There are communities who build, as bees and beavers do, from instinct and natural necessity. There are also, clear-headed, strong, and pious men, worthy to be leaders, who know what they are about, and who have laid their strong hand to the work of cultivation. There are great cities which develop the highest luxury of civilisation, and its highest crimes; who build altars to Mammon, and would make the whole world subservient. There are also small communities which possess themselves of land in the power of the peace principle, and in the name of the Prince of Peace. Lydia Maria Child tells us of such a one, either in Indiana or Illinois. It is a short story, and so beautiful that I must repeat it in her own living and earnest words.
“The highest gifts my soul has received, during its world-pilgrimage, have often been bestowed by those who were poor, both in money and intellectual cultivation. Among these donors, I particularly remember a hard-working uneducated mechanic, from Indiana or Illinois. He told me that he was one of the thirty or forty New Englanders, who twelve years before, had gone out to settle in the western wilderness. They were mostly neighbours; and had been drawn to unite together in emigration from a general unity of opinion on various subjects. For some years previous, they had been in the habit of meeting occasionally at each other's houses to talk over their duties to God and man, in all simplicity of heart. Their library was the gospel, their priesthood the inward light. There were then no anti-slavery societies: but thus taught, and reverently willing to learn, they had no need of such agency to discover that it was wicked to enslave. The efforts of peace societies had reached this secluded band only in broken echoes, and non-resistance societies had no existence. But with the volume of the Prince of Peace, and hearts open to his influence, what need had they of preambles and resolutions?
