Part 15

DEAR FRIEND,--It gives me great pleasure to know that the pupils in thy class at the Institution for the Blind have the opportunity afforded them to read through the sense of touch some of my writings, and thus hold what I hope will prove a pleasant communion with me. Very glad I shall be if the pen-pictures of nature, and homely country firesides, which I have tried to make, are understood and appreciated by those who cannot discern them by natural vision. I shall count it a great privilege to see for them, or rather to let them see through my eyes. It is the mind after all that really sees, shapes, and colors all things. What visions of beauty and sublimity passed before the inward and spiritual sight of blind Milton and Beethoven!

I have an esteemed friend, Morrison Hendy, of Kentucky, who is deaf and blind; yet under these circumstances he has cultivated his mind to a high degree, and has written poems of great beauty, and vivid descriptions of scenes which have been witnessed only by the "light within."

I thank thee for thy letter, and beg of thee to assure the students that I am deeply interested in their welfare and progress, and that my prayer is that their inward and spiritual eyes may become so clear that they can well dispense with the outward and material ones.

THE INDIAN QUESTION.

Read at the meeting in Boston, May, 1883, for the consideration of the condition of the Indians in the United States.

AMESBURY, 4th mo., 1883.

I REGRET that I cannot be present at the meeting called in reference to the pressing question of the day, the present condition and future prospects of the Indian race in the United States. The old policy, however well intended, of the government is no longer available. The westward setting tide of immigration is everywhere sweeping over the lines of the reservations. There would seem to be no power in the government to prevent the practical abrogation of its solemn treaties and the crowding out of the Indians from their guaranteed hunting grounds. Outbreaks of Indian ferocity and revenge, incited by wrong and robbery on the part of the whites, will increasingly be made the pretext of indiscriminate massacres. The entire question will soon resolve itself into the single alternative of education and civilization or extermination.

The school experiments at Hampton, Carlisle, and Forest Grove in Oregon have proved, if such proof were ever needed, that the roving Indian can be enlightened and civilized, taught to work and take interest and delight in the product of his industry, and settle down on his farm or in his workshop, as an American citizen, protected by and subject to the laws of the republic. What is needed is that not only these schools should be more liberally supported, but that new ones should be opened without delay. The matter does not admit of procrastination. The work of education and civilization must be done. The money needed must be contributed with no sparing hand. The laudable example set by the Friends and the American Missionary Association should be followed by other sects and philanthropic societies. Christianity, patriotism, and enlightened self interest have a common stake in the matter. Great and difficult as the work may be the country is strong enough, rich enough, wise enough, and, I believe, humane and Christian enough to do it.

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.

Read at a meeting of the Essex Club, in Boston, November, 1885.

AMESBURY, 11th Mo., 10, 1885.

I AM sorry that I cannot accept thy invitation to attend the meeting of the Essex Club on the 14th inst. I should be glad to meet my old Republican friends and congratulate them on the results of the election in Massachusetts, and especially in our good old county of Essex.

Some of our friends and neighbors, who have been with us heretofore, last year saw fit to vote with the opposite party. I would be the last to deny their perfect right to do so, or to impeach their motives, but I think they were mistaken in expecting that party to reform the abuses and evils which they complained of. President Cleveland has proved himself better than his party, and has done and said some good things which I give him full credit for, but the instincts of his party are against him, and must eventually prove too strong for him, and, instead of his carrying the party, it will be likely to carry him. It has already compelled him to put his hands in his pockets for electioneering purposes, and travel all the way from Washington to Buffalo to give his vote for a spoilsman and anti-civil service machine politician. I would not like to call it a case of "offensive partisanship," but it looks a good deal like it.

As a Republican from the outset, I am proud of the noble record of the party, but I should rejoice to see its beneficent work taken up by the Democratic party and so faithfully carried on as to make our organization no longer necessary. But, as far as we can see, the Republican party has still its mission and its future. When labor shall everywhere have its just reward, and the gains of it are made secure to the earners; when education shall be universal, and, North and South, all men shall have the free and full enjoyment of civil rights and privileges, irrespective of color or former condition; when every vice which debases the community shall be discouraged and prohibited, and every virtue which elevates it fostered and strengthened; when merit and fitness shall be the conditions of office; and when sectional distrust and prejudice shall give place to well-merited confidence in the loyalty and patriotism of all, then will the work of the Republican party, as a party, be ended, and all political rivalries be merged in the one great party of the people, with no other aim than the common welfare, and no other watchwords than peace, liberty, and union. Then may the language which Milton addressed to his countrymen two centuries ago be applied to the United States, "Go on, hand in hand, O peoples, never to be disunited; be the praise and heroic song of all posterity. Join your invincible might to do worthy and godlike deeds; and then he who seeks to break your Union, a cleaving curse be his inheritance."

OUR DUMB RELATIONS. (1886.)

IT was said of St. Francis of Assisi, that he had attained, through the fervor of his love, the secret of that deep amity with God and His creation which, in the language of inspiration, makes man to be in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field to be at peace with him. The world has never been without tender souls, with whom the golden rule has a broader application than its letter might seem to warrant. The ancient Eastern seers recognized the rights of the brute creation, and regarded the unnecessary taking of the life of the humblest and meanest as a sin; and in almost all the old religions of the world there are legends of saints, in the depth of whose peace with God and nature all life was sacredly regarded as the priceless gift of heaven, and who were thus enabled to dwell safely amidst lions and serpents.

It is creditable to human nature and its unperverted instincts that stories and anecdotes of reciprocal kindness and affection between men and animals are always listened to with interest and approval. How pleasant to think of the Arab and his horse, whose friendship has been celebrated in song and romance. Of Vogelwied, the Minnesinger, and his bequest to the birds. Of the English Quaker, visited, wherever he went, by flocks of birds, who with cries of joy alighted on his broad-brimmed hat and his drab coat-sleeves. Of old Samuel Johnson, when half-blind and infirm, groping abroad of an evening for oysters for his cat. Of Walter Scott and John Brown, of Edinburgh, and their dogs. Of our own Thoreau, instinctively recognized by bird and beast as a friend. Emerson says of him: "His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas Fuller records of Butler, the apologist, that either he had told the bees things, or the bees had told him. Snakes coiled round his legs; the fishes swam into his hand; he pulled the woodchuck out of his hole by his tail, and took foxes under his protection from the hunters."

In the greatest of the ancient Hindu poems--the sacred book of the Mahabharata--there is a passage of exceptional beauty and tenderness, which records the reception of King Yudishthira at the gate of Paradise. A pilgrim to the heavenly city, the king had travelled over vast spaces, and, one by one, the loved ones, the companions of his journey, had all fallen and left him alone, save his faithful dog, which still followed. He was met by Indra, and invited to enter the holy city. But the king thinks of his friends who have fallen on the way, and declines to go in without them. The god tells him they are all within waiting for him. Joyful, he is about to seek them, when he looks upon the poor dog, who, weary and wasted, crouches at his feet, and asks that he, too, may enter the gate. Indra refuses, and thereupon the king declares that to abandon his faithful dumb friend would be as great a sin as to kill a Brahmin.

"Away with that felicity whose price is to abandon the faithful! Never, come weal or woe, will I leave my faithful dog. The poor creature, in fear and distress, has trusted in my power to save him; Not, therefore, for life itself, will I break my plighted word."

In full sight of heaven he chooses to go to hell with his dog, and straightway descends, as he supposes, thither. But his virtue and faithfulness change his destination to heaven, and he finds himself surrounded by his old friends, and in the presence of the gods, who thus honor and reward his humanity and unselfish love.

INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION.

Read at the reception in Boston of the English delegation representing more than two hundred members of the British Parliament who favor international arbitration.

AMESBURY, 11th Mo., 9, 1887.

IT is a very serious disappointment to me not to be able to be present at the welcome of the American Peace Society to the delegation of more than two hundred members of the British Parliament who favor international arbitration. Few events have more profoundly impressed me than the presentation of this peaceful overture to the President of the United States. It seems to me that every true patriot who seeks the best interests of his country and every believer in the gospel of Christ must respond to the admirable address of Sir Lyon Playfair and that of his colleagues who represented the workingmen of England. We do not need to be told that war is always cruel, barbarous, and brutal; whether used by professed Christians with ball and bayonet, or by heathen with club and boomerang. We cannot be blind to its waste of life and treasure and the demoralization which follows in its train; nor cease to wonder at the spectacle of Christian nations exhausting all their resources in preparing to slaughter each other, with only here and there a voice, like Count Tolstoi's in the Russian wilderness, crying in heedless ears that the gospel of Christ is peace, not war, and love, not hatred.

The overture which comes to us from English advocates of arbitration is a cheering assurance that the tide of sentiment is turning in favor of peace among English speaking peoples. I cannot doubt that whatever stump orators and newspapers may say for party purposes, the heart of America will respond to the generous proposal of our kinsfolk across the water. No two nations could be more favorably conditioned than England and the United States for making the "holy experiment of arbitration."

In our associations and kinship, our aims and interests, our common claims in the great names and achievements of a common ancestry, we are essentially one people. Whatever other nations may do, we at least should be friends. God grant that the noble and generous attempt shall not be in vain! May it hasten the time when the only rivalry between us shall be the peaceful rivalry of progress and the gracious interchange of good.

"When closer strand shall lean to strand, Till meet beneath saluting flags, The eagle of our mountain crags, The lion of our mother land!"

SUFFRAGE FOR WOMEN.

Read at the Woman's Convention at Washington.

OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, MASS., Third Mo., 8, 1888.

I THANK thee for thy kind letter. It would be a great satisfaction to be able to be present at the fortieth anniversary of the Woman's Suffrage Association. But, as that is not possible, I can only reiterate my hearty sympathy with the object of the association, and bid it take heart and assurance in view of all that has been accomplished. There is no easy royal road to a reform of this kind, but if the progress has been slow there has been no step backward. The barriers which at first seemed impregnable in the shape of custom and prejudice have been undermined and their fall is certain. A prophecy of your triumph at no distant day is in the air; your opponents feel it and believe it. They know that yours is a gaining and theirs a losing cause. The work still before you demands on your part great patience, steady perseverance, a firm, dignified, and self-respecting protest against the injustice of which you have so much reason to complain, and of serene confidence which is not discouraged by temporary checks, nor embittered by hostile criticism, nor provoked to use any weapons of retort, which, like the boomerang, fall back on the heads of those who use them. You can afford in your consciousness of right to be as calm and courteous as the archangel Michael, who, we are told in Scripture in his controversy with Satan himself, did not bring a railing accusation against him. A wise adaptation of means to ends is no yielding of principle, but care should be taken to avoid all such methods as have disgraced political and religious parties of the masculine sex. Continue to make it manifest that all which is pure and lovely and of good repute in womanhood is entirely compatible with the exercise of the rights of citizenship, and the performance of the duties which we all owe to our homes and our country. Confident that you will do this, and with no doubt or misgiving as to your success, I bid you Godspeed. I find I have written to the association rather than to thyself, but as one of the principal originators and most faithful supporters, it was very natural that I should identify thee with it.

THE INNER LIFE

THE AGENCY OF EVIL.

From the Supernaturalism of New England, in the Democratic Review for 1843.

IN this life of ours, so full of mystery, so hung about with wonders, so written over with dark riddles, where even the lights held by prophets and inspired ones only serve to disclose the solemn portals of a future state of being, leaving all beyond in shadow, perhaps the darkest and most difficult problem which presents itself is that of the origin of evil,--the source whence flow the black and bitter waters of sin and suffering and discord,--the wrong which all men see in others and feel in themselves,--the unmistakable facts of human depravity and misery. A superficial philosophy may attempt to refer all these dark phenomena of man's existence to his own passions, circumstances, and will; but the thoughtful observer cannot rest satisfied with secondary causes. The grossest materialism, at times, reveals something of that latent dread of an invisible and spiritual influence which is inseparable from our nature. Like Eliphaz the Temanite, it is conscious of a spirit passing before its face, the form whereof is not discerned.

It is indeed true that our modern divines and theologians, as if to atone for the too easy credulity of their order formerly, have unceremoniously consigned the old beliefs of Satanic agency, demoniacal possession, and witchcraft, to Milton's receptacle of exploded follies and detected impostures,

"Over the backside of the world far off, Into a limbo broad and large, and called The paradise of fools,"--

that indeed, out of their peculiar province, and apart from the routine of their vocation, they have become the most thorough sceptics and unbelievers among us. Yet it must be owned that, if they have not the marvellous themselves, they are the cause of it in others. In certain states of mind, the very sight of a clergyman in his sombre professional garb is sufficient to awaken all the wonderful within us. Imagination goes wandering back to the subtle priesthood of mysterious Egypt. We think of Jannes and Jambres; of the Persian magi; dim oak groves, with Druid altars, and priests, and victims, rise before us. For what is the priest even of our New England but a living testimony to the truth of the supernatural and the reality of the unseen,--a man of mystery, walking in the shadow of the ideal world,--by profession an expounder of spiritual wonders? Laugh he may at the old tales of astrology and witchcraft and demoniacal possession; but does he not believe and bear testimony to his faith in the reality of that dark essence which Scripture more than hints at, which has modified more or less all the religious systems and speculations of the heathen world,--the Ahriman of the Parsee, the Typhon of the Egyptian, the Pluto of the Roman mythology, the Devil of Jew, Christian, and Mussulman, the Machinito of the Indian,--evil in the universe of goodness, darkness in the light of divine intelligence,--in itself the great and crowning mystery from which by no unnatural process of imagination may be deduced everything which our forefathers believed of the spiritual world and supernatural agency? That fearful being with his tributaries and agents,--"the Devil and his angels,"--how awfully he rises before us in the brief outline limning of the sacred writers! How he glooms, "in shape and gesture proudly eminent," on the immortal canvas of Milton and Dante! What a note of horror does his name throw into the sweet Sabbath psalmody of our churches. What strange, dark fancies are connected with the very language of common-law indictments, when grand juries find under oath that the offence complained of has been committed "at the instigation of the Devil"!

How hardly effaced are the impressions of childhood! Even at this day, at the mention of the evil angel, an image rises before me like that with which I used especially to horrify myself in an old copy of Pilgrim's Progress. Horned, hoofed, scaly, and fire-breathing, his caudal extremity twisted tight with rage, I remember him, illustrating the tremendous encounter of Christian in the valley where "Apollyon straddled over the whole breadth of the way." There was another print of the enemy which made no slight impression upon me. It was the frontispiece of an old, smoked, snuff-stained pamphlet, the property of an elderly lady, (who had a fine collection of similar wonders, wherewith she was kind enough to edify her young visitors,) containing a solemn account of the fate of a wicked dancing-party in New Jersey, whose irreverent declaration, that they would have a fiddler if they had to send to the lower regions after him, called up the fiend himself, who forthwith commenced playing, while the company danced to the music incessantly, without the power to suspend their exercise, until their feet and legs were worn off to the knees! The rude wood-cut represented the demon fiddler and his agonized companions literally stumping it up and down in "cotillons, jigs, strathspeys, and reels." He would have answered very well to the description of the infernal piper in Tam O'Shanter.

To this popular notion of the impersonation of the principle of evil we are doubtless indebted for the whole dark legacy of witchcraft and possession. Failing in our efforts to solve the problem of the origin of evil, we fall back upon the idea of a malignant being,--the antagonism of good. Of this mysterious and dreadful personification we find ourselves constrained to speak with a degree of that awe and reverence which are always associated with undefined power and the ability to harm. "The Devil," says an old writer, "is a dignity, though his glory be somewhat faded and wan, and is to be spoken of accordingly."

The evil principle of Zoroaster was from eternity self-created and existent, and some of the early Christian sects held the same opinion. The gospel, however, affords no countenance to this notion of a divided sovereignty of the universe. The Divine Teacher, it is true, in discoursing of evil, made use of the language prevalent in His time, and which was adapted to the gross conceptions of His Jewish bearers; but He nowhere presents the embodiment of sin as an antagonism to the absolute power and perfect goodness of God, of whom, and through whom, and to whom are all things. Pure himself, He can create nothing impure. Evil, therefore, has no eternity in the past. The fact of its present actual existence is indeed strongly stated; and it is not given us to understand the secret of that divine alchemy whereby pain, and sin, and discord become the means to beneficent ends worthy of the revealed attributes of the Infinite Parent. Unsolved by human reason or philosophy, the dark mystery remains to baffle the generations of men; and only to the eye of humble and childlike faith can it ever be reconciled to the purity, justice, and mercy of Him who is "light, and in whom is no darkness at all."

"Do you not believe in the Devil?" some one once asked the Non-conformist Robinson. "I believe in God," was the reply; "don't you?"

Henry of Nettesheim says "that it is unanimously maintained that devils do wander up and down in the earth; but what they are, or how they are, ecclesiasticals have not clearly expounded." Origen, in his Platonic speculations on this subject, supposed them to be spirits who, by repentance, might be restored, that in the end all knees might be bowed to the Father of spirits, and He become all in all. Justin Martyr was of the opinion that many of them still hoped for their salvation; and the Cabalists held that this hope of theirs was well founded. One is irresistibly reminded here of the closing verse of the _Address to the Deil_, by Burns:--

"But fare ye weel, Auld Nickie ben! Gin ye wad take a thought and mend, Ye aiblins might--I dinna ken-- Still has a stake I'm was to think upon yon den Fen for your sake."

The old schoolmen and fathers seem to agree that the Devil and his ministers have bodies in some sort material, subject to passions and liable to injury and pain. Origen has a curious notion that any evil spirit who, in a contest with a human being, is defeated, loses from thenceforth all his power of mischief, and may be compared to a wasp who has lost his sting.