The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, August, 1864

APHORISMS.—NO. XIII

It was a frequent exclamation of Herder the Great: 'Oh, my life, that has failed of its ends!' and many of us, no doubt, find ourselves disposed to indulge in the same lament. But it deserves careful attention; no man's life fails of its true end unless through some grievous moral fault of his own.

The true end of life is that we may 'glorify God, and enjoy Him forever.' How this may be attained, as far as outward circumstances or activities are concerned, we can hardly judge for ourselves: but there is one sure test; and that is in the duties of our station. If we honestly perform them, and especially as under the teachings of the gospel of Christ, there can be no real and permanent failure. We shall have done what we were set to do upon the earth; and with this we may well be content.

OUR GREAT AMERICA

The republican government of the United States, when first originated by the fathers of the commonwealth, was regarded by the old fossil despotisms with secret dread and a strange foreboding; and neither the ridicule which they heaped upon it, nor the professed contempt wherewith its name was bandied from throne to throne, could wholly mask their trepidation. They looked upon it, in the privacy of their chambers, as the challenge of a mighty rebellion of the people against all kingly rule and administration; they saw in it the embodiment of those popular ideas of freedom, equality, and self-government, which for so many centuries had been struggling for adequate utterance in England and France, and they knew that the success of this sublime experiment must eventually break asunder the colossal bones of the European monarchies, and establish the new-born democracy upon their ruins.

That they saw truly and judged wisely in these respects, the history of modern Europe, and the current revolutions of our time, bear ample testimony. There is no luck nor chance in human events, but all things follow each other in the legitimate sequences of law. The American republic is no bastard, but a true son and heir of the ages; and sprang forth in all its bravery and promise from the mammoth loins of the very despotism which disowns and denounces it.

We have a full and perfect faith in the mission of this republic, which breaks open a new seal in the apocalypse of government, and unfolds a new phase in the destiny of mankind. Feudalism has had a sufficient trial, and, on the whole, has done its work well. After the dismemberment of the Roman Empire, we do not see how it was possible for society to have assumed any other form than that of kings and princes for rulers, and the people for passive and more or less obedient subjects. It was a great problem to be resolved how society should exist at all, and history gives us the solution of it. Despotism in politics and authority in religion was the grand, primal, leading, and executive idea of it. What learning and culture existed was confined to the guild of the ecclesiastics, and they, for the most part, ruled the rulers as well as the people, by virtue of their intelligence. It required many centuries to usher in the dawn of unfettered thought, and generate the idea of liberty. And when at last the epoch of Protestantism arrived, and Luther, who was the exponent and historical embodiment of it, gathered to its armories the spiritual forces then extant in Europe, and overthrew therewith the immemorial supremacy of kings and priests over the bodies and souls of men, he made all subsequent history possible, and was the planter of nations, and the founder of yet undeveloped civilizations.²

It would, however, be by no means difficult, were it in accordance with our present design and purpose, to show that the first germ of republican liberty sprang into life amid the sedges and savage marshes of uncultivated ages, far remote even from the discovery of America, and trace it through successive rebellions, both of a political and religious character, from and before the times of Wycliffe, down to Oliver Cromwell and George Washington; for all through English history it has left a broad red mark behind it, like the auroral pathway of a conqueror. The first man who prayed without book, and denied the authority of the church over the human soul, as the brave Loilards did, was the pioneer of Protestantism and the father of all the births which ushered this mighty epoch upon the stage of the world; Protestantism, which means so much and includes so many vast emprises—establishing for freedom so grand a battle ground, and for philosophy and learning so wide and magnificent a dominion.

The same spirit which made nonconformists of the first seekers and worshippers of God apart from the churches and cathedrals of Rome, in the sublimer cathedrals of nature, when the Roman hierarchy was master of Europe—made republicans also of the first rebels who resisted the tyranny of kings. Political and religious liberty are the two sides of the democrat idea, and have always marched hand in hand together. They culminated in England during the Commonwealth, and became thenceforth the base and dome of popular government.

The republic of America was born of this idea, and is the last great birth of Protestantism, big already with the destinies of mankind. Here, upon this mighty platform, these destinies, as we believe, have to be wrought out by their final issues, and close the drama of human development. All things are possible for America under the beneficent institutions and laws of the republic, now that the hideous skeleton of black slavery is to pollute the soil no more nor make brother war against brother any more on account of it; and at no distant period the awful conflict which at present shakes the earth with the thunder of its clashing and embattled hosts, shall give lasting place to the interchanges of commerce and the peaceful enterprises of civil life.

It was impossible that American society could hold together with this accursed African vulture eating at its heart. Nor could the aristocratic idea of the South, which slavery had interwoven through every fibre of the people, through all the forms of its social condition, and into all its State laws and institutions, exist side by side with the democratic idea of the North, without an inevitable conflict sooner or later. The present war is but a renewal of the old battles which make up the sum of history, between liberty and despotism, civilization and barbarism. No one can doubt in whose hands will be the victory; and happy will the result be for future generations.

Hitherto we have exhibited to the world the amazing spectacle of a republic which, proclaiming the freedom and equality of every one of its subjects, holds four millions of men in a terrible and appalling bondage. So frightful a mockery of freedom, perpetrated in her great name, and sanctioned by tradition and the authority of law, could not, ought not, be suffered to grin its ghastly laughter in the face of the world. And when the hour was ripe, and the doomsday of the monstrous iniquity was proclaimed aloud by the dreadful Nemesis of God, the people of the free North clothed themselves in the majesty of the nation, and rose as one man to sweep it from the soil in whirlwinds of fire and wrath.

Slavery has been an unmitigated curse to America in every one of its aspects and especially to the South, out of which it has eaten, with its revengeful and retributive teeth, all the vitalities and grandeurs of character which belong to the uncorrupted Anglo-Saxon race. It has destroyed all the incentives to industry, all self-reliance, and enterprise, and the sterner virtues and moralities of life. It has put a ban upon trade and manufactures, and a premium upon indolence. The white population—the poor white trash, as the very negroes call them—are ignorant, brutal, and live in the squalor of savages. It has driven literature and poetry, art and science, from its soil, and robbed religion of all its humanity and beauty. Worse than this, if worse be possible, it has darkened with the shadow of its apparition the minds of the Southerners themselves, and defaced their highest attributes—confounding within them the great cardinal distinctions between right and wrong, until, abandoned by Heaven, they were given over to their own lusts, and to a belief in the lie which they had created under the very ribs of the republic.

We do not speak this as partisans, nor in any spirit of enmity against the South as a political faction. It is the fact which concerns us, and which we deal with as history, and not here and now in any other sense. Nor do we blame the Southern aristocracy for riding so long on the black horse, which has at last thrown and killed them. For proud and insolent as they have ever shown themselves in their bearing toward the North, they were in reality mere pawns on the chessboard of Fate, necessary tools in working out the game of civilization on this continent. Who can calculate the sum of the divine forces which the institution of slavery, and its blasphemous reversion of the commands of the Decalogue, and all its cruel outrages and inhuman crimes, have awakened in the souls of the freemen of the North? The loathsomeness of its example and the infernal malice of its designs against liberty and truth, righteousness and justice, and whatsoever holy principles in life and government the saints, martyrs, and apostles of the ages have won for us, by their agony and bloody sweat upon scaffolds and funeral pyres—regarding them as a cheap purchase, though paid for by such high and costly sacrifices—these appalling instances, we say, have at last produced so powerful a reaction in the national mind that millions of men have marshalled themselves into avenging armies to rid the earth of their presence.

That, too, was fated and necessary, and a part of the predestined programme. The nation could not progress with this corrupting monster in its pathway; and the battle between them has not come an hour too soon. The monster must be exterminated, and that, too, without mercy and without compassion, as the sworn and implacable enemy both of God and man. Otherwise this glorious country, which has so long worn the garland and surging robe of liberty, will become a dungeon of desolation from the Atlantic to the Pacific, resounding only with the shrieks of mandrakes and the clank of chains.

This obstruction removed, there is, as we said above, no height of greatness which the American people may not reach. Then, and then only, shall we begin to consolidate ourselves into a nation, with a distinct organon of principles, feelings, and loyalties, to which the mighty heart and brain of the people shall throb and vibrate in pulsations of sublime unity. At present we are only a people in the making, and very few there are calling themselves Americans who have any idea of what America is and means in relation to history. By and by we shall all apprehend the riddle more wisely, and be more worthy of the great name we bear.

In the meanwhile it is no marvel that we are not a homogeneous people. Our time has not come for that, and may yet lie afar off in the shadowy centuries. Consider how and through what alien sources we have multiplied the original population of the associated colonies as they existed when our fathers raised them to a nationality. There is not a nation in all Europe, to say nothing of Asia and the islands, which is not represented in our blood and does not form a part of our lineage. It is true that the old type predominates, and that we have the virtues and the vices of the Anglo-Saxons in us; but we are far too individual at present, Celt and Dane and Spaniard and Teuton, and all the rest of our motley humanities, will have to be fused into one great Anglo-American race, before we can call ourselves a distinct nation. It took England many centuries to accomplish this work, and fashion herself into the plastic form and comeliness of her present unity and proportion. We, who work at high pressure and make haste in our begettings and growth, can scarcely hope to make a national sculpture at all commensurate with the genius of the people and the continent, in one or two or even half a dozen generations; for we cannot coerce the laws of nature, although it is quite certain, from what we have done, that we can perform anything within the range of possible achievement.

We have all the elements within and around us necessary to constitute a great people. We started on our career with a long background of experience to guide and to warn us. We saw what Europe had done for civilization with her long roll of kings and priests, her despotic governments, and her unequal laws—the people in most cases ciphers, and in all cases ignorant and enslaved—with no room for expansion, and little or no hope of political or social betterment; every inch of liberty, in every direction, which they had gained, wrung from their oppressors piecemeal, in bloody throes of agony.

Our fathers had not the best materials out of which to build up a republic; neither, in all cases, were they themselves sufficiently ripe for the experiment. They had the old leaven of European prejudice largely intermingled in their minds and character. They could not help, it is true, their original make, nor the fashioning which their age, time, and circumstances had put upon them. All this has to be taken into the estimate of any philosophical judgment respecting their performances. But they had learned from the past to trust the present, and to span the future with rainbows of hope. They stood face to face with the people, and each looked into the others' eyes and read there the grounds and sureties of an immortal triumph. Instead, therefore, of resting the supreme power of government in the hands of a person, or a class, making the former a monarch, and creating the other an aristocracy, those grand magistrates and senators of human liberty who framed the Constitution of the new American Nation, made the nation its own sovereign, and clothed it with the authority and majesty of self-government.

A venture so daring, and of an audacity so Titanic and sublime, seemed at that time and long afterward to require the wisdom and omnipotence of gods to guide it over the breakers, and steer it into the calm waters of intelligent government. All the world, except the handful of thinkers and enthusiasts scattered here and there over Europe, was against it, mocked at its bravery and aspirations, and sincerely hoped and believed that some great and sudden calamity would dissolve it like a baleful enchantment. But the hope of the republic was in the people, and they justified the fathers and the institution.

Here, therefore, was opened in all the directions of human inquiry and action a new world of hope and promise. The people were no longer bound by old traditions, nor clogged by any formulas of state religions, nor hampered by the dicta of philosophical authority. Their minds were free to choose or to reject whatever propositions were presented to them from the wide region of speculation and belief. The Constitution was the only instrument which prescribed laws and principles for their unconditional acceptance and guidance; and this was a thing of their own choice, the charter and seal of their liberties, to which they rendered a cheerful and grateful obedience.

With this mighty security for a platform, they pursued their daily avocations in peace, trusting their own souls, and working out the problem of republican society, with a most healthy unconsciousness. Sincere and earnest, they troubled themselves with no social theories, no visions of Utopia, nor dreams of Paradise and El Dorados, leaving the spirit which animated them to build up the architecture of its own cultus, with an unexpressed but perfect faith in the final justice and satisfaction of results.

Religion, therefore, and politics—literature, learning, and art—trade, commerce, manufactures, agriculture—and the amenities of society and manners, were allowed to develop themselves in their own way, without reference to rule and preconcerted dogmas. Hence the peculiarities which mark the institutions of America—their utter freedom from cant and the shows and pageantry of state. Bank, titles, and caste were abolished; and the enormous gulfs which separate the European man from the European lordling were bridged over by Equality with the solid virtues of humanity.

What a stride was here taken over time and space, and the historic records of man, in the fossil formations of the Old World during the ante-American periods! It had come at last, this long-prophesied reign of Apollo and the Muses, of freedom and the rights of man. Afar off, on the summits of imaginative mountains, were beheld, through twilight vistas of night and chaos, the proud ruins of dead monarchies, and the cruel forms of extinct tyrannies and oppressions, crowned and mitred no more; whose mandates had once made the nations tremble, and before whose judgment seats Mercy pleaded in vain, and Justice muffled up her face and sat dumb and weeping in the dust. Over the wolds of their desolation hyenas prowled, snuffing the noisome air as for a living prey; ghouls and vampyres shrieked in hellish chorus, as they tore up forgotten graves; and all manner of hateful and obscure things crawled familiarly in and out of palaces and holy places, as if they were the ghosts of the former inhabitants; and, high above them all, in the bloody light of the setting sun, wheeled kites and choughs and solitary vultures; owls and dismal bats flitting, ever and anon, athwart the shadows of their grim processions.

No matter that this vision was in reality but the symbolism of imagination and poetry, that Europe was not dead, but alive with the struggling vitalities of good and evil, and all those contending forces out of which American freedom was born—the vision itself was not the less true, either as feeling or insight; for Europe was now literally cut adrift from America, and the hopes and aspirations of the young republic were entirely different from hers, and removed altogether from the plane of her orbit and action.

The liberalists and thinkers of the age expected great things from a people thus fortunately conditioned and circumstanced. For the first time in modern history a genuine democratic government was inaugurated and fairly put upon its trial. The horizon of thought was now to be pushed back far beyond the old frontiers into the very regions of the infinite; and a universal liberty was to prevail throughout the length and breadth of the land. No more dead formalities, nor slavish submissions, but new and fuller life, self-reliance, self-development, and the freest individuality. Gladly the people accepted the propositions and principles of their national existence. Not a doubt anywhere of the result; no faltering, no looking back; but brave hearts, everywhere, and bold fronts, and conquering souls. Before them, through the mists of the starry twilight, loomed the mountain peaks and shadowy seas of the unventured and unknown future; and thitherward they pressed with undaunted steps, and with a haughty and sublime defiance of obstructions and dangers; fearing God, doing their best, and leaving the issue in His hands.

We know now, after nearly a hundred years of trial, what that issue in the main is, and whitherward it still tends. During that little breathing time, which, compared with the life of other nations, is but a gasp in the record, what unspeakable triumphs have been accomplished! Nearly a whole continent has been reclaimed from the savage and the wild beasts, and the all-conquering American has paved the wilderness, east, west, north, and south, with high roads—dug canals into its hidden recesses, connected the great Gulf with the far-off West by a vast network of railways and telegraphs—planted cities and villages everywhere, and fashioned the routes of civilization; bound Cape Race to the Crescent City and the Atlantic to the Pacific, sending human thoughts, winged with lightning, across thousands of miles of plains and mountains and rivers, and making neighborly the most distant peoples and the most widely sundered States of the mighty Union. Let any man try to estimate the value of this immense contribution to human history and happiness; let him try to measure the vast extent of empire which it covers, and sum up the mighty expenditure of physical and intellectual labor which has conquered those savage wilds, and converted them into blooming cornfields and orchards; which has built these miraculous cities by the sea, and made their harbors populous with native ships and the marine of every nation under heaven; those busy inland cities, the hives of manufacturing industry and the marts of a commerce which extends over all the regions of civilization, from the rising to the setting sun; those innumerable towns of the great corn-growing districts; those pleasant hamlets and pastoral homes which fringe the forest, and girdle the mountains as with the arms of human affection and the passion of love; those mills on the far-off rivers, whose creaking machinery and revolving wheels are the prelude of a yet unborn, but rapidly approaching civility, and whose music, heard by the right ears, is of the divinest depth and diapason, and in full concord with the immeasurable orchestra of triumph and rejoicing which the nation celebrates in the perpetual marches of her starry progress.

No man can compass this vast dominion, and no intellect can plumb its soundings or prophesy of its upshot. Who could have foretold what has already happened on this continent, had he stood with the Pilgrim Fathers on Plymouth Rock, that memorable day of the landing? Looking back to that great epoch in American history, we have no dim regions of antiquity to traverse, no mythic periods as of Memnon and the Nile, but a mere modern landscape, so to speak, shut in by less than two centuries. And yet what unspeakable things are included in that brief period! If we have made such vast strides and so rapid a development in those few years of our national life, with the heterogeneous and unmalleable materials with which we had to deal, converting the filth of Europe into grass and flowers for the decoration of the republic, what may we not achieve hereafter, when this dreadful war is over, and the negro question is adjusted, and the sundered States are reunited, and the Western wilderness is clothed with the glory of a perfect cultivation, and the genius of the people, no longer trammelled by Southern despotism, shall have free room to wing its flight over the immeasurable future?

There will be no likeness, in any mirror of the past, to the American civilization that is to be. New manners, customs, thinkings, literature, art, and life, will mark our progress and attest the mission of the nation. We are fast outgrowing the ideas and influences of that brave company of Puritans out of whose loins our beginning proceeded; and already each man goes alone, insular, self-reliant, and self-sustained. We owe the Puritans a large debt, but it is altogether a pretty fiction to call them the founders of American civilization. They helped to lay in the foundation stones of that early society, and kept them together by cementing them with their love of religious truth and liberty, so far as they understood these primal elements of a state; and we are likewise their debtors for the integrity which they put into their laws and government. But it is too high a demand to claim for them that they were the founders of the republic, and the originators of those great ideas which are embodied in our institutions and literature.

They came to this country with no very enlarged notions, either of religion or freedom, although they were perfectly sincere in their professions of regard for both; and it was this very sincerity which gave solidity and permanence to their colonies. We suppose we may repeat what history has made notorious respecting them, that they were, both in belief and civil practice, very narrow and limited in their outlooks—by no means given to intellectual speculations—and with but little faith in the intellect itself—which, indeed, was proscribed as a sort of outlaw when it stood upon its own authority, outside the pale of their church. The religion which they established had its origin in the reign of Elizabeth, and was a sort of revived Lollardism, which last dated as far back as Wycliffe, long before the Reformation. They thought they could worship God in conventicles, and in the great open-air cathedrals of nature, with quite as much purity of motive and heavenly acceptance as in regularly consecrated churches, and that the right of praying and preaching was inalienable, and secured to all godly men by the charter and seal of Calvary.

They had no idea, however, of non-conformity which was not based upon an orthodox creed, upon their creed, as they subscribed it on Plymouth Rock. They fled from persecution themselves, and sought freedom for themselves in the barren regions of our dear and now hospitable New England; and they, in their simplicity and good faith before God, sought to organize a system of civil and religious polity which should incrust all future generations, and harden them into a fossil state of perpetual orthodoxy.

They were a stern, implacable race, these early fathers, in all that related to belief, and the discipline of moral conduct; and we owe many of the granite securities which lie at the bottom of our social life and government to this harsh and unyielding sternness. It held the framework of the colonies together until they were consolidated into the United States, and until the modern culture of the people relaxed it into a universal liberty of thought and worship.

The Puritans, however, had no notion of such a result to their teachings and labors; and would have looked with pious horror upon them if they could have beheld them in some Agrippa's mirror of the future.

The truth—unpalatable as it may be—is simply this about the Puritans: they were narrow-minded, bigoted, and furious at times with the spirit of persecution; sincerely so, it is true, and believing they did God service; but that does not alter the fact. They had no conception of the meaning of liberty—and especially of religious liberty as a development of Protestantism. Their idea of it was liberty for themselves—persecution to all who differed from them; and this, too, for Christ's sake, in order that the lost sheep might be brought back, if possible, to their bleak and comfortless folds. They could not help it; they meant no wrong by it, and the evil which they thus did was good in the making, and sprang from the bleeding heart of an infinite love.

We like them, nevertheless; and cannot choose but like them, thinking it generous and loving to invest them with as much poetry as we can command from the wardrobes of the imagination. But we can never forgive them—in critical moods—for their inhuman, although strictly logical persecution of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who represented in his person all the liberal-thoughts-men, both in religion and speculation, then existing on this continent.

This man of capacious intellect and most humane heart was hunted by them out of the associated colonies, as if he had been some ferocious beast of prey, because he differed from them in his religious opinions; and this drove him to found a state in accordance with the most liberal interpretation of Christianity. He had more than once, by his influence with the Indians, saved them from a general massacre; but their theological hate of him was so intense that they would not allow him to pass through their territories on a necessary journey; and once, on his return from England, where he had been negotiating with ministers for their benefit, they capped the climax of their bigoted ingratitude by refusing him permission even to land on their soil, lest his holy feet should pollute it.

It is a little too much, therefore, to say that all our ideas of liberty and religion have sprung from this stout race of persecutors. They were pioneers for us, bu nothing more. Our progress has been the untying of their old cords of mental oppression, and the undoing of many things which they had set up. This was so much rubbish to be moved out of the path of the nation, and by no means aids to its advancement, except as provocatives. What we now are, we have become by our own culture and development, and by the inflowing of those great modern ideas which have affected all the world, and helped to build up its civilization into such stately proportions.

Puritanism, as it then existed in its exclusive power, is, to all intents and purposes, dead upon this continent. The form of it still lingers in our midst, it is true, and in the Protestant parts of Europe its ritual survives, and pious hearts, which would be pious in spite of it, still cling to its dead corpse as if it were alive, and kindle their sacred fires upon the altar of its wellnigh forsaken sanctuaries. We should count it no gain to us, however—the extinction of this old and venerable faith—if we had no high and certain assurance that a nobler and sublimer religion was reserved for our consolation and guidance. We cannot afford, in one sense, to give up even the semblances and shows of religion, and these will survive until the new dayspring from on high shall supersede the necessity of their existence. 'Take care,' said Goethe, in some such words as these, 'lest, in letting the dead forms of religion go, you sacrifice all reverence and worship, and thus lose religion itself!' There is great danger of this in the transition state of human thought and speculation which marks the present crisis of American history. We are not a religious people, and shall not present any development of that sort until the intellectual reaction which has set in among us against the old modes and organons of belief has exhausted the tests of its crucibles, and reduced the dross to a residuum of gold which shall form the basis of a new and sacred currency, acceptable to all men for the highest interchanges.