they manifest the wisdom of Pope's maxim about the danger of a little
learning. Adopting the cant and slang phrases of the hour, and satisfied
with the hasty conjectures and partial glimpses of truth that diurnal
journals usually contain, they are at once superficial and dogmatic, full
of fragmentary ideas and oracular commonplace. If such is the natural
effect upon an undisciplined mind of exclusive newspaper reading, even the
scholar, the thinker, and the man of refined taste is exposed to mental
dissipation from the same cause. A celebrated French philosopher, recently
deceased, remarkable for severe and efficient mental labour, told an
American friend that he had not read a newspaper for four years. It is
incalculable what productiveness of mind and freshness of conception is
lost to the cultivated intellect by the habit of beginning the day with
newspapers. The brain, refreshed by sleep, is prepared to act genially in
the morning hours; and a statistical table, prepared by an able
physiologist, shows that those authors who give this period to labour,
most frequently attain longevity. Scott is a memorable example of the
healthfulness and efficiency attending the practice. If, therefore, the
student, the man of science, or the author dissipates his mental vigour,
and the nervous energy induced by a night's repose, in skimming over the
countless topics of a newspaper, he is too much in relation with things in
general to concentrate easily his thoughts: his mind has been diverted,
and his sympathies too variously excited, to readily gather around a
special theme. Those intent upon self-culture, or intellectual results,
should, therefore, make this kind of reading a pastime, and resort to it
in the intervals of more consecutive thought. There is no element of
civilization that debauches the mind of our age more than the
indiscriminate and exclusive perusal of newspapers. Only by consulting
history, by disciplining the reasoning powers in the study of philosophy,
and cherishing a true sense of the beautiful by communion with the
poets,--in a word, only by habitual reference to standard literature, can
we justly estimate the record of the hour. There must be great examples in
the mind, great principles of judgment and taste, or the immediate appeal
to these qualities is ignorantly answered; whereas, the thoughtful,
intelligent comments of an educated reader of journals upon the questions
they discuss, the precedents he brings in view, and the facts of the past
to which he refers, place the immediate in relation with the universal,
and enable us to seize upon essential truth. To depend for mental
recreation upon newspapers is a desperate resource; not to consult them is
to linger behind the age. De Tocqueville has shown that devotion to the
immediate is characteristic of republics; and this tendency is manifest in
the prevalence of newspapers in the United States. They, in a great
measure, supersede the demand for a more permanent native literature; they
foster a taste for ephemeral topics and modes of thought, and lamentably
absorb, in casual efforts, gifts and graces of mind which, under a
different order of things, would have attained not only a higher, but a
lasting development. The comparative importance of newspapers among us, as
materials of history, is evidenced by the fact that the constant
reference to their files has induced the historical societies to propose
an elaborate index to facilitate the labours of inquirers, which has been
felicitously called a diving-bell for the sea of print. A list of the
various journals now in existence would be found to include not only every
political party and religious sect in the country, but every theory of
life, every science, profession, and taste, from phrenology to dietetics,
and from medicine, war, and odd-fellowship, to literature, catholicism,
and sporting. Tribunals and punsters, not less than fashion and
chess-players, have their printed organ. What was a subordinate element,
has become an exclusive feature. 'In those days,' writes Lamb, 'every
morning-paper, as an essential retainer to its establishment, kept an
author who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty paragraphs at
sixpence a joke.' Now _Punch_ and _Charivari_ monopolize the fun, and
grave and gay are separately embodied. The cosmopolitan nature of the
people would as obviously appear in the number of journals issued in
foreign languages, each nation and tribe having its newspaper organ; and
an analysis of the contents, even of one popular journal for a single
year, would be found to touch the entire circle of human knowledge and
vicissitude, without penetrating to a vital cause, or expanding to a
comprehensive principle, yet affording a boundless horizon;--astronomical
phenomena, _causes célèbres_, earthquakes, the advent of a great
_cantatrice_, shipwrecks and revolutions, battles and bankruptcies,
freshets and fires, _émeutes_ and hailstorms, gold discoveries,
anniversaries, executions, Arctic expeditions, World's Fairs, the
utterance of patriots, and the acts of usurpers; all the materials of
history, the suggestions of philosophy, and the visions of poetry, in
their chaotic, elemental, and actual state. It is evident that more
excitement than truth, more food for curiosity than aid to reflection,
more vague knowledge than actual wisdom, is thus promulgated and
preserved. The harvest of the immediate is comparatively barren; and life
only proves the truth of Dr. Johnson's association of intellectual dignity
with the past and future. The individual, to be true to himself, must take
a firm stand against the encroachments of this restless, temporary, and
absorbing life of the moment represented by the newspaper; he must cleave
to Memory and Hope; he must look before and after, or his mind will be
superficial in its activity, and fruitless in its growth.
There is no mechanical invention around which cluster such interesting
associations as that of printing; the indirect agency of the press and of
journalism is remarkable; and this is owing to the relation they bear to
the world at large, and to personal improvement. The newspaper office has
always been a nucleus for wits, politicians, and literati,--a nursery of
local genius, and a school for knowledge of the world, and criticism. In
Franklin's autobiography, the natural effect of even a mechanical
connection with the press is memorably unfolded; and scarcely a great name
in modern history is unallied with some incident or activity connected
with the daily press. Otis, Adams, Hancock, and Warren, used to meet at
the office of the _Boston Gazette_, and write essays on colonial rights in
its columns. Talleyrand and Louis Philippe frequented the sanctum of an
editor in the same town, to read the _Moniteur_ and discuss news.
Chateaubriand first heard of the king's flight from a stray newspaper
picked up in a log hut in the backwoods of America; and it sent him back
at once to the army of the Princes. Horne Tooke's _Diversions of Purley_
were written to beguile his imprisonment occasioned by a libel; and his
trial resulted in making parliamentary reports legal. Hunt's prison-life,
for which he was indebted to his comments on the Prince-Regent in the
_Examiner_, is the most charming episode in his memoirs; and some of the
noblest flights of Erskine's eloquence arose from the defence of those
prosecuted for constructive treason based on the free expression of
opinion in regard to public questions. Jefferson thought Freneau's paper
'prevented the Constitution from galloping into a monarchy;' it was in the
columns of a daily journal that Hamilton defended the proclamation of
neutrality. It has been said that the most reliable history of the French
Revolution, and wars of the Republic, could be gleaned from the pages of
an American journal of the day, conducted by a man of political knowledge
and military aptitude, who combined from various prejudiced foreign papers
what he deemed an authentic narrative of each act in the drama; and it is
certain that the best account of the massacre and the destruction of the
tea--from which dates our Revolution--are to be found in the contemporary
newspapers. Never was contemporary history so copiously and minutely
written as in the newspaper annals of the war for the Union. In fact, the
best history thereof has been compiled by an assiduous collator from
current journalism. The history of censorship in Europe in modern times is
the history of opinion, of freedom, and of society. We felt the despotism
of the King of Naples in all its baseness, only when a writer of genius
told us, with a sigh, that he had been driven to natural history as the
only subject upon which he could expatiate in print without impediment.
Thus we see how the fate of nations and the experience of individuals are
associated with the press; and how its influence touches the whole circle
of life,--evoking genius, kindling nations, informing fugitives, and
alarming kings.
PREACHERS.
'It is neither the vote nor the laying on of hands that gives men the
right to preach. One's own heart is authority. If he cannot preach to
edification, he is not authorized, though all the ministers of
Christendom ordain him.'
Thus writes a popular preacher of the conservative sect in theology:
recognizing a spiritual fact and conviction which tempts us to analyze and
define, as a subject of natural history, the function and fame of the
preacher. The term by its derivation is the most generic word to indicate
clerical vocation; 'to say before,' to proclaim, inculcate, preach; in
other words, to be the herald and representative of truth, right, faith,
and immortal hope,--such is the basis and logical claim of the preacher's
authority, under whatever form, creed, or character. They may be divided
into the inspired, the ascetic, the jovial, the belligerent, the finical,
the shrewd, and the ingenuous. The 'oily man of God' described by Pope,
Scott's Covenanter, and Friar Tuck, the disinterested Vicar of Fielding,
Shakspeare's good friars and ambitious cardinals, Mawworm, Mrs. Inchbald's
Dorimel, the gentle hero of the Sexton's Daughter, Manzoni's Prelate and
Capuchin, and Mrs. Radcliffe's Monks, are genuine and permanent types,
only modified by circumstances. All that is subtle in artifice, all that
is relentless in the love of power, all that is exalted in spiritual
graces, all that is base in cunning, glorious in self-sacrifice, beautiful
in compassion, and noble in allegiance, has been and is manifest in the
priest. His great distinction is based upon the fact that 'the church,
rightly ministered, is the vestibule to an immortal life.' He is at once
the author of the worst tyranny and the grandest amenities of social life.
The traveller on Alpine summits blesses the name of St. Bernard, and
descends to Geneva to shudder at the bigoted ferocity of Calvin. The
picture of the good pastor in the _Deserted Village_, and Ranke's _Lives
of the Popes_, give us the two extremes of the character. The spiritual
heroism of Luther, the religious gloom of Cowper, and the cheerful
devotion of Watts, are but varied expressions of one feeling, which,
according to the frail conditions of humanity, has its healthy and its
morbid phase, its authentic and its spurious exposition, and is no more to
be confounded in its original essence with its imperfect development and
representatives, than the pure light of heaven with the accidental mediums
which colour and distort its rays.
The _prestige_ of the clerical office is greatly diminished because many
of its prerogatives are no longer exclusive. 'When ecclesiasticism became
so weak as to be unable to regulate international affairs, and was
supplanted by diplomacy, in the castle the physician was more than a rival
for the confessor, in the town the mayor was a greater man than the
abbot.'[39] The clergy, at a former period, were the chief scholars;
learning was not less their distinction than sanctity. In every
intelligent community, this source of influence is now shared with men of
letters; and even the once peculiar office of public instruction, is now
filled by the lecturer, who takes an evening from the avocations of
business or professional life, to claim intellectual sympathy or impart
individual opinions. But the great agent in breaking up the monopoly of
the pulpit has been the press. Written has in a great measure superseded
oral thought. Half the world are readers, and the necessity of hearing no
longer exists to those desirous of knowledge. The sermons of the old
English divines abound with classical learning and comments on the times,
such as are now sought in periodical literature. In Latimer, Andrews, and
Donne, we find such hints of the prevailing manners as subsequently were
revealed by _The Spectator_. The philosophy of antiquity and the morals of
courts, the facts of distant climes, all that we now seek in popular books
and the best journals, came to the minds of our ancestors through the
discourses of preachers. American ministers, prior to and at the era of
the Revolution, were the expositors of political as well as religious
sentiments. Independent of the priestly rites, therefore, a clergyman, in
past times, represented social transitions, and ministered to intellectual
wants, for which we of this age have adequate provision otherwise; so that
the most zealous advocate of reform, doctrine, or ethical philosophy, is
no longer obliged to have recourse to the sacerdotal office, in order to
reach the public mind. This apparent diminution of the privileges of the
order, however, does not invalidate but rather simplifies its claims. In
this as in so many other functions of the social economy, progress has the
effect of reducing to its original elements the duties and the influence
of the profession. Education, once their special responsibility, and
popular enlightenment on the questions of the hour, being assumed by
others, the preacher is free to concentrate his abilities on theology and
the religious sentiment. Division of labour gives him a better opportunity
to be 'clear in his great office.' It is reduced to its normal state.
Except in isolated and newly-settled communities, there is not that
incessant appeal to his benevolence and erudition: to heal the sick,
reconcile litigants, argue civic questions, teach the elements of science,
promote charities; in a word, to be the village orator and social oracle,
are not the indispensable requisites of a clergyman's duty which they were
before the Newspaper and the Lyceum existed. He is, therefore, at liberty
to imitate the apostles of Christianity and the fathers of the church, and
bring all his power to awaken devotion and faith, and all his learning to
the defence of sacred truth. That the time and capacity of the profession
are diffused, and the sympathy of its members enlisted in behalf of other
than these aims, is, indeed, true; but this is a voluntary and not an
inevitable result, and only proves that the spirit of the age overlays
instead of being penetrated and ruled by the priestly office.
'Civilization,' says Lamartine, 'was of the sanctuary. Kings were only
concerned with acts; ideas belonged to the priest.' And, by a singular
contradiction, with the general progress of society, the same class, as a
whole, have proved the most antagonistic to innovation even in the form of
genius, whose erratic manifestations are jealously regarded as
inconsistent with professional decorum. Hence Byron, in one of his
splenetic moods, exclaimed to Trelawney: 'When did parsons patronize
genius? If one of their black band dares to think for himself, he is
drummed out or cast aside like Sterne and Swift.' On the other hand,
venerable physicians say that the clergy are the most efficient promoters
of medical innovations; and that quackery owes its social _prestige_ in no
small degree to their countenance.
After the Reformation, this office, as such, lost its specialty; the right
to exercise it was no longer peculiar; and in all societies and epochs,
when a great activity of the religious sentiment, or an earnest discussion
of questions of faith prevailed, men prayed, sermonized, commented on
Scripture, and mingled all the duties of the clerical vocation with their
own pursuits. Thus the English statesmen of Cromwell's time were versed in
divinity, exhorted, and published tracts in behalf of their creeds.
Theology was a popular study; and the kingdom swarmed with lay-preachers.
Sects, too, repudiated official leaders; and even among the Pilgrim
Fathers of New England, ministers betrayed a jealousy of encroachments on
the part of their unconsecrated brethren. Many Christians also recognized
spiritual gifts as the exclusive credentials of a priesthood. Church, not
less than State prerogatives were challenged by republican zeal; and the
historical authority of the order being thus openly invaded, a new and
more rational test was soon applied, and preachers, like kings, were made
amenable to the tribunal of public opinion, and obliged to rest their
claims on other than traditional or educational authority. 'On conserva,'
says Rochambeau, writing of American society at the period of the
Revolution, 'au ministre du culte le première place dans les repas
publics; il bénissoit le repas; mais ses prérogatives ne s'entendoient pas
plus loin dans la société.[40] Cet exposé,' he adds, evidently in view of
priestly corruption in France, 'doit amener naturellement des moeurs
simples et pures.'[41] 'They,' says the historian of preachers at the time
of the Revolutionary war, 'dealt in no high-sounding phrases of liberty
and equality; they went to the very foundations of society, showed what
the rights of man were, and how those rights became modified when men
gathered into communities. The profound thought and unanswerable
arguments, found in these sermons, show that the clergy were not a whit
behind the ablest statesmen of the day in their knowledge of the great
science of human government. In reading them one gets at the true pulse of
the people, and can trace the steady progress of the public sentiment.
The rebellion in New England rested on the pulpit, received its strongest
impulse, indeed its moral character, from it; the teachings of the pulpit
of Lexington caused the first blow to be struck for American
independence.'
The tendency of all the so-called liberal professions is to limit and
pervert the development of character, by giving to knowledge a technical
shape, and to thought a prescriptive action. Conformity to a specific
method is unfavourable to original results, and organization often does
injustice to its subjects. Only the strong men, the brave, and the highly
endowed, rise above such restrictions. It is a kind of social necessity
alone which reconciles the man of scientific genius to seek the passport
of a medical diploma,--the logician to exert his mind exclusively before a
legal tribunal, and the votary of religious truth to sign a creed and
become responsible to a congregation. How constantly each breaks away from
his respective sphere to expatiate in the broad kingdom of letters! Would
Humboldt have written the _Cosmos_ had his life been confined to a
laboratory, or a round of medical practice? Would Burke have theorized in
so comprehensive a range if chained to an attorney's desk, or Sir Henry
Vane's martyrdom acquired a holier sanction from the mere title of priest?
At the first glance, so distinct are the phases of the office that it is
difficult to realize its identity. The ideal of a village pastor like
Oberlin, self-devoted, in a secluded district, to the most pure and
benevolent enterprise,--the life of a Jesuit missionary in Canada or Peru,
who seems to incarnate the fiery zeal of the church he represents,--the
complacent bishop of the Establishment, listlessly going through a
prescribed form, and his very person embodying worldly prosperity; and the
inelegant but earnest Methodist swaying the multitude at a camp-meeting in
the wilds of America,--consider the vast contrast of the pictures: the
dark robe, lonely existence, and subtle eye of the Catholic; the simple,
friendly, conscientious toil of the poor vicar; the scholarship and good
dinners of the English bishop; the cathedral decked with the trophies of
art, and fields lit up by watch-fires; the silence of the Quaker assembly,
and the loud harangue and frantic moans of the 'revival;' the solemn
refinement of the Episcopal, the intellectual zeal of the Unitarian, and
the gorgeous rites of the Roman worship; and an uninformed spectator, to
whom each was a novelty, would imagine that a totally diverse principle
was at work. To the philosophic eye, the ceremonies, organization,
costume, rites, and even creeds of Christian sects, are but the varied
manifestations of a common instinct, more or less mingled with other human
qualities, and influenced in its development by time and place. Traced
back to its source, and separated from incidental association, we find a
natural sentiment of religion which is represented in social economy by
the preacher. Simple as was the original relation between the two,
however, in the process of time it has become so complicated that it now
requires no ordinary analytical power to divest the idea of the priest
from history, and that of religion from the church, so as to perceive both
as facts of human nature instead of parts of the machinery of civilized
life. To do this, indeed, we look inward, and derive from consciousness
the great idea of a religious sentiment; and then ask ourselves how far it
is justly represented in the institutions of the church and the persons of
her ministers. Let this process be tried by a man of high endowments,
genuine aspirations, and noble sympathies, and what is the result?
'Milton,' says Dr. Johnson, in his life of that poet, 'grew old without
any visible worship,' a phrase which, considering the superstition of the
writer, and the exalted devotional sentiment of the subject, has, to our
minds, a most pathetic significance. It tacitly admits that Milton
worshipped his Maker; it brings him before us in a venerable aspect, at
the time when he was blind, proscribed, and indigent; we recall his image
at the organ, and seem to catch the symphonies of _Paradise Lost_ and the
_Hymn on the Nativity_; and yet we are told by the greatest votary of
religious forms and profession among English literary men--one who was
oppressed by the sense of religious truth, and a slave to church
requirements, that, in his old age, the reverential bard had no 'visible
worship.' It is an admission of great moment; it is a fact infinitely
suggestive. Why did not Milton practically recognize any organized church,
or publicly enact any prescribed form? Not altogether because he had
tasted of persecution, and been driven, by the force of individual
opinion, away from popular rites; but also, and to a far greater degree,
because he had so fully experienced within himself the force and scope of
the religious sentiment, and found in its prevalent representation, not an
incitement, but a hindrance to its exercise.