Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/439

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HOMES OF THE NEW WORLD.425

I can never celebrate a more beautiful thanksgiving festival. And never shall I forget this moment.


I must yet add a few words about the State and the city in which I am a happy guest. The wealthy, beautiful Ohio is placed like the heart in that great group of States between the Eastern Ocean and the Mississippi. And although this State is one of the youngest in the Union, I feel that a more central life stirs here than in any of the States which I have hitherto visited. It seems to me as if people here wished with unprejudiced minds to do justice to all powers and tendencies of humanity, and to allow every one his proper share of the heart's life and blood. Among the facts of this class I place the Medical College here, under the direction of an intellectual young man, Dr. J. Buchanan, and in which Alloeopathy and Homœopathy, Hydropathy, and the so-called Botanical Medicine, are admitted and studied as natural methods in nature's sanitary-code, and all as serviceable in certain diseases and circumstances; all as necessary in a comprehensive system of study of health and disease. Buchanan makes man the measure of the universe and its centre. He sees the centre of man in the human brain, and from that point strikes out an infinite, glorious future, in which all those infinite possibilities now slumbering within it, will develope themselves into life and harmony on earth and in the universe. Amid severe daily labour and many anxieties he reposes in this view, as in the sabbath-festival of his spirit.

Among the facts of this class I place Oberlin College, where the youth of coloured as well as white people, both boys and girls, study, and take degrees in all those branches of knowledge which are taught in the American academies.

Among these I place the works and opinions of many distinguished men, who are occupied in organising a more