Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 04, February, 1858», страница 14

In that delightfully naïve and simple journal of the Rev. Thomas Smith, the first minister settled in Portland, Maine, in the year 1725, we find the following entries.

"July 4, 1763. Mr. Brooks was ordained. A multitude of people from my parish. A decent solemnity."

"January 16, 1765. Mr. Foxcroft was ordained at New Gloucester. We had a pleasant journey home. Mr. L. was alert and kept us all merry. A jolly ordination. We lost sight of decorum."

This Mr. L., by the by, who was so alert on this occasion, it appears by a note, was Stephen Longfellow, the great-grandfather of the poet. Those who enjoy the poet's acquaintance will probably testify that the property of social alertness has not evaporated from the family in the lapse of so many years.

It is recorded of Dr. Griffin, that, when President of the Andover Theological Seminary, he convened the students at his room one evening, and told them he had observed that they were all growing thin and dyspeptical from a neglect of the exercise of Christian laughter, and he insisted upon it that they should go through a company-drill in it then and there. The Doctor was an immense man,—over six feet in height, with great amplitude of chest and most magisterial manners. "Here," said he to the first, "you must practise; now hear me!" and bursting out into a sonorous laugh, he fairly obliged his pupils, one by one, to join, till the whole were almost convulsed. "That will do for once," said the Doctor, "and now mind you keep in practice!"

New England used to be full of traditions of the odd sayings of Dr. Bellamy, one of the most powerful theologians and preachers of his time. His humor, however, seems to have been wholly a social quality, requiring to be struck out by the collision of conversation; for nothing of the peculiar quaintness and wit ascribed to him appears in his writings, which are in singularly simple, clear English. One or two of his sayings circulated about us in our childhood. For example, when one had built a fire of green wood, he exclaimed, "Warm me here! I'd as soon try to warm me by star-light on the north side of a tombstone!" Speaking of the chapel-bell of Yale College, he said, "It was about as good a bell as a fur cap with a sheep's tail in it."

A young minister, who had made himself conspicuous for a severe and denunciatory style of preaching, came to him one day to inquire why he did not have more success. "Why, man," said the Doctor, "can't you take a lesson of the fisherman? How do you go to work, if you want to catch a trout? You get a little hook and a fine line, you bait it carefully and throw it in as gently as possible, and then you sit and wait and humor your fish till you can get him ashore. Now you get a great cod-hook and rope-line, and thrash it into the water, and bawl out, 'Bite or be damned!'"

The Doctor himself gained such a reputation as an expert spiritual fisherman, that some of his parishioners, like experienced old trout, played shy of his hook, though never so skilfully baited.

"Why, Mr. A.," he said to an old farmer in his neighborhood, "they tell me you are an Atheist. Don't you believe in the being of a God?"

"No!" said the man.

"But, Mr. A., let's look into this. You believe that the world around us exists from some cause?"

"No, I don't!"

"Well, then, at any rate, you believe in your own existence?"

"No, I don't!"

"What! not believe that you exist yourself?"

"I tell you what, Doctor," said the man, "I a'n't going to be twitched up by any of your syllogisms, and so I tell you I don't believe anything,—and I'm not going to believe anything!"

A collection of the table-talk of the clergy whose lives are sketched in Dr. Sprague's volumes would be a rare fund of humor, shrewdness, genius, and originality. We must say, however, that as nothing is so difficult as to collect these sparkling emanations of conversation, the written record which this work presents falls far below that traditional one which floated about us in our earlier years. So much in wit and humor depends on the electric flash, the relation of the idea to the attendant circumstances, that people often remember only how they have laughed, and can no more reproduce the expression than they can daguerreotype the heat-lightning of a July night.

The doctrine that a minister is to maintain some ethereal, unearthly station, where, wrapt in divine contemplation, he is to regard with indifference the actual struggles and realities of life, is a sickly species of sentimentalism, the growth of modern refinement, and altogether too moonshiny to have been comprehended by our stout-hearted and very practical fathers. With all their excellences, they had nothing sentimental about them; they were bent on reducing all things to practical, manageable realities. They would not hear of churches, but called them meeting-houses; they would not be called clergymen, but ministers or servants,—thereby signifying their calling to real, tangible work among real men and things.

As we have already said, in the beginnings of New England, the Church and State were identical, and the clergy ex officio the main counsellors and directors of the Commonwealth; and when this especial prerogative was relinquished, they naturally retained something of the bent it had given them.

An interesting portion of these sketches comprises the lives of ministers during our Revolutionary struggle, showing how ardently and manfully at that time the clergy headed the people. Many of them went into the army as chaplains; one or two, more zealous still, even took up temporal arms; while the greater number showered the enemy with sermons, tracts, and pamphlets.

Some of the more zealous politicians among them did not scruple to bring their sentiments even into the prayers of the church. We recollect an anecdote of a stout Whig minister of New Haven, who, during the occupation of the town by the British, was ordered to offer public prayers for the King, which he did as follows: "O Lord, bless thy servant, King George, and grant unto him wisdom; for thou knowest, O Lord, he needs it."

So afterwards, in the time of the Embargo, Parson Eaton, of Harpswell, a Federalist, is recorded to have introduced his prayer for the President in a formula which might be recommended at the present day for the use of the people of Kansas. "Forasmuch as thou hast commanded us to pray for our enemies, we pray for the President of these United States, that his heart may be turned to just counsels," etc.

This same Parson Eaton distinguished himself also for his patriotic enthusiasm in Revolutionary times. When the British had burned Falmouth, (Portland,) a messenger came to Harpswell to beat up for recruits to the Continental forces. Not succeeding to his mind, he went to Parson Eaton, one Sunday morning, and begged him to say something for him in the course of the day's services. "It is my sacramental Sabbath," said the valiant Doctor, "and I cannot. But at the going down of the sun I will speak to my people." And accordingly, that very evening, Bible in hand, on the green before the meeting-house, Dr. Eaton addressed the people, denouncing the curse of Meroz on those who came not up to the help of the country, and recruits flowed in abundantly.

The pastors of New England were always in their sphere moral reformers. Profitable and popular sins, though countenanced by long-established custom, were fearlessly attacked. No sight could be more impressive than that of Dr. Hopkins—who with all his power of mind was never a popular preacher, and who knew he was not popular—rising up in Newport pulpits to testify against the slave-trade, then as reputable and profitable a sin as slave-holding is now. He knew that Newport was the stronghold of the practice, and that the probable consequence of his faithfulness would be the loss of his pulpit and of his temporal support; but none the less plainly and faithfully did he testify. Fond as he was of doctrinal subtilties, keen as was his analysis of disinterested benevolence, he did not, like some in our day, confine himself to analyzing virtue in the abstract, but took upon himself the duty of practicing it in the concrete without fear of consequences,—well knowing that there is no logic like that of consistent action.

We should do injustice to our subject, if we did not add a testimony to the peculiarly religious character and influence of the men of whom we speak. Shrewd, practical, capable, as they were, in the affairs of this life, perfectly natural and human as were their characters, still they were in the best sense unworldly men. Religion was the deep underlying stratum on which their whole life was built. Like the granite framework of the earth, it sunk below all and rose above all else in their life. No Acta Sanctorum contain more pathetic pictures of simple and all-absorbing godliness than were displayed by the subjects of these sketches. However they may have differed among themselves as to the metaphysical adjustment of the Calvinistic system, all agreed in so presenting it as to make God all in all.

Doctor Arnold says it is necessary for the highest development of the soul that it should have somewhere an object of entire reverence enthroned above all possibility of doubt or criticism. Now a radically democratic system, like that of New England, at once sweeps all factitious reliances of this kind from the soul. No crown, no court, no nobility, no ritual, no hierarchy,—the beautiful principles of reverence and loyalty might have died out of the American heart, had not these men by their religious teachings upborne it as on eagles' wings to the footstool of the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible. Hence we see why what was commonly called among them the "Doctrine of Divine Sovereignty" acquired so prominent a place in their preaching and their hearts. They were men of deep reverence and profound loyalty of nature, from whom every lower object for the repose of these qualities had been torn away,—who concentrated on God alone those sentiments of faith and fealty which in other lands are divided with Church and King. Hence, more than that of any other clergy, their preaching contemplated God as King and Ruler. Submission to him without condition, without limit, they both preached and practised. Unconditional submission was as constantly on their lips God-ward as it was sparingly uttered man-ward.

No picture of the "good parson" that was ever drawn could exceed in beauty that of the Rev. Jeremiah Hallock, whose life and manners had that indescribable beauty, completeness, and sacredness, which religion sometimes gives when shining out through a peculiarly congenial natural temperament,—yet we must confess we are as much interested and impressed with its effects in those wilder and more erratic temperaments, such as Bellamy, Backus, and Moody, where genius and passion were so combined as to lead to many inconsistencies. This book is a record of how manfully many such men battled with themselves, repairing the faults of their hasty and passionate hours by the true and honest humility of their better ones, so that, as one has said of our Pilgrim Fathers, we feel that they may have been endeared to God even by their faults.

The pastoral labors of these ministers were abounding. Two and sometimes three services on the Sabbath, and a weekly lecture, were only the beginning of their labors. Multitudes of them held circuit meetings, to the number of two or three a week, in the outskirts of their parishes; besides which they labored conversationally from house to house with individuals.

Gradual, indefinite, insensible amelioration of character was not by any means the only or the highest aim of their preaching. They sought to make religion as definite and as real to men as their daily affairs, and to bring them, as respects their spiritual history, to crises as marked and decided as those to which men are brought in temporal matters. They must become Christians now, today; the change must be immediate, all-pervading, thorough.

Such a style of preaching, from men of such power, could not be without corresponding results, especially as it was based always upon strong logical appeals to the understanding. From it resulted, from time to time, periods which are marked in these narratives as revivals of religion,—seasons in which the cumulative force of the instructions and power of the pastor, recognized by that gracious assistance on which he always depended, reached a point of outward development that affected the whole social atmosphere, and brought him into intimate and confidential knowledge of the spiritual struggles of his flock. The preaching of the pastor was then attuned and modified to these disclosures, and his metaphysical system shaped and adapted to what he perceived to be the real wants and weaknesses of the soul. Hence arose modifications of theology,—often interfering with received theory, just as a judicious physician's clinical practice varies from the book. Many of the theological disputes which have agitated New England have arisen in the honest effort to reconcile accepted forms of faith with the observed phenomena and real needs of the soul in its struggles heavenward.

* * * * *

A BRIEF REVIEW OF THE KANSAS USURPATION

If it had been the avowed intention of the dominant party in this country to disgust the people by a long and systematic course of wrong-doing,—if it had wished to prove that it was indissolubly wedded to injustice, inconsistency, and error, it could not have chosen a better method of doing so than it has actually pursued, in the entire management of the Kansas question. From the beginning to the end, that has been both a blunder and a crime. Nothing more atrocious,—nothing more perverse,—nothing more foolish, as a matter of policy,—and we might add, but for the seriousness of the subject, nothing more ludicrous,—has occurred in our history, than the attempt, which has now been persisted in for several years, to force the evils of Slavery upon a people who cannot and will not endure them.

We say, to force the evils of slavery upon an unwilling people,—because such has been and is the only end of this protracted endeavor. The authors of the scheme have scarcely shown the ordinary cunning of rogues, which conceals its ulterior purposes. Disdaining the advice of Mrs. Peachum to her daughter Polly, to be "somewhat nice" in her deviations from virtue, they have advanced bravely and flagrantly to their nefarious object. They have been reckless, defiant, aggressive; but, unfortunately for them, they have not been sagacious. The thin disguise of principle under which they masked their designs at the outset—as it were a bit of oiled paper—was soon torn away; the plot betrayed its inherent wickedness from step to step; the instruments selected to execute it have one after another abandoned the task, as quite impracticable for any honest mortal; and now these whilom advocates of "Popular Sovereignty" stand exposed to the scorn and derision of the country, as nothing less than what their opponents all along declared them to be,—the sworn champions of Slavery-Extension. All the movements and changes of their external policy find their explication in the single phrase, the actual and the political advancement of the interests of Slavery.

It is humiliating to an American citizen to cast his eyes back, even for a moment, to the history of this Kansas plot,—humiliating in many ways; but in none more so than in the revelation it makes of the depth and extent of party-servility in the Northern mind. Throughout the proceedings of the "Democracy" towards the unhappy settlers of Kansas, it is difficult to place the finger on a single act of large, just, or generous policy; every step in it appears to have developed some new outrage or some new fraud; and yet, every step in it has also elicited new shouts of approval from the echoing lieges and bondmen of "the Party." We should willingly, therefore, turn away from the theme, but that we believe the end is not yet come; a review of its past may instruct us as to its future. For it is not always true, as Coleridge says, that experience, like the stern-lights of a ship, illuminates only the track it has left; the lights may be hung upon the bows, and the spectator be enabled to discern, by means of them, no less, the way in which it is going.

A "Territory," viewed in connection with the political system of the United States, must be confessed to be a somewhat erratic and embarrassing member. Few or no specific provisions are made for it in the Organic Law, which applies primarily, and quite exclusively, to "States." The word is mentioned there but once,—in the clause empowering Congress to "make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States,"—and here it occurs in a somewhat doubtful sense. Judging by the mere letter or obvious import of the Constitution, the right of acquiring and governing territory would seem to be a casus omissus, or a power overlooked. Accordingly, Mr. Webster went so far as to assert that the framers of it never contemplated its extension beyond the original limits of the country;¹⁰ but this we can scarcely believe of men so far-seeing and sagacious. It were a better opinion, which Mr. Benton has recently urged, that the acquisition and control of territories are necessary incidents of the sovereign and proprietary character of the government created by the Constitution.¹¹ But be this as it may, whatever the theoretic origin of the right to acquire territory,—whatever the origin of the right to govern it,—whether the former be derived from the war-making power, which implies conquest, or from the treaty-making power, which implies purchase,—and whether the latter be derived from an express grant or is involved as necessary to the execution of other grants, both questions were definitively settled by long and universally accepted practice. Under the actual legislation of Congress, running over a period of sixty years,—a legislation sanctioned by all administrations, by all departments of the government, by all the authorities of the individual States, by all statesmen of all parties, and by frequent popular recognitions,—prescription has taken the force of law, and that which might once be theoretically doubtful became forever practically valid and legitimate.

It was not till within the last few years that the right of Congress over the Territories was questioned. Certain classes of politicians then discovered that the whole of our past statesmanship had been a mistake, and that the time had come to propound a new doctrine. No! they said, it is not Congress, not the Federal Government, which is entitled to govern the Territories, but the Territories themselves,—which means the handful of their original occupants. The real sovereignty resides in the squatters, and Squatter Sovereignty is the charm which dispels all difficulties. Alas! it was rather like the ingredients mingled by Macbeth's hags, only "a charm of powerful trouble." Overlooking the fact that the Territories were Territories precisely because they were not States, this absurd theory proposed to confer the highest character of an organized political existence upon a society wholly inchoate. As land, the Territories were the property of the United States, to be disposed of and regulated by the will of Congress; as collections of men, they were yet immature communities, having in reality no social being, and in that light also wisely and benevolently subjected to the will of Congress; but Squatter Sovereignty elevated them, willy nilly, to an independent self-subsistence. They were declared full-formed and fledged before they were out of the shell. A mere conglomeration of emigrants, Indian traders, and half-breeds was invested with all the functions of a mature and ripened civilization. Long ere there were people enough in any Territory to furnish the officers of a regular government,—before they possessed any of the apparatus of court-houses, jails, legislative chambers, etc., essential to a regular government,—before they lived near enough to each other, in fact, to constitute a respectable town-meeting,—before they could pay the expenses or gather the means of their own defence from the Indians, these wonderful entities were held to be endowed with the right of entering into the most complicated relations and of forming the most important institutions for themselves,—and not only for themselves, but for their posterity.

This puerile dogma was asserted ostensibly in the interest of Slavery, in order to get rid of the power of Congress over that subject; but the real source of it was the cowardice of those invertebrate and timorous politicians who desired to evade the responsibility of expressing opinions concerning this power. General Cass was the putative father of it, and it might well have come from one of his pliancy and calibre; but as Slavery itself, embodied in the person of Calhoun, scouted the feeble bantling, there was soon no one so mean as to confess the paternity. Abandoned of its begetters, Squatter Sovereignty wandered the streets like a squalid and orphaned outcast, begging anybody and everybody to take it in, and finding no creditable welcome anywhere.

Calhoun and his friends, no less anxious than Cass and his friends to rescue Slavery from the discretion of Congress, though for other reasons, contrived to find a more respectable excuse for such a policy. As California and New Mexico—both free soil—had lately been acquired, they contended that the moment new territories attached to the United States, the same moment the Constitution attached to them; and inasmuch as the Constitution guarantied the existence of Slavery, presto, Slavery must be regarded as existing under it in the Territories! This, we say, was more respectable ground than Squatter Sovereignty, because it met the question more fairly in the face; yet, considered either as dialectics or history, it was not one whit less absurd. We do not wonder that Webster, and all the other sound lawyers of the nation, heard such an announcement of Constitutional hermeneutics with utter surprise and astonishment. It was enough to astound even the veriest tyro in the law. The Constitution—and especially by all the premises of the State-Rights school—is a mere compact between the States; it confers no powers but delegated and enumerated powers, and such as are indispensable to the execution of these; and nowhere is there a clause or letter in it extending its operation beyond the States. Even in respect to acknowledged powers, these are inoperative until carried into effect by a special act of Congress; they have no vitality in themselves,—they are only dead provisions or forms till Congress has breathed into them the breath of life; and thence to argue that of their own energy they may leap into or embrace the Territories is to argue that a corpse may on its own motion rise and walk.

But granting this caoutchouc property, this migratory power, in the Constitution, the inference that it would take Slavery with it is a still more monstrous error than the original premises. Slavery as such is not recognized or guarantied by the Federal Constitution. Whatever the five slave-holding judges of the Supreme Court may seek to maintain, they cannot upset the universal logic of the law, nor extinguish the fundamental principles of our political system. Slavery exists only by the local or municipal usage of the States in which it exists; it is there universally defined as a right of property in man; whereas the Constitution of the United States, in all its prohibitions and provisions, designates and acts upon human beings only as persons. Whatever their characters or relations under the laws of the States, they are, under the Federal Constitution, MEN. Nowhere in that immortal paper is there an iota or tittle which gives countenance to the idea that human beings may be held as property. It speaks of "persons held to service or labor," as apprentices, for instance,—and of persons other than free, i.e. not politically citizens, as Indians and some negroes; but it does not speak of Slaves or of Slavery; on the contrary, in every part, it legislates for men solely as men. The laws of each State, and the relations of the various inhabitants of each State, it of course recognizes as valid within each State; but it recognizes them as resting exclusively on the municipal authority of the State, and not on its own authority. Against nothing did the framers of the Constitution more strenuously contend than against the admission of any phrase sanctioning the tenure of man as property. They refused even to allow of the use of the word servitude, so much did they hate the thing; and Madison expressed their almost unanimous sentiment when he exclaimed, "We intend this Constitution to be THE GREAT CHARTER OF HUMAN LIBERTY to the unborn millions who shall yet enjoy its protection, and who should not see that such an institution as Slavery was ever known in our midst." In that spirit was the instrument framed, and in that spirit was it administered, while its framers lived.

Nevertheless, under the twofold pretence we have cited,—the one reconciling the conscience with the cowardice of the North, and the other conceding the arrogant pretensions of the South,—the negation of the power of the central government over Slavery was carried into effect. By a legislative hocus-pocus, known as the Compromise Measures of 1850, Congress, contrary to the uniform tendency of bodies entrusted with a discretion, vacated instead of enlarging its powers. Its sovereign function of territorial legislation was abdicated, in favor of that wretched and ragged pretender, Squatter Sovereignty; and silly or misguided people everywhere, who professed to regard as dangerous that political excitement and agitation which are the life of republics, hailed the accession of King Log as a glorious triumph of legitimacy. In the remanding of a delicate question from the central to a local jurisdiction, in the conversion of a general into a topical inflammation, they affected to see an end of the difficulty, a cure to the disease. But no expectation could have been less wise. It was a transfer, and a possible postponement, but not a settlement of the trouble. Had they looked deeper, they would have discerned that the dispute in regard to Slavery is involved in the very structure of our government, which links two incompatible civilizations under the same head, which compels a struggle for political power between the diverse elements by the terms and conditions of their union, and which, if the contest is suppressed at one time or place, forces it to break out at another, and will force it to break out incessantly, until either Freedom or Slavery has achieved a decisive triumph.

The principle of the non-interference of Congress with the Territories once secured, there yet stood in the way of its universal application the time-honored agreement called the Missouri Compromise. Down to the year 1820, Congress had legislated to keep Slavery out of the Territories; but at that disastrous era, a weak dread of civil convulsion led to the surrender of a single State (Missouri) to this evil,—under a solemn stipulation and warrant, however, that it should never again be introduced north of a certain line. Originating with the Slave-holders, and sustained by the Slave-holders, this compact was sacredly respected by them for thirty-three years; it was respected until they had got out of it all the advantages they could, and until Freedom was about to reap her advantages,—when they began to denounce it as unconstitutional and void. A Northern Senator—whose conduct then we shall not characterize, as he seems now to be growing weary of the hard service into which he entered—was made the instrument of its overthrow. That hallowed landmark, which had lifted its awful front against the spread of Slavery for more than an entire generation, was obliterated by a quibble, and the morning sun of the 22d of May, 1854, rose for the last time "on the guarantied and certain liberties of all the unsettled and unorganized region of the American Continent." Everything there was of honor, of justice, of the love of truth and liberty, in the heart of the nation, was smitten by this painful blow; the common sense of security felt the wound; the consoling consciousness that the faith of men might be relied upon was removed by it; and to the general imagination, in fact, it seemed as if some mighty charm, which had stayed the issue of untold calamities, were suddenly and wantonly broken.

Thus, after the Constitution had been perverted in its fundamental character,—after Congress had been despoiled of one of its most important functions,—after a compact, made sacred by the faith, the feelings, and the hopes of the third of a century, was torn in pieces,—the road was clear for the organization of the Kansas and Nebraska Territories. It was given out, amid jubilations which could not have been louder, if they had been the spontaneous greetings of some real triumph of principle, that henceforth and forever the inhabitants of the Territories would be called to determine their "domestic institutions" for themselves. Under this theory, and amid these shouts, Kansas was opened for settlement; and it was scarcely opened, before it became, as might have been expected, the battleground for the opposing civilizations of the Union, to renew and fight out their long quarrel upon. From every quarter of the land settlers rushed thither, to take part in the wager of battle. They rushed thither, as individuals and as associations, as Yankees and as Corn-crackers, as Blue Lodges and as Emigrant Aid Societies; and most of them went, not only as it was their right, but as it was their duty to do. Congress had invited them in; it had abandoned legitimate legislation in order to substitute for it a scramble between the first comers; and it had said to every man who knew that Slavery was more than a simple local interest, that it was in fact an element of the general political power, "Come and decide the issue here!"