Also among the passengers I find the Bishop of Michigan. The governor's
sister, Miss Mason, introduced us at starting, and bespoke his good
offices for me. His conversation has been a great resource and interest
for me during the long day. He is still a young man, who began life as a
lawyer, and afterwards from a real vocation adopted his present
profession: his talents and popularity have placed him in the rank he
now holds. He is on his way to visit the missions and churches in the
back settlements, and at Green Bay. His diocese, he tells me, extends
about eight hundred miles in length and four hundred in breadth. And
then if you think of the scattered population, the _sort_ of population,
the immensity of this spiritual charge, and the amount of labour and
responsibility it necessarily brings with it, are enough to astound one.
The amount of power is great in proportion; and the extensive moral
influence exercised by such a man as this Bishop of Michigan struck me
very much. In conversing with him and the missionaries on the spiritual
and moral condition of his diocese, and these newly settled regions in
general, I learned many things which interested me; and there was one
thing discussed which especially surprised me. It was said that two
thirds of the misery which came under the immediate notice of a popular
clergyman, and to which he was called to minister, arose from the
infelicity of the conjugal relations; there was no question here of open
immorality and discord, but simply of infelicity and unfitness. The same
thing has been brought before me in every country, every society in
which I have been a sojourner and an observer; but I did not look to
find it so broadly placed before me here in America, where the state of
morals, as regards the two sexes, is comparatively pure; where the
marriages are early, where conditions are equal, where the means of
subsistence are abundant, where the women are much petted and considered
by the men--too much so.
For a result then so universal, there must be a cause or causes as
universal, not depending on any particular customs, manners, or
religion, or political institutions. And what are these causes? I
cannot understand why an evil everywhere acknowledged and felt is not
remedied somewhere, or discussed by some one, with a view to a
remedy;--but no, it is like putting one's hand into the fire, only to
touch upon it; it is the universal bruise, the putrefying sore, on which
you must not lay a finger, or your patient (that is, society) cries out
and resists, and, like a sick baby, scratches and kicks its physician.
Strange, and passing strange, that the relation between the two sexes,
the passion of love in short, should not be taken into deeper
consideration by our teachers and our legislators. People educate and
legislate as if there was no such thing in the world; but ask the
priest, ask the physician--let _them_ reveal the amount of moral and
physical results from this one cause. Must love be always discussed in
blank verse, as if it were a thing to be played in tragedies or sung in
songs--a subject for pretty poems and wicked novels, and had nothing to
do with the prosaic current of our every-day existence, our moral
welfare and eternal salvation? Must love be ever treated with
profaneness, as a mere illusion? or with coarseness, as a mere impulse?
or with fear, as a mere disease? or with shame, as a mere weakness? or
with levity, as a mere accident? Whereas, it is a great mystery and a
great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality,
and happiness; mysterious, universal, inevitable as death. Why then
should love be treated less seriously than death? It is as serious a
thing. Love and Death, the alpha and omega of human life, the author and
finisher of existence, the two points on which God's universe turns;
which He, our Father and Creator, has placed beyond our
arbitration--beyond the reach of that election and free will which He
has left us in all other things!