Part 28

The fact is that a church needs poor men and wicked men as much as it does pure men and virtuous men and pious men. What man needs is familiarity with universal human nature. He needs never to separate himself from men in daily life. It is not necessary that in our houses we should bring pestilential diseases or pestilential examples, but somehow we must hold on to men if they are wicked; somehow the circulation between the top and the bottom must be carried on; somehow there must be an atoning power in the heart of every true believer of the Lord Jesus Christ who shall say, looking out and seeing that the world is lost, and is living in sin and misery, "I belong to it, and it belongs to me." When you take the loaf of society and cut off the upper crust, slicing it horizontally, you get an elect church. Yes, it is the peculiarly elect church of selfishness. But you should cut the loaf of society from the top down to the bottom, and take in something of everything. True, every church would be very much edified and advantaged if it had in it scholarly men, knowledgeable men; but the church is strong in proportion as it has in it something of everything, from the very top to the very bottom.

Now, I do not disown creeds--provided they are my own! Well, you smile; but that is the way it has been since the world began. No denomination believes in any creed except its own. I do not say that men's knowledge on moral subjects may not be formulated. I criticize the formulation of beliefs from time to time, in this: that they are very partial; that they are formed upon the knowledge of a past age, and that that knowledge perishes while higher and nobler knowledge comes in; that there ought to be higher and better forms; and that while their power is relatively small, the power of the spirit of humanity is relatively great. When I examine a church, I do not so much care whether its worship is to the one God or to the triune God. I do not chiefly care for the catechism, nor for the confession of faith, although they are both interesting. I do not even look to see whether it is a synagogue or a Christian church--I do not care whether it has a cross over the top of it or is Quaker plain. I do not care whether it is Protestant, Catholic, or anything else. Let me read the living--- the living book! What is the spirit of the people? How do they feel among each other? How do they feel toward the community? What is their life and conduct in regard to the great prime moral duty of man, "Love the Lord thy God and thy neighbor as thyself," whether he be obscure or whether he be smiling in the very plenitude of wealth and refinement? Have you a heart for humanity? Have you a soul that goes out for men? Are you Christ-like? Will you spend yourself for the sake of elevating men who need to be lifted up? That is orthodox. I do not care what the creed is. If a church has a good creed, that is all the more felicitous; and if it has a bad creed, a good life cures the bad creed.

One of the dangers of our civilization may be seen in the light of these considerations. We are developing so much strength founded on popular intelligence, and this intelligence and the incitements to it are developing such large property interests, that if the principle of elective affinity shall sort men out and classify them, we are steering to the not very remote danger of the disintegration of human society. I can tell you that the classes of men who by their knowledge, refinement, and wealth think they are justified in separating themselves, and in making a great void between them and the myriads of men below them, are courting their own destruction. I look with very great interest on the process of change going on in Great Britain, where the top of society had all the "blood," but the circulation is growing larger and larger, and a change is gradually taking place in their institutions. The old nobility of Great Britain is the lordliest of aristocracies existing in the world. Happily, on the whole, a very noble class of men occupy the high positions: but the spirit of suffrage, this angel of God that so many hate, is coming in on them; and when every man in Great Britain can vote, no matter whether he is poor or rich, whether he has knowledge or no knowledge, there must be a very great change. Before the great day of the Lord shall come, the valleys are to go up and the mountains are to come down; and the mountains have started already in Great Britain and must come down. There may be an aristocracy in any nation,--that is to say, there may be "best men"; there ought to be an aristocracy in every community,--that is, an aristocracy of men who speak the truth, who are just, who are intelligent: but that aristocracy will be like a wave of the sea; it has to be reconstituted in every generation, and the men who are the best in the State become the aristocracy of that State. But where rank is hereditary, if political suffrage becomes free and universal, aristocracy cannot live. The spirit of the gospel is democratic. The tendency of the gospel is leveling; leveling up, not down. It is carrying the poor and the multitude onward and upward.

It is said that democracies have no great men, no heroic men. Why is it so? When you raise the average of intelligence and power in the community it is very hard to be a great man. That is to say, when the great mass of citizens are only ankle-high, when among the Lilliputians a Brobdingnagian walks, he is a great man. But when the Lilliputians grow until they get up to his shoulder, he is not so great a man as he was by the whole length of his body. So, make the common people grow, and there is nobody tall enough to be much higher.

* * * * *

The remarkable people of this world are useful in their way; but the common people, after all, represent the nation, the age, and the civilization. Go into any town or city: do not ask who lives in that splendid house; do not say, This is a fine town, here are streets of houses with gardens and yards, and everything that is beautiful the whole way through. Go into the lanes, go into the back streets, go where the mechanic lives; go where the day-laborer lives. See what is the condition of the streets there. See what they do with the poor, with the helpless, and the mean. If the top of society bends perpetually over the bottom with tenderness, if the rich and strong are the best friends of the poor and needy, that is a civilized and a Christian community; but if the rich and the wise are the cream and the great bulk of the population skim-milk, that is not a prosperous community.

There is a great deal of irreligion in men, there is a great deal of wickedness and depravity in men, but there are times when it is true that the church is more dissipated than the dissipated classes of the community. If there is one thing that stood out more strongly than any other in the ministry of our Lord, it is the severity with which he treated the exclusiveness of men with knowledge, position, and a certain sort of religion, a religion of particularity and carefulness; if there is one class of the community against which he hurled his thunderbolts without mercy and predicted woes, it was the scribes, Pharisees, scholars, and priests of the temples. He told them in so many words, "The publican and the harlot will enter the kingdom of God before you." The worst dissipation in this world is the dry-rot of morality, and of the so-called piety that separates men of prosperity and of power from the poor and ignoble. They are our wards....

I am not a socialist. I do not preach riot. I do not preach the destruction of property. I regard property as one of the sacred things. The real property established by a man's own intelligence and labor is the crystallized man himself. It is the fruit of what his life-work has done; and not in vain, society makes crime against it amongst the most punishable. But nevertheless, I warn these men in a country like ours, where every man votes, whether he came from Hungary, or from Russia, or from Germany, or from France or Italy, or Spain or Portugal, or from the Orient,--from Japan and China, because they too are going to vote! On the Niagara River, logs come floating down and strike an island, and there they lodge and accumulate for a little while, and won't go over. But the rains come, the snows melt, the river rises, and the logs are lifted up and down, and they go swinging over the falls. The stream of suffrage of free men, having all the privileges of the State, is this great stream. The figure is defective in this, that the log goes over the Niagara Falls, but that is not the way the country is going or will go.... There is a certain river of political life, and everything has to go into it first or last; and if, in days to come, a man separates himself from his fellows without sympathy, if his wealth and power make poverty feel itself more poor and men's misery more miserable, and set against him the whole stream of popular feeling, that man is in danger. He may not know who dynamites him, but there is danger; and let him take heed who is in peril. There is nothing easier in the world than for rich men to ingratiate themselves with the whole community in which they live, and so secure themselves. It is not selfishness that will do it; it is not by increasing the load of misfortune, it is not by wasting substance in riotous living upon appetites and passions. It is by recognizing that every man is a brother. It is by recognizing the essential spirit of the gospel, "Love thy neighbor as thyself." It is by using some of their vast power and riches so as to diffuse joy in every section of the community.

Here then I close this discourse. How much it enrolls! How very simple it is! It is the whole gospel. When you make an application of it to all the phases of organization and classification of human interests and developments, it seems as though it were as big as the universe. Yet when you condense it, it all comes back to the one simple creed: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself." Who is my neighbor? A certain man went down to Jericho, and so on. That tells you who your neighbor is. Whosoever has been attacked by robbers, has been beaten, has been thrown down--by liquor, by gambling, or by any form of wickedness; whosoever has been cast into distress, and you are called on to raise him up--that is your neighbor. Love your neighbor as yourself. That is the gospel.

A NEW ENGLAND SUNDAY

From 'Norwood'

It is worth all the inconveniences arising from the occasional over-action of New England Sabbath observance, to obtain the full flavor of a New England Sunday. But for this, one should have been born there; should have found Sunday already waiting for him, and accepted it with implicit and absolute conviction, as if it were a law of nature, in the same way that night and day, summer and winter, are parts of nature. He should have been brought up by parents who had done the same thing, as _they_ were by parents even more strict, if that were possible; until not religious persons peculiarly, but everybody--not churches alone, but society itself, and all its population, those who broke it as much as those who kept it--were stained through with the color of Sunday. Nay, until Nature had adopted it, and laid its commands on all birds and beasts, on the sun and winds, and upon the whole atmosphere; so that without much imagination one might imagine, in a genuine New England Sunday of the Connecticut River Valley stamp, that God was still on that day resting from all the work which he had created and made, and that all his work rested with him!

Over all the town rested the Lord's peace! The saw was ripping away yesterday in the carpenter's shop, and the hammer was noisy enough. Today there is not a sign of life there. The anvil makes no music to-day. Tommy Taft's buckets and barrels give forth no hollow, thumping sound. The mill is silent--only the brook continues noisy. Listen! In yonder pine woods what a cawing of crows! Like an echo, in a wood still more remote other crows are answering. But even a crow's throat to-day is musical. Do they think, because they have black coats on, that they are parsons, and have a right to play pulpit with all the pine-trees? Nay. The birds will not have any such monopoly,--they are all singing, and singing all together, and no one cares whether his song rushes across another's or not. Larks and robins, blackbirds and orioles, sparrows and bluebirds, mocking cat-birds and wrens, were furrowing the air with such mixtures as no other day but Sunday, when all artificial and human sounds cease, could ever hear. Every now and then a bobolink seemed impressed with the duty of bringing these jangling birds into more regularity; and like a country singing-master, he flew down the ranks, singing all the parts himself in snatches, as if to stimulate and help the laggards. In vain! Sunday is the birds' day, and they will have their own democratic worship.

There was no sound in the village street. Look either way--not a vehicle, not a human being. The smoke rose up soberly and quietly, as if it said--It is Sunday! The leaves on the great elms hung motionless, glittering in dew, as if they too, like the people who dwelt under their shadow, were waiting for the bell to ring for meeting. Bees sung and flew as usual; but honey-bees have a Sunday way with them all the week, and could scarcely change for the better on the seventh day.

But oh, the Sun! It had sent before and cleared every stain out of the sky. The blue heaven was not dim and low, as on secular days, but curved and deep, as if on Sunday it shook off all incumbrance which during the week had lowered and flattened it, and sprang back to the arch and symmetry of a dome. All ordinary sounds caught the spirit of the day. The shutting of a door sounded twice as far as usual. The rattle of a bucket in a neighbor's yard, no longer mixed with heterogeneous noises, seemed a new sound. The hens went silently about, and roosters crowed in psalm-tunes. And when the first bell rung, Nature seemed overjoyed to find something that it might do without breaking Sunday, and rolled the sound over and over, and pushed it through the air, and raced with it over field and hill, twice as far as on week-days. There were no less than seven steeples in sight from the belfry, and the sexton said:--"On still Sundays I've heard the bell, at one time and another, when the day was fair, and the air moving in the right way, from every one of them steeples, and I guess likely they've all heard our'n."

"Come, Rose!" said Agate Bissell, at an even earlier hour than when Rose usually awakened--"Come, Rose, it is the Sabbath. We must not be late Sunday morning, of all days in the week. It is the Lord's day."

There was little preparation required for the day. Saturday night, in some parts of New England, was considered almost as sacred as Sunday itself. After sundown on Saturday night no play, and no work except such as is immediately preparatory to the Sabbath, were deemed becoming in good Christians. The clothes had been laid out the night before. Nothing was forgotten. The best frock was ready; the hose and shoes were waiting. Every article of linen, every ruffle and ribbon, were selected on Saturday night. Every one in the house walked mildly. Every one spoke in a low tone. Yet all were cheerful. The mother had on her kindest face, and nobody laughed, but everybody made it up in smiling. The nurse smiled, and the children held on to keep down a giggle within the lawful bounds of a smile; and the doctor looked rounder and calmer than ever; and the dog flapped his tail on the floor with a softened sound, as if he had fresh wrapped it in hair for that very day. Aunt Toodie, the cook (so the children had changed Mrs. Sarah Good's name), was blacker than ever and shinier than ever, and the coffee better, and the cream richer, and the broiled chickens juicier and more tender, and the biscuit whiter, and the corn-bread more brittle and sweet.

When the good doctor read the Scriptures at family prayer, the infection of silence had subdued everything except the clock. Out of the wide hall could be heard in the stillness the old clock, that now lifted up its voice with unwonted emphasis, as if, unnoticed through the bustling week, Sunday was its vantage ground, to proclaim to mortals the swift flight of time. And if the old pedant performed the task with something of an ostentatious precision, it was because in that house nothing else put on official airs, and the clock felt the responsibility of doing it for the whole mansion.

And now came mother and catechism; for Mrs. Wentworth followed the old custom, and declared that no child of hers should grow up without catechism. Secretly, the doctor was quite willing, though openly he played off upon the practice a world of good-natured discouragement, and declared that there should be an opposition set up--a catechism of Nature, with natural laws for decrees, and seasons for Providence, and flowers for graces! The younger children were taught in simple catechism. But Rose, having reached the mature age of twelve, was now manifesting her power over the Westminster Shorter Catechism; and as it was simply an achievement of memory and not of the understanding, she had the book at great advantage, and soon subdued every question and answer in it. As much as possible, the doctor was kept aloof on such occasions. His grave questions were not to edification, and often they caused Rose to stumble, and brought down sorely the exultation with which she rolled forth, "They that are effectually called do in this life partake of justification, adoption, sanctification, and the several benefits which in this life do either accompany or flow from them."

"What do those words mean, Rose?"

"Which words, pa?"

"Adoption, sanctification, and justification?"

Rose hesitated, and looked at her mother for rescue.

"Doctor, why do you trouble the child? Of course she don't know yet all the meaning. But that will come to her when she grows older."

"You make a nest of her memory, then, and put words there, like eggs, for future hatching?"

"Yes, that is it exactly: birds do not hatch their eggs the minute they lay them. They wait."

"Laying eggs at twelve to be hatched at twenty is subjecting them to some risk, is it not?"

"It might be so with eggs, but not with the catechism. That will keep without spoiling a hundred years!"

"Because it is so dry?"

"Because it is so good. But do, dear husband, go away, and not put notions in the children's heads. It's hard enough already to get them through their tasks. Here's poor Arthur, who has been two Sundays on one question, and has not got it yet."

Arthur, aforesaid, was sharp and bright in anything addressed to his reason, but he had no verbal memory, and he was therefore wading painfully through the catechism like a man in a deep-muddy road; with this difference, that the man carries too much clay with him, while nothing stuck to poor Arthur.

* * * * *

The beauty of the day, the genial season of the year, brought forth every one; old men and their feebler old wives, young and hearty men and their plump and ruddy companions,--young men and girls and children, thick as punctuation points in Hebrew text, filled the street. In a low voice, they spoke to each other in single sentences.

"A fine day! There'll be a good congregation out to-day."

"Yes; we may expect a house full. How is Widow Cheney--have you heard?"

"Well, not much better; can't hold out many days. It will be a great loss to the children."

"Yes; but we must all die--nobody can skip his turn. Does she still talk about them that's gone?"

"They say not. I believe she's sunk into a quiet way; and it looks as if she'd go off easy."

"Sunday is a good day for dying--it's about the only journey that speeds well on this day!"

There was something striking in the outflow of people into the street, that till now had seemed utterly deserted. There was no fevered hurry; no negligent or poorly dressed people. Every family came in groups--old folks and young children; and every member blossomed forth in his best apparel, like a rose-bush in June. Do you know that man in a silk hat and new black coat? Probably it is some stranger. No; it is the carpenter, Mr. Baggs, who was racing about yesterday with his sleeves rolled up, and a dust-and-business look in his face! I knew you would not know him. Adams Gardner, the blacksmith,--does he not look every inch a judge, now that he is clean-washed, shaved, and dressed? His eyes are as bright as the sparks that fly from his anvil!

Are not the folks proud of their children? See what groups of them! How ruddy and plump are most! Some are roguish, and cut clandestine capers at every chance. Others seem like wax figures, so perfectly proper are they. Little hands go slyly through the pickets to pluck a tempting flower. Other hands carry hymn-books or Bibles. But, carry what they may, dressed as each parent can afford, is there anything the sun shines upon more beautiful than these troops of Sunday children?

The old bell had it all its own way up in the steeple. It was the licensed noise of the day. In a long shed behind the church stood a score and half-score of wagons and chaises and carryalls,--the horses already beginning the forenoon's work of stamping and whisking the flies. More were coming. Hiram Beers had "hitched up," and brought two loads with his new hack; and now, having secured the team, he stood with a few admiring young fellows about him, remarking on the people as they came up.

"There's Trowbridge--he'll git asleep afore the first prayer's over. I don't b'lieve he's heerd a sermon in ten years. I've seen him sleep standin' up in singin'.

"Here comes Deacon Marble,--smart old feller, ain't he?--wouldn't think it, jest to look at him! Face looks like an ear of last summer's sweet corn, all dried up; but I tell ye he's got the juice in him yit! Aunt Polly's gittin' old, ain't she? They say she can't walk half the time--lost the use of her limbs; but it's all gone to her tongue. That's as good as a razor, and a sight better 'n mine, for it never needs sharpenin'.

"Stand away, boys, there's 'Biah Cathcart. Good horses--not fast, but mighty strong, just like the owner."

And with that Hiram touched his new Sunday hat to Mrs. Cathcart and Alice; and as he took the horses by the bits, he dropped his head and gave the Cathcart boys a look of such awful solemnity, all except one eye, that they lost their sobriety. Barton alone remained sober as a judge.

"Here comes 'Dot-and-Go-One' and his wife. They're my kind o' Christians. She is a saint, at any rate."

"How is it with you, Tommy Taft?"

"Fair to middlin', thank'e. Such weather would make a hand-spike blossom, Hiram."

"Don't you think that's a leetle strong, Tommy, for Sunday? P'raps you mean afore it's cut?"

"Sartin; that's what I mean. But you mustn't stop me, Hiram. Parson Buell 'll be lookin' for me. He never begins till I git there."

"You mean you always git there 'fore he begins."