LIBRARY 
 
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 University of California. 
 
 Received /V>^2^ . f^QQ..- 
 
 Accession No.yd^ ^ J/,(^^ . Class No. ??^e. 
 
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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
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 trN IVEKSl'i'V OF 
 
 \T JT?f>l?\"TA 
 
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 THE REPUBLIC 
 
 «> 
 
 By MARIE HERBERT. 
 
 "The tirst principles of our goverument are the truths of Divine Rewel&tiou."— l^Vedsifer 
 "England made Shakspeare, and the Bible made England."— FzW^r/Zw^c?, 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO : 
 Cubery & Company, Publishers, 414 Market Street, below Sansome. 
 
 187P. 
 
 Entered according to Act of CongresB, in the year 1876, by VV. H. BARTON, in the office 
 of the Libraiittu of Congress, at Washington. 
 
THE BIBLE; 
 
 Its Influence; its Relations to Republican Govern- 
 ment, AND ITS Necessity as a Text-Book 
 of Ethics in the Public Schools. 
 
 LIBEARY 
 
 UNI VERSIT Y OF 
 
 CALIFORNIA, j; 
 
 By MARIE HERBERT. 
 
 ' England made Shakspeare, and the Bible made 'Eax^^xl^:'— Victor Hugo. 
 
 'The first principles of our government are the truths of Divine Revelation."— /f'/^i/zr. 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO : 
 Cubary A Company, Publishers, 414 Markat Street, b^low Sansome. 
 
 1876. 
 
TO 
 
 The American People, into whose keeping has been placed the most 
 sacred trusts of conscience and of government, and upon 
 whose virtue and wisdom is depending the suc- 
 cessful solution of the great problem 
 of popular sovereignty, 
 
 I dedicate this humble volume, as a token of my love of country and of the 
 rights of men. 
 
 THE AUTHOE. 
 
 mi 
 
 
 ttx^ 
 
:&BP T7' Ar'Tr 
 
 E RRATA 
 
 Paj^e IQ, third line, the "purely spiritual and purely divine" should read "purely 
 ppirituHl, the purely divine." Same page, eleventh line, "Lossing" should read "Lessiug." 
 In the fourteenth line, •• could " should read " would." 
 
 On payie 12, last line, " present hour of civilization have struck centuries ago " should 
 read " present hour of civilization may llien have struck centuries ago." 
 
 On page 32, eighth line, " Do their fires never die ow( with" should read, " Do their fires 
 never die only with." 
 
 On page 31), second line, " conflict of all certainty oi ideas " ghould read, " conflict of all 
 ages, certainly of ideas." 
 
 On page 42, thirtieth line, " provided for by their sect " should read, " provided for by 
 this sect." 
 
 On page 43, thirtieth line, " demagogues, the ' honest, capable,' " etc, should read 
 " demagogues, of the ' honest, capable.' " 
 
 On page 47, thirteenth line, " Herot^litus " should read " Heraclitus." 
 
 On page 49, twenty-fifth line, " the eternal flow " should read " the eternal flux." 
 
 Ou page 52, twelfth line, "Lossing" should read "L«ssing." Twenty -seventh line, 
 " christened by its afi'ections " should read "nourished by its affections." 
 
 On page 57, sixteenth line, " would not have been " should read "would have been." 
 
 On page 59, thirtieth line, " work as simple, and yet as sublime " should read, " work 
 so simple, and yet so sublime." 
 
 On page (il, tenth line, "the tendencies of the reachings" should read, "the tendency 
 of her teachings." 
 
 On page 65, twelfth line, " the Jewish " should read, " the Jesuit." Sixteenth line, " o 
 heir iconoclasts " should read, " of these iconoclasts." 
 
 ~K?-a-». ji — a. j.i.n.rrc7:i o C A/ 
 
 , ocpi, rij 1075^ 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Believing that the Bible is a revelation from God, given 
 both for spiritual enlightenment and as a great popular text- 
 book, from which may be draw^n a clear knowledge of those 
 ethical principles upon which human society can alone success- 
 fully build individual and public character, I have in my spare 
 moments prepared this little volume, which, it is hoped, will be 
 found to contain at least a few grains of truth, and be instru- 
 mental in awaking with some a more correct comprehension of 
 the essentiality of the Sacred Scriptures in the developing of 
 a healthy social and civil life. 
 
 Political and social reformers are constantly and ostentatiously 
 laboring to correct public abuses, and to impel the race forward 
 toward the ideal ; but it is only where the Bible becomes the 
 source of popular inspiration that we find an active reformatory 
 spirit and a permanent progressive movement. And it is this 
 great fact, which I wish to indelibly impress upon the minds 
 of my countrymen, that they may be enabled to discharge with 
 fidelity and with honor those sacred trusts of conscience and of 
 liberty which a beneficent Providence has committed to their 
 care. 
 
 The writer is not unconscious of the penalties as well as 
 rewards of authorship. Silence may bring disappointment, and 
 criticism may bring agony of spirit. But having supreme faith 
 in the indestructibility and omnipotence of truth, we scatter the 
 golden kernels in the manner most in consonance with the inspi- 
 rations of our soul, trusting in the fructifying influences of the 
 gentle dews and wooing sunshine, which ever, in the fullness of 
 the season, bring forth the sheaf, and then the bread. 
 
 San Francisco, Sept. ii, 1875. 
 
UNIYERSITY OF 
 
 ( ^LIF ORNIA. 
 
 THE BIBLE5 
 
 Its Influence ; its Relations to Republican Government, and its 
 
 Necessity as a Text-Book of Ethics in 
 
 THE Public Schools, 
 
 " Tell me where the Bible is, and where it is not, and I will write 'a moral 
 geography of the world." 
 
 Was significantly remarked by a certain tourist 
 whose observations were not alone confined to art- 
 galleries, museums, old architecture, classic ruin, and 
 historic reminiscence — material expression of buried 
 generations — but were more especially directed to the 
 spiritual manifestations of the present — the character, 
 homes and institutions of the living. The proposition, 
 though embodying an idea popularly recognized as a 
 relic of Puritanism — too antique and dogmatic for 
 this self-sufficient, speculative, and commercial age, 
 is nevertheless fundamental in character, vital in 
 relationship, and broad in its reachings as are the 
 necessities of the common weal ; involving as it 
 does, political and social, as well as moral conditions. 
 Unworthy of consideration though it may be deem- 
 ed by the sensuous masses, it possesses, notwithstand- 
 ing, for the statesman equally with the ethologist, a 
 
8 THE BIBLE 
 
 Skepticism may weave its subtle theories : Material- 
 ism may shed, as the diviner revelation, its pale light 
 upon the human understanding; and still, the written 
 Word of God stands, and will stand forever, as the 
 chief primate in the true development of man. There- 
 fore, as suggested in the proposition we quote, the Bi- 
 ble is the grand criterion of morality, of social and civil 
 progress, and of the latent resource of nations. 
 So effective, so uniform, so distinctive is it in 
 its influences in developing character, that we need 
 only inquire by what firesides it is cherished, and from 
 what hearth-stones it is rejected, to be able not only 
 to determine the moral character of communities, but 
 to point out upon the world's map the great centres of 
 popular intelligence, of useful industry, of individual 
 dignity, of physical health and comfort, of personal 
 grace and beauty, as well as to draw prophetic outlines 
 of the civil and social destiny of peoples. 
 
 The logic of all authentic modern history unequiv- 
 ocally confirms what is here assumed wringing even 
 from the skeptic Gibbon the declaration, that where- 
 ever the Sacred Scriptures form the basis of religious 
 faith, there do we find " the most distinguished portion 
 of human kind in arts and learning as well as in arms ;" 
 and from Hume, the apologist of royalty and its vices ; 
 the traducerof republican virtues and of the Christian 
 faith, the admission that the great spring of popu- 
 lar action under the English Commonwealth " — the 
 period when, he admits, England retrieved her lost 
 power upon the Continent, and established it upon 
 the sea, " was the inspiration of revealed religion." — 
 The "fanaticism," as he terms it of the Puritans, that 
 class whose moral and intellectual forces were drawn 
 fron*i their Bibles and their hymn-books. 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. » 
 
 The testimony of an observing American who vis- 
 ited Europe a few years prior to the subversion of the 
 Papal States is not inapplicable here. He says : " One 
 glance of the eye will inform you where the Bible is 
 and where it is not. Go to Italy : decay, destruction, 
 suffering, meet you on every side. Commerce droops, 
 agriculture sickens, the useful arts languish. There 
 is a heaviness in the air. You feel cramped by some 
 invisible power. The people dare not speak aloud ; 
 they walk slowly ; an armed soldiery is around their 
 dwellings ; the armed police take from the stranger 
 his Bible before he enters the territory. 
 
 " Ask for the Bible in the book-store, it is not there; 
 if so, in a form so expensive as to be beyond the reach 
 of the common people. The preacher takes no text 
 from the Bible. Enter the Vatican and inquire for 
 the Bible, and you will be pointed to some case where 
 it reposes among prohibited books, side by side with 
 the works of Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire. But 
 pass over- the Alps into Switzerland, and down the 
 Rhine into Holland, and over the Channel to England 
 and Scotland, and what an amazing contrast meets the 
 eye ? Men and women look with an air of independ- 
 ence. There are industry, neatness, thrift, instruction 
 for children. Why this difference ? There are no 
 brighter skies — there are no fairer scenes;" but, he 
 says, " they have the Bible." 
 
 And it is herd, in the light of divine Revelation, 
 that humanity has written, and is still writing, its 
 grandest epics. It is here that the loftiest ideals of 
 the pure and the just, the heroic and sublime, are 
 most nearly approached. God's written law is no less 
 certain in its ultimate effects upon mind receptive 
 than is His unwritten law in its effects upon matter. 
 
10 THE BIBLE 
 
 Under its influence the soul develops into forms of 
 beauty and of strength, prototypes of which are only 
 found in the purely spiritual and purely divine, reach- 
 ing back even into the mind of the Infinite. 
 
 Its influence, inherently sovereign, must finally be 
 accepted by the social and political reform as the only 
 means of radical and permanent improvement ; as the 
 only moral analeptic in which diseased and retrogres- 
 sive communities can have reasonable hope. 
 
 Mazzarin sought to soften and refine the manners 
 of France through the opera and the ballet. Lossing 
 dreamed of reforming the world through the power 
 of the drama. Kant seized upon ideas and upon pure 
 reason as the forces by which he could perfect a sublime 
 morality and establish the universal republic. Cer- 
 vantes, Robinson, Goldsmith, Dickens, Hawthorne, 
 George Elliot, Mrs. Southworth, Arthur, and others, 
 have thought to ennoble humanity through the novel 
 and the romance. The Goughs would reform deprav- 
 ed appetites and elevate the social standard through 
 prohibitory statutes and the persuasive power of the 
 rostrum. The Stantons would correct social abuses 
 and sublimate the race, until, " like the Beatrice of 
 Dante it waits upon divine inspiration," through the 
 force of permissive laws and the ballot for woman ; 
 but all these agents, adopted, have failed in their mis- 
 sion to the soul, and will fail, because, lacking the 
 divinity that awakens the fundamental forces of moral 
 being, no conscience kindles or responds to their 
 calls. 
 
 So distinguished a scientist as Baron Liebig has 
 said, that the civilization of a people may be best 
 measured by the quantity of soap consumed ; and that 
 another has discovered that the commercial demand 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 11 
 
 for iron is the best criterion of moral and social ad- 
 vancement ; and that still another finds, like Mazza- 
 rin, that the songs of a nation form the best index oF 
 its progress and refinement. But, while it is true that 
 soap and ballads do indicate, to a large degree, taste 
 and sentiment, and iron invention and industry, it 
 will be ascertained, by observation and statistics, that 
 the most refined civilization is best measured by the 
 number of Bibles found at the firesides and the altars 
 of a people. And we shall also find that even the 
 consumption of soap and the demand for iron increase, 
 as well as the merit of ballads improve, in exact ratio 
 with the popular desire for Bibles. 
 
 There exists no longer doubt that that people whose 
 models of moral excellence are most faithfully drawn 
 from the inspired Word are able to present the most 
 refined manners, the largest industries, the noblest 
 charities, the purest literature, the most varied arts, 
 the most equitable laws, the most stable government, 
 and even the most invincible armies. True, there 
 have been peoples with philosophies, laws, literature, 
 industries, and military renown, without the Bible; 
 but the civilization of the most distinguished of these 
 was no more than a brilliant prolepsis of that which 
 was to come ; no more than genius, in the dawn of 
 its inspiration, struggling for immortal embodiment in 
 the graces of the material, in the subtleties of dialec- 
 tics, in the eloquence of harangues, in the speculations 
 of philosophy, and in the achievement of arms. Those 
 inspiring glimpses of the attributes of the Godhead, 
 those lofty ideals of the pure in morals, those enrap- 
 turing visions of a future life, those grand and mighty 
 impulses of enlightened thought, those broad utilities 
 and charities which so mark the reign of Christian 
 
12 THE BIBLE 
 
 law, have no place in the civilization or philosophy of 
 such. 
 
 Greece has left an enduring impress upon the world. 
 Her temples, her sculpture, her poetry, her oratory, 
 her philosophy, and her arms have given her an im- 
 mortal memory. And yet, while these were giving 
 her immortality, she was not only trampling upon the 
 manhood of more than half her people, but her man- 
 ners were course, her social tastes impure, her chari- 
 ties mean, her industries narrow, her ambitions barba- 
 rous, and her arms, when over the ages they cross 
 with those of the Christian, are weak and unequal. 
 
 Had Paul found upon the Athenian altar this in- 
 scription : *' To the .Known God — the Supreme, 
 Eternal One, Absolute Lawgiver, Teacher, Father; " 
 and if with this sublime Theism he could have found 
 interwoven into the popular heart the Messianic hope 
 that so kindled the vision of the Hebrew prophets, or 
 that even which seemed to so tinge the faith of their 
 own " divine Plato," he might have so planted there 
 the new philosophy that Greece would not have ex- 
 pired at Corinth, but would have survived the rudest 
 shocks of barbarism, and given us a history far more 
 inspiring than that which we now have, in the most 
 brilliant chapters of her marbles, her philosophy, her 
 eloquence, her epics, or her valor. 
 
 And, too, if Paul could have found Rome without 
 a Pantheon — Rome, monotheistic; and if at the close 
 of the apostolic period the gospels of Christ, instead 
 of the poems of Hesiod, could have been the source 
 of popular inspiration, not only Greece might have es- 
 caped the fury of the Roman eagles, but Rome might 
 have escaped the fiery vengeance of Alaric, and the 
 present hour of civilization have struck centuries ago. 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 13 
 
 Tyndall, in his Belfast address, draws a parallel 
 between Mohammedan and Christian civilization, at 
 the time of the Moorish occupancy of Spain, in favor- 
 of the former. With seeming unfairness he virtually 
 forces Draper upon this point into antagonism with 
 Christianity. In quoting him in support of his own 
 views, he says, " With the intrusion of the Moors into 
 Spain, cleanliness, order, learning, and refinement took 
 the place of their opposites. When smitten with dis- 
 ease, the Christian peasant resorted to a shrine ; the 
 Moorish to an instructed physician. They encourag- 
 ed translations from the Greek philosophers, but not 
 from the Greek poets. They turned with disgust 
 from the lewdness of our classical mythology, and de- 
 nounced as an unpardonable blasphemy all connec- 
 tion between the impure Olympian Jove and the Most 
 High God." He further quotes as evidence of the 
 superior activity of the Saracenic intellect and liber- 
 ality of the Mohammedan faith that, " Plato, in his 
 absurd notions of the emission of light by the eye, 
 was first corrected by an Arabian. That it was an 
 Arabian who first discovered atmospheric refraction; 
 who first explained the enlargement of the sun and 
 moon, and the shortening of their vertical diameters 
 when near the horizen ; who first constructed a table 
 of specific gravities ; improved the hydrometer ; in- 
 vented the* method of measuring time by pendulum 
 oscillation ; " and that, in short, it was the Moham- 
 medan, and not the Christian, who at this period was 
 unfolding the sciences and cultivating the intellect of 
 the age. But is it the inciting, the enlightening, the 
 tolerant, the pure and sublime philosophy of Christ 
 which the subtly lance of this skeptic would so skill- 
 fully pierce ? or is it a mere phantom — a corruption 
 
14 THE BIBLE 
 
 of the real essence — an equal triad of idolatry, skep- 
 ticism, and formal Christianity which we acknowledge 
 did then hold its scepter, not only over Catholic Spain, 
 but over Catholic Europe, and which we willingly ad- 
 mit was far less favorable to the advancement of the 
 sciences, and of civilization, than were the then pure 
 Theism and rigid precepts of Mohammed ? 
 
 And is this distinguished scientist prepared to deny 
 that the superior activity of the Arabian intellect and 
 the greater liberality of the Islam faith toward the 
 sciences, the arts, and literature at this period was not 
 after all due to the influences of the Bible, upon which 
 he well knows Mohammed reared his great structure 
 of theology ? 
 
 Will not a knowledge of the true God, of Christ, 
 even as a prophet, of a promised Comforter, of a res- 
 urrection, of a judgment, of an immortal life, have an 
 inspiring and elevating effect upon the soul, even 
 though mingled with crudities and extravagant ver- 
 biage, as in the Koran ? 
 
 The Pentateuch, the Psalms, and the Gospels were 
 the foundation of the faith of Mohammed ; and, 
 through him, these it were surely that kindled, direct- 
 ed, and liberalized the Moorish intellect when in the 
 mediaeval centuries it came in conflict with the enslaved 
 and debauched spirit of the nominal Christian. But 
 if Tyndall here really means to discriminate against 
 Christianity, let him come down from his chosen 
 period and draw a parallel to-day between Christ and 
 Mohammed. If the Koran then was superior to the 
 Bible in inciting the intellect and inspiring the hearts 
 of men, why the contrast now ? 
 
 Mohammed, in fact, but little more than unified 
 semi-barbarism ; although, as an incident of the plan, 
 
LIBEARY 
 
 ' UNIVERSITY Oj 
 
 AND ITS INFLUENCE. OALIFBrNIA. 
 
 he did for a time arouse the higher Hfe oTiKe SafaCerr"^~^"-^ "^ 
 and the Moor with borrowed inspiration. But Christ 
 
 is slowly destroying the unities of Mohammed, as well 
 
 as those of all false theologies and creeds ; and is 
 not as an incident, but as a grand design, awaking for 
 all time the higher life of all peoples ; and is steadily 
 building an empire under whose quickening and genial 
 sway the written and unwritten philosophies- of God 
 will fmally harmonize as parts of a grand and sublime 
 unity. 
 
 It is not from the Theogony of the Greek, the 
 Vedas of the Hindu, or the Zenda of the Persian, 
 nor from the Koran of the Mohammedan, but from 
 the Bible of the Christian that modern society has 
 imbibed its purest ideas of ethics ; that letters and 
 art have drawn their loftiest expressions ; that sci- 
 ence and industry have derived the spirit of their 
 grandest conquests ; that charity has gathered the in- 
 spirations of its sweetest victories ; that law has re- 
 ceived the principles of its divinest equities ; and that 
 arms even have caught the light that has led to the 
 most brilliant and enduring triumphs. 
 
 The perfect in civilization and government can 
 spring from no other source than the Bible; for 
 among all the systems of religion and ethics which 
 the world has had given it, the human soul only here 
 finds the satisfaction, the fullness of its spiritual, 
 moral, and social needs — that the grand " Ultimate " 
 of the intellectual and the just, the pure and the beau- 
 tiful, the meek and the majestic, the merciful and the 
 mighty, is revealed to us in an unmistakable person- 
 ality — a defined and real presence. 
 
 Philosophy attempts to discover in Nature an infi- 
 nite " Satisfaction " for the emotional and intellectual 
 
16 THE BIBLE 
 
 necessities of man ; but, after following natural law 
 through all its complex ramifications to the utmost 
 limit of the experimental ; after tracing organic life 
 through all its innumerable series of evolutions, down 
 through the ages and aeons of ages, to even the atom 
 and the germ, at last finds itself at the boundary of 
 the realm of material law, still unsatisfied, confound- 
 ed, overwhelmed, even as was the "Human Spirit" 
 in the " Dream of Richter," seeking in the midst of 
 infinite creations for outermost suns, for frontier 
 worlds. 
 
 And it is only in the Inspired Word that we find 
 not alone the true God — the " Grand Ultimate " of 
 the infinite aspirations and longings of the soul — but 
 those great fundamental social ideas, the common 
 Fatherhood of God ; the common brotherhood of 
 man ; the common heirship of life immortal — a divine 
 triology, by which the vital problems of sociology and 
 of government can only be satisfactorily solved. 
 
 The despotism of superior intellect and power 
 through all time has imposed its wrongs upon the 
 masses ; and, as a result, the inherent sense of individ- 
 ual right from the beginning has periodically manifest- 
 ed itself in some form of popular discontent. The 
 contest, however, down through all the cycles of his- 
 tory to nearly our own epoch, has been fruitless, sim- 
 ply because no " Pillar of Fire " awakened, illuminated, 
 and etherialized the faith of the oppressed. It was 
 only when the sublime truths of the Bible awoke the 
 spiritual life of man; only when these thrilled the 
 great chords of popular thought ; only when armies 
 marched to the chant of Hebrew poetry and bayonets 
 flashed in the light of the Cross, that human bonds 
 began to break ; that germs of equal law began to 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 17 
 
 crystalize ; that the people began to move by divine 
 impulse to their true places in government, and that 
 science, art, and civilization began their final marcb 
 to the conquest of the world. And it will ever be 
 found that inexact proportion to the influences which 
 God's Written Law has over popular thought will gov- 
 ■ernment become popularized, and civilization become 
 progressive. True, free government ostensibly graces 
 the history of some of the earlier periods, even at 
 the time when divine revelation was yet but slowly 
 descending upon Judea: but it is there only as a his- 
 toric embellishment. Roman as well as Grecian liber- 
 ty, in a correct sense, was but a splendid political 
 mockery. It was, in fact, no more than a polyarchy 
 of caste — an aristocracy in which popular right had 
 no recognition. In mediaeval history free govern- 
 ment claims acknowledgment; but neither the victory 
 of Legnano, the prosperity of Venice, nor the elo- 
 quent enthusiasm of Rienzi could establish it upon 
 a rational and permanent basis ; simply because the 
 Bible, with its fundamental ideas of human rights and 
 of equal law, had not yet become the common herit- 
 age of the people. Had the Church of the Middle 
 Ages been true to her obligations — had she but been 
 a faithful exponent of the cause she claimed to repre- 
 sent, Italian liberty may then have been established 
 to the enduring benefit of all succeeding periods. 
 
 In modern times France has repeatedly attempted 
 the establishing of free government; but failure has 
 constantly followed, because her religious and moral 
 faith springs from no higher source than the philos- 
 ophy of her '* Encyclopedists," or of the dogmas of 
 a corrupt theology. True and substantial self-gov- 
 ernment with her is impossible, until she emancipates 
 
18 THE BIBLE 
 
 her faith and rises above the materialism and super- 
 stition which now fetter her aspirations for freedom. 
 
 Edmond About would have it that France is a sick 
 soldier of God, only needing, as a remedy, the lapse 
 of time ; but he should have said France is a sick sol- 
 dier of the Triumvirate — Cassarism, Ecclesiasticism, 
 and Atheism ; needing, as a remedy, a free Bible, a 
 free conscience, and then time. 
 
 The hopeful but unphilosophic have confidence in 
 her present experiment to construct free government ; 
 but, like all preceding efforts, it m.ust fail; because 
 Christ, the Inspiration of the true Republic, has not 
 yet supplanted Voltaire, Pompadour, and the Pope, in 
 the popular heart. When France, in her love, gath- 
 ers up from exile the ashes of her Christian reformers, 
 and places them as tenderly in her Pantheon as she 
 has those of her Paladins* and of her great Infidelt 
 then, and only then, shall we see streaking the hori- 
 zon the morning of her freedom. 
 
 The very first step of departure with France in 
 the new line of government was a violation of a great 
 fundamental moral and social law, a law founded in 
 human necessity and indissolubly linked with human 
 prosperity. Following in the moral track of the 
 Empire, the Republic of 1870, in its first work of or- 
 ganization, as well as in subsequent elections, trampled, 
 with all the fearlessness of Paganism, upon the Chris- 
 tian Sabbath ; betraying thereby, in the beginning, 
 that want of moral integrity which is vital to the suc- 
 cessful establishing of free government. Could John 
 Calvin have inspired the French heart with the spirit 
 of the Reformation as did Luther that of the German, 
 
 * Turenne, Vaubau, Napoleon, 
 t Voltaire. 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 19 
 
 France might now, with her aspirations, not only be 
 able to build up a grand structure of popular sove- 
 reignty, but she might have saved herself the humilia^ 
 tion of her late defeats. The Bible at her firesides 
 would, in the three centuries since Calvin, not only 
 have made more peaceful, more grand, and more 
 mighty her history, but would have silently built 
 about her a bulwark, against which neither the di- 
 plomacy of Bismarck nor the artillery of William 
 could have prevailed. 
 
 It was the great truths of the Divine Word, scatter- 
 ed centuries in advance by the Jeromes of Prague, 
 the Husses and the Luthers, that laid the foundation 
 of the triumph of the German arms at Metz, at Stras- 
 bourg, and at Sedan ; and that, finally, not only re- 
 venged at Paris international wrongs of two hun- 
 dred years, but great social and religious crimes which 
 France had so long committed against the Christian 
 world. And these same great truths are now in turn 
 destined, in the fullness of God's time, to lead to the 
 overthrow of German Imperialism, and to build upon 
 its ruins a great empire of republican law. 
 
 Love of personal independence is the old and dis- 
 tinguishing passion of the German heart. Liberty of 
 thought and of will, and loyalty to conscience are its 
 historic ideals. This spirit dominated in rude and 
 turbulent forms in the ages of Tacitus and of Lucien, 
 and reached its grandest climax in the devastations 
 and wrath of Alaric. " I feel a secret and preternat- 
 ural impulse to march to the gates of Rome," said the 
 barbarian chief, in reply to the Christian zealot ; and 
 Rome finally, at midnight, reeling with debauch, 
 burned and bled at the blast of the Gothic trumpet. 
 *' We steer as the winds direct. They will transport 
 
20 THE BIBLE 
 
 US to the guilty coast whose people have provoked 
 the divine justice/' said Genseric to his pilot; and 
 now licentious Rome burned and bled at the hands of 
 the Vandal. 
 
 Germanic liberty finally subverted by feudalism, 
 the descendants of warlike and democratic ancestors 
 now seek its restoration through the peaceful influ- 
 ences of philosophy. To regain it, theorists violate 
 the reverence of ages, trampling down faiths, dogmas, 
 and traditions. In search for it, they subject to fiery 
 analysis the universe of matter and of spirit, march- 
 ing with audacious step and with profane criticism, 
 under the cover of dialectics, to the very throne even 
 of the Infinite. And still the instinctive and supreme 
 idea — liberty — has not yet become embodied again 
 in sensible form. Afar in the regions of theory are 
 hovering still, in divine idea, the republics of Kant 
 and of Fichte, waiting to descend for embodiment in 
 written constitutions and statutes. This realization, 
 however, will not come through the speculations of 
 philosophy, but only through the facts of revelation. 
 Through the theses of the great Reformer,* and not 
 through the h3^potheses of the philosopher, is germi- 
 nating and steadily strengthening, down deep at the 
 social foundations, the revolutionary force that is 
 finally to restore to the German — refined, embodied, 
 legalized — his ancient liberties. 
 
 It is here, in the stormy polemics and sublime dia- 
 lectics of Luther, that we find the inspirations of the 
 prophetic revolution of Hein — that revolution in 
 whose awful conflicts lost and subverted rights are to 
 be regained, and out of which is to rise, above the 
 ruins of monarchism, the genius of constitutional lib- 
 
 * Luther. 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 21 
 
 erty. Luther, and not Spinoza, nor Kant, nor Fichte, 
 nor Hegal, nor Schelling, nor even Leibnitz or Goethe, 
 will become in the hour of freedom the great glory oL 
 the Germanic race. 
 
 Ireland weeps, counts her beads, and offers her 
 blood for the restoration of her ancient honor. But 
 her prayers are unanswered, her dreams of sovereignty 
 pass unfulfilled; and will, until the people become 
 their own interpreters of God's Written Law, and ac- 
 cept that great moral Code as the source of inspira- 
 tion. If this gifted, this brave, and immortally hope- 
 ful race would be free, they must first place Bibles at 
 their firesides and at their altars ; and then free em- 
 pire may have foundation in the free thought and un- 
 trameled faith of the people. Let this be the initial- 
 revolution of Ireland, and the period may come whert 
 either her hopes of freedom will be realized or her 
 bond of union with Anglo-Saxon destiny will become 
 congenial or more closely knit. 
 
 Tyndall would preserve Ireland from " spiritual and 
 intellectual tyranny," and, as a corollar}^ from politi- 
 cal, by " flashing upon the minds of her youth the 
 mild light of science ;" but spiritual and intellectual 
 chains are already upon her Catholic masses, and it is 
 not in the " flashings of the mild light of science," 
 nor in the dull gloamings of pantheistic materialism, 
 as all history afiirms, but in the effulgence, the fiery 
 essence of the Divine Word, that these chains will 
 melt. 
 
 England, with her Bibles, will always make laws 
 for Ireland, with her dogmas. And England with 
 her Bibles will yet become too strong for England 
 with her kings. God's Law, with broken seal, in the 
 English homes, chapels, and libraries, is slowly but 
 
^'^ THE BIBLE 
 
 irresistably lifting the masses in the political as well 
 as social scale, and educating them for the exercise of 
 sovereign prerogatives. 
 
 Had Austria welcomed Luther and the Reforma- 
 tion, as did Saxony, Brunswick, and Prussia, her bat- 
 talions 300 years after would not have been scattered 
 at Sadowa and her national prestige lost. Her new 
 faith would have removed the weakness which centu- 
 ries of superstition and ecclesiastical tyranny had 
 brought ; and then no field of disaster would have en- 
 tombed her pride, and no hopeless oaths would have 
 been written in blood to revenge the triumphs of the 
 Prussian needle-gun. 
 
 Russia, that colossus of empire and of Caesarism, 
 with its chaos of tongues, of barbarisms, of civiliza- 
 tions, of sects, of sentiments, and of ideas, is begin- 
 ning to quicken and thrill in all its living atoms under 
 the inspirations of the Divine Word. As matter in 
 its primitive, chaotic state, moves in lines of order and 
 aggregates into the beautiful crystal, and fmally into 
 the luminous world, under the subtle laws of attrac- 
 tion, affinity and crystalization, so are the confused and 
 social elements of this great empire of violence and 
 of antagonisms, under the silent and mysterious influ- 
 ences of the Revealed Word, slowly but surely and 
 grandly crystalizing into a harmonious creation of 
 Sclavonic individuality and power. Through the col- 
 porteur and the Holy Synod of the Greek Church the 
 Bible is being freely circulated throughout the impe- 
 rial domain ; and, as a result, is gradually creating an 
 improved spiritual and social life — a new and mighty 
 moral force, not only in the cottages of the tradesman 
 and the artisan, but in the palaces of the nobles, in 
 the dwellings of 20,000,000 of manumitted serfs, in 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 23 
 
 the cabin of the exile, and in the tent even of the 
 nomad Tartar — a moral force which is destined to 
 work out that great problem of ideal freedom which 
 so inspired the genius and burdened the prophetic 
 spirits of Hertzen, of Pushkin, of Pestal, and of Ry- 
 leyof — those grand apostles of Sclavonian unity, con- 
 science, order, and liberty. 
 
 The republicans of Spain hoped to establish free 
 government upon the ruins of Bourbonism, but the 
 effort was premature and failed. Neither the philoso- 
 phy nor eloquence of Castellar, though coupled with 
 the earnest zeal of able compatriots, was sufficient to 
 secure success. These apostles of freedom should 
 first have prepared the way for their gospel by enfran- 
 chising the religious faith of the masses. Individual 
 thought and conscience should first have been awak- 
 ened by the implanting of divine truth. The colpor- 
 teur with his tracts and Testaments for the million, and 
 the evangelist with an open Bible, should first have 
 been called into the service of Spanish freedom. A 
 free Bible and a free conscience, here as elsewhere, 
 must become the heralds of political liberty. And 
 this, in fact, inconsistent as it may appear with the 
 public policy of Castellar, receives his earnest indorse- 
 ment when he says : " If the Latin peoples could read 
 — if they were obliged, at least every Sunday, to turn 
 the pages of the Bible instead of hearing the chants 
 of their priests in a strange and unutterable language, 
 would they not have been two centuries ago republi- 
 can ?" " Because," he says, " the Bible is full, from the 
 first page to the last, I will not say of republican ideas, 
 but certainly of republican sentiments, which, with 
 their poetry, have greater influence among the people 
 at present." 
 
24 
 
 THE BIBLE 
 
 It is unphilosophical and impossible to successfully 
 establish and maintain republican institutions until 
 the public mind is spiritually enfranchised and thor-- 
 oughly imbued with those moral and religious prin-^ 
 ciples which God only has revealed in His written 
 Word as the rule of human conduct. A republic 
 from necessity must have a spiritual prototype in the 
 hearts of the masses, or else its existence at best will 
 be but feeble and but a burlesque upon free govern- 
 ment. 
 
 If those representative agitators of republican 
 ideas, Kossuth, Mazzina, and Garibaldi, had in the 
 beginning but assumed, as their life-work in the great 
 drama of political reform, the sublime apostolate of 
 the Cross, laboring first to give the Old World a true 
 faith and a true conscience, Europe now, instead of 
 suffering the pangs of premature political births, 
 might feel the mighty movings of embryonic empires, 
 whose timely advent would be hailed as an apocalypse 
 of liberty by a generation born, not only to be free,, 
 but to establish and to maintain freedom; writing, if 
 it need be, its sublime statutes by the light of battles 
 and with the blood of martyrdom. 
 
 Garibaldi, to his credit, did, in his great scheme of 
 Unification, comprehending the potency of divine 
 revelation in emancipating the public mind, scatter 
 throughout Italy his hx\Q,i foliums or scriptural frag- 
 ments, as an essential preliminary in the struggle with 
 Ecclesiasticism for national unity and independence. 
 And it is primarily to the influence of this stroke of 
 spiritual and political philosophy that Garibaldi owes, 
 in part, his prominence, and Italy her freedom from 
 priestly thraldom. 
 
 With the truths of the Bible thoroughly interwovea 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 25 
 
 in the beginning into the faith of the people, these 
 reformers might have laid the foundation upon which 
 popular government, in due time, would have arisen 
 in defiance of despotism. There is more latent mili- 
 tary energy to be marshalled in behalf of freedom in 
 a single copy of God's Word than there is in a whole 
 squadron of enslaved or materialistic bayonets. It 
 was the influence of a single Bible that awoke the 
 spirit of the Reformation ; that crippled the power 
 of Rome ; that drove back the arms of Charles — forc- 
 ing his abdication ; that wrested the Netherlands from 
 the empire of Philip ; that saved Protestant liberty 
 on the field of Leutzan ; that under Cromwell laid the 
 foundation of English commerce and power ; that for 
 ever made grand and immortal through the Covenant- 
 er the memory of the Scot ; that gave to the West a 
 great empire of freedom, and that has finally impelled 
 Anglo-Saxon language and law — those great mission- 
 aries of thought, liberty, and order — over half the 
 globe. When the European liberalist accepts, as a 
 political axiom of universal application, the faith of 
 John Owen, that " The Bible is England's best hope," 
 then he will comprehend the true philosophy of found- 
 ing free government, and republicanism, as a neces- 
 sary result, will, in the end, advance to universal 
 supremacy. 
 
 The " United States of Europe," of which the 
 republican theorist now dreams, will only assume 
 promise and tangibility when the Bible shall have- 
 become a sacred and universal heir-loom with the: 
 cottager — when its poetry, its ethics, and its spiritual 
 revelations shall have inspired the emotions, refined 
 the morality, and sublimated the faith of the now 
 stolid, down-trodden, priest-ridden masses. This great 
 
26 THE BIBLE 
 
 truth is forcibly exemplified in our own history. The 
 century next preceding the formation of the Repub- 
 lic may justly be denominated the religious epoch — 
 literally, the period of the Bible — the heroic period, 
 out of which sprang the Revolution and constitu- 
 tional liberty. Under colonial regime the Bible found 
 a place in every family and school ; and from this, 
 more than from any other cause, came our declara- 
 tion of rights, which not only focalized the holiest 
 aspirations of all preceding ages, but which gave to 
 freedom an impulse that will thrill all the ages of 
 the future. So important was the Inspired Word 
 considered in the maintaining of self-government in 
 our early history that the Congress of 1777, on 
 grounds of political and moral necessity, ordered the 
 printing and circulation among the people of 20,000 
 copies of the Scriptures. And the Congress of 178 1, 
 for the same reasons, ordered for public use 30,000 
 copies more. 
 
 And here it is, in this early national faith in God's 
 word, rather than in the abstract wisdom of states- 
 men or the genius of martial leaders, that rests the 
 primary cause of our national progress. The heroes 
 of the Revolutionary tribune and battle-field were but 
 the consequent, the inevitable offspring of an historic 
 period, which, under the procreative and quickening 
 influences of the Divine Word, pulsated and glowed 
 with heroic life. That epoch could have produced 
 none others than heroes; could have produced no 
 results other than the establishing of constitutional 
 liberty. As the legendary angel of the Talmud visits 
 and inspires the unborn child, so did the angel of the 
 Word visit the unborn nation, and touched its heart, 
 not only with an irrepressible love of freedom, but 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 27 
 
 with the unconquerable energies of revolution. By 
 this moral light we were ushered into the family of 
 nations, and unconsciously guided through the politi--- 
 cal wilderness of the theoretic — were unconsciously 
 directed over untrodden and unknown paths in our 
 first efforts to demonstrate the new problem of gov- 
 ernment. And it was our Bibles, remotely inspiring 
 the popular heart with the sublime equities of the 
 Higher Law and the daring of a lofty faith, that finally 
 snapped as ropes of sand the old thralls of party servi- 
 tude, and brought, in the twinkling of an eye, the 
 ^reat North to its feet to meet in solid column the 
 advance of the slave power. It was the silent forces 
 of the Divine Word, coming up with the seeming 
 might and majesty of Omnipotence through nearly 
 two hundred years of colonial and national life, that 
 made invincible the arms of freedom at Gettysburg, 
 Antietam, Shiloh, and Lookout Mountain, and that 
 £nally, in the hour of the nation's triumph, drawing 
 a veil over the examples of history, extended to the 
 conquered the olive-branch instead of the sword — the 
 fraternal welcome instead of the avenging statute. 
 So long as the Bible directs the popular conscience, 
 so long will popular liberty with us remain impregna- 
 ble. But whenever the American people put from 
 them this great moral educator, and renounce the 
 early faith of the Republic, then will have commenced 
 a political decline which has, perhaps, in Gibbon or 
 Bulwer an historic parallel. And as we comprehend 
 this, who, I ask, is not startled with the thought, in 
 view of the religious, moral, and political delinquen- 
 cies of the hour, that this national renunciation may 
 not already in effect have been proclaimed, and a- 
 consequent decline may not have even now commen- 
 
28 
 
 THE BIBLE 
 
 ced ? Certain it is, the Bible has no longer that hold 
 upon the reverence and affections of the masses it once 
 had. And certain is it, that that firm religious trust, 
 that rigid moral rectitude, that stern and simple vir- 
 tue, which so distinguished the nation in its heroic 
 and most republican days, is no longer a prominent 
 trait. And also certain is it that that same social 
 and moral condition which has invariably preceded 
 the decay of other commonwealths is now being 
 established with us. 
 
 The simple manners and rigid virtues of the gen- 
 eration of men who made Marathon, Salamis, and 
 Platea immortal were lost in the luxurious ages of 
 Cimon and of Periclese. With the influx of wealth 
 from conquest, from tribute, and from the mines of 
 Thasos and of Laurion, came luxury, vulgar ostenta- 
 tion, coarse sensuality, public extravagance, official 
 corruption, and then the decline of Grecian liberty. 
 
 Private and public virtue gave Rome laws, wealth, 
 and power, but the abuse of these gave her Caesar, 
 Nero, the Pretarian Guards, and then the Barbarians. 
 
 No close observer of the times, familiar with his- 
 tory and the indissoluble relations between free gov- 
 ernment and sound morality, can deny that our insti- 
 tutions are threatened with danger. Human nature, 
 fundamentally, has experienced no perceptible change 
 with the progress of the centuries. Two hundred 
 years of unparalleled moral and political discipline 
 have in no way modified the innate love of individual 
 aggrandizement and power, even in the American 
 heart. Catalines and Caesars are to-day in our midst, 
 in the garb of the most meek citizens of the Repub- 
 lic. The tyrant is ever present with us, waiting, un- 
 consciously though it may be, the opportunity down 
 
AND ITS INFLUENC;^. ^ / 29 
 
 the scale of national decadence, to measure and fix 
 upon our soil the boundaries of his empire. So sure 
 as it is that God's moral law is immutable — is still su- 
 preme throughout the conscious universe — is still the 
 great Code by which we are to be governed in the 
 maintaining of social order and of political liberty — so 
 sure is it that, unless there is a tightening of moral 
 bonds, a restraining of individual and public exces- 
 ses in the use of wealth, privilege, and power, and 
 a harmonizing of our life with the philosophy of the 
 Divine Word, we are destined, at no remote period, 
 to reach a point in our history at which liberty of 
 conscience and of political sentiment will cease to ex- 
 ist as cardinal features of our government. This is 
 no creation of morbid fancy, but is the solemn decla- 
 ration of history, the inevitable deduction of philoso- 
 phy, and the prophecy of an inspired faith. The 
 astronomer can, with no more exactitude, predict an 
 eclipse, the return of a periodic comet, or of a varia- 
 ble sun, than can the political philosopher determine 
 the final result of the moral and religious sentiments 
 of a people. Law extends its scepter over nations, 
 as well as over worlds, determining their orbits, their 
 influences, and their destiny. 
 
 And it is in the presence of this danger that we 
 are led to appreciate the importance, in the preserva- 
 tion of republican institutions, of a spiritualized, vigi- 
 lant, and aggressive Christian Church — that we per- 
 ceive the true relations which exist between Church 
 and State ; that the problem of religious and politi- 
 cal unity with us passes to a satisfactory solution. 
 
 The Bible, the great conservator of morals and of 
 law, as well as the grand primordial in the establish- 
 ing of our government, is a special trust of the Church. 
 
30 THE BIBLE 
 
 And, as such, its truths become popularized and in> 
 terwoven into the public faith in exact proportion to 
 the fidelity with which that trust is discharged. If 
 true to her obligations, the Church, through the citi- 
 zen, becomes the sure support and hope of the State, 
 vitalizing every pulsation and enriching every current 
 of its life with that moral sense and moral force whichy 
 with the certainty of natural law, not only secures 
 personal right, but gives to the Republic material 
 wealth, social grandeur, and civil security. Not that 
 the church, as an organization, should assume, or at- 
 tempt to assume, a single prerogative of State, but 
 should, through her teachings, impress upon the pop- 
 ular heart the great principles of God's Revealed 
 Law. Through the religious sentiments of the na- 
 tion, she should refine its ethics, purify its passions, 
 invigorate its intellect, inspire its laws, unify its sym^ 
 pathies, and thereby build about its liberties an im- 
 pregnable bulwark. That the Church is subject to 
 arraignment for neglect of duty here cannot be de- 
 nied. Existing facts testify too loudly against her. 
 The moral and social desolations of the period con- 
 vict her of serious delinquencies. 
 
 The spread of infidelity, the steady growth of licen- 
 tiousness, the despotism of wealth and threatened 
 revenges of labor, the decline of republican virtue and 
 of private and public integrity, are living records of 
 her recreancy. Perpetually are the melancholy testi- 
 monies of her guilt coming up from the cells of pris- 
 ons, the dens of crime, the hovels of distress, the pal- 
 aces of dissipation, the tribunals of perverted justice, 
 the halls of venal legislation, the mercenary presence 
 of executive power, and even from the very shadows 
 of her own altars. 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 31 
 
 Individual and public morality, personal comfort, 
 popular intelligence, pecuniary independence of the 
 masses, and the equity of statutory laws, constitute, 
 the spiritual thermometer which indicates the zeal 
 and fidelity of Christ's people. If chastity is a dis- 
 tinguishing trait ; if laws are just and are faithfully 
 observed ; if honor in the commercial and political 
 scales has more gravity than gold ; if charity extends 
 impartially her loving hands to the unfortunate ; if 
 industry and gold unite in the promotion of human 
 comfort ; if the decalogue is wrought into the con- 
 sciences of the masses, then we may know that the 
 Church is upon her knees ; that upon her forehead is 
 streaming the light of God ; that upon her lips are 
 glowing those immortal truths which have come down 
 from lawgiver and prophet, Messiah and apostle, for 
 the refining and the enfranchising of the world. But 
 if hearthstones are breaking; if Sabbaths are forgot- 
 ten; if prisons are crowded; if laws are unjust; if 
 wealth supplants virtue and poverty becomes a syno- 
 nym for crime ; if gold plants its jeweled heel upon 
 the heart of labor, and, in expiation, builds costly 
 altars to the Most High; if immorality taints the 
 atmosphere of private and public life ; if the pulpit 
 becomes enervated, and ceases its fearless criticisms, 
 its fiery threatenings, and its sacred individuality be- 
 comes involved in the whirl of luxury and of worldly 
 excitement — then we may know the Church is recre- 
 ant to her trust ; that infidelity has chilled her faith, 
 and that indolence and ease are more congenial to 
 her tastes than are those toils and sufferings, those 
 self- denials and disinterested loves which have ever 
 been and which ever will be the only sygnets of her 
 fidelity, the only gems that will sparkle in her coronet 
 
32 , THE BIBLE 
 
 in that great day when her mission is complete and 
 the world passes to final judgment. 
 
 And is it difficult to determine the spiritual condi- 
 tion of the Church to-day, guided by these evidences ? 
 Are our homes, as a rule, eminent nurseries of the 
 good, the true, and the lofty in character ? Are they 
 moral castles, strong and impregnable in their walls 
 and their towers ? Do their fires never die out with 
 those who in love kindled them, and who in unity 
 nourished them ? Go to the records of our courts, 
 and there read of the desolation of firesides, of the 
 wrecks of sacred hopes, of the sundering of tender 
 ties, of the sorrows of helpless offspring, and then 
 answer. Are our Sabbaths held in sacred remem- 
 brance and revered as holy because of the commands 
 of God and the wants of humanity .^^ Go stand on 
 that day upon the thoroughfares and at the outlets 
 of our cities and towns, and listen to the roll of the 
 drum, the blare of the trumpet, and the shouts of the 
 returning mob. Go out upon your streets at the 
 hour of Sabbath evening hymn and witness the crowd- 
 ed vestibules of your theatres, the brilliant and thronged 
 saloon, the dimly - lighted but packed, mephitic, sub- 
 terranean dance - rooms that everywhere allure to fas- 
 cinate, unbalance, and overthrow your sons and your 
 neighbors, and then answer. Are our jails and pen- 
 itentiaries decreasing and becoming tenantless ? Go 
 visit our seats of government, and there examine the 
 constantly-augmenting appropriations for their exten- 
 ;sIon and support, and then answer. Does wealth 
 hide no moral deformities ; does it never seduce the 
 heart and steal the homage due to virtue ? Is even 
 honest poverty more a misfortune than an aggravated 
 crime? Go into all the walks of life — upon the streets. 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 33 
 
 into the public assembly, the halls of justice, and even 
 into the sanctuary of prayer, and there witness the 
 license allowed to wealth — the deference, the partiali-^ 
 ties, and the slavish obsequiousness so anxiously paid 
 to gold, and then answer. Is the social atmosphere 
 free from moral taints that poison and wither the 
 greenest and holiest of human fruitage ? Go into 
 the retirements of domestic life, and there glance 
 over the columns and cuts of the periodicals which 
 too often find welcome from under the pens and 
 pencils of perverted genius, and then answer. Do 
 the pulpits and the press of the Church fill the land 
 with their voices; reaching all the by-ways and 
 dark recesses of human misery with their prophetic 
 words of warning, their tender accents of sympathy, 
 their anxious pleadings for a higher life ? Go into 
 the abodes of luxury, into the hovels of poverty, into 
 the haunts of crime, and there mark as a rule either 
 ihe absolute religious solitude, or, at best, only the 
 faint and occasional echoes of an equivocal and un- 
 impassioned appeal from these ministers of Christ, 
 and then answer. Do these assumed advocates of 
 a beneficent gospel as fearlessly espouse the cause 
 of the poor, in their unequal struggle with wealth 
 and power, as of the opulent? Go listen to the 
 pathetic recitals of the weak ; to the sighs of over- 
 worked, ill-paid labor, as it rises, with aching heart 
 and tired limb, to toil through the long hours in the 
 vitiated atmosphere of the task-room, or in the swel- 
 tering sun, or pitiless storm, that mere shelter, bread, 
 and garments may be won for the waiting, patient 
 companions of a dwarfed and cheerless life, and then 
 answer. 
 
 LIBEARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 CALIFORNIA. . 
 
34 THE BIBLE 
 
 Do these assumed tribunes of divine equity as bold- 
 ly attack crime in the purple as in the garb of the 
 peasant ? Go to the cells of the prison and there see 
 only, as a rule, the victims either of a moral or a so- 
 cial necessity; those upon whom in the cradle, and 
 even in the womb, has only fallen a darkened moral 
 light, or upon whom the remorseless hand of penury, 
 revenge, or of seeming fate, has heavily rested ; while 
 the tinseled, dramatic actor of stupendous crime is 
 still free to sneer at courts and juries, at divine in- 
 junctions, at human virtues, and to build about him 
 still higher and higher his impregnable bulwarks of 
 gold, and then answer. Do the hands of ordination 
 always fall upon those worthy of being denominated 
 " stars in the right hand of Christ ; " worthy of the 
 mantle of such as Knox, Luther, Edwards, Wesley, 
 Asbury, McKendree,and others of the great apostolic 
 line, with whom self-denial, toil, suffering, and even 
 death were welcome, if for the glory of the cross and 
 the amelioration of human want? Go lift the cur- 
 tain that hides the interior life of some of our clergy 
 mark their leanings toward the materialism of the 
 Tyndalls, of the Spencers, or of the Huxleys; their 
 gravitations toward the utilitarianism of Hume, the 
 psilanthropism of Channing, or the ritualism of Rome. 
 Follow them out into the busy world, as they tread 
 their way among the multitudes, along the avenues 
 of worldly profit, into the great highways of specula- 
 tion, crossing even the threshold of the Stock Ex- 
 change, that arena of chance and of guilded fraud, 
 so ghastly with the wrecks of fortune, of honor, of 
 life, and of a future hope, and there witness in the 
 priestly heart its consuming greed, its fireless altar, 
 its dead Urim and Thummim, and then answer. Truly, 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 35 
 
 the emergencies of the hour call for a more self- 
 abnegating, a more enthusiastic, a more aggressive 
 and comprehensive spirit at the great centres of re^ 
 ligious force. From these sources of power an influ- 
 ence should go forth which would pervade the entire 
 social being of the Republic ; vitalizing its conscience, 
 quickening its faith, and inspiring all its activities with 
 a stern and sublime rectitude. When that great 
 Catholic Missionary, Francis Xavier, was on the eve 
 of departure for India, he was shown in dreams of 
 the night the fields he was to win to the Truth. 
 Vast continents, islands, and empires which he was 
 to conquer to the " Holy Faith " arose, one after an- 
 other, upon his vision like a retinue of unlighted 
 worlds ; and yet, in the fervor of his religious zeal 
 and infinity of his apostolic ambition, he exclaimed, 
 " Yet more, O my God ! yet more !" And such 
 should be the zeal of every herald of the Cross in 
 these days of decaying faith. The cry of Xavier, 
 " Yet more, O my God ! yet more !" should echo 
 from every consecrated lip until the great heart of the 
 nation would pulsate in rythmic harmony with the 
 pure and sublime spirit of the Divine Logos. 
 
 To-day, even, the Church, like a dumb and paralytic 
 prophet under the weight of Divine displeasure, is sit- 
 ting in the midst only of a splendid barbarism. The 
 ideal civilization of the Christian is still in the womb 
 of the future. It is not enough that we as a people 
 theoretically assume the Christian faith ; that we 
 stamp " God " upon our coin, or incorporate the sa- 
 cred name into our Constitution. It is not enough 
 that we build costly houses of worship and swing their 
 doors to the comfortably -fed and comfortably - clad ; 
 that we found schools in the name of freedom and yet 
 
o 
 
 6 THE BIBLE 
 
 1-efuse the child its sacred creed. It is not enough 
 that we give by proxy to the poor and formally bury 
 the pauper in the name of the Lord ; that we ordain 
 public humiliations and fasts, national thanksgivings 
 and prayer. It is not enough that we plant our faith 
 by the Ganges, the Yang-tse-Kiang, the Nile, and 
 upon the islands of the sea. Rome, the mother of 
 popular ignorance, of intolerance, and of want, can 
 boast of all this, even upon a broader and a grander 
 scale. Constantine and his barbaric legions with equal 
 right boasted of the Christian faith upon the plea 
 that they bore its symbol upon their banners and 
 their shields, carrying it as the ensign of ambitious 
 conquest. Something more than this is needed to 
 develop into symmetrical proportion the moral, social 
 and political character of the nation. If we would 
 build up into ideal strength and beauty the manhood 
 and womanhood of the Republic, we must reach the 
 inner life of the masses, arouse the public conscience, 
 and touch all the springs of the divine and heroic in 
 the great popular heart. 
 
 To accomplish this, however, there must be a sys- 
 tematic, an energetic, unremitting, universal effort. 
 No violent, spasmodic local outburst of public virtue 
 will alone avail. The moral lapse is too great, too 
 widely-spread to admit of any course but that which 
 shall thoroughly and permanently improve and inspire 
 the fundamental forces of life. As the Roman hier- 
 archy plans and labors, not for this alone, but for the 
 coming centuries, so should the true Church, by a uni- 
 form, constant, and persistent effort, labor to build up 
 and mould the personality of the nation into forms of 
 ethic and civic beauty. If the Church would fully 
 perform her obligations, preserving with all civil and 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 37" 
 
 religious liberty inviolate, she must radically change 
 her agents and modes of popular education. In^ 
 these days of steam and of electricity, when thouglit 
 multiplies with the moments to infinity, and flashes 
 over the latitudes and longitudes with the speed 
 of lightning, she must seize upon some other 
 agents or fulcrums of power than simply her pulpits 
 and her present literature to move and inspire the 
 world. Were she fully awake to her responsibilities ; 
 were she intelligently and conscientiously earnest in:- 
 intensifying her rightful influence, and in extending, 
 and solidifying her moral empire, she would readily^ 
 discover the means which are now presented to her 
 for the fulfillment of this work. From the impulses 
 of free thought, and the necessities of free govern- 
 ment, the common school, and from the evolutions of 
 genius, the steam-press with its daily newspaper, have 
 appeared as the most potential agents for the dissem- 
 ination of popular thought and inspiration. 
 
 The pulpit and the library, as moral educators of 
 the masses, are of the old dispensation. These are of 
 the new — the dispensation of universal mental quick- 
 ening — of restless, independent thought; and by these 
 the destiny of our political, social, and religious life 
 is to be mainly determined. As these are inspired 
 so will our national character be formed and our 
 national history written. 
 
 And yet the Church, practically, is insensible to 
 this. She seems to be sleeping with contentment 
 upon the old flint-locks of the Revolution, while the 
 restless age, without prophet or Messiah, is wielding 
 the Columbiads and rifle-guns which Providence has 
 expressly prepared for the successful completion of 
 her own conquests. 
 
38 THE BIBLE 
 
 The circumscribed and periodic duties of the sacred 
 desk; eccentric expositions of divine truth; denomi- 
 national aggrandizement the building of ostentatious 
 altars ; the inauguration of fanatical temperance cru- 
 sades ; the issue of feeble weekly sectarian journals, 
 and the effort to renew races and civilizations long 
 since effete by fulfillment of appointed time, seems to 
 fill the very measure of her ambition and her hopes. 
 
 An effective externality is seemingly the grand 
 sum of her desires. Figuratively, the apostolic zeal 
 and simplicity of teaching, healing, and inspiring by 
 the wayside, and in the chambers of the poor and 
 lowly, are apparently of far less moment than are the 
 ostentatious environments, the awe-inspiring rites and 
 ceremonies of the temple. 
 
 When she will arouse to a consciousness of her 
 responsibility, and with a fresh baptism and a broad- 
 er vision commence a new era of struggle with anti- 
 Christ, striking at the foundations of evil rather than 
 at results, is a sealed problem. Judging, however, 
 from her present secularistic tendencies, we fear that 
 around her altars must first sweep cyclones whose 
 fury will not only threaten her own safety but that of 
 the Republic. The signs of the times significantly 
 point to this. It requires no prophetic ear to even 
 now catch the sobs of the coming storm. 
 
 Materialism, under the teachings of the Pantheistic 
 scientists; politico- ecclesiasticism, the star of Papal 
 hope ; imperialism, the ideal polity of vulgar affluence ; 
 monopoly, the ambitious aim of Jesuitical wealth; 
 agrarianism, the defined and settled theory of the 
 Communist; free - love, the apotheosis of socialism ; 
 with their concomitants, are spreading and entrench- 
 ing themselves in every direction, preparatory to a 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 39 
 
 struggle for supremacy. In results, the mightiest 
 conflict of all certainty of ideas is surely approach- 
 ing — a conflict in which Christianity and republican 
 government upon this continent will either become 
 more clearly defined and more deeply rooted, or else 
 will, for a time at least, relapse into simple ideals ; 
 having no tangible form or force in law. 
 
 In the face of existing facts, this crisis should not 
 only become an absorbing desire with the Church, 
 but its approach she could hasten ; for its speedy ad- 
 vent is the grand hope of constitutional and religious 
 freedom. Delay can only increase the intensity of 
 the struggle and the chances of success. 
 
 Material prosperity and prolonged rest have stricken 
 the Church with the weakness of senility ; and there- 
 fore some great struggle, in whose surges her fortunes 
 shall tremble and vibrate with dread uncertainty, is her 
 first and greatest need. It is a necessity of being, 
 applicable to collective as well as to individual life, 
 that the perfect, the ideal good shall only be reached 
 and maintained through conflict and suffering. The* 
 faith of the Church has ever been most mighty, her 
 glory most resplendent, when the foe has pressed 
 most heavily upon her flanks. It was only when the 
 chariots of the Egyptian were thundering at the heels 
 of Israel that the sea parted to his footsteps, and the 
 *' pillar of cloud and of fire " stood between the op- 
 pressor and the freedman. 
 
 It was because of impending danger to the Hebrew 
 Church that, for more than four hundred years, the 
 invisible battalions of God formed its imperial guard. 
 And so have been the sublimest periods of the Church 
 of Christ when the sword and the fagot have most 
 scourged her ranks ; when the caves and the fast- 
 
40 THE BIBLE 
 
 nesses of the mountains have most echoed her plaint-^ 
 ive chants and prayers. These were the days of her 
 real transfiguration ; the days of her true scriptural 
 simplicity and of her greatest spiritual ardor. Not: 
 that we would have a repetition of this sad history, 
 for this was the sorrow of conditions never to return 
 — the sorrow of a rude age, of a numerical weakness 
 — a discipline necessary to the deep implanting and 
 final growth of a lofty and sturdy faith. But we 
 would have her, in these days of her material plenti- 
 tude and of her spiritual poverty, forced into some 
 great moral conflict, whose uncertainties would startle 
 her dreams, quicken her pulse, sublimate her faith,, 
 and lead her into closer communion with her celes- 
 ial allies. 
 
 In a period like this, civilization and free law 
 would catch a new inspiration, and march upward 
 with colossal strides toward grander heights. That 
 the penalties of neglected duties and of perverted laws 
 may be alleviated the Christian element of the na- 
 tion, in its civil capacity, either united or in its denom- 
 inational character, should at once move on the line 
 of the aggressive, and take position at the great, 
 points of moral strength. 
 
 In the military campaigns of Napoleon, aggression,, 
 combined with celerity of action, was the grand char- 
 acteristic that gave to his arms victory and empire. 
 Aggression embodies force that mere numbers do not 
 alone possess. This should be a leading feature in the 
 policy of the Church. Though theoretically peaceful, 
 yet she should become aggressive, and move without 
 delay, figuratively with her hand upon her sword-hilt, 
 to control not only the daily press of the nation, but 
 to place the Bible in its schools as a text -book of 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 41 
 
 moral and political inspiration. Here we indicate the 
 great work of the future — the grandest of the age — 
 and point to a battle-field upon which the Christian: 
 Church, in her individuality, must finally carry her 
 standards, though it be in the face of relentless storm 
 and opposition. The struggle she may postpone, but 
 its coming is inevitable ; for in that struggle only is 
 now hope of political and social reform, as well as 
 that of her own regeneration. The fiery crucible is 
 still indispensable in the reforming and refining of 
 nations, of the Church, and of the individual man. 
 Surely her surpliced bishops, and her meek-mannered 
 ministers must finally, alike, if loyal to their trusts, 
 throw off their robes of peace, and, war-clad and fear- 
 less as were Luther, Knox, and Wesley, lead in strik- 
 ing for the triumphs of a national conscience and a 
 national faith, which shall give consistency to our 
 public acts, and no longer contradict our professions 
 of Christian ethics. 
 
 The preliminary steps should be a unification of 
 evangelical strength for all public measures of moral 
 and social good ; among the chief of which should be 
 the establishing of daily newspapers at the great cen- 
 tres of population and of influence, of such a char- 
 acter and at such a cost as would defy all competition, 
 and thereby be enabled to carry, in the true spirit 
 of the missionary, to every fire-side, however humble 
 or impoverished, a daily resume of the world's enter^ 
 prises, industries, charities, aims, triumphs in science 
 and in faith, as well as to inspire and aid Labor in its 
 unequal struggle for competency and independence; 
 leaving the history of the passions now so prominent- 
 ly presented, and so potent in the work of demorali- 
 zation, unwritten, except as judicial records. This 
 
42 
 
 THE BIBLE 
 
 is entirely feasible if earnestly and judiciously under- 
 taken. The money even that is now annually ex- 
 pended in the extravagant construction and appoint- 
 ments of edifices of worship; in the maintaining of 
 an abortive system of sectarian journalism ; in the 
 support under existing circumstances of a questiona- 
 ble economy of foreign missions ; in the personal ex- 
 travagance of professing Christians, would alone suc- 
 cessfully establish a journalistic influence scarcely 
 secondary to that of all the leading dailies of the 
 country combined — certainly an influence which, if 
 wielded with sagacity and fidelity, would send an 
 ethic glow, now unfelt and unknown, through all the 
 arteries, and along all the nerves of the body politic. 
 
 The " Centennial Fund " of the Methodist Episco- 
 pal Church North amounted to $5,000,000 — a sum 
 suflicient to have successfully established three power- 
 ful dallies, either of which might have possessed a 
 popular influence that would have far transcended 
 that of the great " Book Concern " of this denomina- 
 tion, with its thirty cylinder power-presses — combined 
 even with the 25,000 preachers and 1,000 instructors 
 in the colleges and seminaries of this sect. 
 
 The Baptists now contemplate the collection of a 
 similar fund ; but it is hoped, if successful, the moral 
 and social education of the masses, especially that 
 element in which Communism is striking deep and 
 luxuriant root, and which forms so large a proportion 
 of the numerical and vital power of the nation, may 
 be liberally provided for by their sect in the estab- 
 lishing of a powerful daily press. 
 
 Moral, social, and political science is infinitely of 
 more national importance than theology, rhetoric, and 
 the Pagan classics. Teach the masses, conjointly 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 43 
 
 with the rudiments of secular education, the sanctity 
 of the moral law, the divinit}' of the eleventh com- 
 mandment, and political economy, and we lay deep 
 the foundation of popular sovereignty and build about 
 it a bulwark, over which the ambitions of a secular- 
 ized priesthood, of Jesuitical monopolies, of political 
 demagogues, and of social iconoclasts can never pass. 
 The denominational classes parade the results of 
 their sectarian enterprises in self-commendatory sta- 
 tistics of the number of their clergy, their theological 
 schools, their libraries, their periodicals and tracts ; 
 but what are all their pulpits, their seminaries, their 
 iixed and periodical literature, in their direct popular 
 influence, compared with that of the daily press? 
 While their voices only reach, at indefinite, or at best 
 at weekly or semi-weekly periods, the disciplined and 
 comfortable thousands, the daily press may reach, not 
 only these, but all the unbridled and needy millions. 
 This is the great arch-apostle of our century, speak- 
 ing with infinite tongues of infinite power. In its 
 nervous and eternal syllables is embodied a force more 
 mighty, if free, than that of armies — a force in whose 
 flash, crowns, bayonets, senates, statutes, creeds, or- 
 ganizations, and men, melt and pass away. Give the 
 *' Nazarine" the daily press, and the fortress is gained 
 whose guns command the world. Rescue it from its 
 lawless and mercenary condition, sanctify it to the just, 
 the pure, and the lofty, and we not only encourage 
 the advance to the political front, over the heads of 
 demagogues, the " honest, capable, and faithful," but 
 we embody in one the equivalent of all the diversified 
 moral and intellectual power of the past as well as of 
 the present. We may even gather up from sacred 
 dust into single quivers, as arrows of quenched light, 
 
44 THE BIBLE 
 
 the long spent forces of genius, and send them out 
 again in perpetual streams, rekindled and reinspired, 
 over broader and vaster circuits ; making the Chry- 
 sostoms and the Abelards, the Luthers and the Fene- 
 lons, the Sydneys and the Miltons, the Whitfields 
 and the Chathams, the Masillons and the Turgots, 
 the Adamses and the Franklins, speak again, in grand- 
 er and more intensified periods, to grander and more 
 intensified audiences. " The newspaper," said Lord 
 Mansfield, " will write the Dukes of Northumberland 
 out of their titles and possessions, and the country 
 out of its king." " Before this century shall have run 
 out," said Lamartine, "journalism will be the whole 
 of human thought. #***** Xhe ruling 
 book, possibly, will be a daily newspaper." The finan- 
 cial and political centers of all Europe thrill as sen- 
 sitively in response to the leaders of the Loftdon 
 Times as do the magnets of our planet in response 
 to the solar storm. And does not the religious world 
 see its fearful responsibility here involved in neglect- 
 ing to control this mighty agent of social and politi- 
 cal power — this agent by which civilization and all 
 the sacred interests of the race are to receive their 
 ultimate type — their final cast ? 
 
 Better worship beneath humble roof and beside lowly 
 altar, and know that through our zeal and our sacrifices 
 we are hewing the great rough block of sensual hu- 
 manity into the beauty of divine proportion, and 
 gradually bringing into being the grand ideal of Chris- 
 tian hope and of popular liberty. 
 
 Ascendancy gained in journalism, then, should 
 follow an effort to restore the Bible to the common 
 schools. But here we approach a field of earnest con- 
 flict, a field upon which forces, now quietly strength- 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 
 
 ening and intensifying at the foundations of society, 
 will finally rally for supremacy. What the arbitra- 
 ment, however, of that field will be need not be a 
 question of doubt. With the influence of the Press 
 and the inspiration of the cause no friend of Christian 
 civilization and of popular government need stumble 
 in his conclusions, or bow himself in fear. I am 
 aware, however, that there exists, even with some of 
 the assumed friends of the Bible, objections to its in- 
 troduction into the public schools. Influenced by 
 denominational sympathies, and lacking a just com- 
 prehension of the political necessity, the scope, and 
 the national pre-eminence of the common school, they 
 advise against its introduction there, excusing their 
 sectarian prejudice and their virtual disloyalty to the 
 State, as well as to the Bible, in appeals for *' inde- 
 pendent " or denominational schools. While others, 
 .moved by fear of the opposition which the effort of 
 introduction would provoke, are led to tamely submit 
 to its exclusion, choosing peace w4th no Bible rather 
 than the social and political contests which would 
 follow. But to thus yield up our great system of pub- 
 lic instruction into the hands of demagogues, to the 
 control of hereditary enemies of popular government 
 and of social order, without a struggle, is not only an 
 act of cowardice, but a crime against liberty ; a crime 
 that will finally bring, alike upon Church and State, 
 overwhelming disaster. 
 
 That the effort would invoke strenuous opposition 
 we have no doubt, but shall we refuse to attempt so 
 plain a duty because of opposition ? Can we elect in 
 this matter? Is not the introduction of the Inspired 
 Word into our schools a necessity which we, as 
 -guardians of free government, must accept at all haz- 
 
46 THE BIBLE 
 
 ards ? Is this not a required evidence of the necessary 
 moral rectitude essential to the successful mainte- 
 nance of self-government? 
 
 By legal enactment we seek to establish our faith, 
 to lull the public conscience, and to dignify the na- 
 tional character by engraving " In God we trust " 
 upon our coin, and by incorporating into our organic 
 law a more specific declaration of our faith. But is 
 this sufficient ? Would it not be more consistent 
 with our religious assumptions to place the Bible in 
 our schools, and thereby seek to engrave upon the 
 hearts of our children a declaration of our trust, in 
 lines more deep and more imperishable than they can 
 be upon our coin or our organic acts ? It was not 
 sufficient with God that the Hebrews should simply 
 engrave His name and His words upon their door- 
 posts and their gates ; but it was upon the hearts of 
 their children that He especially designed that His 
 statutes should be written ; for it was here that He 
 w^as to establish, not alone Hebrew government, but 
 to lay the foundations of prophetic civilization. And 
 so should w^e, imitating the Jews in their obedience, 
 not alone seek to write our faith upon mere gold or 
 parchment, but to incorporate it into our system of 
 public instruction, and thereby figuratively bind it as 
 a sign upon the hands of the national childhood, and 
 as frontlets between its eyes. 
 
 No plea, however specious, no portrayal of danger, 
 however threatening, can be of sufficient force to war- 
 rant a prohibition of the use of the Bible in the pub- 
 lic schools. Its presence there is the imperious de- 
 mand of moral, social, and political progress. Our 
 system of common schools is no result of Pantheism, 
 Paganism, Vaticanism, or even of Judaism. No such 
 
• 
 
 AND ITS INFLUENCE. 47 
 
 scheme of education was ever born of these mothers 
 of Anti-Christ. Each has had ages of empire. Each 
 has stamped its genius upon the centuries ; and yetr^- 
 they give us no record of a system of free education 
 for the great laboring, patient, needy masses. This 
 is the peculiar offspring of the Christianized Ameri- 
 can idea of social and political necessity — that grand 
 idea of conscience and of liberty which had its con- 
 ception in the religious inspirations of the sixteenth 
 century — embryonic life m the early experiences of 
 the Puritans, and birth in the cabin of the May/lower, 
 No priest of Jerusalem or of Rome, no disciple of 
 Heroclitus or of Lucretius, no forerunner of Voltaire, 
 Hume, or of Hegal stood sponsor at the baptism of 
 our cherished system of schools. None but the 
 saintly " Pilgrim," with his Bible and his " hymns of 
 lofty cheer," was there to give pledge for this offering 
 of Christian liberty. And why, then, should we yield 
 to the dictates of these foes of Christian revelation, 
 and as a logical historic sequence of popular govern- 
 ment ? What principles of duty, necessity, or expe- 
 diency demand this ? Are our institutions so deeply 
 entrenched that we can, as a mark of republican gen- 
 erosity, for any reason, safely hand them over to the 
 control of their natural enemies ? Or can we, in the 
 role of the demagogue, afford, even for a season, to 
 barter this or any guaranty of our liberties for place 
 or emolument ? 
 
 "Oh ! not yet 
 Mayest thou embrace thy corselet, nor lay by 
 Thy sword, nor yet, O Freedom ! close thy lids 
 In slumber ; for thine enemy never sleeps, 
 And thou must watch and combat, till the day 
 Of the new Earth and Heaven." Bryant. 
 
 The most momentous reasons exist why the Scrip- 
 tures should be introduced into the schools as a text- 
 
48 THE BIBLE 
 
 book of ethics. Never since the great flood of Gothic 
 and Vandal life which rushed over the Alps in the 
 early centuries has there been such a flow of peoples 
 as is now setting in upon us from the old seats of 
 European and Asiatic civilizations. Irresistible and 
 ceaseless is this tide of vitality now flowing to our 
 shores, with all its crude ideas of religion, of morals, 
 and of government ; vitiating more and more the 
 republican sentiment of the nation, as each succeed- 
 ing wave, sweeping over the land, leaves in its broad 
 continental track the germs of new life, the elements 
 of new power. The historic Roman disappeared be- 
 neath the great northern deluge ; because he not only 
 lacked the moral power to resist and to assimilate the 
 vigorous barbarism that flowed in upon him, but the 
 means to secure it. So is the historic American grad- 
 ually losing his individuality and power amidst the 
 great deluge of the east and the west. 
 
 With this type came liberty ; and with its extinction 
 liberty will expire, unless its spirit and its personality 
 are perpetuated through those who are now succeed- 
 ing to political duty and responsibility. Unlike the 
 Roman, however, we possess the means not only to 
 resist, but to assimilate all these elements of antago- 
 nism which surround us with such gloomy promise. 
 With the Bible inspiring the statute, the tribune, the 
 press, and the school, we may mold all this mighty 
 influx of Paganism, Romanism, Atheism, and Com- 
 munism into our own likeness ; making it a part of 
 ourselves in the hopes and perpetuity of the Repub- 
 lic. 
 
 Can any doubt this ? Can any doubt the power of 
 Christian philosophy in resisting, overcoming, and 
 iinally assimilating antagonistic elements to itself 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 49 
 
 when faithfully taught and exemplified ? If so, we 
 'have only to refer to its early struggles and final tri- 
 umphs to fully comprehend this truth. No other 
 proofs are wanted to establish forever its irresistible 
 •energy as an agent of defense, of reform, of conquest, 
 and of empire, than its early struggles with, and its 
 decisive victories over, old-established and venerated 
 ■creeds and systems of philosophy, with which it first 
 came in contact when only exemplified in the teach- 
 ings and lives of but even a little band of humble 
 Galileans. Old and deep as were the foundations of 
 the ritualism of the Jew, lofty and unyielding as was 
 the intellectual pride of the Greek, imperial and splen- 
 did as was the barbarism of the Roman, beautiful and 
 enslaving as was the mythology of the classic Pagan, 
 these, all these, were shaken and overthrown by the 
 gentle, but yet irresistible and revolutionary spirit of 
 that philosophy which Jesus so meekly taught to men, 
 and which His disciples so faithfully expounded, not 
 only to the Jew, but to the Gentile, at Athens, at Co- 
 rinth, and at Rome. And its modern victories are no 
 less convincing of its powers than are those of its 
 early history. It may sometimes, in subordination to 
 the great law of reaction, appear for a time to have 
 lost its vitality and power ; but like the eternal flow 
 of the tides, inflow follows outflow, and each suc- 
 ceeding wave lifts the social life-line higher and high- 
 er, and will until the highest summits of human pos- 
 sibilities are reached, and, in fulfillment of the great 
 drama, the finite blends with the shadow of the Infi- 
 nite. 
 
 Napoleon said : ** Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, 
 and myself have founded empires ; but upon what 
 does the creation of our genius rest ? Upon force," 
 
 4 
 
50 
 
 THE BIBLE 
 
 he replies. " Christ," he continues, " founded His em- 
 pire upon love, and millions at this hour would die 
 for Him. I see kings, potentates, and armies arrayed 
 against Him; but with Him I see no army — none 
 but a mysterious force — peaceful men, scattered here 
 and there, having no rallying-point but a commork 
 faith in the mysteries of the Cross. I die before my 
 time, and my empire expires with me ; but the King- 
 dom of Christ survived the Crucifixion; still lives, ex^ 
 tending its scepter over the earth." 
 
 Our success in assimilating the great mass of this 
 rapidly inflowing alien element, as well as in perpetuat- 
 ing the true republican spirit with the native-born, will 
 be mainly determined by the ethic forces we employ in 
 our educational system. If our agents of conversion 
 and of perpetuation are wanting in the requisite power 
 to inspire and to elevate the moral sentiments, then 
 we shall fail in our work. But if we bring to our aid 
 influences which, by their natural adaptation and their 
 spiritual force, incite and develop the emotional na- 
 ture into pure and lofty types, as well as stimulate 
 the understanding, then our success will equal our 
 hopes. And here exists an unfortunate point of dif- 
 ference among even the stanch friends of our public 
 schools. While some, overlooking the need of Chris- 
 tian ethic culture as a political and social necessity,, 
 maintain that a system of public instruction, purely 
 secular, is all that is required in laying the foundation 
 of republican citizenship, others contend that secu- 
 lar studies, alone, possess no inherent influence es- 
 pecially favorable to republican sentiment ; that it is- 
 only through the emotions, guided by an enlightened 
 understanding, that we can build up a strong and 
 systematic republican character. Hence, they claim 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 51 
 
 that, on political grounds alone, the Bible, so prepo- 
 tent in its power over the heart in restraining and re- 
 fining its passions, in quickening the conscience, and 
 in inspiring the mind with the true ideas of equity 
 and of equality, should be introduced into the public 
 schools as a reading-book, that the great moral defi- 
 ciency which exists in the popular character, through 
 the negligence or recreancy of the guardian, may be 
 at least partially supplied by the State. 
 
 That the position of the latter is correct we have 
 abundant proof It is not the merely intellectually 
 trained that have proved the exclusive champions or 
 the most sturdy defenders of republican principles* 
 It was not from the scholarly and courtly ranks of 
 England that chiefly came the most strong and ardent 
 supporters of the commonwealth, but it was from the 
 fields and the shops — from the industrial ranks of the 
 lowly and emotional Puritans, that sprang, as if by 
 inspiration, those fiery and invincible squadrons 'of 
 republicanism. It was not from scliools of classic 
 learning that mainly flowed the heroic spirit of the 
 American Revolution, but it was from the counting- 
 rooms, the workshops, and the farms, recruited from 
 common schools with Bibles, that gathered those 
 untrained battalions who sealed with unutterable sor- 
 rows their devotion to liberty, and won for humanity 
 its first substantial victory. 
 
 Russell and Sydney are conspicuous among the 
 martyrs of English liberty. Their republican -sym- 
 pathies brought them to the scaffold. And the first 
 extenuation, of this crime against human rights came 
 from the halls of Oxford. While the block was yet 
 reeking with the blood of these martyrs of free thought 
 Oxford University proclaimed to the world that the 
 
52 THE BIBLE 
 
 principles for which. these men died were '* impious; 
 were damnable — doctrines fitted to deprave the man- 
 ners and corrupt the minds of men ; to promote sedi- 
 tion and to overthrow states." 
 
 Pure intellect, however highly cultivated, untem- 
 pered with Christian philosophy, is inclined to inordi- 
 nate self- devotion or to caste, and is, therefore, in- 
 stinctively antagonistic to popular sovereignty. 
 
 The American Republic struggled into life in the 
 midst of a brilliantly intellectual age — the age of 
 Bentham and of Herschell ; of d'Alembert and of 
 Condillac ; of Kant and of Lossing ; of Goethe and 
 of Schiller; and yet, scarcely any great intellect, save 
 Chatham, Barre, and Burke, rose up in that splendid 
 period of philosophy, poetry, eloquence, and of law, 
 to inspire, even with hope, the founders of the infant 
 Republic. The ostentatious reception of the Ameri- 
 can Ambassador by the savans and literati of France, 
 in "1778, was the result more of national prejudice 
 against England than from true love of republican- 
 ism. The kiss of Voltaire and of Franklin, as sym- 
 bolical of political sympathy, in the presence of the im- 
 perial intellect of France, was dramatic, overwrought, 
 and unnatural, and no more represented a unity of 
 political inspiration than did the great revolutions of 
 the two peoples. Truly, republics have ever been 
 born of the heart, christened by its affections, and 
 defended by its enthusiasm. 
 
 The public school, where the childhood of the na- 
 tion daily gathers — where the great majorities of com- 
 ing power meet to receive the first lesson of civic life 
 — -is the most effective point at which we can reach the 
 faith and the conscience of the future. And it is here, 
 then, that the Bible should be placed as a text-book 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 5S 
 
 of moral, social, and political inspiration. Sabbath- 
 schools do not fully meet the necessities of the case, 
 for reasons readily assigned. We do not presume, 
 however, that the Bible in the schools would at once 
 and alone work out the great problem of social and 
 political science — would alone accomplish all for civil 
 and religious freedom. Moral and civil treason would 
 still continue. Tribunals of justice and prisons would 
 still be needed as necessary adjuncts of our present 
 civilization. For, with all the spiritual and moral 
 appliances within human reach, the upward march of 
 the race is, as is the march of the centuries, percept- 
 ible only by comparison of epochs or eras. To edu- 
 cate man up to the full standard of the Christian ideal, 
 when statutes of force shall become obsolete, when 
 individual right shall find impregnable defense in the 
 right of another, is a work of ages — slow in its pro- 
 cesses, it may be, as is the precession of the equinoxes. 
 But with its presence there the pulse of the nation 
 would beat stronger ; its life would become grander ; 
 its step toward higher planes would be more sure and 
 steady ; because, with the Divine Word goes out an 
 influence which mind, particularly in its formative 
 period, cannot wholly resist. Silent and unostenta- 
 tious as the light in its operations though it is, still, 
 few hearts there are that can pass from under its con 
 tinned influence without receiving some of the strokes 
 of its divine sculpturing, or some of the touches of its 
 divine coloring. 
 
 William Tyndall must have felt this when laboriously 
 translating in exile the Word for the fatherland, desir- 
 ing that it might be given even to every plow-boy of 
 England. Faber felt it when he said, " The poetry and 
 philosophy of the Bible live on the ear like music that 
 
54 THE BIBLE 
 
 never can be forgotten." Erasmus realized it when 
 he wished that not only the " husbandman at the plow, 
 but his little ones at the cottage-fire, might sing some- 
 thing from the Gospels and the Epistles*." De Quin- 
 cey was conscious of it when he said, " The Script- 
 ures which I read in childhood ever sway me as mys- 
 teriously as music, and slept on my memory like early 
 dawn upon the waters." Burke, Chatham, Erskine, 
 Otis, Henry, Ames, Webster, and other great masters 
 of language, early understood its mysterious power in 
 giving resistless charm to eloquence and to argument. 
 Elizabeth Fry had faith in its influence over the adult 
 as well as youthful criminal, and had sublime con- 
 firmation of it when in the English prisons she recited 
 its tender compassions, its sweet reconciliations, its 
 inspiring hopes, and awoke within their gloomy walls 
 a new and eloquent life. Gustavus, the knightly hero 
 of Protestant liberty, fully comprehended, as did Crom- 
 well, the power even of its martial influence, when, 
 with his unhelmeted warriors, on the eve of battle, he 
 would reverently plead its promises of help, and trust- 
 ingly chant the hymns of its inspiration. 
 
 Freedom by the Danube, thrilled with divine hope, 
 beneath the influence of Revelation, as Kossuth, 
 kneeling amidst the graves of the heroes of Ranoy- 
 ina, plead with inspired lips for the glory of the fallen 
 brave and the cause of Hungarian liberty. 
 
 It was the imperial power of Christian Revelation 
 that wrung from the apostate Julian that sublime con- 
 fession when, upon the sands by the Tigris, flinging 
 his own blood toward heaven, he exclaimed, " Gali- 
 leean ! Galileean ! Thou hast conquered ! " . 
 
 We give to the public schools, as models of moral 
 excellence, of diction, of pathos, and of the sublime. 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 55 
 
 Milton, Young, Dwight, Ruskin, Webster, Bryant, 
 and other eminent teachers ; but when these, as eth- 
 ical standards, are viewed simply as reflexes of those" 
 inimitable lessons of the " humble Nazarine," how 
 quickly do they lose their importance and take infe- 
 rior rank in the realm of philosophy ! What weak- 
 ness of imagery do we find with these authors when 
 paralleled with that which arose in the visions of John 
 at Patmos, of Ezekiel by the Chebar, and of Daniel 
 by the Euphrates ! What passionless poetry when 
 placed in the light of that which kindled upon the 
 lips of Deborah, of Job, of David, and of Isaiah ! 
 What emotionless pathos, when contrasted with that 
 which trembled in the voice of the prophet by the 
 rivers of captivity, or when, down through the ages, 
 lamenting, he saw the final scattering and exile of his 
 people. 
 
 While the embodied thoughts and emotions of hu- 
 man teachers may, for a time, charm and thrill with 
 their magnetic power, they quickly become spiritless 
 and inert when compared with the written inspirations 
 of Jehovah. The grandest and purest philosophy, 
 the sublimest and most impassioned poetry, the bold- 
 est and most startling imagery, the loftiest and most 
 enrapturing diction, the tenderest and most tearful 
 pathos which ever thrilled the human heart, come 
 from the pens of God's lawgivers — from the lips of 
 God's prophets-^from the harps of God's poets. It 
 is at these sources of wondrous power that the great 
 statesmen, orators, bards, and soldiers of reform have 
 ever caught their inspiration, have ever kindled the 
 torch with which they have spanned the heavens with 
 the broadest and brightest arches of promise. And 
 it is here that the great masters of immortal art have 
 
S5,;, . THE BIBLE 
 
 received their divinest inspirations of the beautiful, the 
 grand, the tragic, and the awful. 
 
 Mythology was the inspiration of Greek art ; hence,, 
 its apotheosis was simply beauty of form and fidelity 
 of expression. But the Bible inspired the genius of 
 the Renaissance, whose art creations embody not only 
 beauty of line and of sentiment, but ideas, whose for- 
 ces thrill the universe, and whose sweep touches the 
 very heart of the Infinite. 
 
 If the " Minerva "of Phidias, the '' Venus " of Prax- 
 itiles, the " Lance Bearer " of Polycletus, are perfec- 
 tions of ideal beauty, the marbles of Ghiberti, of Do- 
 notello, and of Canova, are but little less. But the 
 infinite grandeurs and transcendencies of Michael 
 Angelo, the sublimities and pathos of Raphael, the 
 divine harmonies and purity of Coreggio, in their 
 illustrations of the Messianic drama, have no parallel 
 in the grandest of Pagan art. Toby Rosenthal at 
 one time threw a portion of the artistic world into 
 ecstacies in materializing " Elaine" — a conception of 
 Tennyson ; but this young Jewish master might call 
 up with his magic pencil, from the grand old poetry 
 of his own race, conceptions and ideals, in the light 
 of which " Elaine " would pale like a star at midday. 
 When this novel work of Rosenthal's shall have beea 
 forgotten, the sacred illustrations of even Gustave 
 Dore will still live to inspire and rap the hearts of 
 men. 
 
 We read of the great lyric power of the old Pagan, 
 masters ; but critics decide, that while the cultivated 
 music of the most distinguished of these was full of 
 harmony and of tender melody, it was yet effeminate,, 
 and lacked vastly the variety of air and of modulation,, 
 the pathos, the power, and the grandeur of that of the 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 
 
 
 Christian. The celebrated names of Hyagni^ 
 Timotheus, and of Pindar, rendered in the temples 
 at the zenith of Greek glory, deserve no comparison 
 with the sublime oratorios of Handel, of Haydn, of 
 Mozart, or of Gibbons. These choral symphonies, 
 upon which so many millions in emotion have again 
 and again swept into communion with the angelic 
 choirs, could have had no creation except by inspira- 
 tion of the Bible. 
 
 Emerson says Milton is forerun by Homer, Virgil, 
 and Tasso ; that without these precursors there would 
 have been no *' Paradise Lost." But Emerson here 
 is superficial ; dealing simply with the anatomy of 
 poetry. Its spirit glows now, beyond the limit of his 
 observation. Had there been no Iliad, no -^neid, or 
 no Jerusalem Delivered, " Paradise Lost " would not 
 have been ; for it was an inevitable epic creation of the 
 Inspired Word — a grand, irrepressible poetic out-burst 
 of the faith of the Christian centuries. The fore- 
 runners of Milton were the Hebriac prophets and the 
 Messianic revelators. And these will ever furnish 
 epic and dramatic genius its most seraphic concep- 
 tions and its most imperishable models. 
 
 Milton declared that " no songs were comparable 
 with the songs of the Bible, and no orations equal to- 
 the orations of the prophets." 
 
 Sir William Jones thought the " Scriptures contain- 
 ed more sublimity and more exquisite beauty than, 
 can be collected from all other books." 
 
 The learned and eloquent Herder said, " The poetry 
 of the Bible is the most thrilling and sublime of all 
 poetry." 
 
 Erasmus says, " Paul, at the close of the fourth 
 Chapter of Romans, is more eloquent than Cicero." 
 
58 THE BIBLE 
 
 Goethe pronounced the book of Ruth " the loveli- 
 est epic idyl that has come down from any age." 
 
 Humbolt asserted that " The Hebrew description 
 of nature was unrivaled, and the 104th Psalm the 
 sublimest panorama of the universe." 
 
 Carlyle remarks that " the book of Job is the grand- 
 est thing ever written — a noble book with sublime 
 sorrow — sublime reconciliations ; the oldest melody 
 of the heart of manhood, * * * ^ * so soft, and great 
 as the Summer midnight — as the world with its seas 
 and stars." 
 
 " The elder Pitt recognized the Bible as *' the crite- 
 rion of political equity ; as the highest instrument of 
 popular appeal when tyranny violated constitutional 
 right ; and in it found justification for revolution when 
 public liberty was assailed." 
 
 Burke acknowledged the power of the Bible in 
 ^' inspiring public energy, and the spirit of popular 
 liberty." And, upon the authority of his biographer, 
 it was *' from its pages that he imbibed that sublime 
 morality, and gathered that rich imagery, apt illustra- 
 tions, and lofty diction," which have made his orations 
 classic and immortal. 
 
 Erskine said, " The principles taught by the Bible 
 lay at the foundation of English laws ; and that under 
 the auspices of the Inspired Word only had the lost 
 and subverted liberties of mankind been re-asserted." 
 
 John Stuart Mill, that obdurate and subtle skep- 
 tic, in a candid moment, admits that what '* Christian 
 Revelation lacks in direct strength is more than com- 
 pensated by the greater truth and rectitude of the 
 morality it sanctions." 
 
 Guizot writes : " The nations who are conquering 
 the world by mind and strength derive their mission 
 and their source of power from the Bible." 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 
 
 Victor Hugo says: "England made Shakspeare, 
 and the Bible made England." 
 
 Samuel Adams declared "The Holy Word the- 
 only infallible guide in morals and religion — the pal- 
 ladium of the rights of conscience, of liberty, and of 
 happiness." 
 
 Out of the " great idea of God's infinite attributes, 
 as revealed in His Word," Theodore Parker, looking 
 down the vista of time, saw " rise in beauty the ideal 
 home, state, nation, world." 
 
 Webster said : " The first principles of our Govern- 
 ment are the truths of Divine Revelation." 
 
 Novalis holds that " The Christian religion is the 
 root of all democracy, and the highest fact in the 
 rights of man." 
 
 Goldwin Smith says : " The progress of nations 
 and individuals follows in exact proportion in which 
 they approach the gospel morality ;" and that it was 
 " from no other source than Christian Revelation that 
 was derived that spirit * * which ^ * sent forth, on 
 a crusade for the freedom and happiness of man, the 
 best soldiers of the revolutionary armies of France — 
 those of whom Hoche and Marceau were the gentle, 
 brave, and chivalrous types." 
 
 Even Rousseau tells us, " The majesty of the Scrip- 
 tures astonishes ; their sanctity enraptures. The 
 writings," he says, " of the philosophers, with all their 
 pomp and parade, are trivial when compared with the 
 sacred volume." " Is it possible," he asks, " that a 
 work as simple, and yet as sublime, should be the work 
 of men ? Is it the style of an enthusiast or a sectary, 
 inflated with ambition ? The maxims, how sublime ! 
 * * the discourses of the Great Teacher, how wise 
 and profound ! " 
 
60 THE BIBLE 
 
 And now are not these testimonies sufficient, inde- 
 pendent of intrinsic evidences, to lead us to accept 
 the Inspired Writings as suitable for popular use in 
 our schools ? If the influence of the Bible is, as it 
 is proven to be by individual experience and the civil 
 and social history of advanced peoples, favorable to 
 good morals, intellectual improvement, industrial ac- 
 tivity, frugal habits, just laws; if its truths awaken in 
 the soul the spirit of the humane, the love of the beau- 
 tiful, the noble, the heroic, and the sublime — why 
 object ? Is this not the ideal type ? Has any other 
 system of religion or of morals developed a nobler 
 manhood, awakened loftier hopes or holier ambitions; 
 inspired diviner equities or sweeter charities ? If so, 
 when and to whom has it been given ? We travel 
 back through the generations, and find superiority 
 with those only who have marched down the periods 
 in the light of God's Revelation. 
 
 In plea of submission to the removal of the Bible 
 from the public schools some affect to believe in the 
 sufficiency of the home, the church, and the school 
 of the sectarian, to give the nation its required moral 
 sentiment But in this a fatal error is committed ; 
 for the reason, the homes, the churches, and the schools 
 toward which we can now turn with confidence, but 
 feebly represent the grand aggregate of social, politi- 
 cal, and numerical power — are but mere rivulets com- 
 pared with the mighty flood that is sweeping on with 
 the Republic into the future. 
 
 Gold, luxury, ecclesiasticism, and infidelity have so 
 far impaired the moral and religious sense of the na- 
 tion that the model home, church, and school is fast 
 becoming local and exceptional; soon, seemingly, to 
 be scattered only here and there, like the retirements 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 61 
 
 of the recluse of the Middle Ages. But even though 
 there did not exist this disparity of moral and numer- 
 ical force, there is present a serious defect in the prop- 
 osition to place our children under the instruction of 
 the religious sectary and dogmatist, as all experience 
 shows. It is an experiment that has even proved in 
 the end disastrous to the purity of faith and of con- 
 science ; especially, whenever the love of power, or 
 when wealth and luxury, as now, have secularized the 
 Church. The tendencies of the reachings, then, are 
 politically pernicious and subversive of popular in- 
 dependence. 
 
 Collyer, Schermerhorn, Swing, and Cardinal Mc- 
 Closkey, religious exponents of more than six millions 
 of our people, would exclude the Bible from the public 
 schools, and place its exposition in the hands of the 
 clergy, because it is only here, they assume, that its 
 truths can be rightfully interpreted. 
 
 To the student of history and of the human heart 
 these distinguished public utterances, at this time 
 of increasing ostentation and of declining republican 
 simplicity and virtue, are significant and portentious, 
 and should lead us to guard with jealous care against 
 the civil encroachments of the Church. The argu- 
 ments of these advocates of clerical influence and 
 authority clearly indicate a desire for the restoration 
 of the old regime of absolutism, at least in matters 
 of faith and of conscience. Freedom of individual 
 will and thought in spiritual affairs is still an inter- 
 dicted privilege with the ecclesiastic. 
 
 The Christian citizen, however, notwithstanding 
 •clerical authority, needs, neither for himself nor his 
 child, the aid of any. interpreter to comprehend the 
 essential truths of the Bible. These are given us in 
 
62 THE BIBLE 
 
 the plain text of the Decalogue, the Beatitudes, the 
 Universal Prayer, the xA^tonement, and the Resurrec- 
 tion, in language more explicit and effective than 
 they can be through the mediumship of the school, 
 man, or any commentator. Like the rigid and self- 
 reliant Puritan, from whose foot-prints sprang free 
 laws spontaneously, as flowers beneath tropic suns, 
 we need no teacher but the Divine Spirit, no Con- 
 fessor but the Father, no liturgy but the Bible. The 
 true Church can, in spirit, exist without preacher, 
 prelate, or Pope ; and it is of such only, in fact, that 
 the true Republic rises and augments in grandeur 
 and power. 
 
 And the liberalist, as well as the strict construc- 
 tionist, who affects to believe that our organic laws, 
 Federal and State, prohibit Bible reading in the 
 schools on the ground of sectarian influence, also falls 
 into error ; for the reason that, while it is true the peo- 
 ple have, in their fundamental laws, provided against 
 religious tests in official qualifications and the legis- 
 lative establishing of religious organizations, they, at 
 the same time, expressly recognize in their Bills of 
 Rights or Constitutions the cardinal truths of Divine 
 Revelation as the moral foundation of government. 
 While they have wisely and jealously guarded against 
 the encroachments of the Church or of sectarianism 
 upon the rights of conscience and of the ballot, they 
 have in most of the States, especially in the " Old 
 Thirteen," plainly recognized in their organic Acts, 
 as the standard of faith and ethics, the Christian and 
 Hebrew Scriptures. It was not against the reading 
 of the Bible in the schools that the fathers made con- 
 stitutional provisions, but against the encroachments 
 of ecclesiasticism, that undying vampire of liberty 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 63 
 
 — that power which had so long enthralled the intel- 
 lect and the conscience of the race. 
 
 The evidence of this rests in the fact that, during 
 the whole of the colonial period and the first half- 
 centur}'' of the national, the use of the Bible in the 
 public schools was felt to be a necessary feature of 
 popular education; so much so as to assume the 
 character and force of common law. Some of the 
 colonies even legislated it into the schools ; and the 
 Congress of 1777, as well as that of 178 1, on account 
 of its " universal and great importance," as expressed 
 by one Congressional Committee, did not deem it 
 unworthy of their official attention and support. 
 
 From the moment that the spirit of American liber- 
 ty began to stir in the hearts of a " poor people " in 
 the north of England — from the hour it covertly fled 
 from ecclesiastical and civil persecution across the 
 heaths of Lincolnshire, down the Humber and out 
 upon the North Sea — to the time when it had grandly 
 embodied itself upon a new continent in the statutes 
 of a great and free people, the Bible was its standard 
 of faith ; its supreme authority of moral appeal ; its 
 inspiration of law. And to-day, in letter and in 
 spirit, running through bills of rights, preambles, 
 constitutions, judicial oaths, and executive procla- 
 mations, it forms the religious and ethical standard of 
 the nation — a standard which, not only the native- 
 born, but the alien, be he Christian or Pagan, Jew or 
 Mohammedan, is peculiarly bound by the most sa- 
 cred obligations, as a recipient of the benefits of asy- 
 lum, of the privileges of free citizenship, of the rights 
 of manhood, to accept, formally at least, with respect- 
 ful consideration and grateful deference. 
 
64 THE BIBLE 
 
 It is accepted by the political philosopher as axiom- 
 atic that without popular morality there can be no 
 substantial popular government ; and as it is also an 
 established truth that, without a recognition of God 
 and His moral government as revealed in the Script- 
 ures, there can be no sound morality, it logically fol- 
 lows, that Scriptural readings in our schools are not 
 only constitutionally consistent, but strictly legal. It 
 is the plea only of the sophist, who brings the charge 
 of sectarianism against the reading of the Bible in 
 the American public schools ; for it is plainly written 
 in legislative Act, and in national custom, that its phi- 
 losophy forms the moral woof and warp of our politi- 
 cal faith and our entire organic law — that in spirit, 
 Christianity, by constitutional and conventional recog- 
 nition, is the established faith of the State ; and that 
 the Bible, as the text-book of that faith, is the standard 
 of national ethics. Therefore, critically considered, 
 it is the Atheist, the Jesuit, the rigid ecclesiastic — 
 hereditary enemies of a popular Bible and of popular 
 government, who are the sectarians in fact, and against 
 whom their own charge strictly rests. 
 
 To declare the simple reading of the Bible in the 
 schools, or the chanting there of the Psalms, or the 
 Lord's Prayer — that sublime '' Litany of nations " — 
 sectarian, is the acme of absurdity, is the subterfuge 
 of a narrow and jealous dogmatism, and can only be 
 pronounced by him whose heart has never yet glow- 
 ed in the full light of either written or unwritten rev- 
 elation, nor truly thrilled beneath the touch of their 
 spiritual forces. 
 
 And yet we hear those in our midst assuming to 
 have been called of God to expound, defend, and to 
 scatter among men the truths of His Word, so dark- 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. Of) 
 
 ened in comprehension, or so recreant to duty, as to 
 willingly withhold it from the great needy masses by 
 such construction of the letter and spirit of our or- 
 ganic laws as to render its use in our schools osten- 
 sibly a violation of civil and religious rights. In their 
 professed and dramatic zeal for religious and politi- 
 cal liberality they would not only remove from pop- 
 ular reach the very foundation of the faith they pre- 
 tentiously teach, but in fact the moral foundation of 
 the government itself. Out of a pretended sense of 
 equity, and an assumed Christian deference to the 
 prejudices of the Pagan, the Infidel, the Jewish, and 
 the Red Republican — in their extreme catholic desire 
 to bend and accommodate our institutions and our 
 customs to the religious, social, and political views 
 of their inconoclasts of liberty, they willingly subvert 
 the meaning of the most plain and sacred provisions 
 and influences of fundamental law. They anxiously 
 make concessions in the name of liberty, but not to 
 those who have established and maintained it; but 
 rather to those who, in every period of their power, 
 have trodden down with Gothic fierceness the proph- 
 ets and Messiahs of freedom. 
 
 Instead of a wise and just tolerance in the exercise 
 of republican liberty, these men seem drunken with 
 an excess of the sentiment ; or else but express a 
 venal ambition for popularity, or for power and its 
 forms, which sickens over the virtues and simplicities 
 of republicanism. If republican, their inconsistency is 
 only equaled by that 6f the statesman whose rhetori- 
 cal fastidiousness led to more concern for the cadence 
 of a period than for the fall of a commonwealth." 
 
 As additional evidence of clerical drift, we here 
 call attention to 4 virtual indorsement of Collyer, 
 
66 THE BIBLE 
 
 Schermerhorn, Swing, and McClosky, from a source 
 which we might least expect. At the last anniver- 
 sary of the " Conference Educational Society of the 
 Methodist Episcopal Church North," of California, 
 its Vice-President gave official utterance to the fol- 
 lowing language : He says: " It is my candid opinion 
 •that our public schools must eventually be Bibleless 
 and prayerless. So long as all do not believe in 
 Christ and the Scriptures, I do not see how we can 
 stand by our principles as Americans, and yet force 
 people to hear the Bible read as the Word of God. 
 In the interests of Christianity, I advise that Bible 
 reading '''-■ ^ ^ ^ be discontinued in the public 
 schools, when persistent objection is made * * '^ * 
 by lawful patrons." 
 
 Such is the language of L. L. Rogers, Vice-Presi- 
 dent of the " Conference Educational Society of the 
 Methodist Episcopal Church North," of California— 
 an expression of sentiment remarkable for two reasons : 
 First, because it is tacitly an official declaration of a 
 loss of faith, by a prominent body of Protestant cler- 
 gymen, in the progressive energies of Christianity. 
 Second, because it is an unequivocal acknowledgment 
 of hopeless defeat in the maintaining of a traditional 
 feature of the American system of public instruction 
 ' — an unconditional surrendering to the enemy of one 
 of the great moral guaranties of our government. 
 
 To analyze the opinion of this clerical representa- 
 tive, and weigh it by the old, the heroic standai*d of 
 American faith, as w^ell as by the orthodox standard 
 of true Methodism, we are mpre convinced than ever 
 that Christianity with us is losing its heroism ; is 
 becoming formalized, and that Gladstone was correct 
 when he lately said : " The marked want of the Church 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 67 
 
 to-day is the want of great men as leaders " — men, we 
 will add, who have a supreme faith in God, in His 
 Word, and in His providence — men who have the 
 nerve and the fidelity to ' stand by principle,' though 
 " all do not believe in Christ and the Scriptures " — 
 men who, discerning the indissoluble relations be- 
 tween the Bible and free government, are ready to 
 labor, at any cost, to interweave its ethics and its 
 republican sentiments into the primary education of 
 the masses. 
 
 Ordained expositors of the Bible may recommend 
 its exclusion from the public schools, and thereby 
 practically contradict their assumption of faith in its 
 divinity, its philosophy, and its prepotent influences ; 
 but they may as well arouse themselves first as last to 
 the overshadowing fact that a crisis is approaching 
 upon this question, in which they must either advance 
 and take a more consistent stand, or retreat and make 
 a more consistent profession. The prophecy of " com- 
 ing revolution" is no idle dream. He who can not hear 
 its onward tread is deaf to the footsteps of the future. 
 
 The re-establishing of the early custom of reading 
 the Bible in the schools, and the rescue of our system 
 of public instruction from anti-republican influences, 
 is to be a leading question of the near future ; destined 
 to force to the front, unmasked, every element of our 
 national life, and lead to a more satisfactory solution 
 of the American idea of government and of govern- 
 mental auxiliaries. 
 
 The Bible in the schools is a question we cannot 
 evade if we would. It involves principles which are 
 essential and vital to liberty ; and, as a result, it is now 
 reassuming its early national importance — is again 
 irresistibly crowding itself, as if by divine necessity, 
 
68 THE BIBLE 
 
 upon our serious attention. No escape from finally 
 meeting it can be made, either behind the subterfuge 
 of " independent schools," as recommended by the 
 sectarian or the timid, or through the specious plea 
 of illiberalism, as assumed by the infidel or the secu- 
 larist. The limit is being approached, beyond which 
 "compromise" becomes an empty term, and timidity, 
 indifference, or infidelity virtually become political 
 treason. 
 
 To relinquish our hold to any essential extent upon 
 the public school, and substitute for it the " independ- 
 ent," would ultimately be fatal, inasmuch as it not 
 only involves finally a division of the school funds, 
 but would increase and intensify sectarian prejudice, 
 sectionalize the national sympathies and aims, and 
 thereby weaken the bonds of public unity. 
 
 Our common schools, with common support, with 
 common text-books, and with a common faith, would 
 become, finally, bonds of union, strong and binding 
 evfen as is the Constitution. 
 
 It becomes us to meet this question boldly, and 
 with no offers of compromise — determined to main- 
 tain inviolate the original idea and faith of the fa- 
 thers in the management of our common schools. 
 It seems incomprehensible that men who, by their 
 habits of thought and professions of faith, ought to 
 understand the political as well as moral influences 
 of the Bible — in fact, its utter indispensability to 
 popular government — should be found willingly with- 
 holding from the publip school this guaranty of civil 
 and religious freedom. But such are the incongrui- 
 ties of the times. We, however, rest in the faith 
 that every great emergency involving sacred public 
 interests calls up, at the right hour, its hero or its he- 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 69 
 
 roes, to inspire and to lead. So, in the coming con- 
 flict of Bible or no Bible in the public schools, of 
 national loyalty to the Revealed Law of God, or na- 
 tional apostasy, we are sure that, in the fullness of 
 time, regardless of secular or ecclesiastical opinion or 
 decree, the spirit embodied will come, which shall 
 lead the Republic to a higher and a grander life. 
 Melancholy as is the reflection, it is nevertheless true 
 that it is mainly through the defective judgment, apa- 
 thy, or apostasy of the representatives of religious 
 sentiment that our youth are now going forth to as- 
 sume the sacred trusts of citizenship with no higher 
 inspiration, beyond the uncertain moral influences of 
 secular education, than that of the cold legalism of 
 the materialist; the narrow dogmas of the ecclesias- 
 tic ; the sensuous tenets of the spiritist; the lawless 
 creed of the communist — antagonistic forces, in which 
 are inherent and expanding the elements of irrepres- 
 sible conflicts — conflicts in which all the tragedies of 
 history will finally be repeated and intensified — 
 wherein will finally be fulfilled the vision, in which 
 John saw the angel with thrusting sickle, and the great 
 wine-press with its sea of blood flowing even to the 
 "horse-bridles" of the armies of God. This is as clearly 
 defined to the vision of philosophy as Were the trage- 
 dies of the irrepressible conflict between freedom and 
 slavery to the prescient eyes of Seward and his coad- 
 jutors. Let the fool only believe that republics may 
 flourish without God; that God does not manifest 
 Himself in history, rewarding the nations that walk 
 in His law, and punishing those that depart from it. 
 
 True, the hour is resonant with the voices of a 
 mighty skepticism, regal in power of research, of anal- 
 ysis and of deduction ; proclaiming " No God but 
 
70 THE BIBLE 
 
 nature ; " no revelation but her silent mountains, her 
 wide -spread plains, her heaving seas, her glowing 
 suns ; and declaring man, the offspring only of her 
 pulseless womb — his spiritual, moral, and social evo- 
 lution the result simply of a blind, self-acting, inevi- 
 table law. But all this dies in echo as we stand by 
 the mighty Angel of History, and see him write on 
 every page of the nation's annals, " Lo ! God is here ; 
 though ye see Him not, yet, behold the light of His 
 presence, the foot -prints of His passing, the desola- 
 tions of His vengeance." 
 
 And now, in conclusion, I will add: if we would 
 protect the integrity of our institutions ; if we would 
 preserve liberty to ourselves and transmit it to others, 
 we must be loyal to the Bible — that great obstacle to 
 the advance of ecclesiastical and civil despotism — 
 that great instrument of freedom which lies beneath 
 all our Bills of Rights, Constitutions, and laws, and 
 from which our entire civil polity draws its inspira- 
 tion and power. We should cherish it as sacredly as 
 we cherish liberty itself; for, without it, the voice of 
 experience and of philosophy tell us there can be no 
 liberty, no protection for the weak, no guarantee of 
 private or public rights. 
 
 Said De Bow, in embodying the civilization of a 
 country in its aristocracy: "The masses are molded 
 into soldiers and artisans by intellect, just as matter 
 and the elements of nature are made into telegraphs 
 and steam-engines. If you educate the poor, they 
 soon forget all that is necessary in the common trans- 
 actions of life. To make an aristocrat in the future," 
 he says, " we must sacrifice a thousand paupers. Yet 
 we would, by all means, make them — make them per- 
 manent too, by laws of entail and primogeniture." 
 This, oh ! ye brown-visaged, rough-handed, brawny 
 
AND ITS INFLUENCE. 
 
 71 
 
 armed son of toil — patient builder of the world's ma- 
 terial and moral grandeurs — is the social and political 
 theory of the De Bows — those who would rear, as did 
 the Spartan, their civic and social pillars upon the 
 quivering heart of Labor. But how quickly does this 
 cold, imperious, and barbaric figure shiver, from vital 
 transitions ; and then blush, with warmer blood ; and 
 now glow, with sublime inspirations of equity, when 
 placed in the light of the Inspired Word — when 
 brought beneath the focus of this great Beam of efful- 
 gent essence from the heart of the Infinite. The 
 friends of civilization, and of civil and religious free- 
 dom in all lands, should venerate it ; for what instru- 
 ment or agent has accomplished so much for the ag- 
 grandizement of man ? Through the influence of 
 that single Bible which Luther found at Erfurt there 
 has been written a grander and more imperishable 
 civil and social history than that of all the preceding- 
 ages. The impulses of that very Volume are to-day 
 throbbing and chafing in the world's great channels 
 of sympathy, of thought, of language, and of law. It 
 pulsates in the heart of the steaniship, in the furnace 
 of the factory, along the electric currents of the tele- 
 graph, in the types of the printing-press, in the shafts 
 and galleries of the mine, in the battle-hymns of our 
 poets, in the prophecies of our seers, and in the ora- 
 tions of our statesmen. It flashed upon the steel of 
 our soldiery along the Potomac, the James, and the 
 Rio Grande. It struck the fetters from the limbs of 
 our slaves, and is now giving light, faith, and con- 
 science to the heart of the master. The Bible is the 
 great hope of the free as well as of the oppressed in all 
 lands, and will be in all periods of the future, until the 
 fullness of time is complete, and the great dial-finger of 
 the ao^es shall cease its revolutions forever and foreven 
 
 ^N'lVERSITY