the theory of whose institutions the chief magistracy of the state or of the nation is open to the poorest boy that is born in the land ! THOUGHTS. 43 THE LUIITATIOXS OF EDUCATION. ACCORDING to the highest views of educa- tion, but few are educated. Alas ! such is the truth — the melancholy, incontestable truth. The past history and the present condition of the world — intemperance, w^ar, slavery, bigotry, pride, uncharitableness, self-seeking — prove it to be true. But what is the moral conclusion from these admitted premises? Surely not that we should despair, but that we should labor, that we should aganize with laboring. The present con- dition of the race is as much below attainable perfection as it is above possible abasement. The empyrean above is as much without a dome that shall forbid our ascent, as the abyss below is with- out a bottom that shall arrest our fall. In mid-space we stand. Ascent and descent are equally open to us. THE EDUCATED AND THE UNEDUCATED MAN. BOTH the educated and the uneducated man stand in the same material universe ; the same heavens bend over them, and the same earth stretches out beneath their feet. Upon the eye of each descends the light of the same sun and the same stars, and their ears are forever open to the 44 THOUGHTS. same harmonies of nature. Yet, while the one rec- ognizes the overwhehning proofs of the power, and the wisdom, and the goodness of God, the other is blind amidst the splendors of the universe, and deaf to that perpetual chorus of praise which ascends from all created things to their Creator. DOES INTELLECTUAL POWER MAKE A MAN VIRTU oust A MAN, who, like an inebriate, an epicure, or a libertine, avails himself of the arts and powers of civilization to gratify his appetites and passions, is neither a civilized man nor a barbarian. He is a sub-barbarian. His place in the scale of human- ity is to be measured from barbarism downwards. Considering barbarism as zero^ we must measure oiF the degrees of his degradation by counting netherwards. WHAT IS EDUCATION? A MAN is not educated because he buys a book ; he is not educated because he reads a book, though it should be the very best book that ever was written, and should enumerate and unfold all the laws of God. He only is educated who prac- tises according to the laws of God. THOUGHTS. 45 UNIVERSAL EDUCATION. IN a government like ours, each individual must think of the Avelfare of the state, as well as of the welfare of his own family, and therefore of the children of others as well as his own. It becomes, then, a momentous question whether the children in our schools are educated in reference to themselves and their private interests only, or with a regard to the great social duties and prerogatives that await them in after life. Are they so educated that when they grow up they will make better Christians, or only grander savages? for, however loftily the in- tellect of man may have been gifted, however skil- fully it may have been trained, if it be not guided by a sense of justice, a love of mankind, and a devotion to duty, its possessor is only a more splen- did, as he is a more dangerous barbarian. PURITY OF CHILDHOOD. WHATEVER views we may take of the nature of children, — and the controverted questions on this subject we studiously avoid, — it is still certain that they are born into a world whose prac- tices are less upright and pure than their sentiments. The conscience of society is far less tremblingly alive to injustice and impurity than the consciences 46 THOUGHTS. of children. As the moral tone of the community now is, children have not a fair chance to become moral men. Their better instincts are overborne by the force of the examples they witness, and what- ever upward tendencies they have towards right and truth are drawn downwards by the powerful gravi- tation of vicious manners and customs. POWER OVER EVIL MEN: ALL the powers of the mightiest nation can never prevent bad men from doing wrong. The only way to diminish the amount of wrong in the world is to diminish the number of bad men. I conclude, therefore, that every philanthropic and Christian view which we can take of the question, How shall our educational resources be distributed ? points to a distribution of them which shall afford, as nearly as possible, an equality of advantages for all. GREATNESS NOT DEPENDENT UPON THE SPHERE OF ACTION. IT matters nothing what the particular duties are to which the individual is called — how minute or obscure in their outward form. Greatness, in God's sight, lies not in the extent of the sphere that is filled, or of the efiect which is produced, THOUGHTS. 47 but altogether in the power of virtue in the soul, in the energy with which God's will is chosen, with which trial is borne, and goodness is loved and preserved. TO BOYS. Do not trouble the birds. Let them sing and fly without fear from you. Do not kill them, do not catch and imprison them. Let them go abroad in all the joyousness of their brief sum- mer's life. If you wish for something to do in the spring days, dig a hole in some suitable place by the road-side, three or four feet across and a foot and a half deep ; tlirow back part of the earth ; then go into the fields or woods, catch a wild tree, the prettiest you can find, and fasten its roots care- fully in the cage that you have made for them, and your children's children, or the poor wayfaring man, a century hence, may thank you for the shade which you have provided. Is not this better than catching birds ? READ ALWAYS. RESOLVE to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year. 48 THOUGHTS. GREATXESS OF HEART. A BOY'S heart is not like his vest or his jacket^ which would split open if he should grow into a man in five minutes. The heart may be very small, — so small as only to embrace one's self in its thoughts and desires ; — this makes a very mean, selfish person. The heart may be enlarged so as to embrace a town ; — this makes a good townsman. Or it may take in one's whole nation ; — this makes a patriot. Or it may take in all mankind ; — this makes a philanthropist. Or it may embrace in its affections the whole universe and the great Creator of it ; — this makes one godlike. And all the way, let me tell you, from the narrowest limit to the vastest expansion, its happiness will be in propor- tion to its enlargement. THE DOOR TO THE TEMPLE. THE creation is a museum, all full, and crowded with wonders and beauties and glories. One door, and one only, is open, by which you can enter this magnificent temple. It is the door of Knowl- edge. The learned laborer, the learned peasant, or slave, is ever made welcome at this door, while the ignorant, though kings, are shut out. THOUGHTS. 49 " WITHOUT GOD IX THE WOULD." THERE is no other conceivable privation to be compared with an ignorance of our Creator. If a man be blind, he but loses the outward light. If a man be deaf, he but loses music and the sweet converse of friends. If a man be bereaved of com- panions, and the nearest and dearest kindred are plucked from his bosom, — if he be persecuted and imprisoned, and torn limb from limb, by the hatred and malice of men, — he is only beneath a temporary cloud, which will pass away like the vapor of the morning. But if he is "without God," he is a wanderer and a solitary in the universe, with no haven or hope before him when beaten upon by the storms of fate ; with no home or sanctuary to flee to, though all the spirits of darkness should have made him their victim. DUTY A HAPPIXESS. IN vain do they talk of happiness who never subdued an impulse in obedience to a principle. He who never sacrificed a present to a future good, or a personal to a general one, can speak of happi- ness only as the blind do of colors. 50 THOUGUTS. THE MOST IMPOBTAXT THIXGS THE MOST COMMOX. A BENEFICENT Providence has ordained that what is most essential may be most easily acquired. Health is more essential than astron- omy, and therefore its laws are more easily learned. Common sense is better than genius, and hence its bestowment is more universal. Society might sub- sist and enjoy a good degree of happiness without any knowledge of the learned languages, or of the higher mathematics, but it cannot endure, in any tolerable state, without honesty ; and therefore hon- esty may be more cheaply and universally incul- cated than Latin or Greek or the differential calculus. In the benign order of the creation, necessities are first provided for, — embellish- ments, superfluities, luxuries, afterwards, if at all. IXTELLECT. THE intellect is the light of the mind. The appetites, impulses, affections, sentiments, — whatever we please to call them, — have their otjects of desire ; but they know not how to obtain them. The intellect points out or devises the means by which their ends can be reached. They inform the intellect what they want ; the intellect THOUGHTS. 51 discerns and adopts the measures necessary to their gratification. The intellect performs the oflice of a pilot ; but what shall become of the vessel and its treasures, if the pilot is blind? PLEASURES OF KNOWLEDGE. AN attempt to describe the uses, pleasures, blessings of knowledge, would be like an attempt to clasp the huge earth around in our arms ; — we should fail, not because there is no earth, but because of its vastness. When the Pennsylvania Dutchman said that all he wanted his boys to know was, how to count a hundred dollars and to row a boat to New Orleans, he did not think that if others had not known vastly more than this, there would have been no dollars to count, nor New Orleans to go to. THE VALUE OF KNOWLEDGE. WHEN a ship has been driven by adverse winds and currents until her path is wound into a coil, and crossed and tangled in inextricable confusion, it is knowledge alone which can lift the sextant to the skies, and tell, within a hand-breadth, on what spot in the waste of waters, in what direc- 52 THOUGHTS. tion, and how far from home, the wanderer may be. SKILLED LABOR. AN ancient historian relates that the mere labor of raising the stones which compose the great pyramid of Egypt, and fastening them in their proper places, occupied one hundred thousand men for twenty years ; and this number was exclusive of those who were employed in hewing and trans- porting the materials. It has been calculated that the same labor might be performed by thirty- six thousand men using the steam-engines of Eng- land in a single day ; that is, by about one third of the number of men in less than one six-thou- sandth part of the time. It is true that it would cost something to build the engines, but their value would hardly be lessened by a single day's work. THE IXFINITE AND THE FINITE. GOD can speak whatever he will into existence, but man must work into existence whatever good he desires. And hence the necessity, not merely of a general aim or resolve to effect a noble object, but of learning or devising the means by which it can be attained. THOUGHTS. 63 HUM Ay NATURE A PROBLEM. AMONG all the works of God, there is nothing so heterogeneous and self-contradictory as the nature of man. That figment of the ancients was an inadequate, though a just representation even of jx good man, Avhich likened him to a charioteer drawn by steeds, one of whom had wings by which he would soar to heaven, while the weight of his fellow held him to the earth. Under all the influ- ences which human art, and nature, and Provi- dence shed around us, it is the work of education to reduce these conflicting powers to harmonious action. Let us not deny that, with the aids which Heaven vouchsafes to all who seek for them, the appetites and propensities of the young can be subjected to the restraints of reason and con- science. PARENTAL INFLUENCE. DR. FRANKLIN attributed much of his prac- tical turn of mind — which w^as the salient point of his immortality — to the fact that his father, in his conversations before the family, always discussed some useful subject, or developed some just principle of individual or social action, 54 THOUGHTS. instead of talking forever about trout-catching or grouse-shooting, about dogs, dinners, dice, or trumps. LANGUAGE. SOME languages are musical in themselves, so that it is pleasant to hear any one read or con- verse in them, even though we do not understand a word that we hear. Such is the Italian. Oth- ers are full of growling, snarling, hissing sounds, as though wild beasts and serpents had first taught the people to speak. Such, to a painful extent, are those of the Saxon stock, from which the greater part of our own i^ derived. A few poets, how- ever, by their wonderful powers of culling and collocating, have been able to tune the jaggy hoarseness of the English throat, horrid with croak and gutturalness, into the sweet utterance of many a page of gently-flowing verse, musical with swell and cadence of melodious sounds. When the language is unmusical, the only remaining beauty with which we can invest it is that of a distinct articulation. Nothing is more painful to a culti- vated and delicate ear, than the jargon which has the harshness of the adult's voice, with the inar- ticulateness of the infant's. THOUGHTS. 55 LEARN OF THE BIRDS. IN learning to read, we might derive a lesson from the mocking-birds. If, in learning to sing the songs of other birds, they fall into a mis- take, in a moment the gush of sound is checked, and they go back, again and again if necessary, until they catch and can repeat — and verbatim et literatim — the notes they aspire to imitate. They also practise long and faithfully, and they have wisdom enough to do this when they are young. Speaking of the ferruginous mocking-bird, Audu- bon says, " It sings well. The young begin their musical studies in autumn, re pleating pas- sages with as much zeal as ev^er did Paganini. It scarcely possesses the faculty of imitation, but is a steady performer.^' These birds begin their studies young, in the autumn of the year in which they are hatched, and before the silken and flexible fibres of their throats toughen into whalebone. They repeat, innumerable times, what they hear, and the development of their "full powers of song " is not reached until after long application. IMPORTANCE OF HEALTH. SOUNDNESS of heahh is preliminary to the highest success in any pursuit. In every 56 THOUGHTS. industrial avocation it is an indispensable element, and the highest intellectual eminence can never be reached without it. It exerts a powerful influence over feelings, temper, and disposition, and through these upon moral character. Yet, incredible as it may seem, the means of acquiring vigor, endur- ance, quickness, have been sought for, not by the clergyman, the lawyer, the artist, the cultivator of letters, the mother, but by the wrestler, the buf- foon, the runner, the opera-dancer. There are ten professors of pugilism in our community to one of physical education in our seminaries of learning. MAX IS FEARFULLY AND WOXDERFULLT MADE. WITH what a variety of sounds does the nerve of hearing, — a little soft cord, two inches long, and not larger than a straw — make us acquainted ! No arithmetic can compute the num- ber of sounds which come from the hum or chirp of insects, from the song of birds, from the occu- pations, the speech, or the music of men, from the voices of animals, from trees and streams, from the ocean and the air, — and yet with what facility and distinctness does this bit of nervous matter communicate the whole to the mind, so that we can readily assort or unravel these sounds, and refer THOUGHTS. 57 each to its true organ ; and all this is effected without any artificial change of stops or keys. THE MORAL FACULTIES SUPREME. AS indications of the supremacy of the moral faculties, and as a measure of their success, we use the terms Civilization and Christianity. But these terms are most vaguely used. If sub- jected to the least rigorous definition, they can import nothing less than a knowledge of the laws of God., and an obedience to them. It matters not, in any good sense, what men profess ; it matters not what books, or institutions, or revelations they may have inherited ; the same question forever recurs ; Do they know the loill of God, and do they obey it ? Judged by the standard of knowledge and obedience, how far is the best nation in the world, at the present time, authorized to call itself civil- ized or Christian? CIVILIZATION. IT is in the sphere of the intellect alone that men are becoming really civilized. Here they have learned some of the laws of God, as expressed in nature, and they do obey them. And how magnificent are the rewards ! How the crude sub- 58 THOUGHTS. stances of nature are changed into comfort, beauty, and blessedness ! . . . From the first and few rudi- mentary lessons which the intellect has learned, and learned to practise too, from the great volume of God's will, has proceeded this vast- multiplication of our comforts, embellishments, and means of progress, just as naturally as a bird comes out of an egg. MORAL GROWTH. WHY should the student be taught that, in dynamics, the power must be greater than the inertia, and in statics, that the resistance must be equal to the pressure ; and yet not be taught, so as to feel a far livelier consciousness of its truth, that the quantum of energy must exceed the maxi- mum of obstacle, or no heroic enterprise will ever be achieved, and that moral principle must grow as temptation grows, or we are swept to ruin? THE REMEDY FOR EVIL. THE more I see of our present civilization, and of the only remedies for its evils, the more I dread intellectual eminence, when separated from virtue. AVe are in a sick world, for whose mala- dies the knowledge of truth, and obedience to it, are the only healing. THOUGHTS. 69 STUDY OF SCIEXCE. A SCIENCE approximates perfection only as it more nearly exhausts all the truths which belong to that science in the constitution of things. No science wil^be perfect until all the truths which God has wrought with the subject of it are re- vciiled. PRIXCIPLES OF SCIEXCE. WE know not how many sciences are yet to be discovered whose seminal principle still re- mains unknown. But from the fact that new sciences are constantly added to the radiant circle of knowledge, and that the sciences already culti- vated are daily enriched by the addition of new truths, we seem to be pre-assured of the existence of an infinite number of truths which still await the working power of human genius. To use an astronomical illustration, I would say, that new constellations of truth are daily discovered in the firmament of knowledge, and new stars are daily shining forth in each constellation. W TRUTHS OF SCIEXCE. lAT an inconceivable number of truths is comprised in the science of zoology, em- 60 THOUGHTS. bracing the structure, instincts, habits, and races of animals, from the insect that lives but an hour in the summer's warmth, to the eagle of a century ; from the animalcule, undiscernible by the naked eye, to the lion, the leviathan, or the " half-reason- ing elephant." MENTAL SCIENCE. ALL the sciences, as they relate to matter and time, have the relative meagreness and paucity of matter and time ; while the sciences which be- long to the spirit partake of the number and com- plex relations of that infinitude to which spirit belongs. Such are the mathematical sciences, ac- cording to whose diagrams and formulae the uni- verse seems to have been projected ; for, so far as we yet know, all magnitudes are in precise accord- ance with mathematical proportions ; the substances of chemistry unite together in aliquot parts ; all sounds, from the roar of the thunder-cloud to the tones and semitones of the most delicate instru- ment ; light, heat, electricity, gravitation, motion, — are inwardly governed by mathematical laws ; all planets and suns were weighed in their balance, as the void spaces between them were measured by their line. THOUGHTS. 61 CLASSES OF TRUTHS. SO multifarious are the diiFerent classes of truths, and so multitudinous the truths in each class, that it may be uudoubtingly affirmed that no man has yet lived who could so much as name all the different classes and subdivisions of truths, and far less any one, who was acquainted with all the truths belonging to any one class. What wonderful extent, what amazing variety, what collective magnifi- cence ! And if such be the number of truths per- taining to this tiny ball of earth, how must it be in the incomprehensible immensity ! MULTITUDE OF TRUTHS. SURELY the Creator is not infinite only, but an Infinity of infinities. An earth full, a sky full, a heaven full of truths are around us and be- fore us, upon the extreme margin of which we are but just entering. How can such a world produce a do^^matizer or a h\":oi ! ADVAXTAGE OF KNOWLEDGE. A TON of coal, by means of a locomotive, will transport as great a weight upon a railroad, in a day, as a man could carry on his back in a hun- dred years. This leaves ninety-nine years three hundred and sixty-four days in which to do other b2 THOUGHTS. things ; and in these other things we have learned to gain time in an equal ratio. LA TVS OF THE SOUL. I HAVE endeavored to show, in some slight degree, what benefits knowledge has conferred by developing and appropriating to human uses the powers which are inherent in matter ; but all this is only a faint type, an imperfect emblem, of the bless- ings which will be conferred by a knowledge of the higher order of powers and laws which are inherent in the soul of man. POWERS OF THE MIXD. IT is my design to show that the world has lost even more by not understanding the powers and laws of the mind than was lost by an ignorance of the powers and laws of matter, and that there are obvious and practical uses of the natural powers of the mind which will confer far greater blessedness upon the race than has been conferred by a knowl- edge of astronomy, navigation, chemistry, and all the radiant circle of the useful sciences. ACTIVITIES OF KATURE. THE human soul, like the material universe around us, is instinct with activities ; and these activities are all obedient to an innate law THOUGHTS. 63 impressed upon them by the Creator. Our own consciousness attests that in our own souls there is a spontaneity of action — action uncaused by any precedent volition of ours. There are laws necessitating and determining the association of ideas, which we never formed and can never annul. Tliere are out-darting impulses, which aim and strike so quickly that we see them only by retro- spection. There are rending and upheaving pas- sions, which, ever and anon, explode from some volcanic stratum in our own nature, deeper down than we had ever known before ; and sometimes torrents of feeling and emotion, as resistless and as fathomless as ocean tides. More or less, in all sane men, these activities are directly or indirectly under the control of the will ; in the insane we see their centrifugal force and madness, when they have revolted from the will and cast off its dominion. ACTION OF COXSCIENCE. ACOXSCIEXTIOUS man, subjected by ad- verse fortunes to some vehement temptation, which, day after day, seems more and more to bend his affrighted and struggling conscience to its pur- pose, until with strong and divine resistance he casts off the clinging viper, experiences a change 64 THOUGHTS. through all his soul, as great in kind, if not in degree, as can ever be felt in passing from one world to another. LAWS OF MIND. ALL the mental activities are governed by a law, — a law impressed upon them by the Creator, — just as much as the energies which reside in matter are governed by a law. Each faculty, too, in the spiritual world, has its own law, just as each class of substances has in the material world. In philosophical strictness, or, which is the same thing, in the divine contempla- tion, there is no such thing as chance. A philoso- pher uses the word chance not to denote an effect without a cause, but to denote an effect of whose cause he is ignorant. Both in the philosophical and material world all is power and motion, and wherever there is power or motion there is law to govern it. SPIRITUAL COXniTIOXS. IN the economy of mind it is necessary to know not only the active principle, and the law by which it acts, but also the spiritual conditions by which its waste energies can be reclaimed and THOUGHTS. 65 employed. Circumstances which aatedate birth, the circumstances into which we are born, and the education and training we receive, constitute these conditions ; and, obedient to their sovereignty, a savage nation may be elevated into Christians ; or, through disobedience, a Christian nation may be debased into savages. SOURCE OF SPIRITUAL ERRORS. MEN who make self, instead of Deity, the centre of action, fall into spiritual errors. Now, I believe there is some central point, like that on which Copernicus stood, from which all human studies may be surveyed, and all human duties in- vestigated, and where more can be gained by the intuitions of an hour than can be discovered from a false point of view by the labors of a life. In regard to conduct, this central truth is announced in the golden rule — to do unto others as we would that they should do unto us ; and doubtless the intellect has its golden rules as well as the con- science. Yet in regard to both intellect and con- science, how often do false systems of education, and perverse customs and institutions, seize upon the mind before its powers of reflection are devel- oped, and remove it to some false position ! 5 66 THOUGHTS I VALUE OF TIME. SUPPOSE all children residing in the country, though belonging to families in the narrowest circumstances, might, at the age of sixteen, possess very respectable attainments in geology, mineralogy, and zoology, and know a great deal of botany, entomology, and agricultural chemistry, without ever abstracting one hour from their customary labors, or from the course of common studies which they now pursue ; but only by using the time and the powers which are now wasted, — often worse than wasted. The only conditions to be per- formed for the attainment of such results are, that their parents, older associates and teachers, shall be so full of these kinds of knowledge as constantly to exhale them, filling the air with their fragrance, so that the children shall breathe them in as they now inhale the common air. STUDY OF LANGUAGES. IN the acquisition of languages by direct study, where time can be aiforded for the purpose, it is found that several languages, belonging to the same family, — as the Latin, Italian, and Spanish, for instance, — can be acquired together, almost as easily and rapidly, as either of them can be ac- THOUGHTS. G7 quired separately, and with far less chance of their being lost from the memory by disuse. By finding the roots in the parent tongue, and by tracing the growth from these roots outward into different tongues, as it were genealogically, it is found that they descend and spread according to certain organic laws of modification and growth. It is found that each root bears copious clusters of words, and that each word is modified according to the genius of the language to wliich it belongs ; so that, when we have learned the signification of the root word, in the parent tongue, we perceive by inspection the meaning of the derivative in the atiJliated tongue. ASSOCIATION- OF IDEAS. THE law of the association of ideas is, as yet, as far from accomplishing those beneficent ends for wiiich the Creator implanted it in the human mind, as steam was on the day when the Marquis of Worcester caught the idea of its power, from seeing it throw off the lid of a tea-kettle, and before Savery, Newcomen, Watt, and Fulton made it dig coal, weave cloth, grind corn, and bring all nations and continents into one small neighbor- hood. 68 THOUGHTS. rO TVER OF ELOQ UEXCE. WHATEVER we may see, or hear, or read, that faculty of our minds, which, from nature, education, or habit, is the strongest, seizes and expatiates upon the parts most congenial to itself. When an audience of a thousand men, of diverse tastes, of hostile creeds, and of conflicting desires, are, as it were, uplifted from the earth by the might and majesty of eloquence, and are wafted onward together through the clear, upper heaven of Sublime and beautiful thoughts, — their minds all glowing with the same intellectual delights, their hearts all ravished by the same moral en- chantments, their pulses all responsively beating to the same harmonious music, — it is nothing but the breaking away of each mind, for the time being, from the fastenings of those habitual associations, which at other times bind it to its monotonous, mill-horse circle of thought. PHILOSOPHY OF IXSAXITT. PROBABLY most, if not all of those whom we call demoniacs, are men some one or more of whose passions have, by an indefinite number of repetitions, risen into resistless strength ; until, overmastering every other power, they bind their THOUGHTS. 69 victim to the fiery car of madness, and bear him away into the dark reahns of insanity, like that reinless and untamed steed that fled with Mazeppa into the wilderness. ERROR COXTAGIOUS. THE mischief of giving a child an erroneous principle of action, or habit of association, is not to be measured by taking the dimensions of that one error. Xo error is infused into the young mind, to lie there dormant, or to be reproduced only when the subject of thought or action recurs to which the error belongs ; but the error becomes a model or archetype, after whose likeness the ac- tive powers of the mind create a thousand other errors. Some leading idea in our minds being the mould in which our new views are cast, it becomes of inconceivable importance what those patterns or formative ideas are. TEACHIXGS OF HISTORY. AS yet the instinct of imitation seems to have produced nearly as much evil as good ; because the examples given by the aged to the young, by men who occupy the high places in society to their social inferiors, and by the great 70 THOUGHTS. teacher, History, to the great school. Posterity, have been oftener evil than good. They who set an example make a highway. Others follow the example, because it is easier to travel on a high- way than over untrodden grounds. As the mind becomes habituated to travel in the great thorough- fares which example makes, it seems even unnatural to leave them. The daughter, taught by example to expend her whole capacities of admiration on dress, equipage, and manners, when she arrives at a mar- riageable age, will probably worship the Nash or Brummel of her caste, though the ten command- ments lie in fragments about him. TBE LAW OF CAUSE AND EFFECT. THERE is an inherent power or law of the mind which we are but just beginning to learn how to use, — I mean the power or law which makes us ask the cause of whatever we see. Every event in this world is the effect of some precedent cause, and also the cause of some subsequent effect. Every event is linked, at one end, to a chain reach- ing forward into eternity. Myriads of the chains of causes and effects coexist. They lie, as it were, side by side, and layer upon layer, — sometimes running on parallel to each other, sometimes a THOUGHTS. 71 thousand causes converging to one event, and again, one event diverging or branching out into a thou- sand others. In each case, if each cause were different, the effect would be different. A" SUPERSTITION NATURAL. MONG a savage people, a pestilence chances 1\. to be stayed, after human sacrifices ; and hence, whenever a pestilence rages, the anger of the gods must be appeased by human sacrifices again. Now, the authors of all these follies and cruelties were instinctively right in believing a cause to exist for each event. To this the law of their minds compelled them. But they were all wrong in their designation of the antecedent, casual fact. The mind, by its involuntary action, gener- alized these fortuitous connections into universal laws ; and what floods, ocean-deep, of the direful miseries of superstition and barbarity, have, in consequence of these errors, been poured upon the world ! CAUSE AND EFFECT. 11IIR0UGH the want of a clear perception and . strong conviction of the indissoluble bond be- tween causes and effects, — that is, how the future grows out of the present, — we are prone to seek 72 THOUGHTS. immediate pleasure or good, however small, rather than remote pleasure or good, however vast. REFLECTION-— PERCEPTION. AS it regards the intellectual man, nothing en- larges or diminishes his power and useful- ness more than the predominance of the reflective over the perceptive faculties, or that of the percep- tive over the reflective. The reflective man is immeasurably superior to the perceptive one. His analysis is always deeper, so that he not only shows his antagonist to have been wrong, but shallow as well as wrong. I would not say a word against the cultivation of the perceptive powers ; but it is most desirable that the reflective ones should main- tain the ascendency. The true ofiice of the former is to supply materials for the latter to work upon. INFLUENCES OF CITY AND COUNTRY. IN the city, owing to the endless variety of inter- esting objects which are presented to the senses, the perceptive faculties are more cultivated ; in the country, the reflective or reasoning. It has been said, a thousand times, that if the health and ro- bustness of the country were not regularly trans- ferred into the city, the population of the latter THOUGHTS. 73 would soon die out. The remark would be as true in regard to intellect and power as to physical stamina. TEMPERA ME NT. WHETHER a man has one temperament or another, is described all over him, — in his hair, in his eyes, in his complexion, in the style of his features, and in the firmness or sponginess of his flesh. I say, therefore, the proofs of a man's temperament are written all over him. He cannot help himself, any more than a horse can help show- ing how old he is by his teeth, or an ox by his horns, or a rattlesnake by his rattles. We know, too, that there is such a thing as a natural lan- guage, which is more truthful and unambiguous than the English language, or any other that was ever invented. This natural language consists in the peculiar tones of the voice, in the expression of the countenance, and in the gestures, the air and carriage, of a man, — all betokening the spirit within. These outward signs declare what thoughts and emotions have made up the inward history of our lives ; they declare what thoughts and emotions we are now indulging, and what, probably, we shall continue to indulge. 74 THOUGHTS. KATUEAL LANGUAGE. COMMON emotions, no less than tragic pas- sions, have their proofs, although it is not every man to whom these proofs are legible. But it no more follows that these proofs do not exist, because all men are not able to recognize them, than it does that there are not different species in botany or zoology, because all men are not able to distinguish one species from another. The common observer knows only si few different kinds of fishes. But had any dried bone, belonging to any variety in the whole class of mammalia, been shown to Cuvier, from the inspection of that bone he could construct the whole animal to which it belonged, and tell whether it lived upon flesh or grass. Let a single, solitary scale of a fish be shown to Agas- siz, and he will make a picture of the whole fish to which the scale originally belonged. By tokens and testimonies still more numerous, he who under- stands the laws of temperament, and can read the natural language of man, can decipher their origi- nal tendencies, and learn, to a great extent, their present character THOUGHTS. 75 XA TUBE' S AD VEll TISEMEXTS. BY the temperament, which indicates the degree of activity ; by the natural Language, which is a hundred fold polygraph ; and by the size of the organ, which is one of the measures of power, every man advertises what he is ; and unlike com- mon advertisements, liis are true, for the hand of nature has written them. PUNISHMENT SELF-IXFLICTED. BY the laws of society, penalties for the commis- sion of crime are denounced upon our outward condition, — upon our property, life, reputation, liberty. By the law of God working in the soul, guilt revolutionizes the motions of the soul itself. The evils which society denounces may happen or they may not happen ; for the infliction depends upon the vigilance of the police, the incorruptibility of magistrates, and the power of the executive arm. What God denounces, must come, for his laws are self-executing ; nor speed nor midnight can save us from their vengeance. Yet for ages, moralists and divines, the guides and teachers of mankind, have used up the common air in pro- claiming the outward, remote, or uncertain conse- quences of criminality. Even now the moral 76 THOUGHTS. instructions of the school and family, and the re- li«>-ious exhortations of the sacred desk, consist mainly in portraying the terrors of outward, dis- tant retribution, until every one at all observant of society sees, that the prevalent notion among men is, that a criminal, so far as this world is concerned, remains substantially unharmed while his crime remains unknown. The ideas of perpetration and of instant suffering and loss are sundered and sep- arated. The ideas of detection and suffering are associated and linked together. Hence, so far, children and men are educated away from and out of the great truth, that the main evil of guilt is in- ternal and instantaneous ; that by an inherent law of the soul, punishment is not postponed until the guilty act is discovered, but bursts with instant •wrath upon the offender's head, as soon as the offending deed is done. GUILT TRAXSFORMS. VOLUNTARY guilt changes all the" involuntary operations of the soul itself. It dissolves the coherence of former associations, and recombines, on a new principle, every idea and emotion that rises in the mind. It fills the imagination' \vith lying interpreters, and sends the lightning courses THOUGHTS. 77 of fear up and down through every avenue of feel- ing. Else why does the criminal, who can prepare his plans with so much sagacity beforehand, betray himself so like an idiot afterwards ? Why does a culprit's blood congeal if a leaf rustles ? Does he will or wish that it should congeal? Why hears he perpetually the sound of pursuing footsteps? Does he desire to hear them? In the midst of a happy family, why does the simple story of inno- cence avenged, which claims unsought rejoicings from all other hearts, pour lava through his own? The will has no agency in these inflictions. Nature begets the scorpions. Her laws overcome volition, and mock at it. CAUSES OF ALIEXATIOX BETWEEX SCJEXCE AXD ItELIGIOX. IN every instance where science has revealed a new truth which conflicted, not with the Bible, but with the current interpretations of the Bible, — instead of inquiring whether the alleged discoveries were or were not true, many clergymen have de- nounced it, and poured vengeance upon its sup- porters. Hence a disastrous alienation has ensued between science and religion ; or rather, between the disciples of science and the ministers of religion ; 78 THOUGHTS. for between true science and true religion there can never be any conflict. As all truth is from God, it necessarily follows that true science and true re- ligion can never be at variance. The works of o God, and the providence of God, can never conflict with any revelation from God. HAltMOXT OF NATURE. THERE is an inexorable necessity that all true religion and all true science should be harmo- nious. There can never be a discordant tone or undertone between them. Hence all science, rightly considered, has a religious aspect. It is not more fitted to delight the intellect by the perfectness of its laws, than it is to excite veneration for its Author, for their divine justice, wisdom, and beneficence. Indeed, I go farther than this. I maintain that the constantly recurring revelations of science are a great religious desideratum in this age of the world. MIRACLES I KNOW not how those who think the days of miracles have gone by, can expect to keep up to its former height that flow of vivid religious emotions, that sennment of the continued presence THOUGHTS. 79 and agency of the Deity, Avliich was once sustained by the constant recurrence of real or supposed miracles, over the whole world and amongst all nations, in any other way than by supplying their place, as far as it can be done, with the God-pro- claiming revelations of science. Everybody knows that, since the general prevalence of the belief that God has ceased to interfere with the order of nature in the affairs of the natural world, the idea of His perpetual presence and administration has gradu- ally receded from the minds of men. Is it not desirable to reinstate this idea by all legitimate means? and do not all discoveries in science tend strongly to do so, by giving us new and lively ex- amples of a God working in wisdom and beneficence all around us and within us ? It is of unspeakable importance, then, that the priests of religion should be scientific men. It is equally important that the professors of science should be religious men. Each cause loses its right arm Avhen separated from the other. If fraternized in spirit, and cooperating in action, science would kneel with religion in the church, and religion would share with science the laurels of the academy. 80 THOUGHTS. n ELI G I OX OF XATURE. WHEN we observe the needle of tlie mariner, Avitliout visible organ, or sense, or faculty, pointiug with a trembling and pious fidelity to the unseen pole, and guiding, not one favored people only, but all nations, at all times, across a wilder- ness of waters, so that a ship sails forth from one shore and strikes the narrowest inlet or bay on the other side of the globe, why ought we not to be filled with an awe as reverential and as religious as though we had seen the pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night, which led the children of Israel in their journey through the wilderness? SPIRITUAL WRECKS. TFIERE are no wrecks of things so precious as those which lie at the bottom of the spiritual ocean. The serfs of Europe, the vassals and Pariahs of Oriental despotism, the barbarians of Africa, have lived and died, scarcely leaving any more trace behind them than their contemporary swarms of insects in the marshes of the Nile or the Ganges. THE TRUE GREAT MEX. THERE has been an order of men, — the real magnates of the earth, the mighty priesthood of truth, the more than prophets, — the producers^ — THOUGHTS. 81 of human welfare, who have come forth from their deep communion with nature, as Moses came down from the mount, radiant with holy light, and bear- ing in their hands the tablets of the eternal law. They have learned some words of that language wherewith Omnipotence commands the universe ; and when they utter these words, whether to the flaming sky, or to the cavern's depth, consenting nature hears and obeys. By these men the world has been taught a new truth, — that just so far as we imitate God in his knowledge and his goodness, he invests us with his power. In the presence of true science and religion, the mighty elements with- out us, and the mightier, fiercer elements within, become tractable and docile. They obey the voice of wisdom as a flock obeys the voice of its shepherd. RIPEXESS OF MEN. As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is edu- cated GOD'S LAWS. WE put things in order; God does the rest. Lay an iron bar east and west, — it is not magnetized. Lay it north and south, and it is. 6 82 THOUGHTS. GRACE. GOD'S Spirit, the Holy Spirit — Grace, a laio by which when we do certain things, God does certain other things. IF man moves in harmony with the physical uni- verse around him, it prospers and blesses all his works, lends him its resistless strength, endues him with its unerring skill, enriches him with its bound- less wealth, and fills his body with strength, celerity, and joy. But woe to the people or the man who, through ignorance or through defiance, contends against the visible mechanism or the invisible chem- istry of Nature's laws. Whoever will not learn and obey these laws, her lightnings blast, her waters drown, her fires consume, her pestilences extinguish ; and she could crush the whole human race beneath her wheels, nor feel shock or vibration from the contact. KEY TO THE U XI VERSE. THE material universe is not matter alone. It is filled with scientific treasures, inconceivable, boundless, endless. Knowledge furnishes the keys by which the apartments of the temple containing these treasures can be unlocked. THOUGHTS. 83 CONSEQUENCES OF PHYSICAL EVILS. WERE all the wrongs and calamities which pertain to the human race to be classified according to their more immediate relation to the body, the intellect, or the soul, I believe by far the greater proportion of them would be found to pro- ceed from the bodily appetites and propensities. SO universal and long-continued have been the violations of the physical laws, and so omni- present is human suffering as the consequence, that the very tradition of a perfect state of health has died out from amonsr men. I F it be a solemn duty to keep the spirit pure, as a sanctuary for the Most High ; if heart, and soul, and mind are to be devoted to the service of God and of our fellow-men ; then who can overstate our responsibility to keep the body — through which alone and by which alone the highest achievements of practical heroism can be won upon earth — in the robustest working and militant condition ? WELL did the apostle say, " Let not sin, there- fore, reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey the lusts thereof." Well did he urge his fol- 84 THOUGHTS. lowers onward by telling them that " every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things." Well did he exhort all who called themselves by the name of Christ to present their "bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God." And well did he set forth, what was perhaps the greatest of all his achievements, " I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection, lest by any means when I have preached to others, I should myself be a castaway." NO combatants are so unequally matched as when one is shackled with error, while the other rejoices in the self-demonstrability of truth ; yet when virtue contends with vice for the extirpa- tion of social abuses, or for the advancement of great reforms, how often do the strong-bodied rep- robates vanquish the weak-bodied saints ! IN all the higher departments of invention and discovery, in the soarings of genius, and in the exultant aspirations of sentiment, all well-organized and healthy persons rise, as by natural buoyancy, to the sublimities of an upper sphere, whither im- becility, or mediocrity of strength, with all their strivings, can never soar. H THOUGHTS. 85 OW beautiful is the ever-changing and ever- renewing beauty of HeaUh ! — the raarmo- rean repose of infantile sleep ; the singing gladness of childhood ; the exultant and sometimes way- ward impulses of youth, intoxicated and bewil- dered by varieties of joy ; the firm, right-onward march of manhood, unbarbed by an arrow of pain, and uncrippled age at last, venerable in its serene and lofty front ; — how beautiful are they all ! Less beautiful is the clear-springing fountain with its flower-adorned brink ; less noble the mighty river, cleaving its mountain-barred passage to the deep, and less reflective of all the glories of heaven, its outspreading and calmer current as it lapses and dies into the sea ! ALMIGHTY Mind guides the universe. As to this earth, just in proportion to the devel- opment and culture of man's intellect, he partici- pates in that guidance ; knowledge enables him to lay his hand upon the great machinery w^hich God has constructed, and to direct its movements for his own benefit. NO longings, no night-watchings, no aspirations, will ever enable us to see one inch beyond the capacity of our glass. 86 THOUGHTS NE such man as Whitney is worth more than all the common schools of New England ever cost. ABSOLUTE TRUTH IMMUTABLE. THERE is no increase of absolute truth in the universe, and there can be none. The num- ber of minds that know truth may be indefinitely increased, but there can be no more truth to be known. All truth pre-existed in the Divine Mind. The creation of the visible universe, with the for- mation of the countless orders of beings that dwell in it, did not create truth ; it only displayed it. It only made those things objective in the splendors of creation, which before Avere subjective in the Divine Mind. The race knows vastly more now than it ever knew before, and will doubtless go on redoubling its stores. But He who \vas always infinite cannot be more than infinite now. He who was always omniscient cannot know more in the future eternity than he did in the past. We speak of men as making new and wonderful inven- tions and discoveries. We cannot speak so of the Deity. Truth, therefore, is not progressive, though finite beings may be forever progressive in acquir- ing truth. THOUGHTS. 87 USES OF KNOWLEDGE. WHAT fulness of granary and storehouse, wliat freights for ship and car, come from agricultural knowledge, — that is, from Mind, — where once the barrenness of earth and the barren- ness of ignorance spread a common solitude ! SELF-IMPROVEMENT must precede all other improvement. Whatever miraculous creations have been scattered over immensity by the Divine Hand, all must first have existed in the Divine Thought. AS each generation comes into the world devoid of knowledge, its first duty is to obtain pos- session of the stores already amassed. It must overtake its predecessors before it can pass by them. CIVILIZATION AND CHRISTIANITY. AS indications of the supremacy of the moral faculties, and as a measure of their success, we use the terms Civilization and Christianity. But these terms are most vaguely used. If sub- jected to the least rigorous definition, they can import nothing less than a knowledge of the laius of God, and an obedience to them. It matters not, in 88 THOUGHTS. any good sense, what men profess ; it matters not what books, or institutions, or revelations they may have inherited ; the stern question forever recurs, Do they know the will of God, and do they ohey it f SCRIPTURE SYMBOLICAL. THE old history stands for a universal truth ; and not the ancient Sodom alone, but any Sodom could be saved by ten righteous men. INTEGRITY OF THE SOUL. THE inquiry has sometimes been made. Which is the more necessary to the world, intellect or the moral sense? We might as well inquire which is the more necessary to our natural life, air or food. Doubtless a being of both infinite intelligence and infinite goodness, can see no diflfer- ence between the expedient and the right, for, whatever is right must, in the long run, be expe- dient ; and whatever would, in the long run, be inexpedient, could not coincide with the right. SUPREMACY OF THE 3I0RAL LAW. GOD created the universe upon the principle of the supremacy of the moral law, and it would be easier for mankind to walk on their heads, or THOUGHTS. 89 breathe in vacuity, than to subvert this moral order of creation. UyiOX OF IXTELLECTUAL ANT) MORAL LIFE. OH, if the literary institutions of our land would sanctify their ambition, and, instead of an earthly rivalry to send forth great men, would provoke each other to the holy work of rearing good men, then would they be doubly rewarded, both by greatness and goodness, such as they have never yet imagined. PROPORTIOX. IF the weight of the atmosphere immediately surrounding a few persons were to be doubled, the general effect would be imperceptible ; but double the weight of the earth's atmosphere, and all acoustic apparatus, all pneumatic machinery, would be suddenly endued with new and vaster energies. So, when the common stock of knowl- edge is enlarged, all men are enlarged ; because, if gigantic ideas are given even to a pygmy, the pygmy becomes a giant. INSIGHT. I^HE philosopher looks at the scientific proper- . ties of matter, and admires ; the Christian beholds not only the gift, but the Giver, and adores. 90 THOUGHTS. The one has only the knowledge of truth ; the other the rapture of devotion. SUPREMACY OF LAW. GOD lives and rules by law; and therefore, wherever He lives, and wherever He rules, there is law, and a law of God is a command. DUTY. I FIND the foundation of duty in the being and attributes of God. There are secondary and incidental arguments, but this is the primary and original one. There are collateral arguments, but this is fundamental. Even on the atheistic hypoth- esis of no God, it could be shown that Duty is expedient ; but on the theistic hypothesis of a God, it can be demonstrated that the knowledge and per- formance of Duty are the highest moral necessities for every human being. IXDIVID UALITY. IF men, in this state of existence, with their un- equal faculties, unequal attainments, and une- qual opportunities, are not alike, and never can be alike in their intellectual or metaphysical concep- tions of the Deity, how can they be aliie in wor- THOUGHTS. 91 shipping the same living and true God ? I answer, that, with the greatest diversity of thought, they can be ahke in their affections. Love must be the same in all worlds. LOVE. LET us thank God that our humble tribute of devotion, though poured from the nut-shell capacity of our hearts, will be as acceptable to Him as though its copious floods came from the hollow of the ocean, or the concave of the sky. The bond of love engirdles the universe ; it is the oneness of Creator and created ; so that, as Christ said to his disciples, " Ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you." HOW little we comprehend the significance of the tremendous words. Almighty, All-power- ful, Omnipresent, — words that should strike the soul as successive thunder-claps would strike the ear. " THE STILL SMALL VOICE.'' ANIMAL fear sees God's power with the senses, — in noise, in tumult, in flame ; but reason sees it in silence, in order, in its still yet eternal activities. 92 THOUGHTS. EELIGIOX OF XATURE. TAKE the first warm day in spring; go out into the cultivated fields ; walk through the solemn woods, or by the streams. What millions of millions of roots are now waking from their wintry slumber ! how in all their veins they tingle with new life, as through all their myriad pores they suck in the water that lies by their side ! How many seeds beneath your feet are alive ! what gases are in fermentation within them to swell, and burst, and send out the new germ ! The air is populous with insects that perform their mystic dances in the sunbeam. The migratory birds rise in such flocks as darken the air, to go northwards on their heaven-appointed course, and the migratory fishes make a wave swell in the sea as they journey southward to fulfil the great econ- omy of life. Yesterday, the branch of every tree, as it stood out against the sun, was naked ; to-day, his light is obscured by its myriad leaflets. Each one of all those insect swarms, of those flocks of birds, of those shoals of fish, has its bones and muscles, its lungs and brain ; and an instinct that guides them to their destination burns in them all, as though each one were a king or a queen, and gloried in his royal blood. What varied, what THOUGHTS. 93 amazing, what incalculable life ! AVho fashioneth these countless forms ? From whose capacious urns are they filled with life and joy ? Who metes out the span of all their days, and upholds the order of their generations ? SYMMETRY IN NATURE. DID you ever observe the wonderful arrange- ment of the leaves of trees, by which their attachment to diiFerent sides of the tree can be expressed arithmetically? Thus, if you mark the point at which one leaf starts out from the trunk or branch of certain kinds of trees, you will see that the next leaf above it is exactly on the oppo- site side, so that the third one is over the first, the fourth over the second, and so on, — each two leaves being equal to one turn round the tree as you ascend. This is arithmetically expressed by one half; because each new leaf makes half a turn round the tree. In the plant called succory it takes three leaves to make this spiral turn round the stalk ; so that the fourth leaf comes perpendicu- larly over the first, and begins a new turn. As it takes three leaves here to make one turn, we de- note this by the fraction of one third. In the apple tree, five leaves or buds make two turns round the 94 T H OU G H T S . tree, so that this fact is expressed by the fraction two fifths. In the currant bush, eight leaves make three turns, so that the ratio here is three eighths. In the plant called shepherd's purse, it is five thirteenths ; and in another still, twenty-one suc- cessive leaves, as you ascend spirally round the tree, require thirteen turns. And here another most curious fact is observed, — that these several numbers form an ascending series in which the denominator of the preceding fraction is the numer- ator of the succeeding one, and the denominator of the succeeding one is the sum of the two preced- ing denominators. Thus, starting with ^ and ^, we then have |, f , y^vj, ^f , and so on. So you will see the other wonderful fact I mentioned, that the suc- ceeding denominator is equal to the sum of the two preceding denominators. Thus, 2^, ^, f ; 2-|-3 — 5 ; ^, f,f; 3+5^=8; hhi%', 5+8zrl3; f, f^, H ; 8-|-13 = 21. In this last statement there is one apparent anomaly, too subtle for explanation on this occasion,* though adding to the beauty of the result. This exemplifies, in botany, what I mean by laiu. It applies to the rose-bud, the oak-leaf, the pine- cone ; and though we can conceive of other meth- * Sermon on Law — the first principle. THOUGHTS. 95 ocls of arraDging the leaves on plants and trees, yet such other methods are nowhere to be found in nature. Now turn your attention for a moment to a field of nature as different from what we have been con- templating, as the planets above our heads are from the vegetation beneath our feet. The mean motion of each planet, as compared with its next interior planet, is uniformly represented, with great approx- imation to exactness, by one of the fractions of the same series I have given to you in reference to the growth of leaves. IGXORAXCE AND MIRACLES. KNOWLEDGE has its boundary line, where it abuts on ignorance ; on the outside of that boundary line are ignorance and miracles ; on the inside of it are science and no miracles. LA IF OF RESPOXSIBILITT. WHEN any one of God's truths is demonstra- bly made known to us, that truth is equally entitled to our homage and observance, and binds us by the same awful sanctions, whether revealed from the cloudy top of Sinai, or discovered by philosophic research, or even by accident. It is 96 THOUGHTS. the duty, and not the mode of demonstrating it ; it is the holy message, and not the chance messenger ; it is the majesty and sanctity of God's commands, and not the red or black ink in which they may be printed ; it is the holiness of the light dispensed, and not the direction from which it shines, which thunders and flashes its appeals on the soul, and says. Obey ; it is God's will. COXSCIEXCE. COXSCIENCE is the magnet of the soul. It has a divine polarity. Amid the tempests of passion, in the dark hours of trial, that only lie just this side of despair, when a host of fierce tempta- tions beleaguer, then consult this Divine Monitor ; and though its tiny needle may tremble amid the attractions of earth, yet, if uncorrupted, its pole- star will be the throne of God. TEMPTATIOX. THE most formidable attribute of temptation is its increasing power, its accelerating ratio of velocity. Every act of repetition increases power, diminishes resistance. It is like the letting out of waters, — where a drop can go, a river can go. Whoever yields to temptation, subjects himself to the law of falling bodies. THOUGHTS. y / THE devil tempts men througli their ambition, their cupidity, or their appetite, until he comes to the profane swearer, whom he catches without any reward. NO SUCH THIXG AS ACCIDENT IN NATURE. NATURE, or God acting through nature, is uniform. There is no sign of accident or caprice, or the arbitrary, fitful interference of a superior power, but the things of nature proceed onward from age to age with a solemn, majestic movement, — an august procession that strikes the contemplative beholder with awe, and expands and lifts his soul with indescribable emotions of sub- limity and grandeur. We call this the course of Providence ; and in the wisdom that planned it, in the benevolence with which it overflows, and in the omniscience which sees the end from the beginning, it is worthy of a God. LOOK INWARD. HAVING looked outward, around us, let us for a moment look inward, into our own con- sciousness. Corresponding with the w^onderful or- der of external nature, the marvellous arrangement 98 THOUGHTS. of bodies, and the solemn progression of events in the outward world, we have a faculty in our own souls, whose special function it is to take cogni- zance of the external arrangement and order. Two things are necessary : the order of the exter- nal world, and the power of availing ourselves of that order in the mental world. The sublime external order we call Cause and Effect. The faculty within us which recognizes this order, we call Causality. CAUSALITY. CAUSALITY is the mightiest intellectual power bestowed on man. No such intellectual dif- ference exists between men, as between the man who has it and the man who has it not. The extremes of its presence or its absence mark the extremes of greatness and of imbecility. Idiots have but a germ or minimum of it, and hence they are idiots. CAUSES. YOUTH is a cause, the condition of manhood and of old age is an effect. Time is a seed- field ; in youth we sow it with causes ; in after life we reap the haf vest of effects. God has established THOUGHTS. 99 no relation more indissoluble than that between youth and age, between the spring-time of causes and the autumn and winter of consequences. Cause, cause, cause, is stamped all along upon the conduct of youth ; effect, effect, effect, is moulded and chiselled in upon the results of that conduct in age. Look at the causes, on one side ; look at the effects, on the other ; look at the adamantine rela- tion which God has established between them. KIXGDOM OF GOD. IF the kingdom of God means, intrinsically, the moral supremacy, the undisputed sway of God's holy law ; and if it means, geographically, the place where that law is supreme, unresisted, unquestioned, then the difficulty will consist rather in finding where God's kingdom is, than where it is not. We shall find trouble in tracing out the cir- cumference or boundary of God's law, not because the included territory is so immensely large, but because it is so microscopically small. . . . The earth endured Christ's ministry only three years ; — not three weeks after his real character and pur- poses were generally known. 100 THOUGHTS. REMEDY FOR POVERTY. BY far the greater portion of tlie privations of the poor I believe to be unnecessary and avoid- able. The poor suffer hardships which are not of Nature's appointment. They bear privations which I cannot believe to be permanently involved in the system of Divine Providence. They are out of their place in the social system ; fallen from that sphere of dignity and happiness which Heaven has prepared them to occupy, and in which they may yet be reinstated. . . . In the midst of all the munificence and prodi- gality of Heaven, in the infinite profusion which is spread out around us, and the supremacy of man's intellect which can make it all subservient to his welfare, a degi-ee of want and suffering abounds. But would society remove the causes of impov- erishment which it has hitherto so diligently en- couraged, the number of the sufferers would be almost indefinitely diminished, and it would be no burden to give a comfortable support to all the remainiler. REMORSE. WHEN a man, before innocent, commits crime, he passes, by a sudden transition, into a new world. The significance of all objects around him THOUGHTS. 101 is chauged ; the laws of association in his own mind are changed ; a viper is born in his breast which stings and goads him. Sounds that he never heard before ring in his ears ; a violated conscience turns avenger and scourger ; — the foe is within him. Were it merely an external enemy, assault- ing the criminal from without, perhaps he might be fled from, resisted, bribed, or would at last remit his inflictions through very weariness of tormenting. But not so with the consciousness of wrong. When- ever the soul works, that works, for it is a part of the soul. It will not sleep, nor tire, nor relent. " From virtue's ways when vicious men depart, The first avenger is the culprit's heart." FICTITIOUS LITERATURE. ONE of the most beguiling charms of fictitious literature is the sympathy for misfortune which it excites. To captivate us, to work our feelings up to the highest pitch of intensity, is the test of genius or criterion of an author's power. Subdued by his magic skill, we condole, we feel our heartstrings tightening, deep and tender emo- tions flow out in tears, on reading of the imaginary pains of imaginary beings. And there we stop ; for the humane impulse to afford relief dissolves 102 THOUGHTS. the charm, because we find there is no one to be relieved. After frequent and long indulgence, the will is intoxicated and made captive, like that of an inebriate ; it can be satisfied with nothing but fiercer stimulants, until it becomes deaf, and blind, and heartless to the most melancholy sufierings at its own door. Of all the heartless people that ever existed, — with perhaps the single exception of pirates, — I do not believe there is any class so in- sensible to the woes of poverty, of orphanage, of juvenile temptation, and of juvenile depravity, as the class of inveterate novel-readers. Of all the people in the world who can bear most resignedly, and suffer most bravely, all the misfortunes of other people, the professed novel-reader has the calmest and the stoutest heart. XATURAL PHILOSOPHY VERSUS LITERATURE AXD HISTORY. IX comparing the value of natural or physical philosophy with that of history or literature, we are struck at first sight with this all-important truth, that while in history and literature we are mainly conversant with the purposes and deeds of men, in natural philosophy we are exclusively among the works of God. In the former we see THOUGHTS. 103 God only through dim and distorting media, and hear of Him only at second hand. But in the latter we are admitted into His presence ; we behold not only His works, but Him working ; and He gives us lessons in regard to the sublime plans on which the universe was formed and is operated. History may be forged or falsified ; but who can counterfeit the signatures of the Deity, as they are written in the earth and in the skies ? Men may be corrupted by literature, or sophisticated by false systems of logic ; but in tracing the processes and laws of Nature, we are walking in the luminous footprints of the Creator, and the difference between these and the obscure footprints of men is too broad and bright to be mistaken. XATUBAL PHILOSOPHY. OF all the studies in the world, on which to form early and sound habits of investigation and reasoning, natural philosophy holds preeminence. It gives us the happiest proofs, and the most deep- rooted convictions of truth ; it furnishes the quickest admonitions when we deviate towards error. IGXORAXCE. X entering this world our starting-point is Ignorance. None, however, but idiots remain 104 THOUC^HTS. there. All others make advances in some direc- tion. There is not only an ability, but an inexo- rable necessity, for the human mind to grow and to accumulate. Would you see to what different re- sults this growth and accumulation come, after the lapse of seventy, fifty, or even forty years, look on the philosopher, the maniac, and the felon. FALSE KXOWLEDGE. WE often hear false notions, false ideas, — or what I call false knowledge, — spoken of as synonymous with ignorance. This is a great mis- apprehension. False knowledge is as far from igno- rance on the one side, as true knowledge is from it on the other. True knowledge lifts us upward, false knowledge propels us downward. Every ad- dition of true knowledge makes the soul of man more beautiful, more powerful, more angelic. Every addition of false knowledge deforms the soul, crip- ples its native energies, gives it false hearing, false vision, false sensations, and, of course, makes all its judgments false. HISTORY. HISTORY, with scarcely an exception, ought to be re- written. A moral muse should indite it. The sin of unnecessary wars should be charged THOUGHTS. 105 home upon their authors and voluntary instruments, until what, for so many ages, has been called mili- tary glory, should turn black and hideous, and become horrible to the imagination. PHILOSOPHT OF HISTORY. THE phenomena of history should be so recorded as to aid the reader, and particularly the young reader, in discovering its philosophy, instead of being recorded as they have hitherto generally been, in such a way as to obliterate the better instincts of humanity. BIOGEAPHT. BIOGRAPHY, especially the biography of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions from poverty and obscurity to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study. Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records. LITERATURE. EVEN the choicest literature should be taken as the condiment, and not as the sustenance, of life. It should be neither the warp nor the woof of existence, but only the flowery edging upon its borders. Neither deep wisdom, bold action, the administrative faculty, nor that soundness of 106 THOUGHTS. judgment whose predictions are always ratified by results, ever comes from the study of literature alone. LAWS OF NATURE. IF in studying the works and laws of Nature, we are walking with its great Author and Sustainer, then we behold this department of truth as He be- holds it ; we recognize the order of nature and the relations of cause and effect as He recognizes them, and the whole tendency of this must be to bring our minds into gi'ateful harmony with His. SPIRITUAL TRUTH. As the Infinite Spirit does not exhibit Himself to us personally, I believe He intended to make known to us His natural attributes, through a knowl- edge of His works ; and that, for this purpose. He pre-adapted our minds to acquire this knowledge ; and that,' so far as -we do acquire, we are growing in His natural image, and are becoming better pre- pared for the reception of spiritual truth. CLASSICAL STUDY AS A DISCIPLINE. IT is said that the classics are valuable as a means of disciplining the mind ; but can any- thing impart so true and perfect a discipline as the THOUGHTS. 107 errorless teachings of God? The inflections of a Greek verb may be strikingly symmetrical and harmonious ; but even in the polished and sculp- tured language of the Greeks, is there aught so harmonious and symmetrical as the evolution of a flower, or the crystallization of a rock, or the for- mation of the rainbow, or the unfolding of a golden- winged insect from its chrysalis, or the marvellous workmanship of the human eye, where spiritual and material beauties glow together in unison? GOD'S LESSONS IX NATURE. IN the paradigms given us by the All-wise there is nothing irregular or defective. Neither ex- ception nor anomaly deforms His perfect lessons. We need no expurgated edition of His works, for all His teachings are stainless and untainting, and like rays of light from the sun, they may fall upon corruption or permeate impurity, but cannot them- selves be defiled. NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. THE study of natural philosophy is of recent origin. History and literature have been studied wherever men have studied anything ; but it is only since the time of Lord Bacon that natural philosophy has been successfully cultivated, and far 108 THOUGHTS. more has been done for it within the last hundred and fifty years than in all the previous centuries of the world's existence. MORAL INFLUENCE OF INTELLECTUAL CULTIVATION. I AM not only profoundly convinced that it is the general tendency of intellectual cultivation to promote virtue, but that no community can ever rise to any high eminence in virtue without intellec- tual development. Still it is true that, as a good man may be so much better, in proportion to his intellectual power, so may a bad man be so much worse. The powers of the intellect are like the mercenary soldiers which Switzerland formerly sent forth to join in the European wars, — almost equally ready to fight in the ranks of despot as of republican. Precisely the same powers of combi- nation, judgment, prescience, by which Napoleon built up his blood-cemented empire, were employed by Washington in spreading over our heads the all- sheltering dome of a republic. FANATICISM. RESISTANCE to improvement contradicts the noblest instincts of the race. It besets its opposite. The fanaticism of reform is only the THOUGHTS. 109 raging of the accumulated waters caused by the obstructions which an uUra conservatism has thrown across the stream of progress ; and revo- lution itself is but the sudden overwhelming and sweeping away of impediments that should have been seasonably removed. The French Revolution was a frightful spectacle of a too rapid effort at reform. The present condition of England and Ireland is a spectacle still more frightful of an almost inflexible conservatism. COLLEGES AND THE PEOPLE. THE relation which colleges bear to the commu- nity is but little less than that which the brain bears to the rest of the body. It is not enough to say that " knowledge is power." In our times, hnowledge is government. Once the soldier bestrode and ruled mankind, and by the soldier I mean the intellect of Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, superin- duced on a moral substratum of tiger or wildcat. Then came the priest. The priest planted his bat- teries in the Avorld that is to come rather than in the world that now is, and he plied his artillery at long range. Standing secure behind the ramparts of the future life, he could strike, but no one could strike back. The priest professed to act under 110 THOUGHTS. the immediate dictation and inspiration of God. Heaven and its delights, hell and its torments, were his, and he was commissioned to dispense them among friend and foe. In Christendom, powers and principalities, garlands and crowns, the king- ship of heavenly hierarchies, were the rewards of those who would subscribe to the creed, and pro- mulgate the dogma, and maintain the apostolic succession, and fight the battles of the Church. In Mohammedan lands, bowers of Paradise, an elysium for every sense, balm and redolence and splendor, with liouris daily renewing their beauty and virgin youth, — these ever-returning miracles of joy were the rewards of the faithful. But tor- tures, inextinguishable, inexhaustible, and without end ; purgatories to meet all cases, from a simple hot-bath to a centillion of fiery years ; caldrons of all temperatures, to fry, or roast, or boil ; of all sizes also, — large enough to hold an entire nation or race of heathen or heretic, small enough to sim- mer the stillborn babe that had come into the world without ante-natal baptism ; papal bulls, excommuni- cations, anathemas, vomited from the craters of such tophets as the gods alone could make, and falling in a storm of fire and hail upon unbelievers ; — these were the enginery, these were the arsenal and maga- THOUGHTS. Ill zine of weapons, with which the priest conquered the soldiery and bound them in alliance with him for the subjugation of the world. PRIESTCRAFT. TO wonder the dominion of the priest has been, and, in many parts of the earth, still is, the most dreadful the world has ever known. Founded upon divine authority, being the only acknowledged medium of communication between God and men, Avith power to call down angels from above, and to call up demons from below, drawing subsidies from all the realms which superstition has peopled, with command over earthquake, and storm, and eclipse, and all the fiery portents of the sky, the priesthood governed the world as it never had been governed before, and they made its strength minister to their aggrandizement, and its beauty to their pleasure. This intelligence Avedded and made one with the pure and unperverted religion of Jesus Christ, the w^orld waits for a glorious atonement at their hands. SELF-CONFIDEXCE OF IGXORAXCE. AN ignorant man is always able to say yes or no immediately to any proposition. To a wise man, comparatively few things can be propounded 112 THOUGHTS. which do not require a response with qualifications, with discrimination, with proportion. PUT a man into a factory, as ignorant how to prepare fabrics as some teachers are to watch the growth of juvenile minds, and what havoc would be made of the raw material ! EVILS OF BAD TEACHING. PHYSIOLOGISTS tell us that pairs of nerves go out from the brain to every part of the body. Experiments have been tried upon animals, demon- strating that if the nerves which go from the brain to the stomach be cut and separated, digestion instantaneously ceases. Bring the severed ends of the nerves together again, the processes of life are renewed. Think how many of these nerves a harsh, cruel, ignorant teacher may cut in a day ! COMPENSA TION. JAILS and state prisons are the complement of schools : so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former. I N dress, seek the middle between foppery and shabbiness. THOUGHTS. 113 WHY IS EDUCATION IX DISREPUTE? IT is the cultivation of the intellect to the neglect of the moral powers that has brought education into disrepute. APPLICATION OF PRINCIPLES. WE want principles, not only developed, — the work of the closet, — but applied; which is the work of life. Between the recluse, who never emerges from his study, however well he may rea- son on human nature, and the active man, who pre- pares the machinery and puts it in operation, there is the same difference as between one who describes a wolf and one who tames the animal. DUTY OF THE TEACHER. WHEN the teacher fails to meet the intellectual wants of a child, it is the case of asking for bread and receiving a stone ; but when he fails to meet its moral wants, it is giving a serpent. FOLLOW NATURE. WE never work alone : Nature works with us ; sometimes to aid, sometimes to defeat, ac- cording as we coincide with or contradict her laws. Every branch of study pertaining to the useful arts, 8 114 THOUGHTS. or to the natural sciences, therefore, demands this con- stant reference to the laws and processes of nature. We never make progress without a recognition of them. But not so in works of imagination. When we give reins to the fancy, we can have everything our own way. Absurdity does not shock us. Im- possibility ceases to be an obstacle. RELATIOXS OF THIXGS. IN the works of Nature nothing stands alone. Nature is full of connections. No one subject can ever be understood alone. We must know something of its collaterals. There must be a per- petual reference to related objects. It is true there is every variety in nature. Still no one of its de- partments stands alone. There is as distinct a connection as between the different parts of an ex- tensive machine. A 'perfect knowledge of all the different parts of a machine is no knowledge of the machine itself. To know the machine one must know where each part belongs, and what its office is. In the study of nature this truth is forever and ever enforced upon one's mind. This makes discern- ment, comparison, discrimination, necessary at every step. H THOUGHTS. 115 HABIT. ABIT is a cable. We weave a thread of it every day, and at last we cannot break it. THE prayer of Christ was, "Thy kingdom come." The prayer of every bigot is, " 3Iy kingdom come." HAVE HEATHENS SOULS t AFTER the discovery of America, the question was started among the ecclesiastics of Spain, whether the aborigines of North America had souls. It was warmly debated pro and con., and the argu- ments were so equally balanced that no decision was had on the question. But it was wisely suggested that perhaps they had souls, and therefore mis- sionaries should be sent to them. This course was adopted. We would recommend a similar decision. If, peradventure, the children have moral and re- ligious natures, they ought to be cultivated. I T has been well said that the epithets of a skil- ful orator are so many abridged arguments. L OVE your fellow-creatures, though vicious. Hate vice in the friend you love the most. 116 THOUGHTS. LITERARY EXPRESSION. WE get at the full value of a well-expressed idea only by conceiving the full extent of the effect it produces. Suppose all the world were to read at the same moment Hooker's splendid descrip- tion of law : how beautiful is the thought of the innumerable multitude of sublime emotions that would vibrate simultaneously through the univer- sal soul of man ! Suppose some irresistible passage of Shakspeare's or Sheridan's wit were to be read by all men capable of understanding it at the same moment, all sides shaking at once, and the very air lifted off from the earth by the explosion ! ACTION OF CONSCIENCE. WHEN a child can be brought to tears, not from fear of punishment, but from repentance for his offence, he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from grief at one's own conduct, be sure there is an angel nestling in the bosom. EXCUSES OF TEMPTATION. GO through the w^ards of a prison, read on the faces of the convicted felons the history of passion and suffering, and dare you say that if from the cradle you had been encompassed by these THOUGHTS. 117 temptations, yon should have escaped unharmed? Those whose righteousuess covered them in the fiery furnace hud had a life fitted to grow righteous in. I N this country we seem to learn our rights quicker than our duties. THE man who brought out the idea of the in- finite divisibility of matter did the world no good, and yet he was worthy of an apotheosis, com- pared with the men who are illustrating by their works the infinite divisibility of mind. MANNERS. MANNERS are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy ; laws are manners fully grown, — or, manners are chil- dren, which, Avhen they grow up, become laws. RESPONSIBIITIES. AN ignorant and degraded portion of society are to the intelligent w^hat children are to parents ; so, as parents are mainly responsible for the mis- conduct of their children, the intelligent are mainly responsible for the vices of the abandoned. 118 THOUGHTS. IGNORANCE. IGNORANCE has been well represented under the similitude of a dungeon, where, though it is full of life, yet darkness and silence reign. But in society the bars and locks have been broken ; the dungeon itself is demolished ; the prisoners are out ; they are in the midst of us. We have no security but to teach and renovate them. POVERTY OF SPIRIT. IT is the age of commerce, of profit, of finance. One part of our nature is intensely stimulated. Let us beware of the effect of this stimulus upon that nobler portion of our being, w^hich no splendor of opulence nor profusion of luxuries can ever sat- isfy ; which demands allegiance to God, and justice and humanity towards our fellow-men ; and which must have them, or die the second death. We may be poor ; but let us deprecate and forefend the most calamitous of all poverties — a poverty of spirit. We may be subjected to great sacrifices ; but let us sacrifice everything else, nay, life itself, before we sacrifice our principles. I commend to you the language of Bishop Watson, who, when tempted to stifle the expression of his convictions through the THOUGHTS. 119 hope of kingly patroDage, replied, that it was " better to seek a fortuitous sustenance from the drippings of the most barren rock in Switzerland, with freedom for his friend, than to batten as a slave at the most luxurious table of the greatest despot in the world." COMPROMISE MEASURES OF 1850. SOME of these compromise measures are des- tined to be of great historic importance. They will be drawn into precedent. When, in evil days, further encroachments are meditated against human rights, these old measures will be cited as a sanction for new aggressions ; and, in my view, they will always be found broad enough, and bad enough, to cover almost any nameable assault upon human lib- erty. When bad men want authority for bad deeds, they will only have to go back to the legislation of Congress, in 1850, to find an armory full of the weapons of injustice. When several of these meas- ures were passed, and particularly when one of the most obnoxious and criminal of them all was passed, — I mean the Fugitive Slave bill, — the House was not a deliberative body. Deliberation was silenced. Those who knew they could not meet our arguments, chokqpl^ their utterance. The pre- 120 THOUGHTS. vious question, which was originally devised to curb the abuse of too much debate, was perverted to stop all debate. The floor was assigned to a known friend of the bill, who, after a brief speech in pallia- tion of its enormities, moved the previous question ; and thus we were silenced by force, instead of being overcome by argument. For I aver, without fear of contradiction, that the bill never could have become a law, had its opponents been allowed to debate it, or to propose amendments to it. A FREE COUNTRY. THIS is a free country, except when a man wishes to vindicate the claims of freedom. All other parts of the temple may be entered, but slavery is the ark of the covenant, and whoso lays his profane hands thereon must perish. FREE SPEECH. I FEEL none the less inclined to discuss the question of freedom because an order has gone forth that it shall not be discussed. Discussion has been denounced as agitation, and then it has been dictatorially proclaimed that " agitation must be put down." Humble as I am, I submit to no such dictation, come from what quarter or what THOUGHTS. 121 numbers it may. If such a prohibition is intended to be laid upon me personally, I repel it. If intended to silence me as the representative of the convictions and feelings of my constituents, I repel it all the more vehemently. In this government, it is not tolerable for any man, however high, or for any body of men, however large, to prescribe what subjects may be agitated, and Avhat may not be agitated. Such prescription is at best but a spe- cies of lynch law against free speech. It is as hateful as any other form of that execrable code, and I do but express the common sentiment of all generous minds, when I say that for one, I am all the more^ disposed to use my privilege of speech, when imperious men, and the sycophants of imperi- ous men, attempt to ban or constrain me. In Italy, the Pope decides what books may be read ; in Aus- tria, the emperor decides what books may be writ- ten ; but we are more degraded than the subject of pontiff or Csesar, if we are to be told what topics we may discuss. ... I hold treason against this government to be an enormous crime ; but great as it is, I hold treason against free speech to be incom parably greater. 122 THOUGHTS. A TOBCH OF FIRE. WHEN was there ever written or published a more fanatical document than the Decla- ration of Independence ? — a torch to set the world on fire. RETRIBUTION. IT seems as if, when a freeman debases his soul by lending himself to the defence of slavery, God punishes him on the spot, by demoralizing his own nature with that spirit of tyranny which be- longs to. slavery. Wherein consists the advantage of a republican government over a despotism, if the freedom of speech and of the press, which can be strangled in the one by arbitrary command, can be stifled in the other by obloquy and denunciation. DISCUSSION AND AGITATION. IT was by discussion and agitation that the first glowing sparks of liberty in the bosom of the Adamses, of Hancock, and of Franklin, of Thomas Jefferson and of Patrick Henry, were fanned into a flame that consumed the hosts of the tyrant, — that tyrant who sought to put down this dreadful agitation by means not a whit more reprehensible in his day, than those by which certain leading men are strivinoj to silence it now. THOUGHTS. 123 TRUTH SEEKS LIGHT. ON the face of it, it must be a bad cause which will not bear discussion. Truth seeks light instead of shunning it. He convicts himself of wrong who refuses to hear the arguments of his opponent. AGITATION. AGITATION is a part of the sublime order of nature. In thunder, it shakes the stagnant air, which would otherwise breed pestilence. In tempests, it purifies the deep, which would other- wise exhale miasma and death. And in the immor- tal thoughts of duty, of humanity, and of liberty, it so rouses the hearts of men that they think them- selves inspired by God ; and not the mercenary clamor of the market-place, nor the outcries of politicians, clutching at the prizes of ambition, can suppress the utterances that true men believe them- selves heaven-committed to declare. " C03IPR0MISE MEASURES." I DRAW no augury of despair from the calamity that has befallen us. It teaches whatever there is of virtue and of principle in manhood, the task which has been set them to do, and whose accom- plishment God will require at their hands. 124 THOUGHTS. COXSCIENCE. "TTTHAT cares mj conscience Avhether I am in a f T minority or a majority, if I am right ? Has any great and glorious cause ever been started upon earth that did not find itself, at the outset, in a minority ? PUBLIC OPIXIOX IX 1850. A SLAVE, it is said, is not one of the " peo- ple " by whom and for whom the Constitution was formed. He is an outlaw, and an outcast. He has no inherent or inalienable rights as a man. What he has, he has ex gratia^ by the good will of those who own him body and soul, and who are gra- ciously pleased to forego some of their legal rights from generosity in themselves, and not from justice to liim. As it seems to me, a most obvious princi- ple confutes this argument utterly. By the laws of the free states, we know no such being as a slave. Our courts, in their functions as state courts, do not understand the meaning of the word slave. To talk to them in that capacity about a slave, or slavery, is to talk to them in an unknown tongue. In the eye of the legislators of the free states, and in the eye of the courts of the free states, so far as their domestic polity is concerned, there can be no such creature as a slave. THOUGHTS. 125 TRIAL BY JURY. IT is the most cruel of sophisms to say that be- cause a man is claimed as a slave, he is not under the protection of the Constitution, and then to 'prescribe a hase mode of trial for liim^ hy ivhich he can he proved the thing he is claimed for. THE Constitution of every free state in this Union must be first altered, before any such being as a slave, or any such condition as slavery, can be recognized under them, as state authorities. SUMMARY TRIAL OF A SLAVE. ACCORDING- to the mode of proceeding under the Fugitive Slave act, the first thing which the commissioner says to his victim is, " Being a slave, you must be tried in a summary manner." " But I am not a slave," asseverates the respond- ent, " and I claim to be tried by my peers under the guaranties of the Constitution." " You are no party to the Constitution," rejoins the commis- sioner, " and therefore not entitled to its shelter. The Constitution was made by the people, and for the people, and you are not of them." Then says the victim, " If I could have the trial due to a freeman, I could prove myself a freeman ; but un- 126 THOUGHTS. der the form of trial awarded to a slave, I may- be adjudged a slave ; so that my fate is made to depend, not on my rights, but upon your form of proceeding." FEDERAL COXSTITUTION. THE immortal principles of the Declaration of Independence were partially embodied in the Constitution of the United States. But, as the pre- existing metaphysics and mythology of the heathen nations mingled with the pure spirit of Christianity, and corrupted it, so the preexisting laws and usages of oppression deformed to some extent the doc- trines of the Declaration of Independence, and stamped some hideous features upon the otherwise fair face of the Federal Constitution. THE MOLOCH OF SLAVERY. AS a true disciple of Christ ought to feel if he saw the imbrutiug dogmas and Moloch rites of heathenism returning to invade Christendom, and to extinguish the lights of the gospel, so should every lover of liberty feel when he sees the fell spirit of slavery regaining its lost empire over the institutions of freedom. THOUGHTS. 127 ANNEXATION- OF TEXAS. FROM the fatal day of the annexation of Texas, thousands and thousands of honest and intel- ligent Democrats, though still remaining true to what they believed to be the principles of the party, became alienated from its leaders. From that day, the claims of the party lay lightly, but the sins of the party heavily, upon their souls ; and some there were, who, like Daniel of old, went into their cham- bers three times every day, and throwing open the windows which looked towards the Jerusalem of liberty, prayed aloud to the true God, although within hearing of the wild beasts which had been prepared to devour them. "7)0 AS YOU WOULD BE DONE BY." IF the selfish and bestial part of our nature comes into conflict with the higher law of justice and mercy ; if we look through the magnifying end of the telescope at our rights, and through its be- littling end at our duties ; if personal or family affections bring an object so near to our eye that we can see nothing beyond it ; if, I say, our selfish- ness thus threatens to override our conscience, — then we find, not only support, but solace, in the heaven- descended maxim, "Whatsoever ye would that 128 THOUGHTS. men should do unto you, do ye also the same unto them." GOLDEN RULE PEIiVEBTEB. IN the year 1850, when that deadly blast of pro- slavery blew over the North, a gentleman in the city of Lowell wrote and printed a pro-slavery tract, in which he cited the Golden Rule of the Savior in favor of slaveholding ; that is, he so bewitched and bedeviled that holy precept, as to make it read, " Whatsoever other men would do to you, if they have a chance, do ye also the same to them." A MAN'S A MAN FOR A' THAT. I DO not care whether the commonly received notion is found to be true, — namely, that all men are descendants from one Adam and Eve, — or whether science shall prove a various origin of the races, as many Adams and Eves as there are types of mankind, — five or fifty. The principle is this : Wherever we find God-like capabilities, mental and moral, — the " thoughts that wander through eter- nity ; " the innate recognition of a Supreme Ruler of the Universe ; the prophecy, the prescience, as it were, of immortality ; and those sympathetic nerves which, reaching beyond the body, ramify THOUGHTS. 129 over the race, and thrill with joy or throb with paiu at the happiness or misery of others, — where these exist, I will not inquire about the color or the condition of hair, nose, lips, armpit, clavicle, or heel-bone ; but in spite of them all, I proclaim, in the language of the Scottish bard, — " A man's a man for a' that." TRUTH AXD ERROR. AS there are some lofty and comprehensive truths which can be born only of lofty and comprehensive souls, so there is a profligacy and flagitiousness of iniquity which none but a dark and perverted soul could ever originate. The no- blest and grandest minds that have ever lived, could not, even with a lifetime of effort, ever think out the despicabilities and abominations that a mean, bad man can originate extemporaneously. ANCIENT AND MODERN SHAD RACE. I BELIEVE God must have been as well pleased with the escape of the modern Shadrach from the commissioner in Boston, as with the escape of the ancient Shadrach from Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. I only wish that Simms and Burns could have stood for Meshach and Abednego. 130 THOUGHTS. LIBERTY OF THOUGHT. ■\ I7HEN thoughts cannot find vent and utter- f f ance in action, the mind ceases to think. It ■will not continue to produce its mighty births of power and beauty, to see them fall dead-born into the world, or to be strangled in embryo. The painter's and the sculptor's genius would palsy and die but for the canvas and the marble on whose objective glories it can luxuriate and grow rap- turous ; and patriotic bravery would perish out of tlie life of man, but for the Thermopylses and Bunker Hills wdiere it turns common earth into holy ground. The fire of poet and orator would be quenched, yea, the rapt spirit of Isaiah would droop its wing, but for the effulgence and the pal- pableness of the visions they project upon the upper sky, and frame like pictured glories in the solid earth. A B BITE A RT GO VERNMENTS. ARBITRARY governments say and do what they please against the subject, but they forbid the subject, under extremest penalties, from saying or doing aught against them. Such, hitherto, has been ahnost the entire history of the human race — the people debarred from doing right — the govern- ment licensed to do wrong. THOUGHTS. 131 RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. THE greatest temporal blessing ever enjoyed by man is religious liberty ; the greatest temporal calamity ever suftered by man is religious despot- ism. Without religious liberty, Christianity is struck with paralysis. If, then, you have any spot in your citadel more strongly built or more vigi- lantly guarded than all others, there place the ark of your religious liberty. Watch it with the sleep- less eye of cherubim and seraphim. Guard it with a flaming sword. Feel a shudder of horror through all your frame when it is assailed or men- aced by impious hands ; and remember that he who, in our age, will strive to steal this right from your possession, will begin by striving to make the Bible an accomplice in the crime. LAW OF LIBERTY. JUST as far as a man denies civil liberty or religious liberty to others, he debars himself from the possession of Christian liberty. This is a universal law. There is a moral necessity by which every man who keeps others out of their rights keeps himself out of his own enjoyments. If I desire to keep a man outside of heaven, I must stand myself eternally outside of heaven to do it. 132 THOUGHTS. The moral wrong I Avould commit separates me from the moral bliss I would enjoy. PRESERVATION- OF OUR LIBERTIES. WE must show our love of liberty by our readi- ness to make sacrifices for it. Is it not amazing that we are so neglectful of so precious a boon? Our revolutionary fathers abandoned the endearments of home, sacrificed property, encoun- tered disease, bore hunger and cold, and stood on the fatal edge of battle, to gain that liberty which many of their descendants will not go to the polls, on a fair day, to protect. Our Pilgrim Fathers expatriated themselves from their native land, crossed the Atlantic, — then a greater enterprise than it would be now to .circumnavigate the globe, — braved the terrors of a wintry clime, an inhos- pitable shore, and a savage foe, that they might find a spot where, unmolested, they could worship God, while so many of us cast away all civil and reli- gious franchise, and throw our votes in wantonness to gratify revenge, or for a bribe. LIBERTY AND LABOR. UNIVERSAL liberty necessitates labor. Where men have to labor on their own account, and THOUGHTS. 133 are striving with the least expenditure of force to produce the greatest amount of profitable resuUs, they have the strongest motive to abridge processes, to economize strength, to turn out equal products with less effort, or greater products with equal effort. Hence the origin of the inventive arts. Hence contrivances to abridge labor, to call in the mighty forces of.Nature to supersede the feeble force of human muscles, and to perfect processes by the precision and energy of Nature's powers. And it will be found that men will have made but little progress in this direction before they open re- sources vastly greater than any to be found in human strength. Nature will endue them with a capacity v.iiich tyrants, even those of the Oriental order, never possessed. They have discarded human servitude, and Nature, as a reward, has placed her mighty energies at their disposah For the emanci- pation of one mortal, the power of a hundred is given them as a recompense. INVENTIONS. INVENTIONS in this country have risen up at the North, and not at the South. The comforts and the competency of life are best known and most universally diffused where slavery does not 134 THOUGHTS. exist. In the order of Nature, those who are led by the Lord shall find a land flowing with milk and honey. DELIVERANCE. ARE the slaves never to have their Thermopylae, their Bunker Hill, or San Jacinto? If I or my descendants ever meet them in such an en- counter, I hope we shall be discomfited, as were Xerxes, General Gage, and Santa Anna. UNION. THERE is no Union when we must buy it and pay for it every day. Why do tou swear so ? PROTECTION TO LABOR. PROTECTION to labor is of equal importance with the Declaration of Independence and the first article in the Bill of Rights, "All men are born free and equal. All men are created equal." Mr. Clay's criticism — " Not created^ but born " — then there is no Creator? CHANGE OF TACTICS. WHO changes? Is the Whig party hung on what the mechanicians call a universal joint, so that they can turn any way with equal facility ? THOUGHTS. 135 CASTE. 11HE law of caste includes witliin itself every . form of iniquity, because it lives by the prac- tical denial of human brotherhood. NATIVE LOVE OF LIBERTY. ALL the noblest instincts of human nature rebel against slavery. Whenever we applaud the great champions of liberty, who, by the sacrifice of life in the cause of freedom, have won the homage of the world, and an immortality of fame, we record the testimony of our hearts against it. Wherever patriotism and philanthropy have glowed brightest, wherever piety and a devout religious sentiment have burned most fervently, there has been the most decided recognition of the universal rights of man. SLAVERY A STATE OF WAR. THE conscious idea that the state of slavery is a state of war, — a state in which superior force keeps inferior force down, — develops and manifests itself perpetually. It exhibits itself in the statute-books of the slave states, prohibiting the education of slaves, making it highly penal to teach them so much as the alphabet ; dispersing and 136 THOUGHTS. punishing all meetings where they come together in quest of knowledge. Look into the statute-books of the free states, and you will find law after law, encouragement after encouragement, to secure the diffusion of knowledge. Look into the statute- books of the slave states, and you find law after law, penalty after penalty, to secure the extinction of knowledge. SLAVE MARTS. rjlHERE are now (1848) two conspicuous places JL — places which are attracting the gaze of the whole civilized world — Avhither men and women are brought from great distances to be sold, and whence they are carried to great distances to suffer the heaviest wrongs that human nature can bear. One of these places is the coast of Africa, which is among the most pagan and benighted regions of the earth ; the other is the District of Columbia, the capital and seat of government of the United States. By authority of Congress, the city of Washington is the Congo of America. AMERICAN SLA VES IX LIBERIA. THE very slaves upon whom we have trodden have risen above us, and their moral supe- riority makes our conduct ignominious. Not Euro- THOUGHTS. 137 peans only, not only Arabians and Turks, are emerging from the inhumanity and the enormities of the slave traffic, but even our own slaves, trans- planted to the land of their fathers, are raising barriers against the spread of this execrable com- merce. On the shores of Africa a republic is springing up, whose inhabitants were transplanted from this Egypt of bondage. And now, look at the government which these slaves and descendants of slaves have established, and contrast it Avith our own. They discard the institution of slavery, while we cherish it. A far greater proportion of their children than of the white children of the slave states are at school. In the metropolis of their nation, their flag does not protect the slave traffic, nor wave over the slave mart. Would to God that the very opposite of this were not true of our own. . . . The very race, then, which were first stolen, brought to this country, despoiled of all the rights which God had given them, and kept in bondage for generations, at last, after redeeming themselves, or being restored to their natural liberty in some other way, have crossed the ocean, established a government for themselves, and are now setting us an example w^hich should cause our cheeks to blister w^ith shame. 138 THOUGHTS. SLAVERY EXTEXSIOX. rilHERE is an idea often introduced into Congress JL and elsewhere, and made to bear against any restriction of slavery, or any amelioration of the condition of the slave, which I wish to consider. The idea is, that the slaves are in a better condition in this country than they would have been at home. It is affirmed that they are brought under some degree of civilizing and humanizing influences amongst us which they would not have felt in the land of their fathers. Let us look, first, at the philosophy of this notion, and then at its morality. All those who use this argument as a defence or a mitigation of the evils of slavery, or as a final cause for its existence, assume that if the present three million slaves who now darken our southern horizon, and fill the air with their groans, had not been here in their present state of bondage, they would have been in Africa, in a state of paganism. Now, the slightest reflec- tion shows that this assumption has no basis of truth. Not one of them all would now have been in existence, if their ancestors had not been brought to this country. And, according to the law of pop- ulation operative among barbarous nations, there are now just as many inhabitants — pagans, cannibals, THOUGHTS. 139 or what you please, — in Africa, as there would have been if the spoiler had never entered their home, and ravished and borne them into bondage. . . . How infinitely absurd and ridiculous is the plea that the slaves are better off here " than they would have heen in Africa " / Go out into the streets of this city (Washington) and take the first one you meet ; perhaps he is a mulatto. But for being here, he would have been a mulatto in the middle of Africa — would he? Take them all, — mulatto, mestizo, Zambo, and all "the vast variety of man " so far as color is concerned, — and if they had not existence here they would have had it in Africa ! This is the doctrine. Would they have had the same American names also f . , . The idea, then, of sending the slaves back to their country is an egregious fallacy. SLAVES BETTER OFF HERE THAN IN AFRICA. IF the ancestors of the present three million slaves had never been brought here, — if their descendants had never been propagated here, for the supposed value of their services, their places would have been supplied by white laborers — by men of the Caucasian race, — by freemen. Instead of the three million slaves, of all colors, we should 140 THOUGHTS. doubtless now have at least three million white, freeboro citizens, adding to the real prosperity of the country, and to the power of the republic. If the South had not had slaves to do their work for them, they would have become ingenious and inven- tive like the North, and would have enlisted the vast forces of Nature in their service, — wind, and fire, and water, and steam, and lightning, the mighty energies of gravitation and the subtle forces of chemistry. The country might not have had so gaudy and ostentatious a civilization as at present, but it would have had one infinitely more pure and sound. ALL MEy CREATED EQUAL. I HAVE been taught from my earliest childhood that " all men are created equal." This has become to me not merely a conviction of the under- standing, but a sentiment of the heart. This maxim is my principle of action, whenever I am called upon to act ; and it rises spontaneously to my contemplations when I speculate upon human duty. It is the plainest corollary from the doctrine of the natural equality of man, that when I see a man, or a class of men, Avho are not equal to myself in opportunities, in gifts, in means of improvement, or THOUGHTS. 141 in motives and incitements to an elevated character and an exemplary life, — I say, it is the plainest corollary that I should desire to elevate those men to an equality with myself. NO EDUCATION FOE THE SLAVE. OF all the remorseless and wanton cruelties ever committed in this world of wickedness and woe, I hold that to be the most remorseless and wanton which shuts out from all the means of instruction a being whom God has endued with the capacities of knowledge, and inspired with the divine desire to know. Strike blossom and beauty from the vernal season of the year, and leave it sombre and cheerless ; annihilate the harmonies with which the birds of spring make vocal the field and the forest, and let exulting Nature become silent and desolate ; — do all this, if you will, but Avithhold your profane hand from those creative sources of knowledge which shall give ever-renew- inf? and ever-increasing deli^jht through all the cycles of immortality, and which have the power to assimilate the finite creature more and more nearly to the infinite Creator. 142 THOUGHTS. TEE VALUE OF KNOWLEDGE TO EVERT HUMAN BEING. HE who denies to children the acquisition of knowledge works devilish miracles. If a man destroys my power of hearing, it is precisely the same to me as though, leaving my faculty of hear- ing untouched, he had annihilated all the melodies and harmonies of the universe. If a man oblit- erates my power of vision, it is precisely the same to me as though he had blotted out the light of the sun, and flung a pall of darkness over all the beau- ties of the earth and the glories of the Armament. So, if a usurper of human rights takes away from a child the faculties of knowledge, or the means and opportunities to know, it is precisely the same to that child as though all the beauties and the wonders, all the magnificence and the glory of the universe itself had been destroyed. . . . Just so far as he disables and incapacitates them from know- ing, he annihilates the object of knowledge ; he obliterates history ; he destroys the countless mate- rials in the natural world that mif]fht, through the medium of the useful arts, be converted into human comforts and blessings ; he suspends the sublime order and progression of Nature, and blots out those wonderful relations of cause and effect that THOUGHTS. 143 belong to her unchangeable laws. Nay, there is a sense in which such an impious destroyer of knowl- edge may be said to annihilate the attributes of the Creator himself, for he does annihilate the capacity of forming a conception of that Creator, and thus prevents a soul that was created in the image of God from ever receiving the image it was cre- ated to reflect. IGNORANCE BREEDS ERROR. HE who shuts out truth, by the same act opens the door to all the error that supplies its place. Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up all the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge. He who dethrones the idea of law, bids chaos welcome in its stead. Supersti- tion is the mathematical complement of religious truth, and just so much less as the life of a human being is reclaimed to good, just so much more it is delivered over to evil. The man or the institution, therefore, that withholds knowledge from a child or from a race of children, exercises the awful power of changing the world in which they live just as much as if he should annihilate all that is most lovely and good in this planet of ours, or transport the victim of his cruelty to some dark 144 THOUGHTS. and frigid zone of the universe, where the sweets of knowledge are unknown, and the terrors of igno- rance hold their undisputed and remorseless reign. SLAVERY IN THE CONSTITUTION. IN regard to this whole matter of slavery, the Constitution touches the subject with an avert- ed face. The abhorred word ^' slave" is no where mentioned in it. The Constitution is ashamed to utter such a name. The country, coming fresh from that baptism of fire, — the American Revo- lution, — would not profane its lips with this un- hallowed word. Hence circumlocution is resorted to. It seeks to escape a guilty confession. Like a culprit, in whom some love of character still sur- vives, it speaks of its offence 'svithout calling it by name. It uses the reputable and honorable word "per.so?2s," instead of the accursed word ^^ slaves." As the Tyrian queen, about to perpetrate a deed which would consign her character to infamy, called it by the sacred name of " marriage," and committed it, — ^^ Hoc prceterit nomine culjpam" — so the Constitution, about to recognize the most guilty and cruel of all relations between man and man, sought to avert its eyes from the act, and to pacify the remonstrances of conscience against THOUGHTS. 145 every participation in the crime, by hiding the deed under a reputable word. CONGRESS m 1849. ONE of the prohibitions of the Constitution is, that Congress shall pass " no bill of attain- der." What is a bill of attainder? It is a bill that works corruption of blood. It disfranchises its object. It takes away from him the common privileges of a citizen. It makes a man incapable of acquiring, inheriting, or transmitting property ; incapable of holding office, or acting as attorney for others ; and it shuts the doors of the courts against him. These disabling consequences may descend to a man's children after him, though this is not necessary. Now, to pass such a bill is a thing which Congress cannot do. But when Congress undertook to legalize slavery in the District of Co- lumbia, it undertook to do all this, and worse than all this. It attainted, not individuals merely, but a whole race. A slave is an outlaw ; that is, he cannot make a contract ; he cannot prosecute and defend in court ; property cannot be acquired by him, or devised to him, or transmitted through him. A white man may give his testimony against him, but he cannot give his testimony against a white 10 146 THOUGHTS. man. He is despoiled of his liberam legem — his birthright. He cannot own the food or clothes he has earned. What is his, is his master's. And this corruption of blood, which the law of slavery- works, does not stop with the first, nor with the second generation ; not with the tenth, nor the ten-thousandth ; but, by the theory of the law, goes on forever. Bills of attainder, during the history of the first periods of the world, have applied to individuals only, or at most to a family. But here, Congress, in defiance of the Constitution, has un- dertaken to establish a degraded caste in society, and to perpetuate it through all generations. Can any reasonable man for a moment suppose that the Constitution meant to bar Congress from passing acts of attainder against individuals, but to permit it to pass wholesale, sweeping laws, working dis- franchisement of an entire race, and entailing degradation forever ? FREE-SOILISM. 1850. THE term " Free-Soiler " is perpetually used upon this floor (of Congress) as a term of igno- miny and reproach ; yet I maintain that in its original and legitimate sense, as denoting an advo- cate of the doctrine that all our territorial pes- THOUGHTS. 147 sessions should be consecrated to freedom, there is no language that can supply a more honorable ap- pellation. It expresses a determination on the part of its disciples to keep free the territory that is now free ; to stand upon its frontiers as the cherubim stood at the gates of Paradise, with a flaming sword to turn every way, to keep the sin of slavery from crossing its borders. . . . The epithet " Free-Soil- er," therefore, when rightly understood and cor- rectly applied, implies both political and moral worth ; and I covet the honor of its application to myself. SLA VE-SOILISM. WHAT does the term " Slave-Soiler " signify? It signifies one who desires and designs that all soil should be made to bear slaves. Its dread- ful significancy is, that after Magna Charta and the Petition of Right in Great Britain, and after the Declaration of Independence in this country, we should cast aside with scorn, not only the teachings of Christianity, but the clearest principles of reli- gion and natural law, and should retrograde from our boasted civilization into the Dark Ages, — ay, into periods that the Dark Ages might have called dark. It means that this Eepublic^ as we call it, formed to establish freedom, should enlist in a cru- sade against freedom. 148 THOUGHTS. ABOLITIONISM. BEFORE ^Ye can decide upon the honor or the infamy of the term "Abolitionist," we must know what things they are which he proposes to abolish. We of the North, you say, are abolition- ists ; but abolitionists of what? Are we abolition- ists of the inalienable, indefeasible, indestructible rights of man? Are we abolitionists of knowl- edge, abolitionists of virtue, of education, and of human culture? Do we seek to abolish the glo- rious moral and intellectual attributes which God has given to his children, and thus, as far as it lies in our power, make the facts of slavery conform to the law of slavery, by obliterating the distinction between a man and a beast? Do our laws and our institutions seek to blot out and abolish the image of God in the human soul? Do we abolish the marriage covenant? Do we ruthlessly tear asun- der the sacred ties of affection by which God has bound the parent to the child and the child to the parent? Do we seek to abolish all those noble instincts of the human soul,, by Avhich it yearns for S^ improvement and progress? and do we quench its sublimest aspirations after knowledge and virtue? A stranger would suppose, from hearing the epi- thets of contumely that are heaped upon us, that THOUGHTS. 149 we were abolitionists of all truth, purity, knowl- edge, improvement, civilization, happiness, and holi- ness. On this subject, perversion of language and of idea has been reduced to a system, and the false- hoods of our calumniators exclude truth with the exactness of a science. If we are abolitionists, we are abolitionists of human bondage ; while those who oppose us are abolitionists of human liberty. SLAVERY SANCTIO^^ED BY THE LEVITICAL LAW. I MUST express the most energetic dissent from those who would justify modern slavery from the Levitical law. My reason and conscience re- volt from those interpretations which " Torture the hallowed pages of the Bible To sanction crime, and robbery, and blood, And, in Oppression's hateful service, libel Both man and God." FREE THOUGHT IN GALILEO'S TIME. PRIESTS appealed to the Bible, in Galileo's time, to refute the truths of astronomy. For more than two hundred years the same ijlass of men appealed to the same authority to disprove the science of geology. And now this authority is cited, not to disprove a law of physical nature merely, but to deny a great law of the human 150 THOUGHTS. goul, — a law of human consciousness, — a law of God written upon the tablet of every man's heart, authenticating and attesting his title to freedom. Let those who reverence the Bible beware how they suborn it to commit this treason and perjury against the sacred rights of man and the holy law of God. Whatever they gain for the support of their doctrine, will be so much subtracted from the authority of the Scriptures. If the Bible has crossed the Atlantic to spread slavery over a con- tinent where it was not known before, then the Bible is a book of death, and not a book of life. THE FACT OF SLAVERT AND THE LAW OF SLAVERY. IT is said that the fact of slavery always precedes the law of slavery ; that law does not go before the institution that creates it, but comes afterwards to sanction and regulate it. But this is no more true of slavery than of every other institution among mankind, whether right or wrong. Homicide ex- isted before laAv ; the law came in subsequently, and declared that he who took an innocent man's life without law, should lose his own by law. The law came in to regulate homicide ; to authorize the taking of human life for crime, just as we author- ize involuntary servitude for crime ; and it may just THOUGHTS. 151 as well be argued that murder is a natural right because it existed before law, as that slavery is a natural right because it existed before law. This argument apjpeals to the crime ivhich the law was enacted to prevent, in order to establish the supreme acy of the crime over the law that forbids it, SLAVERY SAyCTIONED BY THE COXSTITUTIOIT. AS to the argument that the Constitution of the United States recognizes slavery, and that, upon the cession of new territories, the Constitution, by some magical and incomprehensible elasticity, extends itself over them, and carries slavery into them, I think I speak with all due respect when I say it does not come up to the dignity of a sophism. ... It would have been a much more plausible pretension, when the purchase of Louisiana and Florida was made, that the Constitution carried freedom into those territories ; because the Consti- tution was built upon the basis of the common law, and, in terms, adopts the common law for its legal processes and its rules of judicial interpretation ; and everybody knows that there is no principle more dear to the common law than that all treaties, statutes, and customs shall be construed in favor of life and in favor of liberty. 152 THOUGHTS. GOOD OPIXIOX OF OTHERS IXFLUEXTIAL FOR GOOD. IN his " Theory of Moral Sentiments," Adam Smith maintains that it is the judgment of men, — the opinion of the bystanders, — that gives us the pleasure of being approved, or the pain of being disapproved, on account of our conduct. Now in this contest between the North and the South, on this subject of extending slavery, who are the by- standers? They are the civilized nations of the earth. We, the North and the South, are contend- ing in the arena. All civilised men stand around us. They are a ring of lookers on. It is an august spectacle. It is a larger assemblage than ever witnessed any other struggle in the history of mankind ; and their shouts of approbation or hisses of scorn are worthy of our heed. They are now looking on with disgust and abhorrence. They groan, they mock, they hiss. The brightest pages of their literature portray us as covered with badges of dishonor ; their orators hold up our purposes as objects for the execration of mankind ; their wits hurl the lightnings of satire at our leaders ; their statute books abound in laws in which institutions like ours are branded as crimes ; their moralists, from their high and serene seats of justice, arraign and condemn us ; their theologians find our doom of retribution in the oracles of God. THOUGHTS. 153 DISUNION. THREATS of dissolution, if executed, become rebellion and treason. The machinery of this government is now moving onward in its majestic course. Should the hand of violence be laid upon it, then will come that exigency, expressly provided for in the Constitution, and in the President's inau- gural oath, " TO TAKE CAEE THAT THE LAWS BE FAITHFULLY EXECUTED." Such collision would be war. Such forcible opposition to government would be treason. Its agents and abettors would be traitors. Wherever this rebellion rears its crest, martial law will be proclaimed ; and those found with hostile arms in their hands must prepare for for the felon's doom. I cannot contemplete this spectacle without a thrill of horror. If the two sections of this country ever marshal themselves against each other, and their squadrons rush to the conflict, it will be a war carried on by such powers of intellect, animated by such vehemence of passion, and sustained by such an abundance of resources, as the world has never before witnessed. . . . And what is the object for which we are willing to make this awful sacrifice? Is it to redeem a realm to freedom ? No ! but to subjugate a realm 154 THOUGHTS. to slavery. Is it to defend the rights of man ? No ! but to abolish the rights of man. FREEDOM IX THE TERRITORIES. WITH every philanthropic Northern man, a collateral motive for keeping the new territo- ries free, is, that they may be a land of hope and promise to the poor man, to whichever of all our states he belong, where he may go and find a home and a homestead and abundance. But the South, in attempting to open these territories to the slaveholders, would give them to the rich alone, — would give them to less than three hundred thou- sand persons out of a population of six millions. The interests of the poorer classes at the South all demand free territory, where they can go and rise at once to an equality with their fellow-citizens, which they can never do at home. They are nat- ural abolitionists, and unless blinded by ignorance, or overawed by their social superiors, they will so declare themselves. LEADING MEN RESPONSIBLE TO THE COMMUNITY, THE leading minds in a community are mainly responsible for the fortunes of that community. Under God, the men of education, of talent, and of THOUGHTS. 155 attainment, turn the tides of human affairs. Where great social distinctions exist, the iutelh'gence and the weahh of a few stimulate or suppress the voli- tion of the masses. They are the sensorium of the body politic, and their social inferiors are the mighty limbs, which, for good or for evil, they wield. Such is the relation in which the three hundred thousand, or less than three hundred thousand slave-owners of the South hold their fellow-citizens. They can light the torch of civil Avar, or they can quench it. But if civil war once blazes forth, it is not given to mortal wisdom to extinguish or control it. It comes under other and mightier laws, under other and mightier agencies. Human passions feed the combustion ; and the fire which the breath of man has kindled, the passions of the multitude — stronger than the breath of the hurricane — will spread. Among those passions, one of the strongest and boldest is the love of liberty, which dwells in every bosom. In the educated and civilized, this love of liberty is a regulated, but paramount desire ; in the ignorant and debased, it is a wild, vehement instinct. It is an indestructible part of the nature of man. Weakened it may be, but it cannot be destroyed. It is a thread of asbestos in the web of the soul, which all the fires of oppression cannot consume. 156 THOUGHTS. SPIRIT OF THE AGE. THERE is one hazard which the South invokes and defies, which to her high-minded and honor- loving sons, should be more formidable than all the rest. She is defying the spirit of the age. She is not only defying the judgment of contemporaries, but invoking upon herself the execrations of pos- terity. Mark the progress in the public sentiment of Christendom, within the last few centuries, on the subject of slavery and the rights of man. After the discovery of this continent by Columbus, the ecclesiastics of Spain held councils to discuss the question, whether the aborigines of this country had or had not souls to be saved. They left this ques- tion undecided ; but they said, as it was possible that the nations of the New World might have an immortal spirit, they would send them the gospel, so as to be on the safe side ; and the mission of Las Casas was the result. NEW MEXICO. ALL that part of New Mexico which Texas claims, and which lies between the parallels 36° 30' and 42^" is, by the resolutions of annexa- tion, to be forever free. Mr. Clay's compromise proposes to buy this territory, so secured to freedom, THOUGHTS. 157 and annex it to New Mexico, which is to be left open for slavery. We are to peril all the broad region between 36° 30' and 42°, and pay Texas some six or eight millions of dollars for the privilege of doing so ! Mr. Clay is not less eminent for his statesmanship than for his waggery. Were he to succeed in playing off this practical joke upon the North, and were it not for the horrible consequences which it would involve, a roar of laughter, like a feu-de-joie^ would run down the course of ages. As it is, the laughter will be " elsewhere." M"; MR. CLAY'S COMPROMISES. CLAY'S last point is too facetious. So J_?J- solemn a subject does not permit such long- continued levity, however it may be marked by sobriety of countenance. It is, that Congress shall make more effectual provision for the capture and delivery of fugitive slaves ; and, as an equivalent for this, it shall bind itself never to interfere with the inter-state traffic in slaves. We are to catch the slaves of the South, and, as though this were a gi-ateful privilege to us, we are to allow them free commerce in slaves, coastwise or inland. By this means, slaves can be transported to the mouth of the Rio Grande, and some hundreds of miles up 158 THOUGHTS. that river, towards New Mexico, instead of being driven in coffles across the country. The compro- mise is, that for every slave w^e catch, we are to facilitate the passage of a hundred into New Mexico. These are such compromises as the w^olf ofi'ers to the lamb, or the vulture to the dove. WILMOT PROVISO. MR. WEBSTER casts away the Proviso alto- gether. He says, ^^ If a resolution or a law were now hefore us to provide a territorial govern- ment for New Mexico^ I would not vote to put any prohibition into it whatever." The reason given is, that slavery is already excluded from "California and New Mexico" ''by the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation of the earth." *' California and New Mexico are Asiatic in their formation and scenery. They are composed of vast ranges of mountains of enormous height, with broken ridges and deep valleys." Now this is drawing moral conclusions from physical premises. It is arguing from physics to metaphysics. It is determining the law of the spirit by geographical phenomena. It is under- taking to settle by mountains and rivers, and not by the ten commandments, a great question of THOUGHT S . 159 human duty. It abandons the second command- ment of Christ and all bills of rights enacted in conformity thereto, and leaves our obligations to our neighbor to be determined by the accidents of earth and water and air. To ascertain whether people will obey the divine command, and do to others as they would be done by, it looks at the thermometer. What a problem would this be : " Required, the height above the level of the sea at which the oppressor will undo the heavy burden and let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke, — to be determined barometrically." Alas ! this cannot be done. Slavery depends, not upon cli- mate, but upon conscience. Wherever the wicked passions of the human heurt can go, there slavery can go. Slavery is an effect. Avarice, sloth, pride, and the love of domination, are its cause. In ascending mountains, at what altitude do men leave their consciences behind them? Different vegetable growths are to be found at different heights, depending also upon the zone. This I can understand. There is the altitude of the palm, the altitude of the oak, the altitude of the pine, and, far above them all, the line of perpetual snow. But, in regard to innocence and guilt, where is the white line f There are to-day forty-eight millions 160 THOUGHTS. of slaves in Russia, not one rood of which comes down so low as the northern boundary of Cali- fornia and New Mexico. EXTEXSIOX OF SLAVERY. WHILE I utterly deny the claim set up by the South, yet I would gladly consent that my southern fellow-citizens should go to the terri- tories and carry there every kind of property which I can carry. I would then give to the Southern States their full share of all the income ever to be derived from the sales of the public lands, or the leasing of the public mines ; and whatever, after this deduction, was left in the public treasury, should be appropriated for the whole nation, as has been the practice heretofore. That is, in conse- quence of excluding slavery from the territories, I would give the South a double share, or even a three-fold share, of all the income that may ever be derived from them. Pecuniary surrenders I would gladly make for the sake of peace, but not for peace itself would I surrender liberty. MASSACHUSETTS CONSENT TO SLAVERY! THE idea that Massachusetts should contribute or consent to the extension of human slavery ! — is it not enough, not merely to arouse the livin» THOUGHTS. 161 from their torpor, but the dead from their graves ? Were I to help this, nay, did I not oppose it with all the powers and faculties which God has given me, I should see myriads of agonized faces glaring out upon me from the future, more terrible than Duncan's at Macbeth, and I would rather feel au assassin's poniard in my breast than forever here- after to see the "air-drawn dagger" of a guilty memory. In Massachusetts the great drama of the Revolution began. Some of the heroes yet survive amongst us. At Lexington, and at Bunker Hill, the grass still grows greener where the soil was fattened by the blood of our fathers. If, in the providence of God, we must be vanquished in this contest, let it be by force of the overmastering and inscrutable powers above us, and not by our own base desertion. Mli. WEBSTER APPEALS TO HIGHER AUTHORITY. M R. WEBSTER advises me, in a certain con- -JX tingency, " to appeal to that higher authority which sits enthroned above the Constitution and the laws." I take no exception to this counsel because of its officiousness, but would thank him for it. My ideas of duty require mc to seek anx- iously for the true interpretation of the Constitu- 11 162 THOUGHTS. tioD, and then to abide by it, unswayed by hopes or fears. If the Constitution requires me to do any thing which my sense of duty forbids, I shall save my conscience by resigning my office. I am free, however, to say, that if in the discharge of my political duties, I should adopt Mr. Webster's ironical advice, 1 should go to the power " which sits enthroned above," rather than descend to that opposite realm whence the bill he so cordially prom- ised to support (Fugitive Slave bill) must have emerged. TRIAL BY JURY. IT is perfectly well known to every student of the Constitution, that the only reason why that in- strument did not make express provision for the trial by jury in civil cases, was the difficulty of running the dividing line between the many cases that should be so tried, and the few that should not. All were agreed that ninety-nine per cent, of all civil cases should be tried by jury ; but they could not agree upon the classes of cases from which the one remaining per cent, should be taken. SLAVERY " THE SUM OF ALL VILL ANTES.'' JOHN WESLEY, who had lived amid slavery, denominates it the " sum of all villanies." And THOUGHTS. 163 if Christ came into this world and left it, without permeating and saturating all his teachings with injunctions against the injustice, cruelty, pride, avarice, lust, love of domination, and love of adu- lation, which are the inseparable accompaniments of slavery, then I think the Christian world will cry out, that so far as this life is concerned, his mission was substantially fruitless. '* O star-eyed Science ! hast thou wandered there, To bring us back those tidings of despair? " So, if the Constitution of the United States con- tains not even any implied security for the liberty of all the colored population in the free states and territories, and for the trial by jury as the only ade- quate means of securing that liberty, then would it not be more creditable to its framers never to have put their signatures to it? SLAVERY EXTENSION. SUCH is my solemn and abiding conviction of the character of slavery, that under a full sense of my responsibility to God, I deliberately say, better disunion, — better a civil or a servile war, — better any thing that God in his provi- dence shall send, than an extension of the bounds of slavery. 1C4 THOUGHTS. SLA FEET OR FREEDOM! WHICH is of the greater importance, that the owner should recover his slave, or that the citizen should retain his freedom ? I answer accord- ing to the language which the criminal law uses respecting guilt and innocence, that it is better that nine hundred and ninety-nine, that is, an indefinite number of slaves should escape, than that one free- man should be delivered into bondage. '^ PEXXSYLVANIA'S WRONGS.'' MR. WEBSTER holds Massachusetts up to the ridicule of the world, because, as he says, she " grows fervid on Pennsylvania's wrongs ; " and he has deemed it his duty to inquire how many seizures of fugitive slaves have occurred in New England within our time. Is this the Christian standard by which to estimate the evil of enact- ments upon the most sacred rights of men? If I repose in contentment and indifference, because my own section, or state, or county is as yet but a partial sufferer, why should I not continue con- tented and indifferent while I myself am safe ? In providing for the liberties of the citizen, under a common government, I think Massachusetts wor- thy of all honor and not of ridicule, because she THOUGHTS. 165 does " grow fervid on Pennsylvania's wrongs," and on the wrongs of an entire race, whether in Pennsylvania or California, or anywhere within the boundaries of our own country. I see no reason why my sympathies as a man, or the obliga- tions of my oath as an officer, in regard to the nearer or the remoter states, should be inversely as the squares of the distances. Even with regard to foreign countries, did Mr. Webster think so in those better days, when his eloquent appeal for oppressed and bleeding Greece roused the nation like the clarion ? Did Mr. Webster deem it neces- sary to make inquisitions through all the New England States, to learn how many Hungarian patriots they had seen shot at the tap of the drum, or how many noble Hungarian women had been stripped and whipped in their market-places, before he thrilled the heart of the nation at the wrongs of Kossuth and his compatriots, and invoked the exe- crations of the Avorld upon the Austrian and Rus- sian despots? I see no diiference between these cases, which is not in favor of our home interests^ of our own domestic rigliU^ except the difference of their bearing upon partisan politics and presidential rivalries. 166 THOUGHTS. MORAL EARTHQUAKES. THERE is a spot near the Mississippi River famous for the frequeocy of its earthquakes. A gentleman who visited there some years ago, told me that soon after entering a hotel, at a place called New Madrid, his attention was suddenly arrested by the rattling of the crockery, the jarring of the household furniture, and the shaking of the chair in which he sat. Starting up in trepidation, he sprang for the door. " O," said his landlord, " don't be alarmed. It is nothing hut an earth- quake." These phenomena, it seems, had become so common as to have lost their power of exciting alarm. So, I fear, it is in regard to the late com- motions in Europe, and especially in regard to some of the marvellous doin^js of Congress in our own country. From their astounding character, and their rapid succession, I fear we are becoming insensible to their importance, like the inhabitants who dwell at the base of Mount ^tna, whom neither the rumbling of the mountain, nor the lava rivers which pour down its side, can awake from their stupor, until, like Pompeii or Herculaneum, they are buried in the ruins. THOUGHTS. 167 MORE SUGAR-PLUMS. THIS surrendering to the threat of disunion is like tl^e foolish mother who gave her boy a sugar-plum to stop his swearing. Presently he belched out a stream of profanity ; and when the mother asked him why he did so, he said, " I want more sugar-plums." General Taylor embraced the 'whole subject in a short sentence, when he said he was more afraid of Texan bonds than of Texan bayonets. Their bonds have been ten thousand times more powerful than their bayonets in con- summating this disastrous compromise. PARTY DICTATION. PERHAPS I do not know what I was made for ; but one thing I certainly never Avas made for, and that is, to put principles on and off, at the dictation of a party, as a lackey changes his livery at his master's command. COMMERCE AND FREEDOM. ONE objection made to my position is, that I regard the question of the extension of slavery into our territories as paramount to those questions of a pecuniary character, on which we desire to ob- tain the favorable notice of our government. Let 168 THOUGHTS. this objection against me have its full force. I ad- mit it, in all its full length and breadth. I do regard the question of human freedom for. our wide- extended territories, with all the public and private consequences dependent upon it, both now and in all futurity, as first, foremost, chiefest among all the questions that have been before the government, or are likely to be before it. When temporary and commercial interests are put in competition with the enduring and unspeakably precious interests of freedom for a whole race, of liberty for a whole country, and of obedience to the will of the Creator, my answer is, " Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." DUTIES OF REPUBLICS. HOW obvious it is that we stand in the same relation to posterity that our ancestors do to us. And, as we boldly summon our forefathers to our tribunal for adjudication upon their conduct, so will our conduct be brought into judgment by our successors. Each generation has duties of its own to perform ; and our duties, though widely different from theirs, are not less important in their charac- ter, or less binding in their obligation^;. It was THOUGHTS. 169 their duty to found or establish our institutions, and nobly did they perform it. It is our duty to perfect and perpetuate these institutions ; and the most sol- emn question which can be propounded to this age is, are we performing it nobly? Shall posterity look back npon our present rulers, as w^e look back upon Arnold, or as we look back upon Washington ? Shall posterity look back upon us, as we look back upon the recreants who sought to make "Washington Dictator, and would have turned those arms against their country, which had been put into their hands to save her ? — or shall posterity look back upon us with the heart-throbbings, the tears, and passionate admiration wuth which we regard the Saviour-like martyrs, w^ho, for our welfare, in lonely dungeons and prison-ships, breathing a noisome atmosphere, — their powerful and robust frames protracting their tortures beyond the common endurance of nature, — and when the minions of power came round, day after day, and offered them life, and freedom, and a glad return to the upper air if they would desert their country's cause — refused and died? IT has long seemed to me that it would be more honorable to our ancestors, to praise them in words less, but in deeds to imitate them more. 170 THOUGHTS. If from their realms of blessedness they could ad- dress us, would they not say, "Prove the sincerity of your words by imitating the examples you profess to admire. The inheritance we left you is worth- less, unless you have inherited the spirit also by which it was acquired. The boon we would be- queath to the latest posterity, can never reach and bless them, save through your hands. In these spiritual abodes, whence all disturbing passions are excluded, where all i'usions are purged from our eyes, we can neither be beguiled nor flattered by lip-service. Deeds are the only language we under- stand ; and one act of self-sacrifice for the welfare of mankind is more acceptable to us than if you should make every mountain and hill-top a temple to hallow our names, and gather thither the whole generation as worshippers." TRUSTS, responsibilities, interests, vaster in amount, more sacred in character than ever before in the providence of God were committed to any people, have been committed to us. The great experiment of Eepublicanism — of the capacity of man for self-government — is to be tried anew, which, wherever it has been tried, — in Greece, in Rome, in Italy, — has failed, through an incapacity THOUGHTS. 171 in the people to enjoy liberty without abusing it. Another trial is to be made, whether mankind will enjoy more and suffer less, under the ambition and rapacity of an irresponsible parliament, or of irre- sponsible parties ; — under an hereditary sovereign, who must, at least, prove his right to destroy, by showing his birth, or under mobs, which are like wild beasts, that prove their right to devour by showing their teeth. A vacant continent is here to be filled up with innumerable millions of human beings, who may be happy through our wisdom, but must be miserable through our folly. Religion — the ark of God — which, of old times, was closed that it might not be profaned — is here thrown open to all, whether Christian, Jew, or Pagan ; and yet is to be guarded from desecration and sacrilege, lest we perish with a deeper perdition than ever befell any other people. SELF' G VEENMENT. WITH the heroes, and sages, and martyrs of former days, I believe in the capability of .man for self-government — my whole soul thereto most joyously consenting. Nay, if there be any heresy among men, or blasphemy against God, at which the philosopher might be allowed to forget 172 THOUGHTS. his equanimity, and the Christian his charity, it is the heresy and the blasphemy of believing and avowing that the infinitely good and all-wise Au- thor of the universe persists in creating and sustain- ing a race of beings, who, by a law of their nature, are forever doomed to suffer all the atrocities and agonies of misgovernment, either from the hands of others, or from their own. The doctrine of the inherent and necessary disability of mankind for self- government should be regarded, not simply -with denial, but mth execration. To sweep so foul a creed from the precincts of truth, and utterly to consume it, rhetoric should become a whirlwind, and logic fire. THE VOTIXG DAY. ON one of those oft-recurring days, when the fate of the State or the Union is to be decided at the polls ; — when, over all the land, the votes are falling thick as hail, and we seem to hear them rattle like the clangor of arms ; — is it not enough to make the lover of his country turn pale, to reflect upon the motives under which they may be given, and the consequences to which they may lead ? By the votes of a few wicked men, or even of one wicked man, honorable men may be hurled from THOUGHTS. 173 oflBice, and miscreauts elevated to their places ; use- ful offices abolished, and sinecures created ; the public wealth, which had supported industry, squan- dered upon mercenaries ; enterprise crippled — the hammer falling from every hand, the wheel stopping in every mill, the sail dropping to the mast on every sea — and thus capital, which had been honestly and laboriously accumulated, turned into dross; — in fine, the whole policy of the government may be re- versed, and the social condition of millions change'd, to gratify one man's grudge, or prejudice, or re- venge. In a word, if the votes which fall so copi- ously into the ballot-box, on our days of election, emanate from wise counsels and a loyalty to truth, they will descend, like benedictions from Heaven, to bless the land and fill it with song and gladness — such as have never been kno^vn upon earth since the days of Paradise. CHANGE OF MEASVRES. WITH the change in the organic structure of our government, there should have been corresponding changes in all public measures, and institutions. About the expediency, and especially about the extent of that change, a wide difference of opinion prevailed. But, the change being made, 174 THOUGHTS. was it not the duty of its opponents to yield to the inevitable course of events, and to prepare for coming exigencies? And could not every really noble soul find an ample compensation for the loss of personal influence or family distinction, in the greater dignity and elevation of his fellow-beings? From whom should instruction come, if not from the most educated? Where should generosity to- Avards the poor begin, if not with those whom Prov- itlence had blessed with abundance ? Whence should magnanimity proceed, if not from minds expanded by culture ? If there were an order of men who lost something of patrician rank by this political change, instead of holding themselves aloof from the people, they should have walked among them as Plato and Socrates did among their contemporaries, and ex- pounded to them the nature and the vastness of the work they had undertaken to do ; nay, if need were, they should have draiaed the poisoned bowl to sanc- tify the truths which they taught. For want of that interest and sympathy in the condition of the poor and the ignorant which the new circumstances re- quired, they and their descendants have been, and will be compelled to drink potions, more bitter than hemlock, as their daily beverage. THOUGHTS. 175 SCHOOLS THE COUNTERPART OF FREEDOM. I HAVE said that schools should have been established for the education of the whole peo- ple. These schools should have been of a more perfect character than any which have ever yet existed. In them, the principles of morality should have been copiously intermingled with the principles of science. Cases of conscience should have alter- nated with lessons in the rudiments. The multipli- cation table should not have been more familiar nor more frequently applied, than the rule, to do to . others as we would that they should do unto us. The lives of great and good men should have been held up for admiration and example, and especially the life and character of Jesus Christ, as the sub- limest pattern of benevolence, of purity, of self- sacrifice, ever exhibited to mortals. In every course of studies, all the practical and preceptive parts of the gospel should have been sacredly included ; and all dogmatical theology and sectarianism sacredly excluded. In no school should the Bible have been opened to reveal the sword of the polemic, but to unloose the dove of peace. I have thus endeavored to show, that with uni- versal suffrage, there must be universal elevation of character, intellectual and moral, or there will be universal mismanagement and calamity. 176 THOUGHTS. STREXGTH OF A REPUBLIC. SOME have thought that, in a republic, the good and wise must necessarily maintain an ascen- dency over the vicious and ignorant. But whence any such moral necessity? The distinctive char- acteristic of a republic is the greater freedom and power of its members. A republic is a political contrivance by which the popular voice is collected and uttered, as one articulate and authoritative sound. If, then, the people are unrighteous, that utterance will be unrighteous. If the people, or a majority of them, withdraw their eyes from wisdom and equity, — those everlasting lights in the firma- ment of truth ; if they abandon themselves to party strife, where the triumph of a faction, rather than the prevalence of the right, is made the object of contest, — it becomes as certain as are the laws of Omnipotence, that such a community will express and obey the baser will. THE SOVEREIGN PEOPLE. I REJOICE that power has passed irrevocably into the hands of the people, although I know it has brought imminent peril upon all public and private interests, and placed what is common and what is sacred alike in jeopardy. Century after THOUGHTS. 177 century, mankind had groaned beneath unutterable oppressions. To pamper a few with luxuries, races had been subjected to bondage. To satiate the ambition of a tyrant, nations had been dashed against each other in battle, and millions crushed by the shock. The upward-tending, light-seeking capacities of the soul had been turned downwards into darkness and debasement. All the realms of futurity which the far-seeing eye of the mind could penetrate, had been peopled with the spectres of superstition. The spirits of the infernal world had been subsidized, to bind all religious freedom, whether of thought or speech, in the bondage of fear. Heaven had been sold, for money, like an earthly domicile, by those who, least of all, had any title to its mansions. In this exigency, it was the expedient of Providence to transfer dominion from the few to the many, — from those who had abused it, to those who had suffered. The wealthy, the high-born, the privileged, had had it in their power to bless the people ; but they had cursed them. Nov/, they and all their fortunes are in the hands of the people. The poverty which they have entailed is to command their opulence. The ignorance they have suffered to abound, is to adjudicate upon their rights. The appetites they 12 178 THOUGHTS. have neglected, or which they have stimulated for their own indulgence, are to invade the sanctuary of their homes. In fine, that interest and concern for the welfare of inferiors, which should have sprung from motives of philanthropy, must now be extorted from motives of self-preservation. As a famine teaches mankind to be industrious and prov- ident, so do these great developments teach the more favored classes of society that they never can be safe while they neglect the welfare of any por- tion of their social inferiors. In a broad survey of the grand economy of Providence, the lesson of frugality and thrift, which is taught by the dearth of a single year, is no plainer than this grander lesson of universal benevolence, which the lapse of centuries has been evolving, and is now inculcating upon the world. ATHEISTS. I HAVE somewhere seen the number of athe- ists, — of Abner Kneeland's men, — in the Uni- ted States, stated fearfully high ; but upon what authority, or after what extent and accuracy of investigation, I am not able to say. These are all men — if not voters; — for, thank Heaven, the female heart is untenantable by atheism. But a THOUGHTS. 179 fact, far more important than the number of theo- retical atheists, is, the number of 'practical athe- ists, — of those who live without God in the world, — who have neither faith nor practice, respecting the existence, the immutability, and the inevitable execution of the Divine Laws. I say the number of practical atheists is the ques- tion of greater importance ; for who can live in this world and mingle with its people, and not be more deeply impressed, day by day, with the divine wisdom of the criterion, " By their fruits ye shall know them " ? Actions are fruits, while pharisa- ical professions are only gilded signs or placards, hung upon thistles or thorn-bushes, saying, "Ho, all ye, we bear figs and grapes ! " "ALL MUST BE CLE AX, OR NONE CAN- BE CLEAN." IT is the sublimest truth which the history of the race has yet brought to light, that God has so woven the fortunes of all men into one inseparable bond of unity and fellowship, that it can be well with no class, or oligarchy, or denomination of men, who, in their own self-seeking, forget the welfare of their fellow-beings. Nature has so bound us together by the ties of brotherhood, by the endearments of sympathy and benevolence, that 180 THOUGHTS. the doing of good to others opens deep and peren- nial well-springs of joy in the human soul ; but if we will select the coarse gratification of selfish- ness, — if we will forget our own kindred blood, in whosesoever veins it may fl6w, then the Eternal Laws denounce, and will execute upon us, tribula- tion and anguish, and a fearful looking for of an earthly, as well as of a heavenly judgment. DANGER OF THE REPUBLIC. I DO not hesitate to affirm, that our republican edifice, at this time, — in present fact and truth, — is not sustained by those columns of solid and ever-enduring adamant. Intelligence and Vir- tue. Its various parts are only just clinging to- gether by that remarkable cohesion, — that mutual bearing and support which unsound portions of a structure may impart to each other, and which, as every mechanic well knows, will, for a time, hold the rotten materials of an edifice together, although not one of its timbers could support its own weight : — and unless, therefore, a new substructure can be placed beneath every buttress and angle of this boasted Temple of Liberty, it will soon totter and fall, and bury all indwellers in its ruins. THOUGHTS. 181 TRUTH, AND A SOUL TO SEE IT. TWO different elements are essential to the ex- istence of truth in the soul of man : — first, the essence, or prototype of truth, as it exists in the Divine Intelligence ; and secondly, a human soul, sufficiently enlightened by knowledge to con- ceive it, sufficiently exercised in judgment to under- stand it, and sufficiently free from evil to love it. The latter are every whit as essential as the former. The human mind must be so enlarged that truth can enter it, and so free from selfishness, from pride and intolerance, that truth may be its constant and welcome resident. To give truth a passport to the souls of men, to insure it home and supremacy in the human heart, there must be some previous awakening and culture of the intellectual and moral nature. In this respect, it is with spir- itual, as with scientific truth. The great astro- nomical truths which pertain to the solar system, have existed ever since the creation ; — for genera- tions past they have been known to the learned ; — and all the planets, as they move, are heralds and torch-bearers, sent round by the hand of God, revolution after revolution, and age after age, to make perpetual proclamation through all their cir- cuits, and to light up the heavens, from side to 182 THOUGHTS. side, with ocular and refulgent demonstration of their existence ; and yet, until their elements are all laboriously taught, until our minds are opened, and made capacious for their reception, these glo- rious truths are a blank, and for our vision and joy, might as well never have been. And so of all truth ; — there must be a mind enlarged, ennobled, purified, to embrace truth, in all .its beauty, sub- limity, and holiness, as well as beautiful, sublime, and holy truths to be embraced. Until this is so, truth will be a light shining in darkness, and the darkness comprehending it not. FREEDOM OR SUBJECTION? ARE there any who would counsel us to save the people from themselves, by wresting from their hands the formidable right of ballot? Better for the man who would propose this remedy to an infuriate multitude, that he should stand in the lightning's path as it descends from heaven to earth. And, answer me this question, you ! who would reconquer for the few, the power which has been won by the many ; — you ! who would dis- franchise the common mass of mankind, and recon- demn them to become helots, and bondmen, and feudal serfs ; — tell me. were they again in the THOUGHTS. 183 power of your castes, would you not again neglect them, again oppress them, again make them the slaves to your voluptuousness, and the panders or the victims of your vices ? Tell me, you royalists and hierarchs, or advocates of royalty and hierar- chy ! were the poor and the ignorant again in your power, to be tasked and tithed at your pleasure, would you not turn another Ireland into paupers, and colonize another Botany Bay with criminals ? Would you not brutify the men of other provinces into the " Dogs of Vendee,'^ and debase the noble and refined nature of woman, in other cities, into the ^' Poissardes of Paris?" O! better, far better, that the atheist and the blasphemer, and he who, since the last setting sun, has dyed his hands in parricide, or his soul in sacrilege, should challenge equal political power with the wisest and the best ; — better, that these blind Samsons, in the wan- tonness of their gigantic strength, should tear down the pillars of the Republic, than that the great lesson which Heaven, for six thousand years, has been teaching to the world, should be lost upon it ; — the lesson that the intellectual and moral nature of man is the one thing precious in the sight of God ; and therefore, until this nature is cultivated, and enlightened, and purified, neither 184 THOUGHTS. opulence, nor power, nor learning, nor genius, nor domestic sanctity, nor the holiness of God's altars, can ever be safe. Until the immortal and god-like capacities of every being that comes into the world are deemed more worthy, are watched more ten- derly than any other thing, no dynasty of men, or form of government, can stand, or shall stand, upon the face of the earth ; and the force or the fraud which would seek to uphold them, shall be but " as fetters of flax to bind the flame." INFLUENCE OF THE MAJORITY IN A liEPUBLIC. WE go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hos- pital. As Satan said, "Evil, be thou my good," so they say, " Darkness, be thou my light." NATIOXAL CRUIES. IN nations, every individual adds a unit to the factor that multiplies all capacities of good or evil. Hence the awful magnitude of a crime when nations put their strength into a wicked institution, or frame a wicked law, or strike a wicked blow. Hence the unimaginable suffering when a nation turns oppressor, and invents and plies the enginery of wronjr. THOUGHTS. 185 VICE IN COLLEGES. VICE and immorality, and the promptings of an irreligious heart, stand in direct antagonism to all true progress in knowledge ; and under their influence, whatever knowledge may be acquired is shorn of its divinest beauties. May all university and college faculties, then, hunt and scourge these pests of literary institutions from their precincts ; not necessarily by the exclusion of the oiFenders, not necessarily by penalties, but by opening to their pupils loftier and nobler views of human duty and destiny, and of the soul's capacities for excellence ; or, as Dr. Chalmers so beautifully expresses it, " by the expulsive power of a new affection." NO TRUTH USELESS. NO matter how seemingly unconnected with human affairs or remote from human inter- ests a newly-discovered truth may appear to be, time and genius will some day make it minister to human welfare. When Dr. Franklin was once sceptically asked what was the use of some re- condite and far-off truth which had just been brought to light, " What," said he, " is the use of babies? " 186 THOUGHTS. CONNECTION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. THE grand object, the main and chief thing, in which colleges should respond to the demands of the age, pertains to the intimate and indissolu- ble unioQ and connection which God has ordained to exist between science on the one hand, and religion on the other ; and by religion I mean the great ideas and affections pertaining to human brotherhood, and to practical obedience to the pre- cepts of the gospel of Jesus Christ. WEALTH OF NATIONS. TO write a work on the " Wealth of Nations," and say nothing of the health, education, or morals of the people at large, is as though a man should write a work on Mechanics, and ignore the lever, wheel, and axle, pulley, screw, inclined plane, and wedge. PARENTAL LOVE. THE Creator has so ordained, that, when the offspring of each animal, " after its kind," is brought forth into life — then — in that same hour — without volition or counsel, flames up in the breast of the parent, as from the innermost recesses of Nature, a new and over-mastering energy — an energy which enters into the bosom like a strong THOUGHTS. 187 invader, conquering, revolutionizing, transforming old pleasures into pains or old pains into pleasures, until its great mission is accomplished. On this instinct the very existence of the races is suspended, and therefore it is made strong enough to sustain them all. In cultivated and Christianized man, this animal instinct is exalted into a holy sentiment. First, it is true, swells up the blind passion of parental love, yearning for the good of the child, tortured by its pains, chained to its pleasures. But this vehement impulse, strong as it is, has not been left to do its work alone. It summons and supplicates all the nobler faculties of the soul to become its allies. PARENTAL CONSCIENCE. THAT is not conscience, but selfishness, which says to a child, " You owe your being to me." Conscience says, " It is I who have struck out a spark which is to burn with celestial radiance or shoot out baleful fires, and I am bound to purify and perfume the flame I have kindled." Conscience says, " Out of nothingness have I worked unknown and incalculable capacities of bliss or of misery, to be enlarged and become more and more intense for years, and lustres, and eternity." 188 THOUGHTS. DISIXTERESTED LOVE. THE soul of the truly benevolent man aoes not seem to live very much in its own body. Its life is made up from the emotions of others. It migrates into the bodies of others, and identi- fies its existence with theirs. THE SOUL ONE. ALL minds have the germs of all the faculties. The anatomist who understands the structure and parts of one human body, understands the structure and parts of all. The surgeon does not need to study the limb on which he is to operate ; he has studied all its parts on other limbs. So in all human minds there is the same number of facul- ties. Were any wanting, or were there a redun- dancy in any individual, that individual would be a monster. There are great differences in size, in proportion, in structure, in color, in different indi- viduals, but all are made after one model. So in the human soul there is the same number and kind of faculties, but differing in proportion, in ascen- dency. Herod and Howard had the germs of benev- olence and power, yet in Herod the love of power bore sway, and when he knew that there was a child in Judea under two years of age who might THOUGHTS. 189 endanger the stability of his throne, he made weep- ing and lamentation in Israel — Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they were not. But in Howard the sentiment of benevolence predominated, and from his day and by his beneficence, the records of human suffering will be abridged in every age while the world stands. LOVE OF TRUTH AN ATTRIBUTE OF THE INTELLECT. W UCH of the welfare of every generation de- pends upon the working capacity of the intellectual faculties. If the intellect cannot be trained to operate Avith mechanical precision, its powers of discrimination between truth and error may be greatly improved. The intellect has an elective affinity for truth. It instinctively repu- diates known error. The most depraved wretch does not love false conclusions for their own sake. ERRORS OF EDUCATION. THE unpardonable error of education has been, that it has not begun with simple truths, with elementary ideas, and risen by gradations to com- bined results. It has begun with teaching systems, rules, schemes, complex doctrines, which years of 190 THOUGHTS. analysis would scarcely serve to unfold. All is ad- ministered in a mass. The learner, not being able to comprehend, has endeavored to remember, and thus has been put off with a fact, in lieu of a prin- ciple explanatory of an entire class of facts. In this way we pass our errors and our truths over to our successors done up in the same bundle, they to others, and so onward, to be perpetual sources of error, alienation, and discord. ''LIVE TO THE TRUTH." THE minds of the incoming generation are as free from the possession of positive error as of positive truth, and they havis capacities that may be qualified to discriminate between them. Instil into them the love of truth, as the supreme good ; teach them, as a matter of conscience and duty, never to rehearse what is believed not to be under- stood ; lead them from antecedent to sequence, from cause to effect, from element to combinations, and minds will be reared which will discover truth, not because they were originally stronger or better minds, but because from their position it will be more easy to discern it. ^ THOUGHTS. 191 MATERIAL IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION. NO race of bondmen, smothered in the igno- rance essential to slavery, can ever earn so much by their muscles as they could earn by their wits, had they been educated and free. The hand is almost valueless at one end of the arm unless there is a brain at the other end. POLITICAL ECONOMY. WHEN visiting the Normal School at Dublin, in Ireland, with Archbishop Whately, an incident occurred which shows where the " wealth of nations " and the " morals of nations " interlink. A class was reciting in Political Economy, on the subject of the demand and supply of labor. " Sup- pose," said the archbishop, " a hundred laborers were wanted in a place and only fifty should offer their services, what would be the consequence ? " " They would be paid more" said the lad. '^ But suppose," said the archbishop, " only a hundred were wanted, and two hundred should come, what would then be the consequence?" " There luould he a rowy' was the answer. SOME schools behave almost as badly as Con- gress. 192 THOUGHTS. TEE KINGDOMS OF CHRIST AND OF SATAN. GREAT books are written for Christianity much oftener than great deeds are done for it. City libraries tell us of the reign of Jesus Christ, but city streets tell us of the reign of Satan. CHRIST'S TEACHING. THE pulpit only "teaches" to be honest; the market-place " trains " to overreaching and fraud ; and teaching has not a tithe of the efficiency of training. Christ never wrote a Tract, but he went ahout doing good. EVERY MAN HAS HIS OWN GOD. NO man can worship, intelligently, any more of God than he knows. A man cannot worship God for his fulness of wisdom, who is ignorant of the works in which that wisdom is displayed. So no man can worship God for his love, who has no perception of that love which is his leading attribute. UNION OF HEART AND INTELLECT. WHEN the faculties of the intellect, which make the political economist, are united to THOUGHTS. 193 those sympathies of the heart which make the philanthropist, their combined power will scale heights of human happiness which no amount of human knowledge, on the one hand, or intensity of love on the other, would ever be able alone to reach. HEAVEN NOT A PLACE. HEAVEN is commonly conceived of as a place, a locality; and somewhere in God's universe it is supposed there is a spot where elemental storms never deform the sky, where inward sorrow never cankers the heart. There is rest after labor, peace after conflict, smiles after tears, and such happiness as quenches all fiery memories of former pain ; and the common or popular notion is, that when good men leave this world, they are translated, that is, transported to heaven, as an aeronaut sails off in a balloon. The falsity of this view Christ exposes, when he says, " The kingdom of heaven is within you." In the words of Holy Writ, the kingdom of heaven is to fear God, and keep his commandments. It is to love the Lord our God with aU our hearts, and our neighbor as ourselves. It is to do to others as we would be done by. 13 194 THOUGHTS. IMMOR TALITY — E TERXITT. THE idea of Immortality differs from that of Eternity. We conceive of immortality as having a beginning, but no end ; but we conceive of eternity as having neither beginning nor end. Hence it is proper to speak of eternity as the attribute of God, but of immortality as the attri- bute of man. IMMORTALITY AN IXNATE CONVICTION. THE doctrine of Immortality, though under the most various forms, has constituted a promi- nent item in the faith of almost all religions. It seems, therefore, natural to man. "We say that vegetation is natural to the earth, because, wherever the requisite conditions co-exist, there vegetation springs up. So this idea of immortality, with very few exceptions, seems to have sprung up sponta- neously in the human mind. The ideas of the eternity of God and the immortality of man go naturally together. . . . The meaning of immor- tality is, that there is something in us all which fire cannot consume, nor waters drown, nor death assail ; that each one of us has an individuality, a personality, which is unsusceptible of decay, im- pregnable to corruption, without the possibility of perishing. THOUGHTS. 195 IDEALITY. HOW Strong that desire of improvement in the human mind, which is the companion, if it be not the condition, of genius! — that ideality, I mean, that always runs ahead of actuality. Achieve- ment is only the eminence whence we survey some- thing better to be achieved. Ideality is only the av ant-courier of the mind, and where that, in a healthy and normal state, goes, I hold it to be a prophecy that realization can follow. IMMORTALITY. I CAN understand why our Heavenly Father should cover the earth with flowers, and then suffer them to wither and decay ; why He should strew the bottom of the ocean with pearl and many- colored shells, and permit them to radiate all their beauty away in the deep ; why He should span the dark cloud with double or triple rainbow, and in an hour melt them into air ; why He should shoot up the northern auroras and quench their glittering flames ; why all the glories of the sunrise and of the sunset should hold their perpetual circuit around the earth from east to west, all of which are to be swallowed up in the brightening morning or in the darkening night ; why, with the annual ascension 196 THOUGHTS. and declination of the sun, a vast Avave of beauty and luxuriance should perpetually vibrate between the summer and the winter solstice, between the temperate zones of the north and of the south, to be followed at each extreme by wintry frosts and desolation ; — I say, I can understand all this, for these hues and forms of beauty, these grandeurs and splendors of nature, have no conscious exist- ence ; they did not know they lived, they do not know they die ; no song of exultation ushered them into being, no hopes died when they departed from it ; and God is so rich that He can afford to cover the firmament from horizon to zenith with the most gorgeous tapestry, and tear it down and replace it with new, every minute while we gaze ; He can afford to load every tree in the forest and every tiniest spire in the field with his icy regalia, — such as all the monarchs in the world cannot buy, — during the night, and melt them down in the morn- ing, and then produce new charms and wonders from the old. But I cannot understand why our conscious being, just awakened here into life, and capable of such keen and unending gratification ; why our virtues, purchased by heroic struggle or endurance, yielding such intense subjective enjoy- ment and longing for a career of immortality ; — I THOUGHTS. 197 cannot understand why these should be dissipated like the morning cloud, or expire, like a vernal flower, by some inherent law of limitation. I can- not explain or conceive why it should be, when, perchance, I have inherited excessive and exorbi- tant propensities from my ancestors ; or find my^ when first awaking to self-consciousness '' comprehension, already in the grasp 6, passions, by reason of some crime in my pi\ or mischance in my organization, or ma\^^ "^y ment of my powers ; and when, after A "<^^ _^- myself fully acquainted with the full compass of my heritage of woe, or the full calamity of my un- happy constitution, I address myself, in a life-long struggle, to the work of self-recuperation, and one after another do battle with these fiends of evil dis- positions that have been incarnated in my person ; cut off one after another, the hundred hydra-heads of each monster appetite and passion and lust, and like the hero in the old Grecian myth, apply a cau- tery of red-hot iron to the quivering flesh of every wound, though that wound is in my own soul, and hold it there through wildest and fiercest agonies, until the living fibre is crisped and charred too deep to allow life ever to spring from it or visit it again ; and when, at last, I have achieved the mighty 198 THOUGHTS. victory, aud stand in majestic and glorious propor- tions, hero and conqueror over that late domain of sorrow and of sin, and am now ready to enter upon those sublimer realms of splendor and beati- tude, and to wing my celestial course upward, through cycles of time and spirals of ascension, all the more vigorously because of the strength where- with I endued my soul in the aforetime contest with e.ny Satanic foes ; that there, at the very apex aud known of all my past endeavors and achievements, into \ my soul purified and rejuvenated, with my heart panuug *^ run the new career, with my aspiring eye fixed upon the zenith, and feeling the grand momentum of progression lifting in every ato7n of my being ; that then, instead of the victor's palm and the triumphal entrance, and the " Well done, good and faithful servant," I must be struck into annihilation, changed into a vacuum, reduced to that idealess, conceptionless state, if such a state ever was or ever could be, anterior to Nothing ! Let us exclaim not only, *' O, what a lame and im- potent," but what a contemptible and blasphemous conclusion ! The Creator of such a world has made a systematic business of fatuity, and given an eter- nal organization to infinite folly. THOUGHTS. 199 LOVE OF IMPROVEMENT A PROPHECY. HOW strong the desire of perfection in the heart of a good man ! what grief over error ! what delightful anticipations of improvement ! These I hold to be prophecy, just as the embryo lungs prophesied the air, and the embryo eye the light. Without immortality, well did Lord Bacon say, — " The world's a bubble, and the life of man Less thaii a span ; ~^ In his conception wretched, from the womb, So to the tomb, Curst from the cradle, and brought up to years With care and fears ; — "Who, then, to frail mortality shall trust, i But limns the water, or but writes in dust." THINK— ACT. y JUST in proportion as a man becomes good, divine, Christ-like, he passes out of the region of theorizing, of system-building, and hireling ser- vice, into the region of beneficent activities. It is well to think well. It is divine to act well. GEOLOGY— ASTR ONOMY. GEOLOGY leads us backward into Time, in the same manner as Astronomy leads us outward into Space. The one kindles the imagination as fervidly as it bears it backward into the eternity 200 THOUGHTS. of duration, as the other does when it causes us to soar outv/ard into an immensity of space. WHAT SANCTIFIES CIVILIZATION. WHO shall contradict the saying of Adam Smith, that " he is a public benefactor who makes two blades of grass grow where but one grew before " ? This the scientific man does. AVherever the intelligent and industrious man goes, though it be to barren waste or pestilential morass, health and abundance follow, if any regard for the common weal sanctifies the civilization. ^T IS EASIER '^C DIE FOR OTHERS THAN TO LIVE, FOR OTHERS. WE .feel within ourselves the power to die for others as Christ did. But can we live for others as he did? It is far more difficult, I assure you, to live for the truth than to die for it. I have seen the time when, if that would have answered as well, I could have died for a cause as easily as a babe falls asleep; but to live for it — that is the cutting off of the riglit hand, that is the plucking out of the right eye. Patient perseverance in well-doing is infinitely harder than a sudden and impulsive self-sacrifice. And hence this " patient THOUGHTS. 201 continuance " is the brightest jewel in the diadem of Christian virtues. TEMPERANCE. A BOVE all, let the poor hang up the amulet of temperance in their homes. I SPEAK against the entire operation of the system, the manufacture, traffic and consump- tion of ardent spirits ; I speak against the whole accursed process and all its several parts, from the time when we take a last look at the simple, health- ful, life-sustaining fruits of the earth before they are subjected to the action of the distiller's fire, until after they have passed through all the transforming* processes, and clothed with another nature, and dis- tributed through the community, come forth imbued w4th a new and terrific life, gigantic, multiform, resistless, stalking over the earth in the thousand shapes of poverty, disease, anguish, death, incen- "'^rism, murder, and undying ignominy. J NOT approximate to any just and ade- _L quate enumeration of the pernicious results of intemperance. When I pass in review in my mind the boundless variety and extent of its calamities, I 202 THOUGHTS. feel as though I were moving round in a circle large as the orbit of Saturn, where upon either side, farther than the eye can reach, there is nothing but desolation and woe, by which mankind have been decimated, — a tenth part cut off and dissociated from the rest. . . . IF all the wealth now sunk in the bottomless pit of intemperance were appropriated to the pur- chase of libraries, philosophical apparatus, or cabi- nets of natural history ; — if all the time, that element of priceless value which is now worse than lost in the various haunts of dissipation, Avere devoted to the reading of well-selected books, to lyceum exercises, to music, or other social and re- fining arts, it would give to society a new moral and political sensorium. How can any man witness without pain this great deformity, where there should be beauty and divine grandeur ? WHEN Solomon says, " Wine is a mocker, and strong drink is raging," and when the apostle Paul repeatedly classes " drunkenness " with the most foul and fatal of crimes, what con- firmation of his texts does the Christian minister find in the sciences of Pathology and Psychology, THOUGHTS. 203 which show alcohol to be among the deadliest of poisons for the body, and endowed with demoniac power over the soul ! IN the march of universal improvement, educa- tion must lead the van, but, in certain passages of this march, temperance must be the pioneer of education. On human beings, as nature leaves them, education can do a transforming work ; but on human beings as intemperance leaves them, education falls as fruitless as water upon flint. FOUR fifths of all the sufferings endured by the poor are caused, directly or indirectly, by the use of ardent spirits. Such sufferings never come in the course of nature, nor are they any necessary part of the dispensations of Providence. ENTIRE absence from all intoxicating drinks, as a beverage, would, with all its attendant blessings, in the course of a single generation, carry comfort, competence, and respectability, with but very few exceptions, into all the dwellings in the land. This is not a matter of probability and con- jecture. It depends upon principles as certain imd fixed in their operation as those which regulate 204 THOUGHTS. the rising of the sun and the revolution of the seasons. I BELIEVE the general opinion has been, and to some extent, still is, that intemperate men are the grocer's or retailer's most profitable customers. Certainly, in all the efforts which have been made for a reform, whether by means of legal restraint or moral suasion, the grocers and retailers, as a class, have arrayed themselves among its opponents. I believe it to be perfectly demonstrable that they are losers, instead of gainers, by the traffic they carry on and defend. I believe the profits of their business will be greater just in proportion as the community becomes more sober. The poor intem- perate man and his family remain fixed and sta- tionary, at the point of bare subsistence. COMPARE, or rather contrast, the pecuniary benefits which tradesmen and mechanics, of every kind, receive from a company of a thousand squalid and destitute immigrants, however much these may need for food, clothing, or shelter, with the profits which the same classes would derive fiViLB a village of a thousand educated, industrious, find perate people ; and we see how deeply inter- THOUGHTS. 205 ested all are in stopping this prodigious leakage from their common reservoir of gain. I DO not contend that intemperance is the cause of every evil which the more favored classes of society may feel or fear. Should this terrible ^ourge cease its inflictions, at once and univer- sally, I have no belief that the earth would be forthwith Arcadianized, or that the millennium would no longer delay its coming ; but still I do believe that the depths of the misery of this vice are yet as far from ever having been fathomed as the deepest parts of the ocean ; and that those who have pondered upon it longest and most profoundly, have only, as it were, explored a few leagues along the wreck-covered coast of a mighty continent of evil. THE brightest minds are most subject to the dia- bolical seducements of intemperance. Who, in the circle of his own acquaintance, does not remember some shining intellect, some bright orb of mind, rising in splendor, and rapidly ascending to a refulgent day, but suddenly shrouded in ever- lasting night ? 206 THOUGHTS. WHEN men of education and taste, general- izing their ideas of propriety and beauty, and applying the same rules of judging and of acting, to the supreme, that they now apply to the subordinate affairs of men ; when they shall look upon the well ordering of society as they now look upon an improved machine or a well-executed wof1k of art, or even upon a skilful scenic exhibition of what never existed, then will all the means by which intemperance is diffused or countenanced become the disgust and scorn of mankind. The spreader of pestilential diseases will be esteemed a more tolerable member of the community than the manufacturer or vender of alcoholic drinks. IN what pagan nation was Moloch ever propi- tiated by such an unbroken and swift-moving procession of victims as are offered to this Moloch of Christendom, Intemperance ! INTEMPERANCE squanders an enormous por- tion of the resources of this country. The capital spent in the preliminary operations of pro- ducing the materials and of manufacturing, pur- chasing, and vending intoxicating drinks, has exceeded the whole civil list expenditures of all THOUGHTS. 207 our governments, state and national. After hav- ing cost so much for production and distribution, its consumption generates a class of persons whose support and punishment equal the amount of the primary outlay. And the value of productive labor annihilated, and the aggregate of losses occasioned by this consumption, subtract from the available resources of the community a third sum, probably not inferior in magnitude to each of the others. IT *s not extravagant to say, that civilization, in this country, is now a century behind what it would have been, if ardent spirits had never been known amongst us. I do not mean that species of civilization whose only evidences consist in a few prodigies of learning, or a few great masters in the elegant arts, Avith a small metropolitan circle of courtly gentlemen, while all around is passion, and ignorance, and superstition. All this, where this is ^jU, is but mockery. But I mean the civili- zation which consists in a love of order and of duty, and in that recognition and sacred regard for the rights of others which cannot be enforced by law ; in affectionate hearts, in active, truth-loving minds, — all combining to make happy families, brotherly neighborhoods, and a great and incorruptible peo- 208 THOUGHTS. pie. This kind of civilization has already been postponed a century, in our land, by the burdening effects of intemperance. THERE are but two methods of curbing or sub- duing the unlawful propensities of men : either by an external or an internal power : either by the law of force or the law of duty. In most of the countries of Europe, the rulers adopt the surgical system ; and, for that system, they use the appro- priate instruments ; — the horse-guard, the gendar- merie, and the Siberian mines. Here we pro- fess to adopt the preventive system. Universal education is our theoretical substitute for standing armies. Instead of policemen, traversing every road and street, we propose the early inculcation of virtuous principles upon the minds of the young. School-houses are the republican line of fortifica- tions. And yet, in flagrant violation of all these pretensions and assumptions, we legalize and up- hold a system which counterworks the influence of all virtuous education, engenders a spirit of uni- versal lawlessness, and multiplies, a thousand fold, the potency of all dissocial passions. . . . Let there be an entire abstinence from intoxicating drinks throughout this country during the period of a THOUGHTS. 209 single generation, and a mob would be as impos- sible as combustion without oxygen. OBJECTION has been made that the Maine law invades natural rights. It restricts natu- ral powers ; but I deny that it invades natarul rights. In a state of nature, men have the power to do wrong, but neither in a state of nature nor in society, can men have a right to do wrong. IS the legislation which tolerates, is that admin- istration of the law which encourages, are those departments of business and those usages of society which inflict this reeking abomination of intemperance upon mankind, — are these the boasted fruits of six thousand years of experience and of progress? Who dares teach children, at home or at the Sabbath school, that it is eighteen hundred years since the commencement of the Christian era, when we all know that the Sabbath is the benefit day of the rum-seller, and the very Saturnalia of drunkenness? It almost seems as though it were by way of insult and mockery, that in some of our States, in the very chapter of the statute-book which sustains the whole scheme of rum-selling, the Sabbath is called the Lord's 14 210 THOUGHTS. Day. Consult the records of the Police Court, and the officers of justice on Monday morning, and they will tell you whose day the Sabbath has been, in facts that leave no doubt about the patron's name. I FEEL a sentiment of pity overmastering that of indignation, when I see the poor and igno- rant seeking, through the indulgence of appetite, a transient oblivion of their cares and sorrows. They do not at all comprehend the magnitude of their error. Human nature demands excitement. Of this they are conscious, while they know but imper- fectly of any other resource save animal pleasures. But there is no such palliation for the wealthy and educated. They are relieved from all the ignoble necessities of existence. They have ten thousand captivating resources at command. The lessons of wisdom which blaze forth on every side of the universe summon them to high contemplations and noble deeds, as with the voice of seraphim. MAN is improvable. Some people think he is only a machine, and that the only difference between a man and a mill is, that one is carried by blood and the other by water. THOUGHTS. 211 \\l i^ want pillars, not pipe-stems. We want f f men who will never use the rod of the oppressor, nor bear the touch of his heel. YOU need not tell all the truth, unless to those who have a right to know it all. But let all you tell be truth. INSULT not another for his want of the talent you possess ; he may have talents which you want. REPROOF is a medicine, like mercury or opium ; if it be improperly administered, it will do harm instead of good. GENEROSITY during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death ; one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevo- lence, — the other from pride or fear. SOME people are as incapable of seeing but one side of a subject, as the flounder and turbot tribes among fishes, which, having both eyes placed on one side of their heads, are able to see but one way. 212 THOUGHTS. B E sure of the fact, before you lose time in searchinor for a cause. IF you have a friend that will reprove your faults and foibles, consider you enjoy a blessing which the king upon his throne cannot have. DO not think of knocking out another person's brains because he diifers in opinion frono you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago. THERE is hardly any bodily blemish which a winning behavior will not conceal, or make tolerable ; and there is no external grace which ill nature or affectation will not deform. DO well, but do not boast of it, for that will lessen the commendation you might otherwise have deserved. THE erroneous opinions of a man of sense are of the most dangerous example. I F you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen. THOUGHTS. 213 NATURE in russet is more agreeable than affec- tation in embroidery. THERE are some disputers, who, after trying all sophistry in vain, call to their aid the super- natural. I T is more difficult, and calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one. rSlHINGS impossible and inconceivable; — that JL a thing should be and should not be at the same time ; part equal to the whole ; that two straight lines should enclose space ; effect without a cause ; space unnecessary to the existence of matter ; or time to the succession of events. SOME people's thoughts never take their places one behind another : they attack, not with a well-disciplined and compact column, but with a rabble of ideas. ALL mental growth is organization, not accre- tion ; it comes from within outwards, and does not consist in enlargement by external applica- 214 THOUGHTS. TRUE BASIS OF POLITICS. EDUCATION has nothing to do with politics, but everything to do with that intelligence and true worthiness which are the true basis of all politics. FEAR AND FALSEHOOD. FEAR begets falsehood ; and as fear is the prin- cipal instrument in procuring family obedience, falsehood has been called, with striking and fearful significance, the " epidemic of the nursery." LAW. LET but the public mind once become thor- oughly corrupt, and all attempts to secure property, liberty, or life, by mere force of laws written on parchment, will be as vain as to put up printed notices in an orchard to keep off canker- worms. FALSE SHAME. WHAT a perversion it is that a nice young gen- tleman should be ashamed of appearing in the street without a fashionable dress, but should not be ashamed of cheating the tailor to get one ! AFFECTATION hides three times as many vir- tues as Charity does sins. THOUGHTS. 215 THERE is no duty more difficult or more thank- less than to check over-exertion in a cause substantially good. AN ancient nation so located its edifices, that the Temple of Honor could only be approached by passing through the Temple of Virtue. LOVE not only occupies the higher lobes of the brain, but crowds out the lower to make room for its expansion. LOVE — that divine fire which was made to light and warm the temple of home — some- times burns at unholy altars. IF evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accounta- ble? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but it is also remediable. PHYSICS is the Science of Matter ; Metaphysics the Science of Mind — the Science of Being ^ apart from accidents and properties — Ontology. W HO can educate without some theory of Mind? 216 THOUGHTS. HE who proposes to become religious and join a church, in order to get more practice as a lawyer or physician, or more custom as a mer- chant, is guilty of precisely the same sort of offence as an Egyptian, in the time of Sesostris, who should first kill and then eat beefsteaks out of the sacred cow he worshipped. ALL nations have their sacred books or relics, and, from the very constitution of the human mind, must have them. WHAT swimmer is there, who, if he saw a fellow-being drowning in deep water, would not plunge in and save him? or what man, if he saw one calling from the window of a house en- veloped in flames, would not peril his own life to save him? But it is infinitely more to save a fellow-being from a moral death. THE term Metaphysics originated with the follow- ers of Aristotle. They collected his treatises on Natural Science and called them to q^varxu. Then they arranged other treatises on philosophical sub- jects, and entitled them la. /usracpvaixa^ — heyond physics, or not included in them. THOUGHTS. 217 THE most precious wine is produced upon the sides of volcanoes. New, bold, and inspiring ideas are only born of a clear head that stands over a glowing heart. WE can be alike in spirit, however great or small W3 may be in thought ; for " thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy, I dwell in the high and holy place ; with him also that is of a contrite and hum- ble spirit ; " but nowhere is it said that God dwell- eth with the great intellect, or with the intellect that can form the grandest conceptions of Him. LOST, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever ! MENTAL PHILOSOPHY. MENTAL Philosophy is not properly Meta- physics. Metaphysics, in its wider and pop- ular sense, includes Logic, Ethics, Politics, and Ontology. rnRUE glory is a flame lighted at the skies. 218 THOUGHTS. M" "ENTAL Philosophy is a Natural Science. The human mind is the most important part of nature. It rests on experience, observation, and induction. It is a science of facts, phenomena, and laws. MENTAL Science is possible. There is a sci- ence of plants, of animals, of the earth, of the stars. So the phenomena, facts, and laws of our minds can be observed, classified, and stated. CONCEPTIONS are neither true nor false, but judgments are. POSSIBLE things are not always conceivable, — existence without beginning or end ; the Infi- nite, the Unconditional, the Absolute. THE Science of Matter and the Science of Mind are alike in this, — that all we know of either is the phenomena they exhibit. We know certain qualities of matter ; we know certain things the mind does — perceives, thinks, feels. The modes of investigation are the same in both, but unlike in this, — that in mind, the field of observation is necessarily within ourselves ; in matter, w^ithout. THOUGHTS. 219 THE phenomena of Mind are within our reach. The facts of Physical Science are scattered over the. globe and over centuries. In Psychology, the mind is its own laboratory, and has its materials within itself. ATTENTION— ac^^e?ic7o, a bending or stretch- ing towards any object of interest. It marks the degrees of intensity with which we devote our minds to any subject or thing. I THINK I restrict myself within bounds in say- ing, that so far as I have obseiwed in this life, ten men have failed from defect in morals where one has failed from defect in intellect. THE " lower orders " are those who do nothing ^ for the ofood of mankind. A MAN of worth is like gold — never out of fashion. INTUITIONS. Time, space, cause, the right, the beautiful, — not communicated, but awak- ened in the mind by other things. 220 THOUGHTS. THIS Science of Mind is neglected because its benefits are not immediately apparent, its at- tainments not capable of display. EDUCATION is our only political safety. Out- side of this ark all is deluoje. I CONCEIVE when I have any distinct object of thought. It is part of all our mental opera- tions, — involved in perception, memory, imagina- tion, abstraction, reasoning, etc. PSYCHOLOGY has relations to Theology. Ideas of Divine Being must be in our own minds, as well as arguments, to prove this exist- ence.. Questions of human ability and of free will are discussed and decided. PHRENOLOGICAL division of Faculties of the Mind far more numerous than any other, — it looks to the classes of actions or functions miud has to perform, and finds faculties to perform them, as the naturalist, who could not find the ear of a fish by looking externally, looked from the lobe in the brain where the auditory nerve should terminate outwardly, and found it. THOUGHTS. ' 221 VALUES. THE true doctrine in relation to the value which we should attach to property seems to be this : — up to the point of competence and to that degree of possession which places us above tempta- tion, which confers self-respect and independence of feeling, and the power of performing duty, few things are more valuable than property ; beyond that point, few things are of less value. ADD TO KyOWLEDGE, VIRTUE. THE Apostle exhorted the early Christians to add to their virtue, knowledge. Do we not need the converse of this exhortation, that we add to our knowledge, virtue? ADAPTATIOX OF MOTIVES. THERE is a class of motives appropriate to every age, to every degree of mental advance- ment ; the great secret is to know what motives belong to the age and the progress. OBJECTS of conception are material or spiritual, actual or ideal, sensible or supersensible, past or future. 222 THOUGHTS. WHAT is a Mental Faculty ? A power of mind capable of performing a specific, distinct class of operations. As many faculties as distinct powers of action, distinct functions, distinct modes and spheres of activity. PHILOSOPHY OF TEACHING. SCHOOL exercises should be founded on mental philosophy, as gymnastic exercises are upon physiology. In one all the muscles of the body must be known, and the exercises adapted to strengthen them ; in the other, all the faculties should be known, and the exercises adapted to im- prove them. HASTE IN TEACHING. IN trying to teach children a great deal in a short time, they are treated not as though the race they were to run was for life, but simply a three- mile heat. NATURE'S PATH. ON every subject of morals, intellect, health, we have a true path marked out for us, on which not only safety, but enjoyment, awaits us ; but on each side of this path fly the arrows of the Lord in THOUGHTS. 223 continual volley. Those arrows are shot, not at A, B, or C, but at^homsoever is found diverging from the strait way which omnipotent wisdom has laid open. REASON IN TEACHING. IT was the sin of Pharaoh to make the children of Israel write composition without ideas — that is, to make bricks without straw. M THE CHILI) A SMALL MAN. OST, if not all, our principles of action are it has been very pertinently asked, What is a child but a little man? and it might have been further asked. What is a man but a great child? — and not always so very great, either. MENTAL EXERCISE STRENGTHENS AS WELL AS PHYSICAL. THE moral powers are strengthened by exer- cise, until, as temptation increases, they grow stronger and stronger, like that cebbrated bridge which was so constructed that it became stronger and firmer the heavier the pressure of the water upon it. 224 THOUGHTS. GIBBON AXD SHAKSPEARE. THE difference between Gibbon and Sbak- speare: one was always struggling for some tbougbt greater tban bis expression, tbe otber for some expression greater tban bis tbougbt. MAHOMET. MAHOMET said, tbe learned man's ink and tbe martyr's blood are equally valuable in tbe sigbt of God. CANT. THERE is a great deal of cant on tbe subject of education," said Mr. . " Yes, tbere may be a good deal of can't," was tbe reply, " but tbere is mucb more won't." BENEVOLENCE. THERE are some men and women wbose sym- patbies for otbers' pains are as quick as tbe con- sciousness of tbeir own ; wbo feel a personal relief from suffering wben otbers are relieved ; and to wbose ear tbe song of tbe captive ransomed from guilt is sweeter tban a tbousand-voiced cborus, peal- ing tbeir own praises. Tbese are tbe god-like. THOUGHTS. 225 GROWTH. AT first the mind cannot project itself outwards, if we may so speak, even so far as the eye can reach. A child may see with the eye the outline of a distant mountain long before his mind can, as it were, leap over the intervening space. But soon the mind attains a power of flight compared with which the space travelled by the keenest eye, aided by the best telescope, is nothing. The eye, indeed, can see the remote star, whose light, travelling since its creation at the rate of two hundred thousand miles in a second, has but just reached the earth ; but all this is only a hand-breadth compared with the depths in the abysses of space into which the adventurous mind plunges itself. RICH AND POOR. THE rich and poor are but different ventricles of the same heart of humanity. INEFFECTIVE TEACHING. A TEACHER w^ho is attempting to teach with- out inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn, is hammering on cold iron. 15 226 THOUGHTS. WRITING OF COMPOSITION. CHILDREN should collect facts for composi- tion in the same way that learned men collect facts for a science. The first step in composition should aim at no more than to enable children to see their own talk. " TEACH OUT OF A MINE." THE idea is to be exploded that the less skilful workmen are competent and adequate to carry- on the early stages of education, and that the more accomplished ones are to be saved for the finishing process. GROWTH OF THE MIND. rr^HERE is always some central idea in contem- _L plating any subject which should constantly be kept in view. In education this central object is the growth of the mind. Some people seem to think they can do what the Deity does not do — make a character perfect all at once by a single word. GOOD TEACHING. GREAT knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected. THOUGHTS. 227 ''BONESTT IS THE BEST POLICY." HOW infinitely woful when such a state of de- generacy prevails that it comes to be instinc- tively felt that a lower amount of honesty will secure an earlier and larger fortune than a higher amount of it can do ! DIFFICULTIES OF AN EDUCATOR. SOMETIMES I cannot repress laughter at the ridiculousness of my own position. When I devote not a little time to preparation, and then visit a place and strive to expound the great subject of education, and lal^r, and preach, and exhort, and implore, I seem to myself as if I were standing, on some wintry day, with the storm beating upon me, ringing the door bell of a house that no one lives in, or perhaps where the dwellers are all sound asleep, or too much absorbed in their own minds to hear the summons of one who comes to tell them that a torrent from the mountains is rushing down upon them. PSYCHOLOGY is now coming into use to sig- nify Mental Philosophy. It teaches how to command the faculties, as a general his army. 228 THOUGHTS. CONCENTRATION OF THOUGHT. INTENSITY and concentration of thought often eiFect what neither genius nor intuition can do, as the strokes of the feeble but long-repeating mat- tock dig deeper than the thunderbolt. Give us time, say the water-drops, and we will bore a hole through your thickest stratum of granite. Give us time, say the coral insects, and we will build up another Australasia. IDEALITY A PROPHECY. HOW strong that desire of improvement in the human mind, which is the companion, if it be not the condition, of genius ! — that Ideality, I mean, that always runs ahead of Actuality. Achievement is only the eminence whence we survey something better to be achieved. Ideality is only the avant- courier of the mind, and where that, in a healthy and normal state, goes, I hold it to be a prophecy that Kealization will follow. IS MATTER INERT 7 THE substances of the earth are compacted of redundant and forth-springing life. They are full of velocities, compared with which the swiftest animal speed is snail-like. They are full of ener- THOUGHTS. 229 gies, which sweep all human power before them, as a hurricane sweeps a leaf. Elder philosophy, indeed, ascribed to all matter the quality of inertness. The phrase " inert mat- ter ^^ w^as adopted into the language of science, and from the belief of the philosopher it became the belief of the multitude. But where sleeps one particle of inert matter ? Without referring to the now well-established motions of what have hereto- fore been called the Fixed Stars, I might appeal to the diurnal rotation of the earth upon its axis, or to its more stupendous movement as it performs its annual revolution around the sun, " wheeling un- shaken through the void immense," to show that, in its aggregate mass and bulk, it is not inert. But this is not all. By the ever active power of gravi- tation, each particle of matter acts upon every other particle, how^ever wide asunder they may be. This power presses the upper upon the nether mill- stone, brings down alike the rain from the cloud, the cherry from the tree, the avalanche from the mountain, and draws the comet back to the sun from the abysses of space. This power knows no vicissitudes of sleeping or waking. It asks no remission from labor. Always it grasps and con- strains all things. 230 THOUGHTS. ACTI riTIES OF MA TTER ^ POL TTHEISM. IT was the inherent, indwelling activities in matter that gave birth to Polytheism. God was everywhere so present, that each separate man^ ifestation of his power was believed to be a god. Pagans could only explain the saliency and vitality of all created things, by attributing them to the volitions of a deity within. They could conceive no other cause for the ever-renewing life which they saw going on all around them, or for the succession of forms everywhere bursting into life. The up welling of fountains against their own grav- ity, the creations of spring, the ripening of har- vests, — these, and countless kindred phenomena, were inexplicable to them, except upon the faith of an indwelling god. WHOEVER does not look beyond the pon- derous bulk of the globe, and its seeming irregular and mutinous activities, sees nothing but what is equally visible to the eye of the brutes ; but whoso looks beyond or beneath this bulk, and these seemingly insurrectionary forces, into the laws which curb or compel them, which bind or set them free, has lifted the veil, and beholds the inte- THOUGHTS. 231 rior meclianisni of things, and knows the secret springs by which the mysterious energies of nature leap into activity or subside into rest. PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. IT is supposed that the ancients were ignorant of the law in hydraulics, by which water, in a tube, will rise as high as the fountain-head ; and hence they carried their stupendous aqueducts hori- zontally, from hill-top to hill-top, upon lofty arches, with an incredible expenditure of labor and money. The knowledge of a single law, now familiar to every well-instructed school-boy, — namely, that water seeks a level, and, if not obstructed, will find it, — enables the poorest man of the present day to do what once demanded the wealth of an empire. The beautiful fragments of the ancient Koman aqueducts, w^hich have survived the rav- age of centuries, are often cited to attest the gran- deur and power of their builders. To me, they are monuments, not of their power, but of their weakness. w HEN the ancients wished to tell what a powerful and labor-performing giant Bria- 232 THOUGHTS. reus was, they described him as one having a hun- dred arms. The Briareus of philosophy is a man having a hundred ideas. GOD mocked at the learning of Job and of his contemporaries by asking, " Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are?" "Were the same question put to modern science, it would be devoutly and grate- fully answered in the affirmative. ALEXANDER THE GREAT could kill men, — the easiest of all things, — but on the day when he wept for other worlds to conquer, he could not, with all the power of his subject nations, do so much for the comfort and the sustenance of man- kind as is done every year at the flour-mills of Rochester, or the cotton-mills of Lowell. *' KNOWLEDGE IS POWEE." WHEN Lord Bacon uttered that often quoted and often misunderstood axiom, "Knowl- edge is power," he meant a knowledge of those laws of Nature, and of the conditions on which they may be summoned to action, or laid to rest. THOUGHTS. 233 He did not mean a knowledge that in the Greek language the earth is called yr/ ; in the Latin, terra; in the German, erde; in the French, la terre : in the Italian, terra, — &c. ; but he meant a knowledge of the powers and laws, the vitality and skill, which its Author incorporated in the earth when He made it, and which only await our progress in knowledge to be transmuted into human power and blessedness. NATURE WOULD WORK FOR MAX. I BELIEVE it to have been a part of the Crea- tor's vast plan of beneficence to endue the earth with powers so mighty, so subtle, so swift, so various, so exhaustless, so obedient to law, as to supersede all human labor, excepting only so much as it is best for his own health that man should perform for himself. As this benevolent design of the Creator is more and more fulfilled, less and less shall the souls of men famish, in order that the wants of their bodies may be supplied. The mind shall no longer be a beggar asking alms of the body, in vain, because that also is a beggar. Hun- ger and toil shall cease to treat knov*'ledge as a robber, coming to snatch away its bread. Cold shall not burn down the halls of refinement, the 234 THOUGHTS. repositories of learning, the galleries of art, the temple of religion, that it may sit down in their ashes to warm its shivering limbs. CURE OF supehstitiox. THE knowledge of Nature not only adds a myr- iad fold to human power, but it preserves its possessor from myriads of dangers. Read such works as Brewster's " Natural Magic," or " Dick on the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," and see from what terrors and alarms the human mind has been freed by the progress of science. As wild beasts flee from a wilderness as civilization enters it, so the most loathsome and debasing supersti- tions, — a multitude that no man can number, — which once held possession of the human mind, have fled before the advance of knowledge. IS PROVIDENCE INSCRUTABLE! WHEN the youthful, the lovely, and the excel- lent are brought to an untimely grave ; when the great benefactors of their race are cut down in the midst of their usefulness, an ignorant piety refers the calamity to the dispensations of an in- scrutable Providence. It sees not that some law was violated, in punishment for which they perished. THOUGHTS. 235 It understands not that Nature never accepts the plea of a general obedience as an excuse for a particular transgression, nor withholds her penalties for the breach of one physical law, on the ground of a life of piety. As it regards the outward and material world, is not a knowledge of its various substances, of their properties and interior laws ; by which we can make a portion of Omnipotence the ally of our weakness, and by which our feeble wisdom and skill can contract a partnership with a portion of the divine wisdom and skill ; by which the race can be saved from indescribable degradation and suffering, and the materials of superstition be converted into kindling excitements for adoration and" gratitude to God, — are not these the parts of knowledge most worthy to be known ? EDUCATION AN ORGANIC NECESSITY OF MAN. EDUCATION is an organic necessity of a human being. It is so in a three-fold sense. It is neces- sary to save him from mistake, which is intellectual error ; from sin, which is moral error ; and from suf- fering, which is the inevitable consequence of both. Instinct, without training or acquired knowledge, may prompt man to a few automatic movements of the muscles, or to a few spontaneous intuitions of 236 THOUGHTS. the miud. But its directive forces have no ampli- tude of scope, no variety of application. Instinct can effect no combination of multitudes or opposites into harmonizing systems. At most, instinct can only move outward from its central point in radii or a single diameter ; but reason and conscientious- ness, enlightened by education, survey the whole area of circles, and not of circles only, but the whole solidity of globes. In its acuteness and in its certainty, instinct has an advantage over reason, as far as it goes ; as a bee, without tools, will build as geometric a cell as a skilled mathematician with them ; but reason has an immense advantage over instinct in the magnitude and boundless variety of its field of operations. A bee with its instinct can build a perfect home for bees ; a man with his reason can build a home for all zoology. Without his reason, man would have been iuferior to most of the brute creation ; with reason, he is the lord of earthly powers ; with conscience, he is God's vicegerent upon earth. THE UmVERSE IS FULL OF THE OBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE. K NOWLEDGE is a mimic creation. God has not merely stored, but stowed, the earth with • it THOUGHTS. 237 His divine knowledge, that is, with things to be known. In its solid rocks and in its pulverized soils ; in its waters, its air, and its gases ; in its light, heat, and electricity ; in the dynamical and in the chemical properties of matter ; in the laws of motion, vegetation, and reproduction, . . . where is there any thing among all things, or any place among all places, not compacted with the objects of knowledge, wonderful knowledge, sound knoAvledge, knowledge emanating from the Divine Mind, knowl- edge in its very nature adapted to bear all minds that shall receive it back to the Divine Mind for adoration and thanksgiving ? THE ''COAL-BAGS'' OF THE ASTRONOMEBS. FAR off in the southern heavens, in that distant realm where the Southern Cross blazes and the Magellan Clouds diffuse their soft radiance, astrono- mers tell us there are certain spots intensely black, — not indeed adequately described by the adjective hlach, but demanding the solid noun substantive blackness ; — where, as they surmise, there are wide realms of space in which there is no constellation, no sun, even, to soften the unmitigated inkiness, — so void, so deep, that no ray of galaxy or zodiac is reflected from it to our eyes. These regions are 238 THOUGHTS. known to astronomers by the somewhat descriptive but inelegant name of " coal-bags " — the appellation being intended to stimulate our imaginations to con- ceive of their solidified blackness of darkness. Now, the brain of an infant, Avhen first born, is as empty of knowledge as one of these astronomical coal-bags is of light. This brain has immense capa- city for knowledge, — as much room for it as one of those coal-bags has for light : doubtless it has even an appetency for knowledge ; but as yet, so far as acquired knowledge is concerned, it is a void, a pure nonentity, an exhausted receiver. All infan- tile brains are in this condition of darkness and vacuity, waiting to be illumined by the stars of thought ! Alas, that they should so often be lighted by the ignis fatuus of mystic speculation, by the cometary light of wayward thoughts, or by the lurid fires of sin ! One of the grand functions of education is to fill these void spaces of the soul with ideas, thoughts, transcripts of the Divine Mind, as that mind is reflected in Nature and in Providence, and with high resolve and aspiration also, noble and enno- bling. Where are these ideas, thoughts, transcripts, records, resolves, aspirations ? I answer, All Nature, all the universe external to our own souls, and the laws of our souls themselves, are full of them. THOUGHTS. 239 GEOLOGY. IN one compartment of the soul's vacant temple, education fills the void by reconstructing the earth on known principles of Geology, so that its possessor may have an earth to himself, — so that, even if this external globe were to be destroyed, he could still go on and try Avhatever experiments he might please Avith his ideal globe, his private model — might toss it with earthquakes, or edge it with mountains, or send up volcanic reefs from its inte- rior, or furrow and scoop its surface for the channels of rivers or the beds of seas. We might say of such an experimenter upon the earth which he car- ries in his own brain, as the prophet Isaiah says of the Almighty, " Behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing." WHAT IS GOD TO MAN1 GOD is more to me than a grand and solitary Being, though refulgent w^ith infinite perfec- tions. Contemplated as enthroned in the midst of His works. His spiritual ofiTspring in all the grand circuit of the worlds, He has become a multiplying glass reflecting back the Original in the profusion and countlessness of infinite numbers. But when the wickedness of man cuts off entire generations 240 THOUGHTS. and whole races from the capacity of reflecting back this radiant image of the Creator, then all that part of the universe where they dwell becomes black and revolting, and all that portion of the mirror of souls which was designed to reproduce and rekindle the glories of the Eternal absorbs and quenches the rays which it should have caught and flamed with anew, and multiplied and returned. PROGRESS. LET us labor for that larger and larger compre- hension of truth, that more and more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments. THE LOVE OF HOME. The following noble sentin^nts were uttered by Daniel \^'ebster. They are, indeed, pearls of the rar- est value. We place them here in order that mothers may see them and read them to their children : "It is only shallow-minded pretenders who make either distinguished origin a matter of personal merit, or obscure origin a matter of personal reproach. A man who is not ashamed of himself need not be asham- ed of his eai-ly condition. It did happen to me to be born in a log cabin, raised among the snow-drifts of New-Hampshire, at a period so early that wlien the smoke first rose from its rude chimney and curled over ••"the frozen liills, there was no similar evidence of a white man's habitation between it and the rivers of Canada. Its remains still exist. I make it an annual visit. I carry my children to it, to teach them the hardships endured by the generation before me. I love to dwell on the tender recollections, the kindred ties, the early affections, and the narration of incidents which mingle with all I know of this primitive family abode. I weep to think that none of those who in- habited it are now among the living ; and if ever I fail in affectionate veneration for him who raised it, and defended it against savage violence and destruc- tion, cherished all domestic comforts beneath its roof, and through the fire and blood of seven years' revolu- tionary war, shrunk from no toil, no sacrifice to serve liis country, and to raise his children to a condition better than his own, may my name and the name of my posterity be blotted from the memory of mankind." M) S n/ University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. UBL mi^ 1990 ?■ <<1>^ SRLF OL «^« i i 2005' '^M 9 9. 1995 ^v^ ^^ r-n h ^ k so i 3> Cv % h m ^ •\Tr' ij? B 000 002 888 6 [mmor^ ^ummo/:^