by a cause of quarrel too insignificant to engage the minds of
sensible worldly men for an hour. I have heard it said that church
quarrels are the most violent of all quarrels, because religious
feelings are the strongest feelings of our nature. I confess that
I do not see the force of this statement, for it does not appear
to me that religious feelings have much to do with these quarrels.
I can much more easily see why all personal differences should be
adjusted peaceably in a church, for there it is supposed that the
individual will is subordinated to the cause of religion and the
general good. The real basis of the bitterness of church quarrels
is women. There are no others, except neighborhood quarrels, in
which women mingle, and a neighborhood quarrel will at once be
recognized as more like a church quarrel than any other. Women
have strong feelings, are attracted or repulsed through their
sensibilities, conceive keen likes and dislikes, do not stop to
reason, and are, of course, the readiest and the most devoted
partisans. If the mouths of the women could only be smothered in a
church quarrel, it would be settled much easier. Of all the
perverse creatures in this world, a woman who has thoroughly
committed herself to any man, or any cause, is the least tractable
and reasonable. I hope this statement will not offend my sweet
friends, because it is so true that I cannot conscientiously
retract it.
What the books call pride of opinion, is, nine cases in ten,
simple perverseness. I know a most venerable public teacher of
physiology, whose early theory of the production of animal heat--
very ridiculous in itself--is still yearly announced from his
desk, notwithstanding the fact that the whole world has received
another, whose soundness is demonstrated beyond all question. As
he, year after year, declares his belief that animal heat is
produced by corpuscular friction in the circulating blood, there
is a twinkle of the eyes among his amused auditors which says very
plainly--"the old gentleman does not believe this, himself." The
youngest student before him knows better than to give his theory
a moment's consideration. Well, the old Doctor is not alone. The
world is full of this kind of thing. Men adhere to old opinions
and old policies long after they have learned that they are
shallow or untenable, not from a genuine pride of opinion, (I
doubt very much whether there really is any thing that should be
called pride of opinion,) but from genuine perverseness of
disposition. Men will give, in some heated moment, an opinion
touching some one's character or powers, and, though that opinion
be proved to be wrong a thousand times, they will never
acknowledge that they have made a mistake. This is simple
perverseness, of the meanest variety. There are some kinds of
perverseness which impress one not altogether unpleasantly, but
this affects a man with equal anger and disgust.
Perverseness is a sign of weakness--nay, an element of weakness--
in man or woman. It is no legitimate part of a true character. The
generous, outspoken man, who is not afraid to show himself, and
what there is in him, who cares more about the right way than his
way, who throws away an opinion as he would throw away an old hat,
the moment he finds it is worthless, and who good-naturedly allows
the frictions of society to straighten out all the kinks there are
in him, is the strong man always, and always the one whom men
love. Perverseness is really moral strabismus, and I am shocked to
think what a multitude of squint-eyed souls there will be, when we
come to look into one another's faces in the "undress of
immortality."
LESSON X.
UNDEVELOPED RESOURCES.
"The world is God's seed-bed. He has planted deep and
multitudinously, and many things there are which have not yet
come up."--BEECHER.
One of the richest and best of the smaller class of American
cities is New Bedford; and the secret of its wealth and beauty is
_oil_. It is but a few years since the immense fleet of vessels
that made that thrifty port their home went out with certainty of
success in their dangerous enterprises, and came back loaded
down with spoil. All that beautiful wealth was won from the
deep, and for years as many ships came and went as there were
dwellings to give them speed and welcome. But the glory and the
gain of the whale-fishery are past. The noble prey, too
persistently and mercilessly pursued, has retired northward, and
hidden among the icebergs. Now, when a ship's crew win a cargo,
they win it from the clutches of eternal frost. It seems certain
that the fishery will dwindle, year after year, until, at last,
only a few adventurers will linger near the pole, to watch for
the rare game that once furnished light for the civilized world.
All this is very unpleasant for New Bedford; but are we to have
no more oil? Is nature failing? Will the time come when people must
sit in darkness?
A few months ago a man in Pennsylvania took it into his head to
probe the ground for the source of a certain oil that made its
appearance upon the surface. Down, down into the bowels of the
earth he thrust his steam-driven harpoon, until he touched the
living fountain of oil, which, gushing up, half drowned him. Now,
all the region round about him swarms with industry. Thousands of
men are hurrying to and fro; the puff of the engine is heard
everywhere; tens of thousands of barrels of oil are rolled out and
turned into the channels of commerce; eager-eyed speculators
throng all the converging avenues of travel, and a waiting world
of consumers take the oil as fast as it is produced. Men in
Virginia, New York, and Ohio are awaking to the consciousness
that, while they have been paying for oil from the far Pacific,
they have been living within three hundred feet of deposits
greater than all the cargoes that ever floated in New Bedford
harbor. For hundreds, and, probably, for thousands of years, men
have walked over these deposits with no suspicion of their
existence. Geologists have looked wise, as is their habit, but
have given no hint of them.
The simple truth appears to be that when, in the history of the
world, it became necessary for these firmly-fastened store-houses
of oil to be uncovered, they were uncovered. Nature had held them
for untold thousands of years for just this emergency. When the
whales ceased spouting, the earth took up the business; and "here
she blows" and "there she blows" are heard in Tideoute and
Titusville, while New Bedford sits sadly by the sea, and thinks of
long absent crews to whom the cry has become strange.
I cannot but look upon this discovery of oil in the earth as one
of the most remarkable and instructive revelations of the age. It
has shown to me that, whenever human necessity demands any thing
of the world of matter, the demand will be honored. Whenever
animal life, or the muscle of man or brute, has shown itself
unequal to the wants of an age, Nature has always responded to the
cry for help. Inventors are only men who act as pioneers, and who
go forward to see what the human race will want next, and to make
the necessary provisions. An inventor has profound faith in the
exhaustless resources of nature. He knows that if he bores far
enough, and bores in the right direction, he will find that which
the world needs. He is often no more than the discoverer of a
secret which nature has kept for the satisfaction of the wants of
an age. A lake yoked to a coal-bed would generally be voted a slow
team, but the inventor of the steam engine saw how it could be
made a very fast and a very powerful one; and we who live now are
able to see that the discovery was made at the right time, and
that, for the emergencies of this latter day, it has really
quadrupled the power of civilized man.
Think how nature has risen grandly up to meet every occasion for
new resources. The revolution wrought by steam in the business of
the world created great wants, every one of which was filled as
soon, as felt. Quicker modes of communicating thought were needed
to give us all the advantages of the increased facility of
carriage, and Mr. Morse was permitted to uncover the telegraph.
More money was wanted for the increased business of the world, and
the gold fields of California and Australia were unveiled. It has
always been so. In the march of the human race along the track of
history, nature has pulled aside the veil in which she hides her
treasures, to display that which she has kept in store for every
epoch. In all the future I have no doubt that whenever oil shall
be wanted, oil will be had for the boring. The world is fitted up
with supplies for all the probable and possible wants of the human
race. We are treading every day upon the lids of great secrets
that await the wants of the larger style and finer type of life
that lie before us. Discovery has but just begun, and will, I
doubt not, be as rife in future ages as in this. There is no end
of it: yet the world is a thing to be weighed and measured. It is
so many miles around it, and so many miles through it. Never mind;
it has more in it than humanity can exhaust.
When we talk of the material world, especially in its relation to
the constantly developing wants of man, we talk simply of the
kitchen and larder of humanity. We have not ascended into the
drawing-room, or conservatory. The moment we step out of the
consideration of manifested nature, we come into a world which may
neither be weighed nor measured--the world of thought. I suppose
that no author has ever entered a large library and stood in its
alcoves and studied its titles long without asking himself the
question: "what is there left for me to do?" It seems as if men
had been reaching in all directions for the discovery of thought
since time began, and as if there were absolutely nothing new to
be said upon any subject. Yet every age has always demanded its
peculiar food, and every age has managed to get it. Certain great
and peculiarly fruitful subjects, blowing in the sea of thought,
have attracted whole fleets of authors for many years, and they
are doubtless chased away no more to return; but, here and there,
while time shall last, strong men will bore down to deposits of
thought unsuspected by any of the preceding generations of men,
and there will gush up streams to light the nations of the world.
For the world of thought is, by its nature, exhaustless. The world
of thought is the world in which God lives, and it is infinite
like himself. We reach our hands out into the dark in any
direction, and find a thought. It was God's before it was ours;
and on beyond that thought, lies another, and still another, _ad
infinitum_. If our arms were long enough, we should be able to
grasp them as well as the first. All that it wants is the long arm
to give us the command of deposits that would astonish the world.
Authors have become eminent according to their power to reach
further than others out into the infinite atmosphere of thought
which envelops them.
Authors, like inventors, are rarely more than discoverers. If God,
who is omniscient, sees all truth, and apprehends the relations of
every truth to every other truth, all an author can do is, of
course, to find out what God's thoughts are. And every age is
certain to find out the thought that is essential to it. When the
world had exhausted Aristotle, and the wide school of philosophers
who embraced him in their systems, Bacon, self-instituted, stepped
before the world as its teacher. He came when he was wanted, and
his age gave him audience, and took the better path which he
pointed out to it. It was in the golden age of the drama--the age
in which the drama was what it never was before, and will never be
again--a great agent of civilization--that Shakspeare appeared. We
call his plays creations, but surely they were not his. He no more
than discovered them. The reason why they stir us so much is that
God created them. His age wanted them, and he had the insight into
the world of thought which enabled him to enter in and lead them
out. The reason why we have not had any great dramatist since, is,
that succeeding ages have not needed one. The great men of later
ages have not recognized the drama as a want of their particular
time. I am aware that there is nothing in this to feed human
pride, but I do not recognize food for human pride as a want of
any age.
We are in the habit of talking of the old authors; and we read
them as if we supposed them wiser than ourselves. We try to feed
on the thought which they discovered, but it is in the main very
innutritious fodder, and the world is learning the fact. We read
and reverence old books less, and read and regard newspapers a
great deal more. The thought which our own age produces is that
which we are learning to prize most. We buy beautiful editions of
Scott, but we read Dickens and Thackeray and Mrs. Stowe, in weekly
and monthly numbers. Milton, in half-calf, stands upon the shelves
of our library undisturbed, while we cut the leaves of "Festus;" and
Keats and Byron and Shelley are all pushed aside that we may
converse with Longfellow and Mrs. Browning. It is not, perhaps,
that the later are the greater, but, being informed with the spirit
of the age in which we have our life, moving among the facts which
concern us, and conscious of our want, they apprehend the true
relations of their age to the world of thought around them. They see
where the sources of oil are exhausted, and bore for new deposits.
It is a comfort to know that they can never bore in vain.
We may be sure that literature will always be as fresh as it has
been. It is possible that we may never have greater men than
Shakspeare and Milton, and Dante and Goethe; but there is nothing
to hinder our having men just as great. Those who are to come will
only bore in different directions, and find new deposits.
Shakspeare and Milton were great writers, but the fields they
occupied were their own. They do not resemble each other in any
particular. Dante and Goethe were great writers, but there are no
points of resemblance between them. When Scott was issuing his
wonderful series of novels, it seemed to his cotemporaries, I
suppose, that there was no field left for a successor; yet
Dickens, in the next generation, won as many readers and as much
admiration as he, in a field whose existence Scott never
suspected. Very different is the world of thought from the world
of matter, in the fact that its deposits are found in no
particular spot. The mind can go out in quest of thought in no
direction without reward; and every man receives from his age
motive and culture which peculiarly prepare him for the work of
supplying its needs. There are some who seem to think that the
golden age of literature is past--that nothing modern is worthy of
notice, and that it is one of the vices of the age that we discard
so much the teachings of the literary fathers. But the world of
thought is exhaustless, and we have only to produce a finer
civilization than the world has ever seen, to secure, as its
consummate flower, a literature of corresponding excellence.
What has been said of the world of matter and the world of
thought, may be said, and is implied, of the world of men. We are
accustomed to say that great emergencies make great men. But this
is not true. Great men are always found to meet great emergencies:
but God makes them, and leads them through a course of discipline
which prepares them for their work. It is one of the remarkable
facts of history, so patent that all have seen and acknowledged
it, that to meet every great epoch a man has been prepared. I mean
it in no irreverent or theological sense when I say that there has
been a series of Christs, whose appearance has denoted the
departure of old dispensations and the inauguration of new. Men
have arisen who have torn down temples, and demolished idols, and
swept away systems, and knocked off fetters, and introduced their
age into a freer, better, and larger life; and it will always be
so while time shall last. Men will arise equal to the wants of
their age wherever men are civilized. The causes which produce
emergencies are the agents which educate men to meet them; and
nature is prodigal of her material among men, as among the things
made for his service.
When, in the history of Christianity, it became necessary to re-assert
and emphasize the truth that "the just shall live by faith," Luther
was raised up; and nothing is more apparent to the student than that
the age which produced him demanded him--that he fitted into his
age, supplied its wants, and cut a new channel, through which the
richest life of the world has flowed for centuries. He found his country
tied up to formalism, scholasticism, and tradition; and by strokes as
remarkable for boldness as strength he set it free. He stands at the
head of a great historical epoch, which was prepared to receive and
crown him. In another field, we have, even in this day, a reformer
whom his age has called for, and who will surely do in the world of
art what Luther did in religion. No one can read Ruskin, and mark his
enthusiasm, his splendid power, his earnestness, his love of truth,
his reverence for nature, and above all, his love of God, without
feeling that he has a great mission to fulfil in the world. I bow myself
in homage before this man, and acknowledge his credentials. He
speaks with authority, and not as the common run of scribes, at all.
Fearlessly he tears the mask away from conventionalism and pretension,
sparing neither age nor nation, and scattering critics right and left
"Like chaff from the threshing-floor."
It seems to me that the sight of this single, unsupported man,
plunging boldly into a fight with a whole world full of liars and
lies, thrusting right and left, anxious only for the triumph of
truth, and everywhere devoutly recognizing God and his glory, and
Christ and his honor, as the ultimate end of true art, is one of
the most striking and beautiful the world has ever seen. Was there
not need of him? Had not art become superstitious and infidel and
missionless? Had it not faded to little more than the repetition
of old inanities, traditional mannerisms, stereotyped lies? Ruskin
came to tell his age that art was doing nothing toward making the
world better--that, instead of lifting the heart toward God, and
enlarging the field of human sympathy, it was only ministering to
the vanity of men--that nature was dishonored that men might win
the applause of vulgar crowds by falsehood and trickery. Nobly
has he done and nobly is he still doing his work; and the world is
reading him. It matters not that critics carp, and scold, and
whine--the world is reading, and will regard him. The eternal
truth of God and nature is on his side; and we are to see, as I
firmly believe, resulting from his noble labors, a beautiful
resurrection of art from the grave in which its friends have laid
it. It shall come forth, though now bound hand and foot, and be
restored to the sisterhood whose happiness it is to serve and sit
at the feet of Jesus Christ.
But time and space would fail to give illustrations of the truth
that God has always a man ready for an emergency. It is not
necessary to speak of Washington. It would not be wise, perhaps,
to speak of the first Napoleon, because men differ so widely in
their estimate of his work. But of the last Napoleon, it may be
said that he furnishes one of the most notable instances the world
has ever seen of a man prepared for his age. I suppose that no one
believes that there is another man in existence who could have
done for France, and would have done for Europe, under the
circumstances, what Louis Napoleon has done. Never did the central
figure of an elaborate piece of mosaic fit more nicely into its
place, than did Louis Napoleon into the complicated affairs of his
age. They were made for him, and he for them.
Shall the world of matter never fail--shall the world of thought
be exhaustless--shall men be found for all the emergencies of their
race, and, yet, shall divine truth be contained in a nut-shell?
Must the human soul lack food--fresh food--because a generation
long gone has decided that only certain food is fit for the human
soul? I believe that the Bible is a revelation of divine truth to
men, and, believing this, I believe that its most precious deposits
have hardly been touched. I believe that in it, there is special food
prepared for all the wide variety of human souls, and that, as
generation after generation passes away, new deposits will be struck,
so rich in illuminating power that their discoverers will wonder
they had never been seen before. I know that just before me, or
somewhere before me, there is a generation of men who will think
less of being saved, and more of being worth saving, less of dogma,
and more of duty, less of law, and more of love; whose worship will
be less formal, and more truthful and spiritual, and whose God will
be a more tender and considerate father, and less a lawgiver and a
judge. For such a generation, there exists a deposit of divine truth
almost unknown by Christendom. Only here and there have men gathered
it, floating upon the surface. The great deposit waits the touch of
another age.
LESSON XI.
GREATNESS IN LITTLENESS.
"This earth will all its dust and tears
Is no less his than yonder spheres;
And rain-drops weak and grains of sand
Are stamped by his immediate band."
STERLING.
"There is a power
Unseen, that rules the illimitable world;
That guides its motions, from the brightest star
To the least dust of this sin-tainted world."
THOMSON.
Infinity lies below us as well as above us. There is as much
essential greatness in littleness as in largeness. Mont Blanc--
massive, ice-crowned, imperial--is a great work of nature; yet it
is only an aggregation of materials with which we are thoroughly
familiar. It is only a larger mountain than that which lies within
sight of my window. A dozen Monadnocks or Ascutneys or Holyokes,
more or less, make a Mont Blanc, with glaciers and avalanches and
brooding eternity of frost. Such greatness, though it impresses me
much, is not beyond my comprehension. It can be reckoned by cubic
miles. So with the sea: it is only an expanse of water larger than
the river that winds through the meadows. It is great, but it is
only an aggregate of numerable quantities that my eyes can
measure, and my mind comprehend. These are great objects, and they
are great particularly because they are large. They are above me,
and they lead me upward toward creative infinity.
If I turn my eyes in the other direction, however, I lose myself
in infinity quite as readily. If I pick up a pebble at the foot of
Mont Blanc, and undertake the examination of its structure,--the
elements which compose it, the relations of those elements to each
other, the mode of their combination--I am lost as readily as I
should be in following the footsteps of the stars. If I undertake
to look through a drop of water, I may be arrested at first,
indeed, by the sports and struggles of animalcular life; but at
length I find myself gazing beyond it into infinitude--using it as
a lens through which the Godhead becomes visible to me. I can
dissect from one another the muscles and arteries and veins and
nerves and vital viscera of the human body, but the little insect
that taps a vein upon my hand does it with an instrument and by
the operation of machinery which are beyond my scrutiny. They
belong to a life and are the servants of instincts which I do not
understand at all.