ORESTES A. BROWNSON. 1800-. (Manual, p. 480.)

From "New Views."

133. THE DUTY OF PROGRESS.

THE duty of every being is to follow its destiny, to seek its end. Man's destiny is illimitable progress. Humanity has but today, as it were, risen to self-consciousness, to a perception of its own capacity, to a glimpse of its inconceivably grand and holy destiny. Heretofore it has failed to recognize clearly its duty. It has advanced, but not designedly, not with foresight; it has done it instinctively, by the aid of the invisible but safe-guiding hand of its Father. Without knowing what it did, it has condemned progress while it was progressing. It has stoned the prophets and reformers, even while it was itself reforming and uttering glorious prophecies of its future condition. But the time has now come for humanity to understand itself, to accept the law imposed upon it for its own good, to foresee its end, and march with intention steadily towards it. Its future religion is the religion of progress. The true priests are those who can quicken in mankind a desire for progress, and urge them forward in the direction of the true, the good, the perfect.

From "The Convert."

134. POLITICS OF CATHOLIC EUROPE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DESPOTIC.

IN France, Spain, Portugal, and a large part of Italy, all through the seventeenth century, the youth were trained in the maxim, The prince is the state, and his pleasure is law. Bossuet, in his politics, did only faithfully express the political sentiments and convictions of his age, shared by the great body of Catholics as well as of non-Catholics. Rational liberty had few defenders, and they were exiled, like Fénelon, from the court. The politics of Philip II. of Spain, of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV. in France, which were the politics of Catholic Europe, hardly opposed, except by the popes, through the greater part of the sixteenth and the whole of the seventeenth centuries, tended directly to enslave the people, and to restrict the freedom and efficiency of the church. Had either Philip, or, after him, Louis, succeeded, by linking the Catholic cause to his personal ambition, in realizing his dream of universal monarchy, Europe would most likely have been plunged into a political and social condition as unenviable as that into which old Asia has been plunged for these four hundred years; and it may well be believed that it was Providence that raised and directed the tempest that scattered the Grand Armada, and that gave victory to the arms of Eugene and Marlborough.

LYDIA M. CHILD.

1802-. (Manual, p. 484.)

From "The Progress of Religious Ideas."

135. INSPIRING POWER OF CHRISTIANITY.

If any one is disposed to doubt that Christianity contains within itself a vital element of progress, superior to any other spiritual influence by which God has yet guided the world, I think he will be convinced by comparing the practical results of different religious systems. All of them contain truth, all of them have produced, and are producing, greater or less degrees of good; but, after making due deductions on account of the iniquitous practices of Christendom, we are still compelled to admit that there only do we find sympathy, benevolence, and active exertion for the improvement of all mankind. Christianity is the only form of religion which has warmed up whole nations to sacrifice time, talent, and wealth for the benefit of remote and degraded classes of people, from whom no return of advantages could be expected. One instance will suffice for illustration. Where the slave trade and slavery have been abolished, it has not been done by policy of government. It has been the expansive force of Christian sympathy, compelling cold, reluctant statesmen to move in obedience to the mighty pulsation of the popular heart. There was no fire to create such propelling steam in the pagan religions, and in the Asiatic the celestial spark smoulders under the heavy pressure of belief in irresistible fate.

TAYLER LEWIS. 1802-1

From "The Six Days of Creation."

136. UNITY OF THE MOSAIC ACCOUNT.

ANOTHER striking trait of the Mosaic cosmogony is its unbroken wholeness or unity. Be it invention or inspiration, it is the invention or the inspiration of one mind. Other cosmogonies, though bearing unmistakable evidence of their descent from the Mosaic, have had successive deposits, in successive series, of mythological strata. This stands towering out in lonely sublimity, like the everlasting granite of the Alps or the Himalaya, as compared with the changing alluvium of the Nile or the Ganges. "In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth. And the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God brooded over the waters. And God said, Let there be light, and it

1 Born in New York; a prolific writer, eminent for his profound scholarship, and for originality and freedom of mind.

was light. And God saw the light that it was fair, and God divided the light from the darkness. And thus there was an evening and a morning one day." What is there like it, or to be at all compared with it, in any mythology on earth? There it stands, high above them all, and remote from them all, in its air of great antiquity, in its unaccountableness, in its serene truthfulness, in its unapproachable sublimity, in that impress of divine majesty and ineffable holiness which even the unbelieving neologist has been compelled to acknowledge, and by which every devout reader feels that the first page in Genesis is forever distinguished from any mere human production.

137.

From "State Rights."

CRUEL INTESTINE WARS CAUSED BY NATIONAL DIVISION. If it were Death alone! But "Hell follows hard after." What a heaving Tartarus was Greece, when all hope of a true nationality was given up! . . In the cities, in the isles, in the colonies, banishments, confiscations, ostracisms, and cruel deaths. The most ferocious parties everywhere, fomented in the smaller states by the influence of the larger, and kept alive in the leading cities by the continual presence of foreign emissaries. With us it would be far more like Satan's kingdom, inasmuch as our states are more numerous, relatively more petty, and, from the increased powers of modern knowledge and modern invention, capable of the greater mutual mischief.

We are not prophesying at random. Here is our old guide-book. The road is all mapped out, the way surveyed, by which we march to ruin. All the dire calamities of Greece may be traced to this word autonomia.1

Greece presented the first great proof of a fact of which we are now in danger of furnishing another and more terrible example to the world. It is the utter impossibility of peace, in a territory made by nature a geographical unity, inhabited by a people, or peoples, of one lineage, one language, bound together in historical reminiscences, yet divided into petty sovereign states too small for any respectable nationalities themselves, and yet preventing any beneficent nationality as a whole. No animosities have been so fierce as those existing among people thus geographically and politically related. No wars with each other have been so cruel; no home factions have been so incessant, so treacherous, and so debasing. The very ties that draw them near only awaken occasions of strife, which would not have existed between tribes wholly alien to each other in language and religion.

1 State sovereignty.]

HORACE GREELEY.' 1811-.

From a "Lecture on the Emancipation of Labor."

138. THE PROBLEM OF LABOR.

THE worker of the nineteenth century stands a sad and careworn man. Once in a while a particular flowery Fourth of July oration, political harangue, or Thanksgiving sermon, catching him well filled with creature comforts, and a little inclined to soar starward, will take him off his feet, and for an hour or two he will wonder if ever human lot was so blessed as that of the free-born American laborer. He hurrahs, and is ready to knock any man down who will not readily and heartily agree that this is a great country, and our industrious classes the happiest people on earth. The hallucination passes off, however, with the silvery tones of the orator, and the exhilarating fumes of the liquor which inspired it. The inhaler of the bewildering gas bends his slow steps at length to his sorry domicile, or wakes therein on the morrow, in a sober and practical mood. His very exaltation, now past, has rendered him more keenly susceptible to the deficiencies and impediments which hem him in his house seems narrow, his food coarse, his furniture scanty, his prospects gloomy, and those of his children more sombre, if possible; and as he hurries off to the day's task which he has too long neglected, and for which he has little heart, he too falls into that train of thought which is beginning to encircle the globe, and of which the burden may be freely rendered thus: "Why should those by whose toil all comforts and luxuries are produced, or made available, enjoy so scanty a share of them? Why should a man able and eager to work, ever stand idle for want of employment in a world where so much needful work impatiently awaits the doing? Why should a man be required to surrender something of his independence, in accepting the employment which will enable him to earn by honest effort the bread of his family? Why should the man who faithfully labors for another, and receives therefor less than the product of his labor, be currently held the obliged party, rather than he who buys the work and makes a good bargain of it? In short, why should Speculation and Scheming ride so jauntily in their carriages, splashing honest Work as it trudges humbly and wearily by on foot?" Such, as I interpret it, is the problem which occupies and puzzles the knotted brain of Toil in our day.

1 The well-known journalist of New York; conspicuous for his many writings on social and political reform, his reminiscences, &c.; a native of New Hampshire.

WENDELL PHILLIPS.1 1811-.

From "A Lecture delivered in December, 1861."

139. THE WAR FOR THE UNION.

I WOULD have government announce to the world that we understand the evil which has troubled our peace for seventy years, thwarting the natural tendency of our institutions, sending ruin along our wharves and through our workshops every ten years, poisoning the national conscience. We know well its character. But democracy, unlike other governments, is strong enough to let evils work out their own death strong enough to face them when they reveal their proportions. It was in this sublime consciousness of strength, not of weakness, that our fathers submitted to the well-known evil of slavery, and tolerated it until the viper we thought we could safely tread on, at the touch of disappointment, starts up a fiend whose stature reaches the sky. But our cheeks do not blanch. Democracy accepts the struggle. After this forbearance of three generations, confident that she has yet power to execute her will, she sends her proclamation down to the Gulf. freedom to every man beneath the stars, and death to every institution that disturbs our peace, or threatens the future of the republic.

1 A native of Massachusetts; a vigorous thinker and speaker on the great moral and political topics of the day.

THEODORE PARKER. About 1812-1860. (Manual, p. 531.)

From "Lessons from the World of Nature," &c.

140. WINTER AND SPRING.

IN the hard, cold winter of our northern lands, how do we feel a longing for the presence of life! Then we love to look on a pine or fir tree, which seems the only living thing in the woods, surrounded by dead oaks, birches, maples, looking like the gravestones of buried vegetation that seems warm and living then; and at Christmas, men bring it into meeting-houses and parlors, and set it up, full of life, and laden with kindly gifts for the little folk. Then even the unattractive crow seems half sacred, through the winter bearing messages of promise from the perished autumn to the advancing spring—this dark forerunner of the tuneful tribes which are to come. We feel a longing for fresh, green nature, and so in the shelter of our houses keep some little Aaron's rod, budding alike with promise and memory; or in some hyacinth or Dutchman's tulip we keep a prophecy of flowers, and start