The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 08/Discourse 5
V.
A SERMON OF THE MORAL DANGERS INCIDENT TO PROSPERITY.—PREACHED AT THE MUSIC HALL, IN BOSTON, ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1854.
“Because they have no changes, therefore they fear not God.”—Psalm lv. 19.
This morning I ask your attention to “A Sermon of
the Moral Dangers which are Incident to a State of
long-continued Prosperity.”
By prosperity, I mean the present success of schemes
which we form for our material purposes. The ambitious
man wants power; the acquisitive, money; the vain,
admiration; the nation wants numbers, riches, wide territory,
commercial and military power. When they succeed
in these desires, they attain prosperity. It is the effect of
this condition of success on the formation of a moral
character which I ask you to consider.
The human race does not thrive very well under circumstances where Nature does too much for us: man becomes
an animal, or a plant; not also to the same extent a spirit,
with the power to do, to be, and to suffer what becomes a man.
In physical geography, there are two extremes equally
unfavourable for the higher development of man; namely,
the equatorial region, where Nature does too much; and
the polar region, where she does too little. No high
civilization adorns the equatorial day; none such blooms
in the polar night. And so there are two analogous
extremes in the geography of human condition;—polar misfortune, equatorial prosperity. To the eye of man,
very little lofty manhood ever comes from the frozen ring
wherein are hedged the beggar and the thief, where
——“To be born and die
Makes up the sum of human history.”
And little comes also from the tropic zone of excessive affluence. I say it is so to the mind of man; but the mind of God takes in alike the circumstances of both, and allows for such as perish on hills of gold, or hills of snow, and doubtless has a compensation somewhere for all that is anywhere suffered by success or by disappointment.
It is a very wise prayer, in the Book of Proverbs—suiting either latitude—“Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me; lest I be full, and deny Thee, and say, Who is the Lord? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain.”
It seems comparatively easy to understand the peril of want, of distress, of cold and hunger. Yet it is difficult, adequately, to appreciate all these—the squalidness of want, the misery of human life, when reduced to its lowest terms of physical misfortune and material barrenness. But that is far easier than to calculate the effects of continual success. Prosperity is not a good schoolmaster to produce the higher forms of character. For that life must be discipline even more than it is delight. Give a man all that he asks for, and he ruins himself. So under God's providence we are often thwarted and checked by the material and the human world, while we learn the use and beauty of both. Contrary to the wishes of the town and the family, some angel is always troubling the water, that impotent folk may be healed thereby. If continually successful, we grow rash, heedless, vain-glorious, and overconfident. It is stormy seas which breed good sailors, who in stout ships outride the tempest. What a sad world it would be if there were no winter, never a storm! Man would be a mere butterfly, and no more. Adam was turned out of Eden, says the Hebrew mythology, and the Christians mourn thereat. It was his first step towards heaven. He “fell through sin,” did he? He fell upward, and by his proper motion has been ever since ascending in laborious flight. It was the tree of spiritual life,
——“Whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe.”
It is amazing how much we need the continual check of failure and disappointment. When the body is over-fed, leanness devours the soul; there is sleekness of flesh, but no great growth of character; the mouth stops the mind. With too many favours we are not thankful. Gratitude is one of the rarest of virtues; the boy does not think so; the man knows it. She comes rather late to the feast of Christian graces, after all that sweet sisterhood have sat down to meat. Gratitude is a nice touch of beauty added last of all to the countenance, giving a classic beauty, an angelic loveliness, to the character. But in our present stage of growth, gratitude to men for their services is by no means common: and thankfulness to God is oftener expressed by the fasting than the feasted. We have a lively sense of favours to come, but humanity is not yet rich enough, nor well enough bred, to be very thankful for what we have in hand. It is only when the well is dry that we appreciate the worth of water, and the first return thereof brings thanks—which soon dry up and perish. How grateful we should be if we could get the bird in the bush; that in the hand is an old thing not worth thinking of. In gaol, Pharaoh's chief butler courts Joseph; but when restored to honour, it is written, “neither did the chief butler remember Joseph, but forgat him.” The boy at college—prosperous, high in his class, welcomed to the society of rich men’s sons, and often associating with their daughters—soon forgets the plain-clad sister at Manchester or Lowell, whose toil gave the poor boy his scanty outfit; he feels small gratitude for that tender hand which pushed his little shallop from the shore, and set him afloat on the academic sea, whether her nightly prayer and daily toil attend his now thoughtless voyaging. But when sick, deserted by the gilded, fickle butterfly, which drew his puerile eyes and idle thought, he falls back on the sisterly heart which beats so self-denyingly for him. The Hebrews, settled in their land of hills and valleys, forgot the high hand and outstretched arm which brought them forth from the house of bondage in Egypt, whose unleavened bread and bitter herbs were a healthier sacrament than Canaan's milk and honey. How strange it seems! but look through any village or family, and you see in brief what the world's history has writ on its vast pages, blazoned in luxury and in war.
Man is so little advanced, as yet, in his higher culture, that he must be fed with the utmost caution. A hearty draught of prosperity turns our head; and so God feeds us as yet with milk, and not with strong manly success; else we should perish. One day the average life of man will be a hundred years, I doubt not, and
“Fever and ague, jaundice and catarrh,
The grim-looked Tyrant's heavy horse of ar,
And Apoplexies, those light troops of Death,
That use small ceremony with the breath,”
will be put to rout, and early death be as strange to men as nakedness and famine are to you and me. But we cannot bear it now. If the average life of man were all at once lengthened only twenty years in this present generation; if what it costs us ten hours' sore toil to accomplish could now all at once be achieved in a single hour, or “miraculously” given, it would be a misfortune to mankind; our heads would be giddy, and we should perish. “Neither yet now are ye able,” quoth Paul to his new converts; “I have fed you with milk, and not with meat;” and the great God does the same to His little children here below.
The savage in the tropics contents him with the spontaneous products of Nature. He is filled with the earth's fruits and satisfied with her beauty; he goes no further. Wherever Nature is an indulgent mother, she finds man a slothful and a lazy son.
The successful man, in general, cultivates only the easy virtues which come mainly of their own accord; nay, he often welcomes the easier vices which we are so swift to learn. Samson need not fear the Philistines; it is in Delilah’s lap his head is shorn of its crispy strength; her amorous fingers are more terrible to him than all the gods of Philistia, “the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.” It is often the soft hand which wounds to death. With the winter to oppose him, Hannibal stormed the Alps, and carried them; but with the summer for his ally, his “invincible Carthaginians” and elephants fell and perished in wealthy Capua. How many a Sir John Franklin has gone to pieces, made shipwreck and perished, amid the delicate luxuries of London, Paris, Boston, and New York, and no exploring expedition, no adventurous Captain Kane, was sent out after him; in vain his wife has spent the last farthing of her estate, and found no trace of the man who had perished in the city's worse than snow.
It is a thin soil which bears the richest grapes; men make it poorer, covering the surface with slate stone “to draw the sun.” Peru yields silver and gold; it is a poor country. New England bears nothing but granite, timber, and ice, which we make into men; it is the richest of all lands the sun shines upon. Freedom grows in poor Wisconsin, in cold New England; but in the fat plains of Mississippi and Alabama, slaves and slave-masters only mingle and multiply and rot.
Sons of rich men very seldom get the best of even mere intellectual education. It is said that, for four generations, no man in England, who has inherited two hundred pounds a year, has become eminent as a lawyer or physician. Money commands the college, libraries—“tall copies” and “best editions” of costly books—time, and tutors; but poverty commands Industry, and she is the mother of Culture. Nay, well-born Genius is the child of Time and Misfortune; the star which heralds his birth goes before the wise men, and when it stops, “stands still over a stable.” The great God knows best what cradling to give his child, and it is easier for the sun of the soul to climb over mountains of ice than to transcend the little hills of gold and silver. Apollo, so the old myth relates, was inimically sold as a slave to King Admetus, who set him in hard service to tend the sheep and cows and swine, whereat his goddess-sister mourned. If his foes had wished to take the soul of poetry out of him, they had done better to have set him in a palace,
“To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neœra’s hair,”
and tho young god would have dwindled to a wealthy. clown.
How often have you and I longed for some special thing—fortune, position, honour—but afterwards found that, could we have obtained it, it would have been our ruin! In my own life, I have set my heart on five special things, seeking therefore with earnestness and self-denial. None of them is mine; and as one by one they fell from my hands, or slipped away from my hopes, I mourned bitterly at the “lack of success;” but already I am old enough to be thankful that four of them were impossible. The race was worth a great deal more than the prize I ran after. And is it not so with each of us? I only share the usual fortune, and am the one mouth which utters the experience common to most before me. Do we not all thank God for many a failure, a great many sorrows—so once they seemed!
“When summer's sunny hues adorn
Sky, forest hill, and meadow,
The foliage of the evergreens,
In contrast seems a shadow.
“But when the tints of autumn have
Their sober reign asserted,
The landscape that cold shadow shows
Into a light converted.
“Thus thoughts, that frown upon our mirth,
Will smile upon our sorrow,
And many dark fears of to-day
May be bright hopes to-morrow.”
Disappointment is often the salt of life. Sometimes we must warm our hands at a fire, sometimes in the snow. It is air condensed by cold which best warms the healthy blood. The greatest political are always rendered by the minority. Men of large military reputation—Hannibal, Gustavas Adolphus, Frederick, Napoleon—have done their noblest works when hard pressed by misfortune. The greatest exploits of Washington were achieved when he had the heaviest odds against him. The most illustrious oratory always thunders and lightens out of some tempest which threatens ruin to the state—and the individual speaker. The far-shining eloquence of Demosthenes and Cicero came out of the stormy cloud which bore ruin to Athens and to Rome. In the piping times of peace they had reared no great flocks of oratory. It is the weight of a nation's fall which presses such sad prophetic wisdom from Kossuth's mighty heart. The best age of England was the time of her greatest calamity. That hundred years which saw the Spanish Armada on the coast, the scaffold of King Charles in London, and witnessed the exile of his son, saw also Bacon, Harvey and Hobbs, Hooker and Taylor, Fox and Bunyan, Hampden and Vane, Spenser, Herbert, Shakspeare, Milton, Jonson, and the long line of England's noble sons; saw Blake on the water, Cromwell on the land, and Newton in the heavens. Her greatest literature, science, and character, came from that century of storms. And when her own heart bled with the world's oppression, she reached to the Alps, and protected the Waldenses whom the Pope was treading under his foot. It was in such an age that England bore her fairest bud, which sorrow broke off from the Saxon tree and planted in this land, with no hedge of shelter but the wild woods, no husbandry save that of beasts and savage men. Yet New England grew by neglect, and prospered in spite of pains to kill. The little Puritan bud looked up to heaven, and God, “who holds creation as a rose-bush in his hand,” smiled, and it opened into rath prophetic bloom.
The best age of the Christian Church came before “the fatal dower which the first wealthy Pope received;” it was when all the world opposed her, and Heathenism bared its sword and struck at Christendom's young neck. What an age it was when the Christian Church was bordered with the red flowers of martyrdom on the outskirts of her every province; nay, when the metropolis of Christendom bloomed only scarlet! No “lower-law divines” in that day. What an age it is when the Catholic Church has no blossom more radiant than the Cardinal's hat—its only passion-flower! The great plants of humanity grow in that little rocky belt of land between the ocean and the fertile soil; and they bloom maturest when they drink the salt dew of oceanic storms. Then and there grow the warriors, lawgivers, orators, philosophers, poets, prophets, saints, patriots, and martyrs, who form a chaplet of beauty which adorns the heroic brows of Man. Harrow the land with revolution and civil war, and there spring up great crops of men. When it rains money, the world reaps no such harvest !
“How do you suppose I could injure my boy?” asked a mother of a friend; and the austere answer was, “Give him all he wants, and he is ruined.” Where the city shoots the offal of the streets, there mushrooms, toadstools, and puff-balls come up; every morning you find them, rank and worthless; but in the clefts of the Swiss mountains, on the edge of New Hampshire rocks, where the artist can hardly lay his pencil safe, there gleams the Alp-bloom, the mountain-gentian, the hare-bell—clean as daylight and fair as blue-eyed Lyra's topmost star.
The individual man finds the period of excessive
prosperity one of great peril to his moral character. “What
a bitter lot is yours and father's!” said a thoughtful boy
once to his mother; “we are hard pushed all round. How
many of my sisters have died already! Some one of us is
always sick; and then our poor relations hang on us a
heavy load. But our cold-hearted neighbours over the
hill there, beyond the great tree, they have had no trouble
since I was born. Surely it is a very unjust and wicked
God to let things go on so badly.” The deep-souled
mother cleared her eye with her apron, and took her boy
in her bosom, and said, “If it be so, it is our neighbours
who have most cause to complain, and not we. They
have had nothing but prosperity; they are rich, and
getting richer only too fast. They have no old
grandmother to help on in life, no poor relations to cling to
their skirts and draw them back, no one of them is ever
sick, no near friend has died; but because they have no
changes they fear not God. They are cold-hearted, they
are worldly and irreligious. I often pity them, and have
said so to your father. It is we that have had the best
chance in this world. They will doubtless have their
opportunity also in the next. My boy, there is a gain for
all this loss that you speak of, for wicked thoughts and
actions are the only bad things which no man can profit
by.”
I sometimes see a man with whom all is prosperous. What the flesh wants, Mr. Glueckselig has it all. He seems to have been born beneath a lucky planet. He began poor, and now is rich. He is cautious, and never loses; far-sighted, and lays out his plans with masterly skill; administrative, and executes admirably. His life for twenty years has been what, in the streets, they call a “splendid success.” He is an “eminent citizen,” high on the assessors' books, and in the opinion of the newspaper where he advertises. I know him very well; he has a most successful walk, and I know that all his ventures prosper when I see him afar off. He has a “high, prosperous voice,” and somewhat loftily utters his opinion on all matters, whereof he has thought nothing. But his poor relations he never recollects; his prosperous acquaintances never speak of them to him. His house is a show-box of his estate—a house of the flesh, where the confectioner, the upholsterer, and the vintner have done their best. His wife is a show-woman, yet meant for a better purpose, poor thing! His children are show-children—“babes in the wood” of civilization—left more hopeless than those other babes described in the ballad, for, look wistful as they may, they shall never see “the man approaching from the town.” His religion is only decorum; he has the richest of Bibles, the costliest pew; his real God is the dollar, and a sacrament of copper, of silver, and of gold binds him down to earth—a threefold cord, which his soul has now not force enough to snap. He has no elevation of character. Blameless in his mercantile business, his word is good; no man doubts it; his judgment is admirable, his plans never miscarry; he is “respectable,” and no more. He is all of this world, and, if there were no soul, and no heaven, and no absolute justice, and no great manhood, he would be the model man. No great sentiment throbs in his bosom, no lofty idea is welcomed beneath his roof; his daughter must sit on the door-step to read the one great book printed in her life-time. His hands turn not the machinery of noble deeds. “Let the poor take care of themselves,” says he, “as I also have taken care of myself.” “The negroes ought to be slaves; it is good enough for them.” He sneers at the “law of God,” which is above the covetousness of the market and the statutes of the politician and the customs of the parlour. And so he goes on, “from greater to greater,” as the newspapers say, but as a wise man says, from worse to worse. Above his daily life he sees no “primal virtues shine aloft as stars;” no
“Charities that soothe and heal and bless
Are scattered at his feet like flowers.”
But one day a commercial panic, which even that masterly understanding could not foresee, shears off the half of his estate, rending the other half to shreds. Sickness shakes the costly door of his house; all the well-compacted windows rattle at the earthquake of misfortune; child after child drops through the wealthy floor, and perishes in the unseen night beneath; a lone and neglected kinswoman, no longer “a distant connection of the family,” has just cradled his dying babe in her friendly bosom. Where now is his forgetfulness of his poor relations? Where is the pomp and pride of his riches? His “high, prosperous voice” has shrunken down to a modest, yet manly tone; that fool's bolt of brittle opinion which he delivered so readily just now, is shot no more at vanity's low mark; and arrogance has faded off from that humiliated brow. The show-wife and the poor residue of his show-children are real enough now. Sorrow has raised the human heart which prosperity had deeply buried up. The cloud of vanity comes down in a cold, thin patter of rain, which yet starts new greenness in the thirsty soil, and there spring up virtues which else were strangers in that ground-parched with being too near the sun. It is the real God he communes with now; the Infinite, whom no prosperity could ever drive away. We close our eyes against the great God, but His never slumber nor sleep. The show-Bible lies there as idle as before, on its cushion, but the old plain Book, thumbed all over with his mother's piety—who has long since gone where she can be wise without study, and pious without Bibles—or by his own youthful touch, the old Bible comes back to his bosom, and David, and John, and Jesus speak comfort to his newly-awakened soul. Through the rents in his estate there come in
“The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless.”
and above the ruins of his fortune, his eye, delighted, sees
“The primal virtues shine aloft as stars.”
Nay, gratitude gives its blessing now on his cheap and daily bread. “We had been lost if we had not been ruined,” quoth the real woman to the husband now freed from the worldly devil.
In soils too rich, the grain runs all to stalk, and there is no corn; the Egyptian farmer must mingle sand with the surface of his ground, which else the Nile enriches overmuch. The fat greyhound, housed in parlours, the girl's plaything, loses alike his power of scent and speed. It is so with men. Honour too easily or early got is a curse. “More than a fortune is misfortune,” says a wise man.
There are exceptions—men whom prosperity does not injure; whose gratitude greatens with their success, and their charity enlarges with each increase of means. They are the rarest of men, uncommonly well born, or bred with such painstaking as few mortals find. Yet I have known such.
There are others whom adversity itself does not teach. The full horror of avarice and lust are not commonly seen in the summer of life, when leaves and flowers and youthful fruit hide the ugly naked limbs; but when autumn has shaken down the fruit and torn the leaves away, and winter gibbets the vice in all its grim anatomy, it is then you know the hatefulness of avarice and lust. So the full baseness of mean men is not seen in their success but in their sorrow. Their tears are melted iron. I have known those whom prosperity maddened, but whom adversity did not sober. They fell, but fell only bruised and broken, never softened nor mellowed by the fall. These also are rare men. They must “wait the great teacher Death,” before they can adore their God. There are grapes of so poor a stock that the summer's sun but sours them, and the autumnal frost, which beautifies their leaves, only embitters the fruit; and when the winter's wind brings them to the ground, the all-devouring swine devours not them, but therefrom turns in disgust away. Sad sight, which the dear, motherly God must needs pity, and so should loving men.
Continual success commonly hardens the heart, and almost always enervates the character. The politician whose office is not contested, the merchant who has a monopoly, the minister without a rival, the farmer with acres too wide and more fertile than is enough, all these are in peril. So are such as acquire money with too rapid swiftness, and every man to whose house sorrow does not now and then come in to wish him good morrow. Excess of good fortune is our undoing.
A benevolent man whom I knew, very familiar with the hearts of men, was on his way, one morning, to ask a charity of a wealthy citizen of the town, when he learned that in the three months just passed by, that merchant had added the tenth part of a million of dollars to his fortune. My friend said, “I go on a fool's errand,” and turned back and asked not the charity.
Religion does not enter at the golden gate of a man's house; she comes in some other way—comes with the doctor or with the sheriff. “He went away sorrowful,” says the New Testament, “for he had great possessions.” A man reputed a millionaire, in a large trading town of America, four or five years ago, used to make a mock of religion. He never entered a meeting-house for many a year. Charity did not open his crowded purse, nor his shrivelled heart. But a commercial crisis made him a bankrupt, and then religious emotions broke from their golden fetters, and he sought his God again. An underground railroad conducted this slave of money to a large place where there was room for his soul, and he was made free from the bondage of the flesh, by the law of the spirit of life. In his native town men mocked when they saw him again at the old parish meeting-house, in his mother's long-forgotten seat. It was a foolish laugh; they should have known that the blind man had received his sight. Was it not to such an one that the greatest of teachers said, “Go and sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, and then shalt thou have treasure in heaven?”
You see the same thing in a town or nation. Virtue
does not grow very tall, nor flower very fair in an
over-prosperous State. In the time of success a nation is never
well ruled; the people choose low men with low aims; sorrow, distress, and fear are better counsellors. How soon
a rough wind blows the human chaff out of office! No
ninnies for rulers then! On a summer festival, or election-day
in winter, or on a time consecrated to Christian
martyrs, when, to glut the covetousness and lust for power
of the meanest things which ever barked against humanity
in New England since she shook Arnold from her robe—when
wealthy Boston sends an innocent man into bondage
for ever—boys padded with cotton—substitute for body
as for conscience!—men's red coats upon their backs,
marching to gay and costly music—play at soldier; and
they think: “How many eyes look on us, and how our
pretty cousins will admire at the spectacle!” But when war
blows its horn, such boys go home to their mothers, and
bearded, manly men bring the firelock to the shoulder,
and only to fife and drum wheel into column and
steadfastly march away, thinking of the fight before them and
the hearts breaking at home.
In her poverty and sadness, in her fear and peril, in the name of God, America made Washington her President; but strong, impudent, rich, she declared there was “no higher law,” and put in her chief offices the mean things which we know. America in peril, poor, weak, oppressed, bore great men—the Revolutionary family; now strong, rich, tyrannical, she fills her offices with men of such stuff and stamp as we behold. She puts base men in her cabinets, to make foolishness the national council; base men also in her judicial seats, to execute wickedness as law; base men in diplomacy, “to lie abroad” for their own behoof.
In 1776, with no ally, in poverty, the two million freemen of America fell back on the universal rights of humanity, and appealed to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of their intentions. In 1850, the twenty million denied every rule of morality, every precept of religion, made Atheism the first principle of their government, and enacted the Fugitive Slave Bill, with the consent of Boston, and the North's consent; re-enacted it the next year, Boston a second time giving her vote. The nation has enforced it ever since, Boston voluntarily offering her unlawful hand.
Poor America, in 1776, asks Canada to come and be free with us, and sends an army to help; but rich America, in 1854, seeks to enslave Cuba and Hayti.
In 1771, while Great Britain was clutching at our liberty, Governor Hutchinson, a son of Boston, the avaricious creature of the throne—money and power the gods of his idolatry—made a Proclamation of Thanksgiving, and gave as reason for gratitude, that “civil and religious liberties are continued.” The Boston ministers came together, and considered and refused to read it—all but Mr. Pemberton, the governor's priest, and when he began it the patriots of the congregation turned their backs on the smug official, and left the polluted spot. All the rest refused to read the proclamation but, instead, agreed to “implore of Almighty God the restoration of lost liberties.” Where, then, was “lower-law divinity?” Then, Boston was poor; she had only sixteen thousand men, not four millions of money. In 1851, from his illegal dungeon in the chained Court House, Thomas Sims sent round his petition to the churches of Boston for prayer in his behalf; but of all the incumbents of the Boston pulpit, the fourscore successors of the Mayhews and the Coopers of old time, not six could read an unoffending black man's prayer, that he might be restored to his inalienable rights. When an exceptional man spoke of the higher law of God in his meetinghouse, indignant parishioners turned their backs on the minister—turned Christianity out of the house—fulfilling the Scripture, that the disciple shall suffer with his Lord. Now, Boston is rich, with a hundred and sixty thousand men in her bosom, and two hundred and twenty-five million dollars in her purse.
In 1765, Boston made a stamp officer resign his post, and swear under the Liberty Tree never to issue a single stamp. In 1850, when the Fugitive Slave Bill passed Congress, the citizens of Boston—wealthy Boston—fired a hundred guns, in token of rejoicing, on the great green of the city. Long since the Tories cut down Liberty Tree to build “Union Hall” on its ruins.
In 1769, the farmers and mechanics of Lexington would “drink no more tea” till the unlawful tax was taken off; and, in 1773, poor Boston, with the country to help her, threw into the ocean that taxed herb which was the vehicle wherein tyranny hoped to ride across the land. Your and my fathers, after solemn deliberation, did it, when we were poor, in spite of King and Church, and Lords and Commons. But, in 1850, Boston held a “Union Meeting” in Faneuil Hall, and resolved that the stealers of men should pursue their craft in the city of Hancock and Adams and Mayhew and Cooper.
In 1770, the British Commissioner of Revenue could not tarry in Boston, but must retreat to the castle on an island. But in 1854, the men-stealers in Boston are more safe than the most estimable citizens; they are welcome.
In 1766, Boston sought the “total abolishing of Slavery;” six years later even the burgesses of Virginia covenanted with each other to import no slaves, and buy none brought over; in 1773, the town of Medfield—only a hamlet then—wanted a “final period put to that most cruel, inhuman, and unchristian practice, the slave-trade;” and Massachusetts remonstrated against the sale of slaves and the condition of Slavery. But, in 1850, the meanness and the money of Boston assembled at a Union Meeting, in Faneuil Hall, to assure the slaveholders that a man might safely be kidnapped in Boston! Nay, a famous Doctor of Divinity publicly declared in a lecture, that, to “save the Union," he "would send into bondage the child of my affections, the wife of my bosom, nay, the mother that bore me!” The audience answered with applauses loud and long; only one great, honest soul, cried out “ Damnation!” In 1854, the South demands the restoration of the African slave-trade; and a Boston minister—too orthodox to reckon a man a Christian who denies that Mary's son is also God—hints his cowardly approval of the scheme.
In time of peril, Boston had for her agent in England America's foremost man, her own son, who began his career by filling the moulds in a tallow-chandler's shop, and ended by taking the thunder from the cloud, and the sceptre from tyrants; and Boston sustained him in his bravest word. But, in 1854, the leading political and commercial newspapers of the same Boston addressed the only anti-Slavery senator which Massachusetts has had in Congress since the days when Colonel Pickering held his seat, asking him to resign—for the friend of humanity “belonged to no healthy political organization.”
In 1769, oppressed Boston advocated the right of free speech; a town meeting declared that “a legal meeting of the town of Boston is an assembly where a noble freedom of speech is always expected and maintained—where men think as they please, and speak as they think.” “And such an assembly,” adds patriotic poor little Boston, “has been the dread and often the scourge of tyrants.” In 1850, Boston shut up Faneuil Hall, and forbid all freedom of speech; there must be “no agitation.” In 1854, the Supreme Court of the United States seeks to procure an indictment and inflict a fine of three hundred dollars and imprisonment for twelve months on men who, in the same Faneuil Hall, stirred up the minds of the people to keep the precepts of Christianity, and defend the inalienable rights of man.
In 1768, the British Government sought to prosecute the printers of a patriotic paper in Boston, but the Grand Jury refused a bill. In 1851, in the same Boston, fifteen hundred citizens thereof, one for each illegal grog-shop, then officially known to be in the city, entered into a solemn compact, and gave their names to the City Marshal; volunteering to escort to eternal bondage a poor, friendless negro boy.
In 1774, the British tyrant shut up the port of poor Boston, and the adjoining towns opened their harbours and said, “Use our wharves without cost, ye that suffer!” In 1851, when Lynn, Worcester, Marblehead, and New Bedford declared they would keep the commandments of Jesus of Nazareth and the New Testament's golden rule, and no fugitive slave should be torn from their municipal bosom, the leading political and commercial newspapers of Boston called on her merchants to refuse to trade with these four Christian towns.
Once, Boston and America appealed to the law of Nature and Nature's God. It was when Boston and America were poor. In 1851, 1852, 1853, and 1854, Boston and America declared there was no law of God above the Fugitive Slave Bill.
When America was poor, a single colony in the wilderness, owning but a single “Mayflower,” with nothing but clams for their food, those stern Calvinistic fathers of the land lifted up their hands and thanked God that “we are permitted to suck of the abundance of the seas and treasures hid in the sands,” and sought to establish freedom all over this western wilderness. Now, America, with five-and-twenty millions of people, with five million tons of shipping white-blossoming on all the seas, with more than seven thousand million dollars of property, is longing to encircle with chains the whole American commonwealth of freemen, and spread the curse of bondage from the Gulf of Mexico to the most Northern lakes; nay, to plant this Upas by the borders of the Amazon that it may reach far as the Andes, and drop its lecherous distilment all over the South American continent.
In 1636, when Massachusetts was poor, not a settlement twenty miles in the interior, not a shore-line fifty miles long, she established Harvard College, and therefore once levied a tax of a peck of corn, or twelve pence, on each householder in the province. But now, in fifteen States of the affluent Union, it is a felony to teach one of the labouring classes to read and write; nay, for a Mulatto mother to teach her daughter to read the golden rule of Jesus in the New Testament. This very year, Mrs. Douglas has been gaoled thirty days for teaching free black children to read!
In 1772, even the burgesses of Virginia wished to abolish the slave trade. Jefferson and Patrick Henry, noble sons of the afflicted colony, sought to emancipate all her slaves. The author of the Declaration of Independence trembled for Virginia when he remembered that God is just. In 1854, Virginia counts “negroes as the connecting link between man and the brute creation.” In 1778, the Articles of Confederation between the revolutionary colonies allowed the slave to escape from State to State; no compact authorized the master to go over the border for his prey. But, in 1850, the one-and-thirty wealthy States authorized the master to pursue his fugitive at the expense of the Federal Government, in every State, and tread down its law: nay, if a man gives but a cup of cold water to the hunted fugitives, he is to be fined a thousand dollars and put in gaol for six months for each offence. Only last week a Fugitive Slave Bill Judge fined a man three thousand dollars for aiding three fellow Christians to keep their freedom in the “Democratic State” of Michigan! America puts a penalty on all the Christian virtues.
Just before the Revolution, Boston was so noble in defence of the rights of her citizens, that in the Parliament of corruption her conduct was despotically stigmatized as a “defiance of all legal authority;” her “inhabitants must be treated as aliens!” Massachusetts could not be governed unless, said an organ of the ministry, “the laws shall be so changed as to give to the kings the appointment of the council, and to the sheriffs the sole power of returning juries.” Mayhew wrote: “God gave the Israelites a king in his anger, because they had not sense enough to like a free commonwealth.” But, in 1850, Boston invited and welcomed a decree of her masters, dictated at the Capitol, which drove more than five hundred of her innocent citizens into exile; nay, in her zeal to make a man a slave, she put chains around her own Court House, and the judges of Massachusetts crawled under on the way each “to his own place!” The ministers—there were a few noble exceptions—preached, Down with God and up with the Fugitive Slave Bill!—preached it and lived it.
The minions of power arrested our own John Hancock, in 1768. The Governor of Massachusetts—appointed by the Crown—the good old State elected no such enemies of Freedom then—with his Chief Justice and other tools of the king, wished “to take off the original incendiarics,” and send Samuel Adams over seas “for trial,” that is, for execution: Edes and Gill, the patriotic printers, “trumpeters of sedition,” and others now of famous memory, authors of “treasonable and seditious writings," were to share the same fate. But such was the force of a righteous public opinion in all New England, that the counsel of the ungodly was carried headlong, and the crafty taken in their own net. Look at Boston now; remember the attempts of the Fugitive Slave Bill Judge last summer to construct a “misdemeanour” out of speeches made in Faneuil Hall against the attempt of his kinsmen to kidnap a man in our own streets! Where is the ancient love of justice and the rights of men which brought our Puritan mothers here, and fired our fathers for the greatest of revolutions! Wait and see!
These are the perils of prosperity. God be merciful to us! We are not only wicked and cowardly in our conduct and character; we are mean and vulgar. Our fathers lived in times of trouble which tried men's souls. We are exposed to a sadder trial which more dangerously racks the man. For forty years the nation has had no outward peril, no war, no famine, nothing to fear from abroad. We have increased amazingly in numbers and riches. Now the nation is drunk with power and nauseous with wealth. We are like the savages in the neighbourhood of the Rocky Mountains, who, when the green corn came, sat down to eat and rose up to play, and ate till their health went from them: every tenth man died. I suppose a prophet, who was as sternly merciful as Jesus of Nazareth, would pray for some great affliction, some famine, some pestilence, some war, some bankruptcy, that the nation might recover its soberness once more, and also remember its God.
When the Hebrews were rich and easy, they relapsed into the licentiousness of the Tyrians or Chaldees, the Philistines or Egyptians. With what savage rods did Isaiah and Jeremiah scourge their own people! But when war came, when the temple smoked, the exiles hung their harps on the willows of Babylon, and thought of Mount Zion and the Jehovah who had brought them out of the iron house of bondage. It was at such times that there sprung up, in the religious corner of their heart, the hopes of a Messiah and a “kingdom of heaven.”
I know not what is before us. Some calamity: for no doubt America, like other nations, must have her time of trouble; a day of sickness when she also will sit with ashes on her head, and pray to the God of the red men we have slain, and the black men we have enslaved, and then find mercy.
Calamity is not half so calamitous as constant prosperity. When the prodigal, in riotous living, is wasting his substance with dice, and wine, and harlots, he thinks not of his father; but when the husks are refused him, he then says, “How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and ask that I may be made, not his son, but only one of his hired servants.”
It is under such circumstances that you and I are living, and are to work out our redemption and achieve our character. Great success is a great temptation. It was a wise Roman poet who said, “It is a hard thing not to betray your morals to your riches, and when you become many a Crœsus in wealth, to be a single Numa in your virtue.”
In prosperity consider that, after all, the great thing in life is man's soul, his highest powers, their delight and their duty.
There runs an old story, I know not how old, of John,
the son of Zebedee, richest of Galilean fishermen. “Come
and follow me,” said Jesus to the young man, in his
father's ship, mending the nets. Pleased with the attention,
and greedy of honour and power, John forsook all
and followed him, not knowing what manner of spirit he
was of. As they went up to Jerusalem, the Samaritans
would not let Jesus enter their village, and John asked if
he should command fire to come down from heaven and
consume them. Jesus replied, “The Son of man is not
come to destroy, but to save.”
John was wroth, but said nothing. As they drew nigh to Jerusalem, that “son of thunder” thought the kingdom of heaven should presently appear: he himself desired to take it by force; and he asked Jesus, “Let me drink of thy cup, and be baptized with thy baptism; let me sit at thy right hand, and be lord over all the eleven.”
Jesus answered, “The lofty seat, it is not mine to give; but thou shalt drink of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with.”
And John's foolish heart was gladdened in him, for he said, “Surely his cup is delight, and his baptism the sacrament of power.”
But that night John saw Jesus in his agony, yet only dimly perceived the angel that came and strengthened him. He beheld the “marshal's guard” seize the world's great prophet; and, fearful lest the officers should seize him also, he shrunk into the crowd, crouching down amid the maidens about Herod's palace. He sat down afar off, and looked on the crucifixion; and when Jesus cried, “My God! why hast thou forsaken me?” and gave up the ghost, John's weak heart failed in him and he fainted, and women assisted him.
But presently he fled into Galilee, and there his townsmen mocked him: “Ha! ha! thou that wouldst sit at the right hand of the Messiah!” The magistrates set their eyes on him—"This fellow was also with Jesus! a pestilent man, like his master; but we will bring him to his senses!”—and they cast him into prison. Death looked through the bars of his grate, and his shadow fell thick and ugly on the prison floor, and John was ready to perish. Then he tasted the cup of his Master.
Escaping from the gaol, he was driven from city to city, and then he was also baptized with the baptism of Christ. But that great Angel who had been with the Hebrew children in the Babylonian furnace, and brought them out unharmed, no smell of fire on their garments' hem, who had been also with Jesus alike in his temptation and his agony, came likewise to John and touched his eyes, speaking in the still small voice to his innermost, and the “son of thunder” declared, “God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” When an old man, his companions took him, at his request, on his couch, and carried him to the assembly of Christians at Ephesus, that he might bid them a last farewell; and he said, “Little children, love one another!” and passed on.