CHAPTER VIII.

DEVELOPMENT OF MANHOOD AND HUMANITY.

"The Americans are a very old and a very enlightened people, who have fallen upon a new and unbounded country, where they may extend themselves at pleasure, and which they may fertilize without difficulty. This state of things is without a parallel in the history of the world." — DE Tocqueville.

THERE is a higher, more important progress than the merely physical, a greatness that rises above the greatness of wealth and commerce, and quite as far above the merely intellectual.

If the effect of climate or the configuration of our continent had been to make us earthly and sensual, and, as a nation, we had become only large consumers and large traders, the period of development in our history had been only the animalization of the race with an enormous growth of individualism, which would have made us the contempt and scorn of all pure intelligences on earth and in heaven. The Western continent, it has been noticed, is concave toward the sky; while the Eastern is convex. Our rivers run from the outer rims toward the great inward trough, and so seek the sea by the way of the Mississippi; therefore, it has been very learnedly explained, our minds run downward, earthward, and we are material, naturally and necessarily materialists while the land of the Europeans and Asiatics arches towards the centre, and their waters are drained each way towards the oceans; therefore the Europeans and Asiatics by great physiological laws look up, and are inevitably religious, superstitious.

If this argument were not a most ridiculous conceit, and therefore utterly unworthy of serious consideration, and if the tendencies were exactly what this physical theory of the moral man assumes, we have a strong and triumphant answer in the facts; for, despite the convexity of the East and the concavity of the West, materialism and sensuality are rank and extended in both hemispheres. Even the present forms of religion are compelled to resist the downward tendency of fallen human nature, everywhere, by the most heroic exertions; an era of rationalistic scepticism and another of kindred ritualism not unfrequently following rapidly on the track of great religious reformations.

TRUE MANHOOD.

The great truth is, that, in the Orient as well as the Occident, men can be good and great only by aid from above. Under the action of this inspiration, selfishness and corrup tion, there as here, recede, and give place to all the ennobling feelings and acts of regenerated humanity. There and here, human pride and ambition substitute the material for the spiritual, the worship of the fine arts for the worship of the great Architect of the heavens and the earth, of church architecture instead of the Holy Being to whom these stately, magnificent edifices are consecrated. In America, just as much, and no more, must be conceded. Without the regeneration and the new life, we are earthly and sensual, exactly like Europeans; and tend to idolatry in some form, like the Asiatics: while, just like both, under the power of the great spiritual resurrection, despite the concavity of our part of the globe, our nations are refined and exalted; and we rise in the scale of greatness to the highest spirituality and benevolence. One grand announcement includes us all. "Ye must be born again" reveals at once the reasons for our despair and our hope.

In the new moral creation, we have a marked development

of the native capabilities of man, and learn how the disabilities of our race may be effectually helped, and our inherent vices eradicated. There man begins to live for man in distinction from self. It cannot be controverted, just so far as the power of experimental religion extends in reforming and moulding the nature of a man, he moves from littleness to greatness, from selfishness to beneficence; humility takes the place of pride; chastity, the place of lust; honesty, the place of fraud; love, the place of hatred; truth, the place of falsehood; industry and enterprise, the place of idleness and decay. These are all great elements of true manhood; and the growth is so visible, that a man who denies it simply condemns himself for absurdity or dulness, narrowness or falsehood.

Just as in individuals, so in nations. So far as the regeneration of human nature advances, so far the nation rises in character and moral power. For all great moral achievements of the race, sin is the infancy of a people, righteousness their manhood. Virtue begins to reveal its strength under the cross, and piety unfolds its power in the exercise of true faith, -"faith that works by love, and purifies the heart."

True manhood appears in its types. The first Adam was a man combining the powers and susceptibilities directly created by infinite perfection. His descendants were less than men by all their infidelity, disloyalty, depravity, falsehood, sorrows, groans, and dying. The second Adam was a man, a God, it is certain, but nevertheless a man, a typal man; and as the race became less than men by receding from the first typal man, so they become men just as they approach the second. In his fullest form, the second man was the Lord from heaven; and thus the divine in union with the human becomes the highest type of manhood. Just as the human race becomes imbued with the grace and power of God under the power of the second man, who becomes to believing sinners "a quickening spirit," do they approach this highest type of manhood.

The true manhood of a nation will therefore be, first the regenerated manhood of the Fall; then, so far as the new life succeeds, the restored manhood of Eden; and thence the developed manhood of the old in the new creation.

Let it be remarked, then, as a matter of fact, that the growing greatness of the American nation is, so far as it has advanced, the progressive development of the new manhood. This is seen in the individual instances of reformation in the domestic Edens, which come of the restoration of love; the social elevation, which makes vice disgraceful, and installs virtue and piety as the dominant forces of reason; and in the grand uprising of a whole people, courting martyrdom to honor and secure a great principle.

We must reckon as the result of the regeneration, not only the persons in whom it is developed as a new life, but those in whom any divine influences have found room and liberty to begin their work. The general faith in the being of God; the public universal acknowledgment that Jesus is the Christ, that he is the only hope of the world; the condemnation of professing Christians for their improprieties and sins; and the universal homage paid to goodness, with the equally universal acknowledgment of the duty and necessity of reformation in order to perfect happiness and safety, — must be referred to the same source. These all broaden and heighten the manhood of our nation. Then comes the elevating power of science, confirming the truth and reflecting the glory of Christianity; then the spirit of the press, imbued with the life of a great regeneration, moving the world mightily God-ward; then the broad expansion of liberty, accepting and proclaiming the universal brotherhood of man; finally the uplifting of the lowest, and the consequent rising of the whole to the sphere of power which reveals the inevitable, the indestructible, the endlessly-progressive, in the national life. This era of the Great Republic dawns upon us to-day.

It would happen, of course, in the coming of generations,

under such quickening influences, that individual minds, highly susceptible and broadly formed, would grow to distinguished greatness. Hence, though not thoroughly Christian, yet reached and stimulated by Christian forces, Franklin and Webster rose in statesmanship above Mirabeau and Talleyrand. Hence Washington and Lincoln, deeply imbued with the religious spirit, were greater than Jefferson and Calhoun. Thus Williams and Edwards, Marshall and McLean, Judson and Olin, rose higher in historic renown than other men of equal mental greatness, and approached very nearly to the sublime purity and majestic strength of true manhood. But the elevation of the common mind by the power of a pervading Christian life, until justice is enthroned by the will of the people, will be a broader, greater fact. From this epoch in the nation's history, the approach to typal manhood will be more rapid and more thoroughly sustained.

ASYLUMS FOR THE DEAF AND DUMB.

Works of humanity follow promptly the development of true manhood under the benevolent influence of Christianity. The best Christian minds of all countries, from mere love of the race, inquire anxiously after the welfare of the suffering and unfortunate. "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" is the second great commandment of our beneficent Christianity; and the law of action toward the needy is distinctly announced by our Saviour, -"All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." Not merely the authority of these commands, but the actual feeling of regenerated natures, and the longing desires of enlightened good men in the spirit of a religion of love, move them to make efforts to relieve distress, to exalt character, and enlarge the sphere and amount of positive enjoyment and usefulness. Hence it is that institutions for the education of the deaf and dumb, the blind, the insane, the