speak to the wise men of the nation, and I hope they will hear. But we
would not be made Christians as the Spaniards make Christians; we would
be taught before we are baptised." He felt the want unconsciously
acknowledged by the King of Siam, spoken of by John Locke in his chapter
on Probability. A Dutch ambassador, when entertaining the king with the
peculiarities of Holland, amongst other things told the sovereign that
the water in Holland would sometimes in cold weather be so hard that men
walked upon it, and that it would bear an elephant if he were there. To
which the king replied, "Hitherto I have believed the strange things you
have told me, because I looked upon you as a sober, fair man, but now I
am sure you lie." But Tomochichi had an eye that saw the faults of the
colonists, if he did not understand their religion. When urged to listen
to the doctrines of Christianity he keenly replied, "Why, these are
Christians at Savannah! these are Christians at Frederica! Christian
much drunk! Christian beat men! Christian tell lies! Devil Christian! Me
no Christian!" This recalls the pathetic story of the West Indian
cazique, who, at the stake, refused life, temporal or eternal, at the
price of conversion, asking where he should go to live so happily. He
was told--in heaven; and then he at once refused, on the ground that the
whites would be there; and he had rather live anywhere, or nowhere, than
dwell with such people as he had found the white Christians to be.
Almost the first word, says Dr. Medhurst, uttered by a Chinese, when
anything is said concerning the excellence of Christianity, is, "Why do
Christians bring us opium, and bring it directly in defiance of our
laws? The vile drug has destroyed my son, has ruined my brother, and
well-nigh led me to beggar my wife and children. Surely those who
import such a deleterious substance, and injure me for the sake of gain,
cannot wish me well, or be in possession of a religion better than my
own. Go first and persuade your own countrymen to relinquish their
nefarious traffic; and give me a prescription to correct this vile
habit, and then I will listen to your exhortations on the subject of
Christianity!" Dr. Livingstone says he found a tribe of men in the
interior of Africa so pure and simple that they seemed to have no idea
of untruthfulness and dishonesty until they were brought into contact
with Asiatics and Europeans. Some of Dr. Kane's men, "while resting at
Kalutunah's tent, had appropriated certain fox-skins, boots, and
sledges, which their condition seemed to require. The Esquimaux
complained of the theft, and Dr. Kane, after a careful inquiry into the
case, decided in their favor. He gave each five needles, a file, and a
stick of wood, and knives and other extras to Kalutunah and Shanghu, and
after regaling them with a hearty supper, he returned the stolen goods,
and tried to make them believe that his people did not steal, but only
took the articles to save their lives! In imitation of this Arctic
morality the natives, on their departure, carried off a few knives and
forks, which they deemed as essential to their happiness as the
fox-dresses were to the white men."
Among the airy visions which had been generated in the teeming brain of
Coleridge, says a writer in The London Quarterly, was the project of
pantisocracy--a republic to be founded in the wilds of America, of which
the fundamental principles were an equality of rank and property, and
where all who composed it were to be under the perpetual dominion of
reason, virtue, and love. Southey was inflamed by it and converted.
Through it he saw a way out of all his troubles. There he would enjoy
the felicity of living in a pure democracy, where he could sit unelbowed
by kings and aristocrats. "You," he wrote to his brother Tom, "are
unpleasantly situated, so is my mother, so were we all till this grand
scheme of pantisocracy flashed upon our minds, and now all is perfectly
delightful." Coleridge, contented to have delivered a glowing
description of Utopia, did nothing further, and departed on a pedestrian
tour through Wales, where, as the ridiculous will sometimes mingle
itself with the sublime, he feared he had caught the itch from an
admiring democratical auditor at an inn, who insisted upon shaking hands
with him. Some time after, Southey, having tried his panacea upon a few
select pantisocratic friends, wrote, "There was a time when I believed
in the persuadability of man, and had the mania of man-mending.
Experience has taught me better. The ablest physician can do little in
the great lazar-house of society. He acts the wisest part who retires
from the contagion."
"Nature goes her own way," said Goethe, "and all that to us seems an
exception is really according to order." He quoted the saying of
Rousseau, that you cannot hinder an earthquake by building a city near a
burning mountain. Peter the Great, he said, repeated Amsterdam so dear
to his youth, in locating St. Petersburg at the mouth of the Neva. The
ground rises in the neighborhood, and the emperor could have had a city
quite free from all the trouble arising from overflow if he had but gone
a little higher up. An old shipmaster represented this to him, and
prophesied that the people would be drowned every seventy years. There
stood also an old tree, with various marks from times when the waters
had risen to a great height. But all was in vain; the emperor stood to
his whim, and had the tree cut down, that it might not be witness
against him! Sydney Smith said of a certain fanatical member of
Parliament, that "he was losing his head. When he brings forward his
Suckling Act, he will be considered as quite mad. No woman to be allowed
to suckle her own child without medical certificates. Three classes,
viz., free-sucklers, half-sucklers, and spoon-meat mothers. Mothers,
whose supply is uncertain, to suckle upon affidavit! How is it possible
that an act of Parliament can supply the place of nature and natural
affection?"
"There is in nature," said Goethe to Soret, "an accessible and an
inaccessible. Be careful to discriminate between the two, be
circumspect, and proceed with reverence." "The sight of a primitive
phenomenon," he said to Eckermann, "is generally not enough for people;
they think they must go still further; and are thus like children who,
after peeping into a mirror, turn it round directly to see what is on
the other side." "When one," said he on another occasion, "has looked
about him in the world long enough to see how the most judicious
enterprises frequently fail, and the most absurd have the good fortune
to succeed, he becomes disinclined to give any one advice. At bottom, he
who asks advice shows himself limited; he who gives it gives also proof
that he is presumptuous. If any one asks me for good advice, I say, I
will give it, but only on condition that you will promise not to take
it.... Much is said of aristocracy and democracy; but the whole affair
is simply this: in youth, when we either possess nothing, or know not
how to value the tranquil possession of anything, we are democrats; but
when we, in a long life, have come to possess something of our own, we
wish not only ourselves to be secure of it, but that our children and
grandchildren should be secure of inheriting it. Therefore, we always
lean to aristocracy in our old age, whatever were our opinions in
youth."
Lord Eldon said in his old age, "that, if he were to begin life again,
he would be damned but he would begin as agitator." "I am no more
ashamed of having been a republican," said Southey, "than I am of having
been a child." Barere, who said that "the tree of liberty cannot
flourish unless it is watered by the blood of kings and
aristocrats"--who proposed the famous decree for the annihilation of
Lyons--devoted a great part of his later life to declaiming on the
necessity of entirely abolishing capital punishments.
Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer, being asked, "What is a communist?"
answered, "One who has yearnings for equal division of unequal earnings.
Idler or bungler, he is willing to fork out his penny and pocket your
shilling."
"Sir," said Johnson, "your levelers wish to level down as far as
themselves; but they cannot bear leveling up to themselves. They would
all have some people under them; why not then have some people above
them?"
Margaret Fuller, speaking of the greatest of German poets, says, "He
believes more in man than men, effort than success, thought than action,
nature than providence. He does not insist on my believing with him."
"He who would help himself and others," says Emerson, "should not be a
subject of irregular and interrupted impulses of virtue, but a
continent, persisting, immovable person,--such as we have seen a few
scattered up and down in time for the blessing of the world; men who
have in the gravity of their nature a quality which answers to the
fly-wheel in a mill, which distributes the motion equally over all the
wheels, and hinders it from falling unequally and suddenly in
destructive shocks. It is better that joy should be spread over all the
day in the form of strength, than that it should be concentrated into
ecstasies, full of danger, and followed by reactions." "It only needs
that a just man should walk in our streets, to make it appear how
pitiful and inartificial a contrivance is our legislation. The man whose
part is taken, and who does not wait for society in anything, has a
power which society cannot choose but feel."
What a character was Sir Isaac Newton! He is described as modest,
candid, and affable, and without any of the eccentricities of genius,
suiting himself to every company, and speaking of himself and others in
such a manner that he was never even suspected of vanity. "But this,"
says Dr. Pemberton, "I immediately discovered in him, which at once both
surprised and charmed me. Neither his extreme great age, nor his
universal reputation, had rendered him stiff in opinion, or in any
degree elated." His modesty arose from the depth and extent of his
knowledge, which showed him what a small portion of nature he had been
able to examine, and how much remained to be explored in the same field
in which he had himself labored. In a letter to Leibnitz, 1675, he
observes, "I was so persecuted with discussions arising out of my theory
of light, that I blamed my own imprudence for parting with so
substantial a blessing as my quiet, to run after a shadow." Nearly a
year after his complaint to Leibnitz, he uses the following remarkable
expression in a communication to Oldenburg: "I see I have made myself a
slave to philosophy; but if I get free of Mr. Linus's business, I will
resolutely bid adieu to it eternally, excepting what I do for my private
satisfaction, or leave to come out after me; for I see a man must either
resolve to put out nothing new, or to become a slave to defend it." His
assistant and amanuensis for five years (Humphrey Newton) never heard
him laugh but once in all that time: "'Twas upon occasion of asking a
friend, to whom he had lent Euclid to read, what progress he had made in
that author, and how he liked him. He answered by desiring to know what
use and benefit in life that study would be to him. Upon which Sir Isaac
was very merry." He was once disordered with pains, at the stomach,
which confined him for some days to his bed, but which he bore with a
great deal of patience and magnanimity, seemingly indifferent either to
live or to die. "He seeing me," said his assistant, "much concerned at
his illness, bid me not trouble myself; 'For if I die,' said Sir Isaac,
'I shall leave you an estate,' which he then for the first time
mentioned." Says Bishop Atterbury, "In the whole air of his face and
make there was nothing of that penetrating sagacity which appears in his
compositions. He had something rather languid in his look and manner,
which did not raise any great expectations in those who did not know
him." When Pope expressed a wish for "some memoirs and character of
Newton, as a private man," he did "not doubt that his life and manners
would make as great a discovery of virtue and goodness and rectitude of
heart, as his works have done of penetration and the utmost stretch of
human knowledge." When Vigani told him "a loose story about a nun," he
gave up his acquaintance; and when Dr. Halley ventured to say anything
disrespectful to religion, he invariably checked him with the remark, "I
have studied these things,--you have not." When he was asked to take
snuff or tobacco, he declined, remarking "that he would make no
necessities to himself." Bishop Burnet said that he "valued him for
something still more valuable than all his philosophy,--for having the
whitest soul he ever knew."
Slowly and modestly the great in all things is developed. "Though the
mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small." Look at the
Netherlands. "Three great rivers--the Rhine, the Meuse, and the
Scheldt--had deposited their slime for ages among the dunes and
sand-banks heaved up by the ocean around their mouths. A delta was thus
formed, habitable at last for man. It was by nature a wide morass, in
which oozy islands and savage forests were interspersed among lagoons
and shallows; a district lying partly below the level of the ocean at
its higher tides, subject to constant overflow from the rivers, and to
frequent and terrible inundations by the sea. Here, within a half
submerged territory, a race of wretched ichthyophagi dwelt upon mounds,
which they had raised, like beavers, above the almost fluid soil. Here,
at a later day, the same race chained the tyrant Ocean and his mighty
streams into subserviency, forcing them to fertilize, to render
commodious, to cover with a beneficent net-work of veins and arteries,
and to bind by watery highways, with the farthest ends of the world, a
country disinherited by nature of its rights. A region outcast of ocean
and earth wrested at last from both domains their richest treasures. A
race engaged for generations in stubborn conflict with the angry
elements was unconsciously educating itself for its great struggle with
the still more savage despotism of man."
In the central part of a range of the Andes, at an elevation of about
seven thousand feet, on a bare slope, may be observed some snow-white
projecting columns. These are petrified trees, eleven being silicified,
and from thirty to forty converted into coarsely crystallized white
calcaraeous spar. They are abruptly broken off, the upright stumps
projecting a few feet above the ground. The trunks measured from three
to five feet each in circumference. They stood a little way apart from
each other, but the whole formed one group. The volcanic sandstone in
which the trees were imbedded, and from the lower part of which they
must have sprung, had accumulated in successive thin layers around their
trunks, and the stone yet retained the impression of the bark. "It
required," says the eminent scientific man who visited the spot in 1835,
"little geological practice to interpret the marvelous story which this
scene at once unfolded. I saw the spot where a cluster of fine trees
once reared their branches on the shores of the Atlantic, when that
ocean, now driven back seven hundred miles, came to the foot of the
Andes. I saw that they had sprung from a volcanic soil which had been
raised above the level of the sea, and that subsequently this dry land,
with its upright trees, had been let down into the depths of the ocean.
In these depths, the formerly dry land was covered by sedimentary beds,
and these again by enormous streams of submarine lava--one such mass
attaining the thickness of a thousand feet; and these deluges of molten
stone and aqueous deposits five times alternately had been spread out.
The ocean which received such thick masses must have been profoundly
deep; but again the subterranean forces exerted themselves, and I now
beheld the bed of that ocean, forming a chain of mountains more than
seven thousand feet in height. Nor had those antagonist forces been
dormant which are always at work, wearing down the surface of the land;
the great piles of strata had been intersected by many wide valleys, and
the trees, now changed into silex, were exposed projecting from the
volcanic soil, now changed into rocks, whence formerly, in a green and
budding state, they had raised their lofty heads."
"The world," said Goethe, "is not so framed that it can keep quiet; the
great are not so that they will not permit misuse of power; the masses
not so that, in hope of a gradual amelioration, they will keep tranquil
in an inferior condition. Could we perfect human nature, we might expect
perfection everywhere; but as it is, there will always be this wavering
hither and thither; one part must suffer while the other is at ease."
"It is with human things," says Froude, "as it is with the great
icebergs which drift southward out of the frozen seas. They swim two
thirds under water, and one third above; and so long as the equilibrium
is sustained you would think that they were as stable as the rocks. But
the sea water is warmer than the air. Hundreds of fathoms down, the
tepid current washes the base of the berg. Silently in those far deeps
the centre of gravity is changed; and then, in a moment, with one vast
roll, the enormous mass heaves over, and the crystal peaks which had
been glancing so proudly in the sunlight are buried in the ocean
forever." "The secret which you would fain keep, as soon as you go
abroad, lo! there is one standing on the door-step to tell you the
same." The revolution is all at once ripe, and the bottom is at the top
again. Nobody and everybody is responsible. "It is seldom," says John
Galt, in his life of Wolsey, "that any man can sway the current of
national affairs; but a wide and earnest system of action never fails to
produce results which resemble the preexpected effects of particular
designs." At the gorgeous coronation of Napoleon, some one asked the
republican general Augereau whether anything was wanting to the splendor
of the scene. "Nothing," replied Augereau, "but the presence of the
million of men who have died to do away with all this."
You remember the value, to the cause of civil liberty and Christianity,
of the accidental epithet of "beggars," applied to the three hundred
nobles who petitioned Margaret of Parma for a stay of the edicts of
Philip and the Inquisition, about to be terribly executed upon the
rebellious Protestants under the leadership of William of Orange.
Motley, in his Dutch Republic, gives a vivid account of it. The duchess
was agitated and irritated by the petition. "The Prince of Orange
addressed a few words to the duchess, with the view of calming her
irritation. He observed that the confederates were no seditious rebels,
but loyal gentlemen, well-born, well-connected, and of honorable
character. They had been influenced, he said, by an honest desire to
save their country from impending danger,--not by avarice or ambition.
'What, madam,' cried Berlaymont in a passion, 'is it possible that your
highness can entertain fears of these beggars? Is it not obvious what
manner of men they are? They have not had wisdom enough to manage their
own estates, and are they now to teach the king and your highness how to
govern the country? By the living God, if my advice were taken, their
petition should have a cudgel for a commentary, and we would make them
go down the steps of the palace a great deal faster than they mounted
them!' Afterward, as the three hundred gentlemen and nobles passed by
the house of Berlaymont, that nobleman, standing at his window in
company with Count Aremberg, repeated his jest: 'There go our fine
beggars again. Look, I pray you, with what bravado they are passing
before us!' 'They call us beggars,' said Brederode to the three hundred
banqueting with him in the Calemburg mansion on that famous April night.
'Let us accept the name. We will contend with the Inquisition, but
remain loyal to the king, even till compelled to wear the beggar's
sack.' He then beckoned to one of his pages, who brought him a leathern
wallet, such as was worn at that day by professional mendicants,
together with a large wooden bowl, which also formed part of their
regular appurtenances. Brederode immediately hung the wallet around his
neck, filled the bowl with wine, lifted it with both hands, and drained
it at a draught. 'Long live the beggars!' he cried, as he wiped his
beard and set the bowl down. 'Long live the beggars!' Then for the first
time from the lips of those reckless nobles rose the famous cry, which
was so often to ring over land and sea, amid blazing cities, on
blood-stained decks, through the smoke and carnage of many a stricken
field. The humor of Brederode was hailed with deafening shouts of
applause. The count then threw the wallet round the neck of his nearest
neighbor, and handed him the wooden bowl. Each guest, in turn, donned
the mendicant's knapsack. Pushing aside his golden goblet, each filled
the beggar's bowl to the brim, and drained it to the beggars' health.
Roars of laughter and shouts of 'Long live the beggars!' shook the walls
of the stately mansion, as they were doomed never to shake again. The
shibboleth was invented. The conjuration which they had been anxiously
seeking was found. Their enemies had provided them with a spell which
was to prove, in after days, potent enough to start a spirit from palace
or hovel, forest or wave, as the deeds of the 'wild beggars,' the 'wood
beggars,' and the 'beggars of the sea' taught Philip at last to
understand the nation which he had driven to madness."
Johnny Appleseed, by which name Jonathan Chapman was known in every
log-cabin from the Ohio River to the Northern Lakes, is an interesting
character to remember. Barefooted, and with scanty clothing, he
traversed the wilderness for many years, planting appleseeds in the most
favorable situations. His self sacrificing life made him a favorite with
the frontier settlers--men, women, and especially children; even the
savages treated him with kindness, and the rattlesnakes, it was said,
hesitated to bite him. "During the war of 1812, when the frontier
settlers were tortured and slaughtered by the savage allies of Great
Britain, Johnny Appleseed continued his wanderings, and was never harmed
by the roving bands of hostile Indians. On many occasions the impunity
with which he ranged the country enabled him to give the settlers
warning of approaching danger, in time to allow them to take refuge in
their block-houses before the savages could attack them. An informant
refers to one of these instances, when the news of Hull's surrender came
like a thunderbolt upon the frontier. Large bands of Indians and British
were destroying everything before them, and murdering defenseless women
and children, and even the block-houses were not always a sufficient
protection. At this time Johnny traveled day and night, warning the
people of the impending danger. He visited every cabin and delivered
this message: 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, and He hath anointed
me to blow the trumpet in the wilderness, and sound an alarm in the
forest; for behold, the tribes of the heathen are round about your
doors, and a devouring flame followeth after them!' The aged man who
narrated this incident said that he could feel even then the thrill that
was caused by this prophetic announcement of the wild-looking herald of
danger, who aroused the family on a bright moonlight midnight with his
piercing cry. Refusing all offers of food, and denying himself a
moment's rest, he traversed the border day and night until he had warned
every settler of the impending peril. Johnny also served as colporteur,
systematically leaving with the settlers chapters of certain religious
books, and calling for them afterward; and was the first to engage in
the work of protecting dumb brutes. He believed it to be a sin to kill
any creature for food. No Brahman could be more concerned for the
preservation of insect life, and the only occasion on which he destroyed
a venomous reptile was a source of long regret, to which he could never
refer without manifesting sadness. He had selected a suitable place for
planting appleseeds on a small prairie, and in order to prepare the
ground, he was mowing the long grass, when he was bitten by a
rattlesnake. In describing the event he sighed heavily, and said, 'Poor
fellow, he only just touched me, when I, in the heat of my ungodly
passion, put the heel of my scythe in him, and went away. Some time
afterward I went back, and there lay the poor fellow, dead!'" "He was a
man, after all,"--Hawthorne might have exclaimed of him, too,--"his
Maker's own truest image, a philanthropic man!--not that steel engine of
the devil's contrivance--a philanthropist!"