of that control. I am not to try men in a narrow way, by my own
theological standard, but by the standard of manliness and Christianity.
As a general rule, the clergy are on the side of power. All history
proves this, our own most abundantly. The clergy also are unconsciously
bought up, their speech paid for, or their silence. As a class, did they
ever denounce a public sin? a popular sin? Perhaps they have. Do they do
it now and here? Take Boston for the last ten years, and I think there
has been more clerical preaching against the abolitionists than against
slavery; perhaps more preaching against the temperance movement than in
its favor. With the exception of disbelieving the popular theology, your
evangelical alliance knows no sin but "original sin," unless indeed it
be "organic sins," which no one is to blame for; no sinner but Adam and
the devil; no saving righteousness but the "imputed." I know there are
exceptions, and I would go far to do them honor, pious men who lift up a
warning, yes, bear Christian testimony against public sins. I am
speaking of the mass of the clergy. Christ said the priests of his time
had made a den of thieves out of God's house of prayer. Now they conform
to the public sins and apologize for popular crime. It is a good thing
to forgive an offence: who does not need that favor and often? But to
forgive the theory of crime, to have a theory which does that, is quite
another thing. Large cities are alike the court and camp of the
mercantile class, and what I have just said is more eminently true of
the clergy in such towns. Let me give an example. Not long ago the
Unitarian clergy published a protest against American slavery. It was
moderate, but firm, and manly. Almost all the clergy in the country
signed it. In the large towns few: they mainly young men and in the
least considerable churches. The young men seemed not to understand
their contract, for the essential part of an ecclesiastical contract is
sometimes written between the lines and in sympathetic ink. Is a
steamboat burned or lost on the waters, how many preach on that
affliction! Yet how few preached against the war? A preacher may say he
hates it as a man, no words could describe his loathing at it, but as a
minister of Christ, he dares not say a word! What clergymen tell of the
sins of Boston,--of intemperance, licentiousness; who of the ignorance
of the people; who of them lays bare our public sin as Christ of old;
who tells the causes of poverty, and thousand-handed crime; who aims to
apply Christianity to business, to legislation, politics, to all the
nation's life? Once the church was the bride of Christ, living by his
creative, animating love; her children were apostles, prophets, men by
the same spirit, variously inspired with power to heal, to help, to
guide mankind. Now she seems the widow of Christ, poorly living on the
dower of other times. Nay, the Christ is not dead, and 'tis her alimony,
not her dower. Her children--no such heroic sons gather about her table
as before. In her dotage she blindly shoves them off, not counting men
as sons of Christ. Is her day gone by? The clergy answer the end they
were bred for, paid for. Will they say, "We should lose our influence
were we to tell of this and do these things?"[29] It is not true. Their
ancient influence is already gone! Who asks, "What do the clergy think
of the tariff, or free trade, of annexation, or the war, of slavery, or
the education movement?" Why no man. It is sad to say these things.
Would God they were not true. Look round you, and if you can, come tell
me they are false.
We are not singular in this. In all lands the clergy favors the
controlling class. Bossuet would make the monarchy swallow up all other
institutions, as in history he sacrificed all nations to the Jews. In
England the established clergy favors the nobility, the crown, not the
people; opposes all freedom of trade, all freedom in religion, all
generous education of the people: its gospel is the gospel for a class,
not Christ's gospel for mankind. Here also the sovereign is the head of
the church, it favors the prevailing power, represents the morality, the
piety which chances to be popular, nor less nor more; the Christianity
of the street, not of Christ.
Here trade takes the place of the army, navy, and court in other lands.
That is well, but it takes also the place in great measure of science,
art and literature. So we become vulgar, and have little but trade to
show. The rich man's son seldom devotes himself to literature, science,
or art; only to getting more money, or to living in idleness on what he
has inherited. When money is the end, what need to look for any thing
more? He degenerates into the class of consumers, and thinks it an
honor. He is ashamed of his father's blood, proud of his gold. A good
deal of scientific labor meets with no reward, but itself. In our
country this falls almost wholly upon poor men. Literature, science and
art are mainly in their hands, yet are controlled by the prevalent
spirit of the nation. Here and there an exceptional man differs from
that, but the mass of writers conform. In England, the national
literature favors the church, the crown, the nobility, the prevailing
class. Another literature is rising, but is not yet national, still less
canonized. We have no American literature which is permanent. Our
scholarly books are only an imitation of a foreign type; they do not
reflect our morals, manners, politics, or religion, not even our rivers,
mountains, sky. They have not the smell of our ground in their breath.
The real American literature is found only in newspapers and speeches,
perhaps in some novel, hot, passionate, but poor, and extemporaneous.
That is our national literature. Does that favor man--represent man?
Certainly not. All is the reflection of this most powerful class. The
truths that are told are for them, and the lies. Therein the prevailing
sentiment is getting into the form of thought. Politics represent the
morals of the controlling class, the morals and manners of rich Peter
and David on a large scale. Look at that index, you would sometimes
think you were not in the Senate of a great nation, but in a board of
brokers, angry and higgling about stocks. Once in the nation's loftiest
hour, she rose inspired and said: "All men are born equal, each with
unalienable rights; that is self-evident." Now she repents her of the
vision and the saying. It does not appear in her literature, nor church,
nor state. Instead of that, through this controlling class, the nation
says: "All dollars are equal, however got; each has unalienable rights.
Let no man question that!" This appears in literature and legislation,
church and state. The morals of a nation, of its controlling class,
always get summed up in its political action. That is the barometer of
the moral weather. The voters are always fairly represented.
* * * * *
The wicked baron, bad of heart, and bloody of hand, has passed off with
the ages which gave birth to such a brood, but the bad merchant still
lives. He cheats in his trade; sometimes against the law, commonly with
it. His truth is never wholly true, nor his lie wholly false. He
overreaches the ignorant; makes hard bargains with men in their trouble,
for he knows that a falling man will catch at red-hot iron. He takes the
pound of flesh, though that bring away all the life-blood with it. He
loves private contracts, digging through walls in secret. No interest is
illegal if he can get it. He cheats the nation with false invoices, and
swears lies at the custom-house; will not pay his taxes, but moves out
of town on the last of April.[30] He oppresses the men who sail his
ships, forcing them to be temperate, only that he may consume the value
of their drink. He provides for them unsuitable bread and meat. He would
not engage in the African slave-trade, for he might lose his ships and
perhaps more; but he is always ready to engage in the American
slave-trade, and calls you a "fanatic" if you tell him it is the worse
of the two. He cares not whether he sells cotton or the man who wears
it, if he only gets the money; cotton or negro, it is the same to him.
He would not keep a drink-hole in Ann Street, only own and rent it. He
will bring or make whole cargoes of the poison that deals "damnation
round the land." He thinks it vulgar to carry rum about in a jug,
respectable in a ship. He makes paupers, and leaves others to support
them. Tell not him of the misery of the poor, he knows better; nor of
our paltry way of dealing with public crime, he wants more jails and a
speedier gallows. You see his character in letting his houses, his
houses for the poor. He is a stone in the lame man's shoe. He is the
poor man's devil. The Hebrew devil that so worried Job is gone; so is
the brutal devil that awed our fathers. Nobody fears them; they vanish
before cock-crowing. But this devil of the nineteenth century is still
extant. He has gone into trade, and advertises in the papers; his name
is "good" in the street. He "makes money;" the world is poorer by his
wealth. He spends it as he made it, like a devil, on himself, his family
alone, or worse yet, for show. He can build a church out of his gains,
to have his morality, his Christianity preached in it, and call that the
gospel, as Aaron called a calf--God. He sends rum and missionaries to
the same barbarians, the one to damn, the other to "save," both for his
own advantage, for his patron saint is Judas, the first saint who made
money out of Christ. Ask not him to do a good deed in private, "men
would not know it," and "the example would be lost;" so he never lets a
dollar slip out between his thumb and finger without leaving his mark on
both sides of it. He is not forecasting to discern effects in causes,
nor skilful to create new wealth, only spry in the scramble for what
others have made. It is easy to make a bargain with him, hard to settle.
In politics he wants a Government that will insure his dividends; so
asks what is good for him, but ill for the rest. He knows no right, only
power; no man but self; no God but his calf of gold.
What effect has he on young men? They had better touch poison. If he
takes you to his heart, he takes you in. What influence on society? To
taint and corrupt it all round. He contaminates trade; corrupts
politics, making abusive laws, not asking for justice but only
dividends. To the church he is the Anti-Christ. Yes, the very Devil,
and frightens the poor minister into shameful silence, or, more
shameless yet, into an apology for crime; makes him pardon the theory of
crime! Let us look on that monster--look and pass by, not without
prayer.
The good merchant tells the truth and thrives by that; is upright and
downright; his word good as his Bible-oath. He pays for all he takes;
though never so rich he owns no wicked dollar; all is openly, honestly,
manfully earned, and a full equivalent paid for it. He owns money and is
worth a man. He is just in business with the strong; charitable in
dealing with the weak. His counting-room or his shop is the sanctuary of
fairness, justice, a school of uprightness as well as thrift. Industry
and honor go hand in hand with him. He gets rich by industry and
forecast, not by slight of hand and shuffling his cards to another's
loss. No men become the poorer because he is rich. He would sooner hurt
himself than wrong another, for he is a man, not a fox. He entraps no
man with lies, active or passive. His honesty is better capital than a
sharper's cunning. Yet he makes no more talk about justice and honesty
than the sun talks of light and heat; they do their own talking. His
profession of religion is all practice. He knows that a good man is just
as near heaven in his shop as in his church, at work as at prayer; so he
makes all work sacramental; he communes with God and man in buying and
selling--communion in both kinds. He consecrates his week-day and his
work. Christianity appears more divine in this man's deeds than in the
holiest words of apostle or saint. He treats every man as he wishes all
to treat him, and thinks no more of that than of carrying one for every
ten. It is the rule of his arithmetic. You know this man is a saint, not
by his creed, but by the letting of his houses, his treatment of all
that depend on him. He is a father to defend the weak, not a pirate to
rob them. He looks out for the welfare of all that he employs; if they
are his help he is theirs, and as he is the strongest so the greater
help. His private prayer appears in his public work, for in his devotion
he does not apologize for his sin, but asking to outgrow that,
challenges himself to new worship and more piety. He sets on foot new
enterprises which develop the nation's wealth and help others while they
help him. He wants laws that take care of man's rights, knowing that
then he can take care of himself and of his own, but hurt no man by so
doing. He asks laws for the weak, not against them. He would not take
vengeance on the wicked, but correct them. His justice tastes of
charity. He tries to remove the causes of poverty, licentiousness, of
all crime, and thinks that is alike the duty of Church and State. Ask
not him to make a statesman a party-man, or the churches an apology for
his lowness. He knows better; he calls that infidelity. He helps the
weak help themselves. He is a moral educator, a church of Christ gone
into business, a saint in trade. The Catholic saint who stood on a
pillar's top, or shut himself into a den and fed on grass, is gone to
his place--that Christian Nebuchadnezzar. He got fame in his day. No man
honors him now; nobody even imitates him. But the saint of the
nineteenth century is the good merchant; he is wisdom for the foolish,
strength for the weak, warning to the wicked, and a blessing to all.
Build him a shrine in bank and church, in the market and the exchange,
or build it not, no saint stands higher than this saint of trade. There
are such men, rich and poor, young and old; such men in Boston. I have
known more than one such, and far greater and better than I have told
of, for I purposely under-color this poor sketch. They need no word of
mine for encouragement or sympathy. Have they not Christ and God to aid
and bless them? Would that some word of mine might stir the heart of
others to be such; your hearts, young men. They rise there clean amid
the dust of commerce and the mechanic's busy life, and stand there like
great square pyramids in the desert amongst the Arabians' shifting
tents. Look at them, ye young men, and be healed of your folly. It is
not the calling which corrupts the man, but the men the calling. The
most experienced will tell you so. I know it demands manliness to make a
man, but God sent you here to do that work.
The duty of this class is quite plain. They control the wealth, the
physical strength, the intellectual vigor of the nation. They now
display an energy new and startling. No ocean is safe from their canvas;
they fill the valleys; they level the hills; they chain the rivers; they
urge the willing soil to double harvests. Nature opens all her stores to
them; like the fabled dust of Egypt her fertile bosom teems with new
wonders, new forces to toil for man. No race of men in times of peace
ever displayed so manly an enterprise, an energy so vigorous as this
class here in America. Nothing seems impossible to them. The instinct of
production was never so strong and creative before. They are proving
that peace can stimulate more than war.
Would that my words could reach all of this class. Think not I love to
speak hard words, and so often; say not that I am setting the poor
against the rich. It is no such thing. I am trying to set the strong in
favor of the weak. I speak for man. Are you not all brothers, rich or
poor? I am here to gratify no vulgar ambition, but in Religion's name to
tell their duty to the most powerful class in all this land. I must
speak the truth I know, though I may recoil with trembling at the words
I speak; yes, though their flame should scorch my own lips. Some of the
evils I complain of are your misfortune, not your fault. Perhaps the
best hearts in the land, no less than the ablest heads, are yours. If
the evils be done unconsciously, then it will be greatness to be higher
than society, and with your good overcome its evil. All men see your
energy, your honor, your disciplined intellect. Let them see your
goodness, justice, Christianity. The age demands of you a development of
religion proportionate with the vigor of your mind and arms. Trade is
silently making a wonderful revolution. We live in the midst of it, and
therefore see it not. All property has become movable, and therefore
power departs from the family of the first-born, and comes to the family
of mankind. God only controls this revolution, but you can help it
forward, or retard it. The freedom of labor, and the freedom of trade,
will work wonders little dreamed of yet; one is now uniting all men of
the same nation; the other, some day, will weave all tribes together
into one mighty family. Then who shall dare break its peace? I cannot
now stop to tell half the proud achievements I foresee resulting from
the fierce energy that animates your yet unconscious hearts. Men live
faster than ever before. Life, like money, like mechanical power, is
getting intensified and condensed. The application of science to the
arts, the use of wind, water, steam, electricity, for human works, is a
wonderful fact, far greater than the fables of old time. The modern
Cadmus has yoked fire and water in an iron bond. The new Prometheus
sends the fire of heaven from town to town to run his errands. We talk
by lightning. Even now these new achievements have greatly multiplied
the powers of men. They belong to no class; like air and water they are
the property of mankind. It is for you, who own the machinery of
society, to see that no class appropriates to itself what God meant for
all. Remember it is as easy to tyrannize by machinery as by armies, and
as wicked; that it is greater now to bless mankind thereby, than it was
of old to conquer new realms. Let men not curse you, as the old
nobility, and shake you off, smeared with blood and dust. Turn your
power to goodness, its natural transfiguration, and men shall bless your
name, and God bless your soul. If you control the nation's politics,
then it is your duty to legislate for the nation,--for man. You may
develop the great national idea, the equality of all men; may frame a
government which shall secure man's unalienable rights. It is for you to
organize the rights of man, thus balancing into harmony the man and the
many, to organize the rights of the hand, the head, and the heart. If
this be not done, the fault is yours. If the nation play the tyrant over
her weakest child, if she plunder and rob the feeble Indian, the feebler
Mexican, the Negro, feebler yet, why the blame is yours. Remember there
is a God who deals justly with strong and weak. The poor and the weak
have loitered behind in the march of man; our cities yet swarm with men
half-savage. It is for you, ye elder brothers, to lead forth the weak
and poor! If you do the national duty that devolves on you, then are you
the saviors of your country, and shall bless not that alone, but all the
thousand million sons of men. Toil then for that. If the church is in
your hands, then make it preach the Christian truth. Let it help the
free development of religion in the self-consciousness of man, with
Jesus for its pattern. It is for you to watch over this work, promote
it, not retard. Help build the American church. The Roman church has
been, we know what it was, and what men it bore; the English church yet
stands, we know what it is. But the church of America--which shall
represent American vigor aspiring to realize the ideas of Christianity,
of absolute religion,--that is not yet. No man has come with pious
genius fit to conceive its litany, to chant its mighty creed, and sing
its beauteous psalm. The church of America, the church of freedom, of
absolute religion, the church of mankind, where Truth, Goodness, Piety,
form one trinity of beauty, strength, and grace--when shall it come?
Soon as we will. It is yours to help it come.
For these great works you may labor; yes, you are laboring, when you
help forward justice, industry, when you promote the education of the
people; when you practise, public and private, the virtues of a
Christian man; when you hinder these seemingly little things, you hinder
also the great. You are the nation's head, and if the head be wilful
and wicked, what shall its members do and be? To this class let me say:
Remember your Position at the head of the nation; use it not as pirates,
but Americans, Christians, men. Remember your Temptations, and be warned
in time. Remember your opportunities--such as no men ever had before.
God and man alike call on you to do your duty. Elevate your calling
still more; let its nobleness appear in you. Scorn a mean thing. Give
the world more than you take. You are to serve the nation, not it you;
to build the church, not make it a den of thieves, nor allow it to
apologize for your crime, or sloth. Try this experiment and see what
comes of it. In all things govern yourselves by the eternal law of
right. You shall build up not a military despotism, nor a mercantile
oligarchy, but a State, where the government is of all, by all, and for
all; you shall found not a feudal theocracy, nor a beggarly sect, but
the church of mankind, and that Christ which is the same yesterday,
to-day and for ever, will dwell in it, to guide, to warn, to inspire,
and to bless all men. And you, my brothers, what shall you become? Not
knaves, higgling rather than earn; not tyrants, to be feared whilst
living, and buried at last amid popular hate; but men, who thrive best
by justice, reason, conscience, and have now the blessedness of just men
making themselves perfect.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] I gather these facts from a Review of Major Poussin's _Belgique et
les Belges, depuis 1830_, in a foreign journal. The condition of the
merchant manufacturer I know not.
[24] Subsequent events (in 1850 and 1851) show that he was right in his
statement. What was thought calumny then has become history since, and
is now the glory and boast of Boston.
[25] Mr. _Robert J. Walker_ published a letter in favor of the
annexation of Texas. In it he said: "Upon the refusal of re-annexation
... THE TARIFF AS A PRACTICAL MEASURE FALLS WHOLLY AND FOR EVER, and we
shall thereafter be compelled to resort to direct taxes to support the
Government." Notwithstanding this foolish threat, a large number of
citizens of Massachusetts remonstrated against annexation. The House of
Representatives, by a large majority, passed a resolve declaring that
Massachusetts "announces her uncompromising opposition to the further
extension of American slavery," and "declares her earnest and
unalterable purpose to use every lawful and constitutional measure for
its overthrow and entire extinction," etc. But the Senate voted that the
resistance of the State was already sufficient! The passage in the text
refers to these circumstances.
[26] It was then thought that the aqueduct would cost but $2,000,000.
[27] I refer to the Report of M. Villerme, in the _Memoires de
l'Institut, Tom._ lxxi.
[28] This was printed in 1846. In 1850, and since, these men have
publicly gloried in a similar act even more atrocious.
[29] Keble, in one of his poems, represents a mother seeing her sportive
son "enacting holy rites," and thus describes her emotions:
"She sees in heart an empty throne,
And falling, falling far away,
Him whom the Lord hath placed thereon:
She hears the dread Proclaimer say,
'Cast ye the lot, in trembling cast,
The traitor to his place hath past,--
Strive ye with prayer and fast to guide
The dangerous glory where it shall abide.'"
[30] It is the custom in Massachusetts to tax men in the place where
they reside, on the first day of May; as the taxes differ very much in
different towns of the same State, it is easy for a man to escape the
burden of taxation.
VIII.
A SERMON OF THE DANGEROUS CLASSES IN SOCIETY.--PREACHED AT THE MELODEON,
ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 31, 1847.
MATTHEW XVIII. 12.
If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone
astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into
the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray?