The same causes that have made me a preacher, have also made me an
abundant contributor to our periodical literature. As I wish to
present a living picture of these early days, I will, from time to
time, furnish extracts from the contributions I have made to our
religious journals:
[Written for the Christian Luminary.]
OCENA P. O., Atchison Co.,
Kansas Ter., May, 1858.
Having myself had a very full experience of the advantages
and disadvantages, the trials, pleasures and perils of a
pioneer life, I propose to write a series of essays on the
matter of emigrating to the West.
While a grave necessity demands that many shall emigrate
to the West, it is not to be denied that it is an
enterprise fraught with many dangers to the moral and
spiritual well-being of the emigrant. We have here men
from the four quarters of the civilized world, and have
thus congregated together all the vices found in Europe
and America. The semi-barbarism of the Irish Catholicism
of Tipperary and Clare is now fairly inaugurated in
Leavenworth city. All the horses of the livery stables are
hired to attend an Irish funeral, and as the mourners take
a "_wee bit of a dhrap_" before starting, they are lucky
if they get the corpse well under ground without a fight.
By this time, having become over-joyful, they raise a
shout, and with a whoop and hurrah they start for home,
and the man that has the fastest horse gets into the city
first. The unlucky traveler, whose horse gets mixed up
with theirs in this stampede, and who thus involuntarily
becomes one of the company at an Irish wake, has need to
be a good rider.
German infidelity has been nurtured in Germany by a
thousand years of priestly domination and oppression, and
is now translated into our Kansas towns by Germans, who
have no Lord's day in their week. Corresponding with our
Lord's day, they have a holiday--a day to hunt, to fish,
to do up odd jobs, to congregate together and listen to
fine music, dance, sing, feast, drink lager beer, and have
a good time generally. Under the best _regimen_ it is hard
for men to keep their hearts from evil; but here, it is a
fearful thing for young men, released from all the
restraints of their native land, to find the house of
revelry and dancing so near the house of God, and the
gates of hell, alluring by all the fascinating and
seductive attractions of harmonious sounds, so near the
gate of heaven.
I am appalled at the amount of drinking and gambling that
has existed in Kansas, especially in the Missouri River
towns, for the last three years, Under the shade of every
green tree, on the streets, in every shop, store, grocery
and hotel, it has seemed as if the chief business of the
people was to gamble and drink.
There are other causes full of evil, and fearfully potent
to work apostasy and ruin in the West. Men come here, not
to plead the cause of a suffering and dying Saviour; not
to give to the people a more pure and self-denying
morality, and a higher civilization; but to get rich. They
have had a dream, and are come to realize that dream. They
have dreamed of one thousand acres of land, bought at one
dollar and a quarter per acre, that by the magic growth of
some Western town becomes worth fifty thousand dollars.
They have dreamed of money invested in mythical towns,
which towns are to rival in their growth Toledo, Chicago
or St. Louis. The dream is to do nothing and get rich.
Land sharks, speculators, usurers and politicians who
aspire to a notoriety they will never win--a station they
will never occupy--swarm over the West thicker than frogs
in Egypt, and more intrusive than were these squatting,
crawling, jumping pests, when evoked from the river's
slime by the rod of Moses.
Some men are too old when they come to the West. They are
like a vine whose tendrils are rudely torn from a branch
around which they have wound themselves, and are so
hardened by time that they can not entwine themselves
around another support. Such men forever worship, looking
to the East. They form no new friendships; engage in no
new enterprises; they care for nobody, and nobody cares
for them. They live and die alone.
But there are more sad and gentle notes of sorrow that
fall upon our ears. The children mourn for the peach tree
and the apple tree, with their luscious fruit. The
mother-wife asks who will watch the little grave, or tend
the rose tree growing at its head, or who will train the
woodbine, or care for the pinks and violets? Then sadly
she sings of home--"Home, sweet home!" The father, too,
remembers his pasture for his pigs, his calves, and sheep,
and cows. He remembers that on one poor forty acres of
land he had a house, a barn, an orchard, woodland, maple
trees for making maple sugar, a meadow, room for corn,
wheat, oats and potatoes, besides pasture for one horse,
two oxen, three cows, together with a number of sheep and
pigs, Then there was the three months' school in winter,
and four months in summer. There was the Sunday-school and
the church, where serious and honest men uttered manly and
religious counsel to sincere hearts, which nurtured good
and holy purposes. All this he has bartered away for the
privilege of being rich--of having more land than he knows
what to do with; more corn than he can tend, and pigs till
they are a pest to him.
Having glanced at some of the evils attendant on Western
life, I must hasten to indicate what class of men should
come to the West. The poor of our cities, whose poverty
becomes the more haggard by being placed in immediate
proximity to measureless profusion, luxury and
extravagance--respectable people, whose whole life is a
lifelong struggle to keep up appearances, and in whom the
securing of affluence is like putting on a corpse the
frippery and finery of the ball-room; young men with brave
hearts and willing hands--these are the classes that may
come, and should come, to the West. And if Adam, realizing
that the world is all before him, where to choose, looks
to the West to find his Eden, I would respectfully suggest
that he has an infirmity in his left side, and that his
best security against the perils of a pioneer life is to
take to himself the rib that is wanting.
The tenant, living on the farm of another man, should come
to the West. He can not plant a tree and call it his own.
God gave the whole world to Adam and his sons, and the
true dignity of every son of Adam requires that he should
be able to stand in the midst of his own Eden and say:
"This, under God, is mine."
There is yet another class of men that may always go to
the West, or to any other place. Whether young, or old, or
middle-aged--whether rich or poor--they may go, and the
blessings of God go with them. These are the men whose
hearts are full of faith, and hope, and love--who
sympathize with all, and who, consequently, will find
friends among all--who are willing to be missionaries of
the cross, and to be pillars in the churches they have
helped to nurture into life.
Kansas is full of men who were once members of our
churches, but who are stranded on the rocks of apostasy,
on whom the storms of life will beat yet a little while,
and then they will sink down into ever-lasting ruin.
Strong drink, the love of money, or, perhaps, the
inadequacy of their former teaching, is the occasion of
their fall. Others, scattered over this great wilderness
of sin, remain faithful amidst abounding wickedness, and
stretch out their hands and utter the Macedonian cry,
"Come over and help us."
The apostolic age was pre-eminently an age of missionary
effort. What will the world say of us, and of our
confident, and, as some would say, arrogant, pretense to
have restored primitive and apostolic Christianity, when
our Israel in so large a part of the great West is such a
moral wreck--such a spectacle of scattered, abandoned,
and, too often, ruined church members, unknown, untaught
and uncared for.
The peerless glory of our Lord Jesus Christ--his
measureless, boundless and quenchless love--this is the
great center of attraction around which the affections of
the Christian do continually gather. The Lord is the
center of the moral universe, and all its light is but the
emanation of his glory. He dwells in the human heart, and
fills it with his love; he dwells in the family, and
becomes its ornament as when he dwelt in the house of
Lazarus; he dwells in the church, and makes it a fold in
which he nurtures his lambs.
Christians wandering over the earth like sheep having no
shepherd, isolated from their brethren, dwelling
alone--however frequent this spectacle now--is not often
witnessed in the New Testament. There they congregated in
churches. But this experiment of isolation is most
perilous to the individual, and a prodigal expenditure of
the wealth of the church, which has souls for her hire. It
is true that a few persons become centers of attraction to
new churches that grow up around them; but very many are
lost in the great whirlpool of this world's strife.
What, then, is the remedy? Evidently this: Jesus accepts
no divided empire in the human heart. He will have all or
nothing. The Church of Christ, the cause of Christ, the
people of Christ--these must be the centers of attraction
to which the heart of the Christian turns with all the
enthusiasm with which an Eastern idolater bows before the
shrine of his idol. In return for such devotion Jesus
gives to his people every imaginable blessing. Wealth,
power, dominion, science, civilization, genius, learning,
power over the elements of nature, and insight into its
magnitude, do now belong to the Lord's people in Europe
and America as they never belonged to any people before.
Yet all these must be laid at Jesus' feet before he will
make the returning prodigal the recipient of his love.
Everything must be subordinated to our religion.
Since the almighty dollar has become the touch-stone by
which everything is to be decided, I assert that this is a
good speculation: secure a neighborhood homogeneous and
not heterogeneous. Let its tendencies be favorable to
temperance, education and religion, and in doing so a man
will have added fifty per cent, to the selling value of
his property. The present thrift, wealth, genius,
enterprise and intelligence of the people of the New
England States is the legitimate outworking of the
training bestowed on their sons by the stern, old Puritans
that first peopled these inhospitable shores.
But all temporal and earthly considerations disappear, as
fade the stars at the approach of day, when we consider
that measureless ruin, that gulf of everlasting despair,
that voiceless woe, into which the emigrant may sink
himself and family by locating in a profligate, dissipated
or irreligious neighborhood, or in a community wholly
swallowed up in the love of money, or absorbed in the
questions, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or
wherewithal shall we be clothed? What home on the
beautiful prairies, what treasures of fine water and good
timber, what corner lots, what property in town or
country, can equal in value the guardianship of our Lord,
the indwelling of God's good Spirit, the approval of a
good conscience, the smiles of angels and the inheritance
of a home in heaven? Let no man, therefore, fall into the
folly--the unspeakable folly--of subordinating his
spiritual and eternal interests to his temporal welfare.
"Seek ye God and his righteousness, and all these things
shall be added."
To teach, to discipline and perfect the churches we have
already organized; to gather into churches the lost sheep
of the house of our Israel, scattered over this great
wilderness of sin; to try and help those who are still
purposing to tempt its dangers; and to lay broad and deep
the foundations of a future operation and co-operation
that shall ultimate in spreading the gospel from pole to
pole, and across the great sea to the farthest domicile of
man--this is the purpose which we set before us, and which
should be pursued with the zeal and enthusiasm displayed
by the followers of the false prophet of Mecca; and with
the patience of the coral workers, who build for ages and
cycles of ages their marble battlements in the waters of
the Pacific Ocean.