Chapter 27

Might we not have done just as well without Puritanism? Might not some other way have been found of preserving the serious element in English character and saving English liberty from those who were conspiring for its destruction? Such questions as these may be asked without end, and they may be answered by any one who is endowed with a knowledge of men who were never born, and of events that have never happened. Might not a way have been found of rescuing the great interests of humanity without Greek resistance to Persian invasion, or German resistance to the tyranny of Bonaparte? Suppose in place of the Puritan chiefs there had been raised up by miracle a set of men at once consummate soldiers and perfect philosophers, who would have fought and won the battle without being heated by the conflict. Suppose, to prevent the necessity of any conflict at all, Charles, Strafford, and Laud had voluntarily abandoned their designs. As it was, Puritanism did, and alone could do, the work. What the Renaissance would have been without Puritan morality we can pretty well guess from the experience of Italy. It would have probably been like the life of Lorenzo--vice, filthy vice, decorated with art and with elegant philosophy; an academy under the same roof with a brothel. There were ages before morality, and there have been ages between the moralities. There was, in England, an age between the decline of the Catholic morality and the rise of the Puritan, marked by a laxity of conduct, public and private, which was partly redeemed but not neutralized by Elizabethan genius and enterprise. No doubt when the revival came, there was a High Church as well as a Puritan morality, and that fact ought always to be borne in mind; but the High Church morality was inextricably bound up with sacerdotal superstition and with absolute government; it had no hold on the people; and it found itself suspiciously at home in the Court of James, in the households of Somerset and Buckingham, and in the tribunal which lent itself to the divorce of Essex.

That the Puritan Revolution was followed by a sacerdotal and sensualist reaction is too true: all revolutions are followed by reactions; it is one great reason for avoiding them. But let it be remembered, first, that the disbanded soldiers of the Commonwealth and the other relics of the Puritan party still remained the most moral and respectable element in the country; and secondly, that the period of lassitude which follows great efforts, whether of men or nations, is not altogether the condemnation of the effort, but partly the weakness of humanity. Nations as well as men, if they aim high, must sometimes overstrain themselves, and weariness must ensue. Nor did the Commonwealth of England come to nothing, though in a society not half emancipated from feudalism it was premature, and therefore, at the time, a failure. It opened a glimpse of a new order of things: it was the first example of a great national republic, the republics of antiquity having been at once city republics and republics of slave-owners: it not only heralded but, to some extent, prepared the American and even the French Revolution. In its sublime death-song, chanted by the great Puritan poet, our ears catch the accents of a hope that did not die.

The Restoration was the end of the Puritan party, which thenceforth separated into two portions, the high political element taking the form of Whiggism, while the more religious element was represented in subsequent history by the Nonconformists. Under the Marian reaction Protestantism had been saved, and the errors which it had committed in its hour of ascendency had been redeemed by the champions, drawn mostly from the humbler classes, who suffered for it at the stake. Under the Restoration it was again saved, and the errors which it had once more committed in the hour of political triumph were once more redeemed by martyrs of the same class, whose sufferings in the noisome and pestilential prisons of that day were probably not much less severe than the pangs of those who died by fire. Both in the Marian and in the Restoration martyrs of Protestantism there was no doubt much that was irrational and unattractive; yet the record of their services to humanity remains, and will remain; let the free-thought of modern times, for which their self-devoting loyalty to such truth as they knew made way, be grateful or ungrateful to them as it will.

The relations of Nonconformity, with which we must couple Scotch Presbyterianism, its partner in fundamental doctrine, its constant ally in the conflict, and fellow-sufferer in the hour of adversity, to English religion, morality, industry, education, philanthropy, science, and to the English civilization in general, would be a most important and instructive chapter in English history, but we are hardly called upon to attempt to write it in refutation of jocose charges of "hideousness" and "immense ennui." A sufficient answer to such quips and cranks will be found, we believe, within the same covers with Mr. Arnold's "Falkland," in the shape of an article on the Pulpit, by Mr. Baldwin Brown, which in tone and culture appears to us a fit companion for any other paper in the journal.

That Nonconformity has been political is true. Fortunately for the liberties of England it has had to struggle for civil right in order to obtain religious freedom. No doubt in the course of the conflict it has contracted a certain gloominess of character, and shown an unamiable side. Treat men with persistent and insolent injustice, strip them of their rights as citizens, put on them a social brand, compel them to pay for the maintenance of the pulpits from which their religion is assailed, and you will run a very great risk of souring their tempers. But without rehearsing disagreeable details, we may say generally that whoever should undertake to prove that the Established Church had not been, from the hour of her birth down to the last general election, at least as political as the Free Churches, and at least as responsible for the evils which political religion has brought upon the nation, would show considerable confidence in his powers of dealing with history. Could he find a parallel on the side of the Established Church to the magnanimous loyalty to national interests shown by Nonconformists, in rejecting the bribe offered them by James II., and supporting their persecutors against an illegal toleration? Could he find a parallel on the side of the Nonconformists to the conduct of the Established Church, in turning round, the moment the victory had been won by Nonconformist aid, and recommencing the persecution of the Nonconformists?

We fully agree with Mr. Arnold, however, in thinking that political Nonconformity is an evil. There are two known modes of getting rid of it--the Spanish Inquisition and religious equality. Mr. Arnold seems to think that there is yet a third--general submission, in matters theological and ecclesiastical, to the gentle sway of Beau Nash.

Religious equality in the United States may not be perfect unity, it may not be the height of culture or of grace, but at all events it is peace. Ultramontanism there, as everywhere else, is aggressive, and a source of disturbance; and, on the other hand, in the struggle against slavery, political and religious elements were inevitably intermingled, but as a rule politics are kept perfectly clear of religion. Saving in the case of Roman Catholicism, we cannot call to mind a single instance of a serious appeal in an election to sectarian feeling. Much as we have heard of the two candidates for the Presidency, we could not at this moment tell to what Church either of them belongs. Where no Church is privileged, there can be no cause for jealousy. The Churches dwell side by side, without disturbing the State with any quarrels; they are all alike loyal to the government; they unite in supporting a system of popular education which generally includes a certain element of unsectarian religion, they combine for social and philanthropic objects; they testify, by their common celebration of national thanksgivings and fasts their unity at all events as portions of the same Christian nation. So far as we know, controversy between them is very rare; there is more of it within the several Churches between their own more orthodox and more liberal members. In none does it rage more violently than in the Episcopal Church, though, under religious equality, irreconcilable disagreement on religious questions leads to seccession, not to mutual lawsuits and imprisonments.

Mr. Arnold says in praise of Falkland that "he was profoundly serious." We presume he means not only that Falkland treated great questions in a serious way, without unseasonable quizzing, but that he was, in the words quoted from Clarendon in the next sentence, "a precise lover of truth, and superior to all possible temptations for its violation." The temptations, we presume, would have included those of taste or fancy, as well as those of the more obvious kind; and Falkland's paramount regard for truth would have extended to all his fellow-men as well as to himself and his own intellectual circle. He would never, we are confident, have advised any human being to separate religion from truth, he would never have suffered himself to intimate that truth was the property of a select circle, while "poetry" was good enough for the common people, he would never have encouraged thousands of clergymen, educated men with sensitive consciences, to go on preaching to their flocks from the pulpit, on grounds of social convenience, doctrines which they repudiated in the study, and derided in the company of cultivated men, he would never have exhorted people to enter from aesthetic considerations a spiritual society of which, in the same breath, he proclaimed the creeds to be figments, the priesthood to be an illusion, the sacred narratives to be myths, and the Triune God to be a caricature of Lord Shaftesbury multiplied by three. If he had done so, and if his propagandism had been successful, we suspect he would soon have produced an anarchy, not only religious but social, compared with which the most chaotic periods of the Revolution would have been harmony and order. In the days of the Antonines, to which Gibbon looks back so wistfully, opinion had little influence; the organic forces of society were of a more primitive and a coarser kind. In modern times if a writer could succeed in separating truth from religion, he would shake the pillars of the moral and social as well as the intellectual world.

That religion is inseparable from truth is the strong and special tradition of the Nonconformists. Their history has been a long struggle for the rights of conscience against spurious authority, an authority which we believe Mr. Arnold holds to be spurious as well as they. This is not altogether a bad start in the pursuit of the truth for which the world now craves, and which, we cordially admit, lies beyond the existing creed of any particular Church. At all events, it would seem improvident to merge such an element of religious inquiry in that of which the tradition is submission to spurious authority, whatever advantages the latter may have in social, literary, and aesthetic respects. Not a generation has yet passed since the admission of Nonconformists to the Universities; and more than a generation is needed in order to attain the highest culture. Give the Free Churches time, and let us see whether they have not something better to give us in return than "hideousness" and "immense ennui."

THE EARLY YEARS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Our readers need not be afraid that we are going to bore them with the Slavery Question or the Civil War. We deal here not with the Martyr President, but with Abe Lincoln in embryo, leaving the great man at the entrance of the grand scene. Mr. Ward H. Lamon has published a biography [Footnote: The Life of Abraham Lincoln from his Birth to his Inauguration as President. By Ward H. Lamon. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1872] which enables us to do this, and which, besides containing a good deal that is amusing, is a curious contribution to political science, as illustrating, by a world-renowned instance, the origin of the species Politician. The materials for it appear to be drawn from the most authentic sources, and to have been used with diligence, though in point of form the book leaves something to be desired. We trust it and the authorities quoted in it for our facts.

After the murder, criticism, of course, was for a time impossible. Martyrdom was followed by canonization, and the popular heart could not be blamed for overflowing in hyperbole. The fallen chief "was Washington, he was Moses, and there were not wanting even those who likened him to the God and Redeemer of all the earth. These latter thought they discovered in his early origin, his kindly nature, his benevolent precepts, and the homely anecdotes in which he taught the people, strong points of resemblance between him and the Divine Son of Mary." A halo of myth naturally gathered round the cradle of this new Moses--for we will not pursue the more extravagant and offensive parallel which may serve as a set-off against that which was drawn by English Royalists between the death of Charles I. and the Crucifixion. Among other fables, it was believed that the President's family had fled from Kentucky to Indiana to escape the taint of Slavery. Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham, was migratory enough, but the course of his migrations was not determined by high moral motives, and we may safely affirm that had he ever found himself among the fleshpots of Egypt, he would have stayed there, however deep the moral darkness might have been. He was a thriftless "ne'er do weel," who had very commonplace reasons for wandering away from the miserable, solitary farm in Kentucky, on which his child first formed a sad acquaintance with life and nature, and which, as it happened, was not in the slave-owning region of the State. His decision appears to have been hastened by a "difficulty," in which he bit off his antagonist's nose--an incident to which it would be difficult to find a parallel in the family histories of Scripture heroes, or even in those of the Sainted Fathers of the Republic. He drifted to Indiana, and in a spot which was then an almost untrodden wilderness, built a _casa santa_, which his connection, Dennis Hanks, calls "that darned little half-faced camp"--a dwelling enclosed on three sides and open on the fourth, without a floor, and called a camp, it seems, because it was made of poles, not of logs. He afterwards exchanged the "camp" for the more ambitious "cabin," but his cabin, was "a rough, rough log one," made of unhewn timber, and without floor, door or window. In this "rough, rough," abode, his lanky, lean- visaged, awkward and somewhat pensive though strong, hearty and patient son Abraham had a "rough, rough" life, and underwent experiences which, if they were not calculated to form a Pitt or a Turgot, were calculated to season an American politician, and make him a winner in the tough struggle for existence, as well as to identify him with the people, faithful representation of whose aims, sentiments, tastes, passions and prejudices was the one thing needful to qualify him for obtaining the prize of his ambition. "For two years Lincoln (the father) continued to live alone in the old way. He did not like to farm, and he never got much of his land under cultivation. His principal crop was corn; and this, with the game which a rifleman so expert would easily take from the woods around him, supplied his table." It does not appear that he employed any of his mechanical skill in completing and furnishing his own cabin. It has already been stated that the latter had no window, door or floor. "But the furniture, if it might be called furniture, was even worse than the house. Three-legged stools served for chairs. A bedstead was made of poles stuck in the cracks of the logs in one corner of the cabin, while the other end rested in the crotch of a forked stick stuck in the earthen floor. On these were laid some boards, and on the boards a shake-down of leaves, covered with skins and old petticoats. The table was a hewed puncheon supported by four legs. They had a few pewter and tin dishes to eat from, but the most minute inventory of their effects makes no mention of knives or forks. Their cooking utensils were a Dutch oven and a skillet. Abraham slept in the loft, to which he ascended by means of pins driven into holes in the wall." Of his father's disposition, Abraham seems to have inherited at all events the dislike to labour, though his sounder moral nature prevented him from being an idler. His tendency to politics came from the same element of character as his father's preference for the rifle. In after life we are told his mind "was filled with gloomy forebodings and strong apprehensions of impending evil, mingled with extravagant visions of personal grandeur and power." His melancholy, characterized by all his friends as "terrible," was closely connected with the cravings of his demagogic ambition, and the root of both was in him from a boy.

In the Indiana cabin Abraham's mother, whose maiden name was Nancy Hanks, died, far from medical aid, of the epidemic called milk sickness. She was preceded in death by her relatives, the Sparrows, who had succeeded the Lincolns in the "camp," and by many neighbours, whose coffins Thomas Lincoln made out of "green lumber cut with a whip saw." Upon Nancy's death he took to his green lumber again and made a box for her. "There were about twenty persons at her funeral. They took her to the summit of a deeply wooded knoll, about half a mile south-east of the cabin, and laid her beside the Sparrows. If there were any burial ceremonies, they were of the briefest. But it happened that a few months later an itinerant preacher, named David Elkin, whom the Lincolns had known in Kentucky, wandered into the settlement, and he either volunteered or was employed to preach a sermon, which should commemorate the many virtues and pass over in silence the few frailties of the poor woman who slept in the forest. Many years later the bodies of Levi Hall and his wife (relatives), were deposited in the same earth with that of Mr. Lincoln. The graves of two or three children, belonging to a neighbour's family, are also near theirs. They are all crumbled, sunken and covered with wild vines in deep and tangled mats. The great trees were originally cut away to make a small cleared space for this primitive graveyard; but the young dogwoods have sprung up unopposed in great luxuriance, and in many instances the names of pilgrims to the burial place of the great Abraham Lincoln's mother are carved on their bark. With this exception, the spot is wholly unmarked. The grave never had a stone, nor even a board, at its head or its foot, and the neighbours still dispute as to which of these unsightly hollows contains the ashes of Nancy Lincoln." If Democracy in the New World sometimes stones the prophets, it is seldom guilty of building their sepulchres. Out of sight, off the stump, beyond the range of the interviewer, heroes and martyrs soon pass from the mind of a fast-living people; and weeds may grow out of the dust of Washington. But in this case what neglect has done good taste would have dictated; it is well that the dogwoods are allowed to grow unchecked over the wilderness grave.

Thirteen months after the death of his Nancy, Thomas Lincoln went to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and suddenly presented himself to Mrs. Sally Johnston, who had in former days rejected him for a better match, but had become a widow. "Well, Mrs. Johnston, I have no wife and you have no husband, I came a purpose to marry you. I knowed you from a gal and you knowed me from a boy. I have no time to lose, and if you are willin', let it be done straight off." "Tommy, I know you well, and have no objection to marrying you; but I cannot do it straight off, as I owe some debts that must first be paid." They were married next morning, and the new Mrs. Lincoln, who owned, among other wondrous household goods, a bureau that cost forty dollars, and who had been led, it seems, to believe that her new husband was reformed and a prosperous farmer, was conveyed with her bureau to the smiling scene of his reformation and prosperity. Being, however, a sensible Christian woman, she made the best of a bad bargain, got her husband to put down a floor and hang doors and windows, made things generally decent, and was very kind to the children, especially to Abe, to whom she took a great liking, and who owed to his good stepmother what other heroes have owed to their mothers. "From that time on," according to his garrulous relative, Dennis Hanks, "he appeared to lead a new life." It seems to have been difficult to extract from him "for campaign purposes" the incidents of his life before it took this happy turn.

He described his own education in a Congressional handbook as "defective." In Kentucky he occasionally trudged with his little sister, rather as an escort than as a school-fellow, to a school four miles off, kept by one Caleb Hazel, who could teach reading and writing after a fashion, and a little arithmetic, but whose great qualification for his office lay in his power and readiness "to whip the big boys." So far the American respect for popular education as the key to success in life prevailed even in those wilds, and in such a family as that of Thomas Lincoln.

Under the auspices of his new mother, Abraham began attending school again. The master was one Crawford, who taught not only reading, writing and arithmetic, but "manners." One of the scholars was made to retire, and re-enter "as a polite gentleman enters a drawing room," after which he was led round by another scholar and introduced to all "the young ladies and gentlemen." The polite gentleman who entered the drawing room and was introduced as Mr. Abraham Lincoln, is thus depicted: "He was growing at a tremendous rate, and two years later attained his full height of six feet four inches. He was long, wiry and strong, while his big feet and hands and the length of his arms and legs were out of all proportion to his small trunk and head. His complexion was very swarthy, and Mr. Gentry says that his skin was shrivelled and yellow even then. He wore low shoes, buckskin breeches, linsey woolsey shirt, and a cap made of the skin of an opossum or a coon. The breeches clung close to his thighs and legs, but parted by a large space to meet the tops of his shoes. Twelve inches remained uncovered, and exposed that much of shinbone, sharp, blue and narrow." At a subsequent period, when charged by a Democratic rival with being "a Whig aristocrat," he gave a minute and touching description of the breeches. "I had only one pair," he said, "and they were buckskin. And if you know the nature of buckskin when wet and dried by the sun they will shrink; and mine kept shrinking until they left several inches of my legs bare between the tops of my socks and the lower part of my breeches, and whilst I was growing taller they were becoming shorter, and so much tighter that they left a blue streak around my legs, which can be seen to this day."